Rideshare operations are being suspended in California

Great summary for this scary situation.

> I see this as an attempt to make the Gig Economy pay all workers fairly in addition to healthcare costs and to put the onus on the company rather than their taxes.

There is a new word for this class of gig workers doing precarious labor that I've started using: the Precariat.

"In sociology and economics, the precariat (/prɪˈkɛəriət/) is a neologism for a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which is a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. The term is a portmanteau obtained by merging precarious with proletariat.[1] Unlike the proletariat class of industrial workers in the 20th century who lacked their own means of production and hence sold their labour to live, members of the precariat are only partially involved in labour and must undertake extensive "unremunerated activities that are essential if they are to retain access to jobs and to decent earnings".

Classic examples of such unpaid activities include continually having to search for work (including preparing for and attending job interviews), as well as being expected to be perpetually responsive to calls for "gig" work (yet without being paid an actual wage for being "on call"). The hallmark of the precariat class is the condition of lack of job security, including intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence.[2] The emergence of this class has been ascribed to the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism.[3][4]"

[..]

"The British economist Guy Standing has analysed the precariat as a new emerging social class in work done for the think tank Policy Network and the World Economic Forum.[6] In his 2014 book entitled A Precariat Charter he argued that all citizens have a right to socially inherited wealth.[8][9] The latest in the series is titled The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class[2][10] where he proposed basic income as a solution for addressing the problem.

The analysis of the results of the Great British Class Survey of 2013, a collaboration between the BBC and researchers from several UK universities, contended there is a new model of class structure consisting of seven classes, ranging from the Elite at the top to the Precariat at the bottom.[11] The Precariat class was envisaged as "the most deprived British class of all with low levels of economic, cultural and social capital." This was contrasted with "the Technical Middle Class" in Great Britain in that instead of having disposable income but no interests, people of the new Precariat Class have all sorts of potential activities they like to engage in but cannot do any of them because they have no money, insecure lives, and are usually trapped in old industrial parts of the country.

The precariat class has been emerging in societies such as Japan, where it includes over 2 million so-called "freeters".[12]"

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat

Taxis are an obsolete service, Lyft and Uber are overwhelmingly favored by customers and businesses.

But if you do agree with that, shouldn't we resolve inequalities by directly supporting the least fortunate (with cash) rather than force parties into arbitrary economic relationships?

Why is the purpose of a wage to live on? Many uber drivers drive part time for fun or extra pocket change. The existence of thousands of uber drivers -- who in my experience, have all been quite reasonable, nice people -- seem to directly contradict your claim that it does not pay a 'reasonable wage'. Clearly, it does for those invested parties.

The main reason I can't get on board with the rest of this line of argument is that it ultimately just comes down to paternalistic protection of the poor disenfranchised gig workers that you clearly view as being less than capable, rational adult humans. The number of gig economy workers has been growing exponentially for years? Somebody must be tricking them into taking this shit work, and confusing them about the real costs.

Gig economy workers have overwhelmingly spoken that they like this work, by continuing to sign up for it in massive numbers. Or at least that they like it more than their alternatives at the time. If it were some massive trap, don't you think the word would have gotten out by now? The ability to entirely set their own schedule and work as much or little as they choose is appealing enough to draw people in in droves, despite all of the downsides of this type of work.

Getting rid of Uber and Lyft completely throws out the baby with the bathwater here. It won't magically create alternative full time jobs that these workers will prefer to their current situation, it'll just make it much harder for many of them to have any work. Surely there are better incremental policies that could limit the downsides for many of these workers without taking away most of the positives for them too.

As with many far-leftist beliefs these days, I can't help but conclude that the driving factor for a law like AB5 is punitive anger towards successful, wealthy organizations. Just like with the NIMBYs using socialist rhetoric to justify blocking needed middle class housing, it's much more important that the organizations they see as the bad guys suffer than it is to maximize the overall, utilitarian good for the parties they claim to care about. I sincerely hope this way of thinking dies out, almost as much as I hope the current far-right way of thinking dies out.

Of course, its probably not in your best interest to mention this to the company you want to work with since they'll probably just choose to work with someone outside of CA instead. Just be glad their legal counsel (if they have any) doesn't know enough about this law to cause you more headaches.

On the wage issue are you talking about the specifics of how prop 22 defines the earnings floor for drivers [0]? It definitely sets a standard even. It pays some for expenses ($0.30/mile) and the 120% minimum wage while on a ride covers a bit of time spent driving between rides. I could see though how if you have high expenses and don't get many rides you will not earn the minimum wage.

0 - https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_22,_App-Based...

Exploiting? Can you please cite another industry that has the capacity to employ millions of unskilled labor people at $10/hr and ALSO allow them the freedom to set their own schedule?

It's clear you've never worked a minimum wage job before. Flexibility on hours is next-to-impossible at these jobs. If people are willing to make a few bucks an hour less for that flexibility, who are you to call it exploitation?

It's not like these companies are minting profits. The alternative is these people go back to work at McDonald's and also get no benefits while being scheduled at such bizarre hours they can't even go to school and educate themselves.

Shrinking the pool of employment choices for these people does nothing to help them actually get healthcare. My mind is still blown at how the American solution to workers not having healthcare is to attack individual businesses instead of looking across the Atlantic at how the rest of the world solved this problem.

I don't live in CA but used to do a fair amount of work travel out there. If they don't have Uber/Lyft in the future, I'll just make work get me a rental car.

It's easy to see all the folks here who don't remember having to wait an hour for a taxi to show after calling, if it ever did. Pushing a button on your phone and getting a ride five minutes later is magic in comparison.

I mean, I don't see why not. Would create some inefficiencies. But I don't think there is a law against that.

I don't see why that would not be possible.

We often think of "on the clock" employment in terms of shift work, where the worker has a scheduled, fixed-length shift with a single employer, and whether they're actively working during that time or waiting around for the employer to tell them what to do next, they're paid for the hours on the clock.

But it is possible for ridesharing companies to employ workers in "micro-shifts" that last the duration of a single ride.

So, Driver X has two part-time jobs: as a part-time employee of Lyft and a part-time employee of Uber. Driver X is ready to work, so checks the apps, and sees there's a Lyft assignment available. Driver X accepts the ride, and for the duration of that ride, he is working exclusively for Lyft, and Lyft pays him for the time worked. Once that ride ends, his micro-shift with Lyft ends, and he's now available to work for either of his part-time jobs again.

The idea of micro-shifts may seem, at first blush, more like a contractor relationship than an employee relationship. And in the past, gigs that used this model were more likely to involve a contractor relationship -- but they also gave the contractor much more freedom in terms of HOW they accomplished the work.

In contrast, if you look at Uber and Lyft, ignoring the micro-shift aspect, there is very little difference between how those jobs work and how other service-oriented part-time jobs work, in terms of the power the employer has to dictate HOW the work gets done.

california is forcing all rideshare contractors to be employees. that's not just a checkbox on a form.

And if you are hiring Joe to work 40 hours as an Uber driver then you need to make sure he works 40 hours that make sense. Thus benefits require a minimum number of hours, and a minimum number of hours requires a schedule.

Ah, you say, but what about them being "on the clock" while not actually being willing to drive? The same thing that happens if they turn down a Lyft ride because they're driving an Uber customer: you fire them. And possibly charge them with fraud.

From what I've read here, it seems like all of the "only way a business could operate" responses are based on Uber or Lyft propaganda.

You can check their S-1 filing for the “economics” of it...Uber before going public was losing money and acknowledged the legal risk they had been misclassifying drivers as contractors and should drivers be reclassified as employees it’s an existential threat to Uber.

That’s the economics of it...Uber knew they were in the wrong, they knew the day of reckoning was coming and investors took the damn thing public for maximum profits and to cash out and leave others holding the bag.

But the reality is the whole employee/independent contractor issue is just a scapegoat for investors to point their finger at regulations and say that’s why the business failed, but the truth is even without the illegal classification of drivers Uber would never have turned a profit.

I drove a taxicab for more than a year back in the 90's. That's the way it worked then. Most drivers were shift because they "rented" the car from the company and shared it with other workers. A few drivers were owner-operators who got to set their own hours. This is closer to the model that Uber & Lyft operate under today.

So when Lyft claims that they would be forced to enforce shift work on their owner-operators, this is a lie. There is already a model for this type of driving that predates Uber & Lyft and they're just choosing to ignore it now because it serves their current interests.

Is there anything in CA law that prevent Lyft from basically doing exactly what they had been doing but also paying payroll taxes on driver income?

What really needs to happen is that conversion rate needs to be established for this kind of work. So if an average driver can do 20 fares per day, times 20 working days per month, then a "full time" uber employee drives 400 fares per month. Or figure it out on a per-mile basis - like the average fare is 4 miles (let's say) so the average driver does 1600 miles/mo.

Figure out the per-ride or per-mile fee and roll that into the fares. Done and done.

(frankly this is being generous - delivery drivers and waitresses are paid "per fare" too, and we still expect their employers to pay for their benefits.)

Really what needs to happen though is we implement government-provided universal healthcare and maybe a basic income, and then you can have all the wacky gig-economy payment schemes you want.

Having been stranded far from home, both late night and in the early evening, I see Uber & Lyft as providing a valuable service.

Having been taken advantage of by taxi drivers on multiple occasions (I don't think I've ever actually had a good taxi experience) I don't want to go back to the way things were. Maybe other people like being defrauded by taxi drivers? Maybe people just forget how bad the taxi system is, and that at one point people were cheering the demise of the old taxi system for a reason.

The idea that there is a gap in the market is something that people are looking for, on Hacker News most especially, and if this is a legitimate gap that Uber and Lyft are ignoring for silly reasons, then there should be a bunch of startups to take their place pretty quickly.

Please cite something to back this up.

> Moreover, you cannot have two companies paying you by the hour for the same hour.

Why not? Again, please cite a source.

If we assume that uber et al. have a baseline staffing level, during which time you as driver might be paid to be working for them exclusively, then sure, during that period of "dedicated time" you would only be working for the one service. But then in addition to that, uber might have on-call hours to accommodate surge. During this time, you as employee driver are free to accept or pass on rides. Like voluntary overtime, by the task (piece work). In your OT/on-call hours you can also be on-call for ride service #2, since they could have the same go/no-go optional work acceptance. So why couldn't you do this? And why couldn't uber/lyft employ people this way?

Your example of being a car salesman is a bad analogy for ride service. I am not "working" for the ride service until I accept the ride, which constitutes clocking in for an on-call task. Whereas being a car salesman that sells my personal car while on-duty with my employer is a different situation.

One can in fact work two separate jobs at the same time without it being fraud (the only real "legal" restriction on working two jobs). You can also have two companies pay "you by the hour for the same hour" depending on the circumstances. There isn't a bright line rule that states this or anything, it comes down to whether one is committing fraud (and I agree it could be fraud in many cases, especially if done in secret).

The agent thing falls into the same category, and would depend on fraud and conflict of interest (loyalty, as you mentioned). And you can in fact be an agent of multiple companies or organizations at the same time, but things can get tricky (think of a hypothetical person being the CEO of Twitter and Square at the same time for example).

Your car example is also off the mark, or could be, because it's not a bright line rule. Loyalty to a company in Corporate Law is largely predicated on responsibility to the company via position or duties you've undertaken, and many cases have swung either way, and these can be hard or nuanced questions. Some small facts could change the whole car example, for example perhaps you only sell large vans, but the customer only wants a small convertible. In this case it might be proper for the employee to sell the person their personal Miata. It also doesn't consider higher level employees, executives for instance, and corporate opportunity. RE: "you cannot have two companies paying you by the hour for the same hour", sure you can, depending on the circumstances. Contrived example, but imagine a night security guard being paid to sit at a desk from midnight to eight am whose only responsibility is to have their butt in the seat. It might be okay for them to also be paid for a few hours of handling an online help desk for a third party employer for a couple hours, both being paid by the hour. That person is being paid by the hour by two employers simultaneously and it's not fraud or a breach of loyalty, especially for a hypothetical lower level employee who has permission.

Point is, these are not always easy questions, there is a lot of grey area, and you're really painting the agent and duty of loyalty thing as very black and white concepts when they're definitely not.

The only way this industry can operate is if all of the drivers have to be searching for rides on all of the networks?

Worse, the financially better off using the paid services allowed the public services to become more responsive to the poorer members of this demographic. So now everybody will suffer.

Edit: This was one of the main reasons against using Uber. Cabs were, I believe, legally required to provide this service, and Uber wasn't. That may have changed, but cabs were subject to that regulation, at least in Oregon, and Uber wasn't. Uber may have filled that gap, but I'm sure it was for financial benefit to them and not because it was the right thing to do.

Also my grandparents in a city always used a cab service that only serves wheelchair and has trained drivers to load and unload.

The ones affluent enough to afford it used private drivers.

A few years ago I was in a freak accident and ended up in a wheel chair for about 3 months. It's really hard to put into words how much more effort and hassle it is to get around that way, even when most of the people around you are willing to help. And I was relatively lucky, still having full use of my arms and no other health issues. But a decent rule of thumb is to take however long you think some activity should require and multiply that by three, at minimum.

A disabled friend of mine has often spent quite literally all day dealing with disabled transit issues to get across town for a single appointment someplace. We help him out when we can, but like most people he hates feeling beholden to the charity of friends.

[1]: https://www.itdp.org/2019/05/23/high-cost-transportation-uni...

Yeah, sounds like a market ripe for picking.

Unfortunately it's difficult to participate in a lot of our society unless you can drive.

i know cost is just a number to you but that’s other people’s money you’re spending

If it were both cheaper and best for the users (as I believe it would be) to pay for private rides, I would support that wholeheartedly. If one option were cheaper, and the other is preferred, it would seem that you'd have to engage in some type of cost-benefit analysis.

I don't see why able-bodied people should impose their view of 'social integration' on minorities at great cost, without additional justification.

So let's ask this imaginary person: Would you rather get free rides everywhere you need to go, or have to wait in the rain/snow/heat for the bus, feeling the stress of inconveniencing others with the ramp, and having to wheel yourself the rest of the distance to your destination?

That's if the bus arrives on time, which it won't. But keep in mind! silviogutierrez will feel better about themself if you take the bus! "poetic and noble" were the exact words.

1. Accessibility doesn't just benefit wheel-chair bound people. Accessibility benefits just about anyone who has temporary difficulty walking, is carrying heavy or bulky things, is out with children, is not fully sober, etc, etc, etc.

2. NYC may indeed be a special case, because of the poor design of existing subway stations, and the difficulty of rebuilding them in the middle of Manhattan. I don't think this sort of thing would generalize to other locales.

Also, accessible transit benefits everyone with a stroller, as well as the elderly and anyone else with a temporary injury.

Seems to happen quite a bit in monoideological areas.

This is a transparent ploy by Lyft and Uber to try and extort the state into changing the law by holding their drivers' livelihoods ransom.

When did California eliminate private property? When did it hand over the means of production to the proletariat?

Last I checked, capitalism was alive and well in California, which is the dearly beloved home of the most successful capitalist entities and richest people on the planet.

If California's policies really were far left, all those companies would be owned and run by their workers, and no one would be richer than anyone else.

But that's not California, is it?

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/uber-is-officially-allowed-in-qu...

I wouldn't describe what happened in Quebec as a loss for Uber.

There is a tendency to classify failed left-leaning policies as 'well-intentioned but failures' and right-leaning policies as 'heartless and also failures'. This is a ridiculous dichotomy.

The fact is that everyone knew this was going to happen. It was indeed a heartless policy. The leftist lawmakers that run california could have asked anyone and could have at least feigned interest in helping Uber and Lyft succeed in their state. Instead, they chose to essentially ban their business model with no input from the companies. It is especially egregious because the state has spent the last 50 years building an incredibly car-dependent society, and has failed in its duty to bring any kind of workable public transportation system. Uber and Lyft started to become their finally workable transit system, and the state can't even have that.

I'm done pretending that leftist policies are well-intentioned. We need to start calling them what they are -- evil.

"That those who know what's best for us Must rise and save us from ourselves"

It was on a playlist I was listening to last week walking my dog. Seems quite apropos here.

[1] https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/rush/witchhunt.html

Life goes on though, probably the Taxi industry is very pleased, many of the full-time drivers will go on to work as Taxi drivers, licensed with hours and all. And I'll just lower my expectations for getting a taxi dispatched within 30 mins outside of the main city.

As someone else mentioned Uber and Lyft impose restrictions on these workers that a typical contractor would not have. The litmus test isn’t simply whether you can set your number of hours.

Millions of employees in the US have flexible schedules and work part-time.

Taxis have not gotten better since then.

So yeah, what parent was talking about doesn't exist.

I think the mistake that Uber and Lyft are making here is just not charging market rates that will let their drivers make a good living. If it turns out that costs 50% more than a taxi - fine. People then have a choice of Public Transit, Taxis, or Uber/Lyft. Their race to the bottom and attempt to price each other out of the market is what led us here.

Where they erred originally is trying to build a business model that didn't provide a good living to their key employees - and lets face it, Uber/Lyft drivers are employees.

I don't think I understand this. Why not? Seems like more options besides a traditional 9-5 is a good thing.

2. There are many jobs available that don't allow the lifestyle freedoms of gig work (see the trucking industry, which as it turns out also has a long reputation for unfairly treating employees).

In my opinion, the US continues to punish employers, employees, and contractors by tying employment to healthcare. It's much easier to say: "Look at that company screwing their workers out of benefits!", than it is to say: "Look at our country screwing our citizens out of benefits!".

Well, no. Prop 22 would force companies to provide benefits, and the rideshare companies themselves are behind it. What was actually chosen was to just put drivers out of work altogether until November at the earliest, because the government deemed that the current compromise was not good enough.

If California's jobs suck, move. Yes, it's hard but it beats the alternative of destroying more jobs through misguided regulations.

There's a huge difference between 'People should not be forced to' vs. 'people should not be'. I think your case is the latter.

No they weren't. It's called "mass transit" for a reason - replacing trains and buses with masses of individuals riding in separate cars is not an effective alternative. While Uber and Lyft are more convenient for certain trips, mass transit still has a place due to capacity constraints.

> If they were out to protect workers they had many more ways to do it.

Such as what? Strengthening collective bargaining rights? Oh wait, you don't like unions either.

The issue is that they're still considered employees which means predetermined shifts and control rather than fluid supply meeting demand by the minute. This changes the service (which matters more than the price for customers) so that it no longer works at the current scale.

Gig work turning into full time work out of necessity is the band-aid on the bullet wound. The unemployment numbers were down, in large part due to gig work, but that work never should've been counted as real employment.

So rather than address the underlying problem with something like the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, which was the real and necessary answer, we papered things over with gig work out of a deep-seated philosophical hatred of government as a primary employer.

Now, rather than admit gig work was never a real solution for employment, we're trying to force it to be that by fiat, and acting shocked when this wrongheaded strategy isn't working.

These drivers who can't put food on the table without Uber(which I've personally never met) in Califoria seem in a far worse position now.

No one is forcing them to do anything. They not only get to decide if they want to work, but how much, and when.

And every time these laws are passed most Uber and Lyft drivers always seem far more worried they will lose their income source than they are excited they might get benefits.

And almost all of my Uber and Lyft drivers had another source of income, were retired, were raising children, or had a medical condition that kept them from holding down a full time job.

Agreed, but is that a problem with the gig economy itself or our entire welfare system?

I agree we can make life better for the workers that remain on Lyft/Uber, but what happens to the workers who were "fired" as a result of reduced ridership?

Nothing about this legislation or the court case before it took that flexibility away. Nothing about it requires people to be "full time" either.

Exactly, why are so many people forgetting this aspect of ridesharing? The whole point is that you can pick it up and put it down whenever you want for a little extra cash. VERY early on people were able to make a killing doing Uber and that gave others a false impression that this was somehow a viable full time job. It's been years and years since it made economic sense to do Uber on a fulltime basis. Giving drivers benefits isn't going to change the effective hourly rate of $7/hr or whatever it's been for a while.

Insurance, parking, fuel, depreciation, maintenance, and random events add up. If you don't need it for commuting, most of the recurring rideshare costs vanish.

If you need to make an extra long occasional trip, car rental for a day or two outweighs ownership.

Edit: To be clear, anything other than a car is cheaper for many (not all) people. (e)Bike, shared scooter, walking, trolley, Uber/Lyft, taxi, carpooling, etc. Cities are expensive and small towns are small.

On average, ~50% of car trips are under 2 miles. A car is not required for most of those in most locations.

That said, I will concede I'm in a unique position. This legislation isn't completely onerous on me.

I’m in a unique position to do this, because i put myself in that position. i moved near my work and live in an urban area.

even if it cost $400 a month, i would still do it this way. i read when i’m in the car, i wouldn’t trade that for staring at the road.

Last I heard, public transit had greatly reduced service in San Francisco, but I'm not sure of the current status.

Public transit for everyday commute to work, plus Uber/Lyft for trips outside of common commute hours or off the beaten path where public transit is less reliable, can definitely be cheaper than car ownership.

In SF proper, there are more cabs, but don't forget the hour-long waits we had before the ride-sharing thing started. I don't know if it'll get that bad again, but I don't think they authorized thousands of new cabs like (IMO) they should have. Also, I've had cabbies in SF tell me point-blank they won't take my fare because it's not far enough. Yeah, illegal, they don't care.

Further out... good luck. You're in Concord and need a ride to Walnut Creek? Might work, but it might be faster to try Craigslist.

(I live in Dallas TX)

2. You'd be surprised how far you can take an Uber. I had a friend take an Uber from SF to Sacremento.

As 20 year California resident, what I do know is that nothing has gotten better here over that time frame. Everything from infrastructure to taxes to city planning is much worse now than ever. CCPA is probably the only good outcome I can think of.

If unions were truly invested in the best interest of workers instead of the best interest of the union, they would value the desires of the 4/5 of drivers that want independent work as much as the 1/5 of drivers that want to be employees with benefits.

No, the heart of the issue is definitely the dismal state of health care in the US.

This even has a name: Medical Tourism.

Earlier this year my family had a medical emergency that resulted in us being billed a truly staggering amount of money for services that were technically elective, somewhat unproven, and not necessarily even recommended by the standard of care, and for which the actual sticker price varies wildly from hospital to hospital. But, when an emergency happens, you don't get to shop for hospitals, and you more-or-less unthinkingly do what the care team recommends, because there's simply no opportunity to stop and do any sort of cost/benefit analysis. As luck would have it, we ended up at a hospital that both tends toward the more liberal end of the spectrum in terms of what they do, and tends toward the more expensive end of the price range.

Fortunately our financial hit won't be too bad, because we have decent employer-provided insurance, and that cushions the blow quite a bit. If there's a silver lining, it's that we hit our out of pocket expense limit in the first part of the year, so we basically get everything for free for the rest of the year. But that whole situation is also a big part of the problem. We're nominally in the driver's seat, but, in practice, we really aren't in charge. Because we don't have access to a lot of the information necessary to make informed decisions, but also because we've been insulated from some of the major factors that might motivate an informed decision.

Social criticism in the USA tends to revolve around the "theater" metaphor. We have security theater, we have hygiene theater. I would characterize the underlying principle of the USA's health care system as agency theater.

It's potentially good for employers, as it increases friction in the labor market.

If you pay for medical insurance yourself, it starts getting complicated[0]. They honestly just need to make it so any medical insurance payments should be 100% deductible, regardless of anything else. It would help level the playing field.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/are-health-insurance-premiums-t...

That is a strange way to Phrase that... Government imposes unethical pay caps, and the "business" brought this on, not government?

No this problem is 100% the fault of the government not business

I would rather see employment and health insurance totally separated from each other.

But if people aren't open to that for whatever reason, one alternative would be a system where the employee freely picks any insurance plan, but the employer pays the premiums tax-free like they do now.

If you make it so the set of insurance choices is the same for all employers and for individuals paying their own way, then you could move around between employers or freelance.

Right now, big employers have bargaining power due to their size, so you'd lose that, but perhaps stronger competition (from everyone freely choosing) would make up for it.

I think the law rightfully distinguishes between truly negotiable contracts and take-it-or-leave-it terms offered by a party with more negotiating power.

It's not mandated but Obama care did introduce tax penalties for those that don't. Exact rules are complicated.

If you have fewer than 50 full time employees, yes (depending on the state).

If you have 50 or more employees, you have to offer healthcare (or pay penalties).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

In an nutshell: USA auto manufacturers purchased and dismantled the streetcar business to force people to have to buy cars.

While they are at it, they could also provide basic food.

That way, with your UBI, housing, and food you could live a dream life. We won't call them 'camps' though, but give them a hip millenial-approved name. Maybe 'launch centers'?