Comment by momokoko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by momokoko | Hacker News Reader

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I'm sorry, but this all just sounds like free market ideology. We are saying the same thing. You just think someone needs to be at fault and there are good guys vs bad guys.

I'm talking to an individual. Please refer the comment I was replying to. I'm not trying to make generalized ideological debates about the gig economy or taxation or any other of the typically religious arguments people shout at each other about online.

To an _individual_ it is important for them to realize that they need to account for the risk involved in what they are doing. If you drive for a company as an employee and get injured and can never work again, you will receive payments from them for the rest of your life. If you do it as a contractor you will be disabled and at best be able to receive the very limited US government disability which would force you to live in poverty. Remember, driving all day is one of the most dangerous types of professions. And absolutely no, you cannot get an individual workers compensation policy because it would cost more money than the income from the gig. Its absurd you would think that exists.

Please do not go into online forums and just shoot idealism everywhere. We get it, you hate big government and taxation is theft. We've all heard it 10 million times. Unless it has a unique connection to the topic being discussed, you are just derailing the conversation.

I think you're missing the point as well, and that may be a generational difference.

You value security and loyalty, because that's what your generation was raised with.

My generation has no delusions of job security. It does not and will not exist in our future. We value independence and freedom, and the opportunity to pursue our careers.

I've done contract work my entire life and wouldn't have it any other way. I do not want to be tied to a company. I earn much, much work working independently.

My insurance is my savings account. My insurance is my adaptability. My insurance is my skillset.

Your reply indicates that you think that has something to do with idealism, and it doesn't. We want to do work, get paid for it, and fuck off to the next thing.

You don't have to agree with it, just don't participate in it if you don't. But don't try to get in the way of other people doing what they want because you don't understand it.

Ring ring Your generation calling. You can take your anecdotal statement and your "my generation" and kindly keep it to yourself. Not to mention, "Our generation" is so different thinking about this across countries that this idea is just so odd.

It's not realistic. It's not scalable to all people. It's survivalistic. You will get tired. You will get sick. You might have a family. You will affect others. You will die one day.

Your skill set won't save you. Your adaptability won't save you. Your material possessions won't save you. And your savings might not be able to even save you.

You will live in a community and by extension affect one. It is a fool's game to act as if youth and health are infinite.

We can have work freedom, that's fine. But without a community, a caring society, a caring government, something to back us up. When the work is gone and we are sick, distressed, and at out most helpless we will have nothing but our hopeful savings to help us. And honestly that's naive to think is a enough imo.

"You value security and loyalty, because that's what your generation was raised with."

How could you possibly know that much about the person you're responding to? He only state he's "older", but didn't say which country, city, religion etc. Even if he did so, it wouldn't say much.

I know people in their 60s that believe in may things you stated, and others in their 20s who disagree with you about everything you said (and I mean high income young software engineers, not someone in need of state help).

Also, it's just my personal opinion from now on:

Don't reason in such absolute ways, everything is much more complex than "your generation" and "my generation" could possibly convey, and even inside a specific age/region/education/income group, the way people think and act varies wildly (and they are probably all both right and wrong depending on subject).

Don't put so much trust on your adaptability and skillset, you never know how the world will change and how you will react to it. I really hope it will just get better, be you never know. I'm only 39yo and saw quite a few highly skilled people go down because of unexpected physical/mental health issues.

Anyway, please don't take it as me trying to "prove you wrong". Well, as humans we almost always do a little of it, but it seems to em I used to think like you at some point and it brought me quite some pain. Maybe I'm misinterpreting you and am just an idiot, but I felt like writing.

Have a great week!

contract work is just great

No. The comment was off topic.

I was replying to an individual. And then someone decided to add a reply to my comment with typical internet free market talking points. I was not discussing these debated to death boring religious debates about government and taxation. I was talking to an individual. Please refer to the comment I was originally replying to for context.

For an individual, the loss of worker compensation is a very very significant thing to consider. Driving is a very dangerous job. Most police officer deaths each year are from automobile accidents. Whether they should make that choice, or if a society should allow it, was absolutely nowhere in any way at all in my comment. Please reread my comment as it appears you seem to have missed that.

If you want to rehash the same typical talking points we've all heard 10,000 times, please do it in a different thread. I have a very difficult time seeing how repeating things that have been said so many times does anything but waste all of our time here.

These are not ideological talking points. They are basic economics.

Believing that markets work according to principles like the law of supply and demand is as ideological as believing that vaccines reduce population wide mortality.

Maybe rehashing those points often enough will get your lazy ass inspired to get up and actually do something about it. Or you can continue to be lazy and disingenuous, your choice, after all.

> My generation has no delusions of job security.

It is a temporary thing that happens to any generation at a certain age range.

> I'm not trying to make generalized ideological debates about the gig economy or taxation or any other of the typically religious arguments people shout at each other about online.

You are in a discussion attached to an article about a piece of proposed legislation. It was a policy discussion from the start.

> To an _individual_ it is important for them to realize that they need to account for the risk involved in what they are doing.

That is true, but is it novel information that nobody is aware of? That seems to be the standard you want to apply.

> And absolutely no, you cannot get an individual workers compensation policy because it would cost more money than the income from the gig. Its absurd you would think that exists.

Disability insurance is typically 1-3% of your income because the payout in the event of a claim is proportional to your income. For the low income in most of these professions that comes to somewhere around $50/month. They may decide it isn't worth that much, but there is no basis to the idea that it would cost more than their overall compensation.

> Please do not go into online forums and just shoot idealism everywhere.

This feels like a double standard that in practice just means that you would prefer it if people with contrary opinions to yours would shut up.

> This feels like a double standard that in practice just means that you would prefer it if people with contrary opinions to yours would shut up.

No. Those opinions on either side of the debate have been done to absolute death online. I can't imagine a single person you could find on this forum that could not list for you the common talking points(for and against) government taxation and regulation. That is what these comments are about. Not detailed, unique, and specific insight into this particular situation. Just mindless regurgitation of the same stuff we've all heard way more times than is needed.

> That is true, but is it novel information that nobody is aware of? That seems to be the standard you want to apply.

Most people I talk to about workers compensation do not realize how different the outcomes are for them between contractor and employee. The most common ones people are aware of is that they have to pay both sides of their social security. Unemployment insurance is also something that some people do not realize. During that last economic slowdown, the US government extended unemployment benefits for years to millions of US workers. Contractors will not be eligible for any of that assistance in the next economic downturn.

See how that information is relevant and specific to the original comment(not article) I was responding to? They discussed how they did not see many downsides with being a gig worker. I was bringing up a couple, especially workers compensation because of how dangerous driving jobs are.

I never said GrubHub should or should not provide that. I certainly never mentioned if the US government should do anything. I would recommend that you please go back to my original comment and the comment I was replying to originally for more information and context.

> No. Those opinions on either side of the debate have been done to absolute death online. I can't imagine a single person you could find on this forum that could not list for you the common talking points(for and against) government taxation and regulation.

It is the misfortune of large online discussion forums that between filter bubbles and user churn, there are always people who actually haven't heard those arguments before. And the longer we avoid rehashing old arguments, the more people around who haven't heard them yet.

So it's never very long before we have the same arguments again and again. Except that they're not the same, because it's different people around each time. You may say the same thing you've said before but they're hearing it for the first time. Then maybe they give you a different response than you've ever heard before, and one or the other person is convinced. At least that's the idea.

What's the alternative? Stop discussing things that are still happening and affecting people, because some different people discussed them last year?

> During that last economic slowdown, the US government extended unemployment benefits for years to millions of US workers. Contractors will not be eligible for any of that assistance in the next economic downturn.

But that's policy. Maybe we should get rid of the distinction entirely, make everyone contractors, but then have taxpayer-funded unemployment compensation for everybody. Maybe we shouldn't have unemployment compensation at all and instead have a UBI.

Even if you're only making decisions as an individual, the possibility of those kinds of policy changes happening by the time it becomes relevant to you may be something you want to consider when making your decision.

> What's the alternative? Stop discussing things that are still happening and affecting people, because some different people discussed them last year?

Discussing government regulation and taxation may have been discussed by every single human being on the planet at this point(joking). It's absolutely worn out. There are likely fewer topics(especially around HN) that are more overused at this point.

If you seriously have something new and different to add, I am all ears. And I would say that is a good time to bring it up again. But all of the comments I have read in this thread have exactly the same stuff.

One side: People should be free to decide what to do with their money and the government should stay out of the way because people understand their lives better and governments can be corrupt.

Other side: Governments should impose restrictions and fees as society as a whole will be effected by certain actions of individuals and governments have a responsibility to look out for the people's best interest.

It's been done to absolute death dude. Its the same points, over and over and over and over again. We all have heard all of this 10,000 times.

> It's been done to absolute death dude. Its the same points, over and over and over and over again. We all have heard all of this 10,000 times.

Speak for yourself "dude". I, for one, find these discussions to be valuable. If you don't like them or are fed up with them, then don't partake. Even if you aren't in a position to change your mind, spectators like me are.

> One side: People should be free to decide what to do with their money and the government should stay out of the way because people understand their lives better and governments can be corrupt.

> Other side: Governments should impose restrictions and fees as society as a whole will be effected by certain actions of individuals and governments have a responsibility to look out for the people's best interest.

I feel like people are always talking past each other. In general what happens is that the policies enacted by Democrats and Republicans are both crap but in different ways, and then both sides argue for their ideal that their party doesn't actually uphold but against the other side's actual results which are in both cases terrible.

So they're both right. Markets are more efficient than governments but we don't want people starving in the streets. The Republicans' policies are terrible in practice and the Democrats' policies are terrible in practice. What now?

I tend to think the answer is a UBI, but the difficulty is in getting it passed. The right-wing objection is obvious; it's the purest incarnation of redistribution of wealth. But we already have such policies and replacing them with an equally-redistributive UBI is probably an easier sell than it is on the left, because it would evaporate their world. Unemployment insurance, disability, social security? Redundant, not required. Minimum wage? Food stamps? Housing subsidies? Same. Progressive income tax? Don't need it, flat tax plus UBI results in negative effective rates for low income people and low effective rates for middle income people.

So "employee benefits"? Bad policy, let's get rid of them all and do a UBI instead. Which is the right policy precisely because it would dismantle a century of accumulated inefficient bureaucracy -- but that very fact makes it hard to enact.

So in the meantime I end up arguing against all of this other stuff, as just more to repeal when we finally get the votes to do it properly, and more institutional inertia that makes it harder to get where we ought to be.

But I sometimes lean on the traditional arguments because, ironically, I'm less tired of those than having the same "does a UBI cause inflation" "not really but if it did that's what we need right now anyway" discussion for the hundredth time.

What does any of what you just typed out have to do with the original comment about someone who drives for GrubHub for supplemental income and feel that they prefer to be an independent contractor as opposed to an employee?

You are completely derailing the conversation with common discussions that have been had tens of thousands of times all over the internet. The information exists in excessive quantities for anyone to find.

Wouldn't it be better use of time to go find a discussion specifically about what you are talking about? There is a reason no one is upvoting stories about this stuff here. I imagine most people here don't find it as interesting because we've read this exact stuff so many times.

> What does any of what you just typed out have to do with the original comment about someone who drives for GrubHub for supplemental income and feel that they prefer to be an independent contractor as opposed to an employee?

It is a policy proposal that allows them to do so without suffering the risks you identified. If they like to be an independent contractor but don't like those risks, they should ask the government for a UBI rather than a law requiring them to be reclassified as an employee, which then mitigates those risks without requiring them to indirectly overpay for unemployment insurance that suffers from an insurance fraud problem that a UBI doesn't (among other advantages).

> Wouldn't it be better use of time to go find a discussion specifically about what you are talking about?

Here's one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20069094

Based on their comment, the person there was apparently not aware of the details of the discussions that have been had about this numerous times by other people. Which is fine -- many people really are only having these discussions for the first time. There is nothing wrong with that.

But why do you assume that no one reading this thread has never been exposed to this information before? Some people have, but no one requires that they participate in a similar discussion again.

It's not as if we're on a totally irrelevant tangent here. The fact that some people have discussed it in the past doesn't reduce its relevance as a policy alternative.

I was not talking about policy _at_all_. I was giving some additional info to a specific person about their specific situation. Why are you doing this? How did we now arrive at a tangent about UBI? What does UBI have to do with how that specific person I was replying to should decide about driving for GrubHub? Are you suggesting that that person should first go lobby government officials to implement UBI and see if that works before deciding to drive for GrubHub or not? This is nuts.

Okay, you're obviously a troll. I fell for it. Lesson learned. I'm going to disengage. Got me, nice work.

Their comment was fine. Relax. They discussed why it actually might be more risky from an individual's perspective to be an employee than a contractor.

In my opinion anyway the individual perspective is a moot point. Unless there's some serious shortage of access to information the main consideration should be the benefit to society as a whole and not just a single company. How much more stable will a business and its impact on commerce be if it does provide reduced-premium insurance is the more important question to ask.

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