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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

$8.55 is the profit but it is compared to minimum wage. Minimum wage is not profit as there are costs associated with getting to work (bus/car) and mandatory taxes.

Shouldn’t the $8.55 be compared with net income from minimum wage? This seems like a meaningful comparison for people choosing to drive or work minimum wage.

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This is a very good point; if you drive your car to work then you pay gas and depreciation just like an Uber driver, except you don't get to tax-deduct it.

You also pay self employment taxes. W2 and 1099 income aren't directly comparable. Oh, and health insurance as a contractor is WAY higher than as an employee. That has to eat into their wages a lot.

Downvote mysteries again. What of my comment isn't accurate?

Edit: Lol. Downvote on this one too with no reply.

"You're wrong and here's why" adds value for everyone. "You're wrong" is close to useless.

You didn't say "You're wrong," you started mentioning other things which might be significant expenses also. I personally upvoted because I was giving the benefit of the doubt. In the response, you proved me wrong; you were mentioning other things not because you thought they were comparable, but as a way to discount the thing you were replying to. You weren't actually interested in whether the costs you mentioned were comparable to the cost of a commute, you just wanted to silence the comparison for some reason.

I'm assuming it was based on the law of averages, aka there's some things here and some things there, it probably all washes out in the end, but I think it's better to actually add everything up than to assume. Useful?

Yes, thanks, though I was equating the unexplained anonymous downvotes as “you’re (I’m) wrong”...not my comment. Just adding some common misses when people equate 1099 rates with w2. I wasn’t arguing your comment, just embellishing. I rarely assume parent is downvoting, I don’t think HN allows that.

Definitely, but "I commute to/from work" is a lot different than "I drive for 10 hours a day, every day".

It’s certainly different, but I think it should be in the comparison.

I drive 10 hours a week, not per day. But there’s a cost. To say “you make $10/hour” and an Uber driver makes $8.55 after expenses and taxes is not very useful because the Uber driver has more cash in pocket.

I think this is useful for an academic paper to compare apples to oranges. And the author directly compared this to minimum wage which seems like an amateur mistake for a researcher from MIT. Unless they have a policy angle they are promoting and are not a fair broker of info.

Agreed - if it was an apples-to-apples comparison we wouldn't need an academic paper.

Writing off depreciation + having to pay self-employment tax is probably a wash I would think, not sure though.

Uber drivers often have to "drive to work" too, from the suburbs or country into the city. One driver I talked with lived 90 minutes away from the city, and usually couldn't find a passenger going that direction during her 'commute.'

I don't think this study accounts for this commute-time, unless I'm misreading.

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