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“Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

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Re: “Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

#111

Post by waterlesscloud »

johnloeber wrote: post #105
ThomPete wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So what?" The way of technology is to increasingly render people obsolete. This is great for some people for most its a threat to their ability to make a living. The logical conclusion is not what you state but one conclusion his other is basic income and then you can automate away all you want. There is an unfortunate tendency to think about technology replacing jobs as temporary until the workforce re-adjust yet t…

> There is an unfortunate tendency to think about technology replacing jobs as temporary until the workforce re-adjust yet the increasing reality is structural unemployment not just temporary. Yeah, I know. The thing you're forgetting is that unemployment denotes a percentage of the eligible workforce, which, in itself, is only a fraction of the total population. Before the industrial revolution, literally EVERYONE,…

Honestly, I think it's useful to be talking about basic income right now so that when the time arrives it's not a totally alien idea.

It would also be useful to have some small-scale prototypes running well in advance to help work out wrinkles.

Re: “Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

#113

Post by stormbrew »

smacktoward wrote: post #89
larrys wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"when people tell you they love their jobs while you are paying them to perform their jobs" Parent comment doesn't say the drivers said "love" and the comments made don't appear to be over the top in any way. Also you are discounting the parent commenters ability to discern a BS answer from a real answer by interpreting emotion. (Not saying you aren't right to be skeptical as you raised a valid point).

The point is that taxi driving is a service industry, and nobody makes money in a service job by appearing unhappy or bitter. Customers come back more often and tip better if you seem cheerful, not if you confront them as cogs in a system that's screwing you. We want our baristas to be Manic Pixie Dream Girls, not overworked, underpaid people who resent our taking 15 minutes to decide what flavor syrup we want in our…

While it's valid to question what an Uber driver says to a customer, it doesn't necessarily follow that because some Uber drivers have come out against it publicly that all of them are somehow in thrall to the company and hiding their disgust, or even that their issues are actually worse than the issues you might hear a taxi driver say about their company off the meter. Particularly since taxi companies are almost always local and local rules vary.

To go back to a specific point in the OP, if an Uber driver says that when they were a taxi driver the company's cut was 40% instead of the 20% uber takes, I'd be inclined to think they're not lying about it. Merely not bringing it up would be more than sufficient to maintain the illusion.

And to compare this to a personal experience conversing with a cab driver and an uber driver, I had a cabbie tell me that they wait a month to get money from debit or credit transactions in their cab from the company, and this is one of the reasons they resist customers paying that way. An uber driver told me it's a week for them. That's a huge difference in payment cycle.

Also, if Uber drivers are trapped somehow from taking their labour elsewhere, it is entirely because of the regulatory capture created by the taxi industry's relationship with city administrations that imposes inflexible limits on the way the taxi industry can grow (often to the point of it being essentially a planned economy).

Re: “Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

#114

Post by droopyEyelids »

sighsigh wrote: post #46

"until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed." Hand-waving pleb magnets like this (the statement, not the person stating) show a painfully inept understanding of how autonomous labor is going to work. Once Moore's Law crosses the processing power/price ratios where robots can perform "good enough" object acquisition and manipulation, (pre-Singularity phase) no nation on earth…

Very cool vision of the future. I'm trying to imagine more consequences of the price of human labor going negative.

After we free up the surplus material making the humans, there will be far less need for many robot-provided services.

Farming won't be as big of a deal anymore. Many of our modern industries will shrink dramatically. We won't need food, clothing, entertainment, or medical services.

We can expect to keep a contingent of engineers around to service and design the robots until they hit the self-repairing, self-designing level of the singularity recursion.

It seems like a more-or-less plausible jumping off point into a runaway-AI future.

Re: “Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

#115

Post by thizzbuzz »

skylan_q wrote: post #73
cjbprime wrote: post #3

> Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers. > It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed. Okay, so I am extremely liberal and everything, but "let's ban any new technologies that might make somebody lose their job to a robot" is seriously the most ridiculo…

I'd take this all with a grain of salt. Reading this from RMS is like taking financial advice from Michael Jordan or medical advice from Albert Einstein. This is Russel Brand level thinking.

MJ is a billionaire and most of that is not directly from his NBA salary. I'd take financial advice from him.

Re: “Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

#116

Post by GabrielF00 »

johnloeber wrote: post #37
blhack wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"More marketable" is how you end up compromising on your ideals. Stallman is nuts, but he is an extremely important type of nuts. The world needs more people like him.

On that note, can you think of more people quite like RMS? In other fields, perhaps?

Jack Kevorkian. Ralph Nader.

Re: “Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

#117

Post by asdrty »

cjbprime wrote: post #3

> Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers. > It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed. Okay, so I am extremely liberal and everything, but "let's ban any new technologies that might make somebody lose their job to a robot" is seriously the most ridiculo…

that is pretty much what Orlando just did... a taxi lobbyist made them introduce a minimum price for rides provided by Uber and Lyft that I think is higher then taxis...

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/breaking-news/os-uber-ly...

but I think that Lyft and Uber still have a chance to appeal the ruling...

Re: “Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

#118

Post by cb18 »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #81
gnaritas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm personally unconvinced that it will create mass unemployment, but I don't call it crazy. Why? It's quite inevitable that it will, unlike all previous eras, there won't be new jobs for humans because it's human thinking that's going to be automated. Robots destroy jobs, that's a fact; sometimes, that creates new jobs, but it's usually always far less jobs for far more skilled humans and that pattern is and must…

Why are the 'masses' not capable of knowledge jobs?

Why are the 'masses' not capable of knowledge jobs?

If you accept that certain jobs[1] to be performed at a worthwhile level require a certain degree of general intelligence, or at the very least, the vast majority of people performing certain jobs have a measurable general intelligence above a certain level, and you accept that things like general intelligence, height, and other observable, measurable phenotypic traits of a species occur on a more or less normal('bell-curve') distribution, two things that are pretty much taken as a given outside the PC deluded, "I love me some outrage!," "Wow, just wow." crowd, then there is your answer. Is it not?

You might think you're doing good for the world by saying 'everyone is equally capable,' but you'll probably have more success in doing good for the world by understanding the world as it presents itself upon clear-eyed observation.

[1]"Software is an IQ business." -Bill Gates

Re: “Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

#119

Post by click170 »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #69
click170 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Granted there are several items that ... detract from the point, but there are some real problems here and I don't think it does them justice to gloss over them because of some errant points at the beginning. We don't see eye to eye on the identification issue, but even if we put that one issue aside I can't agree that the list of complaints doesn't hold water for me personally. Executives stalking passengers and tro…

The first half of the post is RMS's usual loaded rant on what 'freedom' means. He's a weird brand of anarchocommunist, and axiomatically doesn't believe in running any code that you can't see the source to and haven't compiled yourself. That sets him up to start off most of his rants that might otherwise have a point with a bunch of bullshit that we've all seen and laughed at before.

> that we've all seen and laughed at before

Let's be fair, he's been right about a LOT of things. Things that we did laugh at him for saying.

Maybe we shouldn't have laughed so hard.

Re: “Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

#120

Post by ThomPete »

johnloeber wrote: post #105
ThomPete wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So what?" The way of technology is to increasingly render people obsolete. This is great for some people for most its a threat to their ability to make a living. The logical conclusion is not what you state but one conclusion his other is basic income and then you can automate away all you want. There is an unfortunate tendency to think about technology replacing jobs as temporary until the workforce re-adjust yet t…

> There is an unfortunate tendency to think about technology replacing jobs as temporary until the workforce re-adjust yet the increasing reality is structural unemployment not just temporary. Yeah, I know. The thing you're forgetting is that unemployment denotes a percentage of the eligible workforce, which, in itself, is only a fraction of the total population. Before the industrial revolution, literally EVERYONE,…

The jobs are already being removed right now and wont come back. THAT is my argument.
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