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Their massive early investment in Uber distorted their reality and they expected ride sharing to be incredibly successful in other markets when it's not even su
by williamDafoe 3y ago
Their massive early investment in Uber distorted their reality and they expected ride sharing to be incredibly successful in other markets when it's not even successful in the USA - it's a fraud that pays below minimum wage off the backs of people who cannot do math. It has never made money anywhere ...
ARM has had a laziness problem ever since the Apple A1 chip - there's a reason why nobody uses their 6-yr old layouts. ARM almost killed Qualcomm when they adopted A57 for the snapdragon 808 using the 64-bit arm design - that chip melted quite a few phones and this gave Exymos it's start!
- jjeaff 3y agoIt's basically an inefficient, but effective way to siphon money from the poor and middle class and deposit it into the bank accounts of the wealthy by utilizing the equity the poor and middle class have in their vehicles.
- asimpletune 3y agoYeah, it's crazy how much of the end-game of so much tech essentially boils down to something like this.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> to siphon money from the poor and middle class and deposit it into the bank accounts of the wealthy by utilizing the equity the poor and middle class have in their vehicles What poor and middle class assets does SoftBank manage? (EDIT: Nvm. I misread “vehicle” as an investment vehicle.)
- HWR_14 3y agoHe meant Uber. Uber is siphoning residual equity in people's vehicles into cash for Uber by underpaying for depreciation.
- dpflan 3y agoWell said. Would like to see an economic / accountant analysis of this.
- mrguyorama 3y agoGo look it up, it's been done before. Uber basically required you buy a new car in certain circumstances, and don't pay enough to keep up with gas, repairs, and value loss of running a car around.
- sokoloff 3y agoUber allows 16 year old cars in my city. If you're driving a paid-off 5+ year old Honda or Toyota, I think Uber's paying enough for you to turn a decent profit from driving for them. https://www.uber.com/us/en/drive/boston/vehicle-requirements/ https://www.uber.com/us/en/drive/boston/vehicle-requirements... It probably isn't paying enough for you to buy a brand new car with a loan and drive that around for them. But they're not making you do that, either...
- skybrian 3y agoIf we translate that from financial to real-world terms, it means that people aren't getting paid enough to cover wear and tear on their cars. I think that depends on how much you paid for the car and how long it will last (depends on quality, how good the maintenance is, and luck). Also, cash pays the rent and lower depreciation doesn't (unless you sell the car), so some people may prefer this to borrowing money.
- _Parfait_ 3y agoYou completely missed the point made here, which was a very good one.
- Mistletoe 3y agoThe poor and middle class don't have investments. Source: all my co-workers and girlfriend's relatives that meet me with blank stares when I ask if they are saving for their retirement or maxing the company match for the 401k. Not judging that- the reality is somewhere in between they can't afford to do much but stay alive due to inflation and housing costs out of control and that they need to stop getting $7 Dutch Bros. coffee every day, DoorDash every night, and Taylor Swift tickets for $1000.
- maerF0x0 3y agoThis is one thing that terrifies me. I'm sacrificing today to save for tomorrow while the masses are doing the opposite. And in a decade or 3 when I have assets they can out vote me and take it all back via taxes or rules that change the game Some examples are like - I paid off my student debt by not going to coachella or doing optional things (that I observed others doing). They might get it cancelled for free. They got Coachella + Education, I only got Education. Rinse and repeat for all sorts of delayed gratification steps.
- Apocryphon 3y agoYou can still go to Coachella today. Jeff Bezos did, after all.
- nly 3y agoThis is guaranteed to happen. Boomers have been rigging the system as a large voting cohort since coming of age.
- maerF0x0 3y agoBoomers might mostly be dead in 30 yrs, but yeah a concern in 10.
- shp0ngle 3y agoIt doesn't get the wealthy especially rich either, looking at the losses. Who gets rich on Uber and similar apps are all the programmers that visit this website, we make good money on all those schemes. We get paid really well. We are who really gets the best deal in all this. (Now I need to hide away before the flying shoes hit me.)
- mym1990 3y agoThe wealthy got rich at the IPO stage at the expense of the public, much like most tech IPOs.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoas an end user, I got a pretty good deal for quite a while. I'm always surprised that VCs assume that customers are morons and will keep buying the same product even when its not a good deal anymore. Uber's terms of the deal changed, so I don't buy the product anymore. Simple as.
- bombcar 3y agoThe goal is to kill all the alternatives so you have no choice. Uber wanted to kill all taxis everywhere, then they'd have a monopoly.
- SoftTalker 3y agoUber wanted to attack all the things that were bad about legacy taxi service. They did, and it was better for many people. But they were foolish if they thought taxi services would not respond and competitors would not emerge. Ultimately they wanted their cars to be self-driving. They don't want to pay drivers at all. But there was and is no proof that it is possible in the time frame of their runway.
- crazygringo 3y agoNobody's forced to work for Uber. It's not "siphoning" money from anybody. Drivers are driving for it because it's the best job available -- often because of the flexibility that lets them do it around other scheduled commitments. Take that opportunity away and they become worse off, not better.
- maerF0x0 3y agoYou're not directly wrong, but many who are against uber/softbank/capitalists would mix in an implicit assumption that the investor class use desperation as a tool to force short term beneficial actions despite long term consequences. You can make $100 today to afford an airbnb and a cheese burger, but you'll have lost money when the repair bill (or purchasing the next car) comes due.
- hn_throawlles 3y agoor if you wanna be a much blunter in saying this: because this society NEEDS that there exists poor people, essentially people unable to refuse a shitty job.
- maerF0x0 3y agodepending on what you mean by Needs, i actually disagree. For example we could all be a lot richer with automation ... it seems the price of goods typically plummet once they're automated and saturated. Eg: food, iirc food production uses like 95% less people than in the past and is cheaper than it's ever been (practically free, and the very poor can get it for free at foodbanks etc). I do think if we automate the production of lots of things the price will eventually drop as economics says it will. The hard part is the things we cannot automate but also need.
- hn_throawlles 3y agothe real issue is not about what I mean by "Need" the real difficulties in these arguments come from defining (or trying to) what we mean by "this society", in part because society has many distinct (but intertwined) components in regards to food, and those things we need but cannot automate, it's not so simple. because of how capitalism works at dropping costs, in many cases what we actually get is lesser quality things that we absolutely need (like food). When this gets really really nasty is when applied to education. made cheaper because everybody needs one, but also made shittier, thereby creating people who cannot refuse certain propositions and choices. shitty education (shitty food) directly contributing to the continued 'availability' of poor people who cannot refuse shitty deals. in this light it could almost be concluded that this system is self-sustaining? ugh.
- johntiger1 3y agoNo, it's a way I can get a safe and reliable ride anywhere in the world, without getting scammed by a local taxi (not just Uber, but Lyft, Ola, Bolt etc.)
- henry2023 3y agoSafety and reliability are not mutually exclusive with exploitative. It can be both.
- prepend 3y agoSadly, taxis were never both until Uber. Even in Manhattan, getting a taxi at 2am was a crap shoot. I can an Uber in the suburbs at 2am anywhere in the country. That’s neat.
- bryant 3y ago> Even in Manhattan, getting a taxi at 2am was a crap shoot. I can an Uber in the suburbs at 2am anywhere in the country. You certainly can call an uber, yes. Whether they come through or whether they find a suitable reason to cancel on you... that's a crapshoot.
- CamperBob2 3y agoIt's just plain bad faith not to acknowledge that the scenario you describe was 10x more likely to happen with taxis.
- eganist 3y agoAnecdata: it's happened more frequently with me and ubers rather than cabs. So no, not bad faith, just my experience. I apologize that your experience was different. And likewise to all the downvotes who figured my experience was false lol.
- 3y ago
- adrr 3y agoThen why isn’t it financially successful? If riding sharing costs are much lower than incumbents like taxis shouldn’t it be raking in cash?
- SilverBirch 3y agoI do wonder if ARMs business model works long term. Imagination Technologies crashed the exact same way.
- mschuster91 3y agoThey'll have Apple's (likely immense) license fees for at least a decade - Apple won't make another architecture change anytime soon. And the rest of ARM's business... it's not like there are any alternatives. China hasn't managed to create a competitor, and even if they do it may very well be sanctioned and so useless to the US and EU. Intel/AMD's x86 is a dead end for the high-efficiency, low power market that ARM targets. PowerPC, MIPS and SuperH have been dead for years. There's always the possibility that RISC or some other open ecosystem rises, yes, but ARM is decades ahead and it would take absurd amounts of investments that I don't see appearing any time soon given the interest rate hike.
- peoplearepeople 3y agoARMs behavior lately is pushing a lot of riscv investment, my prediction is that Apple will migrate away from ARM 10years from now to something they can self-control, like riscv with some Apple-only extensions
- bhouston 3y agoApple has shifted its processor technology every 11 years for its desktop machines. But it has kept with ARM on iPhone for the last 15, so... Anyhow, it is hard to predict with accuracy that far out. That said, the first indications of a shift would be Apple adopting the RISC-V chip on the low end, things like the Apple Watch and Air Pods. Apple Watch has been using a 7N ARM chip since 2018 at nearly the same speed -- it seems like it doesn't need to be getter faster at each generation like the iPhone or MacBooks do. If adoption happens in this peripheral areas, then it is likely to move upstream to other devices over time.
- gumby 3y ago
- crazygringo 3y agoNot being incredibly successful doesn't make it a fraud. I don't think anybody invested in it because Uber misrepresented the market.
- henry2023 3y agoDesign and implement over engineered solutions to avoid paying minimum wage across dozens of countries seems at least a little sketchy.
- maerF0x0 3y agoOne thing uber did well is it helped break a market distortion in markets where you had to buy a badge, but they were supply limited and could sometimes fetch $1M which IMO makes no sense, if someone can do the job they should be allowed to. I'm not saying everything Uber did was great or right, but breaking that insanity is IMO a step of progress. Next we need to ensure gig workers make at least minimum wage after legitimate expenses.
- jazzyjackson 3y ago> supply limited and could sometimes fetch $1M which IMO makes no sense, if someone can do the job they should be allowed to. I mean, it's new york city, there is not enough room for everyone to drive around all day looking for fares. It's also a unionization thing -- a supply cap ensures a good wage for everyone in the club.
- crazygringo 3y agoStill not fraud though. And it's not exactly like the existing taxicab industry wasn't already sketchy/exploitative. The whole point of Uber is that it's a massive improvement over what came before.
- fredgrott 3y agotell that to FTX stockholders and clients. In loose IRS terms an engineered loss every year starts look like a hobby mis-telling the world that it is a business.
- TylerE 3y agoIronically the one good thing the rideshades did was to get taxis to install credit card readers. Taxis are often half the price of an Uber these days.
- osrec 3y agoWhich location?
- korm 3y agoNot OP but it is often the case around London, UK. Half price isn't an exaggeration! Better cars usually too.
- ch4s3 3y agoThe difference in London is pretty staggering. Cabs in Manhattan are pretty nice now too. Otherwise I find that ride shares are more available and nicer as an experience.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- skibble 3y agoWhat kind of taxi? Do you mean black cabs?
- grumple 3y agoWhen I was in London a few weeks ago the taxi prices were 2-3x the uber prices. Also they'd tell you to fuck off if they didn't want to take you to that location.
- xrd 3y agoI used to love riding taxis because the drivers had such great personalities. I remember when a Jamaican guy in NYC told me all about the OTHER drug users driving around. He didn't have to worry about the rating system, so he was free to share all the dirt. It was a much better time. I wish more cab drivers and uber could tell me to fuck off.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoI’ve asked my Uber and Lyft drivers over the years about how they feel about their work. They seem generally ok because it’s pretty flexible when they work and many people are doing it for supplemental income. I’ve yet to hear someone complain. I’m fact many of them, in nyc at least, are former taxi drivers that were being exploited mercilessly by the medallion holder. While Uber might be exploiting them just as hard or harder economically, they aren’t forcing them to do 12 hour six days a week shifts over night and renting them the taxi on top.
- niccl 3y agoThere might be a selection bias there: the ones doing uber are the ones it works for. I only use taxis and several times I've had drivers who've been uber drivers and gone (back) to taxi for various reasons. Of course that's got a selection bias in it too...
- snvzz 3y agoAnd likely varies wildly across countries.
- throw8383833jj 3y agowhere is this whole below minimum wage thing coming from? Everytime, I take an Uber or Lyft and calculate the hourly earnings of the uber driver minus vehicle miles, uber's take, and x2 the time needed (for the return trip), I come up with 15$-20$ an hour or so.
- CSMastermind 3y agoYeah I have friends who don't work in tech (the horror I know) and they Uber/Doordash sometimes when they're in between jobs. From everything they've told me you make pretty good money though they recommend doing it to supplement and bridge income rather than trying to do it full time (apparently it can be mentally draining if you do it for hours on end). I'm guessing posters here either have a view distorted by living in California/NYC or just have the data wrong.
- xbonez 3y agoWhen calculating their hourly wage, you have to factor in the time spent waiting for a passenger too.
- kikokikokiko 3y ago"...it's a fraud that pays below minimum wage off the backs of people who cannot do math..." Oh, the superiority complex of the white collar masses over the poor blue collar morons. I always like to talk with the Uber drivers down here in Brazil, and probably 50% or more aren't even the owners of the cars. They lease from a local version of "Hertz", and after paying for all the expenses, still take home an amount of money that is way above what they were getting on their prior jobs. I have talked to all range of drivers, from ex engineers to ex burger flippers. It infuriates me when I hear this argument that all gig economy workers are "dumb desperate morons that can't do math". People are not as dumb as you think.
- nebula8804 3y agoNobody was really talking about this ARM problem when it was happening. At least not on HN. I am always hearing these things after the fact. How do you stay on top of these things?