kareemsabri

I didn't propose to reform Uber, and actually didn't make any policy recommendations at all. I engaged on the narrow question of whether some gig workers are being "taken advantage of", which GP claimed was essentially impossible since they have "free will", which I think is a simplistic philosophical / economic argument.

For specific policy, I would probably support something like a federal jobs guarantee, so employment is available to anyone who wants it that sets a wage floor in the labor market. Then those offering gig work will have to compete with that minimum wage floor. But it's really not my area of expertise.

Nobody, but that doesn't change anything about whether they're being taken advantage of. In order to be taken advantage of, desperation is a helpful precondition.

The question isn't whether he's worse off or not. I don't know why you're moving the goalposts. It seems obvious that if you are presented with only two choices, one between $3 an hour and one between $0 and hour, that $3 an hour is better. The post is about whether they are being taken advantage of.

> Do you not understand that if some services are too expensive they will not exist?

No please explain more to me about how the fundamentals of economics and business work.

You should review your contract carefully. Typically the IP is things created "in the context of your work" and that are related to the company's business or with knowledge gained through your work for the company, using company equipment, time etc. So first, you have to violate the specific terms of the contact, and second they need to find out about it and care enough to sue you. People start side projects at work all the time.

Most Americans don't know what Ontario is, I bet.

I meant it's false in that it implies there are no other possible solutions that could alleviate this problem.

But if it's not false, and it truly is their least bad option they are choosing over destitution, I would think that's a strong argument for it being "taking advantage". I guess I don't follow the logic of, essentially, "yes I admit this is a terrible job, but your alternative is nothing / starvation, so I'm not taking advantage!"

You're correct that blaming the delivery apps is looking in the wrong place. If the government doesn't want people in precarious employment they should provide a social safety net. Then if the gig jobs were so bad, they would have no workers and would cease to exist. Otherwise, they must be ok.

> There are also enough gig economy companies that if one of them was especially bad then workers could easily switch to the competitor.

And if they're all the same since they all run the exact same business in the exact same markets?

> This is true across all income classes, because the classes are a distribution. While I agree that those in "precarious" positions may be concentrated in the gig economy for the reasons you suggested, this argument is an insufficient rebuttal.

That wasn't the entire rebuttal. But people in other income classes don't have anything to do with DoorDash. People in other income classes can be taken advantage of too (I believe there's a thread about SBF buying crypto companies on the cheap as they are on the brink of collapse). Another example might be loan sharking.

> OK, so costs go up, consumers don't participate in the market, and the gig economy collapses. Are we in a better or worse position now?

I believe this is what's called a false dichotomy. But I agree with you it's better to work on DoorDash than have no work and no money at all, if that's what you're offering up as an alternative. The fact that you acknowledge that is the only other alternative is actually a point in favor of it being "taking advantage".

> Do these individuals think the picture would be more rosey if they didn't even have this work for income?

Surely not. But what's your point?

I don't think the GP does deserve a good rebuttal tbh, it's a pretty weak argument that I have a hard time believing someone could really think. The argument is, because these people "willingly" took the job, they cannot be being taken advantage of? I don't understand why people think "free will" means you cannot be taken advantage of. People can have both free will, and real economic / physical / legal constraints in my life that people could take advantage of if they are in a position to do so. It happens every single day all over the world.

I'll take a stab at a strong argument for gig workers being taken advantage of. I don't think it describes _every single_ gig worker, but I'm sure there are some for whom it's true.

There are individuals in precarious economic positions. They need income to survive, they are living one week to the next (meaning they pay rent weekly, and have no excess money at the end of the week). They need to provide for their families, maybe send money home to their families in another country because they are immigrants. Stuff like that. You can talk to them yourself, ride a cab in New York and ask the driver about his life, these stories are pretty common.

Let's say they have limited skills. But they have a body. They can move around, drive a car, or maybe just ride an e-Bike. They could maybe drive a cab, but driving a cab costs you a a flat fee per month to rent the medallion, no matter what you make. I believe you need some upfront capital to get started. So they sign up for Uber Eats / DoorDash / Grubhub / pick your delivery app.

The pay on DoorDash is very low, because consumers won't pay that much for food delivery. Out of that, the restaurant has to get paid, DoorDash has to get paid, and the gig worker has to get paid. Who has the least amount of bargaining power in this situation? The restaurant has other sources of income, so they can leave if they aren't happy with the cut. The platform obviously sets the terms, and there's a lot of people in precarious economic positions who need money. So the gig worker has the least amount of bargaining power. So he gets a pretty low pay. He lives in a one-room apartment with like, 8 other gig workers who all do delivery for Doordash, Grubhub, Uber Eats etc. (I'm not making this up, it's pretty common) and works 7 days a week. No time for learning some new skill, and since the wages are subsistence level, no ability to save and eventually move on to better work.

So essentially, they need money to survive, the money they get from delivery apps gives them that, but no more. They would certainly prefer to do something else, but have no other skills. So these apps run on the labor of people in precarious economic positions with no better options. Of course he has "free will", but I'm curios what economic alternatives you think are on offer that make that free will a meaningful, and not simply philosophical, concept.

Perhaps the phrase "taken advantage of" triggers some people. But it doesn't seem that controversial to me. The business works because there are people who need to work a job for very low pay. I don't think they love riding around picking up bags of food for $3-$5 each.

Here's a thread on the DoorDash Reddit, I found it by scrolling down the front page, it's not old.

https://www.reddit.com/r/doordash/comments/xeyvrg/the_soul_c...

Here's the top comment with 119 upvotes

> I couldn’t agree more. The only reason I’m doing doordash currently is out of desperation. Plus, it allows me some much needed flexibility which is crucial given some difficulties in my personal life.

I dunno what you consider that. But it's not like, an arrangement in which the worker seems to opting into this because they think it's a good deal out of their plethora of options. They do it because they are, in their words, desperate.

Edit: I'm not saying gig companies are evil or something, or even predatory. It's unclear to me if they have sound unit economics, but that doesn't make them evil. The business just doesn't work without low delivery wages.

According to this[1] when you dig into these deals the "savior of crypto" thing is mostly spin.

This submission seems like a PR piece for SBF / FTX.

1. https://protos.com/heres-why-sam-bankman-fried-is-not-the-jp...

The private company versus individual has nothing to do with it. The private company / individual is acting on behalf of the state, and the state provides itself the authority to take your property without your consent.

IANAL and haven't read the laws of Philly but it seems pretty obvious that moving your property off a public street is not considered theft.

Insane is a strong word. But your description ("efficiently price a scarce resource") is economics textbook language and irrelevant to the end consumer. What's "insane" about a currency where on any given day the effective purchase price of goods can fluctuate by 100x (from $5 gas fee to $500) is that it's not a usable medium of exchange. As a consumer I need price stability. Getting "priced out" of buying a t-shirt, or playing a game, and whatever other thing I want to buy (or sell), is an inconvenience that would cause me to just use a network with sufficient capacity to never be "scarce".

The resource I want isn't "block verification". That's Ethereum's problem, not mine. I want the thing I'm trying to buy. So I disagree the market is efficient, there's a tax on goods unrelated to the good in question, and I would use Visa to avoid it, as the other poster said in what you call a "weird flex".

I don't think it's reactionary to oppose choosing who to fire based on their race.

I think that's fair. But I would say the article is about activity (shipping features fast) and so as a measure of activity commits per day is a decent proxy. Obviously the devil is in the details.

I would not judge an individual developer's productivity on commits per day, agree that would be foolish.

Obviously I think it does. Why do you think it doesn't?

CI/CD takes like 3 hours to set up and saves you hundreds of hours in deployment time. It delivers new features to your customers faster, lets you ship more frequently because you know you can roll forward quickly or revert when you mess up. Any startup founder who tried to tell their devs not to bother with CI/CD (if it's a real product, not just a prototype or proof of concept) probably doesn't know what they're doing.

Being a startup doesn't mean your tech has to be garbage. So many miserable devs hoping that "after series A" they'll get to refactor that spaghetti code mess (they won't) and seeing their velocity slow to a crawl because they can't make a change without worrying the whole thing is gonna break.

I agree with most of these, and vehemently disagree with a couple. I think we move pretty damn fast, we average 5 commits per dev per day.

I very much agree with break features into many small pull requests. We merge constantly even (especially) if the code path won't be hit yet. Just get it into production. Makes the code review faster, the complexity lower, and lets you focus on one thing at a time.

I think no tests makes you slower. We paid a bit of cost to start writing tests, but now we can deploy 10 times a day because we know the mission critical stuff is working. It's more about testing the right stuff. Decide what can break, and leave it untested. What can't break should be covered by tests. We do stuff with money, all that is robustly tested. The UI isn't.

Code freezing / weekly releasing is counter to CI/CD. Just make your deployment take less than 10 minutes, and ship code constantly.

I think that's fair, and the author choose a bad example (doing cocaine might have been better, or watching Netflix). But I think the difference between the other examples is they involve some sort of a mission. It's difficult (imo) for humans to find fulfillment just in "having a good time" unfortunately.

I have a cofounder now, but didn't for a long time. I go to a nice co-working space every day. I pay for it out of pocket, but it's well worth it to me.

The problem with your theory is that there's actually no argument to it. It's just piggybacking on the utility of the internet to cast crypto in a more favorable light. It might be that crypto will take a long time to become useful, but saying "the internet took a long time to become useful" is not providing ANY evidence that crypto is like the internet.

Lots of things take a long time and never become useful. One thing (the internet) took a longish time to become really useful.

It seems like a distinction without a difference. The investing outcome is identical, so why does it matter that your job pays you out over the entire year.

That's good feedback, we can do that pretty easily.

I consider DCA to be equal notional amount purchases of an asset at a fixed period (weekly, monthly, annually etc.). That's it really. Wherever the money comes from.

Nice work. Shill away :)

The benefit of DCA (in my mind) is avoiding market timing risk. Sure, as another commenter pointed out, if a stock is only going up you better just get in and ride it up. But who knows? If you buy at the peak of a bubble, like in January 2022, it's not so great. If you're not studying the market all day, you can't really predict where it's gonna move (or even if you are).

And of course, many of us don't have a big chunk of cash sitting around waiting to get invested.

I'm not sure I follow how the investing timeline relates to the exposure to companies "in trouble". Isn't that just about what you choose to invest in? If you pick a bad investment, or get unlucky, or anything else, you'll lose your money. DCA or not.

No you can invest weekly in most apps.

Sure, I mean you can DCA into SPY if that's what you like. Some people do want a bit more higher-risk or sector specific approaches.

I personally have 50% going into SPY DCA then a bunch of other bets. Some of them have outperformed SPY, certainly in the bull market. We'll see how they do over 20 years though.

I agree with all that. I still think Microsoft has lots of consumer customers though.