Where I live you have to work a full 8 hour shift to be a taxi driver.

So the real benefit of Uber was enabling mums to drop off children at school and then work until time to pick them up again (one example), casual self determining work not available to many in other ways.

I live fairly central, guy around the corner from me is retired, hangs at home picking up the odd job as he feels like, great for him, plus he can control his income relative to impacts to benefits.

> plus he can control his income relative to impacts to benefits

In other words, benefits abuse?

If the welfare program says you only get money if you earn under $2000/month, what's wrong with keeping your income just under $2000 month?

Because it indicates you are able to find a job that earns you money

not if you are retired, the way it works here the marginal tax rate of a pensioner could end up around 80% when means tested pension payments are taken account of.

For someone that has worked all their life and paid a shitload of tax I find that a little offensive and have no problem with them optimising their returns in their golden years.

Now you are talking about getting welfare subsidies when people are retired? I hope when you are retired you have pension pot or a (paid off) house you can leverage so you need to get welfare money from the government

It's called the pension and everyone who has paid tax more than ten years and over a certain age (it's migrating over time, basically 65) who is not means tested out on income and assets is eligible.

But there is a grey area where you partially qualify, the ideal retirement strategy can be to spend your savings at a rate to allow a comfortable life then at a certain point you drop down into pension eligibility and then you supplement your own savings with the pension.

Unfortunately, in the parts of the zone of grey the way it works out is if you earn too much the combined impact of income tax and reduced payments is equivalent to a tax rate of 70 or 80%, so it sort of makes it an incentive not to work in those cases unless you really like it for some reason, but there is every chance you are 75 or 80 by then so I think you've probably done your bit by then and entitled to take it a little easy.

Where pensions are tied to incomes and go away if you reach certain incomes threshold?

It can be reduced by 50c for every dollar earned, plus you can be taxed on earnings, in some cases.

Isn't that just a few well understood algorithms and the acres of servers to run them? Is Uber coming up with new math?

Then ride a cab? You're involving a middle man because they do a pretty damn good job taking you from point A to point B. It's the same reason you might want to use Amazon to buy something and "take money out of your community."

Local cabs need to innovate and provide an app with similar features. If they do that, they'll probably stay in business. If not... Good luck.

The problem is what happens after Uber goes out of business, having taken out the local cab companies?

In what sense? The taxi's and their drivers will still be there, they're locals. They're not completely dependent on Uber so if a vacuum would arise, it would be filled quite fast I believe.