#rideshare
Text
Source
#capitalism#working class#workers rights#rideshare#Minnesota#government#the left#progressive#labor#workers#end capitalism
596 notes
·
View notes
Text
No, Uber's (still) not profitable
Going to Defcon this weekend? I'm giving a keynote, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification and Throw it Into Reverse," on Saturday at 12:30pm, followed by a book signing at the No Starch Press booth at 2:30pm!
https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=50826
Bezzle (n):
1. "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it" (JK Gabraith)
2. Uber.
Uber was, is, and always will be a bezzle. There are just intrinsic limitations to the profits available to operating a taxi fleet, even if you can misclassify your employees as contractors and steal their wages, even as you force them to bear the cost of buying and maintaining your taxis.
The magic of early Uber – when taxi rides were incredibly cheap, and there were always cars available, and drivers made generous livings behind the wheel – wasn't magic at all. It was just predatory pricing.
Uber lost $0.41 on every dollar they brought in, lighting $33b of its investors' cash on fire. Most of that money came from the Saudi royals, funneled through Softbank, who brought you such bezzles as WeWork – a boring real-estate company masquerading as a high-growth tech company, just as Uber was a boring taxi company masquerading as a tech company.
Predatory pricing used to be illegal, but Chicago School economists convinced judges to stop enforcing the law on the grounds that predatory pricing was impossible because no rational actor would choose to lose money. They (willfully) ignored the obvious possibility that a VC fund could invest in a money-losing business and use predatory pricing to convince retail investors that a pile of shit of sufficient size must have a pony under it somewhere.
This venture predation let investors – like Prince Bone Saw – cash out to suckers, leaving behind a money-losing business that had to invent ever-sweatier accounting tricks and implausible narratives to keep the suckers on the line while they blew town. A bezzle, in other words:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy
Uber is a true bezzle innovator, coming up with all kinds of fairy tales and sci-fi gimmicks to explain how they would convert their money-loser into a profitable business. They spent $2.5b on self-driving cars, producing a vehicle whose mean distance between fatal crashes was half a mile. Then they paid another company $400 million to take this self-licking ice-cream cone off their hands:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money
Amazingly, self-driving cars were among the more plausible of Uber's plans. They pissed away hundreds of millions on California's Proposition 22 to institutionalize worker misclassification, only to have the rule struck down because they couldn't be bothered to draft it properly. Then they did it again in Massachusetts:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/15/simple-as-abc/#a-big-ask
Remember when Uber was going to plug the holes in its balance sheet with flying cars? Flying cars! Maybe they were just trying to soften us up for their IPO, where they advised investors that the only way they'd ever be profitable is if they could replace every train, bus and tram ride in the world:
https://48hills.org/2019/05/ubers-plans-include-attacking-public-transit/
Honestly, the only way that seems remotely plausible is when it's put next to flying cars for comparison. I guess we can be grateful that they never promised us jetpacks, or, you know, teleportation. Just imagine the market opportunity they could have ascribed to astral projection!
Narrative capitalism has its limits. Once Uber went public, it had to produce financial disclosures that showed the line going up, lest the bezzle come to an end. These balance-sheet tricks were as varied as they were transparent, but the financial press kept falling for them, serving as dutiful stenographers for a string of triumphant press-releases announcing Uber's long-delayed entry into the league of companies that don't lose more money every single day.
One person Uber has never fooled is Hubert Horan, a transportation analyst with decades of experience who's had Uber's number since the very start, and who has done yeoman service puncturing every one of these financial "disclosures," methodically sifting through the pile of shit to prove that there is no pony hiding in it.
In 2021, Horan showed how Uber had burned through nearly all of its cash reserves, signaling an end to its subsidy for drivers and rides, which would also inevitably end the bezzle:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/10/unter/#bezzle-no-more
In mid, 2022, Horan showed how the "profit" Uber trumpeted came from selling off failed companies it had acquired to other dying rideshare companies, which paid in their own grossly inflated stock:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/05/a-lousy-taxi/#a-giant-asterisk
At the end of 2022, Horan showed how Uber invented a made-up, nonstandard metric, called "EBITDA profitability," which allowed them to lose billions and still declare themselves to be profitable, a lie that would have been obvious if they'd reported their earnings using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft
Like clockwork, Uber has just announced – once again – that it is profitable, and once again, the press has credulously repeated the claim. So once again, Horan has published one of his magisterial debunkings on Naked Capitalism:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/08/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-thirty-three-uber-isnt-really-profitable-yet-but-is-getting-closer-the-antitrust-case-against-uber.html
Uber's $394m gains this quarter come from paper gains to untradable shares in its loss-making rivals – Didi, Grab, Aurora – who swapped stock with Uber in exchange for Uber's own loss-making overseas divisions. Yes, it's that stupid: Uber holds shares in dying companies that no one wants to buy. It declared those shares to have gained value, and on that basis, reported a profit.
Truly, any big number multiplied by an imaginary number can be turned into an even bigger number.
Now, Uber also reported "margin improvements" – that is, it says that it loses less on every journey. But it didn't explain how it made those improvements. But we know how the company did it: they made rides more expensive and cut the pay to their drivers. A 2.9m ride in Manhattan is now $50 – if you get a bargain! The base price is more like $70:
https://www.wired.com/story/uber-ceo-will-always-say-his-company-sucks/
The number of Uber drivers on the road has a direct relationship to the pay Uber offers those drivers. But that pay has been steeply declining, and with it, the availability of Ubers. A couple weeks ago, I found myself at the Burbank train station unable to get an Uber at all, with the app timing out repeatedly and announcing "no drivers available."
Normally, you can get a yellow taxi at the station, but years of Uber's predatory pricing has caused a drawdown of the local taxi-fleet, so there were no taxis available at the cab-rank or by dispatch. It took me an hour to get a cab home. Uber's bezzle destroyed local taxis and local transit – and replaced them with worse taxis that cost more.
Uber won't say why its margins are improving, but it can't be coming from scale. Before the pandemic, Uber had far more rides, and worse margins. Uber has diseconomies of scale: when you lose money on every ride, adding more rides increases your losses, not your profits.
Meanwhile, Lyft – Uber's also-ran competitor – saw its margins worsen over the same period. Lyft has always been worse at lying about it finances than Uber, but it is in essentially the exact same business (right down to the drivers and cars – many drivers have both apps on their phones). So Lyft's financials offer a good peek at Uber's true earnings picture.
Lyft is actually slightly better off than Uber overall. It spent less money on expensive props for its long con – flying cars, robotaxis, scooters, overseas clones – and abandoned them before Uber did. Lyft also fired 24% of its staff at the end of 2022, which should have improved its margins by cutting its costs.
Uber pays its drivers less. Like Lyft, Uber practices algorithmic wage discrimination, Veena Dubal's term describing the illegal practice of offering workers different payouts for the same work. Uber's algorithm seeks out "pickers" who are choosy about which rides they take, and converts them to "ants" (who take every ride offered) by paying them more for the same job, until they drop all their other gigs, whereupon the algorithm cuts their pay back to the rates paid to ants:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
All told, wage theft and wage cuts by Uber transferred $1b/quarter from labor to Uber's shareholders. Historically, Uber linked fares to driver pay – think of surge pricing, where Uber charged riders more for peak times and passed some of that premium onto drivers. But now Uber trumpets a custom pricing algorithm that is the inverse of its driver payment system, calculating riders' willingness to pay and repricing every ride based on how desperate they think you are.
This pricing is a per se antitrust violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act, America's original antitrust law. That's important because Sherman 2 is one of the few antitrust laws that we never stopped enforcing, unlike the laws banning predator pricing:
https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/sites/ilr.law.uiowa.edu/files/2023-02/Woodcock.pdf
Uber claims an 11% margin improvement. 6-7% of that comes from algorithmic price discrimination and service cutbacks, letting it take 29% of every dollar the driver earns (up from 22%). Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi himself says that this is as high as the take can get – over 30%, and drivers will delete the app.
Uber's food delivery service – a baling wire-and-spit Frankenstein's monster of several food apps it bought and glued together – is a loser even by the standards of the sector, which is unprofitable as a whole and experiencing an unbroken slide of declining demand.
Put it all together and you get a picture of the kind of taxi company Uber really is: one that charges more than traditional cabs, pays drivers less, and has fewer cars on the road at times of peak demand, especially in the neighborhoods that traditional taxis had always underserved. In other words, Uber has broken every one of its promises.
We replaced the "evil taxi cartel" with an "evil taxi monopolist." And it's still losing money.
Even if Lyft goes under – as seems inevitable – Uber can't attain real profitability by scooping up its passengers and drivers. When you're losing money on every ride, you just can't make it up in volume.
Image: JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LA_BREA_TAR_PITS,_LOS_ANGELES.jpg
CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:
http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/09/accounting-gimmicks/#unter
Image:
JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LA_BREA_TAR_PITS,_LOS_ANGELES.jpg
CC BY-SA 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
#pluralistic#bezzles#hubert horan#uber#rideshare#accounting tricks#financial engineering#late-stage capitalism#narrative capitalism#lyft#transit#uber eats#venture predation#algorithmic wage discrimination
1K notes
·
View notes
Text
By Lev Koufax
Uber and Lyft’s attempts to defeat the minimum wage law aren’t about sustainable business, and they aren’t about protecting the consumer. The cynical decision to withdraw from Minneapolis is simply about keeping the Minneapolis drivers at poverty wages while maximizing profits for rideshare shareholders as much as possible.
#Uber#Lyft#rideshare#workers#Minneapolis#minimum wage#class struggle#imperialism#capitalism#poverty#Struggle La Lucha
212 notes
·
View notes
Text
NASA is seeking future innovative methods that could help retrieve rock samples collected by the Perseverance rover on Mars. Gig work apps, like Uber and Grubhub, offered to pick up the rocks, but NASA’s no wage-theft policy killed that plan.
#nasa#space#rocks#mars#rideshare#gig work#uber#grubhub#satire#funny#comedy#wage theft#corporate greed
13 notes
·
View notes
Text
'MINNEAPOLIS — A rideshare co-op is launching services in Minneapolis in the coming weeks."
"The Drivers Cooperative, founded in New York City in 2021, touts itself as the world's first driver-owned rideshare platform."
"More than 12,000 drivers have joined since then, providing more than 300,000 trips in both the Big Apple and Denver"
#uber#lyft#driver cooperative#minneapolis minnesota#wages#minimum wage#business#economy#ride share#rideshare
10 notes
·
View notes
Text
Wired editor-at-large Steven Levy took a 2.95-mile Uber ride from downtown New York City to the West Side to meet Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. When asked to estimate the cost of the ride, Khosrowshahi put it at "twenty bucks." His estimate, as it turned out, was less than half the actual price of $51.69, including a tip for the driver.
"Oh my God. Wow," the CEO said, upon learning the cost.
Not surprising. Uber execs get all the Uber rides they want for free and are never exposed to a price. Also, they typically do not tip.
14 notes
·
View notes
Link
RideBoom can save the money and time not only for the daily travel but for the corporate travel as well.
RideBoom can help you manage travel budgets while providing an elevated experience tailored to the business travel needs.
Pre-book your car whenever you have a late night shift. Our partner driver will be there to pick you up and drop you off at home in a safe and secure car. Every business needs to move with times. RideBoom will help your business to move fast at low cost.
We are able to accommodate all requests and are able to fulfil a range of businesses and company travel transportation needs and at a very low-level costing. RideBoom has an affordable ride for every business need. Use the RB Eco option as a cheaper option for your daily business travel. Staying or finishing late at night don’t worry RideBoom will provide you with secure and safe cars around the clock. You can choose a Ride now or Ride later option. Boost your business with RideBoom.
One Account For All Company Travel, Easy To Monitor
Once you are registered as a corporate client you are able to access our web portal admin panel. From there your staff member who looks after your company travel accounts is able to request either ride now or ride later trips.
You can view the types of cars available in your area and select the car that best suits your needs. You can also request delivery drivers to collect the parcel from your doorstep or warehouse and track the car on the map in-app.
We run monthly billing cycles to clear all accounts.
· Save money on travel bills.
· Book and manage your bookings.
· Track your drivers.
· Affordable billing solutions.
· Select your own cars and drivers.
· Very affordable parcel delivery.
Let's RideBoom your business.
For more info www.rideboom.com/india
34 notes
·
View notes
Photo
Nadine's Saurian Uber
151 notes
·
View notes
Text
"As You Are He"
#egg theory#spotify#reincarnation#near death experience#nde#andy weir#golden rule#reciprocity#ethics#liberal arts#lyft#uber#philosophy#beer#indiana#university#lafayette#rideshare#psychology#carl jung#Spotify
3 notes
·
View notes
Text
One evening last October, Alex Tonsky started to feel like the Lyft app was working against him. He had been driving for hours, trying to boost his meager earnings that week. Later that night, he ended up in downtown Oakland, about 15 minutes from where he lived.
Tonsky turned on an in-app setting called destination mode, which supposedly matched him with rides closer to his destination of choice — in this case, home. He also used an additional feature in the setting to designate the time he wanted to arrive at home. Tonsky thought this feature would be straightforward to use and help him fit rides into his schedule. Instead, he became an unwitting player in an elaborate game — one that seems to favor app-based ride-hailing and delivery companies’ control over where and when their workers work.
Lyft kept matching Tonsky with rides in the opposite direction — toward San Francisco — which, with no guaranteed fares back to Oakland, could cause him to lose money. Lyft wouldn’t show Tonsky the destination of the trip requests until he accepted them. When he saw they were putting him farther from his home, he canceled them — five in a row. Then he gave up. Because Lyft suspends drivers for canceling too many rides, these cancellations put him at risk of losing his job.
“It almost felt like they were doing it on purpose,” he told me in an interview after the incident.
What Tonsky didn’t realize was that destination mode could match him with rides that ended in the opposite direction from where he wanted to be, provided the ride gave him enough time to get there by his designated time preference. Lyft says as much midway down on a “help” page on its website. But that information isn’t on the mobile app when drivers decide to turn the setting on. (Read more at link)
33 notes
·
View notes
Text
I made a thing.
19 notes
·
View notes
Text
A running list I was making while on the job for two Spotify playlists I thought I might make one day if I ever got Spotify and if that's actually how Spotify works.
Anyway,
Songs I played doing Uber that my riders asked if it was Rammstein
Blutengel - Schneekönigin
Subway to Sally - Schwarze Seide
Turmion Kätilöt - Teurastaja
Diary of Dreams - Ikarus
OOMPH! - Unsere Rettung
Blutengel - Love Killer (before Chris even started singing)
ASP - Abertausend Fragen
Lacrimosa - Siehst Du Mich im Licht?
Lacrimosa - Nach dem Sturm
Lacrimosa - Warum So Tief
...I was on a kick but also those three were all the same night, different people
ASP - Ich Will Brennen
OOMPH! - Lazarus
Megaherz - Einsam
Eisbrecher - Stossgebet
Eisbrecher - Frage
Subway to Sally - Sieben
ASP - Eine Kleine Ballade vom Schwarzen Schmetterling
Roland Keiser - Warum Hast Du Nicht Nein Gesagt
DJ Ötzi - Sieben Sünden
Device - Villify
Snakeskin - Bite Me
Powerwolf - Stossgebet
Eisbrecher - Die Hölle Muss Warten
Unzucht - Horizont
Nachtmahr - Heile Mich
Nostra Morte - Eres Todo para Mi
...I quit keeping track after that one.
Songs my riders have heard and said "Hey bro, got any Rammstein?"
Rammstein - Stirb nicht vor Mir
Rammstein - Donaukinder
Rammstein - Frühling in Paris
Rammstein - Dalai Lama
Rammstein - Nebel
Rammstein - Rammstein
(After which point I didn't feel the need to continue)
11 notes
·
View notes
Text
At the vet again 🙃
Aspirated a lump on Mandana’s neck. The vet thinks it’s just scar tissue/hematoma from her May blood draw.
Also did a thyroid test (results in a couple weeks) to see if her weight gain + lethargy are thyroid related or if it’s just the inevitable result of too many treats and not enough exercise.
😭😭 I’m really trying you guys. At this point I kind of hope it’s just hypothyroidism 😭😭
It took months to get her allergies under control so we could go for walks again and then my health tanked.
Her allergies are controlled now, she’s on a very high quality diet that’s low fat / high protein w/o common food allergens.
We’re getting back into scootering (or carpet mill on hot days) and I’m really trying to do long freedom walks again. She’s doing conditioning exercises and we do cardio play sessions several times a day.
I use her kibble for training, she’s on amazing supplements. She is getting a lot of high value rewards during training but they are single ingredient low fat treats and I’m counting calories.
We should get the test results back in a couple weeks. In the meantime I’m supposed to cut her diet back by 300 kcal. I’m totally cool with taking responsibility for her being overweight due to poor management, but I’ve seen what thyroid disease does and would love it if a little pill could make a drastic improvement in her health.
Also had a fun time watching rideshares trick the algorithm so they wouldn’t have to pick us up (I should have screen recorded it so I had proof bc it’s super illegal). I even tried paying extra for an Uber Pet but we had already been out for two hours and it wanted us to wait another 40 minutes when I live less than a mile away. Last time we tried walking home on a hot day, Mandana laid down and wouldn’t move for 15 minutes (hence the thyroid check) and today she had a lot of “pokes” so I wasn’t about to make her walk home in the heat. Luckily being a frequent flyer at the vet has its perks and one of the staff members offered to drive us home but seriously rideshare companies need to get their act together.
You know what’s worse than telling your rideshare that you have a service dog and then watching their gps immediately turn around and drive in the complete opposite direction…NOT telling them you have a service dog, waiting for 20+ minutes and then the moment they see your dog they drive off and cancel the ride. 🫠
#belgian malinois#2 years#service dog in training#lima dog training#cooperative care#considerate care#vetblr#canine conditioning#dog weight loss#dog allergies#rideshare#Lyft#Uber#accessibility matters
14 notes
·
View notes
Text
People's World: NYC Uber drivers stage one-day strike over company robbery of $12M in raises
NEW YORK—Some 80,000 low-wage mostly immigrant New York City Uber drivers staged a one-day strike on Jan. 5 over the firm’s robbery of an estimated $12 million in raises the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission ordered for them.
At a noontime rally at Uber headquarters at 175 Greenwich St., in downtown Manhattan, the drivers explained the city panel, following local law enacted in 2018, ordered a raise for them of at least $1,000 per driver per month, starting Dec. 19, 2022.
Including mileage reimbursements for skyrocketing gasoline expenses, the Uber drivers calculate they’ve lost $12 million. In addition to the strike, the drivers also asked customers to turn off the Uber app on their cell phones in solidarity through midnight.
Uber got a preliminary injunction to stop the raises ordered by the city—prompting a prior one-day drivers’ strike the day they were due to take effect, the 19th. The second strike precedes a Jan. 6 state Supreme Court hearing in Manhattan. In court, the commission is defending its raise for the drivers.
“Uber is trying to steal our raises from us. We aren’t going to let that happen,” responded driver Samassa Tidiane ahead of the rally.
The city’s Uber drivers, like their colleagues driving for the ride-share firm elsewhere in the U.S., are among the millions of exploited, low-wage fed-up workers from coast to coast who have had it with corporate greed at their expense.
Other such groups of workers include adjunct professors, port truckers, retail workers, warehouse workers, Amazon workers, and various “gig economy” workers. Those workers’ activism has led to large increases in union organizing and in employer-forced strikes. Other low-wage workers have just plain left for better jobs.
The commission-ordered raise for Uber drivers is supposed to cover inflation according to the Consumer Price Index for urban consumers’ transportation. That transportation index has skyrocketed since the first commission decision setting pay and reimbursement rates for the drivers, according to a friend-of-the-court brief the union-backed New York Taxi Workers Alliance filed with the judge.
In the brief, Uber driver Lamin Jatta said he told the city commission he used to pay $30 to fill up his tank and now pays $60. He wanted the panel to use “a consumer price that measures drivers’ professional expenses.” Driver Xavier Koudougou asked the commission “to use a CPI that reflects driver expenses because we drivers are consumer[s], but we use more gas than regular driver[s] and when the gas price [is] high, they have options. But we don’t.”
But after the commission approved the raise, Uber got the temporary injunction against it. The results: The drivers have had no raise at all, and their pay has not only fallen behind inflation but it’s also left many financially underwater. Many don’t even make the city’s minimum wage. So they’ve staged one-day strikes on Dec. 19 and on Jan. 5.
The Taxi Workers Alliance brief backing the Uber drivers lays out the impact in stark terms. So did the drivers, in statements before the noontime rally.“I’m shocked and speechless thinking of how Uber stopped our raise after all the hearings and all the protests we did,” said Uber driver Nusrat Jahan, a Taxi Workers Alliance member. “This raise was like a small light of happiness for our families and for us, which Uber didn’t let happen.
“I’m ashamed Uber blocked this happiness before the holidays. Now I’m working for Uber raising all this money for them so they can hire a private jet or go to a private island or go to Dubai to celebrate their happiness with their families. We could have been earning $1,000 extra a month to pay our bills, not for luxuries.”
“We won raises from the Taxi and Limousine Commission, but Uber decided to go to a judge to stop our raises. Uber doesn’t think about the drivers, they just think about themselves,” added Tidiane, also a Taxi Workers Alliance member.
“We’re suffering because car payments, insurance, food, gas, and mechanic prices are all going up. If Uber was the one paying expenses for cars and gas, they would have raised the prices a long time ago, but it’s drivers who pay for everything out of pocket. Uber is trying to steal our raises from us. We aren’t going to let that happen.”
The Taxi Workers Alliance brief elaborated on the conditions the drivers face without the raise. It also noted that even with the commission’s hike, the raise still would not keep up with inflation the drivers face, or the costs of buying and maintaining their cars.
“The cost of everyday essentials, from bread and milk to rent, has increased due to inflation levels not seen in the past 40 years. Uber speaks of the choice it must make: Bear the cost itself—as a major multinational company—or pass it onto customers, in whole or in part, and potentially upset customers with higher fare pricing.
“The stark reality [is] that drivers have no choice…. They cannot increase what Uber charges for fares. They must pay and have already paid higher vehicle costs. They cannot pass the increased cost of cars, insurance, repairs, and fuel onto customers. And they cannot decrease Uber’s commission” from each fare.
Drivers “have seen their take-home pay drop precipitously. The results of such a decrease have immediate, human impact on drivers and their families who, beginning with a baseline of low-wage earnings, cannot make any more trade-offs. Indeed, the record reflects nearly 80% of drivers were already struggling to pay rent, and nearly 50% struggling to afford food.”
#uber#gig economy#NYC#NYC Uber drivers stage one-day strike over company robbery of $12M in raises#rideshare#livable wage
2 notes
·
View notes
Last Seen Blogs
trailblazey
who's gonna save u now
kenanaydincomtr
kenanaydın
raulfleitasdj
Fleitas Sosa
todos-arderemos
Cuento sin fin