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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

#681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think people are really walking around thinking "I don't want health insurance because I prefer being destitute in the event of an injury"?

No, but there are people who would rather keep more of their paycheck than spend it on premiums or taxes for socialized medicine and take on that risk. Those folks are usually younger people who are more likely to work at these entry level jobs. On the flipside there are people who will risk life and limb doing something unnecessary (skiing, rock climbing, parachuting, etc.) and maybe some of them even feel safer bec…

That's complete nonsense. We all take on risk. One could argue driving a car or drinking is more risky than skydiving.

When you can't pay for your risk, everyone else does.

Do you think the uninsured should be refused medical care when their life is in danger?

Do you think it's moral that someone who gets hit by a car is suddenly thrust into bankruptcy?

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

#682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

banning prostitution is the best example of this dumb line of thinking. If they could do something better they already would be doing it. Replacing a "bad" option with "no" option does not help them.

Prostitution should not be an option for anyone. How is: "I was so poor I had to sell my body so as to not starve to death but selling my body made me depressed and so I spent all my money on drugs leaving no money for food, throwing me into a life of starvation." ...better than: "I was so poor I could not buy food." ...really?

I think you forget all of the bad things that come with not having any money. Food is critical, and that is just the start.

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

#683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not. Nothing you wrote contradicted anything I said. The ultimate passenger destinations are less than 1 mile from the airport. They do not include connections to ongoing transportation other than cars, buses, and taxis. It cost $4 billion for something that adds little to no value. LA taxi drivers were actively protesting outside of the airport when the original train was proposed. Stop lying. I agree with…

The ultimate passenger destinations are less than 1 mile from the airport. They do not include connections to ongoing transportation other than cars, buses, and taxis. It cost $4 billion for something that adds little to no value. Again, that is completely false. Only the parking lot facility is less than a mile from the airport terminals. The public transportation hub itself is 1.25 miles away from the airport; the…

What rail? The one into Inglewood? Super helpful for everyone involved.

I'm not arguing the measurement of 1 mile versus 1.5 miles with you. You are nitpicking to confuse the argument and it doesn't change the point in the least.

I have lived in LA long enough to see proposal after proposal made, the taxis protest, and the proposals get canned. You can talk about lack of influence all you want, but they have gotten their way every time they made a statement for the last several decades by threatening to shutdown airport traffic. They are nothing but thugs.

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

#684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll do that at the restaurant next time

Do you want spit in your burger? Because that is how you get spit in your burger.

I do that after I get the food : )

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

#685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap healthcare advances at the same rate as expensive healthcare, it just lags some years. That's why Walmart famously has dozens of prescriptions it can offer at a price of only $4/mo. Those drugs were once very expensive and were only available to the relatively wealthy.

Once upon a time, I bought my expensive asthma inhalers from Walmart because it's the most convenient pharmacy. Then they stopped carrying it. In fact, every one did. The manufacturer's patent ran out and they stopped making it. It was several years before the drug came back on the market by which time I had moved on to another expensive inhaler.

I think you'll find that the price just changed. People are reporting absurd price drops on a wide variety of different medications. You can thank Trump for it.

It's sort of price controls, but not the usual sort. Trump decided to enforce most-favored-nation pricing. Any price can be charged, except that the USA always gets the cheapest price. The drug manufacturers are understandably livid, so they are now funding attack ads.

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

#686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the whole declining rides thing... Wouldn't most companies keep performance stats for their contractors, and if one started refusing lots of jobs, stop giving them work? Seems like Uber is just automating what is a normal part of working with a contractor. With regards to unemployment insurance, this is really a hole in our safety net. Regardless of whether Uber drivers should be considered independent cont…

> we should have a solution for independent contractors being put out of work. We have one age old solution for this problem. It's called savings.

So people without enough savings to tide them over to the next job (about 70% of the US [0]) should be destitute if they are laid off? And in cases of national disaster, we want vast numbers of destitute people?

Preventing people from becoming destitute is a public good. People not having money to provide for their basic needs leads to increases in crime, which is bad for everyone. It leads to increases in disease, which is bad for everyone. It leads to decreases in economic activity, which is bad for everyone.

Arguing against the basic social safety net is just plain foolish and short sighted.

[0]: https://www.fool.com/retirement/2019/12/18/the-percentage-of...

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

#687
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is 734 out of a population of 80,000 a representative sample? And even if it is, are the 80,000 people on their mailing list a representative sample of all drivers? Not saying they aren't, but I... just don't know.

"Representativeness" has to do with the process of sampling, not the sample size -- a sample of one is in fact a representative sample of the population in the sense of being unbiased for the quantity of interest. Here's a simple anecdote: suppose you want to measure how often a coin comes up heads. The true answer is 50% heads. If your "sample" is a single coin flip, the answer will always be 100% or 0% (both wrong…

Thanks for the detailed dive into this! I found it really interesting.

> The bigger concern here is not sample size, it's whether the sampling was random

This confuses me a little. Aren't both of those things pretty important? To go back to your first sentence, a sample size of one could be perfectly random, but it will be pretty useless at telling us anything interesting about the population. Obviously that's a silly case, but what about 10 people? 100? I would venture to guess that a random sample of 100 out of 80,000 people would be unlikely to tell you anything useful about those 80,000 people, at least not without a margin of error much higher than the effect being measured. So that suggests to me that sample size is pretty important too.

> If we discovered that, say, every person above 40 hours a week wanted to be an employee and every person below wanted to be a contractor, it'd be an error to present a weighted average of the groups versus exploring policy solutions that reflect that heterogeneity.

That's a really good point. It's possible, and likely, that any single chosen classification is going to make a lot of people unhappy. Better might be to develop new rules and classes that fit the situation and different drivers' needs better.

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

#688
post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Representativeness" has to do with the process of sampling, not the sample size -- a sample of one is in fact a representative sample of the population in the sense of being unbiased for the quantity of interest. Here's a simple anecdote: suppose you want to measure how often a coin comes up heads. The true answer is 50% heads. If your "sample" is a single coin flip, the answer will always be 100% or 0% (both wrong…

Thanks for the detailed dive into this! I found it really interesting. > The bigger concern here is not sample size, it's whether the sampling was random This confuses me a little. Aren't both of those things pretty important? To go back to your first sentence, a sample size of one could be perfectly random, but it will be pretty useless at telling us anything interesting about the population. Obviously that's a sill…

Sorry I missed your reply here, but on the off-change you get this: a random sample of 10 people is unbiased for the entire population. A random sample of 1 person is unbiased for the entire population. The limitation of very low sample size is that it is going to produce high variance; on average it will be correct, but across multiple surveys our estimates will move around a lot. We can define a margin of error around our estimate to formally account for this. If what we're interested in is a binary yes/no answer, using the classical calculations and without trying to add more complexity for you, the margin of error is +/- 1/sqrt(n), so a sample of 100 people gets you in a qualitative ballpark of whether a property is very common, common, rare, or very rare. If you want to tell whether 69% and 71% reflect statistically different underlying propensities, you will need a much bigger sample. But if you just need to know "does there exist a decent swath of people who say yes to this?", a very small sample will do on average.

The full population size is generally irrelevant statistically (it applies to a "finite population correction"). Almost all the statistics you see presented publicly ignore FPCs by assuming the population is infinitely larger than the sample. Even when people take census reads of a full population they typically assume the population is a realized sample of a larger meta-population.

In general if you are seeing publicly presented poll data, sample size is not the thing that should be sending up red flags. Differential non-response and selection bias; sample frame matching or not matching the population; underlying noise in the conceptual measure; design effects caused by weighting; and many other components are all part of "TSE" (total survey error), which dwarfs the impact of sampling variation as a concern.

Now, mind you, subgroup analyses often do cut samples too finely... e.g., an N=500 sample subset to Men 65+ and people trying to make inferences but not properly reflecting either the sampling considerations or reduced subgroup sample size).

Let it also be noted from those classical calculations that larger samples are diminishing returns: N = 1000 -> 3.1% -> N = 5000 -> 1.4%. Five times the cost of surveying if not more, only a halving of the margin of error, and limited extra power to answer most real questions of interest.

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