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A study conducted by the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research analysed revenue and costs for over 1100 Lyft and Uber drivers, with the conclusion that most earn below minimum wage for their state and about 30% actually lose money when all the costs of owning and operating their vehicles are taken into account.
"A Median driver generates $0.59 per mile of driving, and incurs costs of $0.30 per mile", "On an hourly basis, the median profit was $3.37 per hour".
Because actual vehicle operating costs are significantly lower than the IRS allowance of $0.54/mile, many drivers report incomes that are substantially lower that their actual incomes, leading to a large pool of untaxed income (although it is small for each driver).
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MIT Study Shows How Much Driving for Uber or Lyft Sucks
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Obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off your goal.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Saturday March 03 2018, @05:11PM (11 children)
If it were really *that* unprofitable to drive for Uber/Lyft, why would anyone still be doing it? Workers can't work almost for free and still pay their rent;
No. They can't pay their rent doing that. However, many of them can't (or won't) do math either.
They used to do something similar to pizza drivers in the US and people still fell for it even back then when the education was much better. Back in the day, one friend bragged about getting a fairly high paying pizza delivery job because he had is own car. I talked him into doing a cost-benefit analysis, taking into account the cost of fuel, and we saw quickly that he'd be losing a lot of money on the deal and depending on heavy tips to break even. Amortizing maintenance costs per hour driven cut into the tips noticeably as well. Needless to say there were better, far more fun ways to go broke so he quit that day.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 03 2018, @05:52PM (5 children)
If you need any evidence of people doing things because they can't do the math and get dazzled by the exceptions, just look at how many MLM schemes there are.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Saturday March 03 2018, @06:52PM (3 children)
Or look at farming. Farmers have been squeezed for decades, forced to get bigger and bigger. You can't justify a million dollars worth of state of the art farm equipment without a lot of acreage to farm. You can't work crops a measly 2 or 4 rows at a time any more, like you could 50 years ago. You'll lose money if you try it. Lot of farmers did just that. Spend $100,000 on seed, plant and grow and harvest the crops, and at the end of it all, get $105,000, or maybe $95,000, or less, depending on the commodity prices. And they'd extend their loans and try again next year, hoping for better prices. Eventually, when they have nothing more to put up as collateral, the bank won't loan them any more and they have to quit. Yes, most farmers were bad at finance. Banks too sometimes got burned. Land values could collapse any time, and then suddenly the collateral isn't enough to cover the loans.
There was a joke about a farmer who won the lottery. When asked what he would do with the money he said he'd just farm until it was all gone.
Anyway, there's more to this financial ineptitude than mere lack of math skills. It seems more a mental issue. People engaging in wishful thinking, refusing to see that their fantastic idea isn't a goldmine, or even novel. And refusing to do the math, rather than inability. They don't want to know.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Saturday March 03 2018, @07:29PM (1 child)
That's not as much of a joke as you think. My grandfather wanted to be a farmer, but would work as a licensed electrician for a few years every decade to build up a nest-egg that he would slowly deplete by farming. He knew he couldn't earn a living farming, but he liked it a lot better than being an electrician. (I, OTOH, never liked farming. It involves an incredible amount of hard physical work, getting up very early, being out on cold, rainy weather, and it's boring. But *he* liked it. And so does at least one of my brothers. Who also doesn't quite break even, and knows that he can't quite break even. If he had a good well he could probably break even, but not turn a profit. OTOH, because they both knew they couldn't break even, they didn't go into debt and get saddled with loans.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday March 03 2018, @09:53PM
People enjoy driving, it's why over-the-road truck drivers will work for poverty level compensation.
Some people enjoy working with kids and virtually volunteer as teachers' aides in the elementary schools - and that's fine for them.
If Uber drivers enjoy what they do and know that it's screwing them financially then that's fine, let them drive because they enjoy meeting random strangers in random places at random times on an on-call basis and driving them where they want to go. It can be interesting, even exciting sometimes...
The problem is that a lot of people will see the short term paycheck and think they're making a living when instead they're actually digging themselves into debt... so that's where fact-based education needs to come in and help those who might not be thinking long-term for themselves.
When somebody declares bankruptcy, the rest of the world that hasn't declared bankruptcy gets to pick up their tab. I'd rather not be picking up the tabs of any happily deluded Uber drivers, or similarly deceived workers at minimal net-gain jobs.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Saturday March 03 2018, @08:27PM
Or look at farming. Farmers have been squeezed for decades, forced to get bigger and bigger.
From my understanding that is because of the tax breaks and other subsidies for large farms.
If things are left to the market, without subsidies, then the smaller farms turn out to be more efficient at production. However, at least in some areas there is the problem of real estate speculation and farmers get taxed as if they were sitting on an office park or large residential neighborhood. Then in pretty much all areas, due to population pressure, farms that do get sold end up priced as if they were going to be used as office parks or residential neighborhoods. That puts the new farmer in terrible debt from day 0.
Soil and microclimates are not fungible commodities. There are very, very good reasons that farmsteads were staked out on specific plots, especially during the last centuries when dynamite and machines became available. However, gone is gone [scientificamerican.com] and even if one day people figure out that you can't eat money they won't have anything to work with or on.
Maybe rockwool and hydroponics will feed the oligarchs and their immediate support system. Maybe not. The book, Make Room! Make Room! [wikipedia.org], and not the movie based on it, is too depressing because in the 50+ years since its publication it has become less and less like science fiction. In some ways the book is too optimistic and doesn't have terminator seeds and monsanto politics.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 03 2018, @07:09PM
Are you suggesting the the way Betsy DeVoss made her money is what contributes to Americans being unable to do math, and figure out that Uber is a scam?
Uber School: have a living room that is empty during the day? Can you read?
Uber Laundry: amortize your appliances!
Uber Barber!
Uber Opioids.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 03 2018, @07:06PM (2 children)
I fondly remember the time when the US school system was ever so slightly better than the abomination we have now. There was slightly less rote memorization and less useless standardized testing! Wow! What a grand system it was for creating worker drones.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday March 04 2018, @02:28AM (1 child)
I went through the US school system in the 80s and very early 90s. It was a complete abomination back then, and that was ~30 years ago now. If it ever wasn't an abomination, it must have been well before I was born.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Sunday March 04 2018, @11:05AM
it must have been well before I was born.
I think it was only a little before your time. "Reaganomics" had a swift, negative effect on the US schools. Talking with people that went through those schools in the 1970s or earlier gives me the impression that while not great they were acceptable. Of course some particular schools stood out noticeably on either end of the curve. However, the average seemed to have good results. The defund-sabotage-privatize tactics, with the accompanying PR smears, really only started with Reagan and have only ramped up since then. There's so many ways that causes trouble that many dissertations could be written on that.
However, way earlier, it was possible, if one had ambition and the opportunity to later move, to start out in a one room school and rise high up in research or industry. A long since deceased older colleague of someone I know who was himself born in the 30's went to a one room school and still became a top researcher and academic. The teacher at his school had replaced the desk with his bed and would lie in it the whole day and direct the classroom with the help of a buggy whip. Apparently he could zap with extreme precision and reach every single student at their desk if they got out of line or made an incorrect answer. It was possible to learn. But unlike today rather than metaphorically beating the learning out of students it was beaten into them, sometimes physically. In these times corporeal punishment is avoidable but what needs to be revived is the focus on learning.
In a different state, another, who was a joker to his dying day, did very well in small business despite having gone to a one room school. One of his best pranks was long running. He told that he and his friends made up a story about another kid who was too far away to do the daily walk to school. So they arranged with their teacher to bring extra homework and tests home to the imaginary student. By graduation time, the imaginary student had gotten his diploma with the minimal passing grade and the teacher gave it to this joker and his friend to bring to the imaginary student. Either the teacher was aware of what they were doing and went along with the prank or was really into getting the students to learn. I mention it only because I'd like to think it was the latter based on the small handful I knew of from that school.
It's not going to come back on its own however. Some push is needed to bring that goal-oriented teaching back. Defunding and demeaning the teachers [newsok.com] while burying them in irrelevant paperwork [commondreams.org] is not going to do that.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday March 03 2018, @08:09PM (1 child)
The pizza driver example is one way for a kid to siphon money out of their parents via the car their parents pay for...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 03 2018, @11:43PM
Mining cryptocurrency involves less work though... ;)