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I will say before Uber was a thing, if I tried to call and schedule a taxi pickup in the city I lived in at the time, if they showed up at all they were at east
by irishcoffee 4mo ago
I will say before Uber was a thing, if I tried to call and schedule a taxi pickup in the city I lived in at the time, if they showed up at all they were at east a half hour late. Missed a flight because of it once. I don’t even like uber, but it is objectively a better service most of the time.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- smallmancontrov 4mo agoYes, Uber did something enormously creative. But it also did something destructive and we're guilty of an accounting sleight of hand if we focus on one while pretending the other doesn't exist. We still want to encourage creative destruction to move forward, but paying taxes to clean up the destruction is the very least that the victorious parties can do because the entanglement exists in moral accounting even if it doesn't exist in financial accounting.
- AnimalMuppet 4mo agoDestroying inefficient monopoly rents? By all means, let us not pretend that doesn't exist.
- smallmancontrov 4mo agoYou're forgetting the workers, who were the important part of this analysis.
- AnimalMuppet 4mo agoWhy are the taxi workers more important than, say, the taxi customers? If the companies are providing garbage service, why do I have to care about protecting their workers?
- smallmancontrov 4mo agoWhen you lose your job to AI, you will understand.
- Esophagus4 4mo agoTechnology has always displaced workers. And then the society adjusts. Plenty of people will lose their jobs to AI, but most workers will be redeployed elsewhere. The agricultural revolution displaced farm workers with machines. There was unrest and migration to cities, and eventually that fed the Industrial Revolution and created a working class. Change is tough, but we will all be fine.
- smallmancontrov 4mo agoLast time inequality cooked up it took a lifetime to go back down. It did so very painfully through capital incineration on a monumental scale: a great depression, where the incineration was metaphorical, and two world wars, where it was very literal. In both cases it was economical and in both cases it fixed the problem but at enormous cost. We should aim to do better.
- inigyou 4mo agoPlus all the union violence. The ones where owners used guns to break strikes so striking workers also started bringing guns and using them. I don't think we want that, do you?
- samiv 4mo agoYeah and it took about 150 years until industrial revolution started to actually benefit the common people and the workers started to have their working conditions improved. What it took was social democracy and unions and other social movements. Saying that "it's happened before, it'll be alright" is a bit naive and short-sighted.
- inigyou 4mo ago
- jojobas 4mo agoIt created another monopoly to collect more rent, and some would say it's a worse one to boot.
- timr 4mo agoYeah, anyone who uses taxi drivers as an example of destruction either don't know what they're talking about (because they never experienced it) or they're crying crocodile tears. I had cab drivers nearly drive off with me hanging off the car in San Francisco, because they were far more concerned with screening my destination than, say, not killing me. If Uber destroyed that industry, it was only a net benefit to society. They created immense value, and the "destruction" was only to eliminate a layer of corrupt parasites who made money by preventing a free market (in this case, the medallion owners, but the entire industry was corrupt from top to bottom).
- inigyou 4mo agoNot all places have corrupt taxi industries. I think they were always more expensive than Uber (but there's a reason for that, Uber's pricing is not sustainable) but in most places a taxi is just a taxi.
- thisislife2 4mo agoDon't entirely agree that a local Taxi service is necessarily costlier than Uber. In my indian city, Uber and Ola cannot compete (and have been nearly wiped out) because a local Taxi service (that now dominates the market) is very competitively priced and professionally run. They charge their drivers a fixed percentage (unlike Uber or Ola, and lower fees than them) and release their payments timely in a transparent manner. The price per km, and all extra charges (late night fees, overtime driver charges etc., permit fees in case of long distance travel, toll fees etc.) are transparently conveyed to the customer too. And there is no bullshit practice of price gauging through "surge pricing" or "convenience fees" or "platform fees" etc.
- satvikpendem 4mo agoReminds me of Empower in the US, it charges drivers a fix fee, not even a percentage, and then the drivers take all the upside from their rides.
- retired 4mo ago
- matwood 4mo agoUber also forced taxi services to have apps and always accept CCs.
- nunez 4mo agoCounterpoint: I scheduled an Uber once to take me to the airport. They arrived earlier than the requested time and left when I met them at the time I requested because they waited too long. This was on Uber Black, their professional driver level service. Counterpoint: It is increasingly impossible to get to a human at Uber when you need support, as most of their support channels are gated by LLMs and self-service support workflows.
- LanceH 4mo agoUp front pricing -- even if higher -- is welcome.