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bln_wgcon Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown

> As someone who has lived in New York for the past ten years, the entrance of Uber hasn't changed my life at all

As someone who has lived in NYC for longer, I find your experience atypical. Do you take taxi/ride-hail trips outside of Manhattan? Are you a person of color? If either of those are true, your transportation experience has been fundamentally changed by the existence of Uber/Lyft.

And I'm sorry, but any favorable comparison of the cleanliness of an NYC yellow cab to an NYC Uber is laughable. The cleanest, best-smelling NYC yellow cab I've taken was worse than the dirtiest NYC Uber I've ever taken.

bln_wgcon Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown

Uber and Lyft operated 100% legally in NYC from their inception. The NYC ride-sharing market is not like other US cities, which allow peer-to-peer ridesharing. All rideshare drivers in NYC are licensed by the TLC, and Uber and Lyft are licensed TLC operators.

Uber and Lyft beat NYC taxis fair and square - they used the existing TLC regulations (with the overhead required) and won out because of being a better product.

bln_wgcon Uber Eliminates Forced Arbitration for Sexual Misconduct Claims

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uber-lyft-drivers-sexual-assaul...

Incidence rate is similar on both platforms.

bln_wgcon Uber Eliminates Forced Arbitration for Sexual Misconduct Claims

Lyft for example? Or Airbnb? They have forced arbitration clauses as well.

We'll see if they match Uber's commitment here.

bln_wgcon U.S. judge says Uber drivers are not company's employees

My question is: what do people think a "fair" hourly earnings level should be for a ridesharing driver? Given that it is a job which requires no educational or professional qualifications or experience, (only a driver's license and a clean background check), has an acceptance rate of basically 100%, and has flexibility to work any # of hours whenever you want (which surely has some $ utility) -- the $18-20 earnings per hour and $10-12 profit per hour averages that we've seen from multiple studies seems about right to me. That works out to $35k-50k a year, but without benefits.

I strongly believe everyone below ~$50-60k a year in the US should be paid more, but that's a separate conversation. In a world where teachers, firefighters, policemen, social workers etc. earn $35-50k a year + benefits, it feels wrong to complain about ridesharing drivers making $35k-50k a year without benefits.

bln_wgcon Spotify opens on NYSE, valuing company at almost $30B

I think a different interesting comparable is Uber. Both have really promising revenue growth stories, but (unlike Netflix) have no control over content/supply costs. For both Spotify and Uber ~80% of that gross revenue number goes straight to either record companies or driver commissions and rider subsidies. And the 80% does not diminish with scale.

Uber's 2017 gross revenue was 37B to Spotify's 4B, but the valuations are 50B to 30B. Think Spotify's valuation is a little overheated?

bln_wgcon Spotify opens on NYSE, valuing company at almost $30B

Should be noted that those are gross revenue numbers... ~80% of their gross revenue goes to the record companies and that percentage is constant as Spotify grows (i.e., there's no economies of scale to it).

It's similar to Uber, who had $37 billion gross revenue for 2017, but pays out 80% of that in driver commissions and additional subsidies to riders and drivers.

Seems like a problem for both industries; they'd need to hit insane scale (hard in music streaming for Spotify to 5x) or take control of the content/supply base to hold down costs.