Then buy Lyft stock. I'm sorry folks, but Uber and Lyft are the most egregious scams since Bernie Madoff. Shills tout their stock by pointing to their massive revenue growth but they lose money with every transaction. The faster their revenue grows, the more money they lose and the faster they burn through their capital. Furthermore they have no discernible path to ever making a single penny in profit.
They are already squeezing their drivers as hard as they can and there is not one more drop of juice to be had there. And if they raise prices to the point where they can be profitable, competitors will jump in because the barriers to entry in this business are insignificant. The only reason they don't have more competition now is because nobody else is stupid enough to flush money down the toilet.
The taxi business was profitable because you had to buy one of a limited number of medallions. Restricting the supply kept the price of taxi service high enough to make money. That's why taxi medallions were worth a lot of money.
Now the ride sharing companies are claiming that eventually they'll have self-driving cars, and then they can be profitable because they won't have to pay drivers any more. I don't actually believe that, but even if I'm wrong, if self-driving cars ever actually work then anybody can set up a competing business and there will be no value in Lyft stock.
Can I interest you in some tulip bulbs?
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Thanks for the wry reference to the 17th-century Dutch fiasco.
From a purely common-sense standpoint, I've been against Uber and Lyft from the beginning. There are good reasons people drive taxis professionally, among them knowledgeability and boundaries. It should be a purely professional transaction, not someone driving his/her car and imagining s/he will make a lot of money. And people in this country are so weird because of the sickness and denial of the larger society as a whole ... it's a bad idea to put so many of them out in their cars and try to turn them into self-reliant ride-givers. It's a recipe for disaster on many levels--financially, socially, business-wise.
The IRS would not allow people to initially deduct $0.58/mile on their taxes unless that was what it cost to drive a car. Folks just don't get it: maintenance, depreciation, repairs, insurance, tires, gasoline, etc. It costs $0.58/mile to drive a decent vehicle. That means an Uber or Lyft driver would have to charge almost $3.00 for a 5-mile drive they give someone--just to break even.
The "gig economy" sucks. It's just folks looking to make money to sit on their asses and have others do the work for them, capitalism at its soulless worst. We've all been commodified by this spiritually bankrupt system, far from it bringing out the best in people! The view that the "captains of industry" are heroes, like in Ayn Rand's bullshit ... well, how's that worked for us so far? Oh, yeah, it's destroying the world as we know it and endangering the species to the point of extinction. So much for the sanctity of money and power.
It's one little marble in space, folks, the only one we've got. Sorry, Arthur C. Clarke.
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