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.
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.