351–360 of 688 posts
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+1 for tipping culture. I just dont get it, why can employers pay their fair share, instead of expecting customers to foot the bill.
> instead of expecting customers to foot the bill. Either way, the customer will be paying this bill.
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The IRS deprecation is very far above the costs in actual practice. It's a very conservative number.
I think the IRS number might be spot on. Quick math: ($25,000 cost to buy car new - $4,000 residual value at end-of-life ) / 100,000 miles usable lifetime = $0.21/mi depreciation of value $3.22 / gallon * (1 / (17 mi / gal fuel efficiency)) = $0.19/mi for fuel Maintenance: $40 per oil change / 8,000 miles = $0.01 / mi $600 tire change / 60,000 miles = $0.01 / mi $1,186 average yearly repair / 16,000 average miles dri…
Also, if you're driving for Uber in a new car that gets 17 mi / gal fuel efficiency, you're not making wise moves. There's a reason a lot of Uber drivers are using 5 year old Prius's - this cuts the fuel cost in half, and the depreciation down quite a bit.
[0] https://www.vox.com/2018/10/2/17924628/uber-drivers-make-hou...
When companies like Uber/Lyft depend on safety nets like unemployment without ever paying into the system, what’s happening is that our children are paying for returns on VC capital. People profiting from these types of companies should feel bad about themselves.
That's pretty much the total opposite of what's happening right now. Uber (and the recent group of "tech but not really" unicorns in general) have if anything burnt hundreds of billions of VC/PE money thus directly subsidizing the costs of hundreds of millions of users, for very slim profits at best. Yes, it's because they are expecting future returns on their "burnt" money. But considering the risks, the enormous am…
VC's get their money from everyone else: pension funds, college endowments, charitable foundation endowments, and insurance companies.
It quite literally is a case of our children funding this.
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Who says driving for Uber/Lyft should be a full-time job, or statutorily viable as a full-time job? If you consider it only as a second or third job, then it makes a lot more sense that your second or third job is not going to pay as well or have the same benefits as your first job. Those aspects would be expected and reasonable. The low-risk, high-reward jobs fill your primary job slot, then you seek other options a…
What happens in practice is that people try to make ends meet with two or three crappy part-time jobs, because that's all they can find. (Insert plug for UBI here.)
Unsure where UBI comes into the picture either since UBI also does not make non-crappy jobs magically come into existence.
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> overwhelmingly the drivers tell me they want to stay independent. However, I overwhelmingly don't want to pay for their healthcare or food stamps because they aren't earning enough money. I personally think that AB5 doesn't go far enough. If you employ people for more than 40 hours, you should owe healthcare and benefits, period . It doesn't matter whether those 40 hours are one person or 10 people or whether the p…
Sure, but you can't always get what you want. Not every business model is economically viable, and (at a guess) rideshare-drivers-as-employees might be one of those un-viable models. You can ban exploiting labor, you can force companies to share more with the workers, but you can't legislate well-paying jobs into existence. You might view Uber as an exploitative employer, but it isn't some wildly-profitable company t…
And that's fine. We have minimum wage laws for a reason.
A "contractor" who is earning near or below minimum wage isn't a contractor--they're a mechanism to skirt labor law.
I want to see every layer of "contracting" have to pay benefits. If the contractor is expensive enough (aka $100K+ a year), people won't care. But, yeah, if the "contractor" is skirting labor law, they'll lose--big time.
> I don't care whether Uber and Lyft stop doing business in CA as a result of AB5, but I think that's a fairly predictable outcome.
I'm willing to roll the dice on this one. The last time Uber and Lyft pulled this stunt (Austin), a whole bunch of companies stood up to take their place. Uber and Lyft then went to the state to override Austin--so we never got to see the end evolution of that.
Maybe the business model isn't viable. However, I'm willing to let a bunch of people try competing against it without having to compete against VC subsidy.
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CA is 12% of Uber's revenue and 25% of Lyft's revenue
Source? I've seen many different figures (including a very reliable source that stated it was in the single digits for Uber)
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Uber-and-Lyft-r...
Completely anecdotal but I bring this question up every time I drive in an Uber and overwhelmingly the drivers tell me they want to stay independent. No one is forcing drivers into their jobs. I really struggle to understand why we need bureaucrats imposing their idea of what a market should look like on an fairly efficient market. From my experience the drivers are perfectly aware of the costs that go into driving s…
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They want to stay independent, fine. Then actually treat them like independent contractors. Let them set rates. Let them decline rides without facing penalties by the platform. Make the changes necessary to fit the independent contractor model. And not just the rideshare company, but the state too: these workers need unemployment insurance, as Covid has shown, and somebody needs to pay for it: be it the workers or th…
> these workers need unemployment insurance, as Covid has shown, and somebody needs to pay for it: be it the workers or the ridesharing businesses. The state could also pay for it, through tax revenue. Unemployment insurance seems like a great fit for a government, since any kind of massive correlated unemployment, as we're experiencing now, would absolutely wipe out any private insurer.
And I absolutely agree, divorcing healthcare from employment is the single best thing the US could do to help fix several different issues.
But "We could massively restructure the US economy" is only an answer to "how should rideshare employees be classified" if you want to ensure nothing changes.