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Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay

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Re: Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay

#371

Post by Fauntleroy »

treeman79 wrote: post #253
Consultant32452 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there is a general pattern. The left tends to prioritize all the good ideas: gender equality, racial equality, income gaps, etc. The right tends to prioritize systems that actually function in the real world with real people who are sometimes jealous, stupid, unethical, liars, etc. This is just a case where the first group has run amok without talking to the second group. It's the good idea of everyone sh…

Good insight. Coming together is tricky when there is no common grounds. One side wants wealth to be fairly Evenly distributed to help the poor. The other side helps the poor by creating so much wealth that that most poor people have a lot of wealth. These days you can be considered poor and have housing, ac, heat, tv, video games, maybe a car, and weight problems because food is so cheap. This only leaves those who…

More likely that you'll have weight problems because healthy food and lifestyles are much more difficult to acquire and maintain without sufficient wealth.

Re: Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay

#372

Post by mardifoufs »

gamblor956 wrote: post #353
mardifoufs wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Where do you think VC funding comes from? 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.

I agree, though that's a whole different subject. VCs are usually a very small share of their portfolios, and I guess the high risks are well known.

But it's true that VCs, private equity and bull markets in general, which people always think of as profiting mostly very rich people are actually essential to fund most retirement plans, pensions and insurances.

Re: Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay

#373

Post by Fauntleroy »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #369
senderista wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between being skeptical of idealistic schemes and fetishizing the status quo, which is what I think the right predominantly does.

Don't knock the status quo too much. The status quo is a system that brought billions of people out of abject poverty, gave us human rights, democracy, etc. We take these things for granted, but we're in an incredibly unique and very new situation where you even have the privilege to sit around and pontificate about ideas like global poverty, gender issues, gay rights, etc. Civilizations have crumbled before, and our…

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Re: Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay

#374

Post by pixelatedindex »

ram_rar wrote: post #80
ccktlmazeltov wrote: post #71

This is all a shit show because the infrastructures in place are currently doomed for the market to succeed: - no healthcare means you're a slave of whatever you can find, - tipping culture means your employer can pay you shit

+1 for tipping culture. I just dont get it, why can employers pay their fair share, instead of expecting customers to foot the bill.

I'm on the same boat. But if you're living in America, you tip. Several projects have been undertaken over the years to try to eliminate it but time and time again it's failed.

https://www.grubstreet.com/2018/12/restaurant-tipping-return...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/dining/danny-meyer-no-tip...

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/05/15/478096516/wh...

Sad, but true.

Re: Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay

#375

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

renewiltord wrote: post #38
donsupreme wrote: post #9

Uber gained market cap of $4B since this appeal news broke, already spent $100M to fight AB5, all the while they burnt $2B in their last quarter. And yet their argument is they can't afford to spend $300M to cover driver benefits and pay into state unemployment insurance.

Am I understanding this correctly? You mentioned the market cap because you're proposing that they leverage their market cap to pay for this by making share offerings available on some short enough cadence to ensure cash flow? Or to collateralize some loan with the current ownership? That's not a conventional strategy but perhaps you can make a good argument for why it will work.

No, I think they mentioned the market cap because they want to rattle out random unrelated numbers to manufacture outrage.

Re: Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay

#376

Post by Consultant32452 »

chillwaves wrote: post #299
treeman79 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good insight. Coming together is tricky when there is no common grounds. One side wants wealth to be fairly Evenly distributed to help the poor. The other side helps the poor by creating so much wealth that that most poor people have a lot of wealth. These days you can be considered poor and have housing, ac, heat, tv, video games, maybe a car, and weight problems because food is so cheap. This only leaves those who…

They are poor because they live on a knife's edge, one accident away from financial insolvency or lack of sufficient access to necessities like health care and education opportunities. Also having to work multiple jobs to break even. The problem isn't "inequality" it is that the floor in the US is so low compared to other wealthy nations.

This is a great example of having the right ideas but not understanding workable systems with real people. Let's take just one industry and I can show you how it's not as simple as you make it out to be: socialized/single-payer medicine. This is a system which reduces incentives (profits) in exchange for some equity. This is a great idea because we don't like it when people suffer. But what are the costs? Basic economics/psychology informs us that when incentives affect behavior. When the profits in healthcare are reduced there is less incentive to create new products/treatments/services. This is the tradeoff we're making. What happens down the road? Of course no one knows exactly, but we do know what will tend to happen. A new drug that might've been created in 5 years takes 7 instead. And then the next advancement that builds off that one takes even longer still. The whiz-kid who might've invented the new surgical technique which saves hundreds of lives per year might go into finance instead. What does this mean? It means we've slowed the velocity/acceleration of advancement. So people who live 50 years in the future will not have as good of healthcare as they could've if we'd left the greater incentives in place. And the people who live 100 years in the future are relatively even worse off to where they would've been because we've had 100 year at the slower pace. Since the future is functionally infinite, we are causing infinite harm to people in the future (all the advancements they won't get) at the cost of providing some comfort for some people today. And this applies to every industry, every redistribution program, every set of regulations. It's not just politics/law either, we make these decisions in our own lives every day. Are you going to buy that Apple Watch, or are you going to put that extra $ into your 401k?

Stoicism teaches us that all negative emotion is rooted in a lack of understanding. So when someone says they don't want to raise the minimum wage, or doesn't want universal healthcare, or whatever... it's helpful not to have that knee jerk reaction of "This person is bad and wants people to suffer." That's almost never the case.

Re: Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay

#377

Post by vinay427 »

viscanti wrote: post #260
solutron wrote: post #248

This is a symptom of the core, underlying problem. The coupling between employer, employee and health care needs to be undone. Employers aren't healthcare providers, we don't need additional middle-men and bureaucracy dictating, by proxy, how people receive care and from who. Universal healthcare would let Uber and Lyft continue to do what their primary focus is, and drivers would be able to do whatever they want wor…

It's crazy to see the same politicians who push for universal healthcare also push for more coupling of employment to healthcare.

The subset of politicians who are pushing for universal healthcare don't all belong to the group supporting coupling with employment. I'm not really sure where you heard that? For instance, I don't believe Medicare for All, at least in its proposed form, encourages coupling employment with healthcare, but correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay

#378

Post by [deleted] »

Fauntleroy wrote: post #373
Consultant32452 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't knock the status quo too much. The status quo is a system that brought billions of people out of abject poverty, gave us human rights, democracy, etc. We take these things for granted, but we're in an incredibly unique and very new situation where you even have the privilege to sit around and pontificate about ideas like global poverty, gender issues, gay rights, etc. Civilizations have crumbled before, and our…

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay

#379

Post by Consultant32452 »

Fauntleroy wrote: post #373
Consultant32452 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't knock the status quo too much. The status quo is a system that brought billions of people out of abject poverty, gave us human rights, democracy, etc. We take these things for granted, but we're in an incredibly unique and very new situation where you even have the privilege to sit around and pontificate about ideas like global poverty, gender issues, gay rights, etc. Civilizations have crumbled before, and our…

[flagged]

Please see my parallel post here which explains why it's not as simple as those healthcare systems "working" vs ours not working. Particularly the part about those systems causing infinite harm in the future. FWIW I'm not advocating dismantling any social safety nets. I'm only pointing out that it's not as simple as "good vs bad."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24230557

Re: Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay

#380

Post by vinay427 »

username90 wrote: post #341
lsiebert wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because collections of people organized into corporations have greater bargaining power than individuals in negotiations. Traditionally the answer to that is unions or professional group who can bargain on behalf of all their members, but it's hard to unionize fields with low barriers to entry (and harder when the workers are living paycheck to paycheck and thus can't strike easily), and impossible to unionize indepe…

> impossible to unionize independent contractor drivers based on how the laws are written. What laws, don't you have freedom of association in USA? Just create a group, what is stopping you? Speaking as an ignorant European.

Speaking as someone generally ignorant of unions, I believe the teeth of unions lie in the collective bargaining that comes from making them mandatory. With right-to-work laws in some states (and other countries) this is often not possible, so workers can choose to look out for their immediate interests which undermines the union's power that comes from representing most or all employees. In other words, unions generally require more than just freedom of association or speech.
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