That's a huge "bug" not to notice for presumably a long time. I recently had a Lyft driver in NYC talk to me about how he quit uber after doing the math on what his fare should have been when a passenger told him how much they were being charged. He brought it up to uber and then quit when they didn't fix it. Anecdotal story but seems extremely relevant now
What your driver was talking about may not be a bug/math error like stated here.
After rolling out guaranteed whole-ride pricing (as opposed to metering) Uber is allegedly testing algorithms to bid different prices for rides to both driver and passenger. i.e., passenger sees a fare of $X, while driver sees a fare of $Y, where presumably $Y < $X.
Passengers' fares can be "optimized" by estimating a specific passenger-trip's price ceiling, and driver payments can be "optimized" by estimating the driver-trip's price floor.
To be clear, I find this entire concept incredibly abhorrent, but apparently this is being trialed.
In a nutshell, uber is changing their business from charging a commission to acting more like a retailer: buy low (from drivers) and sell high (to passengers). The problem is that normally the two far ends of that transaction only ever interact with the middleman, but here they're literally sitting in the same car. Hard for both the buyer and seller not to feel (justifiably) ripped off when they can actually compare notes. Especially if even after their margin Uber is still taking a percentage of the driver's pay.
When I read about stuff like this and also how Uber is losing a lot of money, I have to wonder if maybe there's a fundamental problem with their business model.
There is; they are hemorrhaging money, and only manage to stay afloat because of the billions of dollars being shoveled into the furnace by investors and nation-states. In a way, venture capital is subsidizing your rides.
They're not insane, though. They're buying market share and betting that they can pull self-driving cars into their fleets while they still have the market on lock. Without having to pay drivers or deal with their whiny attempts to enforce employment laws (against an app! Crazy,) they see themselves being able to print money hand over foot.
This is how you get away with being a dirtbag, in any situation. Move very quickly, and get to where you're going before anyone manages to claw you back far enough. Possession seems to be 100% of the law, when it comes to companies in this country.
Let's be clear that "they're buying market share and betting that they can pull self-driving cars into their fleets" thing is revisionist history. Nobody who invested billions in Uber years ago was told, "Our plan is to burn your money and win driverless cars." They didn't even have a driverless car program until about two years ago.
Uber thought that they had a viable business model based on human drivers, and that their markets would settle down into profitability once they established market share. They were wrong. They thought that they could successfully expand into a logistics business -- that was a big element of their redesign, which only landed 6 months ago, for god's sake. Now you never hear about logistics (because the only people who might conceivably want Uber-for-packages, Amazon, just went ahead and built the service in-house).
So now they're saying that they're a big bet on driverless cars.
* They didn't even have a driverless car program until about two years ago.*
Now everybody has one. 33 companies have registered with the California DMV to test. Five more accidents are listed for March and April. Cruise has three; they were rear-ended twice while stopped, and were clipped once by a pickup trying to drive around a double-parked mobile crane. Waymo was rear-ended once, and was forced off the road into a curb once by a vehicle drifting out of lane.
This is progress. Cruise is getting hit when it's not their fault, which is way ahead of their earlier driving record. We're seeing more unusual situations, where the other driver did something weird. Nobody was hurt in any of these.
The auto industry is indicating that the 2020 model year is when self-driving starts to ship. They have to be public about that, because the parts suppliers need to get their production lines ready to make the components in quantity. It's not going to be just Uber. It's going to be all the big automakers.
I can't find the post, but there was a 'UBER finance guy' (self-claimed) on HN a few weeks back that 'spilled the beans' and quit on what Uber is actually: a sub-prime auto loan company. Again, this is my recollection, take it with salt. It goes like:
Driver (D): I want to drive for Uber!
Uber (U): Sure! Do you have a car that is safe and less than 5 years old? (I have no idea what the car reqs. are)
D: No
U: Ok, well, we can loan you one! Just sign this!
D: Great! I signed! What are the loan repayments like?
U: Well, you owe us, per the 3 year contract, $100/week (I have no idea what the actual loan terms are like, but 100 is a nice round number so lets use that)
D: Ok! That's not bad!
U: It gets better! We'll just auto-deduct the money you owe us from your driver's account, after that, all the money is yours! You don't have to worry about any of it, just drive for us, we'll take care of it.
D: Cool! What happens when I get sick or something and can't drive?
U: Well, then you still owe us the money, plus a 10% fee on that week's loan payment (again, I have no idea what the loan agreement is like, YMMV) that we'll automatically tack on to the next week's loan payment.
-A week goes by-
D: Oh man, the weather was great this week, not a lot of people needed me to drive them around! I only made $90!
U: Ok, well, per the loan agreement, you owe us $10 more then (100-90=10), plus the 10% late fee, making your next week's payment $100 + $10 + (0.1 x $100) = $120.
D: Oh man! I better hope that the weather is bad so people want to take an Uber that I am driving!
-Another week goes by-
D: The weather was really rainy, but even still, I only got notifications to pick up $90 worth of people! Not again!
U: Well, now you owe us $120 - $90 = $30 plus the 10% late fee on the $120, making your next week's payment $100 + $30 + (0.1 x $120) = $142.
D: Well, darn, I thought a lot of people wanted to take Ubers! All my friends take them! But I don't get enough notifications to pick people up from Uber!
U: We know. We are the people that are giving you a loan and simultaneously are the ones that control how much of that loan you can pay back because we are the ones that tell you how many people you pick up and we also set the 'surge' rates and regular rates that we tell you. Also, we have something of a history of acting in morally reprehensible way without shame.
D: Wait, what did you say?!
U: Nothing! Nothing at all! Get back to driving! That car we bought isn't going to pay itself off, you are!
I'm as negative as the next guy on Uber, and that's a great narrative, but they are losing vast quantities of money. Any dastardly deed that they do has to square itself with the fact that they are losing vast quantities of money.
A predatory auto-loan company is not a $70B business.
True, but you can make a ton of money when you design a system where you have no labor costs (drivers make no net income). It's not $70 billion, but it is on the order of billions carried out for a decade. Perhaps that is why Uber is so ... nasty. Even with their scummy tactics and greyball and whatnot, they still can't make ends meet.
Also, what is stopping them, or anyone else, from running the same scam with other large capital expenditures? AirBnB could do this with houses, DoorDash could do this with heavy industrial kitchen equipment, etc. It's evil as hell, but Wall Street backed VCs have no issues finding people to do it.
It's almost like transport is a mature industry, with lots of competition, decades if not centuries of research on cost reduction, and running on thin margins!
I said this before, Uber should seriously consider closing down its operation in other countries. It is expanding virtually exponentially (they have a huge engineering team) for the type of company they are running. They need to focus on the U.S. market. They are losing way too much money everywhere combiend.
Microsoft did this with the Xbox One (almost all the extra features they advertised were US only) and it completely destroyed their market share, making the PS4 sell 2-to-1. WhatsApp went the other way (the US doesn't matter, you want the global market) and it got them a $19 billion sticker price. The US is a market, not the market.
No, but the loan sideline allows to classify the drivers as contractors.
And there's externalities. No properly run bank would issue a car loan to an Uber driver, they'd run the math for the applicant and find it isn't going to work out. But Uber with its infinite pockets does not have to consider profitability, and eventually the driver has to declare bankruptcy and becomes a burden on the public pocket. It's a disgrace.
It's their xchangleasing leasing program. It's basically a sub prime car loan like from the housing bubble days.
if Uber cuts it's rates they still have same payment but less fare money each month. They did this to a lot of people and it's well known within the company that a lot of Uber black drivers were screwed when this happened.
Thanks for the data! I had heard the lease terms were for 3 years, no exceptions and no getting out of them. Still, they may change from location to location and over time. As always, read the contract!
My original source for the cancellation terms was an Uber driver, and I just looked on Uber's web site, which more or less seems to confirm this:
"Flexible leases from Xchange Leasing, LLC are potentially up
to 36 months with the flexibility to return the vehicle as
early as 30 days after the first payment due date with a
payment of a $250 disposition fee. Not all applicants will
qualify for this program. Certain items present on your
credit report, and other information, may cause you to be
excluded from this offer, including without limitation, a
repossessed vehicle within the last 12 months, a pending
bankruptcy, or a discharged bankruptcy within the last 12
months."
Honestly though, years ago when I heard on the radio that google gave Uber 1 billion in funding I loudly exclaimed to everyone in my tiny office "ah... they want to invest in self driving cars through Uber!"
So yeah, there were plenty of people who were looking at that. I think they just didn't know how expensive that long con would wind up being
So, to be clear, you think that when Google gave Uber 250M in funding (not 1B), in 2013, when Google had without-a-doubt the most advanced driverless car program in the world, and Uber was roughly two years away from beginning any driverless car program, Google made its investment in order to get into driverless cars?
People in the investment community were for sure talking about Uber and driverless cars in 2013. It was clear at the time Uber was going to have to make a buy vs. build decision. But it wasn't out of the question that Uber would become an early adopter and major customer of Google self-driving vehicles.
I agree that one possible synergy at the time between Google and Uber was that Uber might use Google's driverless car technology.
That's very different from the revisionist rationale that Uber was always themselves making a long term play for driverless vehicles, or that Google got into Uber because Google wanted to invest in driverless vehicles.
The narrative at the time was that Uber was going to become a dominant rides-for-hire business (a real business, not a gaping wound hoping that technology would catch up to them) and at least a player in logistics, and then when driverless cars came along, everything would be even better for Uber.
You'll note that as that narrative was increasingly pounded into the dust, Google never invested further in Uber and relations between them have at this point obviously completely soured.
Uber's first massive round was in August 2013. By that time, everyone knew driverless cars were going to be critically important in the long term and Uber would have to make a build vs. buy decision. Whether Uber was ferrying passengers or goods didn't really impact this.
But yes, the investment thesis has always depended on passenger taxi being a decent business for Uber in the midterm.
I don't think that we have a ton of disagreement here. I agree that in 2013, people were looking ahead to a future of driverless cars, and that it was part of the calculation on Uber. I think at that point the assumption was that Uber would probably buy, not build (they did not, after all, start a serious build program for another couple of years), but Uber (I think wisely) was probably on the fence themselves for a while until the technology got clearer.
The claim at the time was that Uber would ferry both passengers and goods. And we agree that the value Uber was claiming was dependent on being a decent business.
I think that what happened since was they were forced into the "build" side of the build/buy decision when it became increasingly clear that they didn't have a decent business in passenger taxi, and they weren't getting traction in logistics. At that point, if they bought driverless cars, you would be forgiven for asking what value exactly Uber was bringing to any business. Now they have to bank on their differentiator being that they have unique access to valuable driverless car tech, which still strikes me as grossly unlikely.
It's astounding to me that they can't make it work based on the convenience of the service. I understand the strategy of wanting to buy market share quickly, and to bet on self-driving cars. That they can't compete on the convenience of the service at a fair price and playing by the rules of the districts they operate in is just astonishingly bad management.
I'd argue they did - I was around San Francisco when Uber was getting off the ground, and the initial service is exactly that: convenient, high-quality, provided professional drivers with commercial insurance.
It was also expensive, and nowadays known as UberBlack, and is a market many times smaller than Uber's ambitions.
UberBlack was a great product with unit economics that would allow for a high-quality product that was a win-win for both drivers and Uber. But it was not a big enough product to justify Uber's stratospheric valuation - hence UberX.
I think we're running into the fundamental truth here that providing high-quality taxi rides at such cut-rate prices is not possible, at least not when a human is at the wheel.
Cutting corners and playing dirty are IMO a manifestation of this fundamental problem.
Their value isn't in the driver business, because eventually they'll just have to pay for the marginal cost of damage to the car. If they can optimize pricing between locations better than others, they'll win in the driverless world. (This drives the value, not the spread between what they pay and collect)
That makes sense. I think that also explains why they started their own driverless car program. Whatever company makes the first viable driverless cars, they may decide that rather than selling the cars, they will own them all and operate a ride-sharing service with them. Uber would be screwed.
So there will basically be no transparency to anyone involved in the transaction except Uber if this is adopted?
The company seems to be guided by a culture of manipulation - manipulate the drivers with erroneous information, the riders with surge pricing, regulatory agencies with different screen views and now the possible manipulation of the bid ask spread.
Information asymmetry at its best, not that there is anything wrong with it.
If Uber charges X for trip, and pays the driver Y for the service, it's obviously a taxi company. As such, I expect authorities to enforce the licensing laws, especially that the public support of Uber starts to diminish.
Except they also penalize drivers for not accepting many rides. So if you want to continue driving for Uber, you have to "sell" your driving services at some point, even if the price isn't good for you.
Indeed, and that's an extension of "if it were the only source of income for Uber". If Uber proposed too high a spread, it's Uber that should be penalized.
IOW it's not the spread mechanism that's wrong, it's everything on top of it.
Effective and fair markets rely on transparency, while this is the exact opposite - the deliberate creation of massive information asymmetry.
Worse even, the information asymmetry isn't meant to favor one side of the transaction over the other (say, passengers over drivers), but is meant to favor the exchange (Uber) itself.
Imagine if you went to your stock broker to buy 10 shares of XYZ. Your broker tells you that the market price is $100 per share, but in reality found a seller at $80/share and is pocketing the difference, without disclosing this to either party in the transaction.
Besides the ethical shadiness of this kind of action, functioning markets are predicated on buyers and sellers having sufficient information, and the exchange behaving in consistent and transparent ways. This sort of double-dealing undermines it.
Another poster snidely speculates that I may operate on a moral framework that finds profit-seeking intrinsically objectionable. This seems like a straw man that's intended to erase the difference between unfair market practices and fair market practices.
> Imagine if you went to your stock broker to buy 10 shares of XYZ. Your broker tells you that the market price is $100 per share, but in reality found a seller at $80/share and is pocketing the difference, without disclosing this to either party in the transaction.
That's a poor analogy, because the stock is an exchange value, but the car ride is a use value.
A better analogy would be buying a pear, and getting angry that the fruit stand bought the pear really cheaply, without passing the savings on to you.
Some people have moral frameworks that always make seeking profits immoral. I'm not sure if that's what OP is saying, or merely that showing the driver and the passenger different rates and subtracting the difference (this is an approximation, not exactly what the post said) is shady and bad.
From previous HN discussions my impression is that the primary issue is with this charge being implicit. Uber already takes its money from drivers, and both drivers and users are participating in the program based on the assumption that what user is charged = what driver gets, minus Uber fee. But then it turns out that what user is charged more than Uber tells the driver (and from what it subtracts its fee), while the company also pockets the difference. This feels wrong.
So by this they're just throwing "let's see if we can run an arbitrage on the concept of price sensitivity itself" against a wall and see who will fund it?
It would be fun to compile a corpus of economics and business books, distill them down to their major points, then throw them into a dack.com style permutation generator. Optionally, post every one as an "Ask HN," or whatever could be called "Etsy for angel funding."
Is this not a business trying to maximize profit for itself? If you find this abhorrent than you must also despise capitalism because that is all this is. I may not personally like it as a consumer of their product but I find this to be a clever way to maximize profits for a middle man.
I've also had Lyft drivers tell me that they stopped driving for Uber after they didn't pay promised bonuses for meeting certain metrics and that Lyft was more reliable in that department. I don't know whether it's a coordinated effort by Lyft to disparage Uber or whether it's just a common thing that happens to Uber drivers, but I've had four drivers tell me that and two did it with almost no prompting.
it's unlikely to be a coordinated lyft effort because drivers can and do drive for both services. it's not in their interests to disparage uber if uber genuinely provides value for them; on the other hand if they left uber due to bad treatment it's probably very satisfying for them to tell their customers that.
Calling it an inadvertent bug is such a giant public relations fail. Uber should have said they're re-evaluating their payment plans to make sure drivers earn even more money, and for their driver's loyalty, they will make this pay increase retroactive.
This is the same company whose founder "took the tax dollars from employee paychecks — which are supposed to be withheld and sent to the Internal Revenue Service — and reinvested the money into the start-up, even as friends and advisers warned him the action was potentially illegal." [1]
It's not potentially illegal, it's unquestionably illegal. Money withheld for taxes doesn't belong to the employer; it has already been paid to its employees, who are trusting the employer to pay it to the government on their behalf, as required by federal and state law. So it's (1) stealing from employees and (2) tax fraud. If the authorities had found out about it, he'd have gone to prison.
in a previous life, i worked for someone (small start up) that did exactly this to me. I reported him to the authorities, and he is not in prison. I depends on the size of the amount stolen and how busy your local DA's office is.
This is not a hard error to identify (seems like one that's harder to make, if Uber employs qualified accountants), and given the number of Uber drivers who carefully and calculatingly join Uber as a way to become financially independent, it's hard to believe that no one discovered the problem and then complained. But maybe someone inside Uber felt more confident in prioritizing this issue after the public shitshow that Uber has been eating this past few months.
This is another example of why I think developers need to professionalize the industry and set ethical standards.
Why do people willingly write code to automate the process off ripping off their own co-workers to enrich shareholders? Because if they don't, someone else will.
Maybe it's time to stop being developers and start being engineers. Ask yourself who benefits from software development being an ethics-free zone? Most likely, it's not you.
> While drivers’ pay is determined according to the time and distance they travel, Uber has begun to experiment with how it calculates the price for riders.
I don't get this. How can you "experiment" with price calculations?
That may be true, but I assume Uber commits to paying drivers $X per mile or hour or something similar (as stated in that article). Surely, you won't drive for Uber if you don't know exactly how much money you make and if it's always subject to changes and experimentation?
People only drive for Uber if they have to in the first place, so now they are testing exactly how much of a beating drivers are willing to take before they leave. They already know the answer is "a lot" so they'll keep on pushing.
> People only drive for Uber if they have to in the first place
This is completely opposite my anecdotal experience. When I ask uber drivers why they drive for uber, the majority say they left a previous job for uber because of the money/flexibility/less-stress.
In addition to what the poster below me said, they treated certain employees as second class citizens and played a lot of shell games involving overtime and even salary.
Basically they weren't very forthcoming to their Bulgarians when money dried up, opting to create a hunger games situation instead of asking for help and patience
The drivers are vendors, not employees, so there's no way for them to form a union or go on strike. But there's also nothing stopping a group of drivers from getting together and collectively agreeing to stop driving for Uber.
So form an 'association' or something. If you're dealing with a company that reflexively breaks rules you're under no obligation to worry about niceties like union certification requirements and procedures. there is no moral obligation to play fair with a known cheater.
Small groups who can identify and contact each other can strike without a union. Uber drivers can't because Uber is the only party who can identify all of them.
Furthermore, scabs might sign up without even knowing they're scabs, or drivers might refuse to strike.
There would have to be some legal/organizational mechanism to force all current drivers to strike.
I was in an uber to one of Microsoft's collegiate CTF's, and when my Uber driver realized that means I knew (the very basics of) computer security he begged me to hack Uber and get all the Seattle driver's emails so he could ask them to strike.
He also tried to sell me on his cult. And told me to defend my servers all I needed was a fractal firewall that used the number Pi somewhere because if you use a number with (presumably) no pattern in it no one could ever touch you.
Wow. I often wonder how much creativity in our society goes untapped for lack accessible channels to filter and distill it. Thanks for seeing the potential value in his inchoate ideas rather than dismissing them for not being fully thought out.
One a side note, quite a few leaderless cults are well worth joining - not the social kind but the ideational/experiential kind.
This reminds me of how Seamless (now merged with GrubHub) took its percentage cut (~10-15%) of every meal delivery order after including taxes AND tip! That was as of a few years ago dating all the way back -- not sure whether it's still going on.
It was painfully obvious already a long time ago that Uber uses the investor money to purchase the market[1]. For any Asian and European city I have ever lived in the calculation never worked. And I still believe it would have been better to just give the Billions to the several taxi companies and have them build a better app. Maybe even work with the car companies and have them build this functionality in their cars from scratch.
I wonder if it's confirmation bias but I'm starting to think that the model of an army of disenfranchised workers jumping through hoops to serve a small professional elite will soon become the norm.
Uber's management team seems to stumble from one mistake/mess/self-inflicted-injury to another. I can't help but wonder why Uber VCs have kept them in place.
It's not unlike the Enron model. Uber is supported entirely by the collective opinion that they're a SV unicorn and the most ruthlessly profitable thing around.
If a vote of no confidence is issued by the Uber management team being fired, the valuation would collapse because it would be an admission that ultimate ruthlessness/evil/whatever you want to call it, does not automatically become ultimate profitability and capital return.
Of course the VCs have to double down. They have no choice but to conclude that Uber's behavior is a model for future business everywhere. It doesn't matter if it's an absurd conclusion: capital is literally at stake. Uber's valuation can only go up or burst. Everybody invested in it strongly prefer the 'go up' option.
It's pretty simple. The VCs don't have enough voting shares to control the board. They could make some noise but their actual legal power is very limited.
What I find interesting is how is this localized to one area? Is it an error in NYC tax law calculations or something? Seems that they are talking about the base fare calculations and you would think those would be somewhat general across several areas. Even if they run multiple algorithms some other city must be running something similar with the same error?
Not having to drive is a very small part of the reason I use Uber in lieu of owning a car. Main reason is expense of owning a car and the time I avoid having to research which car is best for me to buy, how to keep up in its maintenance, where to park, what to do if it's super icy out, etc. etc. etc.
Uber, with its history of fraud, will get huge bills in near future. While the company was acting as not caring about anyone, will get bitten by governments and unions soon for it. You cannot disturb the whole world like that. You need to obey laws and try to change/lobby them, rather than break them.
It continues to boggle my mind, day by day, who really Travis know or is related to?? Is he family of Clinton, Bush, Trump himself??
I mean any one of us deciding to provide a framework for any workers, take it taxi riders, that are very tightly regulated by something called US Government (that has a law on books to not only jail you but take your life away from you [capital punishment] and do it legally) and many US gov branches, and said: "screw rules, regulations, tax law, insurance law, safety laws, screw them all - download app, provide service, make money" would long time ago be jailed without parole, all accounts frozen, passport withhold, house raided by FBI/SWAT and all relatives cross-questioned.
Who the heck is this guy.. or who/what does he know????
Interesting to note that this came about due to a lawsuit. Meaning, somebody noticed, brought it to Uber's attention, got brushed and was forced to resort to hiring lawyers.
The objects you hold up as ideals says a lot about the culture of your environment and its values.
It is extremely disappointing that Uber is considered a crown jewel of Silicon Valley.
It is extremely disappointing that Uber is considered a crown jewel of Silicon Valley
The common refrain I hear is "they're better than taxis" and more and more evidence is mounting against them (at the corporate level) that suggests: no, they really aren't.
Uber is better than taxis for riders, and worse than taxis (in some ways) for drivers.
Also consider that some Uber drivers couldn't realistically become taxi drivers in their spare time, and perhaps some of them would prefer to be underpaid by Uber rather than not working at all.
... and taxpayers. Someone else pays for the upkeep of those roads, without which their business could not exist. In the UK, someone else pays for the healthcare of their drivers, as they dodge Employer's NI. Etc etc.
The entire business model of "disruption" is pocketing what everyone else pays for the dependencies and externalities.
>Someone else pays for the upkeep of those roads, without which their business could not exist.
Everyone pays gas taxes that scale with the amount driven and therefore their use of the roads. Any unusually high driving would be made up by the higher gas consumption and the resultant taxes thereon.
If anything:
1) Taxi routes are concentrated in cities, where they have lower miles per gallon and thus pay more taxes per mile driven than the typical car. (Edit: and city roads probably have lower maintenance costs per ton-mile due to not having to drag people out as far to maintain it and related factors.)
2) Maintenance costs on roads are almost entirely due to cargo trucks, not sedans, since road damage scales with (something like) the fourth power of weight per axle.
Side note: why is it that every time there's an unpopular big player, everyone finds a way to label any publicly provided good as a subsidy to that player? It's not just this but "arresting shoplifters is a subsidy to Walmart", "public roads are a subsidy to Amazon", "public infra is a subsidy to Netflix", "navies are a subsidy to shipping".
> someone else pays for the healthcare of their drivers
No, the government collects income taxes from everyone to provide universal health care through the NHS. Uber's drivers pay the social insurance taxes on their income. The fact that it isn't billed to Uber specifically is irrelevant. Lloyd's isn't billed for the NHS taxes on the couriers that drop them packages, but that doesn't mean Lloyd's "dodges employer's NI".
If your point is that they should be so assessed because they're really employers, not clients, that's economically questionable too -- the burden of a tax is independent of who you assess it to; if one day they forced Uber to pay NI, they could just cut payments to drivers to cover the tax, since all the income streams would be unaffected. Same effect as if they started assessing VAT by charging customers as they leave the store instead of taking it from retailers.
No, the government collects income taxes from everyone to provide universal health care through the NHS. Uber's drivers pay the social insurance taxes on their income.
You've clearly not researched just how much Employer's NI is. It's a lot more than an employee pays.
It's clearly not a subsidy if a company is paying their fair share in taxes. Also here in the UK we have workers on income support (welfare) because their employers underpay them... That is quite literally a case of the public purse subsidising a private enterprise.
>You've clearly not researched just how much Employer's NI is. It's a lot more than an employee pays.
While I'm not familiar with how Employer's NI works else where in the world, given the way it works in the US I'm fine with it being cut. The way it works in the US is great for hiding the true rate of tax from the employee by having it taken out of their paycheck before the employee ever sees it. I think it works better if the employee sees the full amount their employer pays them and exactly how much the government taxes that rate.
> Also here in the UK we have workers on income support (welfare) because their employers underpay them
To qualify for income support a person has to be working less than 16 hours per week.
You also have to be one of these:
> pregnant or a carer or a lone parent with a child under 5 or, in some cases, unable to work because you’re sick or disabled
(There are 3 other requirements too)
The UK benefits system is comprehensive and complex, and there are some people in full time work who get benefits. This is a good thing - we want people to work. We want people to have at least a minimum wage. We don't want to set the minimum wage too high because it reduces jobs.
Some benefits are specifically "in work" benefits - working tax credit and child tax credit.
>You've clearly not researched just how much Employer's NI is. It's a lot more than an employee pays.
If it works anything like the US, there is a portion[1] assessed to the employer and to the employee. If you report income as an independent contractor/self-employment, you pay both sides of it (since otherwise people would artificially class themselves as contractors to pay less). Are you saying Uber drivers in the UK aren't paying that, or that UK law allows that loophole?
>Also here in the UK we have workers on income support (welfare) because their employers underpay them... That is quite literally a case of the public purse subsidising a private enterprise.
So, it's not Uber-specific, just the general argument that all low-wage labor (below some threshold) is inherently subsidized because you qualify for public assistance at that level.
since otherwise people would artificially class themselves as contractors to pay less
That is exactly what they do do. IT, media, even public sector, it is rampant. The Inland Revenue keep trying to crack down on it but contractors are very sly about it and always find a loophole to technically meet the requirement as if they were a genuine small business.
And so they do. Speaking from what I see in Poland, you can divide people going "contracting" into two groups: in industries like IT, it's an easy way to get ~20% bigger salary than you'd otherwise get in a similar position. In low-skilled industry, it may be the only way you'll get a raise (or even a job), so people don't have much choice.
If you report income as an independent contractor/self-employment,
you pay both sides of it (since otherwise people would artificially
class themselves as contractors to pay less).
In general, that's true in the UK, but because of the various allowances, categories, and thresholds, if Uber is a contracting company, and the drivers are individual freelancers/contractors, less tax is paid.
There are complicated rules to ensure this is only allowed in cases of genuine freelancing/self-employment (IR35 is one part of those rules), but Uber has previously lost court cases on parts of those rules, where drivers were ruled to be employees rather than freelancers [1].
In IT consultancy (and other high-paid jobs), it's generally more tax-efficient for the worker to be an independent contractor (but has to satisfy various rules to do so). For lower-paid jobs like driving for Uber (and the general "gig economy"), it's in the companies' interest to label the worker as "self-employed", which means the worker misses out on all sorts of worker protection regulations whilst the employer saves on costs and taxes. Many companies skirt the limit of the regulations, and end up in court as a result.
Strange. In most discussions, I've found UK law to be much more logical than US, but this discussion has revealed two notable counterexamples:
1) That your tax rate can be lower under self-employment classification (incentivizing spurious misclassifications).
2) That roads are paid for through income tax (rather than petrol or odometer tax), which is only loosely correlated with road usage and which punishes people who economize on it, while subsidizing above average users.
In any case, you can't really pin 2) on Uber, which isn't getting any more of a subsidy than any other business using the "road platform". They were abusing the law for 1) but courts have since put a stop to it.
In the USA, gas taxes cover only a tiny fraction of damage to roadway. In Europe it heavily exceeds it, and most of Canada is about break-even. And that's of course ignoring that gas taxes are meant to not simply be user-fees for the roadway. Also ignoring costs outside of infrastructure - stuff like traffic enforcement and health costs. And it assumes the land the road was built on was free - which it obviously isn't, particularly in the kind of dense environments where road widening is impossible.
Yes, in the aggregate, gas taxes don't cover maintenance; but, as I said in points 1) and 2), the typical urban sedan driver is still overpaying since they cause virtually none of the maintenance costs (by percentage). (AIUI, any cab taxes exist to fund the regulatory costs, not the excess wear they're causing.)
Furthermore, the point under debate was whether Uber, as a cab[-like] service is underpaying for its road usage -- relative to the typical person -- by driving so much more; that point is still wrong because their per mile costs are unchanged with such higher usage.
>Everyone pays gas taxes that scale with the amount driven and therefore their use of the roads.
If talking about the UK, that is not quite correct. Roads in the UK are mainly funded by income tax and council tax. See http://ipayroadtax.com/ for more information.
Gas taxes do not even come close to covering road maintenance. My property taxes were raised last year to pay for some road maintenance. That's also assuming you're buying gas where you're Ubering. If you're a suburbanite it's very unlikely you are.
This circles back to that Governments making rules will always find those who find ways to work around them. How about we try making rules that even if worked around, don't harm others?
At least in San Francisco, there's far more of them. The extra wear and tear on the roads ends up as a road repair bill that taxpayers pick up.
If the TNCs were a 1:1 replacement for traditional taxis, this wouldn't be a legitimate argument, but the evidence out there suggests that TNCs have grown the size of the car hail market at the expense of off-peak transit, so the TNCs really are putting more cars on the streets.
Road wear is exponentially proportional to vehicle weight. Almost all of the wear is caused by large commercial trucks and other heavy vehicles such as buses. Passenger cars cause very little road wear. TNC drivers are mostly using lighter vehicles.
Your link supports the claim that "trucks cause exponentially more road damage than passenger vehicles"; it does not support your claim that "almost all of the wear is caused by large commercial trucks" or "passenger cars cause very little road wear".
In San Francisco, the Treasurer estimated 45,000 TNC vehicles in operation compared to just 1,800 taxis. That's an enormous increase in car hail traffic, and one that I claim has a substantial maintenance impact absent evidence to the contrary.
Right, when we say Uber is better than Taxis, we generally mean "the Uber model is better than Taxis". We can exchange Uber with Lyft or any other company that works with thath model. It's about the general environment that ride sharing brings.
Things like how using an app makes hailing a ride easier, how having a rating system forces drivers and riders to behave better, how mobile payment removes the awkwardness of exchanging money, etc.
There's nothing specific to Uber in there, and when it does come to specifics, Uber is pretty awful as we've seen.
Even further, there's nothing specific to the Uber model in there. Every one of those things could be implemented exactly the same way by an ordinary cab company. In fact, many cab companies worldwide have already implemented both the first and the third one.
The only unique thing about the Uber model as opposed to regular cabs is that it's priced lower through a combination of semi-illegal dirty tricks and setting unsustainably low (or negative) margins in order to maintain growth and capture the market.
The good thing about Uber is that I can get an Uber no matter where in the world I am (assuming that town has Uber). I don't have to know what cab companies are around or what apps I have to download.
That's about the only thing that's actually good about Uber. But even then, Europe has at least two competing taxi aggregator apps now, so this advantage is bound to disappear.
Has it always been that way though? I remember when they first launched in SF, and I remember drivers being pretty excited about how much they were making driving. I remember talking to some folks who also drove taxi, mentioning that Uber paid them substantially more.
Part of this is that Uber was / is building a rider / driver base, and to do so, they accept losses on every ride. They were paying drivers more money than they were collecting in fares. It was an attempt to claim market share and drive competitors out of business (which hasn't quite worked thus far) so they could increase the prices later when they had price control power. Uber's existence is all based around investors dumping money faster than they burn it in operating costs (without ever turning a profit).
My first Uber was at RubyConf in San Diego a few years ago. We (a couple of devs that I met) were downtown at a meetup the day before, and we were going back to our hotel, a couple miles away downtown - nothing out of the ordinary. Our Uber driver had trouble communicating, and was asking us for directions. He revealed he had only been in town a couple of days. I was in the front seat, with two other devs in the back - he was chatting with me in front seat about all the sexual stuff he wanted to find on Craigslist that was illegal in his country.
Yeah, definitely worse than any taxi I've ever taken.
Can't say I've ever been treated to the sexual non-history of my taxi driver, but last weekend we grabbed a NYC cab with a driver who had no GPS, and no smart phone - we had to give him turn-by-turn directions to our destination in the Bronx.
I don't expect my cabbies to have The Knowledge, but it would be nice if I didn't have to have my phone out the whole time, watching for upcoming turns and highway exits. At least Uber/Lyft/etc guarantee that the driver has a smartphone with internet connectivity. :/
Although they have a phone and internet there is no guarantee the gps is working/on. I've had an uber that took a long time to arrive due to incorrect gps and then I had to give them directions on the way, they must have been using wifi/cell tower positions as the location on the phone was wrong and jumping around.
Was this one of the green cabs that service the outer boros? If not, normal cabs usually concentrate on Manhattan and have only basic knowledge of everywhere else. It's helpful if you know the name of the neighborhood you are going to as well.
DENNIS: Oh king, eh, very nice. An' how'd you get that, eh? By exploitin' the workers -- by 'angin' on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic an' social differences in our society! ....If there's ever going to be any progress--
WOMAN: Dennis, there's some lovely filth down here. Oh -- how d'you do?
ARTHUR: How do you do, good lady. I am Arthur, King of the Britons. Whose castle is that?
WOMAN: King of the who?
ARTHUR: The Britons.
WOMAN: Who are the Britons?
ARTHUR: Well, we all are. we're all Britons and I am your king.
WOMAN: I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective.
DENNIS: You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship. ..... A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes--
WOMAN: Oh there you go, bringing class into it again.
DENNIS: That's what it's all about if only people would--
You're talking like the taxi monopoly was a global monolith when in fact it was a local uncoordinated model that jurisdictions just copied from each other. IOW there was a taxi monopoly in most cities, but they're not all part of one big TaxiCorp.
This isn't directly related to your comment, but it's odd to me, grammatically, that people say Uber isn't a taxi service. It's like saying Amazon isn't a retailer--certainly it's different than the pre-internet model, but fundamentally they're providing the same service as the traditional businesses.
It depends on what you mean by the term, as there are different senses of "taxi service". In many cases, the law has long differentiated (for non-flaky reasons) between taxi services and limo services[1]. A taxi service is allowed to pick up street hails (i.e. arranged on the spot, by line-of-sight), while a limo service had to be booked and paid for through a third party.
In a way, that makes regulatory sense -- there are many issues that arise with taxis (in this sense) that don't with limos -- unnamed randos getting into a stranger's car, large amounts of cash floating around, clogging up pickup points, fighting for fares, dubious upcharges. In that sense, Uber has functioned more as a limo service than a taxi service (except for this historic association between limo services and expensive cars).
OTOH, I agree that it's ridiculous for them to claim it's "not a taxi service" in the sense of "just a technology company, bro!". It's certainly a ride service of some kind, for which safety/insurance regs are applicable and reasonable (or at least, not outrageous).
(Ditto for the claim of "we just match people up!" -- they obviously are functioning more as a service provider with tight control of the product than some kind of marketplace or matchmaker.)
[1] Despite it's name, that doesn't necessarily mean "stretch limo"; it could be a sedan.
Vs. "We have an idea for a disruptive app. Let's do this 'the right way' and make sure we have the approval of the industry we are disrupting and local government before we get started"
Spotify may not be the best example. They started out with pirated music without the approval of the record companies and then later cleaned up their act. But they are not douche bags like Uber.
One could argue not all laws are moral and that following immoral laws is emphasising your own interests over those of humanity.
If abiding by the law was people's only priority, there would be no widespread usage of public key cryptography (it was extremely illegal in the early 1990s, and only gained legal acceptance after cypherpunks pushed back against the laws and proliferated its use), which would have prevented trillions of dollars worth of ecommerce from being realized.
There would also be no ride sharing apps, no home sharing, and no Bitcoin or Ethereum. Also worth noting that Amazon didn't charge a sales tax for a long time.
> One could argue not all laws are moral and that following immoral laws is emphasising your own interests over those of humanity.
This here is one of my all time favorite false-equivalences.
People performing sit-ins during the Civil Rights era, or women standing up for their right to vote are equivalent to a corporation that wants to run without paying for its drivers health-insurance.
It's another example of the common trope in the news media of "we must cover both sides of the issue". Yes a cashier skimping you on one penny in your change is technically a moral issue - but it's really not.
It's absurd how much our country is going to profit models that consist of nothing more than "make the same revenue, and externalize the costs onto society."
>It's absurd how much our country is going to profit models that consist of nothing more than "make the same revenue, and externalize the costs onto society."
Uber is not externalising costs to society. It is providing employment opportunities that otherwise would not exist, and rides at prices that would otherwise be higher.
Taking market share from competitors by offering consumers lower prices is not a case of "externalizing costs onto society".
> Also worth noting that Amazon didn't charge a sales tax for a long time.
Amazon actively and vigorously sought to make sure it stayed within the previously-established exceptions to the requirement to collect a sales tax for quite a long time, which is different thing than flouting the law.
In particular, many states (e.g., NY) would only demand that a company collect sales tax if it had a physical presence in that state. Since Amazon had no warehouses in NY, it didn't have to collect sales tax here.
In NY, it's actually the purchaser's obligation to report tax that was due on mail order purchases where the company didn't collect NY sales tax - there's a box for it on the state income tax form. (But it's something that most people don't bother to report since it's difficult to enforce.)
>Amazon actively and vigorously sought to make sure it stayed within the previously-established exceptions to the requirement to collect a sales tax for quite a long time,
Don't give me this happy horseshit masquerading as philosophy, this isn't about what "laws" or "ethics" are — Uber is constantly treating their drivers, who are people, like garbage.
I'm a part-time Uber driver and I've never been treated like garbage by them. They pay me exactly what they say they'll pay me and on time. If I don't like the rate I'm earning, I turn it off and go home.
Thanks for providing your perspective. Articles relating to powerful parties who reject established political mores (e.g. prohibitions on unlicensed business activity, redistributive taxation) illicit a lot of demagogic reactions and attempts to cast the party as some kind of terrible menace to society.
You could, and I often do. But the laws you should break in the interests of humanity are ones that permit things like slavery or other mistreatment of people.
If you're engaged in commerce, don't conflate your commercial interests with those of humanity at large. It's possible that you're serving both at once, but not probable, and when you are in it for the money your objective assessment of such things is severely compromised.
Commerce is economic production and coordination at scale. It enables humanity to have a far higher standard of living than would otherwise be possible. In my opinion, it is a moral imperative to remove all restrictions on voluntary economic actions and interactions, both for utilitarian reasons, and for the sake of the individual's right to control their own body and actions.
I largely agree, but I no longer consider myself a utilitarian because few situations are so straightforward that cognitive, systemic, and other biases don't come into play, not to mention the practical limits of foresight. I'm also very concerned with informational asymmetries and the economic costs thereof. You're not wrong, but I encourage you to consider that there is more to the picture.
I understand, but your initial attitude should be "let's try to work within society's boundaries to achieve our goal", not "what can I break". There are certainly cases where laws are outdated or wrong, and breaking them is the most efficient and harmless way to get them changed.
I'm just saying "move fast and break things" is not the only way to succeed, should not be a goal in and of itself, and Uber could have been just as successful without being so shitty to people.
but your initial attitude should be "let's try to work within society's boundaries to achieve our goal"
Why on earth is that the case? This viewpoint imbues "society's boundaries" with some kind of a-priori correctness, when really it has the same as any other concept: 0, until proven otherwise.
It's not a-priori correctness, but a-priori precedence, or respect. You live in a society, you benefit from society, you would not be capable of starting a business without society, so you shouldn't casually dismiss society. Basically all I'm saying is that you need a good reason to break the rules. "This makes it harder for me to make money" is not a good reason. "There's no other way to achieve my worthwhile goal" is a good reason.
Dismissing a restriction of society is not the same as dismissing society, in the same way that ignoring the speed limit or ripping your own music is not the same as ignoring the concept of law.
I agree, and you shouldn't ignore the speed limit or pirate music without good reason. I'm not saying follow the law at all costs, but give the law the benefit of the doubt. In a mostly democratic society, rules are often (obviously not always) there for good reason even if at a glance they seem pointless or wrong.
That's not really what happened. Lobbying by major tech companies such as IBM had a much greater impact on the regulatory changes than anything that the cypherpunks did.
I suppose you could argue that certain taxi laws were enacted to achieve immoral ends. That being the case, if Uber was really fighting for "truth justice and the American way" they could have imposed the socially beneficial aspects of taxi laws on themselves without all the shady stuff they keep getting called out for.
The problem is that Uber has extended that disruptive thinking into all aspects of their being. Ignoring the industry and regulations is one thing, but time and time again it seems they are ignoring human decency.
I swear it feels like the next story we are going to hear out of Uber is how Travis had to discreetly dispose of a rhino carcass by dumping it in the bay...
I have absolutely no respect for Travis Kalanick; he's the personification of a "the rules don't apply to me" attitude, and he's been rewarded for it time and time again.
My opinion of him plunged and never recovered after seeing him present at a YC demo day some years ago. He threw up this slide of a heroically ascending curve and proclaimed 'This is what exponential growth looks like!' to huge applause from the packed house, while I wondered why there were no numbers on the Y axis. OK, that wasn't the only thing that bothered me, but if someone insults my intelligence then I see no reason to put any trust in them.
Uber's work place shenanigans have been a open secret for a while now. People either didn't believe the rumors or thought it wouldn't effect them in their role. Most people didn't care about the rumors because of the Stock packages they gave out. Now that IPO's has been delayed again, all the bad press, massive losses, IP theft, Uber F'ynees, etc people don't think it's guaranteed pay day that it used to be perceived as. A lot of my peers have been contacted by Uber recruiters lately, half of them straight up said no, the other half ignored their linked messages.
After being an early supporter I did a complete 180 on them. If all the various allegations against them (basically: lying to everyone about everything) are true then I think the firm should be shut down and its assets sold off. A person who did what Uber is accused of doing would go to prison for a Long Time. Uber has become the Bernie Madoff of SV imho.
It never stops with this charming company, does it? This cavalcade of illegal and unethical behavior at Uber is what happens when the founder and untouchable CEO of a company is a bad person.
Define 'bad'. Or indeed 'ethical'. There's an awful lot of abstracted money around that sees (to the extent abstractions can see anything) Uber and its boss as the best thing ever, specifically because all the behavior is designed to increase money.
If all that energy was put towards a goal of tormenting red-headed pipe-fitters and their families, there's no way things would have gone on this long. But it's to increase money, so by definition UNTIL it fails and all the money is lost, it's not simply okay but admirable and to be emulated.
If the money buys immunity from any such accountability…
I used to work at Google in the "Don't be evil" era. We had many internal discussions about how it was hard to define "evil". That's part of the purpose of the deliberately ambiguous statement, to state a general principle without getting bogged down in minutiae. The purpose of the guidance is to force people to have ethical discussions, not to answer the question.
Uber is going to collapse under the weight of all its illegal and unethical behavior. All that money is going to evaporate.
I'm breaking a 4 yr HN commenting-hiatus to post this: it's a bit disappointing to see how the quality of HN comments has deteriorated over the years. Virtually all the comments I'm seeing here are sensationalist sentiments/anecdotes, backed with no facts, reverberated in an echo chamber. This is a plead to the HN moderators to continue to iterate on your product to improve the quality of the comments.
One of the worst parts of open source is when someone who has been happily getting value out of your free product for 4 years opens an issue to complain about how quality has gone downhill, and you need to fix a few things.
I don't think this is fair. The mods want the site to be successful and the parent is pointing out something that should be a cause for concern for them. No one wants HN to turn into the next Slashdot.
But a bug report that says "Your program seems to have gotten slower over the past four years and I feel like it's crashing more often. Please fix it" isn't very useful. A couple of concrete examples of specific problems with some suggestions on what should have been done in those cases would have made the post much more informative.
It's human tendency to glorify the past and undermine the present",
I vehemently disagree with the statement that HN is declining in quality.
concluding that HN is declining is like concluding that we live in a chaotic world, while globally violence is at an all time low [1] . Or undermining Dale Steyn in comparison to Malcolm Marshall or Dennis Lillee [2]. Cricket and Football fans would laugh at comparisons of Kohli with Tendulkar or Neymar with Ronaldinho while records speak otherwise [3] [4]. Aren't we falling prey to the same cognitive bias here.
Literally every forum I have ever been on, when it gets old enough, complains about declining quality and new users. There was a big discussion about this on a popular IRC I used to hang out on. And I spent the weekend setting up a bot to replay messages from 4 years ago in real time. And the general opinion was that the quality wasn't any higher back then.
Same thing with a default subreddit I moderated. We got endless complaints about declining quality. Using web archive to go a few years back, and the quality was just the same or worse!
All the time I read old discussion threads on HN. Either through the search feature or the "past" button. And I really don't see any difference between the old HN and the current one.
If anything it's slighty improved. I think many of the complaints discussed 4 years ago here aren't relevant any more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373 When was the last time you saw a "_____ in js" post? Honestly I miss those a bit.
Ideally I'd love to do statistics and see if stuff like average comment length or political words have increased over time. Maybe I'll try that sometime.
If you think the posted sensational anecdotes are not factual, then you're accusing the userbase of being a bunch of liars. Maybe the product isn't as good as you think?
On a more constructive note, why don't you raise the angle that you think is worth discussing? The allegations are pretty straightforward and Uber looks to be admitting to the mistake, hence the payout. Maybe the posted Bloomberg link should be changed to Quartz, which has a more substantial story with more to discuss than the settled payments: https://qz.com/989040/uber-is-paying-back-tens-of-millions-o...
Or you could also try to add to the discussion and enumerate those facts and sentiments that you feel are being overlooked in the discussion.
It's amusing that you have chosen to break your own self-imposed moratorium on participating in order to wag your finger and criticize everyone else while not contributing anything meaningful yourself.
It sounds like you might live in your own self-righteous echo chamber honestly.
I think the use of "product" here is a bit of a stretch, and what "moderators" are you pleading to? AFAIK it's only dang, and I'm not sure what we can expect him to do when the criticism levelled at him is "the comments aren't as good as I remember"
Also worth remembering is that when companies as polarising as Uber are in the news, there's gonna be heated discussion with lots of strong opinions and anecdata. No amount of moderation can avoid that
> Virtually all the comments I'm seeing here are sensationalist sentiments/anecdotes, backed with no facts, reverberated in an echo chamber.
Point them out here, if you disagree. How do I prove to you that I spoke with a Lyft driver who prefers other car service apps over Uber? I am not going to prove it. Take it as a fact, or don't.
Let people post what they want to say. We don't need everyone to write like a professional critic or columnist. This is not a competition for Best Comment. I like sharing my thoughts with people regardless of how much content I can fill my comment with. You like to keep yourself mute from commentary, that's okay. If you think you are hearing echoes, perhaps there is truth to this? Or perhaps we should conjecture a conspiracy theory that a competitor is running a destroy-uber campaign here on this thread, like they planned a bunch of accounts weeks or months ago. Yeah there are a lot of fake online identities out there (esp during election time). Shall we continue with this conspiracy theory?
Let's move on with our life, we have bigger things to worry about than an echo chamber on HN.
I think that's a reputation Uber has built for themselves. I've seen a couple of commenters here who consistently used to denounce every Lyft article and praise Uber without disclosing they worked there.
i've only recently joined the hn community, and i'm interested by this thought because i find the comments generally inquisitive, regardless of how much someone has posted. upon further research of when the golden age of hn may have been, i found an article talking about whether or not app developers should listen to hn (i'm not linking it because it wasn't particularly enlightening). it lead to the hn comments in reply to the advent of dropbox, where i notice the same structure you're describing here, ten years ago. i suppose i just wish you would provide links to what you're describing as the 'height of hn' if you're describing how it has 'deteriorated over the years'
it seems pretty amazing that a conversation like this takes place in the comments section to Uber ?
The FAQ continues to list the "HN becoming more like reddit" comments (which I'd classify this comment as, considering even in a vaccuum both exhibit regression-to-the-mean based quality deterioration, so it's familiar) as a newcomer misconception, so either the mods here are in denial (worse) or lazy enough to not care (better, but still not great).
I'd take an update to the FAQ as at least acknowledgement of issues here, but tbh I don't care much either. Once you have some feeds up for the voices you do like having weigh in the standard content curation set doesn't matter as much.
