Yeah, but then this guy took over the DOL.
Warning : Above post may contain snark and/or sarcasm. Try reparsing with the /s argument before replying.
What the world has learned is that America is never more than one election away from losing its goddamned mindMe on Elite : Dangerous | My WoW charactersOriginally Posted by Howard Tayler
I'm currently researching the Uber topic, and I'm surprised that one company has so many problems. Uber overcomes everything very steadfastly. I will not say that I support or oppose this company, but there are factors that clearly worry me. I'll tell you right away the information that was available to me was taken from many forums, that is, you can say gossip from the article how much it costs to develop an application as an Uber and from the book "Uber" by Adam Lashinski. I think that the first fact that surprises is that in the entire history of its existence, and for almost 12 years, Uber has never made a profit! The second fact is that they constantly put a spoke in the wheels, the most striking incident, I think, is that the company was originally called an uber cab, after which the government filed a lawsuit against the company that since the company has the word cab, it means it is a transport company, which means uber does not pay taxes due taxes, as a result of which the company changed its name to simply Uber. Also, Uber experienced many problems in China, after which she was forced to leave their market. Also, Uber suffers a lot of attacks from society, for the fact that Uber drivers sometimes behave incorrectly, Even here in the comments there are a lot of negative things about Uber, right down to phrases if Uber disappeared then everything would be fine. But! As far as I know, Uber is the first company of this format.Also, as far as I remember from the book about Uber, which I mentioned above, Uber thought about cooperation with Ilona Mask companies. Also Uber has developed or is still developing cars without a driver. There is also a very controversial Uber policy towards drivers, some say that they like everything, others are simply not happy! I think that this is all pointless, judging by my experience and the experience of my friends, Uber never let us down, we traveled to many cities before the pandemic and where there was no Uber, it was really difficult and that the most interesting thing is expensive to take a taxi. If we are not satisfied with the cost in the Uber application, we look at the cost in other applications, and choose the one that suits us!
I have seen a slew of companies never turn a profit and operate for years and years. One model I know of is called share dilution. A company goes public (which Uber has done) and then issues shares. Then periodically, they issue more shares (this is called a private placement) on top of the shares outstanding. This raises money to keep the business running. I've seen companies do this for decades. Uber does private placements. They did a special exclusive private placement directly to PayPal. PayPal got shares of Uber stock and paid $500 million for them. That's money directly raised to keep operations going. They've also sold billions of dollars in bonds to raise money.
Uber's losses are turning around as well. They were losing like $5 billion per quarter in 2019. Now they are down to losing around $1 billion per quarter and are sitting on $8 billion in cash and think they can be profitable by the end of 2020. At the very least, they can operate for 2 more years before doing more private placements to raise more cash.
You might wonder if this can go on forever? It can. Depends on if they can find people to buy shares and bonds. They think they can. The other option is to sell the business to someone else willing to take on the debt and risk. Personally, I think the worst case scenario is they sell the business to another company before they go under.
Last edited by Die; 2020-09-01 at 11:25 PM.
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"Just an information app" in the same way an unpaid internship totally isn't working for free. /s The lengths to which people will go to justify extracting labor from others for free is kinda staggering. To say nothing of how funny it is when the same people bitch about taxes being theft.
Uber is an information app in the same way slaves are prisoners with jobs:
Originally Posted by Marjane Satrapi
Uber is active in Germany, too. They are considered a "taxi-app" in that they can only take orders and pass them on to actual cab and rental car companies. They're not allowed to operate in the transport business themselves. That is, they would be allowed, but it was made very clear to them very fast that they would have to follow the same rules as regular cabs. Turns out there is a way to control Uber. Just use the law you have. If you don't have it, make it law. No idea why the US lets these internet corps roll over them.
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I'll say this, the idea that Uber had is in itself not a bad one. But someone got greedy along the way, I think. We actually have a similar service, it's much older than Uber. It's a website that translates loosely to "hitch-a-ride". If you go somewhere, you can take other people with you. They look up their destinatio and if your time frame and destination matches, they can contact you and you can share the gas cost. This works amazingly well when used with the German railroad system and group tickets, one dude would organise it and up to 5 people would share the ticket. Makes getting around amazingly cheap and hey, you get to meet new people, too!
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That's usually the story with these silicon valley startups; they are a genuinely decent idea that starts to gain traction, and then once it gets to a certain critical mass the combination of an ad hoc corporate structure centered around personalities (Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc.) combined with the toxic effects of quarterly earnings reports - just turns into a massive shitshow of corruption and mismanagement.
It's in many ways what we're seeing with the video games industry in the US, versus say the EU or Japan. The market has become choked by an oligarchy of large publishers more concerned with profits than with quality products.
The irony? Gamer chuds say they love capitalism then complain when the only games they get are Call of Duty Volume 69 with bullets as DLC.
Originally Posted by Marjane Satrapi
And if some market void is formed by Uber's collapse, other companies will arise within the confines of the law to fill it.
Isn't that what all these conservatives jacking off over the concept of "free market" want?
I don't personally find much validity in the argument of "we should be able to treat employees terribly because they're lucky to have these jobs!" If a company has to treat its employees terribly to exist... that company should not exist.
“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” ~ Emily3, World of Tomorrow
Words to live by.
"We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-Louis Brandeis
That only applies to coal, oil & gas, and manufacturing. It does not apply to tech. I always believe the survival of the fittest bloodbath during the 2000 Dot Com burst was how we ended up with the current FAAMG monopoly. Minus FB which was not around yet at the time. Whether its good or bad depends on one's perspective.
Quick clarifying question. What's the harm of a business like Uber classifying their employees as actual employees when they avoid paying for benefits by having them not work full time? Plenty of minimum wage jobs do that to avoid having to give certain employees health insurance and what not.
Oh no, Uber can't exploit people any more and has to treat them like proper employees.
The whole business model of Uber is "you set your own schedule." But at the same time, demand far outstrips supply, and drivers are desperate for more work if they're working for Uber in the first place, so many of them are working well over 40 hours a week.
And frankly, the model can only be sustained by less drivers working full time, as opposed to more drives working part time, because operating costs go up the more drivers you have.