Hacker News Reader

Comment by Illniyar | Hacker News Reader

The car (Uber,Lift), the house (AirBnB), the tools for making what they sell (Etsy,fiverr).

Only Uber (and other ride-haling apps I suppose) forces a price, all other marketplaces the price is set by the seller - AirBnB, Etsy, fiverr. In Amazon Turk the seller and buyer roles are reversed and Turkers only accept work that pay enough for them.

I would say it's more a product of the industry they are in - transportation is usually regulated to have a fixed price almost everywhere - then the nature of marketplaces in the gig-economy as a whole.

View on HN

I don't see how it can be. The equivalent of the capitalist's lock out, is a ban from or temporary closure of a platform.

An individual driver withdrawing his car is a resignation, or declining to do a particular job, surely? Go back to pre employment legislation times and it was pretty common to require a worker to own the tools by buying them themselves and take them to work in the local factory. The factory and machinery was still the means of production.

Consider a nationalisation where a state buys the means of production. They would nationalise the company that owns the factory not the individual workers and their tools. If someone decided to nationalise AirBNB or Uber they'd take the company and platform, not a thousand cars or houses.

Uber does not force a price.

It is up to the driver to accept the fare.

I've been told that uber hides some of the information (either the price or the distance the driver has to go or both) which makes that not quite true.

If that is true than it is no better than the US healthcare system.

I currently drive for Uber and both of these are 100% true When a request pops up all I see is the estimated time it'll take me to get to the pickup point, I also have exactly 10 seconds to accept a request.

Is this also true for Lyft?

No. Take it or leave it is them dictating a price.

if i demand a $2mm salary, take it or leave it, i am not dictating a price; i am getting laughed out of the room and someone else is getting the job. uber is only dictating a price to the extent that lyft won't offer more.

firms like comcast, who may be the only ISP offering >25mbps in a particular area, are the ones who get to dictate a price.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com