With Uber want to work? Press a button. Want to take a break? Press a button. Want to work again? Press a button. Take as long a break as you want. Work as long as you want. No timecards. No obnoxious coworkers. No intrusive questions. No douchebag bosses making your life a living hell. In what other job do you have this sort of freedom without the instability of traditional selfemployment? What more could you ask for? Now it'll all be ruined for everybody because of the greed and entitlement of a few.
Its side hustle money for bored college kids with some free time. They NEVER promised anything more. They're not forcing you to work for them. If you're a a single mother raising 5 kids on Uber alone you're doing it wrong.
> Its side hustle money for bored college kids with some free time.
Except it isn’t. If it was then Uber wouldn’t be trying to setup vehicle leasing schemes for their drivers.
If it was true then I would actually meet some college kid drivers, rather that 30 year old migrants.
If you’re a single mother raising 5 kids on Uber, then you probably have no choice. Telling them they’re “doing it wrong” won’t feed their kids. It’s just a callus relegation of someone you find undesirable and have no wish to help.
Fact is that every time you create a new way to earn money some people will do it full time no matter the feasibility. So basically you argue that we should have the current wage-slave economy forever instead of giving workers more choice. The only reason Uber is even a hint of a problem today is that we only have a single occupation following this model, but if it was more widespread and you could pick between a plethora of different things to earn money by as easily as Uber then suddenly the problems with Uber today would disappear instantly.
I understand that the current wage-slave model is better for employers, workers can't go home early if they feel tired that day for less pay since it would get them fired. Instead they have to tough out their hours every day. Similarly if a part time worker wanted a bit of extra money they could just choose to work more a few times, but that is also impossible in the current model. It assumes that workers are like machines who reliably work XX hours per week with no deviations. And even hourly jobs requires you to pick shifts beforehand and often you can't even get as many hours as you want or need, and you can still get fired for picking too few shifts etc.
So I feel that Uber is a much more humane way to handle labor than current employment contracts.
Don’t assume that US wage slave practices are universal.
Most of the developed world has very strong worker protections and a recognition that mental health and flexible working is important.
We can provide jobs with good benefits, flexible hours, accommodations for parents etc without resorting to the employment model Uber trumpets. The EU proves this is possible (it’s far from perfect, but empirically better than the US), and the fact that it’s one of the worlds largest trading blocks shows it can be done without sacrificing economic progress.
I agree lets look at this empirically. Or as close to it as we casually can. Lets take the top 3 results for Googling "productivity nation" (without quotes) where we can easily get a list to avoid cherrypicking.
US is 3rd ahead of most European countries. (I think this is a slightly more trustworthy number because its simpler and less prone to monkeybusiness like adding 'worklife' balance into the equation like other figures do.
So yes the empirical evidence seems to indicate that the US model is ahead of the EU in general. Its not the best but then again I never said that employment models is the be all end all of everything productivity.
Let's look at mobility, when I say upward mobility. I don't mean simply making do or even living adequately. I mean being ambitious and actually breaking out and being very successful and maintaining it. One straightforward way is to look at USD millionaires per capita.
" But the success of US tech companies is certainly notable."
One of the funniest statements ever following an assertion of empiricism.
The left's idea of "leading" is always amusing. The left in the socialist paradises in Europe will keep depending on US technology and posting on sites created by US innovation. At least until they depend maybe on China and then they won't even have the choice to practice evading their own country's speech laws.
The leftists in the US will just keep abusing the privileges they are afforded by those who keep them in luxury because that's just what they do. The system is good to them that way.
I'll now go "wage slave" so I can afford to travel to places that produce old buildings you visit.
Full-time driving jobs have existed for a century. There's nothing stopping people from driving FT if they want to, but they usually want the freedom and flexibility of working when and where they can that Uber is specifically designed for.
You can always come up with some scenario where it doesn't work while ignoring millions of drivers who are doing just fine. Would that mother in your example be better off without Uber? What if she can't work steady shifts every day and needs the flexibility?
People are perfectly capable of choosing what's best for themselves, they don't need the government to tell them what to do.
If people want to work for Uber so badly then whats Uber's place not to accommodate them? If single mothers need help so badly then thats not Uber's problem, they're out to run a business not save the world. The government should do something useful for them instead of effectively putting them out of work.
Yes the main effect of this is the company will have to restrict its standards and probably less of these people we're supposedly so concerned about will be able to work anymore due to qualifications or being able to cope. And those left now get to enjoy more regulations, supervisors, time cards, and workplace surveillance and the daily grind just like the rest of us drones. Heck Uber is barely scraping by as is. This might be the killing blow and now everybody is out of work. Good job.
> the main effect of this is the company will have to restrict its standards and probably less of these people we're supposedly so concerned about will be able to work anymore due to qualifications or being able to cope.
This kind of whining and fear mongering is done in response to absolutely every kind of employment regulation or workers rights improvement. Somehow it never seems to come true.
There are plenty of Uber competitors out there. There model of employment isn’t the only one possible. We can do better, and we should try.
On the basis of your arguments business should make no attempt to care for any of their workers, and all worker protections should be abolished.
That model only works if you buy into the fantasy that employees have any real negotiating power, they don’t. The only negotiating power they have is collective actions taken by governments. France is nice strong democracy, it’s not unreasonable to say this is the French people’s rejection of Uber’s exploitive employment practices.
You're not protecting the worker. You're taking away their freedom and choice and turning them into a different kind of worker.
Perhaps if you speak to some drivers, you'll find the overwhelming response that shows they want flexibility, not another full-time job.
These kind of laws do not take a majority to pass, and France had violent protests and riots by taxi drivers against ride-sharing with plenty of political infighting. The only votes that matter are Uber drivers, and you would find a very different conclusion if you only asked them.
There is nothing that prevents Uber from providing flexibility. The court has not ruled that Uber contracts were illegal, but that they were employment contracts (obviously, with the flexible hours Uber is known for) rather than (Uber) company to (the driver's) company business contracts.
> With Uber want to work? Press a button. Want to take a break? Press a button. Want to work again? Press a button. Take as long a break as you want. Work as long as you want. No timecards. No obnoxious coworkers. No intrusive questions. No douchebag bosses making your life a living hell. In what other job do you have this sort of freedom without the instability of traditional selfemployment? What more could you ask for? Now it'll all be ruined for everybody because of the greed and entitlement of a few.
Interesting that you forgot to mention the below-minimum-wage rates here
What below minimum wage rates? In most of Uber's markets the price is based on supple and demand, and the drivers get a portion of that price. It's a market driven scheme where you agree to driving at that price. If you don't agree, then just change platforms, or don't drive!
If college kids on Uber are hurting families who rely on the income of a taxi/cab/whatever driver, why wouldn’t we step in? There’s no golden rule that says we can’t intervene in the market to ensure people can have a decent life.
Desperate people will always try to make a living on any money source. Say I live in an area with lots of litter. If I made a program that paid 5 cents per piece of litter picked up from the streets, some desperate person would try to do it full time to support their family, fail, sue me for not paying a living wage and providing full health benefits and a pension, etc.
College kids should very well be allowed to offer a lower price for a service that someone else does at a higher price point - the problem is a multi-billion-USD-valued company trying to weasel around laws to profit off of both of them.
I find it strange that people and historians are so fixated on the 4th Crusade as the be all end all of the Byzantine's and ignore or minimize as much as possible all that irrelevant side business of the centuries of fighting with the Muslims. You know, the guys that fought them far more often and more brutally and actually took away nearly all their territory and destroyed them? In addition to the above comment and a few others in this thread take this video for example.
Don't forget the Persians before the Muslims or all the self-inflicted damage from coups, inept emperors, etc..
In this case though, the fourth crusade really is important since it was when the Hagia Sophia was first looted during a sack of the city. Nearly seven centuries of accumulated treasures were carted out of the place.
It's totally done on a politically oriented ground to denigrate a religion and culture, and put another in favouring light. If people were more educated about some historical facts (for instance the bloody conquest of India) it would be harder for some people to keep the power and push their agenda.
Wikipedia is written by a much smaller (from what I've seen) and far more cliquish group than in the old days. The novelty of editing an open encyclopedia has worn off and a far more vast majority now just visit for the questionable facts while only the people with too much time on their hands still edit.
Coincidentally theres even more territoriality than before with people setting up fiefdoms on prime articles and don't you dare flout their authority. Its worst of course on the politically relevant topics. A current favored tactic is to frontload the very beginnings of articles about organizations and people they don't like with negative/inflammatory information. For example compare the current versions of Breitbart News, Conservapedia, One America News Network, and Stephen Miller with Daily Kos, Rational Wiki, and Huffington Post.
The defense if they're called on it is a tortured appeal to 'authoritative consensus' where an editor will go on a fishing expedition for negative quotes from the left of center media bloc like CNN or HuffPo and anything they find on there even blatant opinion is automatically sacrosanct regardless of whether it actually is a consensus among the entire media.
So basically the political articles are even more trash than ever. Again you can draw whatever connection you want to the type of people left editing this mess. I feel sorry for anyone who actually reads and believes it.
Another annoying thing is that they still haven't fixed their scientific articles which for anything beyond the basics tend to be overly jargonish and technical yet uninformative at the same time.
The Bishop of Rome was considered the preeminent by all the other major sees. Its just whether he was first among equals or outright leader that was the controversy. So the RCC has a bit of a claim as the parent..
Any material you can recommend I can read more on that? As I understand it, the writings of Irenaeus get cited here to make that point except they're often taken out of context.
Here we are in a world that supposedly treasures the ability of consenting adults to do whether we want yet paid sex is still illegal and in fact being restricted further in places it was formerly allowed.
That's a fair take, but I don't think it really applies to the article: almost all of the countries mentioned in it have prostitution some flavor of legalized via Abolitionism or Legalization (Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland) or Neo-Abolitionism (Sweden).
There is nothing to fix or disrupt. The vast majority of women don't need or care about dating apps the vast majority of men won't get anything out of them. Women want the fittest men, men will bang anything that moves.
Thats the root issue and how to fix it or if it even should be fixed is far beyond the purview of a better engineered dating program. At most you'll make it slightly less predatory or more monetarily profitable. A lot of people (men) will still be left out in the cold.
Bumble is not a 'decent' app. Its whole schtick is taking a dump on the group that keeps it in business (men) and how horrible they are and how women need to be protected from them. Thats not fair to men or sustainable.
They are clearly responding to a real market signal (the belief, at least, that too many men behave poorly on some of these apps) that at least some women respond very favorably to. I guess if they remain successful that tells us something about both that signal and the sustainability.
If you don't like a person don't swipe on them. If they behave badly, unmatch them. I fail to see how women are systematically oppressed under this system vs the one Bumble provides.
It doesn't really matter what you or I think about it individually - if enough women are unhappy with the experience (whatever it is) on other sites that they move to this one and then find it superior and stay it's a pretty strong market signal. If it fails, that's another signal.
I'll believe it when I see it. Radical new technology is always leapfrogging conventional fusion and has been overtaking and rendering it 'obsolete' for the past 30-40 years.
So you are okay with this guy dishonestly connecting Google disciplining this workers for an unrelated issue to LGBT rights?
Would you be okay with a story from FoxNews saying Dems has a policy of targeting black people because they happened to throw out a black activist disrupting their meeting in the name of gun rights?
The angle is virtue signaling and potstirring. Its low hanging fruit to earn plaudits and make it seem like you're doing something. In reality like you said there is nothing to indicate the employees were fired for being gay or trans or whatever. The later reference to 'concentration camps' drives home the kind of person this guy is. Gay and trans people should be disgusted this person is using them in such a dishonest way to score points.
That is the unfortunate reality of a lot of activism today. I wonder if this behavior only serves to cause general resentment in the community against LGBTQ folks because the biggest loudmouths drag down the discourse.
Its side hustle money for bored college kids with some free time. They NEVER promised anything more. They're not forcing you to work for them. If you're a a single mother raising 5 kids on Uber alone you're doing it wrong.