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Uber is the largest player by far, so they are an easy target for frustrations and for incumbents. "Uber" is almost a generic term for a iPhone hailable vehicl

Uber is the largest player by far, so they are an easy target for frustrations and for incumbents. "Uber" is almost a generic term for a iPhone hailable vehicle. Generally, there is market competition for drivers. For example, Lyft for those drivers who are unhappy with Uber. You have stated that in your city, São Paulo, there are 3 good companies. If one company mistreats drivers, they would go to a competing firm and the firm would lose revenue.

soneca 9y ago
That's why I trust capitalism. Its dynamics allowed Uber to create a market, but also keep it in check for bad practices.
- tanderson92 9y ago
  Do you think the same about telecom monopolies and the negative externalities of fossil fuel companies?
  - abfan1127 9y ago
    telecom monopolies are government enshrined, so not capitalism. Negative externalities of burning fossil fuels (plastics are a fossil fuel product) are allowed because government allows people to pollute "some"... not capitalism.
    - phinnaeus 9y ago
      I don't understand your second sentence. Government currently allows some pollution. Should government disallow all pollution?
      - riffraff 9y ago
        OP is saying that government allow a certain amount of pollution. A government could decide to forbid pollution altogether (whatever that means) and still maintain a capitalistic economic system. We have generally forbidden dumping barrels of spent oil in rivers, for example. Likewise, a non-capitalistic system can forbid or not pollution.
      - theseatoms 9y ago
        To the extent it owns land, yes.
    - tanderson92 9y ago
      Perhaps the defenders of capitalism should have to account for the effect their economic system has on the government and its ability to properly regulate the economy given the immense private wealth that the owners can use to influence policy and politicians. It is an economic and political system, not purely an economic system.
      - nnfy 9y ago
        You're conflating free markets with capitalism. And once laws are influenced by capitalists, the market is no longer free. And this is again a failure of government, not capitalism. As an analogue, you cannot say that socialism is a flawed system purely because of what happened in russia-you must not mix up economic and political philosophies.
        tanderson92 9y ago
        The free market determined that that was the fair price for government policies to be bent towards industries' or actor's will. You'll forgive people critiquing the economic system if it freely and naturally leads to the ills we find objectionable. And on the contrary, I absolutely do hold the failure of the Soviet system against central planning and command economies, even socialist ones. Given that, I find democratically-executed socialism using markets for prices (some consider this market socialism) much preferable.
        johncolanduoni 9y ago
        You can if your complaint (as above) is that the economic system has adverse effects on the political system or vice versa. Would you claim you shouldn't attribute the resulting explosion to water when you pour it on sodium because one is a liquid and the other is a metal?
    - mcguire 9y ago
      Telecom monopolies were created because of this: http://www.sandman.com/images/oldpolewires1sm.jpg http://www.sandman.com/images/oldpolewires1sm.jpg They were government regulated until that didn't work, then broken up. After the subsequent deregulation, the monopoly is in the process of re-creating itself now.
      - euyyn 9y ago
        Hahaha holy crap!
      - discreteevent 9y ago
        I think that may be a picture of phone lines when they were point to point i.e. each connection had a dedicated line rather than going through a switch. I don't think it had anything to do with thousands of telecom companies.
        mcguire 9y ago
        "Under Theodore N. Vail from 1907, AT&T had [...] acquired many of the independents, and bought control of Western Union, giving it a monopolistic position in both telephone and telegraph communication. A key strategy was to refuse to connect its long distance network — technologically, by far the finest and most extensive in the land — with local independent carriers. Without the prospect of long distance services, the market position of many independents became untenable. Vail stated that there should be "one policy, one system [AT&T's] and universal service, no collection of separate companies could give the public the service that [the] Bell... system could give."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment
    - CalChris 9y ago
      telecom monopolies are government enshrined Telecom monopolies are not by government intent by rather by regulatory capture. As a capitalist, I hella want to exclude others from the market. If I can get the government to do this for me, then I'm willing to pay the lobbyist fees to make that happen. In the IP space the only reason I'm willing to slave away at invention is the possibility of a patent, a right to exclude, a limited monopoly. As a capitalist, the absolute last thing I want is a free market. Thiel puts it this way: competition is for losers.
      - Qwertious 9y ago
        On the one hand, patents give companies a reward for innovation and result in them doing research they might not have otherwise done. On the other hand, software patents.
- pikzen 9y ago
  "Keep it in check" By allowing it to willfully break laws in dozens of countries, contributing to lowering standards of living and high stress at work, tracking users at all times, having a hostile workplace, then becoming the most important provider of such services in the world? Yeah, that's totally capitalism doing its work, and not the painfully obvious "throw VC money at it until it works" scheme, right
  - cgmg 9y ago
    Lowering standards of living? Lolwhat? As a previous comment pointed out, Uber created a consumer surplus of almost $7 billion in 2015 alone.
- CalChris 9y ago
  Capitalism didn't force Kalanick to resign.
  - eljimmy 9y ago
    Well, technically it did. Investors, i.e. the capital, pressured him out.
    - CalChris 9y ago
      capitalism -- an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. So you are saying that the investors, i.e. the capital, pressured Kalanick out for reasons of profit rather than due to pressure by the state in the form of multiple lawsuits. You are mistaken. In particular, there is no evidence that Uber's naughty bro culture is any less profitable than a mature egalitarian culture. Lack of profit wasn't why Kalanick was shown the door.
      - tw04 9y ago
        I would imagine they've seen a revenue decline from all the bad press. Furthermore, there's no way he wasn't directly involved in the Otto lawsuit, which isn't the governments doing.
        linkregister 9y ago
        According to recent reporting in Bloomberg, there was a temporary dip in market share due to the #deleteuber campaign, which has since recovered. Both companies have grown considerably over that time period. Lyft's ridesharing growth in the U.S. has been much higher than Uber's. The Waymo lawsuit is still very much up in the air. Kalanick's involvement is already public: he collaborated with Levandowski to acquire a team of self-driving-car engineers and their work over 8 months. The key demands of the Waymo legal team were rejected in their injunction. Judge Alsop did not see a clear nexus between the Waymo designs and the Uber lidar, referring the matter to trial.
- gcburn2 9y ago
  You're catching a lot of flak for this, but as long as there is diverse competition, you're right. I used to bounce back and forth between Uber and Lyft based purely on price, but now I almost exclusively use Lyft because I'm not a fan of some of Uber's practices.
- jsemrau 9y ago
  Societal norms forced him to resign. In other parts of this world with more patriarchal and authoritarian governments the leadership style might have been accepted.
nullnilvoid 9y ago
Uber is the largest in the US, not across the world. Didi provides way more rides than Uber any single day.
- lettergram 9y ago
  Kind of unfair to compare Didi (or any Chinese company) with the free market alternatives. If you're given state sponsorship from one of the largest countries, then you should easily be able to do more rides than Uber.
  - komali2 9y ago
    There's also Per Capita to consider. Obviously an anything in China will have more actual humans using it - there's a billion of them there.
    - sunbuntu 9y ago
      There are more people in India than China so that is a bit rich.
  - linkregister 9y ago
    I don't think that UberChina's failure to win against Didi was due to state sponsorship. Didi had a better product tailored to the Chinese market, better operations people who conducted local campaigns in more cities, and only one market to compete in, as opposed to Uber's worldwide competition. It was apparent that Didi had achieved the network effects necessary to overcome Uber in volume. Both companies wanted to focus on revenue so it was savvy of Didi to purchase UberChina so they could reduce ride subsidies. I think that the success of UberChina, along with Yum! and Wal-Mart, demonstrate that it is possible to prevail in the difficult Chinese market.
    - euyyn 9y ago
      > a better product tailored to the Chinese market What were the differences?

soneca 9y ago

That's why I trust capitalism. Its dynamics allowed Uber to create a market, but also keep it in check for bad practices.

tanderson92 9y ago
Do you think the same about telecom monopolies and the negative externalities of fossil fuel companies?
- abfan1127 9y ago
  telecom monopolies are government enshrined, so not capitalism. Negative externalities of burning fossil fuels (plastics are a fossil fuel product) are allowed because government allows people to pollute "some"... not capitalism.
  - phinnaeus 9y ago
    I don't understand your second sentence. Government currently allows some pollution. Should government disallow all pollution?
    - riffraff 9y ago
      OP is saying that government allow a certain amount of pollution. A government could decide to forbid pollution altogether (whatever that means) and still maintain a capitalistic economic system. We have generally forbidden dumping barrels of spent oil in rivers, for example. Likewise, a non-capitalistic system can forbid or not pollution.
    - theseatoms 9y ago
      To the extent it owns land, yes.
  - tanderson92 9y ago
    Perhaps the defenders of capitalism should have to account for the effect their economic system has on the government and its ability to properly regulate the economy given the immense private wealth that the owners can use to influence policy and politicians. It is an economic and political system, not purely an economic system.
    - nnfy 9y ago
      You're conflating free markets with capitalism. And once laws are influenced by capitalists, the market is no longer free. And this is again a failure of government, not capitalism. As an analogue, you cannot say that socialism is a flawed system purely because of what happened in russia-you must not mix up economic and political philosophies.
      - tanderson92 9y ago
        The free market determined that that was the fair price for government policies to be bent towards industries' or actor's will. You'll forgive people critiquing the economic system if it freely and naturally leads to the ills we find objectionable. And on the contrary, I absolutely do hold the failure of the Soviet system against central planning and command economies, even socialist ones. Given that, I find democratically-executed socialism using markets for prices (some consider this market socialism) much preferable.
      - johncolanduoni 9y ago
        You can if your complaint (as above) is that the economic system has adverse effects on the political system or vice versa. Would you claim you shouldn't attribute the resulting explosion to water when you pour it on sodium because one is a liquid and the other is a metal?
  - mcguire 9y ago
    Telecom monopolies were created because of this: http://www.sandman.com/images/oldpolewires1sm.jpg http://www.sandman.com/images/oldpolewires1sm.jpg They were government regulated until that didn't work, then broken up. After the subsequent deregulation, the monopoly is in the process of re-creating itself now.
    - euyyn 9y ago
      Hahaha holy crap!
    - discreteevent 9y ago
      I think that may be a picture of phone lines when they were point to point i.e. each connection had a dedicated line rather than going through a switch. I don't think it had anything to do with thousands of telecom companies.
      - mcguire 9y ago
        "Under Theodore N. Vail from 1907, AT&T had [...] acquired many of the independents, and bought control of Western Union, giving it a monopolistic position in both telephone and telegraph communication. A key strategy was to refuse to connect its long distance network — technologically, by far the finest and most extensive in the land — with local independent carriers. Without the prospect of long distance services, the market position of many independents became untenable. Vail stated that there should be "one policy, one system [AT&T's] and universal service, no collection of separate companies could give the public the service that [the] Bell... system could give."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment
  - CalChris 9y ago
    telecom monopolies are government enshrined Telecom monopolies are not by government intent by rather by regulatory capture. As a capitalist, I hella want to exclude others from the market. If I can get the government to do this for me, then I'm willing to pay the lobbyist fees to make that happen. In the IP space the only reason I'm willing to slave away at invention is the possibility of a patent, a right to exclude, a limited monopoly. As a capitalist, the absolute last thing I want is a free market. Thiel puts it this way: competition is for losers.
    - Qwertious 9y ago
      On the one hand, patents give companies a reward for innovation and result in them doing research they might not have otherwise done. On the other hand, software patents.
pikzen 9y ago
"Keep it in check" By allowing it to willfully break laws in dozens of countries, contributing to lowering standards of living and high stress at work, tracking users at all times, having a hostile workplace, then becoming the most important provider of such services in the world? Yeah, that's totally capitalism doing its work, and not the painfully obvious "throw VC money at it until it works" scheme, right
- cgmg 9y ago
  Lowering standards of living? Lolwhat? As a previous comment pointed out, Uber created a consumer surplus of almost $7 billion in 2015 alone.
CalChris 9y ago
Capitalism didn't force Kalanick to resign.
- eljimmy 9y ago
  Well, technically it did. Investors, i.e. the capital, pressured him out.
  - CalChris 9y ago
    capitalism -- an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. So you are saying that the investors, i.e. the capital, pressured Kalanick out for reasons of profit rather than due to pressure by the state in the form of multiple lawsuits. You are mistaken. In particular, there is no evidence that Uber's naughty bro culture is any less profitable than a mature egalitarian culture. Lack of profit wasn't why Kalanick was shown the door.
    - tw04 9y ago
      I would imagine they've seen a revenue decline from all the bad press. Furthermore, there's no way he wasn't directly involved in the Otto lawsuit, which isn't the governments doing.
      - linkregister 9y ago
        According to recent reporting in Bloomberg, there was a temporary dip in market share due to the #deleteuber campaign, which has since recovered. Both companies have grown considerably over that time period. Lyft's ridesharing growth in the U.S. has been much higher than Uber's. The Waymo lawsuit is still very much up in the air. Kalanick's involvement is already public: he collaborated with Levandowski to acquire a team of self-driving-car engineers and their work over 8 months. The key demands of the Waymo legal team were rejected in their injunction. Judge Alsop did not see a clear nexus between the Waymo designs and the Uber lidar, referring the matter to trial.
gcburn2 9y ago
You're catching a lot of flak for this, but as long as there is diverse competition, you're right. I used to bounce back and forth between Uber and Lyft based purely on price, but now I almost exclusively use Lyft because I'm not a fan of some of Uber's practices.
jsemrau 9y ago
Societal norms forced him to resign. In other parts of this world with more patriarchal and authoritarian governments the leadership style might have been accepted.

nullnilvoid 9y ago

Uber is the largest in the US, not across the world. Didi provides way more rides than Uber any single day.

lettergram 9y ago
Kind of unfair to compare Didi (or any Chinese company) with the free market alternatives. If you're given state sponsorship from one of the largest countries, then you should easily be able to do more rides than Uber.
- komali2 9y ago
  There's also Per Capita to consider. Obviously an anything in China will have more actual humans using it - there's a billion of them there.
  - sunbuntu 9y ago
    There are more people in India than China so that is a bit rich.
- linkregister 9y ago
  I don't think that UberChina's failure to win against Didi was due to state sponsorship. Didi had a better product tailored to the Chinese market, better operations people who conducted local campaigns in more cities, and only one market to compete in, as opposed to Uber's worldwide competition. It was apparent that Didi had achieved the network effects necessary to overcome Uber in volume. Both companies wanted to focus on revenue so it was savvy of Didi to purchase UberChina so they could reduce ride subsidies. I think that the success of UberChina, along with Yum! and Wal-Mart, demonstrate that it is possible to prevail in the difficult Chinese market.
  - euyyn 9y ago
    > a better product tailored to the Chinese market What were the differences?