[Trump Economics]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme

"Such organizations seldom involve sales of products or services with value. Without creating any goods or services, the only revenue streams for the scheme are recruiting more members, or soliciting more money from current members. The behavior of pyramid schemes follows the mathematics concerning exponential growth quite closely. Each level of the pyramid is much larger than the one before it. For a pyramid scheme to make money for everyone who enrolls in it, it would have to expand indefinitely. This is not possible because the population of Earth is finite. When the scheme inevitably runs out of new recruits, lacking other sources of revenue, it collapses."

Better hurry up and make your less than minimum wage -- your time is coming.

 

[Trafficat]

Some problems with this:

1) Uber and Lyft sell a service that is in high demand
2) While Uber/Lyft offer referral fees, you get no commission if people you refer also refer others.
3) Lyft driver referral commissions are almost entirely impossible to profit from because in order to get the commission the driver you recruit has to complete a number of rides first that in many places is not possible, and even where it is, would require the new driver to put in serious hours to meet the criteria that I would guess most drivers do not put in.
4) Contrary to the pyramid scheme where "Expanding indefinitely" helps those who are already in, "expanding" the number of drivers will actually HURT those who are already in by reducing their earning potential. Whereas the Pyramid scheme helps the early referers at the expense of the new guys, the Uber referall only helps the referrer himself at the expense of those who referred him to begin with.
5) The driver pool is self-limiting. High rolling drivers who want to make $20 an hour in profit won't like it, but at the end of the day people only drive because it is profitable. The fact is that as the number of drivers in a place increases (without a corresponding increase in clients), that your pay grade will reduce from professional pay levels to that of the fast food worker. But so long as there are still non-Uber jobs it won't really go lower than that because people will do those other jobs instead of Uber thus causing the ones that stay to make a competitive amount of money.

Unless you have access to a very wide audience, chances are you make more money for driving for Uber/Lyft than through referrals.

Good luck even getting $1 per hour without building a pyramid of referrals on true pyramid schemes like the multi-level marketing schemes, such as ACN, which Donald Trump endorsed.

 

[Trump Economics]

Literally the highlight of my day...

How long did that take you -- 20 minutes?

I was being SARCASTIC.

Lyft and Uber don't fit the traditional model of anything, but it's fair to say they've conned people, isn't it?

How many settlements are we talking -- a few hundred (that you know about)? Call it what you want, but when there aren't any drivers left (except for ex-cons and prostitutes), I'm not quite sure investors will be getting their money back.