Rideshare operations are being suspended in California

Do you imagine that there is some hard limit beyond which adding more pollution won’t make any difference to someone’s health? Or is the relationship more linear, where every additional particle inhaled will cause more damage?

"Depend heavily" is different then, "can't operate without". Uber and Lyft would have zero revenue if you took away their "independent contractors". Literally zero.

Uber and Lyft have always lied about the nature of their business.

The first lie was that the passenger was, "sharing a ride". This lie was necessary to support the second lie which was that, "were not a Taxi service" but a "technology platform".

Your Uber or Lyft driver was not planning on going to your destination until you "hailed" them to do so. So it's not "ride sharing". It's a livery service.

But by lying both companies could ignore existing laws.

If it's ok for people to lie about what it is they do so they can skirt existing laws than I guess robbing banks could be classified as "undeclared venture capital opportunities".

Also why aren't predatory business laws ever used against VC backed businesses? Why is it ok for ultra wealthy people to destroy businesses by offering products and services at below what it costs to provide them? And to do this not for short periods of time but for over a decade?

In international trade this would be called, "dumping" and the US complains and files trade disputes about it constantly. Why? Because it destroys good paying jobs. But apparently if your a VC backed Unicorn and just so damn hip and sexy then everyone is supposed to just look the other way and praise you for "your genius".

I hope whatever you do for a living gets undermined in the same way, perhaps then you'll reevaluate what's actually legal, just and sustainable for a nation of people

I think this makes a much deeper point. You can't create an app that will pay people badly because it will pay people badly.

We (society) have traditionally massively underpaid people who are time rich and cash poor, but who have basic life necessities provided outside of their income - teenagers, most obviously, but historically the same applied to middle-class married women (look up "working for pin money").

But that involved discrimination - either only offering these jobs to people who were not relying on them for basic life necessities, or paying people who were actually trying to make a living much more (at least minimum wage, and in some cases far more). That discrimination has usually been illegal, but paying a local teenager a few dollars to mow your lawn (when you would pay a much more substantial fee to a proper lawn-care firm) is the sort of informal small-scale law-breaking that no enforcement body would ever bother with.

But you can't, intrinsically, aggregate this sort of thing. That takes the human being out of the loop, which means there is no one to discriminate. It makes the law-breaking large-scale and formal, rather than small-scale and informal. This happens to all sorts of things - there are plenty of informal payments made to people in exchange for small amounts of their time (lots of us have paid a bit more than the fuel costs for a friend to give us a lift to the airport), but when this starts to scale up (ie Uber), you have to turn it into formal business and employment arrangements, and that changes the nature of the relationship. You can't scale it up without changing it in kind.

I know that a lot of people on HN don't like the idea that there are some things that can only be done one-to-one, personally, and informally, and therefore cannot be automated, done many-to-many, impersonally, and formally. But there are.

For the specific case, surely the solution is to assess how long the job will take, check the minimum wage or living wage, and then aggregate multiple bounties until there's enough to pay for the job to be done.

As for health benefits, the likely approach is something like how SAG health benefits work - you pay a percentage of your income into the plan; if you earn more than $X per year, then you get health benefits. Someone should organise this across all "gig" jobs and employers can then require people working gig jobs to sign up for this (and deduct the percentage at source). That someone would be a labor union, of course.

Huh? I just said that would largely not be considered tolerable. Imagine working at a food court as a flex hours worker and jumping between the KFC counter and the McDonalds counter during the same shift. That might maybe sort of work if only one person does it, but that scheme is going to fall apart on the first lunch hour if all your employees are flex.

What employer would allow that?

Of course an employee can work at KFC and McD simultaneously if they can make arrangements to not have shift conflicts, and likewise one could hypothetically be a Uber employee in the morning and a Lyft employee at night, but why go through the trouble of working effectively full time but only getting redundant part timer benefit packages?

At least we know now that a $100B will get you a high speed train from Bakersfield to Merced in 10 years behind schedule.

I think though that California has an extreme case of NIMBY-ism which makes much needed projects like these so much harder then then should be. I’m sure similar projects in Texas between Houston and Dallas would be far easier to complete on schedule. Similar with the Cascadian corridor between Portland OR, and Vancouver BC. Although I see the Pacific North Western politicians capitalizing on this project for a few decades to win a few more election before this projects gets a go-ahead.