Finally someone gets it.

That would be totally fucked for riders...I don’t want some jackass driver deciding to charge me $100 bucks for a one mile drive because it’s 2AM and i am drunk.

What are you even talking about, the fact that one idiot couldn’t get his shit together to register his personal vehicle and he happened to drive for Uber?

and yet everyone knows uber drivers and building contractors are all independent contractors

It’s almost like you don’t get that building a global business takes some losses.

This would not be a business.

you are simply ignoring the fact that hundreds of millions if not billions have been spent to build out the business...this spend doesn’t have to continue once total market share (not against cabs, that’s dumb, against total driven miles) is achieved.

A big pot of money isn’t an endless pot. And leave automated out of this...it won’t happen for years. The real goal is to get people used to using uber, not versus cabs but versus driving themselves (this is already a success in large metros, but the olds and suburbs still aren’t using uber enough).

Collective bargaining is a lark. Unions are pretty much DOA in the US, and Uber is a global business. Wages would not go up (cash on cash a full time uber driver makes more than minimum wage...the post depreciation stuff is nonsense...ask any commuter to a minimum wage job).

No it’s nothing like that.

It’s not price-fixing, total nonsense.  Taxis across the country are “owner-operated” yet they always charge the network price (one yellow cab charges the same as every other yellow cab, but each cab is a separate company).  This is just more bullshit smear against Uber.

What’s more, this has zero to do with being a contractor.  You can tell the guy who came to fix your plumbing to shut up and work, that doesn’t make him your employee.

The only number that matters is incremental cash, which is clearly higher than any of the quoted hourly income.

what all the “strikers” don’t realize is their beef is really that lyft and uber will always accept more drivers, so the ability of any current driver to line up lots of rides will inherently drop over time

The whole model is in it’s infancy...once people are comfortable not buying cars and instead using rideshare exlusively, the platform is worth 10-20x what it is now.

They didn’t drive taxis, so contracting with Uber was just an incremental opportunity for someone with no marketable skills.

“Uber has been cutting my wages in the last two years,” Derrick Baker, a driver in Northern California, told Gizmodo at Wednesday’s strike. “Be it full time or part time, bad rates are bad rates. So we’re here at HQ asking for a living wage.”

Bullshit.  Trump is a corrupt con man, and there is clearly some very nasty shit in his tax returns (otherwise he wouldn’t be fighting so hard against their release).  Congress needs this information to determine whether or not at a minimum impeachment should be pursued, and there should also be new laws put in place…

More importantly, Uber’s take rate is actually lower than (for example) the amount that Apple takes for apps sponsored on the app store (30% for app store, 20ish for Uber).

only if the side gig is a job