I feel like the whole Reddit AI deal is a trap. If any real judgment comes down about data use Reddit is an easy scapegoat. There was basically nothing stopping them from scraping the site for free.
And more importantly, any indication of impending regulatory action tends to spook away investors who might not want to be on the hook for fines and forced changes to the business model that affect profitability. Yet another staple in the rotting cardboard casket of Huffman’s favorite piggy bank.
Yet another staple in the rotting cardboard casket of greedy little pig boy’s favorite piggy bank.
FTFY.
He also 110% deserves to have his darling little piggy bank IPO ruined after the bullshit, lack of communication, and steamrolling pulled with the API fiasco.
The FTC is worried that the big tech firms will further entrench their monopolies. They are doing a lot of good stuff lately; an underappreciated boon of the Biden Presidency. Lina Khan looks to be really set on fixing decades of mistakes.
I guess they just want to know if these deals lock out potential competitors.
I guess there is going to be a split on this in terms of what people think. Obviously ride share drivers would love this, and since the only time I’m in Minneapolis is when I’m on business, it’s my company footing the bill, not me.
However - if it was me footing the bill, I’m sure I’d be much less inclined to take a Lyft/Uber. However, ending ops over this is stupid, because there will be people that will pay for it, business or personal. Let the market decide what’s palatable.
Everyone’s wallet is shrinking due to the rampant inflation over the past several years, and if you’re a full time ride share driver, it’s hard to cut even with the rising costs all around. Even before the inflation was hard. Vehicles don’t run on hopes and dreams and need maintenance.
This is the beauty of self employment. As I said in a previous comment, I’m a driver and one of the apps I work along with my own service give me the ability and freedom to raise my own rates when I feel the need. Truth is though, as it stands, most uber and lyft drivers could make more than enough if the companies were forced to pass on a percentage instead of low balling offers. Very rough math says they could pass on a fixed 80% and charge the rider whatever they feel like at any point in time. This would give them more enough profit along with covering all costs. They won’t do this because they are greedy and states/cities won’t make them do it because they are stuck in the hourly mindset when most IC work is not hourly. This job is all about miles. Watch dead and wasted time of course but it’s not all about the hourly.
But it’s a tactic, right? They could still make money, if a bit less, by operating in Minneapolis. But they can put pressure on residents to try and get it repealed by stopping, and try to send a message to other cities.
As a whole, yeah, but top-line losses don’t mean each ride makes them less profitable. My understanding was their margins are slim enough they need a lot of rides to subsidize their fixed costs, so fewer rides means less profit, not less loss.
If Uber is actually profitable, stopping operations in Minneapolis really should make them less so. If this isn’t them taking a small loss now because they believe they’ll avoid a bigger loss later, I can’t make sense of it.
Yes, they could make a very tiny profit from a decently sized city, but then it might encourage other cities to follow suit.
The costs are not all fixed, covering another city means paying more support agents, having people signing up local drivers, etc. so after this change it might not even be profitable after all
If costs like support agents that scale with rides make the rides unprofitable, their business model is upside down. Especially for Uber, I’m counting costs that scale with rides with costs per ride, vs infrastructure and truly fixed costs. Maybe they’re so close to breaking even per ride that raising costs depresses demand enough to make them unprofitable, but it seems a lot more likely they’re doing this to send a message first and foremost.
Uber is making way more money than they let on. They got caught stashing millions over seas. They and lyft both take over half of the transaction on average and have reduced their support teams to mostly bots and people who can barely read.
I’m a driver in another state/city but if I lived in Minneapolis I’d be loving this.
Why?
I drive uber, empower (a service launched in my market) and I’m building my own service. Getting uber and lyft kicked out of town will do amazing things for the industry and the drivers and riders. Regional services will pop up and this will help filter out the drivers who know how to run a business and act professionally and those who shouldn’t be self employed and customer facing.
I’m on track to pull 6 figures in the next year or two. I’m currently in the process of upgrading to an EV, later this year we will be buying my wife a phev mini van for her to main and I’ll use it for business if needed as well as for road trips.
You’re right even though you’re getting down voted.
Doesn’t make Uber or Lyft any less shady of a company but so many people have no idea of the overhead it takes to “run an app”. They think that it’s just some computers talking over the Internet that they pay 100$ a month for and not the possible 100’s of thousands of dollars they pay monthly for the infrastructure to support those apps.
It’s not an offline game that someone can just download and play, it’s a live service that is running, plus all of the data whether financial or otherwise that is being stored on multiple levels of backups not to mention the security infrastructure that needs to be maintained etc etc etc.
That being said, I’m not defending these companies in the slightest, but for someone to just say “run an app” is a massive understatement.
You're right even though you're getting down voted.
Par for the course at LemmyWorld. Redditors brought their Redditor attitudes to LW and downvote anything they could possibly conceive as corpo sympathizing.
It’s relatively cheap to maintain the service. What costs money is marketing and expanding that service. That’s what most people are working on.
Remember, Lyft and Uber have thousands and thousands of people giving them money every day. They don’t even maintain the cars, they just take a cut off the top. Sometimes greater than 50% of the ride.
They are making a ton of money, but they are also wasting it on new markets, new features, and Superbowl ads. They could easily just charge a little more in Minneapolis to make the same money, but they don’t want the drivers to win.
"Maintaining" means more than just leasing out a few server farms. It also means hiring software engineers, customer/driver support staffs, HR, legal teams, designers, etc, all of which are required to keep the day-to-day going. Uber and Lyft aren't small operations, by any means. They are monstrously huge projects that require a lot of bandwidth - both technical and human - in order to keep the lights on.
For what it's worth, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and pretty much every gig app out there have all operated at a net loss from the very beginning. It's not just expensive to maintain the service, it's impossibly expensive.
Fuck Lyft. I stopped using them after I dropped my phone in a ride and it took the idiot customer service agent FORTY FIVE MINUTES to reach out to the driver. They kept asking me to login to my account to verify it was me, but I couldn’t because it kept sending the 2FA code to my phone… Which I didn’t have. The agent wasn’t able to comprehend this.
What about Uber Eats and Doordash and the others? Do they have to comply with the new minimum wage or shut down too? Hoping they can make a decent wage.
Uber was forbidden from setting up where I live but Uber Eats is a thing here.
As with so much of what happens at X, there is significant confusion about the policy as the company’s rules seem to change based on the whims of Musk rather than a considered process.
Here is what I assume happend:
Elon, desperate for approval from his “fans” personally changed this, because almost all the people left on twitter that engage with him are “right-wingers”. And they dont want to be held accountable for being vile garbage.
And so they, like the most fragile of snowflakes, started to whine about having to follow basic rules of human decency for once in their online existence, making them deeply uncomfortable.
And Elon followed suit, because these are the only people he has left now. People who exploit him for his position and clout, just as he exploits them for small ammounts of dopamine, when they applaud him for making the worls worse again.
I've noticed that healthy people get upset at being wrongly accused. The most vile and guilty get violently and angry at being tightly called out for being exactly what they are.
I have real American problems, like the fact that Americans have abandoned the most patriotic beverages ever!
Tea and Cider!
George Washington would never have been general or president without cider! Tons of Cider! (NOT beer- that wouldn't get as popular until later!)
Johnny Appleseed was NOT planting eating apples, either.
And now, most cider is kinda crap, and is going to give you a hangover. Its so difficult to ensure that you get a good drinking experience for your friends when trying to share with them the wonders of America's first brew of patriots.
And What about the Boston Tea Party?
The South at least keeps the dream alive with iced tea that it doesn't oversteep. (that's how you can tell if somewhere is Southern, btw- if they both have iced tea and don't brew it to bitter hell) But its still not a proper American fixation on reasonably priced tea!
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