I'd disagree with that. It is providing a means of income for many who are unemployed/underemployed. It's much better than nothing. It probably can be better, but most of these drivers aren't complaining.
They aren't complaining yet because 1. they effectively have no collective voice other than social media, and 2. this "gig" industry Uber has propelled into the stratosphere is just too relatively new to see any significant societal fallout.
Wait until we see more and more drivers whose only job is Uber no longer able to work. What do we say to the veterans who, after being rejected everywhere else due to a dearth of skills took out a car loan on a new $60k SUV to drive for Uber, only now to get injured? Who's going to take care of them? Won't be Uber, who will just be shoving the middle finger in their faces. And I don't think you can call this a strawman, given how aggressive Uber is with vets.
Sure. But why don't we blame literally every other company who is worse and isn't giving any better opportunity. It would be fantastic if everyone had hundreds or thousands of options and they could compete for the best opportunity, but for some people that's not the case. I'd blame every other company before I blamed the one doing the most to help provide a compelling opportunity.
That would be a very financially-imprudent move, in any case. Just extrapolating from my car payment, that's like a $1200 payment. Moreover, are you going to make any more money from fares than if you had bought a used SUV at $20k?
> It's much better than nothing. It probably can be better, but most of these drivers aren't complaining.
This sounds strikingly similar to the working conditions undocumented immigrants encounter in US agriculture.
It's NOT better than nothing. In a proper first world country, you'd have a real safety net for people to fall back on instead of being exploited by shitty technology companies.
It is better than nothing. Consider the most extreme case, child labor (and I don't mean teenagers working at their parent's business). Enough people thought this was not better than nothing and thus pushed to end the practice. In some places this worked (more through economic pressure than laws if memory serves). The children who ended up with nothing found that they were worse off and many turned to the world's oldest profession to make money. They ended up worse off because nothing is worse than being exploited.
But that can change quickly, history has lots of examples of how asymmetric power relations between the owners of the means of production and the workforce can end in conflict and a heavy push for a regulatory framework.
For the most part, the fares seem to gravitate toward uber. Drivers likely do better with uber than with local taxi cos who at times act like extortionists (kickbacks or no dispatches, car rental charges, medallion charges, etc.)
I can attest to the fact that people from the US does not dress more casual than people from the Southern Cone of South America (Argentinians/Chileans/Uruguayans).
Organizational Software is, in essence, bureaucratic automation. And if you try to impose bureaucracy, control, tracking and/or regulaiton inside a deeply "brotherly" organization, you are bound to have issues.
It seems to me we are in the same place Front-End Web was a couple of years ago: There is an explosion of new tech and frameworks. BUT there seems to be a bump for the adoption of new tech for data engineering, the HIGH cost of migrating terabytes and terabytes of the company's data to a new system.
Migrating and integrating data is incredibly expensive. When you implement a new system you either have to migrate the data from the older system (= expensive) OR having both systems working in parallel one for "older" data and one for newer (= really expensive)
Currently the established risk-averse corporations, the owners of most of the non- social media and internet data, seem to be still testing enterprise Hadoop distributions like Cloudera and Hortonworks for daily enterprise data operations, and maybie have some projects on R&D for harnessing new "types" ok data (like sensor data from a factory floor or high granularity transport data for supply chain).
Still, I hope the best of the new tech can get a place inside the modern corporations that work on important problems like Energy and Healthcare.
Some people argue that Uber and AirBNB are not actually changing the way we use capital on a fundamental economic level, but are instead using new channels in a way, and with a magnitude, never used before.
IMHO I tend not to agree with the hole "Sharing Economy is The Next Capitalist Revolution" thesis.
I'd be curious if it's really an unprecedented magnitude (not impossible that it is, but I haven't seen numbers). For lodging, for example, it'd be interesting if someone could estimate at least approximate numbers for what proportion of the paid travel-lodging market was served by formal hotels vs. informal lodging arrangements in various cities over the decades. From what I've read of New York City (but no numbers), there has been a pretty wide array of lodging besides "proper" hotels in various periods, ranging from families running a few spare rooms as a boarding-house business, to large-scale "flophouse" operations. And, like today, it has been a political issue and led to debate over regulations periodically.
Or are they eroding laws and customs built up and evolved over time to manage complicated situations without clear-cut solutions in order that they can extract wealth and feed off society without contributing value? Frankly, I see both of those companies as parasites.
That is such a foolish statement I hesitate to reply. I use the term "parasite", do parasites die out?
Really the point hinges on your definition of "value". I don't credit these particular companies with adding any particular value to the domains in which they operate, and they are arguably degrading the local economic environments where they operate.
Part of my umbrage with airbnb in particular is personal: I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and I am looking for a new place to live. In the past I've used Craigslist for a long time with very good results, but these days it's very obvious that opportunistic landlords have colluded with airbnb to turn quite a lot of available rental spaces into poorly-managed quasi-hotels.
There are important reasons why we don't allow ourselves to e.g. drive and operate illicit taxis, or run unregulated hotels. We have, collectively, thousands of years of experience with letting to lodgers and hiring porters and carriages, etc.
If you got in your car and started driving people around for money, that's not legal. If you started a hotel in your spare bedroom, that's not legal. Just adding computers doesn't make it legal. Calling it "disruption" doesn't make it legal or right. These companies are criminals, they are extracting money and degrading the domains they operate in, and (as Airbnb's recent appalling ad campaign demonstrates) they are fully up their own asses when it comes to owning up to the consequences of their behaviour.
With any luck at all they will "die" soon and we won't be talking about them anymore.
I think the "sharing economy" represents a significant change, and things like AirBNB or Zipcar constitute major parts of that change. I don't, however, see why Uber gets lumped into that. Uber is not a "ride sharing" service; it's a transportation service to connect professional drivers to people getting driven.
> it's a transportation service to connect professional drivers to people getting driven.
It looks more like a "service" that destroys a job in which people can support their family and replaces it with another hand-to-mouth subsistence job.
By which metric would you measure this "efficiency"?
The difference between VC-backed-startups vs traditional R&D departments is that the first one seems more short sighted, and with a tendency towards a narrow subset of IT problems with high scalability and disruptive potential, while the second one works on a wide array of industries and applications where the parent company already has the benefits of economies of scale.
"By which metric would you measure this "efficiency"?"
Good question. A few ideas:
-- ROIC
-- Competitive advantage versus peers (hard to measure, but one attempt: http://web.mit.edu/is08/pdf/Parrish.pdf)
-- Share of market
-- Enlargement of market
-- Quality of hiring versus peers
These are the things that can make a company last for centuries. The hunch I was stating -- though admittedly without a clear way to prove it yea or nay -- is that enterprises that invest in small nimble VC-backed technology companies will begin to outperform, on these measures, traditional in-house R&D departments.
