[palata]

> but the second anyone suggests we were better off with the taxi cab than Uber or Lyft

Uber or Lyft are more convenient for the customer, but the drivers are being abused by Uber or Lyft. Which is less than ideal.

That's the thing about BigTech: nobody says that the product was not more convenient (at least before enshittification), but the problem is that BigTech abuses their dominant position, over and over again.

[AlexanderTheGr8]

> Uber or Lyft are more convenient for the customer

Gross understatement!

1) You can find a cab wherever (almost) and whenever (24x7) - you don't have to hail a cab for minutes/hours (even worse was not knowing when/if the cab would even arrive).

2) Much safer. Emergency support + seeing the route on GPS (can see the path on the driver's uber app) + rating system.

3) Better behaviour, enforced by rating system. Yes, it's not perfect, but much much better than cabs. Cab drivers were regularly abusive, knowing there were no repurcussions. Unfortunately, humans only behave when there's consequences.

4) No scamming vulnerable un-informed people. Cabs were known for scamming foreigners or un-informed people. I can point out a few more things. Calling it `more convenient` is a massive understatement.

> but the drivers are being abused by Uber or Lyft. Which is less than ideal.

This can be fixed by regulation. Just because a new technology brought a new problem, that doesn't mean we should discard the technology and go to its worse predecessor. Remember : there is a reason the new technology took over its predecessor.

I think we can have both : the benefits of digital ride-share + good regulation for drivers to ensure they can maintain their livelihood.

PS : that's until driverless waymo/tesla take over everything...

[palata]

> I think we can have both : the benefits of digital ride-share + good regulation

Not in the US, who don't believe in regulations. But yeah, my point was that the best would be the convenience of those apps without the abuse. It seems possible outside the US, though: I believe Greece had banned Uber from the beginning on, and Taxis ended up building a similar app.

> that's until driverless waymo/tesla take over everything...

Oh right, it's the year of the fully autonomous car! Or was it last year? Or 2016?

[AlexanderTheGr8]

> Oh right, it's the year of the fully autonomous car! Or was it last year? Or 2016?

Just because CEOs have been hyping this tech up to raise valuations doesn't mean it will never happen. They said the same about landing rockets - now, it's a regular thing.

It's pretty clear that driverless is coming - exact timeline is unclear. Whether in 3 years, 5 years, or a decade, but it's coming.

[AnthonyMouse]

> the drivers are being abused by Uber or Lyft.

I still don't get this one. You don't have to sign a long-term contract to drive for these companies. They don't own you. If you try it and it sucks more than working somewhere else then stop doing it. Your leverage is your ability to say no. But if it's better than your other alternatives then why isn't the complaint about the alternatives which are somehow even worse?

[SpicyLemonZest]

Vehicle depreciation is one big example. Any commercial vehicle operator knows that driving a car around causes its value to decrease substantially, 29 cents per mile on average as of 2018, and will (must!) account for that when running the numbers on their business. But most individual drivers don't have the expertise to intuit this, and Uber and Lyft don't tell them. So all but the most financially savvy drivers have an effective income significantly lower than they believe.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Any commercial vehicle operator knows that driving a car around causes its value to decrease substantially, 29 cents per mile on average as of 2018, and will (must!) account for that when running the numbers on their business.

People are always saying this and then you go to KBB. The average car is >12 years old, so let's suppose you're going to get rid of your Prius when it's 12 years old instead of allowing it to become older than average. Typical mileage at that age might be around 150,000 miles. Trade in value in good condition for a 12 year old Prius with 150,000 is ~$4300. Double the mileage to 300,000 miles, it drops to ~$2600. That's $1700 for an extra 150,000 miles, or around $0.01/mile.

$0.29/mile is from new or nearly-new cars which are then resold as nearly new. If you buy a new car and immediately roll the odometer past six digits its value is going to fall off a cliff. But if you start with a ten year old car which has already lost most of its value to depreciation, and then put a lot more miles on it over a couple more years -- which is what most of the people driving for Uber would actually be doing -- the cost is dramatically lower.

Presuming that the people choosing to do this as a profession can't figure this out is kind of patronizing, but, in the common case, not even that much of a difference.

[chongli]

Uber requires that your vehicle be less than 10 years old and in good condition as well as pass an inspection from a licensed mechanic. You can’t just go ahead and grab a 12 year old clunker and run it into the ground unless you’re only planning to do food deliveries (which have no restrictions on vehicle quality).

[AnthonyMouse]

> Uber requires that your vehicle be less than 10 years old and in good condition as well as pass an inspection from a licensed mechanic.

Uber requires that your vehicle be less than 16 years old:

https://www.uber.com/us/en/drive/requirements/vehicle-requir...

Plenty of 10-16 year old vehicles are in good condition and will pass an inspection.

You can keep a vehicle in good condition indefinitely because vehicles are made of modular parts and parts can be replaced as they wear out. Whether this is worth doing depends on the expected frequency of future repairs, which in turn depends on the specific make and model (there's a reason the most common ride sharing car is a Prius), how well the car is maintained and how stupid you drive it, but most cars continue to be worth maintaining rather than scrapping until they're 20-25 years old. Which is why the average age of vehicles on the road is just over 12 years, implying that they last approximately twice that long.

[chongli]

I’m in Canada. Uber has different rules for vehicles here. Though now that I check the 10 year requirement has changed since I wrote that comment.

Perhaps someone from Uber saw my comment and updated the requirements. If so, they must’ve been working on the weekend!

[palata]

> If you try it and it sucks more than working somewhere else then stop doing it.

People like you deserve to end up in a situation where they don't have a choice but to accept an abusive job. Just to learn empathy.

[AnthonyMouse]

Using "empathy" as the reason to diminish the options of someone who has few to begin with is the oblivious cruelty of the political functionary.

If A and B are both bad but B is worse, and then you prohibit A because A is bad, what result do you expect? B is still worse than A and B is now their only option.

This is the age distribution of Uber drivers:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/828981/ride-hailing-serv...

More than 70% are over the age of 50. Only 1.5% are 30 or under. Approximately 90% of Uber drivers are doing it part-time. These are not naive kids being taken advantage of, they're older people who want a little extra income and to get out of the house.

The people claiming that this is abuse are the people who want to sustain a taxi medallion cartel. Competition from bored retirees interferes with that, so they demonize it. This is how we get bad laws, regulatory capture and cost disease.

You help people by giving them new opportunities, not by taking existing opportunities away. Have some empathy.

[palata]

> You help people by giving them new opportunities, not by taking existing opportunities away. Have some empathy.

By making them work for BigTech that takes makes them rely on tips because it takes most of their profits?

With regulations, you don't have to take opportunities away. You can just control the abuse.

[AnthonyMouse]

> By making them work for BigTech that takes makes them rely on tips because it takes most of their profits?

Who is making them work there? Is there any place in the world where Uber is the only source of employment?

> With regulations, you don't have to take opportunities away. You can just control the abuse.

The incumbents define opportunities for competing drivers as abuse and then want to prohibit the competition from doing that. This is straightforwardly taking away those opportunities from others to benefit the incumbents.

If it was actually abuse, the people nevertheless choosing it as the best of their available alternatives would have to be in a position where all of their other alternatives are also abusive. This typically happens when there is some kind of serious monopolization or regulatory capture in the local economy. In that case you can forget about the original company for a minute and redirect all your efforts to addressing that, because then you're on a sinking ship and if you don't stop taking on water it's not going to matter how you position the deck chairs.

Whereas if there are non-abusive alternatives and people are willfully choosing the "abusive" one, something doesn't add up and you shouldn't assume that it's them rather than you who doesn't understand their situation.

[palata]

Regulate how much Uber/Lyft can take from the drivers for merely providing a matching app.

[whimsicalism]

number of causal inference studies have shown that uber/lyft lead to broad based wage gains for the poorest segment of the working population. the cartel approach is only better for the select few who get to be drivers

[palata]

Ok, based wage gains for the poorest segment. What about those who lose? Because Uber makes a ton of money while it's still cheaper to take an Uber than a taxi. Someone, somewhere has to lose, right?

Now imagine they did not abuse the drivers... it would possibly be even better for the poorest segment!