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Can anyone give a manufacturing example for the phenomena for which he uses Uber? It seems off to use a gig economy company in this article with its tariffs/man

Can anyone give a manufacturing example for the phenomena for which he uses Uber? It seems off to use a gig economy company in this article with its tariffs/manufacturing focus.

neogodless 2y ago
> the company spent its early years building its core technology and delivering a high-end experience with significantly higher prices than incumbent taxi companies. Eventually, though, the exact same technology was deployed to deliver a lower-priced experience to a significantly broader customer base; said customer base was brought on board at zero marginal cost Ironically, this was the plan laid out for Tesla early on. Very expensive Roadster, pretty expensive Model S. Make some cash and build a reputation for how good a luxury electric car can be. Then use that cash to go down market. Of course zero marginal cost does not apply with the Model 3, but they did dramatically lower their own cost-of-materials by the time they released the Model 3, making it profitable at scale. > The takeaway from that Article isn’t that Uber is a model for the rebirth of American manufacturing; rather it’s that you can leverage demand to fundamentally reshape supply Anecdotally, I know that Tesla became an aspirational brand, a dream car for many. A status brand. So the demand was there, and if you could get a "dream car" for $35K USD then why wouldn't you?
- Jochim 2y ago
  The Uber example is also an outright lie. They acquired those customers by burning billions of dollars to deliver rides below the cost of providing them. Then they raised prices beyond their competition to account for their ridiculous overheads.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    Taxis still exist and are still more expensive. You pay for them to use bus lanes in SF and so on. Uber prices are not beyond the competition.
    - samtp 2y ago
      At least in Seattle, it's actually about 50% cheaper to get a taxi from SeaTac to the city than to take a Lyft or Uber.
      - renewiltord 2y ago
        Ah then it’s regional. In SF it’s typically 30% more expensive in a taxi from the airport to 4th and king.
        fragmede 2y ago
        it's like $40 to take a car vs like $15 on Bart into the city.
        renewiltord 2y ago
        BART takes 2x the time station to station. Try it out right now. The time is 1256 as of the time of this comment. SFO International to Montgomery St. Station: Earliest arrival is 1346 Driving: Earliest arrival is 1323 My experience is that the car takes ~6 min to arrive to pick you up for Uber. You can call it earlier, but assuming you call it when you arrive and then wait that's 1322. You lose 23 minutes to BART. And that's BART station to BART station. Change it slightly, like to my home near Caltrain and it's pointless. The cost in time is way more than $25.
        fragmede 2y ago
        What are you going to do on your phone in the Uber vs on your phone on your couch when you get home vs your phone on Bart? If you have an important in-person meeting to get to then by all means pay the surcharge but let's be real about how some of us are spending those "saved" minutes. Thank you for doing the math - we're only talking about 23 of them? it's entirely possible to capitalize on 23 minutes, but seriously, 23 minutes?
        2y ago
  - cyberax 2y ago
    > They acquired those customers by burning billions of dollars to deliver rides below the cost of providing them. That is exaggerated. Uber was losing something like $0.50-$1 per ride in 2018. Uber/Lyft were (and still mostly are) just _better_ than taxis.
    - const_cast 2y ago
      It’s not exaggerated. Uber was losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year operating. That’s billions. I don’t know if I trust Ubers numbers on this. I don’t know what they’re counting as “cost per ride”. Does engineers salaries factor into that? What about data centers? Advertising? If you factor all of it in, then they’re losing billions.
      - cyberax 2y ago
        > It’s not exaggerated. Uber was losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year operating. That’s billions. Well, yes. However, the impact of that on the ride cost is exaggerated. > Does engineers salaries factor into that? What about data centers? Advertising? Yes. > If you factor all of it in, then they’re losing billions. And when you divide it by the number of rides, you get into sub-$1 figures.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        const_cast 2y ago
        > Well, yes. However, the impact of that on the ride cost is exaggerated. Yeah, because they’re losing the money. Meaning YOU’RE not paying it, it’s being lost. Keep in mind this is also with: - uber not providing the capital for their rides. Taxi companies buy taxis, uber says you buy it. - vastly underpaying their work force. - skirting employment laws with gig work - relying on tips! The ride cost doesn’t include tips, despite that being a huge portion of wages!
    - torginus 2y ago
      Uber was a 9 year old company in 2018
torginus 2y ago
I think this is the typical modern American bias of idolizing 'tech' companies - it makes a lot of money so it must be because it's very technologically sophisticated. In reality I'd guess building an Uber scale tech company is not particularly difficult - after a quick ChatGPT query, it seems a city like New York, has about 90kish drivers at any moment - if we assume they make a query to the API every 5 seconds (and add once as many for users) - the scale doesn't look particularly daunting, something manageable with optimized tech on a small server cluster. Sharding is trivial since New Yorkers are not really interested in taxies from Brussels etc. And the proof of the pudding is there are tons of competitors, and most of them work just as well as Uber does (on the technology level, driver availability or market penetration might be a different issue). Uber is a brand like McDonalds - you could say people go to McDonalds because they have the best burgers enabled by their superior logistics and equipment - and that's certainly probably a factor, you can't really ignore that they are where they are due to brand strength, availability, and early mover advantage - while also recognizing they are far from the only players in the business. American tech companies have immensely benefited from being the 'default' providers of services - Google, Gmail, AWS, etc. People didn't give much thought on what they chose - and assumed everyone chooses them because they are the best, not because people lacked sufficient incentive to give proper consideration to what service they use. Thanks to Trump, that has certainly changed in Europe at least, literally overnight.
- pkkim 2y ago
  I worked at Uber a long time ago - there was some amount of overcomplicated engineering but you genuinely can't completely shard by city because a big part of Uber's value proposition is that you fly into a city for the first time and Uber just works.
  - torginus 2y ago
    You probably know much better than I do, but that doesn't seem it would make it impossible to do sharding? You just pick a shard based on the current location of the driver/customer.
    - 2y ago

Can anyone give a manufacturing example for the phenomena for which he uses Uber? It seems off to use a gig economy company in this article with its tariffs/manufacturing focus.

neogodless 2y ago

> the company spent its early years building its core technology and delivering a high-end experience with significantly higher prices than incumbent taxi companies. Eventually, though, the exact same technology was deployed to deliver a lower-priced experience to a significantly broader customer base; said customer base was brought on board at zero marginal cost Ironically, this was the plan laid out for Tesla early on. Very expensive Roadster, pretty expensive Model S. Make some cash and build a reputation for how good a luxury electric car can be. Then use that cash to go down market. Of course zero marginal cost does not apply with the Model 3, but they did dramatically lower their own cost-of-materials by the time they released the Model 3, making it profitable at scale. > The takeaway from that Article isn’t that Uber is a model for the rebirth of American manufacturing; rather it’s that you can leverage demand to fundamentally reshape supply Anecdotally, I know that Tesla became an aspirational brand, a dream car for many. A status brand. So the demand was there, and if you could get a "dream car" for $35K USD then why wouldn't you?

Jochim 2y ago
The Uber example is also an outright lie. They acquired those customers by burning billions of dollars to deliver rides below the cost of providing them. Then they raised prices beyond their competition to account for their ridiculous overheads.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Taxis still exist and are still more expensive. You pay for them to use bus lanes in SF and so on. Uber prices are not beyond the competition.
  - samtp 2y ago
    At least in Seattle, it's actually about 50% cheaper to get a taxi from SeaTac to the city than to take a Lyft or Uber.
    - renewiltord 2y ago
      Ah then it’s regional. In SF it’s typically 30% more expensive in a taxi from the airport to 4th and king.
      - fragmede 2y ago
        it's like $40 to take a car vs like $15 on Bart into the city.
        renewiltord 2y ago
        BART takes 2x the time station to station. Try it out right now. The time is 1256 as of the time of this comment. SFO International to Montgomery St. Station: Earliest arrival is 1346 Driving: Earliest arrival is 1323 My experience is that the car takes ~6 min to arrive to pick you up for Uber. You can call it earlier, but assuming you call it when you arrive and then wait that's 1322. You lose 23 minutes to BART. And that's BART station to BART station. Change it slightly, like to my home near Caltrain and it's pointless. The cost in time is way more than $25.
        fragmede 2y ago
        What are you going to do on your phone in the Uber vs on your phone on your couch when you get home vs your phone on Bart? If you have an important in-person meeting to get to then by all means pay the surcharge but let's be real about how some of us are spending those "saved" minutes. Thank you for doing the math - we're only talking about 23 of them? it's entirely possible to capitalize on 23 minutes, but seriously, 23 minutes?
        2y ago
- cyberax 2y ago
  > They acquired those customers by burning billions of dollars to deliver rides below the cost of providing them. That is exaggerated. Uber was losing something like $0.50-$1 per ride in 2018. Uber/Lyft were (and still mostly are) just _better_ than taxis.
  - const_cast 2y ago
    It’s not exaggerated. Uber was losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year operating. That’s billions. I don’t know if I trust Ubers numbers on this. I don’t know what they’re counting as “cost per ride”. Does engineers salaries factor into that? What about data centers? Advertising? If you factor all of it in, then they’re losing billions.
    - cyberax 2y ago
      > It’s not exaggerated. Uber was losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year operating. That’s billions. Well, yes. However, the impact of that on the ride cost is exaggerated. > Does engineers salaries factor into that? What about data centers? Advertising? Yes. > If you factor all of it in, then they’re losing billions. And when you divide it by the number of rides, you get into sub-$1 figures.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - const_cast 2y ago
        > Well, yes. However, the impact of that on the ride cost is exaggerated. Yeah, because they’re losing the money. Meaning YOU’RE not paying it, it’s being lost. Keep in mind this is also with: - uber not providing the capital for their rides. Taxi companies buy taxis, uber says you buy it. - vastly underpaying their work force. - skirting employment laws with gig work - relying on tips! The ride cost doesn’t include tips, despite that being a huge portion of wages!
  - torginus 2y ago
    Uber was a 9 year old company in 2018

torginus 2y ago

I think this is the typical modern American bias of idolizing 'tech' companies - it makes a lot of money so it must be because it's very technologically sophisticated. In reality I'd guess building an Uber scale tech company is not particularly difficult - after a quick ChatGPT query, it seems a city like New York, has about 90kish drivers at any moment - if we assume they make a query to the API every 5 seconds (and add once as many for users) - the scale doesn't look particularly daunting, something manageable with optimized tech on a small server cluster. Sharding is trivial since New Yorkers are not really interested in taxies from Brussels etc. And the proof of the pudding is there are tons of competitors, and most of them work just as well as Uber does (on the technology level, driver availability or market penetration might be a different issue). Uber is a brand like McDonalds - you could say people go to McDonalds because they have the best burgers enabled by their superior logistics and equipment - and that's certainly probably a factor, you can't really ignore that they are where they are due to brand strength, availability, and early mover advantage - while also recognizing they are far from the only players in the business. American tech companies have immensely benefited from being the 'default' providers of services - Google, Gmail, AWS, etc. People didn't give much thought on what they chose - and assumed everyone chooses them because they are the best, not because people lacked sufficient incentive to give proper consideration to what service they use. Thanks to Trump, that has certainly changed in Europe at least, literally overnight.

pkkim 2y ago
I worked at Uber a long time ago - there was some amount of overcomplicated engineering but you genuinely can't completely shard by city because a big part of Uber's value proposition is that you fly into a city for the first time and Uber just works.
- torginus 2y ago
  You probably know much better than I do, but that doesn't seem it would make it impossible to do sharding? You just pick a shard based on the current location of the driver/customer.
  - 2y ago