[inkaudio]

When you charge far less than the actual cost of service you're going to get demand that does not reflect the actual market, hence not true "true" supply and demand. If I was selling dollar bills for 50 cents I would sell a lot of dollars bills. We've seen this before it's called Groupon. A key difference between Uber and Groupon is there are more drivers to con then there are businesses. Uber is losing billions dollars subsidizing rides, that is not a legitimate market. This is a farce to sell a growth story to raise capital and allow early investors to make huge gains, again see Groupon.

Uber was saying drivers could make 90k a year back in 2014 see: https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-drivers-salary-90000-20...

Which lead to this https://www.vox.com/2017/2/28/14766964/video-uber-travis-kal...

[gridlockd]

Even then, having the city of New York set the price according to "utilization" isn't supply and demand either. It's price fixing.

[blub]

One man's price fixing is another's correction of socially harmful behavior.

The free market will almost always devolve into worker exploitation unless there are rules.

[landryraccoon]

If you are saying that venture capitalists and naive investors are paying for part of my ride each time I take an Uber why wouldn’t I want to get as many subsidized rides in as I can before they go broke? How am I as a consumer not gaining every time this happens?

[SpaceRaccoon]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

The idea is that while it is nice to enjoy subsidized rides at the moment, as a consumer you may suffer in the future due to Uber establishing a monopoly.

[vadym909]

You are gaining as a consumer but many new retail investors in the stock or through ETFs may get burned when the business model stops working. Most of the shared economy startups are a house of cards expecting a magic bullet to solve their cost problem (self driving cars). The current stock holders are providing the hang time till that happens or not. The early investors will probably be all gone by then.

[danieltillett]

Do you have a pension? Pension and index funds buying Uber are the ultimate bagholders here.

Uber is basically a legal Ponzi scheme.