1) Now you're making even less sense. Apple has very well defined rules for what it charges a fee for developers who profit from in-app purchases. These purchases made within an app refer to subscription services and additional code loaded into the app to increase features. This does not include physical services.
You don't have to be a developer to know why Apple would charge a percentage fee when it comes to buying apps, in-app features, widgets, keyboard, and subscriptions hosted and curated by their App Store, but not when it comes to physical services that are outside the scope of their business. I don't even think Apple should be charging the same 30% for subscription services that are executed outside of their ecosystem, and that's something they recently addressed at WWDC.
2) If I buy a Mac and FCPX, why should I then have to pay Apple for any profit made from a film I edited on that machine? I don't have to, and I wouldn't agree to such terms.
Can you not agree that Apple is providing a massive benefit to Uber through the App store and iOS? If so Apple should be compensated for that benefit.
That their subcontractors couldn't get from Android right now (or any other modern mobile OS if Uber desired)? No. None. Zip. Zero Zilch.
All you'd achieve is pushing away subcontractor with iPhones to Android that didn't want to be charged another fee for using an iOS-based device.
How much in revenue does an Uber driver that drives for 20 hours in a week pull through his car? Figure that out, then figure out what he makes from Uber, and now subtract Uber's 1% iOS-device use fee. That's a number that will make it more feasible to buying an Android phone for work, which also cause them to not want to be in the Apple ecosystem at all.
That their subcontractors couldn't get from Android right now (or any other modern mobile OS if Uber desired)? No. None. Zip. Zero Zilch.
All you'd achieve is pushing away subcontractor with iPhones to Android that didn't want to be charged another fee for using an iOS-based device.
How much in revenue does an Uber driver that drives for 20 hours in a week pull through his car? Figure that out, then figure out what he makes from Uber, and now subtract Uber's 1% iOS-device use fee. That's a number that will make it more feasible to buying an Android phone for work, which also cause them to not want to be in the Apple ecosystem at all.
The 1% would not be from the driver but from the passenger.
And yes if you cut off iOS passengers than Uber is going to get killed
Its ridiculous to think 1% is too high of a fee. Go ask a retail store how much you would have to pay to sell your product there. Just because Google is willing to give services away for 'free' does not mean Apple has too. Cause Apple is not data mining people to death they can't give services away for free like Google.
Oh, you want this from every... single... passenger that has an iDevice, not from a driver using an iDevice. So for the first time in the history of Apple's long existence there would be an actual Apple Tax for the privilege of using an Apple product. Use Apple Pay at Walgreens: 1% extra from the customer. Pay your mortgage or car through the company's app: 1% fee... for the privilege.
Can you really not see why Apple hasn't put your plan into action after 8(?) years of having an App Store?
If you think that automation reduces employment, you should look at companies like MS, Apple, Ford, etc. What grows jobs are successful business models, not bad ones.
You still have not answered my question why Uber can't be profitable with human drivers. They can. But they are greedy.
It's not that Uber can't be profitable with human drivers but as soon as one of their growing number of competitors goes driverless, they will be out of business within a month because competing fares can be less than half the price. Consumers think of themselves first, they would never pay double to feel good about supporting employees. Taxis are expensive and public transport, while very cheap, offers a poor experience. The happy medium between the two is not quite as low cost as public transport but affordable while retaining the same convenience in getting exactly where you want to go, when you want to go. Consider a driver making minimum wage, say $15k/year, $7.25/hour. If the vehicle can travel an average of 20mph in the city, that driver is placing a minimum price of $0.36/mile on the cost of every taxi journey, worse when the taxi is empty. The following site says half of commuters travel over 10 miles each way to work:
That's over $7 each day or >$1800 per year per commuter just for the driver, the total would be about double that. They'd be as well owning an old car instead of paying out $3600/year for a taxi, which is likely why most people do and this leads to lots of congestion, parking problems and stressful driving conditions.
A lot of jobs only exist because certain ways of doing things are inefficient. The more inefficient a task is, the higher number of people need to be involved. Farming needed a lot of manual workers before machinery improved efficiency. The more that technology improves services, the less that manual input is required. This is clearly going to eventually lead to a state where there are not enough jobs to keep people employed but this is where there needs to be an understanding that the monetary system is all cyclical so it needs to be redesigned to be self-sustaining under all circumstances. There has been some talk about guaranteed minimum incomes being paid by governments.
Having people just being paid by default would encourage people to just stay home and not do anything. There needs to be an incentive to work so it would be better that governments instead pay the first portion (e.g $10k) of every salary and the company would pay the extra. This means it's not such a big decision for companies to hire people, even for non-jobs. The money they get as a salary is taxed, as are all the purchases they make. Say that the government decides to pay $10k towards the salary of any job and the person gets a $20k overall pay. The government would take 25% of the $10k extra in income tax so they immediately get $2.5k back. The worker will spend most of their money on food, accommodation and products. All the people they pay will pay income tax and the products they buy have sales tax. The ideal system would have the full $10k for each person returned (just under $2.5t for the US and nearly $2t already gets spent on welfare and pensions). They would have to try out different experiments on a smaller scale but progress in technology and services won't be held back by a need to keep people in work. Ever increasing efficiency means far less manual work has to be done by everyone and this will be a good thing if a minimum standard of living is designed into the system.
Uber drivers are paid crap after taking out auto expenses, gas, insurance, ect. It is estimated that in most markets they are getting paid close to minimum wage. Ridiculous.
And now Uber is making solid plans to replace drivers with AI.
IMO, Uber drivers should organize and form a union. If they don't Uber will continue to pay them less and less and eventually replace them with a bot.
Apple should also charge Uber for every fare they get using iOS platform. Its ridiculous that a small software company needs to pay Apple 30% when someone buys their app, yet Uber gets billions in sales and does not need to pay Apple zip. Apple should get at least 1% on every transaction on the Uber app on iOS.
Really your solution is Unions, You never been part of Union have you. I grew up in a Union family and attend meeting at the Union Hall and stood on picket lines with my dad and mom. Unions are just as abusive to workers rights as the laws our government pass to so call protect workers. Unions are only interest in everyone making the same pay for the same work, Have you heard they term before Hillary want equal pay. She basically advocating a union for all paid employees and the Government will negotiate you pay for you. As someone point out, when workers walk off the job and go somewhere else when a company realize they can not abuse the work forces. The problem is people do not think they can leave a job. I been in lots of place who are looking for workers and those places bend over backward to hire someone and then treat them nice because they do not want them to leave. I also been in place where people are treated like crap and those people will not leave because they think there is nothing else, but do not realize the better place is down the street from them.
That is amazing news to me, I didn't think we were that close to driverless cars on the roads yet.
Slightly tangential, but it is strange to me that driverless trains aren't already standard in first world countries. Just think how many train accidents have we had in the last few years that were humans' faults. Surely it would be a lot easier than a driverless car technologically!
How is using self-driving cars cutting an expense? Currently the human Uber drivers use their own cars. That means the drivers, and not Uber, have to pay the insurance, the energy, and the upkeep of those cars. Plus, after an Uber driver uses his/her car for a while and the value of that vehicle depreciates, the driver shoulders that loss in value of the car. It's a pretty sweet deal for Uber. As for the drivers, they can't even get tips on a credit card. The business works in part because Uber has a supply of newby drivers who may not realize that it's not really a career, in that, it's going to be hard for the driver to make money over the LONG term.
But now... with this new business model... does Uber plan to buy a bazillion self-driving cars...? And insure them? And maintain them? And charge/fuel them?
They sure as heck can't expect their Uber drivers, whom they will be FIRING, to keep shouldering all the costs lol!
1) Now you're making even less sense. Apple has very well defined rules for what it charges a fee for developers who profit from in-app purchases. These purchases made within an app refer to subscription services and additional code loaded into the app to increase features. This does not include physical services.
You don't have to be a developer to know why Apple would charge a percentage fee when it comes to buying apps, in-app features, widgets, keyboard, and subscriptions hosted and curated by their App Store, but not when it comes to physical services that are outside the scope of their business. I don't even think Apple should be charging the same 30% for subscription services that are executed outside of their ecosystem, and that's something they recently addressed at WWDC.
2) If I buy a Mac and FCPX, why should I then have to pay Apple for any profit made from a film I edited on that machine? I don't have to, and I wouldn't agree to such terms.
Apple is the master of the App Store. They can change the rules any time they want. Uber can walk away from the App store if they don't like the rules. I'd like to see Apple charge 1% on all in-app purchases that are physical services. No reason not to.
Stop comparing the App Store for iOS to the Mac. Totally different beast. The iOS App store and iOS has massive leverage. Mac does not.
Can you not agree that Apple is providing a massive benefit to Uber through the App store and iOS? If so Apple should be compensated for that benefit.
Let's put it another way. If all the top used apps (Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and more) took all their apps off the App store at the same time and users could no longer use them on a iPhone, what would happen? Most users would go to another OS so that they could keep using them. Users are beholden to apps now days. Not to the phone itself. The phone is just a conduit for the apps and if it's a great phone, like the iPhone is, well that's just a plus. Icing on the cake.
Uber has expressed a strong desire to adopt self-driving vehicles as soon as possible. Doing so will allow it to dramatically cut its biggest expense -- human workers, who need to be paid a reasonable wage.
Fucking disgrace.
Uber created an amazing job opportunity in the US and the only they are working on is how get rid of that rake in some more profit instead.
It depends, are they just trying to take a larger slice of the pie from taxi/uber drivers or are they trying to grow the pie by getting people out of their own cars and into an Uber self driving car. I only take taxis late at night when public transport has stopped running but if the price was right, I'd happily take a self-driving Uber inter-city rather than driving my own car. We're a one-car family that eventually will need two - well-priced self driving services could keep us at one.
The scheduling Oberführer will reserve a non-peak time period and will issue a command where upon it toddles off to a high amp charging station and gets itself hooked up and filled with 100% renewable energy courtesy of the national grid and the nearest coal/gas fueled power station.
has anyone done a study if electric cars are actually more enviromentally friendly? Talking about generating electricity and producing batteries.
I'm not sure if he based it on a study or just back of the envelope calculations but according to Elon Musk, even if all electricity were generated by coal and transmission losses taken into account, it would still have less impact on the environment than driving around with a mobile petroleum burner. Not to mention that you centralise the emissions away from population bases and it's all net-new generation and most new capacity is now renewable. As we move more and more towards electrification of transport, a larger chunk of capacity will be renewable.
The money they get as a salary is taxed, as are all the purchases they make. Say that the government decides to pay $10k towards the salary of any job and the person gets a $20k overall pay. The government would take 25% of the $10k extra in income tax so they immediately get $2.5k back.
It is not like there is only one government. There are federal, state, county, city, and even neighborhood taxes. Then you add in sales tax and income tax that gets divided among the various entities and allocated for specific purposes. The layers of bureaucratic red tape would never be able to facilitate such a simplistic strategy. The only real sustainable solution is decreased population by taxing parents for having children.
Spot on. Ford, GM, Uber, Google. . . They're all looking at ride-sharing driverless services for totally autonomous vehicles in their immediate future and not self-driving cars you'll find on your dealer's lot.
I'm 100% in favor of driver-less cars. What about you?
Most shallow thinkers are in favor of self-driving cars. How much are you willing to pay in state and federal taxes to support the new huge government agency that will need to evaluate/approve/monitor/police are the myriad car companies' various non-standardized magical self-driving software and hardware? And this new regulatory agency will be vital to enabling this technology on the US infrastructure. Whose favor will they be working for, really? For the corporations that insist on pushing their wares on the population? For motorcycle drivers? For mass transit riders? For students living on the college campus? All these folks will pay new taxes to support this pie in the sky dream of the corporations, who see us all as the rubes to grow their profits.
And I'm not so sure that self-driving cars actually will be safer and even if they were, I don't see Americans in particular accepting them.
1) They are safer.
2) Americas will adopt because the older generations have a tendency to die off before the younger generations. This is no different than the argument against the personal computer and many other advances in technology. I seem to recall Jobs having a quote in line with my first sentence in this point.
3) This is not an "all or nothing" scenario which, unfortunately, is how most people perceive how technology gets adopted when trying to look ahead. The highways are the ideal starting points for self-driving and driver-less vehicles (the latter is a subset of the former). Nearly 100% reduced foot traffic, steady movement (often with dividers for directions), and where drivers tend to experience white line fever (or fall asleep altogether) are just some of the obvious reasons why long-distance driving is an ideal way to perfect the technologies needed for self-driving vehicles. Moving even further into safety, we already have the ability to isolate lanes of traffic on a given highway for HOV or public transportation traffic, for more condensed, urban highways, which would be ideal for passing laws in self-driving states, where necessary, and then expand outward as demand increases.
How much in state and federal taxes are you willing to pay to help these corporations launch their new dream? Bloody hell, tech companies can't even get auto-correct to keep from making glaring mistakes every time we type an email or text. How in the world would all these rubes trust technology with their lives, when it's only as good as the offshore resource that's writing the code? People are so freaking gullible, it's discouraging as hell that group-think could possibly drive this nonsense forward. I remember the big rage in the 1950's was that everybody would have a flying car in their driveway. Another brilliant idea that was not practical in the US infrastructure. But hey, hard-hats for everyone, flying cars are the future! Followers...
How much in state and federal taxes are you willing to pay to help these corporations launch their new dream? Bloody hell, tech companies can't even get auto-correct to keep from making glaring mistakes every time we type an email or text. How in the world would all these rubes trust technology with their lives, when it's only as good as the offshore resource that's writing the code? People are so freaking gullible, it's discouraging as hell that group-think could possibly drive this nonsense forward. I remember the big rage in the 1950's was that everybody would have a flying car in their driveway. Another brilliant idea that was not practical in the US infrastructure. But hey, hard-hats for everyone, flying cars are the future! Followers...
Machines have problems interpreting human intent, this is clear with voice assistants, because it doesn't always follow a logical structure. It's better with vehicles as it is just movement needing to be controlled. The ultimate decision the machine has to make is whether to move forward/backwards or not and how quickly. Transport infrastructure evolves around the vehicles in use. Without buses there would be no bus lanes. Before cars, the roads were better suited to horses and carts. Once enough vehicles (cars, trucks, delivery vehicles) have automation built-in, roads can get lanes dedicated to use by automated vehicles.
Factories show how precise machine control is:
Humans could never achieve that accuracy for so long and never tire of it. All automated vehicles can communicate with each other so a vehicle can know well in advance of an impending traffic jam and take an alternate route. People can't compute the most efficient alternate routes on-the-fly as they have no data to make that decision.
Human error: tiredness, distraction, inebriation, aggression, is often cited as being responsible for over 90% of all traffic accidents and these are not possible with machines:
If automated vehicles are mixed with human drivers, there us a chance of misinterpretation and the computer making an error of judgement but in a completely automated system, there should be significantly less chance of an error, especially if humans aren't allowed to walk in front of vehicles.
It will help the road budgets because the increased efficiency won't require so many lanes to be maintained. Instead of everyone going in the same direction to work and blocking an entire road, machines will take different routes and while the routes may go a longer distance, they will go faster. Transport will be reduced to an algorithm that will be improved to produce the most efficient outcome.
It will be far easier for people to share vehicles for commuting. There can be vehicles that pick up 6 people at a time, each with a separate cabin. The machines can work out the pickup requests and destinations and choose the most efficient pooling system and this can easily reduce the number of vehicles on the road by a few multiples.
It will clean up the sides of the roads having cars littered everywhere because people won't need to own vehicles, at least in major cities. No more need for giant parking facilities because no vehicles will be needing to park.
Flying vehicles would be a great way to solve a lot of transport problems but the downward air pressure would be too much to have in amongst people all the time (3:09):
The nature of gravity has to be determined first and essentially develop the equivalent of a Faraday Cage for gravity like for electricity. Gravity's effect would just be blocked on objects. Then the objects inside the cage would be weightless and they can easily move this around. I think automated grounded transport will go a long way towards improving transport anyway.
Uber has expressed a strong desire to adopt self-driving vehicles as soon as possible. Doing so will allow it to dramatically cut its biggest expense -- human workers, who need to be paid a reasonable wage.
Fucking disgrace.
Uber created an amazing job opportunity in the US and the only they are working on is how get rid of that rake in some more profit instead.
If they don't disrupt their own business model, somebody else will. Like the previous poster answered: this wasn't going to end any other way.
But this endpoint is a loooong way off. (See my next post.)
This is exactly where I think Apple have been heading with project Titan. I have never thought for minute that anyone would actually be able to buy and drive an Apple car. I think Apple will just let you hail one and ride in it, for a fee. Why make 5 M vehicles when you can make more money from 50 K of them.
Spot on. Ford, GM, Uber, Google. . . They're all looking at ride-sharing driverless services for totally autonomous vehicles in their immediate future and not self-driving cars you'll find on your dealer's lot.
Totally autonomous vehicles are NOT in the immediate future, in spite of all the hype and excitement. Regulations still need to be considered, studied, written, and institutions of enforcement need to be designed, funded, built, populated with employees, etc. Driverless car testing currently being done is limited to very controlled circumstances and/or with backup drivers. Set free on their own in a high traffic area, completely autonomous cars of today would cause both horrendous traffic jams (from being overly timid and potentially coming to a stop when they need to change lanes, for example) as well as accidents. Don't expect this to be solved in a couple of years either. We need to first get cars to be able to "talk" to those around them. (This concept is called "connected vehicles".) We also need them to be able to get special signals from traffic flow control devices and possibly even roadways/billboards/street signs/etc. (This concept is called "smart cities".)
We are a lot further away from completely autonomous cars than the forward-leaning people want to admit. Elon Musk is a fool for downloading "autopilot" into his cars and thinking people won't start to become complacent behind the wheel. A car on "autopilot" is nothing like a plane on "autopilot", unless that plane has hundreds of other planes within one plane length on a daily basis, has to continuously avoid obstacles (like curbs, buildings, etc) in the air, has to obey traffic signals and change its velocity vector frequently, and is constrained to moving in two dimensions. None of which is ever true, of course. Look for Tesla to receive more black eyes and for lawmakers to shut down Musk's capability to download new self-driving features until a future date when safety regulations can be drafted and test facilities can be built to ensure the regs are followed. Many of you will disagree with me, but we can always come back here 3 years from now and see who was right.
Comments
All you'd achieve is pushing away subcontractor with iPhones to Android that didn't want to be charged another fee for using an iOS-based device.
How much in revenue does an Uber driver that drives for 20 hours in a week pull through his car? Figure that out, then figure out what he makes from Uber, and now subtract Uber's 1% iOS-device use fee. That's a number that will make it more feasible to buying an Android phone for work, which also cause them to not want to be in the Apple ecosystem at all.
Can you really not see why Apple hasn't put your plan into action after 8(?) years of having an App Store?
http://www.statisticbrain.com/commute-statistics/
That's over $7 each day or >$1800 per year per commuter just for the driver, the total would be about double that. They'd be as well owning an old car instead of paying out $3600/year for a taxi, which is likely why most people do and this leads to lots of congestion, parking problems and stressful driving conditions.
A lot of jobs only exist because certain ways of doing things are inefficient. The more inefficient a task is, the higher number of people need to be involved. Farming needed a lot of manual workers before machinery improved efficiency. The more that technology improves services, the less that manual input is required. This is clearly going to eventually lead to a state where there are not enough jobs to keep people employed but this is where there needs to be an understanding that the monetary system is all cyclical so it needs to be redesigned to be self-sustaining under all circumstances. There has been some talk about guaranteed minimum incomes being paid by governments.
Having people just being paid by default would encourage people to just stay home and not do anything. There needs to be an incentive to work so it would be better that governments instead pay the first portion (e.g $10k) of every salary and the company would pay the extra. This means it's not such a big decision for companies to hire people, even for non-jobs. The money they get as a salary is taxed, as are all the purchases they make. Say that the government decides to pay $10k towards the salary of any job and the person gets a $20k overall pay. The government would take 25% of the $10k extra in income tax so they immediately get $2.5k back. The worker will spend most of their money on food, accommodation and products. All the people they pay will pay income tax and the products they buy have sales tax. The ideal system would have the full $10k for each person returned (just under $2.5t for the US and nearly $2t already gets spent on welfare and pensions). They would have to try out different experiments on a smaller scale but progress in technology and services won't be held back by a need to keep people in work. Ever increasing efficiency means far less manual work has to be done by everyone and this will be a good thing if a minimum standard of living is designed into the system.
Really your solution is Unions, You never been part of Union have you. I grew up in a Union family and attend meeting at the Union Hall and stood on picket lines with my dad and mom. Unions are just as abusive to workers rights as the laws our government pass to so call protect workers. Unions are only interest in everyone making the same pay for the same work, Have you heard they term before Hillary want equal pay. She basically advocating a union for all paid employees and the Government will negotiate you pay for you. As someone point out, when workers walk off the job and go somewhere else when a company realize they can not abuse the work forces. The problem is people do not think they can leave a job. I been in lots of place who are looking for workers and those places bend over backward to hire someone and then treat them nice because they do not want them to leave. I also been in place where people are treated like crap and those people will not leave because they think there is nothing else, but do not realize the better place is down the street from them.
Slightly tangential, but it is strange to me that driverless trains aren't already standard in first world countries. Just think how many train accidents have we had in the last few years that were humans' faults. Surely it would be a lot easier than a driverless car technologically!
But now... with this new business model... does Uber plan to buy a bazillion self-driving cars...? And insure them? And maintain them? And charge/fuel them?
They sure as heck can't expect their Uber drivers, whom they will be FIRING, to keep shouldering all the costs lol!
What am I missing?
Factories show how precise machine control is:
Humans could never achieve that accuracy for so long and never tire of it. All automated vehicles can communicate with each other so a vehicle can know well in advance of an impending traffic jam and take an alternate route. People can't compute the most efficient alternate routes on-the-fly as they have no data to make that decision.
Human error: tiredness, distraction, inebriation, aggression, is often cited as being responsible for over 90% of all traffic accidents and these are not possible with machines:
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/12/human-error-cause-vehicle-crashes
If automated vehicles are mixed with human drivers, there us a chance of misinterpretation and the computer making an error of judgement but in a completely automated system, there should be significantly less chance of an error, especially if humans aren't allowed to walk in front of vehicles.
It will help the road budgets because the increased efficiency won't require so many lanes to be maintained. Instead of everyone going in the same direction to work and blocking an entire road, machines will take different routes and while the routes may go a longer distance, they will go faster. Transport will be reduced to an algorithm that will be improved to produce the most efficient outcome.
It will be far easier for people to share vehicles for commuting. There can be vehicles that pick up 6 people at a time, each with a separate cabin. The machines can work out the pickup requests and destinations and choose the most efficient pooling system and this can easily reduce the number of vehicles on the road by a few multiples.
http://www.newgeography.com/content/003980-driving-alone-dominates-2007-2012-commuting-trend
It will clean up the sides of the roads having cars littered everywhere because people won't need to own vehicles, at least in major cities. No more need for giant parking facilities because no vehicles will be needing to park.
Flying vehicles would be a great way to solve a lot of transport problems but the downward air pressure would be too much to have in amongst people all the time (3:09):
The nature of gravity has to be determined first and essentially develop the equivalent of a Faraday Cage for gravity like for electricity. Gravity's effect would just be blocked on objects. Then the objects inside the cage would be weightless and they can easily move this around. I think automated grounded transport will go a long way towards improving transport anyway.
But this endpoint is a loooong way off. (See my next post.)
We are a lot further away from completely autonomous cars than the forward-leaning people want to admit. Elon Musk is a fool for downloading "autopilot" into his cars and thinking people won't start to become complacent behind the wheel. A car on "autopilot" is nothing like a plane on "autopilot", unless that plane has hundreds of other planes within one plane length on a daily basis, has to continuously avoid obstacles (like curbs, buildings, etc) in the air, has to obey traffic signals and change its velocity vector frequently, and is constrained to moving in two dimensions. None of which is ever true, of course. Look for Tesla to receive more black eyes and for lawmakers to shut down Musk's capability to download new self-driving features until a future date when safety regulations can be drafted and test facilities can be built to ensure the regs are followed. Many of you will disagree with me, but we can always come back here 3 years from now and see who was right.