The issue is that to some people it looks like illegal search and seizure. It looks that way to them because Geek Squad employees were getting paid by law enforcement and law enforcement was writing up warrants after the fact. And argument could be made that because money was being exchanged for services, it's no longer a case of private citizens reporting illegal behavior to appropriate channels but an effective arm of law enforcement being paid to go fishing for evidence without going through a judge first.
Does it hold water? Probably not. I'll add that in many cases, private citizens are required by law to report some of this stuff. Teachers in both private and public schools, physicians at private practices, and the like are required to report child abuse and child pornography. I believe (and someone who knows better please correct me if I'm wrong) patient-doctor confidentiality is waived in case of child abuse or pornography as well.
You acknowledge the potential abuses of unionized labor and you accuse the government of being bought and paid for by large monopolists, and you even acknowledge a progression of government going from trust-busting to laissez-faire over time, yet you seem to believe there is such a thing as not totally unorganized that doesn't turn into the Teamsters over time. What exactly is this "a little organized" that you seem to be advocating for and what limiting principle that prevents it from turning into Teamsters, SEUI, AFT, and all the rest? Remember now...big labor has government bought and paid for just as much as the large corporations do.
How? Easy. They're all globalists. Literally. They import their workforce from places where that sort of behavior isn't as taboo as it is here, and once those people start gaining seniority within the organization, their cultural norms bleed into the actions of what is on paper an American company. And the guy at the top doesn't care. "Move fast and break things," and all that.
Google and Damore and Sundar Pichai is another example. He's from a place where free speech isn't as ingrained in the culture, so he's less likely to be a champion for it in the workplace. Would a blond-haired, blue-eyed, red-blooded American have done better? Maybe not, but in the aggregate a place where many of the people at the top didn't grow up learning about the American Revolution and Oliver Wendel Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Earl Warren, MLK and Abraham Lincoln and saying the Pledge of Allegiance every morning is going to work differently from a place where nearly all of the people at the top did.
That word doesn't mean what you think it means. A slave is a person whose economic and political rights and personal freedoms are legally curtailed and who is forced to work for an owner under threat of corporal punishment. A person who chooses to drive me around in exchange for monetary compensation does not have his right curtailed, is not under threat of physical punishment if he declines to drive me around, and has one vote that he can cast as he choses, same as me.
The concept of "near-slave" does not exist in this country. It is an exercise in hyperbole meant to inflame emotions to cloud over rational thinking. It is a rhetorical trick without merit.
If Uber is exploiting asymmetric information and driver desperation and known negotiating weaknesses, that leads to lowered social welfare. One side is consistently winning and one side is consistently losing. The economy is a competition for resources. I think we can agree that Uber is keeping a large portion of the incoming cash flow. If drivers had some kind of collective negotiation, they could likely get a lot better deal for their effort.
Life is asymetric. The only way information or capital can be at parity is if you've got two equal spherical cows. Heterogeneity will imply asymmetric exchanges, but guess what: that's good because there's no one number you can put on the value of goods being exchanged that's guaranteed to hold for everyone.
In the case of Uber drivers, the extra dollar you pick up on the way to or from work is worth more to you than the extra minimum wage you could make if you held down a full-blown second job that had time commitments and additional travel. The money is worth more to Uber, the flexibility is worth more to the driver. That's win-win if you don't restrict your analysis to just the things that are easy to quantify like dollars.
In any economy with even half an ounce of freedom, it is not possible for one side to be "consistently winning and one side consistently losing." The free flow of information and the freedom of individual actors to make self-interested choices precludes that from happening. You're operating under the Marxist delusion that everything is about power and oppression. It isn't.
The economy is not a competition for resources. That would only be true if there were a finite amount of resources that could only be used by one party and then vanish off into the void. Win-win transactions would be impossible if that were literally true. Free markets enable resources to be developed, harvested, used, reused and to have value added to them with each transaction. In the most simplistic example, if I make a killing in the stock market, I get to buy a new house, but someone else gets to sell it to me.
If drivers had "collective negotiation" then the following three things could happen: 1. Ride prices would go up if the minimum fee per ride were to go up. This would discourage some fraction of the user base from using Uber at all, thereby lowering the overall size of the pie available to the drivers. 2. Guaranteed minimum work hours could be implemented, meaning small-timers and casual drivers would get booted. That wouldn't be fair to them. 3. They'd all have to pay union dues. Despite many of them being fine with the arrangement now. So how is it fair for them to have to pay to fix a problem that isn't a problem for many of them?
Editorializations on my part aside, these things invariably happen when a place unionizes. And while it may be considered "good" for the small portion of people who benefit monetarily from the arrangement (at the expense of many who don't) and while it may be good for others who politic their way to the top of the heap in these negotiations and outside consultants who end up pocketing the union dues, it's not good for many people for whom a way of earning a little extra money is now closed.
Repeat after me, comrade: people are individuals and they need to be treated as individuals; collective bargaining treats people as cogs in a machine, and that's inappropriate for a workforce composed of part-timers who work irregular hours to provide on-demand services at their own convenience.
Money doesn't grow on trees dude. The reason Uber took off is that their price point attracted more customers than the taxi companies could with their "reasonable chunks." If Uber and Lyft and the rest go away, that money ain't going to the taxi companies, it's staying in people's wallets and to get where they need to go they take public transit or walk if they're in city centers or drive their own cars if they aren't.
No one forces anyone to do anything. If a programmer wants to "negotiate" he can bill himself out and cut out the middle man. Many do. Many don't. I know a bunch from column A and a bunch from column B. The ones who don't don't because they don't want the hassle of running a business on top of doing the work they're paid to do and the difference in dollars isn't worth it.
Same thing with Uber. No one is making you drive for them. If you've got the entrepreneurial bent, you can start your own car service. You'll have to do a lot more leg work though, and that means giving up your day job if you've got one. That's not worth it for a lot of people. So they take the lower pay for the lower amount of things to have to worry about.
What is it in the water that's making people automatically assume that when money changes hands in exchange for services rendered that it means someone's doing something to someone?
If I buy a sandwich from a food truck, am I exploiting the guy making it for me?
When I pay my mechanic to change my oil and rotate my tires, am I exploiting him? Is he exploiting me? Or do I make the judgement that the thirty or forty bucks he charges me to do it is worth it if I don't have to jack up my car one tire at a time and mess around with recycling the used oil?
If several hundred thousand people drive for Uber, give them some credit that they know what they're doing and you don't know better than them what works for them. You do that and I'll refrain from telling you how you're making your bed wrong or how you're messing up your grocery shopping.
So somewhere between one and several hundred thousand there's a magic number? What is it? How does one go about determining what it should be?
What if I'm particularly gregarious and have ten friends? A hundred? What if we entered into an LLP and our trucks and our time are the capital we invest in this operation? What if we plan to, but haven't yet filed the paperwork?
No one is forcing anyone to drive for Uber or Lyft or any of the dozen and a half local equivalents.
Let's say a friend of mine with a van is willing to haul a load of papers for me on his way to work, which takes him an hour each way and happens to go by both the print shop and my street corner.
Is it OK if he does it for free out of the kindness of his heart?
Is it OK if I pay him $3 to reimburse him for the gas in his truck?
Is it OK if I pay him an extra dollar because I don't believe in accepting charity?
by selling copies of my poorly-xeroxed newsletter on the street corner. Should I be banned from doing so on the grounds that I can't feed a wife and two kids by doing that?
Of course it's censorship. It's not legally-mandated censorship, so one could consider it self-censorship on the part of YouTube, being that it owns the series of tubes here. But it's still censorship.
I find it odd how people will go to the argument that it's only censorship if the government does it. Is it also not illegal search and search and seizure if your neighbor or business partner, who is not the government, breaks in your door and rummages through your stuff to collect evidence?
Governments exist to secure people's rights. Against attacks by other people. And other governments. And since someone has to watch the watcher, we specifically enumerate the rights the government cannot violate in pursuit of that purpose.
Read your Declaration. The right to free speech isn't only the right against government censorship; it is a Natural Right that you have by virtue of sucking down oxygen. The government is there to make sure no one takes it from you. That includes other private actors to whom you have not ceded it. YouTube's community guidelines do not constitute an agreement to relinquish the right to make right-wing statements. If YouTube is treating it as such, that would be a breach of contract between customer and service provider.
I'll add one more thing. Again: if you don't want the government censoring you, then you've got to model respect for freedom of expression in the wider culture. Because government doesn't perpetuate itself. This is a democracy. The impressionable people watching you now (aka children) will be tomorrow's legislators and prosecutors. Not a good idea to give them the idea that free speech is not sacrosanct.
At some point, pornhub is going to have this problem too. They've already got a movie pirating problem.
I'm nearly falling out of my chair right now laughing as I type this: behold the newest porn genre: Right-Wing Porn! It can't be transphobic or homophobic or islamophobic if the actor/actress of the necessary background is the one telling you to build the wall, keep a lid on refugees from backward countries, and respect the Bill of Rights.
The printer doesn't know about the internet, the phone doesn't know about the internet, the TV doesn't know about the internet, the thermostat was made before ARPANET went live, and as far as I can tell the router hasn't had any zero-days discovered in it.
Today they started screening out any results containing 'gun' in their shopping results. And I mean all. For a time, searching for 'Guns and roses' would turn up empty. They've "fixed" it at the time of this post.
You're right, but if a mechanical part breaks, that's one thing. If the control board breaks it can be refurbished. If the control board breaks because it came with a vendor-installed self-destruct timer...you're in the latter case and not the former.
Washing machines it's going to be hard. If they try, after-market "repair" services will pop up just like that. Won't even need to get into circumvention/DMCA issues. Just rip out the original electronics and put in a new set for 70% of the cost of paying the original manufacturer. Can't really do that with media delivery, but with durable goods it's cake.
Already happens with things like old elevators and cranes and HVAC and such where the original manufacturer folds and a-guy-in-his-garage companies fill in the void to service and refurbish old equipment with newer electronics.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait...they restored the communication links to the secret child slave colonies on Mars? Excellent news!
The issue is that to some people it looks like illegal search and seizure. It looks that way to them because Geek Squad employees were getting paid by law enforcement and law enforcement was writing up warrants after the fact. And argument could be made that because money was being exchanged for services, it's no longer a case of private citizens reporting illegal behavior to appropriate channels but an effective arm of law enforcement being paid to go fishing for evidence without going through a judge first.
Does it hold water? Probably not. I'll add that in many cases, private citizens are required by law to report some of this stuff. Teachers in both private and public schools, physicians at private practices, and the like are required to report child abuse and child pornography. I believe (and someone who knows better please correct me if I'm wrong) patient-doctor confidentiality is waived in case of child abuse or pornography as well.
It might find its way onto my list eventually. I'm not in a position to read anything that isn't for work right now.
You acknowledge the potential abuses of unionized labor and you accuse the government of being bought and paid for by large monopolists, and you even acknowledge a progression of government going from trust-busting to laissez-faire over time, yet you seem to believe there is such a thing as not totally unorganized that doesn't turn into the Teamsters over time. What exactly is this "a little organized" that you seem to be advocating for and what limiting principle that prevents it from turning into Teamsters, SEUI, AFT, and all the rest? Remember now...big labor has government bought and paid for just as much as the large corporations do.
How? Easy. They're all globalists. Literally. They import their workforce from places where that sort of behavior isn't as taboo as it is here, and once those people start gaining seniority within the organization, their cultural norms bleed into the actions of what is on paper an American company. And the guy at the top doesn't care. "Move fast and break things," and all that.
Google and Damore and Sundar Pichai is another example. He's from a place where free speech isn't as ingrained in the culture, so he's less likely to be a champion for it in the workplace. Would a blond-haired, blue-eyed, red-blooded American have done better? Maybe not, but in the aggregate a place where many of the people at the top didn't grow up learning about the American Revolution and Oliver Wendel Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Earl Warren, MLK and Abraham Lincoln and saying the Pledge of Allegiance every morning is going to work differently from a place where nearly all of the people at the top did.
Why always "Ivan?" Why not a "Vlad" or a "Dmitri" for a change?
That word doesn't mean what you think it means. A slave is a person whose economic and political rights and personal freedoms are legally curtailed and who is forced to work for an owner under threat of corporal punishment. A person who chooses to drive me around in exchange for monetary compensation does not have his right curtailed, is not under threat of physical punishment if he declines to drive me around, and has one vote that he can cast as he choses, same as me.
The concept of "near-slave" does not exist in this country. It is an exercise in hyperbole meant to inflame emotions to cloud over rational thinking. It is a rhetorical trick without merit.
If Uber is exploiting asymmetric information and driver desperation and known negotiating weaknesses, that leads to lowered social welfare. One side is consistently winning and one side is consistently losing. The economy is a competition for resources. I think we can agree that Uber is keeping a large portion of the incoming cash flow. If drivers had some kind of collective negotiation, they could likely get a lot better deal for their effort.
Life is asymetric. The only way information or capital can be at parity is if you've got two equal spherical cows. Heterogeneity will imply asymmetric exchanges, but guess what: that's good because there's no one number you can put on the value of goods being exchanged that's guaranteed to hold for everyone.
In the case of Uber drivers, the extra dollar you pick up on the way to or from work is worth more to you than the extra minimum wage you could make if you held down a full-blown second job that had time commitments and additional travel. The money is worth more to Uber, the flexibility is worth more to the driver. That's win-win if you don't restrict your analysis to just the things that are easy to quantify like dollars.
In any economy with even half an ounce of freedom, it is not possible for one side to be "consistently winning and one side consistently losing." The free flow of information and the freedom of individual actors to make self-interested choices precludes that from happening. You're operating under the Marxist delusion that everything is about power and oppression. It isn't.
The economy is not a competition for resources. That would only be true if there were a finite amount of resources that could only be used by one party and then vanish off into the void. Win-win transactions would be impossible if that were literally true. Free markets enable resources to be developed, harvested, used, reused and to have value added to them with each transaction. In the most simplistic example, if I make a killing in the stock market, I get to buy a new house, but someone else gets to sell it to me.
If drivers had "collective negotiation" then the following three things could happen:
1. Ride prices would go up if the minimum fee per ride were to go up. This would discourage some fraction of the user base from using Uber at all, thereby lowering the overall size of the pie available to the drivers.
2. Guaranteed minimum work hours could be implemented, meaning small-timers and casual drivers would get booted. That wouldn't be fair to them.
3. They'd all have to pay union dues. Despite many of them being fine with the arrangement now. So how is it fair for them to have to pay to fix a problem that isn't a problem for many of them?
Editorializations on my part aside, these things invariably happen when a place unionizes. And while it may be considered "good" for the small portion of people who benefit monetarily from the arrangement (at the expense of many who don't) and while it may be good for others who politic their way to the top of the heap in these negotiations and outside consultants who end up pocketing the union dues, it's not good for many people for whom a way of earning a little extra money is now closed.
Repeat after me, comrade: people are individuals and they need to be treated as individuals; collective bargaining treats people as cogs in a machine, and that's inappropriate for a workforce composed of part-timers who work irregular hours to provide on-demand services at their own convenience.
Money doesn't grow on trees dude. The reason Uber took off is that their price point attracted more customers than the taxi companies could with their "reasonable chunks." If Uber and Lyft and the rest go away, that money ain't going to the taxi companies, it's staying in people's wallets and to get where they need to go they take public transit or walk if they're in city centers or drive their own cars if they aren't.
No one forces anyone to do anything. If a programmer wants to "negotiate" he can bill himself out and cut out the middle man. Many do. Many don't. I know a bunch from column A and a bunch from column B. The ones who don't don't because they don't want the hassle of running a business on top of doing the work they're paid to do and the difference in dollars isn't worth it.
Same thing with Uber. No one is making you drive for them. If you've got the entrepreneurial bent, you can start your own car service. You'll have to do a lot more leg work though, and that means giving up your day job if you've got one. That's not worth it for a lot of people. So they take the lower pay for the lower amount of things to have to worry about.
What is it in the water that's making people automatically assume that when money changes hands in exchange for services rendered that it means someone's doing something to someone?
If I buy a sandwich from a food truck, am I exploiting the guy making it for me?
When I pay my mechanic to change my oil and rotate my tires, am I exploiting him? Is he exploiting me? Or do I make the judgement that the thirty or forty bucks he charges me to do it is worth it if I don't have to jack up my car one tire at a time and mess around with recycling the used oil?
If several hundred thousand people drive for Uber, give them some credit that they know what they're doing and you don't know better than them what works for them. You do that and I'll refrain from telling you how you're making your bed wrong or how you're messing up your grocery shopping.
Color me surprised.
In what way? Am I stealing? Lying? Neglecting to be truthful?
So somewhere between one and several hundred thousand there's a magic number? What is it? How does one go about determining what it should be?
What if I'm particularly gregarious and have ten friends? A hundred? What if we entered into an LLP and our trucks and our time are the capital we invest in this operation? What if we plan to, but haven't yet filed the paperwork?
No one is forcing anyone to drive for Uber or Lyft or any of the dozen and a half local equivalents.
What's the difference? No one is forcing me to do either.
Let's say a friend of mine with a van is willing to haul a load of papers for me on his way to work, which takes him an hour each way and happens to go by both the print shop and my street corner.
Is it OK if he does it for free out of the kindness of his heart?
Is it OK if I pay him $3 to reimburse him for the gas in his truck?
Is it OK if I pay him an extra dollar because I don't believe in accepting charity?
If it isn't, then why?
by selling copies of my poorly-xeroxed newsletter on the street corner. Should I be banned from doing so on the grounds that I can't feed a wife and two kids by doing that?
That would make sense. Seems like they scraped up the editors at a bus station.
Of course it's censorship. It's not legally-mandated censorship, so one could consider it self-censorship on the part of YouTube, being that it owns the series of tubes here. But it's still censorship.
I find it odd how people will go to the argument that it's only censorship if the government does it. Is it also not illegal search and search and seizure if your neighbor or business partner, who is not the government, breaks in your door and rummages through your stuff to collect evidence?
Governments exist to secure people's rights. Against attacks by other people. And other governments. And since someone has to watch the watcher, we specifically enumerate the rights the government cannot violate in pursuit of that purpose.
Read your Declaration. The right to free speech isn't only the right against government censorship; it is a Natural Right that you have by virtue of sucking down oxygen. The government is there to make sure no one takes it from you. That includes other private actors to whom you have not ceded it. YouTube's community guidelines do not constitute an agreement to relinquish the right to make right-wing statements. If YouTube is treating it as such, that would be a breach of contract between customer and service provider.
I'll add one more thing. Again: if you don't want the government censoring you, then you've got to model respect for freedom of expression in the wider culture. Because government doesn't perpetuate itself. This is a democracy. The impressionable people watching you now (aka children) will be tomorrow's legislators and prosecutors. Not a good idea to give them the idea that free speech is not sacrosanct.
At some point, pornhub is going to have this problem too. They've already got a movie pirating problem.
I'm nearly falling out of my chair right now laughing as I type this: behold the newest porn genre: Right-Wing Porn! It can't be transphobic or homophobic or islamophobic if the actor/actress of the necessary background is the one telling you to build the wall, keep a lid on refugees from backward countries, and respect the Bill of Rights.
The printer doesn't know about the internet, the phone doesn't know about the internet, the TV doesn't know about the internet, the thermostat was made before ARPANET went live, and as far as I can tell the router hasn't had any zero-days discovered in it.
Indeed. They've always refused to sell guns, drugs, or explosives on Shopping. Just the ban hammer got away from them today.
Today they started screening out any results containing 'gun' in their shopping results. And I mean all. For a time, searching for 'Guns and roses' would turn up empty. They've "fixed" it at the time of this post.
You're right, but if a mechanical part breaks, that's one thing. If the control board breaks it can be refurbished. If the control board breaks because it came with a vendor-installed self-destruct timer...you're in the latter case and not the former.
Summary implies conflation of mathematical artefacts with physical reality. Real paper is probably quite dry and abstract.
Washing machines it's going to be hard. If they try, after-market "repair" services will pop up just like that. Won't even need to get into circumvention/DMCA issues. Just rip out the original electronics and put in a new set for 70% of the cost of paying the original manufacturer. Can't really do that with media delivery, but with durable goods it's cake.
Already happens with things like old elevators and cranes and HVAC and such where the original manufacturer folds and a-guy-in-his-garage companies fill in the void to service and refurbish old equipment with newer electronics.