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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

> If you want to pay someone to do something employ them.

There is a purpose for casual/contract labor. If I want my lawn mowed, some basement junk hauled away, or my house painted, I want someone on contract/gig to do something for me, but I sure don’t want to hire an employee.

How that person chooses to relate to an employer (whether to be self-employed or work for someone else) is their business, not a concern of mine.

However, from a policy standpoint, I certainly don’t want to prohibit them from being a solo entrepreneur or similar.

So, there’s a reason to allow contract work, even with individuals. Whether you extend that to Uber transportation or to Uber’s new business is a fair question, but “employ them” is not the universal answer to Uber and non-Uber.

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In addition to your very good points: an economy of people who take this live-and-let-live view is going to be far more flexible and efficient in different scenarios.

An economy made up of people who think it proper to make entire classes of employment like gig work (or work that pays under a certain minimum wage) illegal is not only interfering in the decisions of adults, but can only prosper under the exact set of circumstances those people consider ideal.

Has a whiff of Atlas Shrugged.

Sounds like a compliment

Just a neutral observation :)

Your spherical cow version of economics is laughably naive and misguided. If "adults" decided tomorrow that it was fine to employ people at only the infrastructure cost of preventing them running away, people would be outraged. But somehow flooding an ecosystem with money to starve meaningful competition and capitalize on people's inherent lack of options, which is "preventing them from running away with extra steps", is somehow... "a robust and dynamic economic ecosystem between consenting adults".. let's not be naive on HN.

It’s reality-based, empirical economics, not “mine”.

Place that let adults choose who to work for and who to employ, and furthermore consider it improper to even use the word “let” in this context, universally have better employment situations than places that follow your “spherical cow” theoretical planned / over-regulated economies.

You seem to ascribe agency only to the employers, but remember that every Uber driver and every shitty minimum-wage job holder is almost certainly just doing their best. Making their jobs illegal will not improve their lives one iota, not in theory, and not in practice.

Similarly, a lot less children would be impoverished if they could work in factories. Time to put those little hands to use! Oh, uh, for humanity or something.

We do have to draw the line somewhere and it is arbitrary.

I just knew someone would bring up child labour / slavery.

There's a big difference between gig jobs and very low-paying jobs that help free adults with no other options in life, and kids in work houses & coal mines, and you know it.

Of course there is, the broader point is there is a line and we draw it arbitrarily.

Even for slavery - we can easily argue that free housing and food would be a huge boon for a lot of people. Imagine how many homeless people can quit drugs and have a roof over their head if we just allowed them to work for just housing and food. We'd create practically infinite jobs.

But we choose not to do that because that's bad.

There's people out there desperate enough for anything. Anything. There are people who would happily sell their limbs.

The argument of "well it helps them and they want it" isn't very good. That's not how we operate generally - we need something more than that.

>> How that person chooses to relate to an employer (whether to be self-employed or work for someone else) is their business, not a concern of mine.

I think it will be, when the same strategies & policies come up the foodchain to your work that you probably think could never be modeled like this.

> How that person chooses to relate to an employer … is their business, not a concern of mine.

I could try and score points and ask if you would be okay if the lawn employee was prison-labor—if you would be okay employing them (money to go to the prison, of course).

My point though simply is that I don't think anyone should be okay hiring someone whose labor may be being exploited.

I was going to say that I don't think that is ever the case with lawn care but remembered that when I was maybe 10 years old, a neighbor had a lawn business during the Kansas summertime and he "hired" me and my sister (she was 9) to come with him (with his own two kids) to mow lawns for his business. I mean he bought us lunch at a fast food place and we made maybe $0.50 an hour—we were happy to have pocket money in order to buy candy at the drug store. I suppose we were being exploited though. ;-)

But anyway, I ramble.

The gig economy is neither contract work nor casual work.

>If I want my lawn mowed, some basement junk hauled away, or my house painted, I want someone on contract/gig to do something for me, but I sure don’t want to hire an employee.

Error of categories. This simply is not the same.

It is normal employment in everything but name. Uber is replacing the taxi industry, which can not compete, because the taxi industry has to pay for labor protections. It is a scheme where Uber tricks existing labor laws to have employees it does not need to treat as employees.

>“employ them” is not the universal answer to Uber

It is. Before Uber ride hailing existed and it was done by employees or self employed people.

You know that when you cut the last two words off the quote “is not the universal answer to Uber and non-Uber” and respond to only the part you quoted that it leaves the impression that you’re arguing in bad faith, right?

I left it off because I did not know what you meant by "non-Uber". It is a category so wide that I have no idea what you were talking about, so I decided to focus on the part where the subject was clear. In the case of Uber I know that it is possible to replace it by employee labor.

You did not give any examples for "non-Uber" companies and we certainly were talking mainly about Uber, as was the article. I do not consider it at all bad faith to focus on the "Uber" part and ignore the totally unspecified and somewhat irrelevant "non-Uber" part.

To be honest you calling me dishonest because I focus on the topic, namely Uber, and leave out a category which I can say basically nothing about such as "non-Uber", seems to me like you are trying to dodge making any argument at all. Since you are ignoring what I said and focusing on what I did not say.

Wait you sign a contract with the person mowing your lawn?

If they're an adult professional, yeah. Helps smooth out the home insurance if something happens and they get injured on your property or damage your property.

“I want my AI to handle my contracts so I can mow lawns in peace”. Ok now I see how that works! Thanks!

How far away are we from AI running the business (marketing, contracts, payment, scheduling, etc) while the humans compete with each other to do the lawn mowing for subsistence food & shelter? Put one of these tech bro CEOs in charge long enough for the AI to get good enough to do the top-level coordination and then recycle them into energy to power it all, and we're good to go!

A ways away. Anthropic tried recently and it went off the rails. https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1

Verbal contracts are still contracts. Anyone you hire for a job has a contract with you (implicit or explicit).

Is there an Uber for lawn mowing?

Maybe taskrabbit can cover this.

Urban company is a gig platform for all manner of house work, I think it's only india based though.

They're really missing out by not moving into federal services. Current administration would be all over firing federal employees and paying a fraction to gig employees.

I recall a startup doing this a few years ago but I think they went out of business.

I think the issue is lawn mowing is usually done on a set schedule for a long time so the transaction cost is fairly low and you don’t want to pay a third party to handle the matching problem.

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