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Uber started in 2009. It incurred losses every year until 2023 except for a profit in 2019 which was due to selling subsidiaries in various countries. Numbers before the IPO are difficult to obtain, but it lost 31.5 billion from 2016 to 2022. Let’s assume a loss of equal to funding during the pre-IPO period, so 24.7 billion. This seems reasonable, since Uber never made a profit during the period.
So we’ll estimate Uber’s total losses at 86.2 billion from 2009-2022.
In 2023 Uber made a profit of 1.9 billion and in 2024 it made a profit of a little under ten billion. Prices for rides on Uber are between ten to twenty percent higher than taxi rides, rising to as much as 50% higher during surge pricing periods (when there’s the most demand.) Driver’s on average, get paid less than taxi drivers used to.
So–the workers get less, the customers pay more.
The strategy, as many people noted, including myself, was for Uber and Lyft to drive taxis out of business by undercutting their prices. Uber and Lyft didn’t need to make a profit, while taxi companies did. Once they had gained dominant market share, they raised prices and took oligopoly profits.
Everyone knew this was the play, and that people were getting subsidized rides now (Uber was much cheaper than taxis in the early years) in exchange for getting fucked over later. Well we’re now in the sandpaper condom period of “ride sharing”, where investors earn back their investment by hurting everyone else.
This should never have been allowed. Uber and Lyft violated massive numbers of laws and were just allowed to do so thru non-enforcement. The end result was obvious and it’s here now: worse wages, higher prices and less ability to regulate the industry.
This sort of stupid is why everything keeps getting worse. Every part of the “sharing economy” (which is no such thing) has made the lives of ordinary people worse. AirBnB in particular helped drive the rise in rental prices in hundreds of cities.
All that most tech-bro firms do is find a place where there isn’t market power, and try to add it. Same with Private Equity, which buys up entire industries in order to form oligopolies and monopolies, as it’s doing in the housing market now.
Market power always means more money for a few rich people and higher prices and worse income for everyone else involved in any given industry.
Welcome to the tech-bro future and remember, Soylent Green is people and so are high profits, always.
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Alberta is a province in Canada with a lot of oil and a moderate but not yet dangerous separatism problem that polls a little below 30%. That’s far less than needed to win a referendum, but enough to support an insurrection or a large campaign of civil disobedience. It’s also a sufficient level of support for America to take advantage of in one of their patented color revolutions.
Though the level is higher than in the past, it’s nowhere near new. Growing up in the 70s and 80s in British Columbia I remember the anger.
Because there’s a lot of resentment in Alberta and out West in general it also gums up the works politically: the Premier of Alberta has been truculent and unwilling to join in on national efforts to resist Trump’s trade war, for example.
Alberta has oil. Lots of it. Most of it is crap, tar sands oil. It is because of Alberta oil that Canada has a trade surplus with America, in fact, we have a goods and services deficit.
Like all resource rich areas Alberta lives from boom to boom, and the good jobs are in the resource sector. At one time that resource sector was heavily taxed, but that’s far in the past and it is now heavily subsidized. So anything that seems to hurt the resource sector which the Federal government does, like environmental regulations or even renewable energy initiatives is resented. A lot of Albertans identify with oil company interests.
So, this issue needs to be dealt with. Its legs need to be cut out from under it.
The approach which will work is simple enough.
The federal government should either nationalize the oil industry or tax it at high levels when oil prices are high and take the money and just give checks to people in resource rich areas. (Not just Alberta, but also Saskatchewan in particular.)
Put 50% of profits or taxes into a sovereign development fund which invests in new non-resource businesses in resource areas in proportion to the income it receives from them (because resources always run out and one doesn’t want the West to turn into the Maritimes economically), and simply cut checks for the other 50% directly to people who live in the areas.
Make it so that the people of Alberta, Saskatchewan and other resource rich areas see the federal government as the one responsible for their prosperity and personal income, not oil barons.
Of course there are more steps which should be taken, but this is the first and fundamental one: reverse the underlying issue.
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The Consumer Price Index is taken as a proxy for how much consumers pay for goods and services. It isn’t, for a wide variety of reasons. Here’s another:
This is a component of overall CPI, but what it tracks is actually retained earnings. The justification is that if retained earnings are down, more of premiums are being spent on healthcare! Of course you don’t care about that, what you care about is how much your insurance costs.
Now there might be some technical argument for this IF all the other components of medical care costs were tracked accurately, but like everything else they are subject to hedonic adjustments and various other hand waving.
As a reminder, hedonic adjustments lead to conclusions like “there was recently a 20 year period during which car prices didn’t rise.”
I will be clearer, the US economy has been shrinking for some time. I’m not sure how long because the numbers are so poisoned it’s impossible to tell. The maximal case is since the early 90s recession (hedonomic adjustments for computers were off the charts, but the evidence finds no overall increase in productivity from computers.) The “almost for sure” case is from the financial crisis, so late 2007.
Almost everyone in the US is worse off, surveys find that two-thirds of Americans can’t afford a decent lifestyle and wealth is shrinking for everyone except the top 1%. This is all concealed by bullshit top line economic statistics.
Properly accounted for I doubt if the American economy is half the size of China’s, and where it matters (manufacturing and resources) it’s probably closer to a third the size. No, “will you have fries with that” and “my job is to write 1,000 page reports” jobs do not count. The second in particular is actively detrimental to the real economy, as is essentially everything done by finance, crypto, and at least half of what American tech companies do.
As I’ve noted before, Trump is accelerating the decline. We’ll go back to Trump’s “unique accelerationist genius” soon.
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I’ll keep this one brief. Almost no food or water has gone into Gaza for months. What I’m seeing is that it’s hit the crisis point. I’d expect a few hundred thousand more people to die in the next two to three months. The minimum death toll pre-Trump was about 400K as I read it, and probably more.
This is a holocaust.
There wasn’t much anyone who reads this site could have done about it, but I hope, for your sake, that you were consistently against it.
As for Israel, they have damned themselves and so has every politician and corporate executive in the world who could have done something and didn’t.
Forgive the lack of a long article with sources. We’re past that. Anyone who doesn’t see this and doesn’t expect it at this point simply doesn’t care to know.
To set the stage, this comment from GM:
AI music is what really spooked me about the whole thing. I work in a very technical field and I have yet to see AI be useful for anything in it, because it just doesn’t truly know, and most importantly, UNDERSTAND anything at a level approaching a human expert. But then since early 2025 or so the AI-generated music started to be pretty hard to distinguish from the real thing, and making music is quite a complex thing.
You can still kind of hear it’s AI in the vocals, as those have a certain hiss/distortion to them, but instrumental music alone is pretty damn indistinguishable from what humans record.
Is it great? It never reaches the heights human music does, especially when it comes to the highly technical extremes.
But most human-made music doesn’t either.
And from what I’ve heard from AI, it makes truly awful music at a lower rate than humans do. It produces a lot of average-to-good, while humans mostly generate average-to-bad.
Which is not good news for humans, because most popular music is not all that complex at all (and has in fact been getting more and more simplified over time). With further improvements in AI, the average listener, who never cared all that much about music anyway, won’t either be able to tell or care much about the difference.
That will have a perverse second-order effect — humans will be discouraged from going into that line of work, because what is the point, you can’t make a living out of it. Sure, there will be live bands touring (although even there you can imagine at one point having AI bands “playing live” as holograms, no humans involved), but the market for highly skilled studio musicians and engineers will largely evaporate.
And that will have a devastating effect on the quality of music in the future, because good music comes from those people, and musical innovation comes from such highly skilled musicians improvising in the studio. Maybe one day AI will be so smart and advanced it will be able to jam on its own and come up with new ideas, but as it is structured right now, it just provides new variations of patterns it has already been trained on, not anything new.
Thus the short- to mid-term future is quite bleak. Already there was a rather bad problem with stagnation in music — not much really new in terms of fresh ideas has appeared for quite a while, which trend coincided with the transition to using computers for making music. Now with AI? Well…
Here’s the thing: AI isn’t creative. As GM says it offers variations on already existing methods or paradigms. It’s reliant on scooping up an entire volume of work on subjects, but it can’t advance to new paradigms. In other words, AI is (potentially) great for solved paradigms. It doesn’t, yet, work in all fields because it lacks judgment, but it works in some areas, at least well enough if mediocre is good enough, which, let’s be honest, it often is.
The problem is that the ladder of most careers is “learn how to do what’s already be done, then do variations on that, then start creating new stuff.” Most people never move much beyond the first two stages, and if they do they often create only one or two really new things.
As GM points out, AI is going to cut out the first step and in many cases (music being his example) the second step. That means that step three “create actually new stuff” won’t happen very much, because AI can’t do it (not this form of “AI” anyway, because it doesn’t actually understand anything it’s spewing) and there will be hardly any new practitioners, since they can’t make a living during the “learn old stuff” and “variations on old stuff” phases. Those aren’t fast phases. The 10K hours/10 years paradigm isn’t technically correct, but it does take many years to master the old stuff in a field and reach the level of mastery required to create new paradigms.
Add this to the fact that studies coming in are showing that using AI degrades the skills and reasoning ability of people who use it and you have a dismal picture: we hand over to AI our culture, and AI is unable to advance it, but reliance on AI makes it impossible for us to advance it because we no longer produce the people who can do so.
Not a pretty picture. (Also will be forestalled by civilization collapse, but means we are even more likely to be unable to avoid civilization collapse.)
More on civilization collapse and “AI” soon.
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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 20, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
ICE Is Planning Mass Extraordinary Renditions
Spencer Ackerman, 14 Jul 2025 [FOREVER WARS]
AT THE START of this newsletter nearly four years ago, I wrote about how what is widely presumed to be the largest part of the post-9/11 CIA torture program has simply vanished from the historical record. That’s the part where the CIA didn’t do its own torture, but instead sent people it kidnapped off the streets to countries like Bashar al-Assad’s Syria or Moammar Qaddafi’s Libya, where their security apparats would do the dirty work….
Many of us who track the War on Terror have spent literal decades warning that without accountability for these atrocities, they will recur and intensify. It’s one of the main points of REIGN OF TERROR. And now, extraordinary rendition, albeit without the name, is under contemplation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with a crucial assist by the Supreme Court. More than a decade after the CIA got away with it, ICE will perform mass extraordinary renditions at scale….
‘Horror Story’: Flight Logs Reveal Dozens Disappeared on El Salvador Deportation Trips
Julia Conley, July 17, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Trump administration hands over Medicaid recipients’ personal data, including addresses, to ICE
[AP, via Naked Capitalism 07-18-2025]
82 Year Old Green Card Holder Disappeared And Deported By ICE
KeithDB, July 19, 2025 [DailKos]
…Luis Leon is an 82 year legal immigrant (green card holder) who has lived in the United States for nearly 40 years. He doesn’t have so much as a parking ticket on his record. He has cleaner record than most of us.
His one “mistake” was losing his wallet with his green card in it. Doing the right thing, he made an appointment with the nearest immigration office to have it replaced. On June 20th he arrived at the immigration office as scheduled. Instead ICE officials led the 82 year old away in handcuffs with no explanation.
With that Luis Leon was disappeared by the Trump Regime. His family could not find out anything about him, to include where he had been taken. His name did not appear on the database of ICE detainees. Calls by his family to prisons, immigration officials, even hospitals got no answers.
But Luis Leon was in ICE custody. ICE first disappeared him to a detention center in Minnesota and then shipped him off to Guatemala with no due process, and no notice to his family. 82 years old and suffering from a variety of ailments, including diabetes and a heart condition, Leon ended up in a Guatemalan hospital which is who contacted the family….
ICE memo outlines plan to deport migrants to countries where they are not citizens
[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2025]
ICE LAWYERS ARE HIDING THEIR NAMES IN IMMIGRATION COURT
Debbie Nathan, July 15 2025 [The Intercept]
What We Need to Learn from Idi Amin — The dictator of Uganda had a “mass deportation program” too
Jim Stewartson, July 20, 2025 [MindWar]
“I’m giving Uganda back to ethnic Ugandans.”
—Idi Amin, August 1972
This precise message has been echoed throughout history by racist demagogues.
“Germany is not the land of refuge for criminals and Jews from all over the world. Germany is for the Germans.”
—Joseph Goebbels, “Der Angriff,” 1933
“America is for Americans, and Americans only.”
—Stephen Miller, Madison Square Garden 2024
Meet the Disaster Capitalists Behind Alligator Alcatraz
Maureen Tkacik, The American Prospect.
Trump says he’s considering revoking Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship, reigniting decades-long feud
[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2025]
O’Donnell wrote on Instagram, “you want to revoke my citizenship? go ahead and try, king joffrey with a tangerine spray tan.
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.