Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All • Hacker News Board

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#241

Post by jimmywanger » Sun, Jun 10, 2018, 2:05 AM UTC

CamelCaseName wrote: post #236

jimmywanger wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know people in the bay area working 70 hours a week at dead end jobs barely making ends meet; a fact I consider unacceptable given the wealth they are surrounded by. By what means is this unacceptable? "I find myself working 40 hours a week to afford cable and a new iphone. I consider that unacceptable given the wealth I am surrounded by." Those two statements are qualitively equivalent. Because you move to a nic…

Working 70 hours is much more than 40. In the first case you're working to survive and don't have any time outside of work to improve your situation.

I'm pretty sure you own a cell phone and a laptop.

And most of your things are made by people working comparable hours for much less money and a lower of standard of living. Yet you somehow find that "acceptable" even though you're still complicit in their exploitation.

I fail to see why geographic proximity makes things less acceptable. If we could ship the fruits of their labor from overseas, that would be ok?

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#242

Post by quadrangle » Sun, Jun 10, 2018, 5:11 AM UTC

autokad wrote: post #162

quadrangle wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short Uber etc. specific point: "Uber's market is not a free market". But more broadly… it depends whether someone is a dogmatic free-marketer fundamentalist or just someone who was swayed by the arguments from that dogma. For the fundamentalists, forget it. For those actually open-minded, take the scientific argument. Start with confirming agreement that you're both pro-social instead of anti-social (you both actual…

> "dogma" You have a dogma yourself. that's ok, just be aware that you have one, and are espousing one. > "Then get them to acknowledge that the free-market argument is a model that needs to be backed by empirical evidence to be accepted as actually describing reality instead of being just an untested hypothesis." The free market is one of the most tested ideas out there. > "They use things like unions and government…

> You have a dogma yourself. that's ok, just be aware that you have one, and are espousing one.

I completely deny this. I am anti-dogma and presume at this point that you are either just lumping me in with dogmatic people who say things that my points remind you of or that you are otherwise misinterpreting me.

What's my dogma? Are you just conflating "dogma" with things like "bias" and "perspective" because I certainly have those, I'm just one person and not omniscient.

> The free market is one of the most tested ideas out there.

The free-market as a MODEL is well-tested and understood. There are cases where reality fits the model pretty well, but they are isolated. The vast majority of reality is far enough from the free-market model that it's impossible to use reality as a test of "the free market" because most markets in reality aren't fully free.

I suspect you're equating "market" with "free market". All the complex parameters of pricing, supply-and-demand, basic market economics… that's all present in most markets, free or non-free. It's not like when there are regulations or power imbalances, cartels etc. etc. that all of market economics disappears. But there's so rarely any example of completely free market to even study, we can't accurately accept that it's well-tested.

We can't study free-markets in a lab the way we can study basic physics or cell biology or whatever.

Besides, the vast majority of economics as a field has been practiced in ways that are nowhere near the scientific rigor of many other fields.

> [your last two paragraphs]

I'm not sure I follow the relevance here. Are you assuming that you're talking to some dogmatic ideologue such that the plain things you state which seem sensible enough is a counter to anything I think or wrote?

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#243

Post by quadrangle » Sun, Jun 10, 2018, 5:15 AM UTC

neilwilson wrote: post #194

DrJones1098 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ironic. The free market requires a form of socialism to actually work. Education, Infrastructure, Military, etc. All socialistic enterprises funded by the general fund. Free enterprise does not work without a socialistic framework to support it. For a pure unregulated free market see Ethiopia.

In the same way that a nuclear reactor doesn't work to provide power without an engineered containment vessel and control rods. If we want the nuclear power of capitalism without the boom, we need to engineer an appropriate containment vessel.

Please note that capitalism means private ownership of core resources and means of production. It doesn't specify whether we have free or semi-free markets or whatever. Markets (free or not) have great value and are bigger and independent of capitalism (for perspective, markets are much older).

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#244

Post by quadrangle » Sun, Jun 10, 2018, 5:17 AM UTC

DrJones1098 wrote: post #170

autokad wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "dogma" You have a dogma yourself. that's ok, just be aware that you have one, and are espousing one. > "Then get them to acknowledge that the free-market argument is a model that needs to be backed by empirical evidence to be accepted as actually describing reality instead of being just an untested hypothesis." The free market is one of the most tested ideas out there. > "They use things like unions and government…

It's ironic. The free market requires a form of socialism to actually work. Education, Infrastructure, Military, etc. All socialistic enterprises funded by the general fund. Free enterprise does not work without a socialistic framework to support it. For a pure unregulated free market see Ethiopia.

You just mean the market as we know it today. There is no generic "the free market" in existence.

Even Somalia, the market is affected greatly by the military context of what's going on. It's got less centralized control, but it's not an actual free market entirely. A true free market as a complete overall social system is probably just a fantasy idea.

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#245

Post by mgkimsal » Sun, Jun 10, 2018, 11:42 AM UTC

jsoc815 wrote: post #240

mgkimsal wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unemployment is low because people can no longer say no. Succinctly put. I'd say this was also a reason why, 9 years ago during the big crash, we saw "productivity" measures go up, and continue to rise even after the 'recovery', even with companies working with fewer people. They managed to get the same results out of fewer people (or... close enough results), and those people really couldn't say 'no' because... th…

This is correct. And to add more clarity about the oft-cited labor shortage, I was at an event where the President of the Minneapolis Fed talked about how when he asked employers when the best of times was w/respect to hiring, their response was 2008 - 2010. He went on to say that the issue isn't really about a labor shortage but an unwillingness to raise wages because the employers were spoiled by applicants' desper…

I remember multiple news reports and hour-long news stories on the inability of people to get jobs because of their unemployed status. There were so many people to choose from, companies would generally ignore someone who was unemployed, regardless of the reason, preferring only to hire people who were already employed. I have no doubt that delayed the start of a recovery for months.

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#246

Post by conanbatt » Sun, Jun 10, 2018, 12:56 PM UTC

vmateixeira wrote: post #214

conanbatt wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Did you see what I said about poverty traps? Once someone is stuck, it's very challenging to break out without outside help. We need to agree on where the poverty traps come from first to then reason if government is the solution.

I would say greediness.

How does greediness create a poverty traps? I dont see it.

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#247

Post by DanBC » Sun, Jun 10, 2018, 1:04 PM UTC

conanbatt wrote: post #246

vmateixeira wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say greediness.

How does greediness create a poverty traps? I dont see it.

The theory goes: Poor people who need a car should buy a modest car, and keep it running for as long as they possibly can. But some poor people don't do this. They buy an expensive car using weird debt structures that they don't understand, and then when a minor thing goes wrong (traffic ticket for example) they get trapped in a cycle of debt.

I think this probably does happen, but I'd be interested to know how many people are stuck in debt because they bought a product using a financial product they didn't understand vs it just happened.

This thread has a bunch of stuff about these potentially mis-sold financial products: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14476381

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#248

Post by nerdponx » Sun, Jun 10, 2018, 11:20 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #239

ComradeTaco wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seem to work pretty okay in the rest of the developed world.

You'll have to be more specific about "okay" and "developed world." A lot of Americans point to Canada as an example, but it's a pretty bad example. If healthcare was so great in Canada, then there wouldn't be private hospitals in the United States that cater only to Canadians who go to America for the healthcare they can't get in Canada, or can't get in a timely fashion. In American towns where a lot of Canadians sp…

Nationalized healthcare is one very extreme implementation of a specific subset of a social safety net.

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#249

Post by rsachoc » Mon, Jun 11, 2018, 4:24 PM UTC

wslh wrote: post #174

afarrell wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> really hard to do because of catch 22 To expand on what mrtksn means: in the UK, it is difficult to get a bank account without proof of address. It is also difficult to rent a flat without a UK bank account. There are a few ways around this: - Have a friend put you on their water bill and use this as proof of address. I suspect this is illegal. - Join a flatshare without getting on the lease, pay for your portion o…

I am curious if a hack exists to have an account in a bank in UK if you use the same bank in another country. For example, if you are a software developer with a good salary being an HSBC Premier customer can be easy in developing countries, you then go to places like US and they treat you like an HSBC Premier there where you just need to show you are a customer in another country and they use your overseas address a…

Yes, I did exactly this when I moved from the UK to the US. As an existing Premier customer, I was able to open a bank account and provide the necessary verification at a later date.

AFAIK, it doesn't work for Santander (both in the US,UK and Spain, based on a colleagues account) as they treat each country and separate.