Astral Codex Ten

Uber

7 min read

Uber

Article

Uber is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between January 04, 2024 and February 05, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Instacart is like Uber for groceries”; “when California passed a proposition backing down from their attempt to crack down on Uber over gig workers”; “everyone in tech journalism was writing about Uber was a “bezzle”“. It most often appears alongside Anthropic, ChatGPT, Elon Musk.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: January 04, 2024
  • Last seen: February 05, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Does Capitalism Beat Charity?
January 04, 2024 · Original source
Do something like donating to charity, but the donation should go to charities that promote capitalism somehow, or be an investment in companies doing charitable things (impact investing) I agree that overall capitalism has produced more good things than charity. But when I try to think at the margin, in Near Mode, I can’t make this argument hang together. Here’s my basic objection: Consider some company. I’m going to pick Instacart, because I like it and use it often. Instacart is like Uber for groceries. It delivers them to your house, so you don’t have to go shopping. It’s great if you’re lazy, or if you’re sick and don’t want to leave the house. I’m not putting my finger on the scales by choosing Instacart here. Instacart is great. Instacart makes yearly profit of $500 million, yearly revenue of $2.5 billion, and has 10 million yearly customers (who I guess pay $250 each per year?) and a market cap of $10 billion. For complicated reasons I’ll relegate to a footnote1, I’m going to summarize the deal that Capitalism offers by allowing Instacart to exist to “For $1 million, you can give 2,000 people a great deal on grocery delivery”. Compare this to a good charity, like GiveWell’s pick Dispensers For Safe Water. If I understand their claim right, per $1 million they can give 50,000 people clean water for ten years, which would probably save about 1,500 lives. So which is a better use of $1 million? Give it to Capitalism, and give 2,000 people a great deal on grocery delivery? Or give it to Charity, and give 50,000 people clean water and save 1,500 lives? Even without being able to exactly quantify the value of grocery delivery deals vs. clean water, common-sensically Charity wins on first-order effects. So the argument for Capitalism must go through something about second-order effects. But what are these? I can think of a few possibilities: Job creation: Along with helping its customers, Instacart employs 10,000 full-time employees and 600,000 gig workers, so our $1 million investment might produce a few dozen jobs. That still doesn’t seem to counterbalance the advantage of Charity. But also (and I admit I have trouble thinking about this), it doesn’t seem obvious that Instacart “causes” jobs. Suppose Instacart had never been founded. Then people would spend whatever money they now spend on Instacart on something else (let’s say booze and porn), which would also create jobs (for brewers, bartenders, and porn stars). There’s no particular reason to think spending the money on Instacart creates more jobs than spending it on those other things would. So how many jobs does Instacart create over replacement? I’m not sure but I think it must be much less than the official number of employees.
Inline links: 1
SB 1047: Our Side Of The Story
October 10, 2024 · Original source
I think these people beat us because they’ve been optimizing for political clout for decades, and our side hasn’t even existed that long, plus we care about too many other things to focus on gubernatorial recall elections.
Should we have expected a single California law to have an effect visible in the markets? According to Daniel and @GroundHogStrat , past history says yes: when California passed a proposition backing down from their attempt to crack down on Uber over gig workers, Uber’s stock went up 35%. If SB 1047 was going to be as bad for AI as the anti-gig-worker rules were for Uber, we would expect a similar jump. Even if the bill would be fine for incumbents but only hurt small startups, we would have expected a hit for NVIDIA, who sells chips to those small startups. But NVIDIA went up less than the NASDAQ overall.
Inline links: @GroundHogStrat
Links For February 2026
February 05, 2026 · Original source
9: @abio: “DC has a rideshare app called Empower that charges 20-40% less than Uber. (Drivers like it too because they keep 100% of the fare)...DC is trying to shut it down because of liability insurance. DC law requires $1 million per ride. The $1 million requirement isn’t sized to typical accidents. When $100,000 is the limit available for an insurance claim, 96% of personal auto claims settle below $100,000...Empower can offer $7 rides partly because it circumvents the mandate. DC is shutting it down for exactly that reason.”
Inline links: @abio:
42: An AI Generated Reddit Post Fooled Half The Internet. Someone claiming to be a software engineer at a food delivery company (maybe DoorDash or UberEats) talked about all the evil tricks they used to exploit drivers and customers. But on closer inspection, their story fell apart and they didn’t work for a company like this at all. I’m surprised by the arc of this story, not because the original post was convincing (it wasn’t), but because I assumed DoorDash and UberEats did things approximately this evil, but everyone acted like the fake leak was shocking (including real DoorDash and UberEats employees). Also, it’s pretty funny that in a world where everyone is worried about fake AI-generated photos and videos, the record for most successful deceptive AI-generated content is still ordinary text.
Inline links: An AI Generated Reddit Post Fooled Half The Internet
48: Also from Changing Lanes: Whatever Happened To The Uber Bezzle? A couple years ago, everyone in tech journalism was writing about Uber was a “bezzle”, a made-to-order Cory Doctorow coinage which meant it was a giant obvious Ponzi scheme that would finally reveal the entire tech industry as an emperor without clothes when it inevitably collapsed. Now Uber is doing better than ever and making billions in profits. So what happened? Obviously they stopped subsidizing their rides and raised prices until revenue > cost, but how come the bezzlers thought they couldn’t do that, and why were they wrong? Andrew says the bezzle thesis had assumed that the government would crack down on the gig economy (it didn’t; Uber had good lobbyists and voters liked cheap foods and rides), and that there would be an infinite number of would-be competitors moving in to take market share as soon as Uber raised prices (there weren’t; Uber bullied everyone except Lyft out of the market, and Lyft and Uber would rather play nicely together than compete each other down to zero marginal profit). Oh well, I’m sure tech journalists are right about everything else being a giant Ponzi scheme that will inevitably collapse and reveal the entire tech industry to be an emperor without clothes.
Inline links: Whatever Happened To The Uber Bezzle?