(Thread IKs:
Platystemon)
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Justin Tyme posted:Why the gently caress is it so hard for a company that makes an app to have "contractors" who drive their own car drive people places for money, to be profitable? Wtf is costing them so much in overhead their advertising and marketing budget is insane, and they run operations at a loss to undercut their competitors they have no lock-in on either the driver side or the customer side - anyone can download the Lyft app and start using that instead with basically no friction. and the "rideshare" business model relies heavily on the network effect, where the company with the most drivers and users provides the best service and attracts even more drivers and users so they plow tremendous amounts of money into advertising, promotional deals, coupons, and so on, while also charging less for riders than they pay drivers. once they drive everyone else out of a particular city and gain a local monopoly, then they jack up the prices and slash driver pay to run that particular city at a profit. but anywhere they have competition, they'll gladly run a huge deficit for the sake of crushing their rivals, knowing they can make up the difference with tremendous amounts of VC money
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May 6, 2021 17:18
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they’re about destroying public transit, unions, and further entrenching car culture
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May 6, 2021 17:37
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We probably would have gotten a huge investment in public transit during the pandemic but whoops liberals all love their little rent-a-coachman country aristocrat cosplay, so gently caress you essential workers I want to speak to your manager!
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May 6, 2021 17:40
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Car bad. Death to car.
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May 6, 2021 17:44
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I want to ride trains
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May 6, 2021 18:05
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Volmarias posted:I don't think that's the deep dark secret goal, just the outcome. I do think "be the last one standing, then charge monopolistic prices / distribute fixed R&D costs (including app maintenance etc) over a variable and rising revenue stream" is the current model, and they've been extremely successful with the near total absence of taxi services in some places. Why regulators didn't just outright ban them since they're blatantly breaking existing laws, even if they're protectionist ones, I don't know. France and Germany won't let them charge below market price, and Japan just fuckin banned them. American Incompetence is riding high as hell here.
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May 6, 2021 18:16
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Tulip posted:France and Germany won't let them charge below market price, and Japan just fuckin banned them. American Incompetence is riding high as hell here. Gotta differentiate though, is it incompetence due to [malice/greed] or incompetence due to [partisan gridlock/paralysis] or incompetence due to [the clowns running this circus having failed all the way up]?
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May 6, 2021 18:33
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Volmarias posted:I don't think that's the deep dark secret goal, just the outcome. I do think "be the last one standing, then charge monopolistic prices / distribute fixed R&D costs (including app maintenance etc) over a variable and rising revenue stream" is the current model, and they've been extremely successful with the near total absence of taxi services in some places. Why regulators didn't just outright ban them since they're blatantly breaking existing laws, even if they're protectionist ones, I don't know. If the regulators banned them, how would the regulators get their big payday from them 
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May 6, 2021 18:56
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I think the original goal was to make money and when they realized that wasn't happening the new plan is just to ride out the grift and hope investors never catch on.
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May 6, 2021 19:02
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Invalid Validation posted:like most venture capitalist projects I’m assuming they just wanted to get big enough to be bought and move on. Nah they are shooting for a monopoly, at which point they can safely raise prices until they're profitable.
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May 6, 2021 19:08
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Justin Tyme posted:Why the gently caress is it so hard for a company that makes an app to have "contractors" who drive their own car drive people places for money, to be profitable? Wtf is costing them so much in overhead lobbying to make the lives of everyone more miserable, of course
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May 6, 2021 19:08
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Vox Nihili posted:Nah they are shooting for a monopoly, at which point they can safely raise prices until they're profitable. who needs to be profitable if you're close enough to a monopoly that you can be insanely unprofitable and threaten to crash Number, to force the government to bail you out?
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May 6, 2021 19:20
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Main Paineframe posted:their advertising and marketing budget is insane, and they run operations at a loss to undercut their competitors Their marketing must be insanely expensive because even if you skim an absolute pittance off your drivers' fares I cannot understand how operating an app costs so much when you aren't even responsible for providing or maintaining vehicles or driver benefits. In my mind its basically "the app costs $10,000 a month in hosting fees, we have 50,000 drivers per month which generates $1,000,000 a month in revenue, but this month we were net negative by one billion dollars" like what the gently caress is going on?
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May 6, 2021 19:27
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Tulip posted:American Incompetence is riding high as hell here. Not seeing it. There is no attempt to do anything else to be incompetent at American greed? grift? graft? loving the little guy? shortsightedness? definitely
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May 6, 2021 19:32
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Justin Tyme posted:Their marketing must be insanely expensive because even if you skim an absolute pittance off your drivers' fares I cannot understand how operating an app costs so much when you aren't even responsible for providing or maintaining vehicles or driver benefits. I guess it adds up when your HQ is in downtown SF and everyone involved (except the "contractors") expects to be paid like tech bros
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May 6, 2021 19:44
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The rideshare apps are like Medicare for car transit, except if Medicare only paid for 30% of the cost. They are subsidized by the Fed printing fiat for the past decade and shoveling it to VCs.
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May 6, 2021 19:49
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Justin Tyme posted:Their marketing must be insanely expensive because even if you skim an absolute pittance off your drivers' fares I cannot understand how operating an app costs so much when you aren't even responsible for providing or maintaining vehicles or driver benefits. Tired: joke about losing money on each sale and making up for it in volume Wired: actually do that irl
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May 6, 2021 19:55
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Justin Tyme posted:Their marketing must be insanely expensive because even if you skim an absolute pittance off your drivers' fares I cannot understand how operating an app costs so much when you aren't even responsible for providing or maintaining vehicles or driver benefits.  the "general and administrative" category of that chart accounts for the salaries of management, as well as generic white-collar departments like finance, HR, legal, and lobbying note that this chart does not include payments to drivers, which totaled somewhere north of $8 billion that quarter, and gets subtracted before it even gets to Uber's discretionary budget it also doesn't include various side costs and one-time expenses like taxes, refunds, driver nor does it include middleman costs like credit card fees, data center costs, and so on. those side costs are all lumped together as "cost of revenue", which accounted for another billion or so dollars of Uber's spending that quarter add everything up and Uber got paid $12 billion by customers in Q2 2018. but then they paid over 2/3rds of that to drivers, and more than two billion more to various fees and middlemen, leaving them with roughly $1.5 billion in gross profit to go into their own actual budget. and then they spent $1.43 billion of that on marketing, managers, and paper-pushers. so they were already almost in the red before they spent a single loving dollar on the app or driver support or anything else in their supposed core business
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May 6, 2021 20:14
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Justin Tyme posted:Their marketing must be insanely expensive because even if you skim an absolute pittance off your drivers' fares I cannot understand how operating an app costs so much when you aren't even responsible for providing or maintaining vehicles or driver benefits. So going by this post 30.5 Days posted:That's definitely not the plan, because uber has done some experimentation during periods where lyft wasn't spun up in an area or whatever, and found that demand is pretty elastic, people will walk or get rides from friends or just not go if the price goes above a certain amount. After discovering that they started working on uber pool to try and drive costs down, and when that failed they started doing self-driving. Now they're publicly traded though so they don't really need a plan they just need to convince wall street that there's a plan. Also the plan might just be to let other people buy self-driving cars when they come out some day and plug the cars into the uber network. It sounds like they're trying to use advertising to convince people they don't have friends/bikes/legs.
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May 6, 2021 20:17
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they could probably fire 1 guy and post their first profit
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May 6, 2021 20:41
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The Skeleton King posted:Car bad. Death to car. tell me more
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May 6, 2021 20:55
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Centrist Committee posted:We probably would have gotten a huge investment in public transit during the pandemic but whoops liberals all love their little rent-a-coachman country aristocrat cosplay, so gently caress you essential workers I want to speak to your manager! not sure a pandemic involving a disease that's highly contagious in close quarters would have driven the funding of mass public transit
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May 6, 2021 21:45
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https://twitter.com/exodotpet/status/1390352873154875397?s=20
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May 6, 2021 21:55
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No one could have seen this coming!
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May 6, 2021 23:13
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Kitfox88 posted:not sure a pandemic involving a disease that's highly contagious in close quarters would have driven the funding of mass public transit
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May 6, 2021 23:26
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Weird in how an economic model that demands perpetual growth the only place to squeeze profit growth is labour.
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May 7, 2021 01:57
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Kitfox88 posted:not sure a pandemic involving a disease that's highly contagious in close quarters would have driven the funding of mass public transit China ran trains at less than half capacity (to limit proximity and number of people who come into contact with any infected individual), while returning a more or less normal amount (hundreds of millions) of people after chinese new year. Part of that was the return being spread out over a longer period, but they also increased the number of trains running. Also during the quarantine, staffing at train stations was way up, and it's still up, with all the people screening people and sorting them into risk groups. Of course that means nothing in the dumbest country in the history of mankind, just saying that it makes sense to increase spending during a pandemic.
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May 7, 2021 02:47
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They're also extremely strict about quarantining, reasonably, when we can't even get 1/5 of the nation to wear a loving surgical mask at a minimum.
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May 7, 2021 02:56
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You can’t increase spending when revenues are down! The budget won’t balance!
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May 7, 2021 03:00
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withak posted:You can’t increase spending when revenues are down! The budget won’t balance! simcity_you_will_regret_this.png link goes here
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May 7, 2021 03:11
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kind of related: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem can you IMAGINE the year 2038 and how badly we will wish it to be over??
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May 7, 2021 03:20
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mawarannahr posted:kind of related: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem Surely we learned our lesson from y2k and will be ready in time right? Right?
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May 7, 2021 03:24
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the entirety of that Berkshire “issue” would of course vanish if Buffet allowed the stock to split, but you know we just can’t allow those dumb proles to buy any sharesquote:"I know that if we had something that it was a lot easier for anybody with $500 to buy, that we would get an awful lot of people buying it who didn't have the faintest idea what they were doing," Buffett told investors at Berkshire's annual meeting in 1995. bawfuls has issued a correction as of 03:59 on May 7, 2021 |
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May 7, 2021 03:56
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Zil posted:Surely we learned our lesson from y2k and will be ready in time right? Right? No. Y2K response was the digital Montreal Protocol.
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May 7, 2021 04:16
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Main Paineframe posted:their advertising and marketing budget is insane, and they run operations at a loss to undercut their competitors When Uber and Lyft left Austin for a while, a bunch of competitors just stepped in without any real disruption. It's just not an industry where you can lock in market share. When (if?) the VC money runs out and they have to raise prices what happens. bawfuls posted:the entirety of that Berkshire “issue” would of course vanish if Buffet allowed the stock to split, but you know we just can’t allow those dumb proles to buy any shares They've had class b shares that are effectively identical but 1500x smaller for a while now. AreWeDrunkYet has issued a correction as of 04:27 on May 7, 2021 |
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May 7, 2021 04:23
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I respect Warren Buffet’s dedication to making number bigger. The original justification of discouraging retail investors was silly, but at this point he’s in a pissing match with a computer, and that’s amusing.
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May 7, 2021 04:23
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Platystemon posted:I respect Warren Buffet’s dedication to making number bigger. Not when they're drowning the world in piss it's not.
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May 7, 2021 04:29
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Splitting the stock wouldn’t make us any drier.
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May 7, 2021 04:31
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Platystemon posted:I respect Warren Buffet’s dedication to making number bigger. look on my number, ye mighty, and lol. for I am a rich rear end in a top hat and I'm taking it with me.
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May 7, 2021 04:31
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Platystemon posted:Splitting the stock wouldn’t make us any drier. Putting down the pissers like the diseased vermin they are would though.
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May 7, 2021 04:37
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