Comment by mothsonasloth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mothsonasloth | Hacker News Reader

This article illustrates a cultural problem that is emerging especially with the 20-30s generation.

You can try blaming it on baby boomers, high living costs, lifestyle choices, avocados etc.

They don't care about ownership or property and instead want to consume everything as a service right away for convenience. This might be a one off service or something they are tied into with some contract.

I'm 31 and my peers either can't or won't buy property, cars, phones, kitchen utensils or other assets.

It's like feudalism 2.0, there's a whole bunch of people who own nothing now and are tied into contracts which can be quite onerous. Serfdom 2.0 for the middle classes. Ready to be milked by the people who own these services.

Another example is the music market. It's become intangible with Spotify etc. I still keep digital copies of music and host a Plex server which I control. Noone can deny me access that way. I still have CDs if something really goes wrong.

It's almost like it's cool to be a consumer of Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Deliveroo, Lime, DriveNow instead of painstakingly saving for that second hand car or holiday at that hotel resort.

It's far more efficient to share resources then to buy. That is why Uber makes sense. If you own your own car, it might get used on average 40 minutes per day. With Uber that resource is used at least 10 hours each day.

By the way, I think baby boomers are the worst generation in history. They're incredibly selfish and have caused huge externalities (climate change, national debt, global destabilization). The greed of the baby boomers has meant that the average standard of living and income has dropped for those coming behind them. We should eliminate benefits these people voted for themselves including Social Security and Medicare. No one else will get them later.

"It's far more efficient to share resources then to buy"

If it was more efficient, it wouldn't be more expensive. If it wasn't more expensive, there wouldn't be all these huge startups.

You've got that exactly backwards:

If it was more expensive, the startups couldn't afford to exist. It costs me more to pay for parking where I live than to pay for rideshares multiple times a week.

Thats just parking, not to mention insurance or, you know, the actual vehicle.

Not necessarily.

Taxis don't only exist due to cost. It's more convenient to take a cab across London because even if you have unlimited money, finding parking is a pain in the arse, you have to think about it, etc.

Or you might just be tipsy after a night out.

I've never taken a cab to save money; I'm not sure I've ever been in a situation where it would be cheaper than just taking public transport or driving.

It's just a different option with different pros and cons.

> I think baby boomers are the worst generation in history.

Pretty sure most generations have had resentment towards the previous generations that came before them. This isn't new. Most people are selfish and will do what benefits them and don't tend to look beyond their own lifetime or the kids'/grandkids' lifetimes.

I would agree if there weren't middlemen and regulations everywhere making this an enormous pain in the arse and making the costs nowhere near what they would be in an efficient market.

Uber only makes sense for infrequent journeys because you have to pay for:

- a relatively new car - an actual driver and their labour costs - profit margin for Uber.

Last year the TCO of my car was under a thousand pounds, not including fuel.

There is absolutely no way I could have rented my car for 3 GBP a day. It's just not happening, there's no profit in it. I couldn't rent it for a month for 100 GBP, or even a month for 200 GBP (100% markup).

I'm yet to see _any_ of these rental services that actually work out cheaper than doing it yourself except in specific scenarios like somewhere you'd have to pay for parking, or the specifically urban situation of using the car very occasionally because you could actually just cycle everywhere instead (e.g. London zone 2).

As functional programmers (or Buddhists) might say, statefulness is the enemy.

> feudalism 2.0

That phrasing is awesome - you nailed the problem perfectly!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com