Cool. Name one, one which is not kept in place by government regulation.

Google? Nope, plenty of competion.

Meta? Same deal.

Walmart? Uh, Target and Amazon?

Tesla? Plenty of other companies trying to make electric cars.

On the other hand, electricity, water, cable TV, primary education? All effective monopolies both for practical reasons (which one might argue about) and because local laws make them monopolies.

Tesla is an interesting case. They have a very large market share and, near as I can tell, it's because people like the products. It's not because anyone is forced to buy a Tesla. Lots of other companies are trying to take that business away but Tesla keeps out-engineering, out-deploying, and out-marketing them.

The point being that, regardless of net neutrality regulations flip-flopping for the last 20 years, no one can document a company actually charging for prioritization or QoS.

Eh, I think it's been well known that renewables without batteries would have troubles. That's one of the things which always bothered me about early green energy proponents: they touted the cost of solar/wind deployments but didn't include the storage necessary to make it more than a complement to traditional generation.

Up until the last few years, no one was deploying utility scale batteries, first because the technology didn't exist and more recently because it was really expensive. California is known for having really expensive electricity (and everything else) so I'm not convinced the cost issue has been completely solved.

Absolutely true for SF proper and anything to the west of the coastal range or right on the bay.

Not sure where you are, friend, but in San Jose and anything not actually on the water, 90+ in the summer is quite common. Most summers have at least a handful of 100+ days (especially places like Gilroy or Livermore).

FWIW, I've worked in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and Santa Clara, generally between 101 and the bay, and live in south San Jose.

Thanks for clarifying what TFA did not. The article did seem to indicate the union could start negotiating a contract now. Does that come after being certified?

I get it. That's been the argument for over 100 years. I'm just pointing out that people are inconsistent. Progressives hate monopolies when they are a company using market power to raise prices for consumers (which is actually quite rare) but love unions when they do the exact same thing. The union is sticking it to The Man, woot!

Personally, I dislike any form of monopoly and would prefer the government stopped protecting them, be they businesses or unions. If a union can make a case that it can deliver more and better drivers than randomly hiring drivers off the street, that would be one thing. But it's not, unions don't do anything other than restrict supply.

I think you're right, it's really all about power, not monopolies per se. People feel powerless when up against a large company. In theory, they can vote with their feet or wallet but that just isn't a satisfying answer.

Could be. I read through the article and it wasn't clear to me whether there was going to be another vote to actually join the union. The impression I got was the union is now authorized to negotiate a contract. It would find it odd to negotiate a contract if the union couldn't guarantee to deliver the drivers.

But maybe that's how it works. The union and companies negotiate a contract, then the union goes to the drivers with a proposition "if enough of you join the union and accept this contract, then it goes into effect."

Ride sharing also covered far wider service areas than taxis. The canonical example was it was really easy to get a taxi in Manhattan but quite difficult in the Bronx or Queens. Ride sharing covered the non-Manhattan boroughs much better.

Financially speaking, the big innovation of the sharing economy was changing the capital structure. Taxis, limos, and rental cars were owned by the taxi/limo/car rental company, which meant they need to come up with the capital to buy them. Ride sharing used capital assets which were already available but idle. That made it much easier to launch a ride sharing company. It converted capital expenses to operational expenses.

I don't know about that. I have no doubt the union will negotiate higher wages and/or benefits. For the drivers who keep their jobs and like the union rules, this will be a win. Good for them.

This is less good a deal for people who would like to drive but can't get assigned any rides and an even worse deal for riders. Concentrated benefits, distributed costs.

They're no necessarily exclusive. However, union rules and contracts tend to come with inflexible work hour rules. I highly doubt being in a union will make scheduling more flexible.

Knock yer socks off. That's absolutely your right.

I, on the other hand, can't wait for ride-for-hire fees to drop and service areas expand. Given this development, it's getting more likely that means driverless cars because a drivers union is going to price themselves out of the market.

I will point out that autonomous cars generates tons of jobs for people building the cars, software developers writing the code, agents to operate the service, and so forth. You may not care about any of those people, that's your right, but you're hurting more people than billionares.

A labor union wants to be, and often is, the exclusive provider (that is, seller) of labor to a company or industry. How's that not a monopoly?

That you might think it's for a good cause and/or justified doesn't change the economics. They're legally protected exclusive sellers which drive up the price of their product (labor) above market clearing levels.

That's all well and good. Remember the downside is they drive up the price of goods for everyone else in the society so they're not an unalloyed good.

So, that means that 70% of drivers didn't express any interest in union representation. That means a minority of drivers are forcing their preference on the majority. Seems unjust to me.

If drivers had an option to join the union or directly work with the company, that would be a different kettle of fish. But they won't, their choice will forcibly taken away from them.

I find it hypocritical. Progressives in this state hate monopolies, unless its a labor monopoly which shovels huge amounts of cash to the Democrats.

That's what the unions and CA Democratic party want.

Thing is, you poll the actual drivers, most like the flexibility of being able to schedule their own shifts and set their own hours. They like that it's gig work.

I'd even vote for Bernie or AOC if that was their first campaign plank.

The good news is I don't live in a swing state so it's very unlikely my vote will make any sort of difference and I don't need to sweat it.

Go to your Google settings page and change your locale to "Canada".

Problem solved, for now. I just have to remember to undo this when this clusterf**k is over.