171–180 of 316 posts
A guarantee memorably parodied in the setting of Snow Crash.
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I don't think this one is actually true. I remember TV dinners replacing home cooked meals not eating out. Going back before frozen dinners you're back to the time when people actually cooked at home, going out to eat was a rare treat rather than a daily occurrence.
> Going back before frozen dinners you're back to the time when people actually cooked at home, going out to eat was a rare treat rather than a daily occurrence. Fwiw some of us still cook at home and go out rarely. It’s cheaper, tastier, healthier, and can be a pretty relaxing evening activity
So my habits have changed to eating out much more rarely, but at much nicer restaurants.
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> Workers being driven by ratings systems pre-dates the popularity of Internet gig economy jobs. By a lot. Your electronic report card is now more persistent, and there's a much smaller number of companies dominating these gig industries, and they cross areas (food delivery + driving people, for example). It's not as easy to start over.
Is this necessarily a bad thing? Do we want to make it easy for someone to "start over" when that means instead of driving bags of food around they're now driving around people?
Separately, there is a drive towards a sort of "social credit rating" that I do think is a bad thing.
In the narrower space of having a criminal history, the US is very different in how that affects people that have done their time. Any company can do a dirt-cheap background check, this makes people close to unemployable. In other countries, like Australia, employers can request a "yes/no" answer to "is this person's history suitable for this specific job" from a government agency...but they can't just get history themselves.
The combination of consolidation in the space into a few giants, and dirt cheap sharing of data across employers is, over time, applying the same sort of permanent mark problem to everyone else. I think it's a bad thing.
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FWIW this happens even with pickup. I used to use their 7.99 pizzas a lot when money was short. Their app tells you when the pizza is ready, about 30% of the time the pizza was not ready when their app said it was. This means the workers were gaming their timing system with fake pizzas. Often times I'd be sitting in their pickup area for 20 minutes after the pizza was supposed to be done.
>This means the workers were gaming their timing system with fake pizzas. Or it meant the person cutting and boxing your order was falling behind. At least ~15 years ago, the way Domino's timer works is that when the cook puts the order in the oven, they hit a button. ~8 minutes later it says it's ready, which is how long it takes to get through the oven. That was the only input for carryout, delivery had another for…
The Domino's location near me very obviously hits that button as soon as they get the order when things are busy, regardless of if it's actually going in the oven then or not. I've had many, many times where I arrived at the location, with the app saying "your pizza is ready!", only to have them say "it's not in the oven yet, it'll be 10 minutes" when I ask for my order.
I'm certain the stores and even individual employees are rated on how fast they get the orders done so of course they're going to mess with that system to show the best metrics they can. I'm not even a little bit surprised, nor do I really blame them. Even though it's frustrating to find out my order isn't actually in the oven, I just say "no worries" and wait a few minutes.
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> society taking a wrong turn to being driven by ratings on the I internet Workers being driven by ratings systems pre-dates the popularity of Internet gig economy jobs. By a lot. The customer ratings concept even infected places like your local doctor’s office a couple decades ago. Doctors have been complaining about how patient satisfaction surveys have discouraged them from bringing up obesity, smoking, or excessi…
Yes, these ratings problems aren't new, but they are more pervasive and less useful than ever before. For my part, I just refuse to give ratings or pay attention to them. The effective binary nature of ratings (if you don't give the best one, you may as well give worst one) was the last straw for me. Ratings are a game that harms both customers and the people providing good and services.
In my opinion, ratings need to decay over time. For service workers like Uber drivers any rating >1 year old (or maybe less) should decay to 0 significance. For online retail like Amazon, maybe 2 years but not much longer than that. This not only allows people to "clean up their act" after bad ratings, but makes botting a recurring cost instead of a one-time investment.
Chilling ending to the article: > Gig drivers don’t face an edict for speed like past Domino’s drivers, but Wells says the requirement to be fast is built into the job, with drivers hurrying to make financial incentives, avoid bad ratings, and ensure the food is warm upon delivery. Annoying corporate policy replaced by society taking a wrong turn to being driven by ratings on the I internet - that we unlike the bad p…
> society taking a wrong turn to being driven by ratings on the I internet Workers being driven by ratings systems pre-dates the popularity of Internet gig economy jobs. By a lot. The customer ratings concept even infected places like your local doctor’s office a couple decades ago. Doctors have been complaining about how patient satisfaction surveys have discouraged them from bringing up obesity, smoking, or excessi…
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No, this is what a very small section of a service industry looks like. There are millions of people who can have a livable wage in a service industry. The actual problem that I never see addressed is that should EVERY job be a "living wage" job. To me that answer is and always has been no. There will always be a need for temp workers.
The meme of a living wage is a nice one. It hits most moral frameworks as fair. The concern I have with it is it isn't defined. What does living mean? When I belonged to a high demand religion that is known for "helping" its membership, financial assistance was dedicated to the preservation of life only. Not the preservation or growth of the quality of life. So if you had a medical life transition and a mortgage, the…
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> The problem comes when people think this type of work is suitable for a full time career, not just a way to "top up" an income People don't think this work is a full time career, but they often enough don't have another choice . When you have barely (or none at all) language skills, or you're an immigrant whose certifications from their home country aren't recognized, or you're without legal immigration status, the…
> People don't think this work is a full time career, but they often enough don't have another choice. Then I reckon the solution isn't to add antagonism to the employment relationship they already have, but rather as a community rally around to provide resources to lower their search costs (Note: I assume when you say "don't have another choice" you really mean the finding and switching costs for new opportunities a…
No, I mean that the eligibility is not present.
Getting employment requires hurdles many people cannot pass: you need a registered address to get postal letters (which excludes many homeless), you need valid immigration credentials, you need skill certifications (school or academic degrees, vocational training, ...) for many employments (which foreigners sometimes have a hard time showing (refugees) or getting recognized legally), you need to speak the language, you need to be able to read and write...
For us tech people, a lot of these hurdles don't apply, but the lowest rungs of employment / society have a very difficult time which most of us don't have any experience.
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No, this is what a very small section of a service industry looks like. There are millions of people who can have a livable wage in a service industry. The actual problem that I never see addressed is that should EVERY job be a "living wage" job. To me that answer is and always has been no. There will always be a need for temp workers.
> There are millions of people who can have a livable wage in a service industry. There are millions of illegal immigrants, living 5 to a bedroom proping up the resturant industry. The back of house doesn't do very well at all, its only the wait staff that makes a fair wage for the effort.
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No, this is what a very small section of a service industry looks like. There are millions of people who can have a livable wage in a service industry. The actual problem that I never see addressed is that should EVERY job be a "living wage" job. To me that answer is and always has been no. There will always be a need for temp workers.
The meme of a living wage is a nice one. It hits most moral frameworks as fair. The concern I have with it is it isn't defined. What does living mean? When I belonged to a high demand religion that is known for "helping" its membership, financial assistance was dedicated to the preservation of life only. Not the preservation or growth of the quality of life. So if you had a medical life transition and a mortgage, the…