> If they had to reclass as employees, they would just raise prices to end consumer 10-20% to compensate (or fund it via other's money like they're doing now to price out rest of market).
I think saying that they would "just" raise prices 10-20% is trivializing the problem. One of the reasons that Uber took off was because it was so much cheaper than regular taxis. Would Uber look the same now if it had had 20% higher prices from the beginning? Almost surely not.
If their costs had been 20% higher, they still would have priced others out of the market by using VC money to subsidize (as they still do now). Technically their prices were higher than cabs, since they were only black cars for the first two years.
I personally never take cabs anymore even if they're cheaper, the Uber experience is 10x better IMO. The only time I'll consider it is when I use Flywheel on NYE to avoid surge pricing.
I take Uber almost daily from the train to my office because it's about 30% cheaper than a cab. If it wasn't I'd just grab a cab at the cab line. It's so much easier.
Of course if uber has to raise rates because their employee costs go up, you'd have to expect cab companies to do the same because all their employees aren't getting benefits either.
They are, however, paying their portion of the payroll taxes, disability, unemployment, etc. And perhaps softer benefits that still have costs, like paid time off.
I think what happens in the media is small outfit bias.
Über is big, so what they do must be judged in that light, yellow cab is small, so they get a pass even though they engage in similar practices.
I listen to NPR and they had a bit about über and them being "unfair" to drivers, but never was that compared to how drivers are treated at yellow cab for example. So, because they are big they are looked at more suspiciously, plus they are "tech" so there must be a bad angle there somewhere. People have a thing for underdogs, I do too, but not so much in this case because cabs can often be worse for the drivers, at this time. No telling in the future when automation takes over. The point will be irrelevant then.
You're correct - taxi drivers have been suing for decades to get employee status. You don't hear about it because Uber is the first major national player that everyone recognizes.
The money for a cashier to make a livable wage doesn't have to come from increasing the costs of all goods. The point of the article was essentially that companies have more money than they know what do with. If they paid their employees more, not only would it be better for the employees, it would be better for the company as more money in the hands of the poor will drive up demand for goods.
I think you mean, "If other companies(but not us) pay their employees more, then as consumers they can buy our stuff". I seriously doubt that giving an extra dollar to an employee generates more than a dollar in actual revenue looking solely at the purchases made by that employee. Maybe there are other social knock-on effects, but I don't see them spending more than $x on your own products when you give them $x.
One plausible exception would be for items so expensive that they're often financed with debt: A car manufacturing company might plausibly generate more than a dollar in revenue in the short-term if its employees borrowed money to finance it.
Another plausible exception would be if you gave someone a temporary raise, and they immediately started spending more and going further into debt(think buying a bigger house, bigger car, funding a bonus vacation on a credit card, etc.). Then when you cut their wages 6 months later, it's possible that for some items you would've convinced your own employees to spend more money than you gave them on your own products.
A third exception might be for companies that completely control the employees' spending. For example, a prison or a camp full of debt slaves might be paid $3/hour, but they could only spend it on overpriced company goods. Raising it to $4/hour still wouldn't exactly generate direct revenue over the long term, but it wouldn't cost the company much at all since they'd capture 100% of the spending. Anything short of that 100% is savings, and people might be more willing to spend down their savings if they thought money was easier to get. So you could - in the short term - make money by raising wages. Doubly-so if you extend them credit(on top of whatever debt they're working off).
I can't think of a way that the "giving people more money gives them more money to give back to you" argument actually works that doesn't involve saddling them with debt. And these are merely plausible - I don't know that they're what would actually happen.
Actually, what does them being employees have to do with the argument? If that argument were valid, why wouldn't my local grocery store hand out free $20 bills to anyone who comes in, since this would spur them to buy stuff? Or if you were truly convinced that this would make the companies more money, you could easily be a millionaire by buying up a local McDonalds(with a government-backed loan), raising everyone's wages, and then when your income goes up by x% reselling the business for an x% increase on the $300,000 or so you bought the McDonald's for(and repeating this a couple times).
I'm just guessing based on my experience with Amazon's Kinesis Client Library (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/kinesis/latest/dev/developing-con...), but it probably means that you write something as a package with certain public methods, and they have a wrapper around it that knows how to invoke it. That's how KCL integrates with the languages that it supports.
We still use salt to configure our docker hosts... I'm not sure how docker can ever be a replacement to things that operate at a lower abstraction level, because you still need to install docker.
Does anyone have any ideas here? Has anyone ventured down this path?
Comparing to Facebook seems like comparing apples to oranges. The article is about selling physical goods and services for less than it costs to produce them, which is different than allowing people to access a service that you don't yet know how you're going to pay for.
A better analogy might be companies that manufacture video game consoles, where they almost always sell at a loss when a new console is first released, with the hope to make profit in the long term - but there you're locked in to some extent, as you pointed out.
> Is that $180 figure correct? CalTrain charges my route $2,148 annually for a pass, and I'm not even going the full SF to SJ distance. (Granted, that's the low figure, so you need the ridership to get it… but still! It's a 91% quantity discount, if you get enough people.)
We're pretty excited for the compiler and runtime being in Go, because we publish binaries for many different operating systems. Previously this required installing a separate cross-compilation toolchain, but will not any longer.
I think saying that they would "just" raise prices 10-20% is trivializing the problem. One of the reasons that Uber took off was because it was so much cheaper than regular taxis. Would Uber look the same now if it had had 20% higher prices from the beginning? Almost surely not.