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The sharing economy was always a scam
- Animats 8y agoWell, duh. Wasn't that obvious around the time Uber started?
- mdsharpe 8y agoIndeed... “There was a moment of novelty but then a realization that these were the same things. Just much cheaper and unregulated.” Imo this has been obvious all along.
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoIndeed it is. I've posted and talked about this along with posting Richard D Wolff's video "Uber is an old scam" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGwZcR0q6VE&t=10s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGwZcR0q6VE&t=10s We've seen this before, at the beginning of a new industry. And once capitalism sets in, everyone is dragged down to a race to the bottom... Along with safety and human treatment. And then once the abuses are rampant, people demand change in the way of regulation. And it works. Until prices then rise, and people are angry about the high prices of thing (Taxis). And then, an upstart doing "app hailing" starts this all over again, with no quality, no assurances, no regulation, and sub-minimum wage payments, with no work protections. Soon enough, the laws will finally roll in again as they did when Taxis were first made.
- sudden 8y agoWhat a bunch of turd nonsense. You dont understand economics. So stay out of it.
- jetrink 8y ago> Until prices then rise Which they didn't do entirely through the invisible hand. In many areas, taxi regulation was also used limit competition (e.g. medallion systems, unnecessarily difficult licensing exams). In addition to higher prices it permitted lower quality service. If you want to prevent destructive wildfires, you need to do forest management to reduce the fuel that builds up. The taxi industry was a forest full of dry, dead wood ready to burn.
- door5 8y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/02/nyregion/taxi-drivers-suicide-nyc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/02/nyregion/taxi-drivers-sui... It's easy to be cavalier if you ignore the effect on Taxi workers. Ride sharing replaced a stable, unionized, middle class career with low-paying, low-benefit gig jobs. It ruined people's lives and destroyed a stable field of work. This wasn't a technological innovation -- it was a legal one, where they figured out a way to evade regulations to undercut the current system and drive down wages.
- orangecat 8y agoIt ruined people's lives and destroyed a stable field of work. Telephone operators and travel agents used to have stable careers. This wasn't a technological innovation If the technology is so insignificant, why didn't taxi companies develop ride-hailing apps? Either it's actually complex, or they decided they had no need to improve service because of their oligopoly.
- tomc1985 8y agoTelephone operators and travel agents used to have stable careers. So you are for the indiscriminate ruining of lives because of technological innovation? Why can't any of these innovators work with encumbents to ensure happiness for all and not just enriching themselves?
- akiselev 8y agoWhy can't any of these incumbents work with innovators to ensure happiness for all and not just enriching themselves? I don't know if you've ever been to a medallion auction but they went for over a million dollars each in Manhattan before Uber came along. Most of the medallions were bought up by holding companies that then leased them out to drivers who paid up front and had to hope they made enough money that day to cover the fee. In San Francisco, I remember a driver told me that his up front fee was $100-200 per 8 hour shift depending on the season - that's over $100-200k per year ROI and SF's medallions were a fraction of the price of NYC. I seriously doubt many lives were ruined by the fall in value of taxi medallions. Very few are owned by actual drivers and that's where all the money is.
- pmichalina 8y agoVapid socialist nonsense. I’ll take an Uber Black over a taxis any day of the week.
- em3rgent0rdr 8y agoThe claim was never that "‘Sharing’ was supposed to save us" nor any of the other allegations in the article. In fact there never was any unified claims. Of course the individual companies made claims about how their platform would save you a bit of time and money and friction. And that has largely been true. Millions of people each saves a little time and money, and that in aggregate has benefited us tremendously. The sharing economy never promised the moon.
- door5 8y agoWho is "us"? Maybe upper middle class consumers, but not the workers at these companies.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- orangecat 8y agoMaybe upper middle class consumers, but not the workers at these companies. That is not at all clear: https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/workforce/uber-competing-restaurants-workers https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/workforce/uber-comp.... It turns out that flexible hours are a large benefit for many people.
- walterstucco 8y agoYou don't need Uber or Airbnb to do what they do and work flexible hours
- geezerjay 8y agoIf those providing services through platforms such as Uber or airbnb didn't benefitted from them then they'd be doing something else instead. Furthermore, of detractors actually cared about "the workers" then they'd be worried about how they have no better options instead of attacking the best options they have. And no, banning Uber or airbnb does not make the workers' lives any better. It just an option off the table, and to some it's the best option they have.
- benwr 8y agoThe title seems totally unsupported by the article to me. A less misleading one might be "The 'sharing economy' has evolved into a collection of large, unregulated, rental businesses"
- geezerjay 8y agoThe sharing economy was always fron day 1 about rentals. That's the central premise. What's deviating from the original concept is that barriers to entry are restricting supply to the point that providing a service becomes too profitable and actually pays off to provide it full time. Consider Uber. The principle behind ride sharing is quite simple: if you're already driving somewhere you can help someone out by sharing your ride with someone who wants to go where you're going. Cars are already clogging the roads while operating at 1/5 of their capacity. So, why not give someone a ride and be rewarded for your efford? Except that regulation bars individuals from doing just thay, and thus so-called rideshare companies are actually taxi companies.
- benwr 8y agoSure - I still think the title is misleading. "Was always a scam" implies that everyone in the sharing economy has been lying for decades in order to make money. I don't see any evidence presented in the article that supports that implication. And when looking at it through a reasonable lens as you do in your comment, I also don't understand the urge to treat it as though "sharing economy" companies are somehow evil or deceptive. They're just responding to market conditions in a way that (at least in the short term) produces value for both drivers and riders. There are other arguments you can make about whether this is bad in the long term due to e.g. dynamics around regulation, but that's an argument about how things will play out in the future, not about past or current bad faith on the part of Uber or AirBnb.
- jaclaz 8y ago>The sharing economy was always fron day 1 about rentals. That's the central premise. If I may, the central premise is about being middle-man in a (renting) transaction, shaving off a fee from it for the service of establishing a contact between the two parties and - optionally - provide ancillary services (again at a cost for either party involved in the transaction).
- neokantian 8y agoIf you do not like the sharing economy, then do not participate in it. "Other people should not be doing this, and should not be doing that, ..." is one bridge too far. For heaven's sake, who the hell are you, to tell other people what to do?
- MereInterest 8y agoYeah, how dare we insist that people be paid a living wage! And health insurance is only for employees, not employees-in-everything-but-name!
- neokantian 8y agoI am free to make the deals that I want, regardless of what they include or don't include. Why would I need you to protect me from myself? Why do you want to micromanage other people's lives? Is your own life not interesting enough already?
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoBecause your life impacts mine. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19335217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19335217
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- antidesitter 8y agoVirtually everything you do impacts people around you. So can you be more specific?
- zanny 8y agoBecause the price you offer for your time influences the perception of the value of time for everyone around you. Its why minimum wage exists at all. Without it, the most desperate depress wages to the absolute edge of starvation and destitution. It is not, and has never been, and never will be an answer to poverty, but it is a promise by the government that your time can never be valued at less than an absolute floor they set. Because nature and reality are cruel. For many people, in many circumstances, their time is practically worthless. Minimum wage has a carrying effect on the economic baseline - by having minimum wage workers, there exists industry to meet their extraordinarily limited means. Its the old Ford adage that he need pay his workers enough to afford his cars lest he have no market to sell to. This matters to state level actors the same way opiates in the US matter. If isolated, rare, instances of irrationality reign and someone ends up dead from a drug overdose that is a manageable risk for the freedom granted in return. But when millions are addicted, tens of thousands are dead, and whole communities are collapsing from it the individual choices that led people to drug addiction are a consequence to the whole of society. It doesn't even need be in that large a scale. If your brother is a drunk he will by nature he less productive and stable in his life, more prone to disease and illness, and often fall upon his family for support because he cannot support himself due to his own choices. You can then of course choose to not help him, but for those that do their now deflated resources from supporting their drunk brother depress their participation in markets they would have had more voice in. It takes only one bad apple to ruin a family, a bushel to destroy a community, and an orchard can ravage whole counties. Its why anyone contemplating suicide is told its a selfish way out. Because you make the choice, but everyone else gets to deal with the consequences. Almost nothing you do is wholly restricted to yourself alone - everything has consequences, and society at all is built on a foundation of trading personal liberty for freedom from others liberties.
- jeffbax 8y agoArticles like this ignore the impact on individuals. For every group that is trying to full time Uber/Lyft or turn an AirBNB into a hotel, there's also tons of people who are doing in the spare time to make some extra or work the better allocation of resources into something beneficial for them. See threads like: https://twitter.com/RantyAmyCurtis/status/1102721361905106945 https://twitter.com/RantyAmyCurtis/status/110272136190510694... That's what sharing is about, more optimal allocation/usage. It's not an end-all solution to everything, it's a supplement. There will be people who make their entire go at it, and there will be everything in between. The importance is that you let people decide whether to participate in it or not. They're the ones with which the decision of whether it is a scam or not ultimately matters. Trying to paint the entire phenomenon as either a total failure or the end-all panacea is dumb. It's a much welcome addition to the broader economy by millions of people.
- bobthepanda 8y agoAllowing people to participate in activities is useful, but that assumes that they are well-informed and rational. People also willingly participate in multi-level marketing; that doesn’t mean it’s good for them and society to do so.
- wallace_f 8y agoAnd people will also abuse drugs if decriminalized; it doesn't mean prohibition of even such inherently dangerous activities is making things better
- bobthepanda 8y agoThere’s a middle ground, and it’s called regulation. Of course, the ridesharing companies will holler and cry uncle about even the most basic regulations (see: Austin and fingerprinting.) New York recently made moves to, among other things, establish a floor wage for rideshare drivers similar to how there is a minimum wage for tipped workers.
- 8y ago
- nimbius 8y agoSpeaking as a professional engine mechanic for a chain of Midwest shops, you have no idea how big a ripoff uber and lyft are until you're in the shop. The rates you make do not cover fleet style usage of your personal vehicle. Cabbies love the crown Vic because its intercooler let's it idle for hours on end with no worries. And they love the Prius because the idle uses no fuel. But your car? Get ready for more oil changes and brake jobs, and a lot more air filter and steering fluid changes as you go around the blocks. The worst I'd charged shop rate was for a Toyota Camry that had $2500 in service because the uber guy was trying to make it last between paychecks that weren't being paid by uber. A month later in august he lost the transmission at 65000 miles because he never idled in neutral.
- sandeeps_ 8y agoDoes one need to idle in neural even on automatic gear cars?
- thinkingkong 8y agoHe was probably slipping the clutch.
- wyqydsyq 8y agoI think you'll find it's been years if not decades since there was a Camry available with a manual transmission
- redwall_hp 8y agoAnd that would just wear a bearing/spring system or the clutch, which are all repairs that are far cheaper than the cost of an automatic transmission replacement.
- kortilla 8y agoBut idling an automatic shouldn’t be a problem. It’s a fluid turbine.
- matchagaucho 8y agoMaybe "sharing" is not the correct term. The value proposition has evolved into a Subscription Economy with Asset-Light lifestyles.
- nitwit005 8y agoIn a shocking, totally unexpected twist, company owners and marketing professionals exaggerated the value of their products. Most of these sharing startups have just been flops. They promised to "disrupt X", and then no one used them, or they were too expensive, and they vanished.
- KorematsuFred 8y agoSharing economy has existed well before technology and will outlast Uber and others. When you ask friends to drop you at airport that is sharing. When your aunt babyseats for you that is sharing economy. Potluck is sharing economy. Economic efficiency through sharing is a great thing for society, it is just that it is hard to get it right at scale but nevertheless we are trying and we will test success sooner or later in some areas.
- jaabe 8y agoI think the sharing economy works well, but I also agree with the article. I just don’t think AirBNB, Uber and the others are the sharing economy. They are platform economies where the platform wins and it’s workers are at a race for the bottom on minimal pay and no rights. We have a Danish app for taking people with you when you travel between towns. This is an aspect where public transportation unfortunately sucks after decades of conservatives in government, but it’s also an area where there is no taxa service or Uber styles thing because it’s too expensive. But sharing the gas price with strangers when you’re going anyway absolutely works. There is a platform for it, but their primary source of income comes from their leasing services. I’d say that is an example of the sharing economy, because it’s actually people sharing and not just some no-workers-rights shithole.
- aikah 8y ago> When you ask friends to drop you at airport that is sharing. And your friend didn't need a professional insurance for his car for that. The difference is scale. Giving a lift from time to time to friends is very different from doing it full time while pretending you are not a taxi.
- geezerjay 8y agoThe main driving principle of the sharing economy is actually the ability to give a lift from time to time without any bother. The problem is that a number of factors do prevent supply from entering the market, thus the revenue available to established players is high enough to validate working full time.
- Proven 8y agoLOL, I love the title! I disagree with many details, but the article does highlight the main issue, which was also mentioned by one libertarian economist few years ago, namely that SJWs and other statists promote the concept ("sharing economy") because they'd love a society in which the individual owns (next to) nothing and is unaware of the importance of private property. In other words, it's not socialism, but it's very close. And it's also a scam (just like socialism.) One part I disagree with is that the author doesn't spot the issue with Lyft's trajectory although it is clearly visible in the article itself. When Lyft begun, it worked, and once they got regulated, not only that it no longer worked quite as well, but it's also tried to block others from doing what works well (i.e. unregulated car pooling.) Which is to say statism destroys free market capitalism. Statists and crony capitalists erect barriers to entry to prevent individuals - especially small investors, which is what car owners are - from employing capital invested in their vehicle to compete with crony capitalists.
- jellicle 8y ago>Sharing economy Back in the day we called it sharecropping and we knew it was bad.
- razorbladeknife 8y agoPeople forget that sharing economy always existed in some form You ask your friend to drop you off at the work or your sister to babysit your son, it's all sharing. I can argue such kind of sharing (without cash) puts other people at disadvantages who don't have friends or family maybe due to some disability. Now even those people can hail a ride on Uber. What's wrong with it? I don't need to maintain a list of friends which worsens my anexeity/depression, I simply pay and I am happy. I can see why people who have social circle to maintain such favours will not like this because now a lonely soul can get same level of service from others around him.
- walterstucco 8y agoYour vision of social bonding is really sad...
- CM30 8y agoI wouldn't say it was a scam. I mean, at the end of the day, these 'sharing economy' services are basically platforms with a middleman taking a cut, and were originally meant for people to use as a hobby more than anything else. You might occasionally drive for Uber for a bit of spare cash, or lease out a room on Airbnb because you weren't using it right now. In that scenario, it's fine. It doesn't provide a living wage, but really, it wasn't meant to replace your full time income. But the thing is, where a market and platform exists, that's where you see a creeping level of 'professionalism' among participants, and eventually, the people doing it for fun do getting crowded out by people doing it for a living. Yet the model doesn't work for that. What's sustainable for legions of people doing things in their spare time/using their spare resources is not sustainable as a full time replacement for hotels or taxis or what not. The problem is that the gig economy is just that; about gigs, not full time work. And to some degree, you can see this trend everywhere. YouTube was at one point meant as a place to post amateur videos; now nearly everyone sees it as a full time job. Medium was a place for amateur writers, now it's see as a market for selling articles. Even game mods, an area which used to be 100% free now has a growing percentage of devs trying to treat it as a full time career. Hence the problems with the sharing economy (and arguably platforms as a whole) are really two fold: 1. What works as a hobby/extra way to make money on the side doesn't really scale well to a full time career, but more and more people seem to expect the latter. It's like trying to use a paper round (or a ton of them) to pay the mortgage. 2. The existing markets/businesses these platforms target become unprofitable due to the huge increase in competition and lower number of regulations. But that's not really a scam. It's just technology and society unlocking a lot more supply in these areas than there was before, and the existing businesses in the market suffering because of it. You don't even a platform for that, the internet has basically destroyed journalism as a viable career in much the same way as Uber has taxis. On another note, the article also seems to conflate two different things; platform/gig economy services and subscription services. Something like Amazon Prime Video isn't that. It's another example of how companies seem to be trying to kill off private property with the endless subscription, and a whole 'nother kettle of fish in itself.
- rv-de 8y agoI'm currently traveling through the UK. I went from Hamburg to London via Antwerp by blablacar. I so far stayed at two places through couchsurfing. and I'm now heading towards my third Airbnb place. sharing economy is certainly not a scam.