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'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

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Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#171

Post by anonetal »

Lavery wrote: post #138
jillesvangurp wrote: post #109

How can you write an article like this without bringing up self driving cars? The end game for Uber is to get drivers out of the loop completely. So, this is just a temporary problem. It's going to get a whole lot worse if your plan in life is to drive vehicles around to make money. This is not about the gig economy but simply about a lot of jobs becoming commodities before being automated away completely. Anyone wit…

People constantly cite self-driving cars as Uber's salvation, but never really seem to think through the implication. Hypothetically, let's say that self-driving cars are invented next year. Necessarily, these will start in high-end vehicles (as nearly all new car features do) before getting rolled out to the broader ecosystem. Now if you're Uber you face one of two choices: 1) You enter into perhaps the most capital…

Regarding (1), they could just lease the cars from the car manufacturers. As I recall, that was one of the reasons why GE invested so heavily in Lyft.

Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#172

Post by troupe »

CaptainZapp wrote: post #42
troupe wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who were they trusting to responsibly invest it other than themselves? I thought the people who lost were the ones who had it all invested in Enron. I'm not aware of any financial advisor who would consider this responsibly invested.

Look up 401K. Which were mostly invested into Enron shares.

I don't know of anyone who advises people to invest all of their 401k funds in a single company. Every piece of reputable financial advice on retirement seems to suggest that you should NOT do that.

I'm not trying to minimize their loss or how hard that would be, but if we think people should have the freedom to make decisions on how to invest their retirement money, then we have to accept that some people will invest it all in a company where they will eventually lose it.

Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#173

Post by Bartweiss »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #128
refurb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I actually feel bad for medallion owners, even if the medallion system is a bad one. The gov't sets ups a system, tells you the rules and says "if you buy an expensive medallion, you can drive a cab and make a living". The value of the medallion is purely based on the gov't promise to maintain the system. So you buy one (or many) and a few years later someone does a work around and the gov't says "oh we…

Yup, in this case I'd be inclined that on the one side, the government dropped the ball by not banning Uber / "black market taxis" outright; on the other, they created artificial scarcity with the medallion system, creating a trade product that only the super rich could afford to own, which they could in turn lease out to make a profit over decades. I can see why they needed the system though, to prevent a flooding o…

> I can see why they needed the system though, to prevent a flooding of taxi drivers. And they were proven right, because now with gig economy drivers, the floodgates have been opened and the market has been flooded with drivers in a race to the bottom.

I'm not convinced this is true, except in the short term. Plenty of service industries maintain a reasonable number of providers, and many even pay reasonable wages to a lot of those providers.

Uber flooded the market as part of an attempt to break through artificial scarcity; they needed on-demand service to attract customers, and massive scale to fight regulators. And they got their flood of drivers by burning VC money to ensure that the basic "rider -> driver" transaction happens at unsustainably low prices. So what we're seeing isn't a race to the bottom - it's a race to well below the bottom.

Uber rides can't stay so cheap forever; either prices go up and riders leave, or prices stay low and drivers leave. The taxi/driver market in Cleveland or Omaha isn't going to be destroyed by a lack of artificial scarcity.

There is a secondary problem, where even rational markets for services don't function in expensive cities. It may be that rides normal people can afford simply aren't viable in NYC or SF. But that's not a problem with market rates, it's a problem with housing prices that make lots of totally normal jobs unlivable.

Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#174

Post by Fins »

deft wrote: post #136
throwaaawayNNV wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I make most of the money, not them. And the day I reduce their hours significantly because I bring AI into the platform -and one day I will-, I will make even more, and they will make even less. I don't think I am individually wrong to pay market rate for their work, and keep the surplus, but the bigger question is, while nobody is wrong, including AI, where are we going as a society? What will be the conseq…

Look at history. One day people will have had enough and they're going to go after you and people like you.

Historically, they will also be the ones who still lose in the end.

Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#175

Post by Analemma_ »

troupe wrote: post #172
CaptainZapp wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look up 401K. Which were mostly invested into Enron shares.

I don't know of anyone who advises people to invest all of their 401k funds in a single company. Every piece of reputable financial advice on retirement seems to suggest that you should NOT do that. I'm not trying to minimize their loss or how hard that would be, but if we think people should have the freedom to make decisions on how to invest their retirement money, then we have to accept that some people will inves…

> I don't know of anyone who advises people to invest all of their 401k funds in a single company.

That is exactly what Enron's in-house financial advisers did. They went to jail for it, but that's cold comfort to the people whose 401k's got wiped out.

Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#176

Post by nathanasmith »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #107
sokoloff wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a living wage? $30K/yr? How many Americans are there (or just American adults)? 325M / 250M What's those two figures multiplied together? 9.8T / 7.5T What's the total federal tax revenues in 2016? 3.5T To what multiple would we need to raise taxes to pay for such a program? Raise to 3.8x current taxation levels / raise to 3.1x current taxation levels. All that assumes that basic prices wouldn't rise in an envi…

A living wage can be defined as: enough money in the particular location to rent an apartment suitable for human habitation, pay all necessary bills for heating, water, power, phone etc, eat nutritious if simple food, drink safe water, buy cheap but functional clothes and ordinary groceries, commute to work, and have a little over for leisure. If your locality is barbaric enough to charge money or require insurance f…

>If your locality is barbaric enough to charge money or require insurance for healthcare, that is included too.

Eff you, condescending prick. A lecture about "barbarism" from the continent that fought the two most devastating wars of the 20th century and drug the rest of the world into your squabble. spit

Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#177

Post by lr4444lr »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #134
lr4444lr wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are reportedly about 14,000 medallions. At $1,000,000 a pop, it would not be too terrible to have a one-time buyout paid over several years as a compromise to ending the system.

Except that I'm sure there's been a lot of rich people investing into these things and generating artificial scarcity. It's not been the individual taxi drivers that owned these things for a long time; they're leased out for ridiculous amounts of money.

It's a mix. Some wealthier enterprising people consolidated many, and others were cabbies who saved up and took out loans to finance a single medallion.

Another way we might handle this is just to convince these people to cut their losses and default - the banks should have better weighed the risk of deregulation - and give the cabbies themselves reimbursement up to some fixed amount (under $10K) for the inconvenience of reregistering themselves with rideshares, or any livery cab companies.

Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#178

Post by stevenwoo »

reading-at-work wrote: post #67

"The reign of the all-powerful capitalist class has returned with a vengeance. The job conditions of working men and women, thrust backward, will not improve until they regain the militancy and rebuild the popular organizations that seized power from the capitalists." ... "The ruling capitalists will be as vicious as they were in the past. Nothing enrages the rich more than having to part with a fraction of their obs…

This author made the mistake of trying to overgeneralize from the New York taxi industry, but most American job growth since 2005 has been temp work/contracting, Uber/Lyft are just the most visible for one industry - this kind of explains the general unease/longing for the past we saw in a sizeable percentage of the electorate expressed in the 2016 election in both parties.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/most-jobs-created-...

Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#179

Post by Infinitesimus »

throwaaawayNNV wrote: post #99
bbddg wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't pay them how much their work is worth. He pays less, that's how he makes money.

Exactly. I make most of the money, not them. And the day I reduce their hours significantly because I bring AI into the platform -and one day I will-, I will make even more, and they will make even less. I don't think I am individually wrong to pay market rate for their work, and keep the surplus, but the bigger question is, while nobody is wrong, including AI, where are we going as a society? What will be the conseq…

You could start by just paying them better...

Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#180

Post by Bartweiss »

wildmusings wrote: post #166
cptskippy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> USPS benefited from national mail logistics only being available to government level endeavors. What Kool-Aid are you drinking? The Post Office didn't benefit from anything, it was mandated because no such service yet existed. Prior to the Office of the Postmaster General being established, postal service was disjointed and limited at best in the colonies. In the 1600s you had 2 routes in the colonies, Boston to En…

> The Post Office was mandated by the founding fathers under the principle that everyone has the right to secure, efficient, reliable, and affordable mail service. The founders would not have talked about postal service as a "right". A good idea? Yes. Stupid to not have one? Yes. A right? No. > The most recent being the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 which required the USPS to switch from a Pay-As-…

> They took steps

Sure, but not the steps you'd take if you wanted a functioning public postal system. They set an extremely short timeframe to fund the pension account, then cut postage prices right as it neared full funding.

A lot of Congress very openly wants to end the public postal system. Pre-funding the pension system was a reasonable move in principle, but like most changes to the USPS it's structured in a way designed to create a failing system to privatize.

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