Stuff like this is going to be more and more common as govt doesn't want 25+ % of their population to be unemployed due to nerds churning out code.
- A high-school dropout studying towards his Matric and wanting to go into engineering. - An owner of a backpacker lodge looking to do something during the day when his business isn't busy. - A retired person looking to earn some extra income. - A full time Uber driver who was a long-haul truck driver.
IMHO, my country needs more nerds churning out code which will cut through the bureaucracy our government has put in place and create opportunities for our unemployed.
With regards to self-driving cars, that would be awesome. I just don't see that it's something that would be affordable in a developing country in the next few years.
I really don't understand why it has to be so expensive. For inner city trips the gas costs are a negligible part of the total price, and most drivers are being paid minimum wage. (I've actually heard quite a few taxi drivers complain about minimum wage being introduced because their employers claim that it's too expensive for them and they need to cut costs.)
Either there are too many taxis out there so they need higher prices to be able to pay for the time where they just stand around waiting for customers, or somebody is getting rich.
Now, just don't get me started about the prices of regulated taxes in Helsinki, or the largely unregulated taxis in Stockholm, where you really have to be careful.
The whole problem with Uber can be solved if governments deregulate the taxi industry. I absolutely agree that you need an insurance that covers the passengers, but what else except more frequent technical checks? Taxi licenses are an artificial way to control the supply, so I am adamantly against them.
Government regulates a lot of things and if sensibly done, this is imho a good thing and protects the citiziens. A completely deregulated taxi industry would probably bring a lot of overcrowding, put a lot of stress to the drivers and their salaries would fall even lower (they are not high (in Berlin)).
I hope that I'm not wrong, but I've never heard that here in Germany we have something like $700 000 taxi medaillons as in New York. With such conditions a deregulation is probably a good thing, but here?
We've done it before and we'll do it again, but in a society that (correctly) sees hard work as a personal virtue and is controlled by people with a vested interest in conflating the personal virtue with the societal virtue of promoting hard work, there's a fight every time the policies need tweaking.
Life obviously wasn't brilliant prior to the spinning jenny, but it was definitely better than the 20 years that followed its proliferation. If Uber is really a parallel then the workers who drive for them are in for a couple of decades of having a pretty rubbish time.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/09/economic...
Code has absolutely nothing to do with it.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/03/technology/innovationnation/...
It's not a solution to unemployment, it's an exploitation of people unable to find a job in societies where not having a job means living in poverty.
They're not entrepreneurs either. They're workers who have the liberty of employees with the legal requirements of entrepreneurs. It's the worst of both worlds.
They generally have to enter into non-competes, prohibiting them from working for other agencies or companies. They are only paid when the temp agency actually has work for them. They generally get zero benefits compared to regular employees. They also tend to be paid pennies and don't benefit from labour agreements (because unlike their regular employee co-workers they're not allowed to unionize). Basically, they're like independent contractors, except they're not independent.
Temp agencies in this form weren't even legal in Germany until a few years ago (well, about a decade now).