I dunno it sure seems to have worked for Uber and AirBnB…
I would amend your “breaking the law” comment to “willfully ignoring all regulation, taxes, and labor provisions” perhaps but, same sentiment.
I would amend your “breaking the law” comment to “willfully ignoring all regulation, taxes, and labor provisions” perhaps but, same sentiment.
A lot of these companies have taken this approach. Break laws until someone finally notices AND does something about it. The runway to a slap on the wrist is often times more financially beneficial to companies - there is no incentive to stop if you run a billion dollar company and breaking the law gets you a $50M dollar fine you make back in a single month.
I thought SOX (Sarbanes–Oxley Act) was supposed to prevent a lot of this, but I guess companies just continue to find loopholes to exploit.
On the other hand, I've come around to the view that sports betting is a net unqualified bad -- and I didn't necessarily feel that way before the Kalshi/PM explosion.
Which has led to the interesting phenomenon that a sequence of Pareto improvements (each of which makes everyone better off) has seemed to leave everyone worse off.
How the hell is that leaving everyone worse off?
That being said, they weren't effectively offering unregulated gambling on any difference of opinion. Gambling is a vice. We've made it a regulated vice, but it's very much still a vice. If you get rid of the "regulated" part, people, including those with the ability to present a case in front of a grand jury, are going to see you as a 1980s cosa nostra capo and act accordingly.
You might want to look up Barcelona and the issues airbnb causes there. Basically it follows out the cities as you can make way more money doing Airbnb than renting to people living/working there.
As to Uber, I'm not sure if the driver experience is unambiguous good. For some, sure. For the ones that depend on it, I'm sure they'll disagree
Uber drivers are welcome to no longer drive for uber if they don’t enjoy the experience.
Are they?
The drivers have a certain set of capital and skills, and Uber (and to a lesser extent, Lyft) have created a near-monopoly on the market to buy services produced using that capital and skills. Since the ability to execute a transaction in that market is severely compromised if you don't work by Uber's rules, you are effectively outside of the marketplace if you no longer drive for Uber. You make no money. You go broke. You don't have the capital necessary to effectively compete in the market for giving rides in exchange for money. They own your skills and capital in all but the legal sense.
If there were either real, multi-company competition for Uber's market share, or a larger amount of regulation upon their monopoly, it'd be a different story.
Of course, there are people who think that monopolies are good, but that seems to be counterintuitive to anyone with a basic grasp of human nature and history.
This isn't a rhetorical question. As far as I know there are only two globally - Uber and Lyft. If most of what you need is a web server and a lawyer, shouldn't there be ten of these in every city?
The skill of knowing all the roads stopped being important a decade or two before Uber even started.
This is obviously a fallacy under our current economic system; workers are not "free to choose whatever job/occupation" they'd like. Their circumstances (material conditions) dictate what they can and cannot do for work, and in some places, driving for Uber is about it, at least for a part time gig that can fit around a primary job (since many Americans at least must work in excess of 50 hours a week to afford food and rent).
So, instead of punching down and saying "man, just get a better job" we could recognize the realities of the world and hope we can make the conditions of drivers better. Uber, or a system like it, at least if we are forced to have car-centric infrastructure, should be a net good. At the moment it is not.
It should have more protections too, I'm not arguing against those. I just think "it's the only job some people can get" is often a bad argument. And it's often used to perpetuate bad systems.
(Competitive doesn't mean the same price per night - there's also factors of cleaning and occupancy rate)
Uber is a major driver of the gig economy and all the lack of worker protections that that includes.
They’re also arguably a major driver/originator of DoorDash and Uber Eats, a company that famously takes an enormous percentage of every restaurant’s order fee, compounding either the increase in costs of restaurant food, or causing restaurants to struggle further or both.
They’ve done good - they’ve made it easier to get a job when you otherwise can’t, and they’ve reduced car reliance for some people; but “unambiguous good” is too far a bridge.
If a restaurant doesn’t like the cut taken by DoorDash they’re welcome to not participate in DoorDash. As far as I know, neither company has ever forced a restaurant into participation.
DoorDash got sued by In-N-Out for doing this. https://www.eater.com/2015/11/11/9714840/in-n-out-doordash-d...
The parent comment was complaining about the fee that DoorDash charges the restaurant.
Is that link going tell me that DoorDash was charging restaurants non consensually? That would be very tough for me to believe
As for the gambling bits I guess if I had to answer it would be property investors that bought thinking they could rent on AirBnB - speculation but also driving up prices in popular areas to price out locals.