I think a lot of businesses have adopted this. I've seen Papa John's orders on Roadie, but I'm sure they also use Uber Eats or DoorDash and their own in-house drivers.
My car dealership does this with shuttle rides. They've got a couple shuttles with drivers, but they'll book Uber rides for people if there's overflow.
I've worked these 1099 grocery delivery gigs and you get paid around minimum wage to lug these very heavy orders of water and juice up stairs, all while adding miles to your own vehicle and bearing the full risk of injury because you're an independent contractor. I hope you tip them well at least.
I wish no one would tip them. Then they'd quit working for minimum wage, then the costs would go up, then I could see the actual cost of the service and make a decision to use it or not.
a tip for an unusual order/circumstance would be fine. Say if you ordered a 50lb bag of cat food, and live on the Nth floor, and the elevators are not working.
I see no reason to think that was the case. They'll work for whatever rate companies pay them. There are many workers in minimum wage jobs who don't get tips at all. I agree that tipping is a bad practice and that it pushes labor costs onto customers. It will take regulation for companies to stop and tipping culture to change. I'm doing my part to try and keep the problem from getting worse by refusing to tip for almost anything except deliveries and being actually waited on. No matter how much companies beg for tips for basic retail purchases and counter service I don't feel at all bad about turning them down.
I guess you're talking a much higher minimum wage then Kansas. Minimum wage here is $7.25/hr, which isn't enough to live on practically, so it's not hard to find a job for significantly more than minimum wage.
This seems to be you choosing to live in an idealized form of your future vs the actual reality of today. My question is, if you're choosing idealized anyway, why stop at a mundane ideal where anyone has to work for minimum wage at all? Unless you've baked the lower class labor category into your ideal future?
You not tipping doesn't improve anyone's material conditions. You choosing to give money to the exploitative companies does affect material conditions, negatively! To me it sounds like you're trying to doordash your cake, eat it, have it, not pay for it, and get paid for eating it, all at once!
I don't actually even have DoorDash available, but I can put my money where my mouth is when it comes to restaurants; PLEASE pay your workers a good wage, and then I won't eat there if I can't afford it. I don't know what your wages are, or your operating costs; don't make me guess how much I need to pay your employees for you!
Nobody actually likes tipping btw, the question isn't whether it's good, but rather whether we should as individuals punish individual workers for our own failure to not raise minimum wage or ban tipping.
Regarding the restaurant industry, I used to run a restaurant, and my conclusion is that the economy is fake.
There is no profitable way to run a restaurant legally. Somewhere in the supply chain, if not in the restaurant then in the delivery truck or farm, there are undocumented laborers being underpaid and working in unsafe conditions. If we actually applied the typical worker protections we've come to expect for other blue collar jobs, with the expected wages, the already razor thin margins of the restaurant industry would completely collapse. The only thing left would be vertically integrated oligopolies like McDonald's.
Every meal out, somebody, somewhere, is subsidizing your meal to make it affordable enough for you to buy it. Adding the 28-32% margin that Uber eats charges is just increasing that pressure to the breaking point. It all barely survives through psychological tricks that make it seem cheaper than it is like hiding the tip or tax until after you actually get the full bill.
I think the only way the restaurant industry could function fully legally is if the government was the only landlord. There's just not enough margin to include the margins a landlord expects, and landlords pathologically increase rent to be just below causing a restaurant to collapse, or simply cycle through restaurant after restaurant, not caring about months of lost rent revenue because the high rent cost increases the value of the property.
I don't tip. I don't believe in the practice of tipping and especially with digital platforms I don't trust where the money goes.
If I am tipping, it will be directly and usually in cash and there's only one person who gets that and it's the person who cuts my hair.
Get a different job if you don't like it. Minimum wage jobs are dime a dozen and have joke requirements to get onboarded. It's not like competing for faang or whatever.
Why does your personal activism stop after the point that harms fellow humans but not before the step of rewarding an exploitative corporation that subsidizes its labor cost with tips and your tax dollars through welfare to its laborers?
You're welcome to leave the job. If you're working a job that has tips - get a different job. I don't work a job that has tips and never have. I have worked from minimum wage to 1m+/yr.
There are an endless amount of jobs out there that don't have tips involved at all, require similar levels of experience/skill/craft/work-ethic, and pay similarly.
You're also welcome to buy from a company that doesn't offload the fair labor price onto the customer, but instead, you actively incentivize these companies to continue the practice, and punish the worker meanwhile by not tipping. You take advantage of the subsidized lower cost that's normally borne by tipping, actively profiting off this broken system.
Why do you hold humans to a higher standard than corporations?
I don't do tips. If the company wants to not pay well, it's up to the person to choose to not take the job.
You realize you're posting on a hyper capitalist website right? Even by socialist or communist standards, it shouldn't be up to the individual to choose to pay more for an arbitrary reason. That's not how any economic system out there works.
I feel like people posting on here have drastically lowered in quality. Am I speaking with bots?
> I feel like people posting on here have drastically lowered in quality. Am I speaking with bots?
It is trivially easy to determine I'm a real person by clicking my username and following through to my site. Within two clicks you can find a video of me talking. But since we're in the business of blame game here, why do you choose to interact with a website where you're not even sure it's humans you're talking to?
> You realize you're posting on a hyper capitalist website right? Even by socialist or communist standards, it shouldn't be up to the individual to choose to pay more for an arbitrary reason. That's not how any economic system out there works.
Your interaction with society isn't just through paying for things. You seem to enjoy a situation where things are cheap because the labor cost is subsidized via financial tricks like tip culture, and you can swim through the culturally established cracks by not tipping, basically the definition of antisocial behavior.
If you wanted to protest tip culture and low wages, you could, for example, protest. Or stop giving money to companies that do this. For some reason you've decided to blame humans for trying to make a living in this broken system rather than blame companies, who have far more bargaining power, for engaging in exploitative behavior.
Your purchase of the cheaper, tip culture goods over the more expensive non tip culture goods is a price signal rewarding the less ethical company. That's the incentive I meant. It doesn't make any sense for blaming people trying to make ends meet. I don't quite understand why people think their Uber drivers and waiters and whatnot super duper love these tip based jobs, there's a million reasons they are essentially forced to take whatever work they can get. Do you really believe working class people have the bargaining power or job opportunities to walk away from the minimum wage tipped job? You are here which means you have access to the internet which means you must know that many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck - that means they can't miss a single paycheck without catastrophic consequences. So no time to quit and find a new job.
YC may pay for the webservers but there's plenty of commies on here :) for some reason they haven't banned us yet.
People have the opportunity to walk away from minimum wage jobs all the time. It's unironically the easiest job to walk away from in this world because they are very common and easy to get hired on/off of. Low pay jobs are very common and easy to not take.
The jobs that are hard to walk away from are ones that pay enough for someone to live.
Man, you really sound privileged and like you've never worked a minimum wage job at all or know anyone in these positions. Stop talking!
I gotta be real with you man, if you acted like that to your actual delivery driver and they happened to harm you or fuck you your food, I'd understand their POV.
Wow I had no idea Mechanical Turk closed. I assumed it would be quite valuable for doing a lot of data labelling type of work that percolates into AI models.
>I think this is basically what it will be for most knowledge work, knowledge workers are so grossly overpaid compared to the energy they consume, and AI will rectify that. This explains why the Chinese are giving the (much more moderate resources to train) models away for free. They love to see deflationary economics in the US.
I just notice that "knowledge workers are so grossly overpaid compared to the energy they consume, and AI will rectify that" implies that you should not be paid more than what you need to eat.
Well that's what money is. Things are worth how much time humans spend on achieving it, i.e. how much you needed to pay for food to exist for that time + all the time/food you paid for to be consumed by other people recursively.
Not at all, things are worth what the market (= all humans in aggregate) are willing to pay for them. The cost associated with producing something does not matter, except for setting a lower bound.
Yeah and in a free market, neither side can influence the price, hence is settles at the variable costs, which at minimum is what you need to exist, i.e. what I already described.
I think it's less that they want to encourage deflationary economics - because I think this has a tremendous chance of backfiring given that is not how massive productivity/efficiency gains have turned out in the past.
I think they genuinely want to prevent the rise of yet ANOTHER Western bigtech monolith in Anthropic and/or OpenAI. They want to make sure they have no moat. That keeps the value out of the nascent bigtech and instead in people who can run the models.
That, and also I think it just makes them look good and positions them closer to being the respected leader of more of the world.
Look at how they reduced oil imports when the US was being destructive and stupid. China was just like "we're strong, we'll reduce oil consumption to help the world, and if y'all ever want solar panels, we make 'em--also, here's some free AI!"
No kidding? What’s the state of the art for lists of these kinds of prompt biased performance? Or should I ask Opus to game it out with Muse and <Tencent>
Got it, I’m curious about other biases and prompt context results. First that come to mind are Gemini’s very different responses depending on gender in the question.
If it exists, there are others?
Wait, what? "Overpaid compared to the energy they consume"? Firstly, is he talking about the energy resources humans require to be alive? We consume humongous amounts of resources, especially compared to LLMs. It's not clear what that has to do with anything.
Secondly, this is not how Economics works. Relevant terms here would be "supply and demand" because that's what determines almost all wages. Knowledge workers (or any workers) are not paid based on how much it costs to sustain them, like some function of the COGS bill. Knowledge workers are paid so much higher because they supplied the one thing that was pretty rare but for which the demand was very high: intelligence.
AI is not "rectifying" that by consuming less energy, but by providing a supply of intelligence that scales with energy and compute, both of which are technically easier to scale than humans. Which is another piece he misses, the monopoly is not on AI, but on compute. (See: all the kerfuffle about export restrictions on Nvidia chips.)
He is right about some other things in that article though.
Uhh just read that blog post and am not seeing what you see my friend lol. Feynman was one of the best scientific communicators and, simultaneously, scientific contributors of the 20th century. We have plenty of people who are great scientific communicators, and plenty who are great contributors, but not quite any these days who achieve his notoriety as both.
There have been stories like Medvi which did $400m in revenue last year with only a two person team and a bunch of contractors, but it is such a specific niche around arbitraging medical prescriptions, I don't think it could be done in-house at OpenAI without it being a huge distraction.
"As of Monday, at least six purported doctor pages were marketing Medvi's weight-loss drugs and a product that claims to increase men's sexual performance. One profile, "Dr. Matthew Anderson MD," lists an Angolan phone number and appears to have previously belonged to a gospel musician. Another, "Dr. Spencer Langford MD," features older posts and contact information corresponding to a clothing store in the Republic of Congo."
