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posted by janrinok on Thursday May 07 2020, @05:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the challenging-times dept.
Uber lays off 3,700 people as its ride business craters:

Uber will lay off 3,700 people from its customer support and recruiting teams, the company announced in a Wednesday regulatory filing. That figure represents 14 percent of Uber's 26,900 employees, CNBC reports.

Uber has already frozen hiring, and CEO Dara Khosrowshahi will forego his salary for the remainder of the year, the company says.

The Information reported last week that Uber's ride bookings have fallen 80 percent from the same period a year earlier. Uber has tried to compensate by expanding its delivery business, launching two new services called Uber Connect and Uber Direct. But rides have historically been the largest part of Uber's business, making an 80 percent drop difficult to stomach.

Last week, Uber's main US rival, Lyft, announced 1,000 layoffs—a 17-percent reduction of the company's workforce.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 07 2020, @07:53PM (8 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday May 07 2020, @07:53PM (#991436)

    Build a house of cards, insure it with public money - profit! It's the capitalist dream.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 08 2020, @03:02AM (4 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 08 2020, @03:02AM (#991524) Journal
    It doesn't matter what the nominal form of government is supposed to be. You leave food out, it gets eaten. This is why I continue to support reducing the size (and budget) of government rather than complain that the "capitalist dream" revolves so much around taking money from that government.
    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 08 2020, @12:28PM (3 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday May 08 2020, @12:28PM (#991621)

      You leave food out, it gets eaten.

      People need food, they don't get it they die. As demonstrated by the latest crisis: we actually do try to keep people from dying.

      Me, personally, I don't mind taxes paying for food. Food for everyone, enough to eat 1600 economical healthy calories a day. We, as a society can afford that. That + basic health care and the things that make health care economical like basic shelter, clothing, etc. It's actually cheaper overall to provide it than it is to withhold it and then try to keep people from dying after they've been deprived of it; not to mention more pleasant for everyone involved, unless you get off on watching others suffer.

      What I do mind taxes paying for is mountains of bullshit. Except in the present crisis, those who need food and are unable to get it through the "normal" modern cycle of savings->education->job->paychecks->savings->purchase have to climb mountains of bullshit to get to the tax supplied food. The food is there, those who need it and have no alternative do scale the mountains of bullshit to get it, our taxes pay for the erection and maintenance of these mountains of bullshit, and the periodic lobbing of bullshit bombs at those who have reached the other side to get the tax supplied food. Legions of government employees do nothing but shovel this bullshit out with the only goal being impediment of access to tax supplied food.

      How about: everybody gets food (or UBI), whether they need it or not? Simple, easy to understand, cheap to administer. I could do with a lot less interaction with people who hate their jobs, but do it because the alternative is climbing mountains of bullshit to avoid starvation.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 08 2020, @01:49PM (2 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 08 2020, @01:49PM (#991642) Journal

        People need food, they don't get it they die. As demonstrated by the latest crisis: we actually do try to keep people from dying.

        The problem is that most of that "food" doesn't get eaten by who you expect. That's why you were complaining about "insure it with public money". The same impulses to feed people who need food, also feeds "houses of cards".

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 08 2020, @06:42PM (1 child)

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday May 08 2020, @06:42PM (#991763)

          The problem is that most of that "food" doesn't get eaten by who you expect.

          Thus: UBI. Preferably administered as a drip of $0.02778 per minute, paid direct deposit into the normal banking channels, and if persons are incapable of holding on to a debit card, they can have an RFID chip implanted that gives them access to their account. Hungry? Nobody stays hungry for long, after 36 minutes they have received enough UBI to buy something off the McD's $1 value menu. Nowhere to sleep? If you check into a flop house for 8 hours, at the end of those 8 hours you've got $12 for the night's bed and shower, and $1.33 left over for breakfast.

          The same impulses to feed people who need food, also feeds "houses of cards".

          I don't know what impulses you're on about, the houses of cards I'm talking about are built by the "Everybody's gonna get filthy stinkin' rich within 8 months if we all just bust our asses" (and get insanely lucky) crowd. Build a business fast, loose, and risky as hell - 19/20 fail, but that 1/20 can pay a 100:1 ROI, for a little while. The whole VC industry is built up around feeding these meat grinders, and leaving the dead meat for mommy and daddy (or public assistance) to bail out.

          --
          🌻🌻 [google.com]
          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 08 2020, @09:18PM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 08 2020, @09:18PM (#991810) Journal
            Roughly, $14,600 a year apiece (or almost $5 trillion a year over 330 million citizens) on top of all the other stuff that the US tries to do. How are we paying for that? Here's the scenario I'm envisioning for that: UBI Stall.

            The bright bulbs trying to pay for this scheme will start with the usual taxing the rich. The rich will remove every asset that they can (often very easily since a good portion of them never lived in the US in the first place and already experienced with such things) with the early result that much of the expected tax base evaporates overnight. I figure they'll move on to the easy targets next - people who have jobs and of course, taxing the UBI itself say through sales and excise taxes. We'll probably see a lot of gimmicky taxes like sin taxes with a generous definition of what sin is.

            Corruption will of course get worse, since only the more fraudulent can promise that everything will get better and the gullible will vote for that to protect or even increase their UBI checks. Meanwhile, with the combo of people dropping out of the workforce and things just costing more due to higher labor costs, we'll see the peculiar phenomena of increasing amounts of money and work required to do even mundane things. This is the "stall", a sharp reversal in productivity coming as a combination of higher cost labor, business which relies on substantial government support and corruption instead of the providing of services to prosper, and government entities which grow ever less capable of fulfilling basic functions.

            I think the whole thing would end in a few years with a bout of austerity as external creditors impose a financial discipline of sorts, which would probably include a great curbing of the UBI, a moderate correction of the excesses of the past. Past that who knows? Civil war, mergers with other countries, or just another plodding country in the world are possible futures.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2020, @03:19AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2020, @03:19AM (#991528)

    Build a house of cards, insure it with public money - profit! It's the capitalist dream.

    Who is profiting from this?

    Folks receiving 1/2 (or less) their normal pay in unemployment benefits? It's the horrible tragedy of paying people who aren't working a pittance, which *might* keep them from defaulting on their mortgages or cooking up their pets and children so they don't starve*. This is both unfair and an unacceptable burden on real (read: not poor) Americans.

    Employers? Many of whom have seen their revenue drop by 50-75% or had to close down altogether? They're the real victims here. Many won't be able to afford another Alfa Romeo or Tuscan villa for *at least* a year or so. This is a completely unacceptable state of affairs and must be dealt with immediately!

    But there is a solution! You can easily reduce the number of people sucking at the public teat (get your hands out of my wallet, you thieving scumbag!) while creating thousands of jobs! It's called "decimation."

    We should have weekly decimations [wikipedia.org], similar to ranking employees at review time and firing the bottom ten percent.

    But instead of firing those folks, the bottom ten percent should be summarily executed. This will create *thousands* of jobs in the executioner/death/burial industry and give gun and ammunition manufacturers a much needed boost.

    Weekly decimations would resolve any issues with overwhelming the health care system, and would leave more money for the folks who need it most. Maintaining 150-foot yachts and private jets is *expensive*.

    The first week, we take the bottom ten percent (chosen by real incomes) and kill them. That would reduce the population to ~300 million. After the second week the population would be down to ~270 million, and so on.

    At that rate, we'd be down to about 1/2 (~160 million people ) the current population in six weeks or so. Let's go for it! The "job creators" need more money, after all! Open up America Again!

    And once we get down to 70 million or so, we can finally have the country we deserve, without all those lazy, shiftless takers sitting around "smoking weed and watching Netflix" all day.

    The best part of this is that rather than killing these folks *slowly* via joblessness, homelessness, malnutrition and disease, we remove the useless from our society quickly, saving lots of money and more importantly, creating lots of jobs.

    Weekly decimation should be part of *every* plan to open up the economy. It's a win-win for everyone!

    *You apparently seem to be unaware that the majority of the US economy is based on consumer spending. If consumers have no money, they can't spend it and the economy goes to hell...and stays there.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 08 2020, @12:11PM (1 child)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday May 08 2020, @12:11PM (#991618)

      Who is profiting from this?

      Look to the owners of the house of cards: low construction costs, reap profits while it stands, when it falls: walk away and build another.

      The great thing about our current legal structure is that the owners don't even have to walk away, they can just collapse parts of their card house enterprise when times are tough - walk away from those parts - and then rebuild more flimsy structures that generate profits for them as long as they stand when the environment will support them.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2020, @05:06PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2020, @05:06PM (#991727)

        What a bunch of vague bullshit.

        The best I can figure based on what you did say, with its nearly null semantic content is that you're railing against limited liability corporations [wikipedia.org]. Is that what's got your knickers in a twist?

        House of cards? Are you talking about the fine folks over at Hoyle or Vistaprint?

        Speak plainly, as you're sounding like a conspiracy theorist. Then again, maybe you are one.