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Uber is a tinder box
- danlugo92 7y agoUber is not a job
- ForHackernews 7y agoUber is not a profitable company.
- ausbah 7y agoBut it is, what else could it be?
- notus 7y agoSupplemental income you do in addition to a job.
- mcntsh 7y ago$10/hr that comes with high liability to your personal belongings doesn't make for a good "supplemental" job. Plus, as mentioned in the Twitter thread, most of the money Uber pays out is in incentives which are absolutely targeted at full-time drivers.
- ausbah 7y agoWhere is the defining line between supplemental income and a job?
- gnode 7y agoGambling, from the sound of it.
- momokoko 7y agoFrom the data we have about ride sharing. The bulk of rides are done either by people who drive full time or people who drive as a second job. If it were not for those two groups of people, both of which utilize ride sharing as a "job", one could speculate that Uber and Lyft would not be able to exist. Please enlighten us about how Uber can exist if no one treats it as a job based on the data we currently have. I look forward to your insightful response.
- jstarfish 7y agoIt can't, nor should it. Why is it the drivers' responsibility to subsidize a corporate entity's existence? How much of themselves should they give to prop up an unsustainable business model? The money flows up, not down. When Uber eventually collapses, the CEO will fuck off with his golden parachute and all anyone else will have to show for their work is a heavily-depreciated Kia.
- Spivak 7y agoMinimum wage work is for high schoolers, and other lies we tell ourselves to justify the shitty treatment of our most vulnerable workers.
- deogeo 7y agoGreat way to disrupt a business - reclassify it from 'job' to 'not a job', so you can mistreat your workers, and don't have to pay a living wage.
- andrew_ 7y agoWe've all heard stories. Some journalists have even been able to get people on record. And still I have to ask why an anecdotal Twitter rant, something the user seems to specialize in, holds any water whatsoever and how it made it to the front page.
- praneshp 7y ago> something the user seems to specialize in, I think this is why.
- lemcoe9 7y agoWhile I certainly wish for better conditions for these drivers (and in a grander sense, the entire gig economy), I also worry about the price sensitivity of riders when they go to use these apps: There are tons of users that will make their Uber vs. Lyft decision based on <$1.00 in fare difference. If these drivers get everything they want, I cannot imagine a scenario where fares do not go through the roof, which will likely lead to a decrease in demand, which will have a negative effect on take-home pay for drivers. The drivers certainly deserve better, however, I think the toothpaste is out of the tube when it comes to what consumers expect and are willing to pay.
- CydeWeys 7y agoIt's probably for the best if there's fewer people driving for rideshare companies, who individually make more money. The negative externalities from all those extra cars on the road are fierce, and if those single occupancy trips were charged appropriately then more trips would be taken by alternate methods.
- Shorel 7y ago> The negative externalities from all those extra cars on the road are fierce It's better to have an Uber idling at some corner than a traditional taxi driving furiously while trying to find a new ride. That's what the Uber drivers do in the cities I have lived or visited. Taxi drivers are the most aggressive and dangerous drivers ever. Almost all crashes I have seen involve one or two taxis. You can't ignore that externality when discussing the only alternative to taxis we have now.
- CydeWeys 7y agoYou're still in a car-centric mindset. What I have in mind are non-car transit alternatives, like walking, biking, e-biking, e-scooters, light rail, heavy rail, etc. Even if the cars are fully electric, they're still dangerous as you point out (until the time they become fully self-driving). So it's best to eliminate as many of them as possible. And a simple tool to do so is to increase taxes on all for-hire vehicle rides, thus targeting taxis and rideshares equally.
- HiroshiSan 7y agoI have trouble taking stories seriously when the person mentions they were almost in tears, I don't know why but it seems disingenuous.
- jerf 7y agoI have no trouble. People who make bad financial decisions... not necessarily catastrophically bad, just bad... tend to make other ones, like trying to pay off their debts by becoming an Uber driver because they bought Uber's propaganda lock, stock, and barrel. Being unable to pay off the car could very well be merely an exemplar of a larger problem. I've had a couple friends of the family I've been watching on similar paths. It's not like they're "handing their money over to scammers" or anything catastrophically stupid, but they make a kinda bad decision, then compound it with some other kinda bad decisions about what jobs to take, and then make some more kinda bad decisions, and before you know it, they're losing their house and declaring bankruptcy. The tears might not just be about this particular thing, but the increasingly undeniable recognition they're on a snowball's path down a slope they've done everything in their power to make avalanche-prone. The people I know aren't screwing up by thinking they can make lots of money by being Uber drivers without running the math for themselves (that is, it may work for some people but you really have to run the math and be sure before doing it), but it's the sort of thing that would fit right in to their life story right now.
- jstarfish 7y agoIt's loaded language; a cheap appeal to emotion rather than telling you all the facts and letting you draw your own conclusions about the story.
- pentae 7y agoBecause not everyones a sociopath? Some people are genuinely empathetic of others
- berkes 7y ago> We drivers have zero rights. Zero. Uber/Lyfts' idea to start a driver association is going to do nothing for us. The culture of these co's is that we don't matter, that we are junk, replaceable, & deserve nothing. We have to fight together to win this. Lots of those platforms have a simple business model: Outsource the risk to individual partakers, with that, lowers the price for consumers, but market it as"disrupting". As long as the individuals to whom the risk is deferred to, are either locked in, or can cover their risks easy enough, there is no problem. In this, Uber seems to be really pushing the envolope on the amount of risk they can externalize, before their individual risk-takers form a union or walk away.
- radcon 7y agoI'm really glad I saw this. These are the types of things that I think the media should cover. Instead, we get the same weather, traffic and political BS every day. Unfortunately, it looks like few other people will see this on HN -- it's already flagged to the second page even though it should easily be the #1 post right now.
- Miner49er 7y agoIn this case, a union doesn't make much sense. If a strong union was formed, the drivers would then be organized enough to form their own co-op. Uber doesn't really own the means of production here. The drivers do. It's not like a Walmart or something where the drivers would need a lot of capital to start a co-op. Wouldn't the capital they need be pretty minimal?
- ForHackernews 7y ago> Wouldn't the capital they need be pretty minimal? Hard to say. Uber seems to employ large numbers of extremely expensive silicon valley engineers doing god-knows-what. Maybe those are necessary to run a successful ride dispatching app? On the other hand, groups like Lyft, Ride Austin, and Curb seem to have cloned Uber's main app.
- mft_ 7y agoInteresting, isn't it. I get that huge scale is very hard, and I'm sure the iterative small optimisations become increasingly difficult... but the MVP of an Uber-like app wouldn't seem to be hugely complex?
- jjwhitaker 7y agoIf other firms are started like a co-op with an app clone like Ride Austin, it could lead to drivers wearing a dozen hats or "employers" and flipping between platforms depending on pricing which may benefit Uber/Lyft who can subsidize costs to undercut competition. Investors may then choose to go with an established firm like Uber as they already are in this cycle and may projects in the works that become the real money maker like self driving technology.
- ForHackernews 7y agoAFAIK, many (most?) drivers already do this. They carry two or more phones for Uber + Lyft + Curb...
- malandrew 7y ago
- notus 7y agoIt will never get better for gig economy. They are basically mturks until automation is ready. It sucks and it is sad, but the problems are bigger than any one company in the US and ultimately the responsibility of the government. Gig economy jobs were never meant to be people's bread and butter. Also if the price went up much people wouldn't pay for it anymore.
- tesq 7y ago> Gig economy jobs were never meant to be people's bread and butter This is the same talking point people use when arguing against raising wages for retail or fast food workers. Reality shows that, like retail jobs, gig economy jobs are many Americans' bread and butter. Pandora's box has already been opened. > Also if the price went up much people wouldn't pay for it anymore. Doubt it. Investor money allows gig economy companies to undercut their competition. Five years ago I could get across town for $5 via Uber or Lyft. Now, the costs average to about $18 for the same trip. I doubt that my driver's compensation more than tripled during that time like my trip's cost did. There's plenty of room for gig economy workers to increase their pay. Companies that take poverty-level pay for their workers as a given, like Uber, might not survive, but other players will pop up in that space to eat their lunch.
- malandrew 7y ago> ultimately the responsibility of the government Why do so many people always default to "the government will fix it" instead of expecting people to take responsibility for themselves? Everyone has the same 168 hours each week. Even with 12 hour days, 8 hours of sleep, 3 hours for meals, 7 days a week, that still leaves 21 hours to do things to change your circumstances. You only need to keep that up long enough to get into better circumstances that buy you more time. I worked a few years under similar circumstances. It's totally doable, but you have to plan and have to budget your time.
- EliRivers 7y agoYou also need health, genuine opportunity and limited other drains on your energy - don't have anyone sick that needs you, and don't have any children. If you've already lost your health, or have someone relying on you as a carer, or are living somewhere without real opportunity (or perhaps very vulnerable to something that'll get you fired or deeper in inescapable debt - one car maintenance issue, one missed bus, one day off sick), well... Also, you need the ability to plan and budget your time. These are real skills, and if you don't have them, nobody's going to teach you, so you're also out of luck there.
- zbentley 7y agoThe stories linked sound a lot like the stories of people trying to get support from Google for ... well, anything except big-money GCP issues, really.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- anovikov 7y agoWell, anyway the whole thing of having drivers there is temporary. They are just there to hold market share for these companies to let them start making money properly when the self-driving taxis arrive and drivers are all terminated in the end (maybe Uber Black will still have them). They aren't just expendable - they are a stopgap solution as a whole.
- rinze 7y agoIt's not a tinder box. It's a meat grinder. It's an optimized capitalist instrument: extract labour from people at the lowest cost possible to keep expanding.