Hacker News Reader

Comment by adamqureshi | Hacker News Reader

My brother works for uber, He is 54 years old smokes a pack day and has had 2 heart attacks. He drives a Cadillac and pays $500-month for commercial insurance and has a monthly payment for his car. He has TLC plates to work in NYC ( fees apply) he makes about $300 a day works like a dog 12-14 hours a day. All of his friends are the same (uber drivers in NYC) Here you have the typical uber driver who does this for a living as his main gig not some side gig while building a start up or some bullshit side thing. These are the left over drivers from when the yellow cab money / industry dried up in NYC. The job is literally killing him. It's the classic frog in boiling water syndrome. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

View on HN

> He smokes a pack day and has had 2 heart attacks

> The job is literally killing him

I don't mean to be snide or to blame your brother (addiction is a powerful thing), but I'd say that maintaining a smoking habit despite having suffered not one but two heart attacks sounds more like putting a frog in a pot with some water, splashing boiling water into the pot twice, scalding the frog both times, and having the frog decide to stick around and see what happens next.

Ive tried to get a plethora of acquaintances and coworkers to try vape, the upfront cost of a good quality reliable one-device system can easily exceed a couple hundred dollars. The majority of people who I discuss this with are upfront-cost conscious above all, they just have $5 a day (or 2 packs a NY day being $14 a day) and have too little money to gamble, in their mind, on will vaping work.

Scholarly articles on nicotine replacement show that for every person who successful quits using that it costs around $7k, magnitudes more $$ than vape. For some people nicotine is one of the only things they have that makes them hate life less and be able to cope better. On some level I find it unfair that people should say 'well you shouldn't do that categorically' when the vast majority of people have their own individual preferences on vice.

Thanks for your perspective; I didn't know any of those costs.

Everyone has their own individual vice preferences, but some vices are demonstrably worse for health than others. I'm not one to tell a person to quit smoking, but it seems likely that in this case, the guy's two heart attacks did just that.

> he makes about $300 a day works like a dog 12-14 hours a da

Is this profit, revenue or in transactions?

I don't know. he just said to me" I make 300 a day" assume $90 net take home for 12-14 hours or less. Uber basically KILLED The yellow cab industry in NYC. He was driving a yellow cab and considering buying a medallion ( the American dream) for $800k but that yellow cab medallion is worth shit now since uber came on the scene and yellow cab drivers who got a mortgage to buy a medallion are committing suicide now that the medallion is worth shit. So the whole situation is toxic they are FORCED to drive with uber / lyft and its a race to the bottom AI is paying them less and less. Uber is bleeding them dry. They can't drive yellow cabs and now uber is squeezing the shit out of what they are already making, they are under so much stress in order to get some type of relief from working 12-14 hour days for shit pay ,sometimes 7 days a week they smoke / drink to forget the pain of it all to escape for just a moment from earning less and less and getting used to surviving on less. Its brutal in NYC.

I’m sorry about your brother, but I’m not going say Uber’s responsible for his heart attacks and pack a day cigarette habit. Uber might be short changing him on money but you can’t blame them for poor lifestyle decisions.

Uber did destroy his industry.

Uber did not destroy his industry. Industry is flourishing. It's state's fault for not providing a good social safety net. Imagine if we all had to use horses, because the government did not want to "destroy" the industry.

We all know what is the end game here. Driving a vehicle will be recreational activity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com