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>We knew that their future was purely dependent on a self-driving car fleet where they could ditch drivers (and their pay) completely. Nah. Right now their bus

>We knew that their future was purely dependent on a self-driving car fleet where they could ditch drivers (and their pay) completely. Nah. Right now their business model relies on having their labor bring their own capital. I've always seriously doubted that cutting the labor out of the equation and replacing it with capital that Uber now has to furnish and maintain was going to save all THAT much money. The numbers are all over the place, but from what I've been told once you factor in mileage costs, gas, and maintenance + cleaning of the vehicles most rideshare drivers are only earning somewhere from $1.50 to $3.00 an hour. If Uber then has to internalize all those costs plus add all the software maintenance/development costs of their self-driving AI how much is that saving them really? Is it going to be enough to defray the billion and a half dollars they're bleeding every year? No, their long-term game was always going to be to undermine public transit and personal vehicle ownership through an artificially cheap business model and then once their monopoly (or oligopoly with Lyft) is firmly entrenched to boondoggle municipal governments into subsidizing rides for them instead of spending money on building out transit.

trhway 7y ago
>Right now their business model relies on having their labor bring their own capital. That is really post-Marx. It is a new economy structure enabled by technological progress, and which couldn't have existed and hasn't been predicted until it was enabled by technology and was created by Uber and the likes. In marxism, ie. in classic capitalism the capital owner extracts added value which is created by the labor applied to the capital. In the post-marxism economy the birth of which we're witnessing today Uber, by the owning of the information network, manages to extracts the added value which labor creates by applying itself to the labor's own capital. Marxism economical theory naturally postulates socialism after capitalism with the socialism being the maximum entropy of capital ownership distribution, and that is what we've observed in the last 100 years. These days with the rise of technology that got the post-Marx economy enabled the future driven by that economy isn't socialism, its the new fundamental state of society - the network.
- naravara 7y ago
  This is economically illiterate gibberish.
  - trhway 7y ago
    let me guess - 1. you have so far lived only in one economical system, probably capitalism, and in particular you have never lived in the socialism 2. you don't have degree in Math 3. you haven't read Das Kapital So, you basically don't know most of the things what i was talking about. No wonder it sounds gibberish to you.

trhway 7y ago

>Right now their business model relies on having their labor bring their own capital. That is really post-Marx. It is a new economy structure enabled by technological progress, and which couldn't have existed and hasn't been predicted until it was enabled by technology and was created by Uber and the likes. In marxism, ie. in classic capitalism the capital owner extracts added value which is created by the labor applied to the capital. In the post-marxism economy the birth of which we're witnessing today Uber, by the owning of the information network, manages to extracts the added value which labor creates by applying itself to the labor's own capital. Marxism economical theory naturally postulates socialism after capitalism with the socialism being the maximum entropy of capital ownership distribution, and that is what we've observed in the last 100 years. These days with the rise of technology that got the post-Marx economy enabled the future driven by that economy isn't socialism, its the new fundamental state of society - the network.

naravara 7y ago
This is economically illiterate gibberish.
- trhway 7y ago
  let me guess - 1. you have so far lived only in one economical system, probably capitalism, and in particular you have never lived in the socialism 2. you don't have degree in Math 3. you haven't read Das Kapital So, you basically don't know most of the things what i was talking about. No wonder it sounds gibberish to you.