I am not a socialist, but ...

Some of my colleagues think that I am against their left-leaning (in some cases way out left) politics just because I am not in their dues-paying organization.  If only they read even a couple of posts here at this blog!  Or, better yet, if only they had discussed intellectual ideas with me instead of sending me to exile!

The old commie-teenager in me has never really died, as much as the young man with a whole lot of hair has not disappeared from my idea of who I am.  I continue to rail against terrible money-grabbing practices as I have always done.

What increasingly pisses me off is this: The digital economy roars on for those who have money.  For the rest, it is a crawl at best.

Seven years ago, almost to the very date, I ranted against Facebook's IPO.  I quoted from a Forbes column:

Microsoft when public in 1986, its market value was $780 million. Microsoft’s market value would rise more than 700 times in the next 13 years. Bill Gates made millionaires of thousands of ordinary public investors. When Google went public in 2004 at a $23 billion valuation, it left less on the table for you and me. Still, if you had invested in Google then and held your stock, you would be sitting atop a 9x return. Zuckerberg and his Facebook friends took it all.

Money-making in the contemporary digital economy is less and less democratic.

The latest in this is Uber.  (Full disclosure: I have never had an Uber account, but have been in Uber's services a couple of times.)

A successful I.P.O. for Uber will validate and perpetuate the mega-venture capital model, and all the distortions that it entails.

The author--incidentally, an Indian-American--lays out a case, that is less about Uber itself and more about the big venture capital funders:

The largest of Uber’s major shareholders is SB Cayman 2 Ltd., which holds more than 16 percent of Uber shares. That investment represents the SoftBank Vision Fund, a $100 billion mega-venture capital fund that has fundamentally changed the venture financing world. The fund, whose biggest investors are the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and the founder of Japan’s leading internet company, has been writing enormous checks — ranging from $500 million to $5 billion — to start-ups including WeWork, Lemonade, Wirecard and DoorDash. SoftBank’s presence has inflated deal sizes in the venture capital world, where rounds of financing are typically well below $100 million.

These big money funds are taking us all for an uber-ride!

And, of course, Uber is out to screw its employees, er, drivers.  How?  Remember that bottom-line from the Forbes column seven years ago? "The insider pig pile of PE firms and celebrity Silicon Valley angels took it all."  Here too it is the same:

Uber is unprofitable. In fact, they have not really clearly articulated how they're going to become profitable. They have indicated that they intend to clamp down on worker bonuses and incentives, which they acknowledge will upset drivers. At the same time, it's hard to grow, have more drivers, and replace those who turn over and quit, if you're not competitive. And so now we're in a situation of low unemployment. Wages are rising in other industries, but they're not in ride-share driving. So I think they're caught; they're in a price war with Lyft and others. It's hard to see how they're going to be able to accomplish growth, recruiting enough drivers, and become profitable.
So what this IPO is doing is it's giving the Uber investors the potential to cash out. So they may not have to worry about whether Uber ever becomes profitable if they can convince enough people to just buy the stock.

You want an example ?

Mr. McMullen, 33, is part of an exclusive club: the semiretired tech millennial who left California after getting rich. Like many in this group, he is a newly minted multimillionaire who became wealthy by working for high-profile San Francisco start-ups like Uber and Lyft, which are now about to go or have just gone public. Once their wealth was assured, these tech workers quit the companies and fled California, which has the nation’s highest state income tax, at more than 13 percent, to reside in lower-tax states like Texas and Florida, where there is no personal state income tax.

Screw the drivers!

Uber wants to shift the risk, it wants to shift the cost, onto the driver. The end result is that drivers are denied access to worker compensation in an industry that is very dangerous. They have no unemployment insurance, and they obviously get no health or pension benefits. And they're not subject to the wage and hour laws, or laws overseeing race and gender discrimination. So the algorithms that Uber develops are the bosses.

But then, what do I know; after all, according to many of my colleagues, I am nothing but bourgeois trash!