Where I was during uber's ascent, uber's defining value proposition was circumventing the artificial monopoly created by the taxi medallion system. This "disruption" was actually great, it shook up an industry that needed shaking up (ironically I now use cabs because they have become better than uber where I am. This would not be the case if uber never existed).
But even if it did some good "disrupting", I think the article's point is it's not real innovation. Same e.g. with self booked travel, self scan groceries, etc, they are not really innovating, they just change a power balance.
So the it ends up being bad when all the capital is chasing these disruptors instead of "innovators" for some definition.
The thing it misses, I think, is that many of the big winners (or monopolies if you like) actually do end up funding massive amounts of innovation.
Facebook and Google have contributed huge $ to AI/ML research, Amazon Go I think qualifies as real innovation (and I think there are many amazon examples that are more than just an app). Tech is easy to pick on (I've picked on it a lot) and Uber may be an egregious example of a company that disrupted and didn't give back (though they don't make money either). But I think there has been some major innovation come out of tech companies, even if that isn't how they got rich in the first place.
What’s missed in these discussions is these regulations had a point to them. It’s obvious Uber driving around without passengers increases congestion. Really look at AirBnb, Bird, etc and they all offload externalities from the company and it’s customers to everyone around them.
When the basic building model is to break the law, chances are the law had a point and people are going to want a return to normal eventually. The only way they survive long term is if the general population feels it’s the new normal is a useful tradeoff. In the short term they can massively subsidize users, but long term the same basic economic reality sets in so they need some actual innovation.
> What’s missed in these discussions is these regulations had a point to them.
This varies a lot by area - For example, I'd say the NY medallion regulations had a point to them, and that point was to systematically abuse cab drivers for the profit of the local government and banks.
Then for example - in my area (Atlanta) medallion supply was capped at 1600 - the result meant cabs basically didn't exist outside of the airport. Need a ride home from a party? Called a cab company? They won't show up. At all. They will dispatch cab after cab after cab that simply will never EVER show up.
Cabs would show up to exactly two places - Nice hotels that paid them under the table to make sure they kept coming, and the airport. Conveniently those two places tended to make circular trips.
So are there negative externalities to ride-sharing? Sure. Is it currently better than the previous cab monopolies? I'd argue yes. Do Uber and Lyft really represent a sustainable model? I don't think so.
>What’s missed in these discussions is these regulations had a point to them
And what point would that be?
Satisfying some legislator's desire to show Karen they're "doing something"?
Raising the barrier to entry for new entrants?
Protecting people?
Everyone who has a poorly thought out regulatory knee-jerk reaction likes to imagine that it's all the 3rd option but there's a heck of a lot of the first and second sailing under the flag of the third and a heck of a lot of people who would rather just use some heuristic like "more laws, more paperwork, more license fees, more better" than actually think critically about all three options.
A critical mass of the general public assuming that every regulation's primary purpose was to protect people when created and that said purpose has stood the test of time is how you get crap like the taxi medallion system in the first place.
> Uber's defining value proposition was circumventing the artificial monopoly created by the taxi medallion system
Licensing/regulatory evasion is one of the principal strategies that got Uber (taxi services), Airbnb (hotel services) and Paypal (banking services) off the ground and allowed them to compete so effectively against incumbents.
Eventually regulation caught up somewhat but the newcomers still seem to enjoy a favorable regulatory/licensing regime.
And of course another major strategy for Uber and Airbnb was eliminating full-time frontline employees.
The problem is incumbents get lazy and start profit-seeking. Competition is the only way we know to have a chance of fighting it. The taxi industry got away with ripping off customers and having terrible service for ages. In my country they would regularly overcharge or take longer routes. Or you call and they decide not to come, or you walk around waving your hands frantically at a taxi hoping they stop. As a tourist, its even worse because you have no idea what the rate should be.
I don't know if gig companies or all VC companies are perfect, but lets not pretend industries regularly fail to innovate in the absence of competition.
Healthcare - the tech disruption in healthcare actually makes it easy to see a doctor over video call for small stuff and easy to track my records over time. The existing healthcare system requires me to call and wait weeks for an appointment and use some clunky UI to even message a doctor. And everyone knows how terrible insurance is..
Banks - In Canada, I can't get a single bank to give me API access to my own account. Their native interfaces suck, and connecting with Mint is frequently buggy. Mint itself is much worse than Quicken for browsing transactions, grouping, charting, but Quicken's API connection to banks sucks, despite also being built by Intuit. Crypto websites and apps are much better & provide great API access. If they had a trustworthy stablecoin, i would move in a heartbeat.
Education - university prices keep going up even as their model remains the same. Even as the actual content of courses is freely available online. University costs are insane, student debt levels are insane. Software is the first industry where the majority of what you need to know especially as you move beyond general CS comes from the internet, _for free_.
Electric cars/space - Reusable rockets were literally considered impossible a decade ago, they are reality now.
Like it would be great to have actual innovation. It would be nice if we had any meaningful anti trust enforcement or other ways to force innovation. But in my (relatively short) lifetime, i have almost never seen large scale innovation happen in the absence of competition. Any serious competition feels like "disruption" to industries accustomed to hanging out and collecting profits.
So I agree with some of your points: I.e. I think people would generally agree the user experience of Uber is an improvement over taxis even if the labour conditions are a regression.
The problem I see is that even the potential for disruption is consolidated in fewer and fewer hands. With IP law the way it is, Google and Apple acting as gatekeepers to mobile ecosystems, Amazon owning e-commerce and squeezing or competing with vendors who depend on it - the world is increasingly becoming a place where a project has to be blessed by one of a handful of giant corporations to be allowed to exist.
And it’s making things worse for consumers. For instance Disney buying up entertainment properties and putting them behind a walled garden, or MS doing the same with game studios.
Silicon valley made its name as a place where a couple people in a garage could invent something to change the world. It’s debatable whether it’s even worth trying anymore, since it’s such an uphill battle to compete with the giants. If you ask me that’s a problem and we should seriously think about the way IP law is handled.
> I think people would generally agree the user experience of Uber is an improvement over taxis even if the labour conditions are a regression.
I am going to make my point bluntly. Do you think the people driving for Uber are dumb? Every time I see this kind of argument I feel like it removes any agency from the gig workers. The implication is "Uber's drivers don't understand they are getting screwed. We need to change the rules of the game so Uber stops screwing drivers."
I have never seen a good argument for how Uber is exploitive that doesn't assume the drivers are to dumb to realize they are being exploited.
Every week there are startups in Silicon Valley (and other places) building great products, getting more funding rounds, getting acquired, and going public. There are an infinite number of potential new market segments where the incumbent tech giants have no IP. Invent something new.
This is absolutely true, entrenched monopolies, or even a group a companies which have long since decided to stop competing with each other (e.g. canadian banks and phone companies) begin to charge more for less over time. Some of this is intentional too, like the way cities artificially limit the number of taxi licenses. Disruption can be good, but it only gives temporary improvements as a new monopoly will eventually take hold. It's a fundamental feature of the capitalist market system that over time industries consolidate into monopolies (or groups that act like a monopolies) because that's the best way to maximum profits.
Uber if anything makes taxis less productive and efficient, a big taxi company can take care car repairs in a very efficient way.
The magic of Uber is taking those hidden costs and pushing them on the drivers, now the cars get fixed in a much less efficient way, but the ones taking the risk are the drivers, so Uber wins overall.
This argument is my pet peeve. Taxi companies employed drivers as 'independent contractors' who were paid pretty similar to Uber drivers now- by the ride, not by the hour- and frequently forced the drivers to do or pay for their own repairs on the cars. They were often immigrants, they'd work 12+ hours a day, medallion owners issued them illegal fines or took an overly large chunk of the money they earned, etc. The taxi industry was known as notoriously abusive to its drivers for decades & decades before smartphones were even invented, much less Uber. I'm always a bit amazed at how people now remember the old taxi system as good for drivers, much less riders
> and frequently forced the drivers to do or pay for their own repairs on the cars.
I'm not saying the old medallion system was great, but I thought the cab companies back then owned all the cars. (Source: my in-laws owned a medallion company, and I knew a few other cab company owners in NYC in the aughts.) They would frequently make drivers take responsibility for routine care and maintenance (with the worst medallion companies really stretching the definition of "routine"), but they put up the capital and rented cabs out to drivers at exorbitant rates (e.g., $1500/week in NYC ~15 years ago).
Contrast this with Uber, which imposes the same or worse labor conditions and offloads all capital risk onto the drivers.
I don't like Uber, but it became popular because of convenience, not because of costs.
Pre-Uber/Lift in my city you'd have taxi companies that were operating like a cartel and giving a shitty service. Drivers were borderline rude. You had to call a dispatcher that was also usually rude and then wait 20 mins for a cab to show up.
Uber changed that process for the best by actually allowing me to get a taxi from an app in 30 seconds, they usually showed up much faster and the driver, fearing a 4-stars review, is usually incentivized to at least keep their car clean. It's a game changer and I wouldn't go back.
So no, the magic of Uber is not passing those hidden cost to the driver, it's actually offering a service that I want to use after +40 years of a corrupt industry that couldn't give a shit about improving.
Now that Uber gave them a big scare, they actually improved, but the idea that they would have evolved without an existential threat is madness.
Uber was undeniably a lot cheaper than a taxi for me in 2013. I don't use Uber much any more but I assume the same is true. They were able to undercut not just due to shafting the drivers but also all the VC money pouring in. The cost certainly did help with the popularity. It shifted the calculus from "eh, I'll drive and park" (at the airport or other destination) to "let's just get a ride" in a huge number of cases. So for me, it did not just displace taxi rides, it created new demand.
the previous poster makes a very important point - Uber re-externalized the costs for fleet maintenance and many other costs and push them outside their balance sheet.
The big savings is creating plausible deniability that lets the uber drivers get away without commercial insurance. They basically took the good ol' pizza delivery boy loophole and applied it to taxis. Vehicle maintenance is a drop in the bucket compared to gas and tires anyway.
My take on the productivity paradox is software is a form of literacy.
We have put a pen and paper onto every desktop and every pocket but almost no-one can read or write.
Edit: And those that can find that only a tiny fraction of the fold is written down (accessible through the virtual cyber world). Amazon's secret to success was forcing every service to live behind a "public" API.
I disagree that writing software is comparable to literacy.
I think it's more similar to any other profession, with a skillset you can learn if you're interested, or learn to get paid.
Not everyone is interested in writing software, and that's fine.
It has also never been easier to tinker with things, as root VMs are cheaply available, in comparison to 20 years ago, when you really were just given a cpanel interface, if you were on a budget.
Not writing software, using it requires software literacy.
How many people do you know that refuse to learn the software they use everyday? How many times have you helped a friend or colleague with some problem just by googling it even when you don't really understand what they do for a living?
It's not that we need everyone to create software, but it would unlock huge productivity gains if everyone stopped pasting screen shots into word. Excel might be the most important knowledge tool of our time, and almost no one knows how to use it.
Literacy is known at the top for things like the Iliad or the works of Shakespeare, but the major benefits are actually much more mundane, like allowing doctors to write prescriptions or being able to have instructions in a manual.
Similarly, you may never write an OS or a AAA game, but being able to just automate a teeny tiny bit of your Excel spreadsheet, that's where software literacy will benefit the most people.
IMHO software development is closest to research work. E.g. a software development company is much closer to a research institute or design center than an assembly line in a factory. Unfortunately in reality it's more often treated like a late-medieval manufactory, or at best a scriptorium in a monastery.
>I think it's more similar to any other profession
Could not disagree more. I run a small business selling used video games online, and come from a SWE/EEE background.
The fact that we've got processes in place that are built from the ground up to be scalable and automatable, as well as the simple Python scripts to perform this automation has basically tripled or quadrupled our productivity.
I could see much the same happening for a lot of workers who handle data, and as more people who have learned to code enter the workforce I'm not sure employers will continue to tolerate (for example) accountants who can't write their own report generators.
If we're gonna talk about literacy, we need to talk about how many people receive college educations, yet have across the board weak literacy as operating, functional humans. Not just reading, but in thinking itself, as well as care of their bodies such that they can think at all. Critical analysis is no longer being taught, or its teaching is failing hard. I meet quite a few people that simply are incapable of stringing together logical ideas greater than 2-3 concepts. And the concepts they use everyday, they barely grasp and have no foundational understanding how such processes operate or even continue to be.
This a pure education issue, and that includes eradication of the false education taught by religious backed educational institutes. The magical thinking taught by religious backed schools and universities create mentally constrained individuals who live in a demon haunted world and are dragging down all of civilization.
I think you’re on to something there. Most software available today merely does what free software already does, but with specific marketing to make it seem like something people need. For example, all of the below software categories are easily handled with either the software bundled with your operating system or a simple open source download:
- budgeting
- to do / productivity
- book / music / video game / etc. media cataloging
- project planning
- event planning
- file storage
- etc
When someone remarked once that most SaaS products are a front end to a spreadsheet, I just thought, “they’re not wrong.”
Now if people had computer literacy they wouldn’t pay $20 a month for a service their computer already does.
I think what’s truly missing is that all those apps don’t make sharing easy, and operating systems all suck at sharing, or when they’re ok at it (airdrop), it’s limited to nearby people, or not across OSes, etc.
Almost all SaaS are about easy cross-device, cross-internet, sharing, which all traditional apps don’t even try to be good at.
That's a fun metaphor. I don't think it's _literally_ true :)
Adding software got easy because development evolved, and supply
exceeded demand. The "Internet of Trash" is my go-to example. Modern
engineering got so good, and we're surrounded by so much efficient,
durable technology that manufacturers ran out of ways to add
value. So they started figuring out how to:
1) add internet connectivity whether it's wanted or not
2) control and break things using software
3) extract profitable data from users
All of these just kick the can down the road toward more solutionism
without really innovating in the original engineering domain.
People have lots of things in their homes that they’re not experts at or even knowledgeable of. Most people have a hammer and nail sitting around, that doesn’t mean they can build a piece of furniture or build a house. I’ve got all the tools to make bread, but I wouldn’t even know how to get started without some practice. And the list goes on. I also have a real pen and real paper, but that doesn’t mean I can write a novel.
It does literally mean you can write a novel. from an early age you have been trained to write and construct narratives. You can write that novel. it yeah no one has trained you at Primary School to build furniture:-)
I heard the problem expressed as a good ideas shortage versus too much investment capital. Interest rates have been incredibly low since the 2008 banking crash, so where does the spare capital go? There's not enough innovative ideas around (that investors like) to absorb the money. So some of the cash is getting thrown at complete nonsense and the remaining good ideas are receiving excessive capital. So there's a lot of inefficiency in there.
We talk about these things like they are separate closed systems when they are not.
It is an innovation and banking problem. There are all kinds of feedback loops involved.
The ridiculous amount of liquidity in the global system changes and distorts risk preferences.
It also creates these giant sinks of brain power that are just moving money around. We have had amazing innovation the past twenty years in electronic markets, hedge funds, venture capital firms, cryptocurrency. Think of how much brain power is being wasted just modeling capital structures instead of something actually innovating because there is so much capital moving around that needs to be modeled.
How much brain power is being wasted at hedge funds? I have read hedge fund manager Jim Simons say he thinks he has the best research department in the world inside his hedge fund. It is not that much different than dedicating the best research department in the world to playing better poker. It is an utter waste of resources and we see it all around us with the complete lack of innovation.
I agree with that. Money seems to flow to "safe" products. Some minor iteration of payments, CRM, taxis or fitness.
How do you fix it when the incentives are skewed towards quick bucks? Government pushing certain industries has worked for China. There'll be a lot of opposition to that in the US I'd imagine.
I don't know what you mean by banking problem but let me tell you the purpose of money once there are enough savings to fund every single investment. The money must be spent on something that is an end in itself i.e. consumption. All economic activity has the end goal of increasing the ability to consume. If you insist on saving and investing anyway then investment itself turns into consumption i.e. a recreational activity that costs money.
> In the US, food insecurity has become an epidemic on college campuses.
Difficult to the article seriously when reading this. (And I did follow the link to read the academic paper referenced. Though I am not in the field, I thought it was terrible. By defining food insecurity down and needlessly conflating categories it attempts to make a real problem seem worse than it is by viewing it through an ill conceived lens.)
They define "Low food security" as "reports of reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet". Which sounds like a typical college meal plan to me: not particularly interesting or high quality. Calling it an "epidemic" seems to be implying something much worse.
Yeah, comments like this are why so many people have turned against techies.
A) There are plenty of students in the goldilocks zone of being from families to poor to afford a meal plan but too wealthy to qualify for free meals from their college. Some of these students are able to qualify for academic scholarships out of high school. The rest take on multiple jobs, including work-study, so that they can afford tuition and board.
B) When college campuses shut down for COVID, many shut down their food halls as well, which affected those students poor enough to qualify for subsidized meals.
Not everybody lives your life. Food insecurity is a real thing for thousands of college students.
> A) ... There are plenty of students in the goldilocks zone of being from families to poor to afford a meal plan but too wealthy to qualify for free meals from their college
As I understand it, public and private 4-year universities in the US usually include meal plans in the financial aid package. Colleges may even force students to purchase (expensive) meal plans to make them profitable.
You may get stuck with oppressive student loans and mediocre, overpriced food, but you shouldn't starve.
You're not entirely wrong about COVID though - it disrupted food services and made it harder for students to get meals. You see students with meal plans resorting to food hoarding and even theft, which they rationalize based on the cost of the meal plan and lack of access.
Agreed. And college campuses aren't exactly the most Uber-like place. While they experiment with online courses and some are really embracing them, the dominant vision is a pay-one-price, all-you-can-eat model. The colleges themselves bear plenty of similarities to the communist model thanks to need-based financial aid.
So the fact that kids are food insecure on college campuses suggests that it's not a problem with Uberization or the economic model.
Uber and Lyft have made life much easier in San Francisco, since the taxi service here is very poor. I was in Vancouver a few years ago, before they allowed Uber and Lyft, and we had an extremely hard time getting a taxi there too.
We do not have an economy built on disruption, we have an economy built on the myth of disruption. No better example than Theranos.
And we have an economy built on lock-in. No better example that Apple, or perhaps Google and Amazon. These are both ways to extract value from the economic system, not ways to improve it. The Apple Tax, Google Adsense.
It wasn't long ago that customers were locked in to IBM mainframes and DEC minicomputers. How did that work out? Eventually some new disruptive technology appears and the incumbents miss the market shift.
Readit News
But even if it did some good "disrupting", I think the article's point is it's not real innovation. Same e.g. with self booked travel, self scan groceries, etc, they are not really innovating, they just change a power balance.
So the it ends up being bad when all the capital is chasing these disruptors instead of "innovators" for some definition.
The thing it misses, I think, is that many of the big winners (or monopolies if you like) actually do end up funding massive amounts of innovation.
Facebook and Google have contributed huge $ to AI/ML research, Amazon Go I think qualifies as real innovation (and I think there are many amazon examples that are more than just an app). Tech is easy to pick on (I've picked on it a lot) and Uber may be an egregious example of a company that disrupted and didn't give back (though they don't make money either). But I think there has been some major innovation come out of tech companies, even if that isn't how they got rich in the first place.
When the basic building model is to break the law, chances are the law had a point and people are going to want a return to normal eventually. The only way they survive long term is if the general population feels it’s the new normal is a useful tradeoff. In the short term they can massively subsidize users, but long term the same basic economic reality sets in so they need some actual innovation.
This varies a lot by area - For example, I'd say the NY medallion regulations had a point to them, and that point was to systematically abuse cab drivers for the profit of the local government and banks.
Then for example - in my area (Atlanta) medallion supply was capped at 1600 - the result meant cabs basically didn't exist outside of the airport. Need a ride home from a party? Called a cab company? They won't show up. At all. They will dispatch cab after cab after cab that simply will never EVER show up.
Cabs would show up to exactly two places - Nice hotels that paid them under the table to make sure they kept coming, and the airport. Conveniently those two places tended to make circular trips.
So are there negative externalities to ride-sharing? Sure. Is it currently better than the previous cab monopolies? I'd argue yes. Do Uber and Lyft really represent a sustainable model? I don't think so.
Except now airbnb is accepted by city regulations and cities give out permits and make occupancy dollars.
Same with uber.
And what point would that be?
Satisfying some legislator's desire to show Karen they're "doing something"?
Raising the barrier to entry for new entrants?
Protecting people?
Everyone who has a poorly thought out regulatory knee-jerk reaction likes to imagine that it's all the 3rd option but there's a heck of a lot of the first and second sailing under the flag of the third and a heck of a lot of people who would rather just use some heuristic like "more laws, more paperwork, more license fees, more better" than actually think critically about all three options.
A critical mass of the general public assuming that every regulation's primary purpose was to protect people when created and that said purpose has stood the test of time is how you get crap like the taxi medallion system in the first place.
Dead Comment
Licensing/regulatory evasion is one of the principal strategies that got Uber (taxi services), Airbnb (hotel services) and Paypal (banking services) off the ground and allowed them to compete so effectively against incumbents.
Eventually regulation caught up somewhat but the newcomers still seem to enjoy a favorable regulatory/licensing regime.
And of course another major strategy for Uber and Airbnb was eliminating full-time frontline employees.
Deleted Comment
It is more efficient to accomplish the same thing with less time and labor.
I don't know if gig companies or all VC companies are perfect, but lets not pretend industries regularly fail to innovate in the absence of competition.
Healthcare - the tech disruption in healthcare actually makes it easy to see a doctor over video call for small stuff and easy to track my records over time. The existing healthcare system requires me to call and wait weeks for an appointment and use some clunky UI to even message a doctor. And everyone knows how terrible insurance is..
Banks - In Canada, I can't get a single bank to give me API access to my own account. Their native interfaces suck, and connecting with Mint is frequently buggy. Mint itself is much worse than Quicken for browsing transactions, grouping, charting, but Quicken's API connection to banks sucks, despite also being built by Intuit. Crypto websites and apps are much better & provide great API access. If they had a trustworthy stablecoin, i would move in a heartbeat.
Education - university prices keep going up even as their model remains the same. Even as the actual content of courses is freely available online. University costs are insane, student debt levels are insane. Software is the first industry where the majority of what you need to know especially as you move beyond general CS comes from the internet, _for free_.
Electric cars/space - Reusable rockets were literally considered impossible a decade ago, they are reality now.
Like it would be great to have actual innovation. It would be nice if we had any meaningful anti trust enforcement or other ways to force innovation. But in my (relatively short) lifetime, i have almost never seen large scale innovation happen in the absence of competition. Any serious competition feels like "disruption" to industries accustomed to hanging out and collecting profits.
The problem I see is that even the potential for disruption is consolidated in fewer and fewer hands. With IP law the way it is, Google and Apple acting as gatekeepers to mobile ecosystems, Amazon owning e-commerce and squeezing or competing with vendors who depend on it - the world is increasingly becoming a place where a project has to be blessed by one of a handful of giant corporations to be allowed to exist.
And it’s making things worse for consumers. For instance Disney buying up entertainment properties and putting them behind a walled garden, or MS doing the same with game studios.
Silicon valley made its name as a place where a couple people in a garage could invent something to change the world. It’s debatable whether it’s even worth trying anymore, since it’s such an uphill battle to compete with the giants. If you ask me that’s a problem and we should seriously think about the way IP law is handled.
I am going to make my point bluntly. Do you think the people driving for Uber are dumb? Every time I see this kind of argument I feel like it removes any agency from the gig workers. The implication is "Uber's drivers don't understand they are getting screwed. We need to change the rules of the game so Uber stops screwing drivers."
I have never seen a good argument for how Uber is exploitive that doesn't assume the drivers are to dumb to realize they are being exploited.
And we have always been at war with Eastasia.
The Shuttle program was started in the 1970s. Reusable launch vehicles have never been considered impossible, merely inefficient.
Deleted Comment
The magic of Uber is taking those hidden costs and pushing them on the drivers, now the cars get fixed in a much less efficient way, but the ones taking the risk are the drivers, so Uber wins overall.
I'm not saying the old medallion system was great, but I thought the cab companies back then owned all the cars. (Source: my in-laws owned a medallion company, and I knew a few other cab company owners in NYC in the aughts.) They would frequently make drivers take responsibility for routine care and maintenance (with the worst medallion companies really stretching the definition of "routine"), but they put up the capital and rented cabs out to drivers at exorbitant rates (e.g., $1500/week in NYC ~15 years ago).
Contrast this with Uber, which imposes the same or worse labor conditions and offloads all capital risk onto the drivers.
Pre-Uber/Lift in my city you'd have taxi companies that were operating like a cartel and giving a shitty service. Drivers were borderline rude. You had to call a dispatcher that was also usually rude and then wait 20 mins for a cab to show up.
Uber changed that process for the best by actually allowing me to get a taxi from an app in 30 seconds, they usually showed up much faster and the driver, fearing a 4-stars review, is usually incentivized to at least keep their car clean. It's a game changer and I wouldn't go back.
So no, the magic of Uber is not passing those hidden cost to the driver, it's actually offering a service that I want to use after +40 years of a corrupt industry that couldn't give a shit about improving.
Now that Uber gave them a big scare, they actually improved, but the idea that they would have evolved without an existential threat is madness.
We have put a pen and paper onto every desktop and every pocket but almost no-one can read or write.
Edit: And those that can find that only a tiny fraction of the fold is written down (accessible through the virtual cyber world). Amazon's secret to success was forcing every service to live behind a "public" API.
I think it's more similar to any other profession, with a skillset you can learn if you're interested, or learn to get paid.
Not everyone is interested in writing software, and that's fine.
It has also never been easier to tinker with things, as root VMs are cheaply available, in comparison to 20 years ago, when you really were just given a cpanel interface, if you were on a budget.
How many people do you know that refuse to learn the software they use everyday? How many times have you helped a friend or colleague with some problem just by googling it even when you don't really understand what they do for a living?
It's not that we need everyone to create software, but it would unlock huge productivity gains if everyone stopped pasting screen shots into word. Excel might be the most important knowledge tool of our time, and almost no one knows how to use it.
Similarly, you may never write an OS or a AAA game, but being able to just automate a teeny tiny bit of your Excel spreadsheet, that's where software literacy will benefit the most people.
Could not disagree more. I run a small business selling used video games online, and come from a SWE/EEE background.
The fact that we've got processes in place that are built from the ground up to be scalable and automatable, as well as the simple Python scripts to perform this automation has basically tripled or quadrupled our productivity.
I could see much the same happening for a lot of workers who handle data, and as more people who have learned to code enter the workforce I'm not sure employers will continue to tolerate (for example) accountants who can't write their own report generators.
This a pure education issue, and that includes eradication of the false education taught by religious backed educational institutes. The magical thinking taught by religious backed schools and universities create mentally constrained individuals who live in a demon haunted world and are dragging down all of civilization.
- budgeting
- to do / productivity
- book / music / video game / etc. media cataloging
- project planning
- event planning
- file storage
- etc
When someone remarked once that most SaaS products are a front end to a spreadsheet, I just thought, “they’re not wrong.”
Now if people had computer literacy they wouldn’t pay $20 a month for a service their computer already does.
Almost all SaaS are about easy cross-device, cross-internet, sharing, which all traditional apps don’t even try to be good at.
Adding software got easy because development evolved, and supply exceeded demand. The "Internet of Trash" is my go-to example. Modern engineering got so good, and we're surrounded by so much efficient, durable technology that manufacturers ran out of ways to add value. So they started figuring out how to:
1) add internet connectivity whether it's wanted or not
2) control and break things using software
3) extract profitable data from users
All of these just kick the can down the road toward more solutionism without really innovating in the original engineering domain.
It is an innovation and banking problem. There are all kinds of feedback loops involved.
The ridiculous amount of liquidity in the global system changes and distorts risk preferences.
It also creates these giant sinks of brain power that are just moving money around. We have had amazing innovation the past twenty years in electronic markets, hedge funds, venture capital firms, cryptocurrency. Think of how much brain power is being wasted just modeling capital structures instead of something actually innovating because there is so much capital moving around that needs to be modeled.
How much brain power is being wasted at hedge funds? I have read hedge fund manager Jim Simons say he thinks he has the best research department in the world inside his hedge fund. It is not that much different than dedicating the best research department in the world to playing better poker. It is an utter waste of resources and we see it all around us with the complete lack of innovation.
How do you fix it when the incentives are skewed towards quick bucks? Government pushing certain industries has worked for China. There'll be a lot of opposition to that in the US I'd imagine.
Difficult to the article seriously when reading this. (And I did follow the link to read the academic paper referenced. Though I am not in the field, I thought it was terrible. By defining food insecurity down and needlessly conflating categories it attempts to make a real problem seem worse than it is by viewing it through an ill conceived lens.)
They define "Low food security" as "reports of reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet". Which sounds like a typical college meal plan to me: not particularly interesting or high quality. Calling it an "epidemic" seems to be implying something much worse.
A) There are plenty of students in the goldilocks zone of being from families to poor to afford a meal plan but too wealthy to qualify for free meals from their college. Some of these students are able to qualify for academic scholarships out of high school. The rest take on multiple jobs, including work-study, so that they can afford tuition and board.
B) When college campuses shut down for COVID, many shut down their food halls as well, which affected those students poor enough to qualify for subsidized meals.
Not everybody lives your life. Food insecurity is a real thing for thousands of college students.
As I understand it, public and private 4-year universities in the US usually include meal plans in the financial aid package. Colleges may even force students to purchase (expensive) meal plans to make them profitable.
You may get stuck with oppressive student loans and mediocre, overpriced food, but you shouldn't starve.
You're not entirely wrong about COVID though - it disrupted food services and made it harder for students to get meals. You see students with meal plans resorting to food hoarding and even theft, which they rationalize based on the cost of the meal plan and lack of access.
So the fact that kids are food insecure on college campuses suggests that it's not a problem with Uberization or the economic model.
And we have an economy built on lock-in. No better example that Apple, or perhaps Google and Amazon. These are both ways to extract value from the economic system, not ways to improve it. The Apple Tax, Google Adsense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma?wpro...