Cheap cab ride? You must have missed Uber’s true cost

This was the most meandering anti-tech piece ever. "PE is subsidizing growth and Apple hoards cash overseas and some little University project in Iceland died RABBLE!"

There are LOTS of great reasons to be skeptical of Uber but come on.

Sorry having trouble parsing this:

> rates so low that they didn’t even cover the combined cost of fuel and vehicle depreciation

> percentages from its drivers’ fares ... 30%

So apparently Uber managed to find some drivers who are willing to drive people for less than fuel+depreciation, _and_ share 30% of that with Uber? Something must be off in these statements, since I doubt any driver is stupid enough to drive people at a loss. Do the drivers get paid a different amount for a ride than what I see on the screen?

I'm sure there is a potential threat of Uber wiping out the cabs and jacking up the prices, but this article is not very clear.

The article is terrible. It's conflating VC investing with taxation of global companies with global revenues, like Apple and Google. The reason why Apple has hundreds of billions offshore is because they earned it outside the US. That's simply how taxation works.

This article has some good points. Most of the apologists for 'duper have no idea how the transportation industry is actually regulated. For example, somehow Uber and Lyft found a way to fully comply with New York State's transportation regulations, but ignored them everywhere else, until their lobbyists took care of those pesky, gutless state governments.

I drove for a taxi company in Arizona for a few years.It was a lot of fun, at the beginning. The company I drove for built its reputation/brand over 25+ years, and incorporated the latest technology as it became available. The arrival of the "super-duper-not-a-taxi-apps" ruined the economics of the business for the companies that were complying with Arizona's free-market approach to taxi regulation. The companies are adapting, but it's hard to compete with well-funded venture capitalists.

People who have a sense of self-preservation should not use the services of predatory not-transportation companies. There are times when people really, really need a ride, and the smartphone app won't be able to send somebody to pick you up. (It's more than running out of battery power while at the bar - those people were whiners.)

There's an implied assumption that revenues collected from federal taxes ("Look at Apple, which has recently announced that it sits on $200bn of potentially taxable overseas cash") will somehow materialize on municipalities' accounts (city of Cupertino and Santa Clara county, I suppose) as if there's some mysterious revenue-sharing program with the money flowing from the federal government to the municipalities that are lucky enough to host major corporate headquarters.

So what's Uber's long term game plan? Wiping out local taxi companies could be one, but people aren't going to disown their less-driven car anytime soon, nor is public transportation going to go away.

At some point I assume they're going to turn the corner and either need to raise profits or cut expenses. You can build a moat with cash for only so long.

but chicago cabbies are rude, stink, are talking on the phone in foreign language, demand cash( some even yell at passenger for not having cash), drive cars with no functional air conditioning, drive aggressively to out compete other cabs,demand tips, play annoying ads on the little screens attached to seats....

never again cabs. thank you uber for existing.