Hacker News Reader

Comment by lazyasciiart | Hacker News Reader

They are all the same category of things - making it illegal for a person to work in a job that they are volunteering to take. Maybe it's illegal because the pay is below minimum wage, maybe it's because they are doing something without following the safety requirements of OSHA. Some people think this is a sign that minimum wage/child labor laws/any such restriction should be removed. Others, like myself, think that it should be possible for everyone to have better options available so that nobody does want to work for scraps.

View on HN

“The same category of things” still doesn’t make it relevant. It’s obviously not illegal in the US to drive a taxi cab and cab drivers do not make any more money than Uber drivers. The issue is that if someone wants to earn part time income, Uber provides a great option. And these rules would destroy that option. I really don’t know why people cannot be left to make this decision for themselves.

From looking at the condition of the drivers and the cabs they maintained before the arrival of Uber & Lyft, I don't think NYC's medallion system (or its equivalent in other cities) were following any modest safety requirements that were in place back then.

People loved these ride-hailing apps because of how lousy the typical taxi cab experience was for most people.

~ Most of the drivers were not native English speakers and would not put any effort into conducting their business genially.

~ They would refuse to take credit cards despite having card readers or would disable them to take cash.

~ At late hours you were at the mercy of the dispatcher (from the central office) if they would send a taxi at all or if the driver would take your business instead of ditching you to pickup passengers for longer (and more profitable) trips.

~ There was zero accountability in a whole host of areas like that.

There were always computer-dispatched car services in New York, decades before Uber. The reason people prefer Uber is because Computer Car costs $60 to go to the airport and Uber, by contracting with desperate amateurs and their unmaintained jalopies, undercuts their price.

Those services were, and still are, much worse than Uber and the like. They're not bad in any absolute sense; just relatively bad. I'm pretty sure they weren't and aren't "computer-dispatched" in the same way Uber and the like are either. For one, you almost always had and have to speak to a person by phone, and often more than once, e.g. to receive updates about when a driver could be expected to arrive.

A study in 2000 suggested your average low level street dealer made $20-30k/yr [1]. That's no benefits, no OSHA, no minimum wage, no child labor laws, is frequently violent, etc. Surely things have changed, particularly with the spreading decriminalization of marijuana, but I think it's still relevant. When we're talking about restricting poor people from accepting some kinds of work, we must bear in mind that we may like their other options even less.

[1]: http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittVenkates...

Heh, I wonder if a more effective way to wage the War on Drugs would be to stop prosecuting street-level dealers for drugs, but simply enforce employee status on them :-p

> Others, like myself, think that it should be possible for everyone to have better options available so that nobody does want to work for scraps.

It sure seems like a lot of people will have to continue to work , e.g. for less than minimum wage, and without almost any legal protections, until better options are made available to them.

I'm more inclined to welcome incremental improvements, no matter how modest, than to bemoan everything short of some kind of ideal possibly-possible future.

For one, does "everyone", for you, include every person in the world? Should everyone making a living with less than "better" options be forced to stop working as they are now and wait for those better options to materialize? It seems pretty obvious to me that accepting something less than perfect is better than refusing to accept anything that falls short in the interim.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com