So I think the difficulty is less around investors being more savvy to the economics of ride sharing and delivery services, but that they're more savvy to the realities of how far off those technologies are. And that the entrenched firms like Waymo will be far, far better positioned to offer an autonomous taxi service on day 1 than some plucky startup will be.

It was commissioned by Uber but conducted by an independent research firm, and the methodology is documented, so it's up to you how reliable of a source you find that.

Since these are major lawsuits and it's also becoming a pretty big story in California, I imagine if there are significant flaws here or if there are other reputable surveys that have found the opposite, that those will start to surface. So far I haven't seen anything to that effect.

[0] https://www.cadriversurvey.com/

Edit: I missed in the irony in your comment as well on first read. There's an entire side industry devoted to helping workers maximize their profit, and many seem to have success doing so. That seems like a good thing, at least for those who want it? Compare that to other industries like Amazon warehouse workers, where many are full-time employees. It doesn't seem to have helped their working conditions much as there are a lot of complaints about the job, and if certain employees are more productive the company pockets the savings rather than the employees being able to make more money.

What shows the "hate" more clearly is when there is "good" news or just an neutral announcement from/about these companies, where you will see most of the comments being negative to a point they are often irrelevant to the article itself.

Seems like the current CEO is good, but the company gets the good and the bad from it's history. The good part is that they got a ton of money, like inconceivable amounts of money.

There's way more money to be made in having accurate measurements than having inaccurate measurements that optimization engineers can't rely on. The more accurate the measurements, the more confidence you have that your marketplace optimization algorithms are producing the desired marketplace dynamics.

I was paid 1 mile, actual distance 3.5-4.0 miles.

Previous versions of the app would use the first result returned by Google Directions API, which could have been best not shortest (I'm not sure, anyone know?). Newer version (pending app store review) does shortest always.

US culture of tipping is so ridiculous that I think people actually derive enjoyment from tipping by giving themselves an ego boost when they do, as some sort of charity or having role played as an extremely rich person being benevolent with their wealth.

You're comparing apples and oranges. Tipping is just the way portions of the food service industry works.

Pizza delivery is profitable because they sell cardboard and depend on teenager drivers relying on their parent's auto insurance.

Anyone who's actually looked at the person delivering their food would have thought twice about the margins in food delivery. To spell it out: food delivery is often performed by immigrants with few choices for under-the-table work. The margins are thin-to-none. The current system has worked because no one's investigating the thousands of independent restaurants.

Now tech companies are trying to do the same thing, but multimillion dollar corporations have a harder time hiding their labor exploitation from the public.

Going back to ryan's point, I agree that with full vertical integration (dirt cheap ingredients and centralised factory kitchens), food delivery could be profitable, but at what point is one just selling frozen food from a microwave/oven in the back of a car?

The term for this is dark kitchens.

I always wondered something about those meals that are available on airplanes:

in the past I liked quite a lot most of them (e.g. a small piece of meat/fish/other, some vegetables and/or rice, a slice of bread, a small dessert) => wouldn't it be quite profitable to have a similar delivery service for "kits/menus" like those ones (just e.g. ~4 different "kits" available to be ordered daily), cold (but pre-cooked if needed) that only need to be warmed up at home? (if 3 stewards/esses, on a moving tube, managed to warm that up for 300 people then I guess that I'll manage to do the same for myself at home)?

I admit that on one hand the "delivery"-part of the service would be related only to getting fresh (uncooked or "freshly pre-cooked") stuff (not ready for consumption), but on the other hand that way the delivery could be spread over a longer timespan (multiple deliveries per trip, better delivery organization, therefore less costs) and could be left in the mailbox (assuming at least a mediocre insulation of the package).

Here in Switzerland/Zurich I am aware of some similar services, but they deliver only the ingredients (then I would still have to actively cook). Supermarkets do have some similar pre-cooked stuff, but most (not all, but most) is quite terrible (probably because there the stuff has to be able to lie there for days/weeks - definitely not similar to what I used to eat on airplanes) and especially it never changes.

(I used to fly only in Europe using "Swiss", "Air Berlin", "Lufthansa", maybe as well "KLM"/"Air France", always to/from Zurich - your experience with other airlines / in other location might be different)

Woudln't it be nice to get back home and find in the mailbox a ready-to-be-warmed-up (maybe actually "cooked", but in an extremely simple way) menu?

The delivery, being all sourced from the same place and being spread over many hours would not be as expensive as it is currently done for hot stuff coming from multiple restaurants, and the small amount of different menus (4 as mentioned above or slightly more) would allow to buy more source material for less $.

EDIT: I admit of not having any clue how the companies that prepare meals/menus for airlines operate => there might therefore be some important details that make the whole concept crumble... :)

Uber Chef ignores all of that and bypasses all overhead - you don't need a restaurant or even the physical location of a building to employ chefs to cook food. No need for health inspections or expensive fire suppression equipment. (you use people who want to rent their home kitchens out for cooking)

That's Uber's raison-d'etre - to bypass all legal restrictions and externalize all overhead in the way of getting the items to you.

This isn't a joke, this is what Uber did with their taxi service at the beginning as MVP so why not do it to food services as well?

I'm from southern California. I worked in Wellington, New Zealand for a stint, and I found that restaurants were priced about the same as back home. That is to say, an average sit-down restaurant meal of equivalent quality was roughly the same price in USD.

However, in America, there's an entirely different class of much cheaper food (takeout food), and younger people in metropolitan areas eat this food very often. These were usually powered by cheap immigrant labor, often paid under the table to skirt taxes and mandatory benefits.

Labor protections in New Zealand are much higher, of course, and without an easily exploitable underclass, this food simply can't exist there. There weren't really regular kiwis who ate out 1 - 2x per day - virtually all of them cooked most of their meals at home themselves.

This is the environment in which these food delivery companies are operating. These restaurants already have extremely thin margins, consumers are price-sensitive, and as long as the delivery company is just a middle-man, they'll struggle to do this thing profitably. If they lose access to their cheap labor by having to re-classify drivers as actual employees, it might be impossible.

If I'm at home I'll look at the menu of my favourite indian/chineese/whatever place, phone them up, and they deliver it as they have done for decades.

I've spent two nights in a hotel since March, normally it's 70 a year. One night I ordered a dominos as I got back to the hotel just before 2300. The other night I ate out with a supplier.

Likewise with Uber, if I'm at home and not flying off somewhere, I'm not going to be ordering a taxi, either to get to the airport, or when I'm in a strange city on the other side of the planet.

I can see this is the golden age of takeaways and home-delivery (which basically means amazon or groceries), but I don't see it for takeaways.

There's a maximum amount of time someone will wait (1 hour) and the product degrades after it's created (cools off)

Tastier the food, stronger the accent.

Several places we flat out can’t communicate with.

The worse is a local pizza joint with the thickest Indian accent I’ve every heard. I work with Indians, and I still can’t understand them. Really good pizza.

Ask the whole kid angle. Kids screaming, work screaming, wife screaming...

As for discovery, I don’t have data, but I know personally that about half of my regular order spots are places I found by scrolling through door dash.

Your argument (that it is not much of a barrier to use the old way) can be made for so many of the quality of life improvements we have made over the course of human history. Not every advancement is an entire new category of things we can accomplish; so much is just slight improvements that save time and make things a bit easier.

I feel like there has been a backlash against time saving tech, where people wax nostalgic about how much better the older/slower systems were. I don't understand it. I am so happy for all the timesaving advancements we have made over the years. Now, if we don't use that saved time wisely, that is a whole other issue. However, I don't think going back to slower systems is the solution to not using our free time well.