Here’s a good long read on all the reasons Uber is going to fail. Everyone will have their reasons for enjoying it.
For me, I’m sick of hearing how Uber is a model for disruption of an industry, blah, blah, blah. As you can see in the piece, Uber is a set of tiny transfer payments from Silicon Valley VCs to every rider of the service. Passenger fares cover only 41 percent of the trip cost. The business model doesn’t scale: entering every market involves huge investment in driver recruitment and regulatory negotiation. Uber also isn’t “sticky” – most Uber drivers also drive for Lyft and could just as easily drive for a third or fourth competitor. The decision to do their own self-driving car research was also stupid (should have been buy not build, in my opinon), perhaps facilitated by technology stolen from Google, and tends to run red lights.
In addition to the financial stupidity, the fact that the company is run by a bunch of odious Randian bros who appear to tolerate a culture of misogony is yet another reason to dislike them. They have enough cash to stick around for years, but my guess is that the history of our current tech boom will start with the reasons why Uber was over-hyped.
liberal
I don’t get the self driving car thing. That way they have to own the actual cars.
Corner Stone
Huh. I was just reading The Guardian piece about Google’s lawsuit v Uber.
Corner Stone
I still for the life of me can not figure out how they have a market cap of about $70B. What do they actual own or control? A software app?
Baud
I’ve done Uber once in my life, and that was because I was with someone who had the app.
germy
Gov. Cuomo is running TV ads touting Uber. He gave speeches saying it would help the drunk driving problem. But I remember the viral video of the uber driver who kicked out a passenger because he was drunk. (the video went viral because the drunk started pounding the uber driver’s head).
A drunk who doesn’t want to drive can call a regular cab company, so I don’t get the pro-uber logic.
Baud
@Corner Stone:
The hearts of billionaires with money to burn.
Roger Moore
@liberal:
Two points about that:
A) The self-driving cars should pay for themselves pretty quickly in terms of cost savings from not paying the driver’s wages. Also, too, at least theoretically, they’re already paying the driver for depreciation, maintenance, insurance, etc. on his own vehicle, which they no longer have to pay. Not to mention the costs associated with background checks on the drivers, potential liability if they let through a mass murderer, etc.
B) They don’t necessarily have to pay for the cars. It’s always possible that they have in mind a franchise operation, where they sell the driverless cars to
suckersfranchisees who eat the capital, maintenance, etc. costs in exchange for a cut of the fare. It’s a classic model to use if you don’t have the capital to grow the company as fast as you’d like.XTPD
Why doesn’t Uber have a diæresis over the u?
eyelessgame
@Corner Stone:
A marketing agreement to have their app preinstalled on phones.
Corner Stone
Can you say, “Yikes!” ?
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Yup. One of the first things I did, the last time i got a new phone, was disable the included Uber app.
CarolDuhart2
Uber is also in trouble because at least in my area, cab drivers are now independent entrepreneurs. Who needs an app if one has their own cab driver?
Corner Stone
@Roger Moore:
If I am reading the article correctly, Uber does not pay for maintenance, etc.:
“Without the perks and protections that an employee may enjoy—health care, benefits, gasoline and work reimbursements, vehicle maintenance,”
MattF
@XTPD: According to Wikipedia, it’s not a diaeresis. Could be not-an-umlaut. Since it’s not there, it’s hard to tell.
Booger
Uber is recycling the model local messenger/delivery services have used for years…cycle through an unlimited supply of people who believe they will be that special driver who will make the promised wages, while >90% barely cover their costs, and are destroyed when they have an accident they aren’t insured for or a mechanical failure they didn’t plan for. Lather, rinse, repeat. Outsource all the risk, insource all the reward. Always more suckers waiting in line.
Patricia Kayden
Hate to admit that I use Uber all the time because it’s cheap, quick and convenient. I hope some other competitor copies its modus operandi without the unnecessary nonsense. It provides an excellent service, to be honest.
CarolDuhart2
Uber worked because cab drivers were attached to a single company that did dispatch and were territorial. But as I said before, at least where I live, cab drivers are no longer so attached, and can simply do what Uber does with lower cost. I mean, if you can drive for Uber, paying your own insurance, gas, and maintenance, why not go all the way and at least qualify for business deductions? And keep all of the money, and set more of your own hours?
Corner Stone
I am also included in the boat of people who have no idea how these companies think self-driving cars will be a functioning reality any time in the next two or more decades. Even if the technology is there, the infrastructure is not and will not be. Who is going to pay for it? Local counties getting some kind of incentive from Uber or Google? Doubtful.
There is a road construction project that intends to create an HOV lane on the way into Houston. It’s been in the planning stage for 10 years, just recently started, and they plan a four stage construction process that will last (projected) four years. That is just to add a closed in lane, not add any of the signal markings a driverless vehicle would consistently need.
Yarrow
Since the tag for this post is Free Markets Solve Everything, here’s another example of the free market at work. Guess what, travel to the US is way down.
So travel here is already down 6.8% and searches for trips to the US are down 17%. Summer travel season is going to be epic for the US tourism business.
But, hey! At least Trump has saved 800 of those more important factory jobs, right?
So much winning.
XTPD
@MattF: According to Wikipedia, yes it totally is, as a diacritic.
Baud
@Corner Stone: Me too.
Keith P.
RIP Bill Paxton! What a loss…and I just read a mention of him a couple of days ago, how there should be a Hudson spinoff movie instead of Alien:Covenant.
AWJ
This blog post posits that Uber’s business model makes sense if and only if interpreted as the “dump your product and drive everyone else out of business” stage of building a monopoly.
Kay
It bothers me that people pretend it’s this entry-level work but it’s not. Uber relies on a lot of things being in place- licensed driver, car that is presentable and runs, social safety net to protect their workers – they act like they’re these brave mavericks but there’s this whole structure behind the scenes that makes this model possible.
I feel like the driver should get MORE because of the risk they’re taking on and the fact that they have to pony up the (depreciating) asset (car,license, insurance) ahead of time.
If you are running a business YOU have to take some risk because YOU profit more than your hourly employees. You can’t just shift all the risk to your employees and give them no share of the rewards. Besides everything else that is delusional. Cars aren’t “free”. They’re a depreciating asset these drivers own. Because you already own a car doesn’t mean the car has no value to Uber. Of course it does. You’re giving them your equipment. Not to include that in a business model is delusional. You can’t be a real grownup business and say “oh, I just facilitate drivers- I ignore fixed costs and equipment”. That’s nice but it’s bullshit. It’s a fantasy.
Nothing is “free”. I don’t know why people have to be told this over and over. Count it ALL.
Roger Moore
@Corner Stone:
The big things they have- apart from a ton of cash- are name recognition and a network of drivers willing to work for them.
Baud
@Kay: Like @Booger said, it works because there are drivers who believe they can make money off of it.
Peale
@germy: it would make sense in the parts of New York State where taxis are few and far between. Like the whole state outside of metro area. The problem is that there aren’t going to be many uber drivers in those areas either.
Eric S.
@Patricia Kayden: I agree it is am excellent service most of the tune. uber and lyft have been so successful that in my neighborhood it has gotten very hard to find a cab. I rarely use cabs but When I do my best option is not a traditional cab. I choose lyft over uber though. I refuse to get in an uber actually.
MattF
@XTPD: Diaeresis and umlaut use the same symbol, so they are synonyms according to Unicode because Unicode encodes only the symbol and ignores phonology. But the phonologies are different. And in either case– it’s a rather moot point because the symbol isn’t there.
Corner Stone
I just can’t get into AMJoy without the Joy part being there. I keep trying but it seems like the segments just don’t have the same bite or significance to them.
germy
@Peale: There are quite a few cab companies in upstate ny.
Kay
So I have one employee who works part time for me and part time for herself. This is great, she should do that, but I think she has to recognize the role her “real job” plays in allowing her other gig to be so loosey-goosey. ONE of her employers is serving the “secure income,payroll taxes” role in this scenario and it isn’t her home-based business.
My husband used to play this game with maverick self-employed people. He called it “find the health insurance”. So many times they were relying on a spouse or partner who had regular income and security. This is fine, they can do this, but LOOK at it. Count it. Don’t pretend this stuff is “free”. It’s not free. Someone is paying for it. There’s like this army of employed people making mavericks possible.
Patricia Kayden
@Eric S.: So I’ll check out Lyft then. I have a couple of friends who have experience as Uber drivers. One loves it and the other hated his experience. Doesn’t sound as if the drivers make all that money and the wear and tear on their private cars may not be worth it.
OzarkHillbilly
@Keith P.: Sad to hear that it’s Game Over Man, GAME OVER.
Roger Moore
@XTPD:
If they did have the dots over the “U”, they’d be an umlaut, not a diaeresis./pedant
Kay
@Baud:
I had this conversation with my son in law when he was in grad school and thinking Uber. “Was your car free? No? That’s an expense. Subtract it.”
Don’t donate equipment to your employer. No one does that. You’re not “smarter” for doing it. The guy driving the Frito Lay truck that someone else owns had this figured out- addition and subtraction doesn’t change. They’re not “reinventing” anything. They’re just ignoring everything that gets in the way of it making sense. Because they assign no value doesn’t make it true. These things aren’t rain and sunshine. They cost money.
jeffreyw
@MattF:
So, it’s kinda like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin that isn’t there?
voldemort
@XTPD: surely I have better things to do at 6:20am, but SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET. It would be a diaeresis if there were two vowels next to each other than both needed to be pronounced (naïve = NA-EEV not NAYV), but an umlaut if the vowel sound needs to shift (über = OOBER not UHBER).
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay:
This is America, and apparently yes, you can.
RSA
@Kay:
Yes. Uber and some other companies in the gig economy are successful in part because their costs are hidden, paid by someone else in the present or the future. For their contractors, freelancing is great if there’s a strong social safety net. But as a fan of Ayn Rand, Kalanick would seem to be against such a safety net; it’s easy to see people getting screwed over.
Citizen_X
@Roger Moore:
Hey, that only happened ONCE. Once! Anybody can make a little mistake.
Corner Stone
I think I am going to join Uber’s Executive Board. I could be Travis’ “Ivanka” and be a moderating influence on his ego, bullying and hostile work environment.
Baud
@Kay: Yeah, big companies have better accountants than most folks.
Walker
I know Uber as that company willing to hire my C level CS students. Even Amazon is a major step up from Uber
Kay
@Baud:
I read this thing about a “college” that has “no professors”. They’re pretty impressed with themselves. Except what they rely on is work someone else paid for that is on the internet. Actual lectures and content.
It just amazes me. WHERE do they think it came from? A person. Who WAS PAID.
It’s not free! Free to them, yes. But in no way free! It could get really ludicrous, like a circle, musical chairs. The object seems to be NOT to be the person who pays for anything. We will all fall down. Someone has to buy the chair.
Roger Moore
@Corner Stone:
They don’t pay for it directly, but they have to give the drivers a big enough cut to pay for that stuff or they’ll quit when they discover they’re getting shafted.
Kay
@Baud:
Everyone thinks (or says) that liberals are the head in the clouds people but I feel like I spend half my life telling conservatives that nothing is free. It’s just a matter of finding out WHO PAID. You don’t even have to go back that far! It’s usually the person right behind the free marketeer.
LAC
@Patricia Kayden: me too. Our cab service is Maryland can be spotty and unreliable.
Baud
@Kay: You are sounding awfully capitalistic this morning. ;-)
The Thin Black Duke
@Keith P.: Game over, man. Game over.
BruceFromOhio
@AWJ: “Dump your product and drive everyone else out of business while burning through billions in cash”
When that subsidy ends, prices go up, and … profit? Only the underpants gnomes know.
Won’t use Uber, ever.
ETA: What @Kay said.
Citizen_X
@Corner Stone:
Behold the infinite wisdom of the market!
And the government funding basic research and the development of, say, space travel and renewable energy? Horrible inefficiency.
XTPD
@voldemort: Corrected. But what I still want to know is: WHY THE FUCK ISN’T THERE AN UMLAUT OVER THE U IN UBER?
Omnes Omnibus
@XTPD: Because no one put one there.
BruceFromOhio
@voldemort: Oh, I am so stealing this – “Someone hail an UBBER”
Baud
@Citizen_X: While Uber’s market cap and losses are incredible given the service that it offers, it’s not uncommon for new ventures to suffer high losses in the early years. It may be that Uber never turns a profit, but I don’t think bad investments themselves are indicative of market failure, any more than a failed government program would indicate that government is inherently bad at doing things.
PIGL
@AWJ: I remember that article from its first publication; struck me is 100% true and still does even though I avoid naked capitalism now.
Kay
@Baud:
It always goes back to “what if everyone did that?”
What if everyone said “I don’t want employees because they’re expensive and I have to follow so-called rules that cramp my style”. There wouldn’t be any predictability. To BUY THE CAR they have to show regular income. Uber is also relying on this state system that does this nice thing for them- it prequalifies drivers. It’s called a “license”. They don’t want any rules? Okay. Give them a driving test and license them and then pay for this giant system that licenses.
MoxieM
Where I live there are no taxis. Yup, 30 miles outside Boston, no taxis. So, for the few times (outpatient procedures for example) where I need a ride when everyone I know I working, Über is very helpful.
Also, regarding the umlaut/non-umlaut. Most Americans can’t pronounce an ü to save their lives…they even have trouble with ö (see, Boener, John). (At least they didn’t call it Alles, eh?)
SiubhanDuinne
O/T, sorry, but Bill Paxton has died age 61. Complications following surgery.
RIP to a fine actor.
Elizabelle
I think that executives who talk about “disrupting” industries and the work compact are just auditioning: “Me, me! My head would look good on that pike.”
There is not a circle of hell low enough for Travis Kalanick and his Ayn Randian fantasies.
Oatler.
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m proud to say I’m one of the vast majority of Americans who know what an umlaut is but speak no language where it’s used. [Blue Oyster Cult, Spinal Tap…). An Umlaut over the N???
Elizabelle
@SiubhanDuinne: Dang. RIP.
Calls for Spirit in the Sky.
I never tire of Apollo 13. Good actor; Paxton was good in everything I ever saw him in. Everyman quality.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@XTPD: In the original German, it would be an umlaut. It indicates a sound shift, in this case from “oo” to something not found in English, sort of a cross between “oo” and “ee”.
BTW, any German word with an umlaut vowel can also be spelled by adding an “e” to the vowel. It looks really weird to people accustomed to the umlauts. Ueber, Fuehrer, Maedchen, moechte, etc.
Kay
@Elizabelle:
It’s okay as an experiment but they’re always so thrilled with themselves. Making money because you don’t pay any of the costs of doing business isn’t innovative and Randian. It’s dependent. There can be SOME of them but the whole thing falls apart if everyone does it.
Baud
@Kay: I agree that too much of the modern economy relies on free-riderism.
Omnes Omnibus
@MoxieM: And most Germans have trouble with our “th” sound.
Villago Delenda Est
@XTPD: Because they are Scheisskopfen.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@XTPD: Because American English mugged German and stole the word out of its wallet. But English doesn’t use umlauts, so that got tossed aside.
@Omnes Omnibus: My high school German teacher (Sudetenlander) talked about being in English class as a girl with everyone practicing the “th” sound.
Corner Stone
@Kay:
Uber is nothing more than one yooge Ponzi scheme. There is no way to add value without also adding associated costs. Who in the world could be valuing a ride sharing app at market of $70B ?
Elizabelle
@Kay: Your comment about hidden costs reminded me of lunches out with a friend in the SoCal aerospace industry, meeting up with others in his field, a few years ago.
Of the three youngish rocket component entrepreneurs we met: every single one had a wife who worked for a public school or local government, so the family had health insurance and one stable source of employment. No spouse in the private sector. Granted, it was only three in the sample, but I noticed that right off.
One of the promises of Obamacare — being able to obtain insurance for your family, not tethered to your workplace. A reason for opposing it that the GOP “pro-business” fantasists dare not mention; gives away the game.
Steve in the ATL
@Villago Delenda Est:
Finally–the one German word I know!
SiubhanDuinne
@Elizabelle:
Yup, and 61 is just too damned young. A lot of Hollywood isn’t going to be feeling very cheerful tonight, Oscars notwithstanding.
And sorry, didn’t intend to disrupt a dedicated-topic thread.
XTPD
@Villago Delenda Est: You mean Scheißekopfen.
Steve in the ATL
@SiubhanDuinne:
Uber or umlauts?
Villago Delenda Est
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
True, but with character map handy, I always go do some copy and pasting. I never talk about “Nuremberg” or “Munich”, it’s “Nürnberg” and “München” dammit!
Brachiator
Uber and Lyft have already been a success. They have successfully disrupted the market and forced taxi companies to adapt. I’ve used the service a few times with great success, and once with annoying failure.
I recently was in Vegas on business, and heard that Uber is a success there, even though I don’t think you can get a pickup right at the airport.
The big advantage to me was that you can order a car anywhere using the app. I don’t have to look up a taxi service. And one attempt at a taxi app was a pain to use.
However, I agree that Uber has big problems to overcome if they hope to continue to exist.
I am neutral about the possibility of self driving vehicles. Interesting though, that the idea of them has displaced the promise of flying cars as defining the Future.
Now we are looking at self driving cars and more and better drones.
Villago Delenda Est
@XTPD: Yeah, yeah ess-set.
Corner Stone
@Baud: Burn rate is definitely a metric that should be paid attention to. And as the linked article alludes to Amazon losing money for several years, Amazon also had the “benefit” of being able to lower associated fixed costs. Uber can’t do that. They can predict a business model where there are no drivers needed but until that “reality” comes into play they will continue to burn money at a phenomenal rate. Travis is not a smart individual, he’s just another ego-centric bully and an asshole. The fact that he got pretty talented people like Chris Sacca to buy in so heavily to this model made me question my thoughts on Uber pretty strongly. But I am still not getting it.
Major Major Major Major
Here in San Francisco, Uber got a super easy foothold not because we’re all techies (though that provided the necessary lack of technical and psychological barriers for adoption) but because the taxis had become fully cartelized bullshit organizations that abused their drivers, made it damn near impossible to operate an independent cab, and had a nonfunctional dispatch system. Now that they’ve had that major shock the taxis at least have functioning dispatch, but they cost a lot more since Uber still subsidizes its fares.
carol I think said above that Uber is still in the flood-the-market stage of a monopoly, which is correct.
lollipopguild
@Yarrow: Important parts of our economy(tourism) and the individuals who work in that part of our economy are going to choke to death on all of the winning.
Fair Economist
@XTPD:
Probably because an umlaut would call for that distinctive german “ew” version of u, which would make people think of übermensch and a whole host of unpleasant fascist connotations which would be bad for business.
Although given that the company is run by Randians, I suspect they were thinking about all that when they picked the name.
raven
@Brachiator: It was great for getting to the football stadium this season. I just watched the price and, when it wallow, I lit it up. It wasn’t nearly as good after games.
Emerald
@Yarrow:
Already seeing it. I do Airbnb, and I haven’t had a foreign visitor for a month and a half. Now, it is the slow season, but foreign travelers have been at least one third of my business.
I’m really worried about the rest of the year.
International tourism is a huge business in America. This is going to cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.
But hey, if you tell the rest of the world that you hate them, don’t be surprised that they don’t want to visit you anymore.
David Anderson
The same a analysis with the lack of scalable costs is why I doubt Oscar.
MattF
@Villago Delenda Est: I remember, long ago, back in my dirty-hippie days, I was in a European train station, wondering where this place ‘Wien’ was. All the trains seemed to go there.
Brachiator
Bill Paxton, gone? Oh,no. Really liked him.
Loved this recent Twitter message.
Damn. Loved him in “True Lies” and “Tombstone.”
Weird fact. He was apparently the kid being held up in a crowd of people watching President Kennedy come out of a hotel in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
Major Major Major Major
@David Anderson: not a coincidence, haven’t you written about how they’re trying to be the Uber of health insurance (except even stupider), or was that somebody else?
Elizabelle
@Baud: The “gig” economy.
“Gig” also meaning a multi-pronged spear used to kill smaller prey. Like frogs, hanging out in warming water, or not.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Emerald: Do you mind if I ask where your property is? I’ve been thinking FL is going to get hit hard by a drop-off in European tourists, but I don’t know what those numbers are like since the Euro got a bit weaker, and the pound is still very weak isn’t it ?
XTPD
@Villago Delenda Est: Nuh-uh, it’s ezsett.
Mnemosyne
@MoxieM:
I do think that Uber and Lyft successfully identified several underserved markets and figured out an easy way to reach those people. I think it was Keith G on here who said he has a disabled friend in Houston who uses Uber to go visit her friends, because the regular taxis refused to go to those neighborhoods.
Traditional taxi companies are slowly figuring out how to compete, but it seems to be taking quite a while.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator:
The gig economy has shook up some complacent actors, true. But one of the catches is that there are reasons for all those regs that are so “oppressive” and the reason they seem oppressive is that those bitching about them do not have the critical thinking skills (see Trump, Donald) to comprehend that they’re there for a reason, not just pure caprice…which is the way that those who are into capriciousness (see Trump, Donald) “think”.
lollipopguild
@MattF: Ah Vienna! I hear that they make sausage there.
Big Ole Hound
@Booger: EXACTLY. Just like messenger driver services. The net ends up at about $5 per hour if your busy. Been there done that years ago.
Brachiator
@SiubhanDuinne:
Another disruption. Saw “I am not your Negro” and “Lion.” Enjoyed both. More later.
Sebastian
Rejoice all you umlaut-pronunciation challenged people. It’s super easy, all you have to do is this:
1. Say Eh like a Canadian, exagerate a bit and hold the sound.
2. As you keep that sound, move your lips to hiw you would pronounce OO, AH, or OH
That’s it.
Roger Moore
@BruceFromOhio:
It depends on who lasts longer: the cash or the competition.
Mnemosyne
@Emerald:
The story about the Australian children’s book author being harassed by US Customs is going to have a huge ripple effect, IMO. Why the hell would any tourist want to come here from Germany or Australia or Spain if they’re afraid they’re going to be held at the airport for hours? Nobody wants to deal with that shit while they’re on vacation.
I’m starting to think that Bannon is deliberately trying to crash our whole economy so he can consolidate his power, and that scares the crap out of me.
Original Lee
@Kay: Exactly. The number of small business owners I know who can only afford to be self-employed because their spouses have employer-provided health insurance is significant. OTOH, growing up in farm country, I remember the number of farm wives who were nurses or teachers was quite large, too, because just one pre-existing condition used to bar them from affording individual health insurance.
Hey, maybe that’s a pitch for keeping ACA – think of the farmers, dammit!
aimai
@Yarrow: The travel ban has made me reconsider my willingness to go abroad from the US to other countries. I had been wanting to take my daughter to London as a graduation present. But I honestly can not face returning to the US through an international airport and worrying about the treatment accorded to the other, non citizen, passengers. How am I supposed to intervene if CBP come on to the plane and check everyone’s papers before they get off? I also worry that Trump will somehow take people’s passports away–my great Uncle was one of the Civil Liberties lawyers who fought the passport cases of the day back in the 50’s and 60’s. my concerns are probably overblown, but they feel too great to plan a summer trip. I am curious to see the figures for US citizens going abroad–although that is probably a feature, not a bug, from Trump’s point of view.
Emerald
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Oceanside, CA. Yeah, Issa’s district.
I got lots of foreign people taking their kids to Legoland last year (from Indonesia and China, for example). Plus, quite a few young Chinese people moving here to go to college. A bit of international business people, too (and international business travel is down by about the same amount.
In the fall, I got plenty of people from Europe. About a month ago a guy from Sweden was going to stay for three weeks, but canceled.
I’m just hoping that Americans will take up the slack this summer. But normally foreign travelers come all year.
Villago Delenda Est
@Sebastian: Just takes some practice, and pretty soon you’re blurting out Amerikanisches Hochdeutsch that will serve you well until you leave Bavaria or Austria and encounter all the weird dialects elsewhere in the country. Zwo, anyone?
CarolDuhart2
@Corner Stone: Let’s face it: even in the city, a lot of roads are pretty crappy with poor maintenance. How will self-driving cars deal with potholes, terrible weather, and de-listed roads, those people who will keep their cars at least until the end, and wayward wildlife? And country roads are an order worse than city roads that have at least a decent budget for repairs.
Villago Delenda Est
@aimai: Hell, Citizens are being treated to the abuse of the 21st Century American Gestapo as well. ON DOMESTIC FLIGHTS!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Original Lee: I haven’t done the math, but I’m pretty sure I know more people who have made some kind of major life decision– when to have kids, where to live, when they can retire– based on health insurance, than haven’t. Combine that with the Hobby Lobby decision– your employers can tell you how you can spend the compensation you get in return for labor, especially if they’re a sympathetic bunch of nuns– and I can’t believe more people aren’t pissed off about this neo-feudalism that decides whether or not they can see a fucking doctor.
schrodingers_cat
@aimai: I feel the same way. Husband kitteh and I were planning a spring trip to India for his cousin’s wedding. I don’t think I want to go now. Also, I want to wait to till fall to have my M-I-L over. She is 75 and has bad knees. Not a Muslin or from the 7 countries included in the ban but still.
Major Major Major Major
@Villago Delenda Est: zwo, shudder
Brachiator
@Villago Delenda Est:
When regulations get in the way of people being able to get a taxi, they become counterproductive. When a new service arises that better meets a need, then the old service will fall, regulations be damned.
The Los Angeles area, where I live, presents its own challenges. Even mass transit agencies have problems, because this really is a regional transportation hub, but city agencies often fail to cooperate.
And on top of regulations, you have the blatant attempts to maintain monopoly rights, which is why the Green Line train was prevented from going directly to the airport.
Latino immigrants have attempted to create car and van services to serve a willing and eager customer base, but have been stifled by regulations designed to protect existing interests, not serve the public.
Villago Delenda Est
@XTPD: Showoff. My Deutsch is rusty.
Mnemosyne
@Villago Delenda Est:
If they pull that shit when I’m on my way to Florida in a couple of weeks, I’m going to have to grin and bear it, because I can’t risk having my two nieces arrive in a strange city and be left by themselves.
If it happens on my way home, all bets are off.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator: The issue of regulatory capture is another day. Vigilance, always.
Kathleen
@Mnemosyne: He stated in a 2014 Fox interview that crashing the economy is a good idea in so many words, as did Trump. There’s no doubt in my mind they that will try and do it.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
There’s more than one kind of bad investment. Investing in a business that failed isn’t necessarily a sign of a market failure; it’s a sign that the market is unforgiving and most new companies fail. Investing a business without a reasonable long-term strategy and no obvious way to go from unprofitable to profitable is a sign of market failure.
I think a comparison between Tesla and Uber is a reasonable one. Tesla is losing a bunch of money, but one can easily see how they could turn into a profitable company. They need to get their gigafactory finished, start selling the Model 3, and some similar things that are all plausible events. That makes Tesla a risky investment- a bunch of their initiatives need to succeed for them to become long-term profitable- but, depending on the potential returns, a reasonable one. In contrast, it’s not clear how Uber is ever supposed to become profitable. They don’t seem to have a reasonable business plan for how they get from losing a bunch of money to making a bunch of money, and without out that they look more like a pyramid scam than anything else.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@aimai: I was wondering what would happen if they ask to see my social media profile. Would they believe I don’t have one?
also, too, it seems appropriate that his man is one of the leading scholars on the Vichy gov’t in France
lollipopguild
@Mnemosyne: Bannon is a very stupid man who cannot think beyond his fingertips. When all of the business people who supported trump see their business dropping or even failing what do think their reaction will be? If things get bad enough quick enough you will see blowback that even trump will not be able to ignore.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mnemosyne:
And certainly nobody wants to deal with that shit while they’re travelling on business. I’ve seen a few different anecdotes recently about world-renowned experts in their fields who were on their way to academic conferences or similar when they were detained. In fact, I think Mem Fox herself was flying in to address a gathering of children’s lit librarians.
ThresherK
@XTPD: Are you just showing off that you know these things? I mean, that’s cool. Just reminds me how great grandmother would be ashamed for me never having learned to prounounce, let alone write properly, all the Germanic letters.
—
On Uber, I’m pretty much with Atrios: Fix some freakin’ rail systems, and build-in Transit-oriented-development, before getting all goo-goo on Maglev. Budget for road repair (and getting VMT down with smart design) before wet-dreaming over self-driving cars.
Original Lee
@Yarrow: We usually host three foreign exchange students in the summer. So far, we have one coming this summer. Parents are naturally worried about getting their children through the CBP cordon. While the students are staying with us instead of in a hotel, we spend the month each is with us doing tourist-y things nearly every day, plus they shop like nobody’s business. I would say each student easily drops $2000 into the local economy, so if we end up only having one student, that’s $4000 not being spent here, which obviously does things to the trade deficit Lord Smallgloves doesn’t really understand.
Roger Moore
@Omnes Omnibus:
That’s sounds, plural; we have voiced and unvoiced variants of th.
Booger
@Citizen_X: Yes, it’s hard to find drivers of a uniform calibre.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
What could they do? They can’t deport you if you don’t answer, and I don’t think failing to answer is illegal.
Booger
@Roger Moore: Which can typically take quite a while, and there’s always another mark willing to step up, see my previous comment.
Mnemosyne
@lollipopguild:
Sadly, given recent events, I’m pretty sure their reaction will be, Damn that Obama — Trump tried to save our failing economy, but he was too late! The damage was already done.
Baud
@Roger Moore: Maybe I define market failure differently. But dumb or irrational investors does not equal market failure to me.
Sebastian
@Villago Delenda Est: haha, you have no idea. I am fluent in Hochdeutsch and one regional dialect. Delighted to see you are aware of those.
Most people do not realize that there is no auch thing as “German” in the wild. People will speak a modulation of their local dialect and adjust towards High German depending on their counterpart
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Kay:
That’s what happened to outsourcing – last place I worked at some of the stuff we bought was outsourced threw over twelve different companies. Most of the so called tech “boom” is merely companies is insourcing so they can get control their product again.
Yarrow
@lollipopguild: @Emerald: I’ve been saying for awhile that the travel ban is going to hurt our economy much more than the Trump administration figured.
First will be the tourism industry. Expect their quarterly earnings reports coming out in late March/early April to be down. Projections down as well. Hotels, airlines, rental cars, vacation and tourist destinations.
A lot of people work in those industries and they’ll see the slowdown and stop spending as much money because they’ll be worried about their jobs. Next step will be consumer spending dropping off.
Concurrent and also somewhat following that will be things like the building industry as the tourism industry puts expansion plans on hold. So slowdowns and layoffs in the building trades and suppliers, like the lumber industry, will follow. I’d also expect a slow down in real estate in tourist-heavy areas.
If the Fed raises interest rates and people can’t afford their mortgages or much of anything else, we’ll be off to the races with the economy as a whole. Winning!
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
Some of the problem is that traditional taxi companies actually are heavily regulated in ways that may have made sense at one time but don’t now. But that’s an argument in favor of revising the regulations, not in favor of ignoring them completely.
Davebo
I use Uber all the time and love it. I wouldn’t even consider calling a taxi, waiting 45 minutes to ride in a car the driver is literally living in again.
As for fares, they could double the fairs and I’d still happily use it. Sure, at times it can be tricky at a big event like a concert to “hook up” with your car but most times the drivers are pretty savy.
I’ve used it in 6 different cities and the worst experience I’ve had was better than the best one in a cab.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Villago Delenda Est: Damn straight!
Don’t forget Köln.
Also Moskva. ;)
lollipopguild
@Mnemosyne: The dumber ones, of course-everything is the sekret mooselum teerowrists fault. The smarter ones are going to let trump know that it was trump’s doing. This travel ban crap is also going to hurt our military and intel people as well.
Yarrow
@Mnemosyne:
Bannon has already said this is what he wants to do. Trump has said the same. I believe them.
Another Scott
I didn’t realize their business model was so broken. I’d heard the horror stories about $500-$1000 “surge pricing” trips and figured they were making money (at least in some markets). Of course they’re expanding world-wide, so that has to cost a bundle.
I’ve never used Uber or Lyft or any other similar “service”. If I have the choice, I never will. I don’t like companies that figure they can go around rules that incumbents have to follow (all the various taxi regulations) and then threaten to pull up stakes and move out of the city/state if they are forced to follow reasonable rules.
I agree that their “driverless cars” efforts seem to be nonsensical and a distraction, but l guess they’re just continuing to try to act like a “big, successful startup” and keep trying anything while the VC money is flowing to keep up their valuation and stay in the public eye. I also think Atrios is right – driverless cars are a long time away from being “good enough”. The law and insurance is an issue that still isn’t solved, also too.
So, I dunno.
But then again, I couldn’t figure out MCI’s and Enron’s business models either… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Cheers,
Scott.
jeffreyw
@Villago Delenda Est:
Innumerable post-war and cold war movies have those pivotal scenes where a uniformed man asks the protagonist for his/her papers. Will they pass inspection? Will they have to run for it? Will they be shot in the back? Always fraught with suspense! It blows my mind that these same fraught scenes might be coming to a street near me. Occupied America! Man in the High Castle is not a documentary, dammit!
lollipopguild
@Yarrow: Trump and bannon and others like them are incapable of figuring Anything. It’s just “i want this!” and damn the results.
Mickee
So sick of the ‘disruptive technologies’ schtick. It’s just arrogant Dunning-Krugerites that think every widget or app they develop will ‘change civilization.’ Not having a fucking clue what you are doing, but doing it anyway (to outrageously enrich yourself) is not the same as changing the course of history. Disruption is not a laudable goal. Innovation and true improvement are.
Theranos, anyone?
Tripod
extend these trend-lines out to infinity…. we’ll make up for it in volume…
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Elizabelle:
My gf is a copy editor and self employed, she was telling me the only way most copy editors could get health insurance is threw Obama care, before health insurance companies couldn’t be bothered with the self employed. Now keep in mind; traditionally the Republicans have been the party of the small businessman. It just shows how decadent the GOP has gotten as a party they sacrificed one of their core constituents to rhetoric.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
That’s a reason, but not the only one. LAX doesn’t have a single, logical place to locate a station, since the terminals are spread out enough that you need a bus to go from one to the next even if you didn’t take the train there. That’s why they’re planning on having the LAX station on the Crenshaw line away from the terminals with a people mover to get people from there to the airport.
dlwchico
Years ago when I was looking for a job I answered an ad looking for FedEx drivers.
During the course of the meeting I found out that A: you had to provide your own van (that met a bunch of requirements they had) or lease a van/truck from them. And B: They were looking for people to deliver in the shitty rural foothills area outside our little urban area here in Chico.
It’s been 20 years so I am not sure, but I also think we would have been independent contractors rather than actual FedEx employees.
I never called them back.
Yarrow
@jeffreyw: Here’s one of the tweets about the Border Patrol checking documents at the door of the aircraft as people exited. It includes a photo from the jetway. Domestic flight.
They claim they were looking for a specific person, but they could also have announced that to allay fears. People had no idea what was going on and were really confused and afraid according to those on the plane.
Mnemosyne
@Yarrow:
And ponder this — the most prominent part of Trump’s business is in the tourism industry. He’s heavily involved in hotels. He’s actually shooting himself in the foot and assuming that he’ll come out on top.
Of course, this is the same business genius who figured out how to go bankrupt running a ca$ino, so I’m not surprised that he’s going to manage to crash the world economy the same way and then claim he meant to do that the whole time.
Villago Delenda Est
@Sebastian: Yeah, it was something of a shock to me when I was stationed in Germany and first visited the Frankfurt am Main Hauptbahnhof and heard about the “Zwoten Klasse” over the PA. “Say wut?” I was totally unprepared for that.
Then there was the time I visited some friends in Tübingen and was looking for one, ran into her grandmother, and was treated to Schwäbish. Grandma of course was delighted with my Hochdeutsch, but I could only grok about 40% of what she was saying.
Major Major Major Major
@Yarrow: they also lie, so their claims don’t matter much.
JMG
@Yarrow: You have to show documentation of identity to get ON a plane. I don’t get how looking at those same documents when getting off does a thing except allow guys who weren’t smart or brave enough to be real cops to get their jollies.
Corner Stone
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: That’s a couple times you have spelled “through” as “threw”. Your autocorrect feeling ok?
Villago Delenda Est
@lollipopguild: Sausage and Operettas.
Thor Heyerdahl
@lollipopguild:
Yes…frankfurters – if you wanted to eat a wiener that’d be cannibalism.
Yarrow
@Mnemosyne: Well, he probably figures he can make up for the hotel losses in visitors by the increase in visitors by everyone that wants a favor from the President of the United States. He did just that with the Post Office hotel this weekend.
The thing is, travel in general is an optional thing for a lot of people. Even business travel drops off when the economy is bad. Certainly tourist travel does. So if he tanks the economy in general, hotel stays will naturally drop. I don’t think he has any idea how “the economy” works. He just figures he’ll order everyone to stay at a Trump property. Hell, he probably figures he can outlaw all other hotel brands and chains.
Corner Stone
@Yarrow:
I wonder if that means if I say no I can stay on the plane and cost the airline a few hundred thousand dollars in delays?
Iowa Old Lady
@Yarrow: I don’t believe they were looking for a specific person. They screened every man, woman, and child (all of whom showed the same IDs when they boarded) which suggests they had no true target.
A few years ago, Mr IOL was on a flight which on landing announced they all had to stay in their seats rather than disembark. Law enforcement boarded the plane, went straight to the seat where a man was sitting, called him by name, checked his ID, and then arrested him. That’s what happens when they’re after a specific person.
Yarrow
@JMG: Technically you don’t have to show ID to get on a plane. You have to show ID to get through security. Once through security you could switch your boarding pass for a domestic flight with someone else’s and they could go in your place or you in theirs. They check boarding passes upon boarding but not IDs to match boarding passes. Wouldn’t be surprised if that is coming, but it’s not here yet.
They used to check passports along with boarding passes for international flights. It’s been sporadic how that’s been enforced lately, at least in my experience. So I think the switching for an international flight would be harder.
StringOnAStick
@lollipopguild: Europeans coming to the US for vacations will be way down this summer, but the tours my husband’s company sell in the US and Canada are way, way up. Most of the buyers are Americans who are apparently too scared to go to France, which had been their top selling market previously. Still, there will be so eded big hits to US tourism.
Economies don’t just keel over the moment uncertainty starts, it takes awhile to turn the ship. All these shocking policies will have an effect in time. Meanwhile people keep pointing at the highs in the stock market, forgetting two things: the stock market isn’t the economy, and given the instability in other world economies and that the dollar is the world reserve currency, the US still looks like the lowest risk (and since Swiss banks are paying negative interest rates). I’m sure mango morona d his buddy Vlad are busy working away at ending that perception.
Corner Stone
Speaking of travel – I have been looking at packing cubes for light travel packing. Looks like a neat idea but I wonder if it’s more hipster fanboi type of hype, or if they are real world useful. They aren’t a big investment so I may buy a few to try.
tobie
@XTPD: The beautiful s/z, ß, has been taken out of German orthography. It happened some time in the late 1990s. How I rue the day! The word should be Scheißkopf but I think any variation on it is good, and Uber deserves all the scorn we can heap upon it.
@Another Scott: What does the following mean: ¯_(ツ)_/¯? I’ve seen it often but don’t know how to look it up.
Yarrow
@Corner Stone:
One wonders. The passengers reported that the flight attendant said they all had to “show their papers” and no one even knew what that meant until it was explained to them.
@Iowa Old Lady: I don’t believe they were looking for a specific person either. It’s just CYA after the fact from the CBP. However, as I said in a previous comment, you don’t have to show ID to get on a plane. Only to get through security. It’s possible to switch boarding passes once through security.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Yarrow:
Here’s the other shoe – airframe allocation for international travel. First, this KILLS Boeing. Second, how does an operations manager deal with the fleet imbalances? Revenue goes down, prices increase sharply.
Trump’s base hates travel, resents those who do travel, and hate foreign travelers who come here, so they cannot give a shit. Most live within a 12 hour drive of Gatlinburg, Destin, Myrtle Beach and Branson, which they deem perfect but their laughable standards.
Mnemosyne
@Corner Stone:
I will uncloak only to say this: packing cubes are the shiznit, and Eagle Creek makes the best ones.
liberal
@Corner Stone: as Atrios says, they think _we’re_ going to pay for the infrastructure.
Another Scott
@Mnemosyne: Dunno. Trump doesn’t actually own a lot of stuff…
Last night I read this old McClatchyDC story about Trump and the Panama Papers. Trump is selling an image, gets paid for naming rights, gets a percentage of the sales, etc. He uses Other People’s Money and lives off the percentages while spreading the hype that he’s some giant mogul with more money than god.
He tries to tell everyone he’s brash and successful. In a way, he doesn’t care if tourism drops by 25% if people willing to spend $500+/night keep coming to the Old Post Office or other places with his name at the top. People with that kind of money probably aren’t going to have issues with ICE.
Yeah, he said it’s great for him as a property developer when there’s a depression because he can buy up stuff for pennies on the dollar. But he’s also said that having the stock market reach record highs is important, as is “jobs”. He is so simple minded that he doesn’t realize the economy and the world system is interconnected – you can’t have record highs in the stock market and growing employment if you restrict travel. It just doesn’t work, but he thinks there’s no problem saying contradictory things… But I don’t think he actually wants to crash the economy – he thinks it going to boom under him. Bannon? Who knows.
I don’t think there’s any grand underlying philosophy behind Trump’s policies. I think he only thinks in sound-bites and doesn’t understand how connected everything is. Bannon and the rest do have a philosophy, but they’re also constrained by politics – they need to be thinking about re-election and keeping Congress and can’t just burn the place down (no matter how much they would like to). They’re also constrained by Trump’s need for adulation and “success”. Once unemployment starts going up, factories start closing, farmers start going bust, and the DIJA starts falling, there’s going to be a lot of panic in Trump Tower…
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
The Crenshaw Line endpoint at Aviation and Century may be close to an existing transit hub that already served LAX, but the Green Line is too far away. Also, for the longest time, officials did not adequately publicize the fact that free shuttles were available to and from the Green Line. Also, at one point I think they used regular Metro buses instead of luggage friendly vehicles.
The only people I’ve seen use the Green Line regularly are airport employees, and they don’t have to drag luggage with them.
And when you get down to it, the time factor and inconvenience of possible multiple transfers, especially when you have lots of luggage, often makes any of the trains an unattractive option.
ETA. That the Green Line does not easily serve the beach cities is largely due to racism, but that’s a whole nother issue.
XTPD
@tobie: It’s an ASCII shrug; there should be a backslash before the first parenthesis [as such: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .]
Roger Moore
@Corner Stone:
As far as I can tell, packing cubes have two useful functions:
1) They let you organize your stuff. For example, you could have one day’s clothes in each cube, or hot weather clothes in one cube and cold weather clothes in a different one. If you’re going to be moving a lot, so that you don’t want to completely unpack at each destination, that’s very handy.
2) Well made ones let you compress your clothes a fair bit so you can squeeze more in.
trollhattan
@Kay:
The saying around these parts is “Behind every successful startup you’ll find a State worker.” Why the city CoC types don’t tout this is beyond me, other than it possibly sounding commie. Beats sleeping in the garage of Erlich’s incubator.
Corner Stone
@Mnemosyne: Then the exact opposite must be true. Because clearly you would not place the packing cubes of value on the table in front of me!
Mnemosyne
@Another Scott:
Right, but so far it seems like the only place where people are willing to do that are foreign governments traveling to DC and Mar-A-Lago members who want to say they shook hands with the president. Trump has hotels and golf courses all around the country, and around the world. If he tanks the tourist trade, those properties are going to suffer. I honestly don’t think there are nearly enough Trump-loving rich people to keep all of those properties afloat.
Immanentize
@SiubhanDuinne: I saw that. Sad.
Roger Moore
@tobie:
It’s supposed to look like somebody shrugging and holding their hands up as if to say “I dunno”. The “(ツ)” is a face, and the “¯\_” and “_/¯” are the arms (“¯” is the hand, “\” or “/” are forearms, and “_” is the upper arm).
Another Scott
@tobie: It’s a “shruggie”.
The Atlantic:
HTH!
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Great point! At a conference, I talked to a woman who wants to drive all over the US with her recently retired husband. I think she even belongs to a mini Cooper club. The other people at the table assumed that she liked to travel and offered their own travel stories, some relating to foreign travel.
It was disconcerting to hear how hostile she was to the idea of visiting foreign countries, even white bread Canada. She only wanted to travel within the good old USA.
Thru the Looking Glass...
@Mnemosyne:
Yeah, but just look at the losses everyone will have to take on their taxes for years and years to come…
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
I’ve taken Metro to LAX once. Once. I had to make four transfers (Gold->Red->Blue->Green->G Bus); since this was on a weekend, they added a total of close to an hour to the trip. Now when I want to go to LAX, I take the Fly Away shuttle from Union Station, which costs a bit extra but saves time and hassle. I’ll try Metro again after the Regional Connector is finished.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
Did you see any of my comments about my latest Tom Bihn purchase? It’s the Aeronaut packing cube/backpack/waist pack. This multitasker is going to make my trip to Disneyworld much, much easier.
I am not a particularly organized person (to say the least), but packing cubes really changed the way I travel. Not only can I ensure that I packed everything I meant to pack, they fit into the suitcase much better than having everything be separate. I honestly don’t know how I traveled without these things. I have a bunch of different sizes so (for example) with this trip to Disneyworld, I’m going to use a small cube to stash a change of clothes in my carry-on so I can change when I get to the hotel and don’t have to wait for my suitcase to be delivered to my room.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Brachiator: I think it was a Georgia MOC back in the 90s who bragged about not having a passport in his stump speech
trollhattan
@Brachiator:
He will always be Chet in “Weird Science” to me. Truly unexpected and unwelcome death, not unlike Shandling.
Vhh
@voldemort: in english, a vowel followed by a single consonant an d an e is generally long. Ü in German is not pronounce as english long u, but more like the french u. And a non umlauted u on german is not prounonce as uh bout something closer to ou as in ouf.
Immanentize
@aimai: I am scheduled to teach this June in Galway, Ireland. I have similar concerns about the travel issues — if not for me, for others.
That said, I think you really ought to take your daughter to London and make lots of contacts. One of the suggestions in these “nationalism” times is to make friends in other countries and maintain contacts.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
well oiled machine
Brachiator
@Mickee:
Disruption and innovation often come together. Some techies go overboard in pushing the “benefits” of disruption, and are blind to the negative aspects.
But in the past, improvement from innovation was oversold. And as always, there are unforeseen consequences.
tobie
@XTPD: @Roger Moore: @Another Scott: Thank you! My emoticon vocabulary has grown leaps and bounds today!
Immanentize
@Mnemosyne: I am thinking about making up little cards with an American flag on them to hand out to passengers if this happens that say:
Revelations:
And lo, into the land came a usurper who cared not for the stranger nor for the people of the land. He dressed his minions in fearsome garb, but the LORD saw through these disguises and reveled to the people that the usurper and his minions had tiny peni$es.
Robert Sneddon
@Yarrow: At the moment Boeing (and Airbus too) are trying to expand manufacturing capacity to meet a growing demand for new more fuel-efficient airframes from places like China, India and Africa. They can’t turn them out fast enough at the moment.
The big problem for Boeing is any kind of trade war, tariffs and tit-for-tat will hit American high-tech companies very hard in the international markets. Having the ticket price of a new 787 upped by 20% overnight in response to ham-fisted actions by the US government is going to be met with cheers in the boardrooms of Airbus.
Yarrow
@Corner Stone: I love packing cubes. Different sizes for different things. I got the Eagle Creek ones as well. Super lightweight and made organizing really easy. Highly recommend them.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
I would put it another way: some techies now seem to think that disruption should be a goal in and of itself without any accompanying innovation.
Brachiator
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I remember feeling a kind of joy when I got my first passport. Every visa stamp tells a story. And I like the idea that, if the circumstances were right, I could grab my passport and go … somewhere, anywhere.
RandomMonster
I don’t like the idea of unregulated professional drivers, so I’m not a fan of Uber. That said, the company I work for was encouraging us to use Uber Business (don’t ask me what the difference is) for business travel. On a recent trip to Paris I used it a lot, and in the context of foreign travel it was really handy: the trip is arranged in the app so there’s no having to explain your pickup point or destination (language isn’t a barrier), the price is predetermined, and you don’t have to exchange cash. I hate admitting that it was convenient.
Sebastian
@Villago Delenda Est: haha, yes, Schwäbisch is particularly gnarly. They have actually kept a lot of the medieval stuff (parts of Austria and Bavaria have mellowed out a bit).
As to Zwo, that’s not due to dialects. In dialects it’s zwaah or zweeh or zwooah. The Zwo is a valid High German alternative but restricted to formal/military verbal communication. There are two reasons for it, one is similar to the English a and an, which is to avoid an uncomfortable mouth position when saying eins zwei drei vier. Eins zwo drei vier is chanted or shouted much better when marching in lockstep (I know. But even kids in kindergarden will march in lockstep). The other reason is disambiguation. In communication under stress, radio, PA, etc. a zwei and a drei are easily mistaken. I think the US military says “niner” for the very same reason.
Shalimar
“disrupt paradigms” can be translated directly as “we’re sociopaths who don’t follow the same moral rules that normal humans do.”
Gelfling 545
@germy: Some actual cab companies can be booked online as well so I don’t get the advantage of getting in a car with some random stranger.
Sebastian
@Thor Heyerdahl: They were invented in Vienna by a butcher from Frankfurt. So the Viennese of course call it Frankfurter, and everyone else Wiener (Wien being the German word for Vienna).
trollhattan
@Immanentize:
A French historian on his way to a conference in Texas was detained for 10 hours by US border officials and threatened with deportation. Officials at Texas A&M University said Henry Rousso was going to be returned to Paris as an illegal alien “due to a visa misunderstanding”.
-BBC
It’s all a misunderstanding.
Mnemosyne
@trollhattan:
Rousso was born in Egypt. That’s why he was detained.
germy
ThresherK
@Brachiator: We’ve been oversold on privitization. We’ve been oversold on disruption, insofar that some see it as a end goal which government policy should favor over just running like a damned government.
Booth Tarkington wrote many life-drawn stories about old people suffering in penury, wheezing towards their death in spare (and not-so-spare) back rooms of pinched little homes, living with grown children who had to manage their own lives and raise their own children.
Rhetorical quesiton: How many of these techbro libertarians have to do this in the age of Social Security and Medicare?
trollhattan
@Mnemosyne:
Yeah, an Egypt-born Jew at that.
Keepin’ us safe.
StringOnAStick
@RandomMonster: We had planned to take the train back from the airport on our last trip because we had to take it to get there due to snow caused gridlock when we left the US. Return flight delays meant we landed at after midnight and didn’t feel like a 1am ride was such a good idea plus we’d be dragging luggage home on a 1 mile walk to get to our door.
We hated to do it, but we used Lyft; I refuse to use Uber and yes I know that lyft is only marginally better but the strike breaking over the Muslim ban in NY is a line for me. The driver was a nice young man from Sudan, here 2 years now. He had stories about where he would like to go in the US and talked a little about the violence he fled, sad that he still has family there.
randy khan
The most disturbing thing about the Uber model is that it starts from the premise that the company can ignore all regulation – insurance requirements for drivers, licensing (in most places taxi and limo companies must be licensed), wage and hour rules, etc. And Uber has served as a template for other companies, like Air BnB, to do the same thing.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Don’t quite see that. And this is what separates techies from mere libertarians or anarchists. For a techie there is always some device, innovation, technology, service at the center of things. It could be something like Amazon, which disrupted publishing. Or adding a camera to a smartphone.
Or consider digital photography and its impact on the film industry.
There are also tech idealists, who insist that innovation will always be positive in the long run.
john fremont
@Robert Sneddon: This. Having been employed in the aviation industry since the early 90’s and watching Airbus helicopters pull the commercial helicopter market share away from Bell, Sikorsky and McDonnell Douglas (formerly Hughes) I certainly agree with you. The GOP administration is touting the strong dollar which gives an advantage to importers.
amygdala
@Yarrow: Packing cubes are pretty cool, and Eagle Creek makes excellent ones.
I always pack a few ziptop bags, in various sizes (from snack to the big 2 gallon ones). They come in handy in the most unpredictable and diverse ways.
? Martin
Uber was not overhyped vis a vis their vision. Their management is a different story altogether.
The important components to Uber:
1) Thanks to mobile phones with geolocation, the ability to automate the role of dispatcher is actually a game changer in terms of putting providers and customers of services together. It breaks natural monopolies which required heavy regulation in cities to keep in check.
2) Because it was able to break that monopoly, you got quality of service competition among drivers. For taxis, there is no incentive for a driver to provide a better service (as anyone who has taken a taxi can appreciate) because the customer had no insight whatsoever to the quality of service. Because Uber forced a review of the driver before the next ride could be hailed, and customers can see those reviews with a ride is offered, consumers have the ability to opt out of the ride and choose a better rated driver. This allows a much more functional marketplace to develop than taxi services could have which was a one-sided market – you called a dispatcher and you got what you got with no say.
3) Because of the two-sided market, Uber can do SUVs and pickup trucks and a range of rides that meet the needs of customers because the customer can now easily indicate the features they need in a ride and the software can match that with the features offered by a driver.
4) Also because it’s a 2-sided market, Uber did legitimately solve the problem of supply and demand. Uber works very well in locations where taxi service is limited. It works surprisingly well in surge situations. The reason it does is because they can vary cost to balance supply and demand, something the regulated taxi industry can’t. The downside of a very expensive Uber ride is that there’s a big incentive for Uber drivers to leave their house and provide rides. That’s a well functioning market up to the point that riders feel they can’t opt-out because it’s an emergency, then it feels abusive. That’s a solvable problem, though.
5) The biggest cost by far to Uber is the driver. Transitioning to a self-driving model eliminates a lot of their marginal costs and replaces them with really high capital costs (owning the cars) but that’s a very favorable business model because it scales really well. If Uber could make that transition, they would be drowning in money.
The nut of the Uber story is that the internet has enabled certain products and services to be distributed effectively for free. The matching of driver and passenger in a detailed way is extremely expensive to do with a human dispatcher in the middle – so much so that taxi services provide minimal matching functionality – a car will arrive for you. And that’s it. You can’t see what car, do riders like the driver, when will it arrive (Uber provides that and notifies the driver exactly where you are), is it the kind of car that you need? The taxi industry never bothered to make that transition, so Uber did it for them. That’s it. That’s really the whole story – a stagnant industry that resisted technological change and got gutted for it.
That’s not to say that everything is awesome with Uber. They are run by absolute shitheads, their culture is horrible, they never seriously tried to address the pain points around when surge pricing becomes desperation pricing, they are openly contemptuous of regulatory bodies (which was necessary on some scale, but not to the extent that they do), and until they can crack the self-driving thing, they are losing money badly.
But their vision will be achieved by someone, and it will be transformative.
Woodrowfan
@Kay: same here. For people who brag about how “logical” they are, rwers seem to be the ones who have no idea how the world works.
aimai
@Immanentize: We travel abroad very frequently, actually–this would be the first year in a decade where we haven’t travelled to Europe and/or the UK where we do have many friends. In fact, my older daughter is in Cordoba right now on a semester abroad. I just feel frightened for my country, frightened to leave and frightened to come back to a hostile airport–or knowing that my moving through the airport safely and securely is not being afforded to other people at the same time. I am currently in Social Work School and working with a refugee and immigrant population and this is just very much on my mind and in my face and daily life.
Corner Stone
@? Martin:
Maybe give them another six months?
Major Major Major Major
@Gelfling 545: I take it you must know every cab driver in town then.
@Corner Stone: I see what you did there.
Fester Addams
@MattF:
Did you stay at the Hotel Zimmerfrei too?
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
I hadn’t seen that. I have an Aeronaut 30, but I’m a bit skeptical of the packing cube backpacks. They look to me like they’re an unfortunate compromise that won’t work well as either a backpack or a packing cube.
Thor Heyerdahl
@Fester Addams: Maybe he decided to stay in Umleitung – since it was a popular destination on signs.
? Martin
@Brachiator:
Disruption as defined in business model analysis is a specific thing. It refers to either low-end disruption which is simply that an over-serving market will at some point be overturned by a competitor that better matches the needs of the market with a lower-price offering, or new market disruption which is competition against non-consumption.
A good example of low-end disruption would be fast food disrupting the sit-down restaurant industry, McDonalds being the classic example. Someone on a trip may not want to spend 45 minutes sitting down in a diner, and instead favor a 5 minute stop for something they can eat in the car. The food is cheap and fast, but sufficient for the job to be done. But most people don’t want McDonalds for every meal, so sit-down restaurants persist. McDonalds basically killed the diner which sat in the middle space – it was fairly quick and convenient but not portable, and not standardized, so you couldn’t always approach it and assume the food would be instantly available. The limited menu and scale of McDonalds is why drive throughs can be a thing.
New market disruption is entering a market in such a way that people that didn’t consume a good now want to. A classic example of that would be the adult diaper market. There was no technological innovation to make adult diapers (there was a ton of technological innovation behind disposable ones that was previously done) but the main obstacle was marketing. How do you market these to adults in a way that isn’t shameful or embarrassing. The product itself was easy to make and distribute, it was convincing people who needed them to buy them that was hard.
Both of those routinely accompany technological changes and so we commonly put those together, but they don’t really go together. Most technologies are non-disruptive and lots of disruptions don’t involve technology at least as a key component. But the reason why both forms are seen as a net good is that they are solving a problem that consumers want solved, that was previous unsolved. There are plenty of things about the iPhone and the rise of the modern smartphone to complain about, but nobody is required to buy one, and yet Apple has sold roughly $1T worth of them. It cannot be argued that it was a technological change that consumers view as being positive. Are there downsides – of course. But the upsides are incredibly good, not the least of which being that global poverty is in absolute free-fall in part because these devices allow for communication necessary for commerce to exist in place where governments were unable or unwilling to put the infrastructure in place for. It has emerged thanks to these devices in every corner of the world.
Brachiator
@ThresherK:
I agree with you about privatization. But human beings are tool makers, and innovation brings comfort to many even as others are hurt. I believe in the use of government to halo mitigate negative outcomes, but not to stifle innovation, even with good intentions.
Even the founders saw the benefits of innovation and so gave Congress the power
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
QFT.
? Martin
@Corner Stone: This is where you’re seeing their bad behavior coming forward. They’re several years at least from getting there, the evidence they stole trade secrets is damning, and they’re running out of time. They are desperate to get there, and the technology just isn’t ready. The question is whether their cash can hold out long enough, or whether a competitor will get there first. They are making terrible decisions as a result.
I believe very strongly in the vision Uber has for the future, but I won’t shed a single tear if Uber itself collapses in a flaming pile. How you get to the end of the road matters. Someone will get there.
Major Major Major Major
@Roger Moore: there’s some in every industry… ?
Brachiator
@? Martin:
This seems to me to be a lot of “after the fact” rationalization, and economists and business school weenies trying to play catch-up.
And some of your examples, eg adult diapers don’t seem to be about disruption.
And I think the larger issue is that no one can predict the impact of innovation on society.
BruceFromOhio
@Mnemosyne: This one is about Bago, and the overall idea is pretty sweet. Still going to have to pry my trusty old roller bag away, when that happens it’ll be for these.
Ruckus
@Kay:
And not even all business owners understand this. And it’s not all down to the size of the actual business. EVERYTHING costs money, someone has to earn it to spend it. There can be different directions to look at it from, one example, don’t purchase new equipment, avoid the largest cost of depreciation, for example, but then the cost of maintenance or risk of unsuitable equipment may be far higher. Uber of course picks the direction of avoiding all the costs of production other than the app in the first place. At least they think they have, but as you say they can’t, it’s not possible to have a reasonable production without the cost of production, unless you are stealing it from someone/some where.
Mnemosyne
@BruceFromOhio:
Yes, but they go INSIDE your roller bag. You can use both!
It was these Eagle Creek Specter compression cubes that really turned the tide for me. I liked the packing folders, but the cubes are SO MUCH BETTER. Way more versatile and secure.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
I’ll use it at Disneyworld and report back. It’s obviously meant for light use, not backpacking through the Himalayas, but it’s really very roomy. I’ve been having neck/shoulder problems lately, so the fact that it turns into a hip pack was the deciding factor.
When it’s in packing cube form, the smaller bag at the top is on the inside, so I can organize within the packing cube as well, which is nice.
Major Major Major Major
@Ruckus: don’t lie. Everybody Knows the internet is free and everybody on the planet has access to hassle-free, blazing fast private wifi at all times.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
Maybe, but I think a lot of them have a very shallow idea of what real innovation is. A lot of the techie “innovation” is just doing something with a mobile app instead of using traditional technology. Sometimes that’s a true, groundbreaking improvement- maps are radically different when they’re constantly updated and know your position from GPS- but far more often it’s just making things a little bit more convenient.
Also, and I think this is a bigger worry, they combine stuff that’s a genuine, huge improvement with a bunch of baggage that’s useless or destructive. So, for example, I think the “ride sharing” companies like Uber and Lyft have a genuinely good idea about using apps to define pickup and dropoff points in advance so they can calculate a fare before the ride even starts. They’re also letting people act as taxis in places that were previously underserved. But that goes along with a huge amount of ignoring any regulation they don’t like, which is where a lot of the value to the company is coming from.
Aleta
@Yarrow:
And so much research is collaborative across continents. And ideas get generated and advanced at international conferences. Science, medicine, social programs. Drought research. Vulcanology. Space research. Habitation. Integration of the climate work being done in the Himalayas, Africa, the poles, Siberia, and by planetary scientists. Fish populations. Crops. Even modelers who work in front of their computers are visited by (or travel to) field researchers to do more productive experimental runs.
PST
Let me confess right off that I have long used taxicabs extensively and switched almost instantly to Uber when it became available in Chicago. I average more than one Uber trip daily, and I still take a lot of taxis as well. I don’t have any ideological bias toward one or the other, but in practice Uber meets my needs much better. The price difference was large at first, but no longer. The main difference is availability and predictability in any situation except flagging down a ride in the city center.
It seems to me that the prediction of Uber’s demise depends a great deal on the statement that “Passenger fares cover only 41 percent of the trip cost.” I went to the cited source and found that to be misleading. If it were true, then Uber really would be doomed. But what the original author meant, if I read him right, is that Uber drivers keep, on average, 83 percent of what the passenger pays; and that the 17 percent that Uber rakes off only covers 41 percent of its expenses when you use GAAP. That would mean that passenger payments are covering the 83 percent that goes to drivers plus 41 percent of the 17 percent that goes to Uber, for a total of 90 percent of trip cost. That’s not sustainable infinitely, but it looks considerably easier to solve with some combination of higher fares, larger percentage, or greater efficiency. I suspect, however, that much of this really means that GAAP counts as “expense” many of the costs of quickly expanding a new transportation system, whereas the investors and management of Uber see them as investment — as sunk cost that will not continue indefinitely and will ultimately pay returns. I don’t know if that’s correct, but I find it hard to believe that so many billionaires would lay out so much money on a model in which a ride is provided for 41 percent of the cost of providing it.
I have plenty of friends and relatives who work crap jobs, largely in retail or food service, and a few who drive or have driven. I also talk to plenty of Uber drivers about Uber. The bane of the existence of the employees of retail business these days is their schedule. They can’t get enough hours, they can’t predict their hours, and they can’t change their hours to meet their other time needs. I don’t think anyone can disagree with this. It’s a scandal, and not something that will change radically any time soon. The one thing Uber drivers almost always comment on is that they are free to work when and where they like. They may be overworked, they may be undercompensated, they may lack benefits, and they may have expenses they didn’t anticipate, but they can work around their other jobs, their health needs, their parent-teacher conferences, and all that. They truly are independent contractors, and they have the advantages and disadvantages of that. The ACA ameliorates some of the disadvantages. The advantage to the customer is that Uber responds very practically to shifts in demands. Taxi has always been too much demand for two hours in the morning and two in the evening, too much supply the rest of the day, and no one working the neighborhoods.
Uber management has done plenty to offend, but I don’t think the deal they offer, at least where I live, comes close to the ordeal of driving a cab, and that is what it ought to be compared too. Here, the number of cabs is limited by a set number of medallions issued long ago and largely held by a small group of operators. Drivers pay a fixed sum for a 12-hour shift — usually leasing both the car and the medallion — and they bear 100 percent of the risk. They owe the lease fee no matter how many fares they get, and given the economics of the system, they have little choice but to work every minute of the shift. They’re not employees either. When fares have been raised, the value of medallions has gone up, and the revenues get swallowed up in the form of rents by the owners of the restricted resource.
Almost every cab ride I take is driven by an immigrant, judging by their accents. Uber is more 50-50. I don’t mean this as a complaint in any way about cabs, but I think it is an indication of which is more exploitative. Cabs are being driven by the most vulnerable with the least choice. It is the job of last resort, something that generally is not true of Uber.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
This travel bag looks like fun. I was looking for something like this a few weeks ago.
Roger Moore
@Woodrowfan:
They’re so logical, they can only work with simplified, logical models of how the world ought to work. They can’t be bothered with messy, illogical evidence about how the world actually works.
Ruckus
@Kay:
A great point, health insurance. One of the problems originally with the ACA was that all of a sudden there was going to be a cost to a lot of people. Some had not had insurance prior so had no cost, as long as they didn’t “need” healthcare. But a large portion had employer provided health insurance and even if they paid something it was almost always a very, very small portion. I had a job, upper level management, very good insurance (in your home state) and paid $24/month. When I left the Cobra cost was over $1500/month. This in a 90 person company, so not mom and pop sized. No one that worked there outside of HR knew how much per month the company spent on healthcare insurance and wouldn’t have counted it as income in any case. But that’s exactly what it was, income to each one of us, that we didn’t see, at least directly. That’s what employer provided health insurance has done is to hide from people the real cost of health care in the US.
Sebastian
@Thor Heyerdahl: not to mention that “Ausfahrt” place. That thing’s huge, stretches a hundred miles!
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
“Assume a spherical cow …”
Major Major Major Major
@Roger Moore: I always get mad when I realize the majority of the people in my industry are stupid. But I’m not exactly going to fix that by changing industries.
Another Scott
@PST: Thanks for your perspective.
Doesn’t change my mind about Uber, ;-) , but it helps to illustrate the complexity of the problems (especially these days).
Cheers,
Scott.
? Martin
@Brachiator: Uh, no. That’s defined by the guy who coined the term ‘disruptive innovation’ back in 1995. Once it entered the common vocabulary it got bastardized to hell, but that’s really what it refers to. And it did describe a LOT of the dot-com changes in the late 90s and it didn’t describe a lot of other dot-com changes in the late 90s.
People tend to think of Tesla and EVs as disruptive to the automotive market, but they aren’t disruptive at all, they’re sustaining innovations because they preserve the existing structure of the market and how it operates, and it doesn’t address an underserved or non-served customer base, at least in the current vision. Now, it may prove to unsettle ancillary industries – car dealerships, gas stations, etc. but that’s a byproduct of any innovation. Any time a market changes, someone stands to lose. Shifting from steel to aluminum unibodies in trucks could be viewed by a steelmaker as disruptive, but there’s really nothing stopping the steelmaker from having added aluminum to their product offerings.
What’s notable about low-end disruption is that it’s almost impossible for market incumbents to compete against, because their business becomes dependent on the high-market revenues and profits. Moving downmarket requires a deliberate decision to undermine a market that is beneficial to the company, but may not be beneficial to their customers because the customer lacks a cheaper alternative. That’s an almost impossible decision for executives and board members to make, particularly if they have shareholders to answer to. So they tend to hold tight believing they can make their existing market work, even when there is no hope of it working.
For new market disruption, that’s mainly a blind spot in the market that nobody has recognized, or it’s a market that the company can’t figure out how to enter without harming their existing brand. This is why you see automakers running different brands – Scion/Toyota/Lexus so they could enter a new market without impacting the brand identity of their old one (these aren’t disruptive moves, however, as they only serve to sustain the existing business model).
The point is, all market changes are disruptive. Solar employs 3x as many people as coal, but that’s small comfort if you’re a West Virginia coal miner with no local market for solar. A new McDonalds in your neighborhood will have a negative effect on someone in the area, even if it has an aggregate positive effect on the neighborhood as a whole. But it’s not disruptive unless existing business models fail as a result. It’s when business models fail that you get social repercussions because entire industries get wiped out, and these disruptions are almost impossible to defend against. They tend to be sudden and dramatic and unavoidable, and people get hurt when they happen. But they are also more beneficial in aggregate, but that distributed or displaced benefit is often difficult to measure against the clear cost to a market that we have long grown comfortable with. That factory closing down can devastate a town, and there wasn’t a damned thing they could do about it. But elsewhere, more jobs were created, more benefit was delivered to customers, etc.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
They don’t just look like one………
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Again, I largely agree with you. Also, I think that a lot of techies are just tinkerers. The idea that they might become giants of innovation, or architects of disruption is a nice heroic fantasy.
Of course, some of them DO become an Edison or a Steve Jobs.
The maps thing is interesting. People who drive for a living, or threw parties, or were in real estate, used to depend on the Thomas Guide. You just had to have it. But later on Yahoo Maps and later Google maps, on desktops and laptops just killed it. Now people don’t even know when the Thomas Guide went out of business. They just disappeared. And when maps moved to phones, it was a new level of innovation and disruption. I never had a standalone GPS device. But I commute a lot and absolutely depend on Google and some key apps to help me get around.
Also, a small improvement can be a big deal. Lightweight flat screen monitors freed up acres of desk space when they replaced CRT monitors. My auto mechanic used to have a CRT precariously settled on top of a stool in his garage, which he used to look up stuff in an online parts catalog. He is jamming with his flat screen now.
Brachiator
@? Martin:
I agree with you that these companies are not necessarily disruptive. So we may agree that the term is misused and overused.
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
I think I see your problem.
They didn’t have actual business models, which you assumed they did, they were far more interested in theft.
Ruckus
@Tripod:
It’s the Ralph Williams business model.
“I lose money on every car I sell, but I make up for it in volume!”
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
I was going to say that Steve Jobs’s particular genius was figuring out what people would want before they knew they would want it, and then getting other people to design and build it for him, but that was Edison’s genius, too.
? Martin
@Roger Moore: Invention and innovation get confused a lot. Invention is the process of creating something new. But it’s only innovative when the community recognizes it and can absorb it as being better. A great example of this confusion was the Segue. It was clearly inventive – unquestionably inventive in many ways. But it largely failed because the community at large didn’t recognize it as being innovative – it didn’t solve a problem that people felt needed to be solved, whether it was a way to get around where they couldn’t before (new market) or a cheaper way to get around (low-end). There is a high-end disruption as well, like the iPhone, which added so much value (capability) to an existing product relative to it’s higher price that consumers would prefer it over the cheaper alternative. Cramming the capabilities of a full PC into a phone was easily worth the premium to most people. That’s pretty rare though, but autonomous vehicles might slot in here.
Innovation is not different for the sake of being different. Innovation is changing the value proposition for a product or marketplace, and that commonly comes from invention, but need not. And lots of inventions are stupid or counterproductive or just neutral.
I study this because it’s key to understanding companies like Apple and why they receive so much criticism but succeed in spite of it. It’s because the criticism is focused too much on invention and not enough on innovation, and Apple is notable for doing a lot of innovating either off of someone else invention (who were unable to recognize the real potential of the invention and failed to pair it with other things) or without any invention whatsoever. The Apple Stores are the best run retail operation on earth. They generate more sales per square foot than anyone else, by a factor of 4. The 5th avenue store in Manhattan generates half a billion dollars in sales per year – roughly as much as every Starbucks west of the Rockies. The stores are astoundingly innovative in terms of how they have changed the role of the employee, in terms of employee to customer ratios, how checkout works, the nature of the services they employ, even where they are located. They have redefined how retail works to the extent that they can command mall rents that used to be reserved for anchor stores because they are the traffic driver to the mall, rather than Macys. There’s almost no invention in any of that, though – at least in terms of what Apple contributed.
? Martin
@Brachiator: Oh, it’s horribly misused and overused.
Ruckus
@JMG:
They aren’t looking for someone, they are looking at everyone.
I made a decision to fly rather than spend 8 hrs driving. If I have to go through this kind of shit I’m not going to fly again unless there is just no other way to get there and I have to go. They are doing their utmost to fuck with each and every one of us who maybe didn’t vote for them, maybe hoping that we would change our minds and end up like being fucked with.
The place to complain to is the airline.
And I’m telling you all the only way to deal is going to be a general strike. A total disruption of business and life. Not just them fucking with us. And in the US no one could pull it off.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
I think just about everyone who lived and drove in Los Angeles had a Thomas guide. Essentially everyone I knew had one. Now we all depend on our smartphones instead.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Works for me. This has often been the case with many inventions.
The recent movie “The Founder” deftly depicts how it took a Ray Kroc to blow up the efficient fast food operation that the McDonald’s brothers had pioneered.
ETA. I know a few techies who would have been happier had PC s remained garage built gadgets.
Doug R
@Booger: I found shifting over to a bicycle really cut down on costs and if you worked for the largest company in town you could make a living wage, once you got a decent time call at a high volume lawyer.
Still, your knees aren’t gonna hold out forever….
Mnemosyne
@? Martin:
Interesting turn that Pavilions/Vons has taken lately: they removed the self-checkout stands and replaced them with dual “15 items or less” checkstands where the two checkout clerks stand next to each other. (Not sure if I’m describing this right.) I am assuming from this that self-checkout stands did not work as efficiently as grocery stores hoped they would and that customers were getting pissed off about having to stand in a long line to do the work of a checkout clerk for free, but I don’t actually know for sure.
ETA: For non-SoCal people, Pavilions and Vons are grocery stores owned by Safeway.
Villago Delenda Est
@Thor Heyerdahl: If you’re driving along the Autobahn, it’s obvious that Ausfahrt is the largest city in Germany.
Villago Delenda Est
@Sebastian: Ah, you beat me to it…
Ruckus
@Gelfling 545:
You know all the regular cab drivers? If not how are cabs different than Uber or Loft? I’ve ridden in quite a few cabs in the last 20+ yrs and can’t say that any of them has been enjoyable. Cheaper than parking my car at the airport for 2 weeks and having to dig it out of the snow/ice when I get back to homebase, but still a major pain in the ass. Each and every time, far less than enjoyable. Maybe if I lived in NYC I might have a different view, but my experience has not been positive.
Brachiator
Speaking of innovation: 100 years since the release of the first commercial jazz recording.
What was not new, of course, was the theft from the black musicians who created jazz.
Villago Delenda Est
@Sebastian: Enlightening information about “Zwo” there…I never thought of it that way, but it makes terrific sense. “Niner” is a pretty good analog for it, too.
quakerinabasement
I prefer the Curb app. It works a lot like Uber, but it calls you a real cab and driver.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Should be “15 items or fewer,” dammit!
trollhattan
@Mnemosyne:
I refuse to use self-checkout in support of checkers’ jobs. Sometimes this makes for a long damn wait at Home Despot, but I’m not trading one inconvenience for another that also happens to improve profits.
Have also read losses due to theft have proven higher than expected (duh).
Ruckus
@Major Major Major Major:
I see what you did there……
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
And I like self checkout! I get to pack my own so that stuff doesn’t get squashed or bottles are less likely to get broken. And while most checkers are great, some of course are a pain. Have to discuss most of the items and why they like something else or they take twice as long to check you out. Now I shop in a Ralphs most of the time that has no self checkout and most of the checkers know me on sight. That makes a difference.
I think that most stores don’t like self checkout because they still need an operator as lots of people just don’t seem to be able to actually check themselves out. People learned over the last 40-50 yrs to pump their own gas (except in the very few states that don’t allow it) but at the market there are thousands of products and at the gas station there is one product, which you’ve already put in the payment process before starting. Markets allow you to check out and then pay. I see a major problem from the seller’s prospective right there.
Erik Warren
Late the the party, but a few comments that I haven’t seen yet…
1) If Uber is just a better dispatcher than what you get w/ a cab company, they can do fine (maybe not be zillions, but do pretty decently). They will leverage a centralized automated dispatcher, which can expand quite quickly modulo random legislation. For example, most small towns don’t have a cab company at all as there isn’t enough constant business, but an ad-hoc Uber would do fine there for a few people who would take somebody from place A to place B for a few bucks on the side.
2) The amount of corruption in travel is staggering, and Uber in many ways is taking the corruption legally. For example, I once got to travel with one of Uber’s original 30 drivers. He told me he used to pay $1000 per month to the doorman of the Hyatt, who would then pitch departing hotel guests a towncar for the same price of a cab to the airport (about a $60 fare). The driver would then also hand the doorman 10% of the fare. Assuming 3 airport rides a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, total gross would be $45,000. 10% off the top ($4500) and the 12K take it to $28,500 – meaning he was spending 36% of his gross to get fares. Uber just took 20% — in his mind, he was clearly making money, and it felt a lot better giving money to a company vs the doorman.
All this being said, Lyft or Curb can do the exact same thing… my guess is Uber has run way too rich and has left itself too open to Lyft and others to undercut on cost, and the company culture seems pretty messed up. Fun times.
sheila in nc
@PST:
I don’t personally use Uber, but I know people who do, and I totally get how its convenience and service quality are attractive to customers. Thing is, even with the ability to set one’s own hours, I wonder if everybody who is driving knows how much of the collective risk they are taking on. I read the fine print of my last auto insurance policy and found VERY specific, detailed language preventing any liability on the part of my insurer for accidents occurring in the course of using my vehicle basically as a taxi (giving other people a ride for money). I wonder how many drivers are basically driving uninsured? Or does Uber provide coverage?
Mnemosyne
@Ruckus:
I am, as you know, not a dumb person, but I had to stop using self-checkout for more than 1 or 2 items at a time because I would somehow lock it up every. single. time. I used it and the supervising checker would have to fix it. It was at the point that if G and I were together and using the self-checkout, I was a little afraid to even watch the process as he did it in case I jinxed it somehow.
So whoever the self-checkout was made for, it clearly was not made for people with two arts degrees.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
I hate self-checkout. Packing shopping bags is a kill. Yeah, I could do it if I have to. But I shouldn’t have to.
Another Scott
@Brachiator: I’ll never get used to “fewer”. I took too much math.
Show me a “fewer than” sign on a keyboard and we’ll talk.
;-p
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who is only exaggerating just a tiny bit.)
PST
@sheila in nc:
I didn’t know, but I looked it up because it could have an impact on me. Yes, Uber says it provides $50,000 in liability coverage whenever the app is on, and that goes up to $1 million from the time an assignment is accepted until the passenger is discharged. So I should be okay if the car I’m in crashes, but it could be dicey to be hit by an Uber driver between assignments.
Another Scott
@Ruckus: I really dislike the self-checkouts at the local NoVA Safeway. There seem to be about 3 different interfaces that you have to keep track of. Watch the screen here, pay and scan your card over here, get change/coupons/receipt over there. It’s really badly designed for people who only use it occasionally and one of the reasons why I don’t go there unless I have to.
I wouldn’t mind the self-checkout at Lowe’s but half the time it doesn’t work without some master-checker’s intervention. And none of these systems handle “bring your own bags” very well. I don’t like being treated like a thief by the machine if I have my own bags. :-/
Lowe’s and HD really should go back to having more people rather than
lessfewer. Back in olden times stores wouldn’t let people wander among the merchandise and clerks would grab things off the shelves and retrieve it for you. There have been too many dozens of hours I’ve wasted looking for plumbing parts, etc., in the big box stores because the inventory is all messed up (with opened packages missing parts among misfiled items). It’s almost pointless to look for things like that there… But the brainiacs who do all the number crunching seemingly can only do the “employees are an expense to be cut” figuring, rather than understanding that people will only take so much aggravation in the name of saving a few cents.Cheers,
Scott.
Steve in the ATL
@Another Scott: FYI Home Depot employees intentionally avoid the plumbing and electrical aisles. The customers there need really specific and often obscure things, and the “associates” find it’s much easier to hang around lumber or lighting or lawn mowers.
? Martin
The self-checkout concept as it current exists is pretty flawed. Interesting Planet Money piece on how they came about. They’re hardly improved in 25 years though.
Amazon I expect will get this right and it’ll really change things a lot. Its easy enough to imagine all of the corner cases, but having seen a lot of the technology behind this at work in other areas, I think they’ve got them covered.
Oh, the appeal to retailers won’t be the loss of workers so much (since we’ll probably demand they return doing other jobs) but the recovery of floor space. 25% of grocery store square footage is checkout. That’s a LOT of additional products they can stock.
goblue72
Uber started off with the germ of a good idea that is now running aground with the typical issues faced by start-ups that are not 100% digital plays – the nuts-and-bolts challenges of execution at the operational level in the physical meatspace.
The good idea was that taxi-cab service in most American cities not named New York City (and maybe Chicago) completely sucks. Uber’s hometown of San Franciso was the ne plus ultra of crappy taxi service. Not enough cabs, of those that are available too many concentrated in a few areas in the CBD, groddy cars, non-existent customer service, crappy dispatching, etc. (Back in the pre-Uber days, good luck ever getting a cab in SF when it was raining out.) And in many cities, sitting at the core of that craptacular service was a system of government controlled taxi medallions that drastically under-supplied the market with cab medallions – which created the all too predictable system of regulatory capture combined with supra-competitive profit-taking and rent-seeking by the owners of the medallions in circulation – many on whom in some cities owned multiple medallions, never driven themselves, and profited entirely by renting out their medallions. A lumpenproletariat version of the rentier class at its finest. It was a completely garbage system begging for someone to come along to just ignore the regulatory state and blow it up.
Which is what Uber did, thank god. Everything that followed after that though, they have managed to royally screw up six ways to Sunday. But its not without a certain amount of reason. To a degree, that had to move very fast. The only way to blow up the existing sclerotic system was to pummel it – roll out an enormous fleet of Unlicensed Taxicab Company 2.0 to build a giant customer base such that the regulators & politicians were helpless to completely kill until they could force the state to quasi-legalize their system post-facto. Going slow & deliberate they had too much a risk that the incumbent cab companies would get their buddies on city council and local taxicab commissions to kill them. And then hope they had enough VC cash stockpiled to figure it all out afterwards.
Probably made sense at the time and still might. Open question whether they can figure it out now in the “figure it out later” phase. Doesn’t seem like – as of this point in time – that having full time drivers is going to work. Way too hard to continue the complete fiction that those full time drivers are “independent contractors” – especially with Uber providing the car loans to buy the cars that the drivers are using in the first place. And its not exactly clear if the business model can provide the needed scale that the VCs demand if they have to rely on the “part-time drivers doing it for pin money” model that they claim was their original plan. (Personally, I don’t think it ever was, anymore than AirBnB honeslty thought it could turn a profit solely on the backs of homeowners periodically renting out their condos or homes a few times a year VRBO style)
No One You Know
@Yarrow: If only the average low-info voter understood that 800 is not bigger than 6.8%!
Or that Orange UberFuehrer did.
Why, no, I’m not bitter or cynical, why do you ask?
@Aleta: Epic? Or tragic, after the fashion of a self-inflicted wound? And ironic. This guy is in the hospitality business, allegedly.
Berto
@Corner Stone:
They screw labor. That’s how you “make it in America”.