Anyone who actually thought people gave a shit about chatbots was either deluded, a chatbot API salesman, or a manager/owner trying to cut costs by downsizing their call/chat support center.
Anyone who actually thought the gig economy was helping anyone but business owners was either deluded or a shill.
Fantastic typo! (Or was it intentional?)
Would not go to extremes and say everybody is a shill, since there has been serious innovation but we should be transparent of what is the cost of all that innovation. Just be honest with oneself (e.g. I'm working with this new fancy decentralized database instead of just buzzwording your way to success by blockchaining everything, etc). We need to drop the ego and work on what we love.
(See: The curious curious phenomena that humans put most of their personal information on the Internet where other people can see it.)
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-gig-econ...
I'm half expecting their business model is to tarnish the industry to badly that Uber et all pay them hush money to stop advertising.
Right?
If HFCS wasn’t healthy, why do people eat it?
Now, that isn't to say that it wouldn't be better if people consumed less HFCS. (But, isn't the ubiquity of HFCS partially due to corn subsidies? I think I heard that.)
So, uh, when people purchase foods with HFCF I think it makes sense that this aligns with their marginal preferences. Does this mean it is to thei benefit? Hmm.
The business does hiring many times, so they reap the efficiencies of scale and get increasingly adept over time at hiding the risks they offload onto the contractors.
To balance the information asymmetry, the contractors would need to pool their efforts similarly, and improve their ability to discover the true compensation. In other words, collective bargaining, with specialists who understand the full terms of the contract including all that's hidden in the fine print.
<snark cantresist="true">All those government officials who pass laws crippling unions should stop treating business owners like idiots who need "protecting".</snark>
Increasing unionizion has many side effects on the wider economy, and it's not my purpose to flog them. Instead, I'm merely trying to illustrate that each individual contractor is at a significant disadvantage when negotiating.
People don't need to give a shit about chatbots. A large amount of people deal with them all the time. Every time you decide to use chat to get help from some site that provides s service for you, what do you think the odds are you're first connected to a human? By having chatbots do the initial contact and information gathering, you can streamline the actual process and seamlessly connect and hand off to a real support rep after the rote info gathering is done, and provide them with the account number, a generalized idea of what the problem is, etc. Some requests can probably be handled entirely by the bot (need to change your password? That's easy to script).
Chatbots are all around us, supplementing formal interactions.
So you’re saying customers use those services for literally no reason.
Consumers were losers?
I feel like the drivers are not paid adequately though, esp. given the hidden expenses. I talk with them regularly and think many don't realize those costs.
I always tip as a result, and I think Uber/Lyft give me better drivers as a result, though I can't be sure.
I think that these kind of thoughts are simply not economics. If driving is bad money after all of that, eventually people will realize and it will all come crumbling down. But it cant be true if drivers keep working for years like this.
It is also a stance that you can take only because you think there is something the government should do about it. There a a lot of carrers that are not financially sensical by some interpretation. Should artsists be banned or licensed to limit the number? Should Actors? Should QA analysts? etc etc.
My point is that even if it is a bad deal for drivers, its their choice to make, and its not going to lead to a better outcome to make the choice for them.
It's more accurate to say business owners and consumers are benefiting at the expense of the employees.
Like, suppose someone is selling some good and they get paid on commission, as like, some proportion of the purchase cost. If the price of goods of that sort go down (maybe one of the materials needed to manufacture it became more abundant?), then they would receive less income, but also not have to pay as much for different similar goods, and whether they are overall better or worse off would depend on the details.
In this particular case the consumers who are benefiting are generally a different group than the employees who are losing out, so I don't see why you bothered to point this out.
Which parent would not agree with, as they are offering a straightforward Marxist reading.
That's quite a generalization you're making.
Just because business owners are benefiting by pushing wages as low as the market will bear and reaping profits/growth, doesn't mean consumers/drivers aren't benefiting from the arrangement as well.
Service providers are granted an additional at-will income opportunity.
Consumers are granted a high-value low-cost service.
Many will argue that the service providers are being tricked into the arrangement through hidden costs. However, a large sector of drivers actually rent their cars, which pretty much removes all hidden costs and proves to me that these gigs are a viable alternative to employment.
I'm going to highly disagree with you, there. I had a friend who tried renting the car from one of those companies. Nothing could be further from the truth than what you posted. It was basically the old "company store".
I am a Software Developer with a decent salary for where I live. I got offered a job a couple of years ago, where 3/4 of my wage was through an international company and the rest through a normal Spanish one. When I saw the amount going into my account every month, I thought I had hit the jackpot as it was way more than I expected.
A while later when I got converted to a full Spanish contract, and my manager advised me to make sure I wasn't getting screwed. It was only then that I realized I hadn't actually been getting the pension payments on the 3/4 of my international contract up until then. What looked like a good deal hadn't actually been one at all.
I would be surprised if people less educated than me would understand all the hidden costs.
Sometimes you just need a quick gig to make ends meet between jobs. Something you can pick up in a day or two and leave just as quickly.
Full-time, long-term? No, it's not a great idea. But it's a good safety net when things get tough.
A lot of Americans point to Canada as an example, but it's a pretty bad example. If healthcare was so great in Canada, then there wouldn't be private hospitals in the United States that cater only to Canadians who go to America for the healthcare they can't get in Canada, or can't get in a timely fashion.
In American towns where a lot of Canadians spend the winter, the radio stations are full of ads for these hospitals. (Palm Springs, for example.)
If you mean the UK, the news over there is constantly full of horror stories about its NHS.
Perhaps you can be more specific?
I've seen a lot of the people that some cases of people that do it that are future minded and care about running the numbers just rent a car for the day. All of a sudden, you've abstracted away a lot of those variable costs to a third party. Unfortunately, I think the rental companies wised up after a while, and have wording in the contracts about ride-sharing now.
I imagine in a large enough metro area, someone could (or has) abstract the vehicle and maintenance portion of the larger taxi services to specialized rental service for people that work in ride-sharing. Rent a ride-share car for a day, or more likely by the hour, and they'll make sure it's clean and in good running condition and meets the requirements for ride sharing service X, Y or Z. Specialized ride-sharing insurance optional...
Actually, I imagine some of the existing taxi services in larger cities might have already shifted to this. Seems like a natural pivot, since they already have the majority of what's needed in place.
Nobody is forced to drive. Nobody is forced to work for less than they value their labor. Unionizing Uber means dramatically high prices, which means less demand. There isn’t a magic pot of money just waiting to be distributed. If comes from consumer pockets. If Uber gets more expensive, I’ll drive myself. So that guy that would have made $10, now makes zero because he thinks he deserves $20. So he is actually worse off now. Markets don’t work in a vacuum — there are substitutes and you can’t “fix” a problem without unintended consequences.
Let supply and demand work. Those that think they should earn more can quit and to sell their services to someone willing to pay their desired rates. If nobody will pay that desired rate, then it’s clear that the market doesn’t value that service that much.
Why is supply and demand so hard for people to understand? We oppose industrial monopolies, why would we advocate for labor monopolies via unions?
It's easy for someone with a sought after talent to say normal workers can just "quit and sell their services to someone willing to pay more", but that isn't an actual option for many many people.
> "...he thinks he deserves $20."
Who said anything about deserving? You said as much that you'd drive yourself when it came to a $20 ride; you wouldn't drive yourself if it was $10. This more or less suggests the only reason Uber provides value to you is because it charges less than what you'd charge if you were providing it, because you think you deserve $20. In that instance it's not unfair to say that you get value out of Uber undercutting the competition.
> "Those that think they should earn more can quit..."
I suppose they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps too? Not many of us can enjoy the privilege of quitting our jobs because we know we're worth more than we're getting. I have that privilege and I use it often, like many of us do in tech. For as long as we value low prices at all costs, there will always be someone who is forced into taking on this kind of job because they don't have the luxury of choice that we do. They can't quit because it's either the $10 you want to give them, so you can save $10 for yourself, or nothing.
It's been clear enough for a long time that those who enjoy the services from others won't really advocate for them, and neither will their employers, so unions and regulations are there to sort that out.
You must not think so if you believe they shouldn't have the ability to join a union.
"Nobody is forced to drive"
This whole "nobody is forced to" meme loses any and all credibility once you think for 2 seconds and realize that people are forced to work or starve.
"Let supply and demand work."
We're not the ones stopping it from working; employers are.
For any unionized category/shop there should be a grouping of unions (adding a new union to that group should require a simple majority among a voting quorum of all active employees) which could thus collectively bargain between a large business and/or group of businesses and the workers that make that possible.
I also like the idea that unions on strike (in this case, groups of them; they'd agree to go out on strike together and vote together for it) don't disrupt business, but rather nullify profits. Maybe they agree that during "strikes" all compensation gets divided by charity/etc. This goes for the workers AND the businesses; both of whom still have to pay normal costs.
-- edit --
I forgot one other critical feature. Just like employees might take an employee though any of the unions, so to can the employee switch unions (I assume seniority and compensation offers would be favorable to prompt such a switch.)
It would be nice if Governments properly recognized the value businesses provide with long term stable jobs, and aligned the incentive in a way that creates more stable and happy communities in the distant future.
Right now governments will give anything to Amazon to get them to move to town and bring all those jobs with them. But how much will we incentive McDonald's to keep jobs, and not to replace all their employees with perfect hamburger vending machines?