No, they will still drive for Uber. People are desperate, obviously. The point is that no one is going to find a $12K vehicle that lasts 130,000 miles so no one is making that $13/hr. Uber is just a bottom feeder that is taking advantage of people who have no other way of making an income. The government is trying to make sure companies treat their workers fairly but apparently Uber has worked around that.
By your numbers 100,000 miles would be about how long a car would have to last to be around the highest state minimum wage. That puts many small cars in the $12k range new, and even more if you considered used cars. Seems there is plenty of room to make what the government currently considers acceptable compensation.
I am all for a higher minimum wage of $15 or even $17 per hour, but to claim the government is trying to protect workers when so many people are wage slaves with brutal and inflexible hours below what the rate Uber is paying is absurd.
It is fairly simple to figure out what the equivalent wage is for Uber drivers. Apply the standard mileage cost estimate for the distance of the requested ride and deduct it from the compensation for Uber drivers would be making. The Uber app should be doing this before the ride using the distance estimate and the minimum wage data for the state to ensure that the price is at or above the minimum wage threshold.
People keep saying that, yet obviously there cannot be too many cars on the road. Also, you want the drivers to actually have some profit potential. This is something that is not currently happening with Uber. There was recently an independent analysis and an Uber driver will make $13 an hour *IF* they only pay $12,000 for their vehicle and it lasts 130,000 miles. That's pretty difficult circumstances to operate in.
If people can't make enough money for it to be worthwhile then they won't drive for Uber and any oversupply will go out of the market. Artificially constraining supply of individual transportation choices could put more cars on the road if the best option then becomes a car rental or owning your own car versus the periodic Uber ride.
Your $13 per hour estimate is at least 30% higher than the highest minimum wage in all 50 states.
The taxi licenses aren't there for safety or any other BS, they are there to give local politicians valuable favors in the form of taxi medallions to hand out to local supporters.
To me it seems easier for Uber just to do the work required to fulfill a cities needs like the taxi services do. Contract some drivers to wait around like the taxis do, force them to go anywhere the fares need to go, have some cars that are up to taxi standards and regulation, and have a certain number of cars for the physically disabled. Then the whole issue goes away.
So the thing that has made Uber successful is that it went around all those regulations that were put into place to protect the politically connected medallion owners. Taxi medallions are a protection racket in restraint of trade and you can't get one unless you play in local politics.
Uber is simply not engaged in "ride sharing". Ride sharing is when a driver is going to make a journey, and takes one or more people with them, in return for covering their costs on the way. No money is made, and the journey happens regardless of the extra people along for the ride.
Uber is certainly not a taxi service. They aren't allowed to just pick up people that don't have a reservation in Massachusetts and most other places with a city medallion based licensing scheme. Uber is closer to a limo service that picks up people that have reservations.
This tax is a very small bone that was thrown to the taxi industry who wanted far more crippling regulation of their competition. The ride sharing companies won big in this law.
Yes, and the taxi subsidy goes away after a few years and then after that state just pockets the tax to do with whatever it wants like any other tax. Also, the state hasn't decided yet how to distribute the subsidy so it is hard to say who is going to benefit. The subsidy could go towards the rich taxi owners or be give to taxi drivers as cash. To the drivers that actually might be impacted with fewer fares and lower tips and could use the money to help transition to new jobs or retire. Or what usually happens is that it could go towards some government boondoggle projects that are designed to do nothing else but give political supporters jobs for a few years at the public expense... either way there is some spreading around money which is what compromises are made of.
Now that is a convincing argument.... bottom line is to go ahead and use as much helium as is economically viable and don't worry about imposing balloon bans or silly restrictions.
That works for all the other delusions as well. Religions, cults, conspiracy theories, SJWs... same shit, different name.
In the end, they all claim to have the moral high ground, they claim they have the truth, they have zero problem with internal contradictions and anyone who dares to tell them that they're crazy, and offer logical, conclusive examples on why they are, are heretics/shills/whatever.
Cynicism about other people's beliefs work that way too.
Certainly. Seems more likely we will see proxy currencies emerging which are baskets of other currencies in order to manage risk of value fluctuations. Really it is the smaller countries that are not aligned with a major currency that are going to be de facto taxed.
I am not actually suggesting that we overnight go towards a UBI, but if you see some sort of steady increases in things like the earned income tax credit and pay for it through borrowing from the Federal Reserve, then I think we could move towards a UBI from there without major disruptions to the economy.
Um, that's the least libertarian thing imaginable. Steal from everyone working, pay people who won't.. . And somehow everything is magically fixed!
Except that it's a stupid fucking idea that would destroy our society in months.
Not an ideal of libertarian thinking no... the point is to give people money they can use towards whatever they freely choose versus a thousand different social welfare programs that create a top down approach and impose solutions on people.
There are many people that are incompetent, so just handing out money won't work for everyone. But for people that are simply without enough money to boot strap themselves, giving them money without strings attached would be better than giving them money with all sorts of hassles and oversight which traps them in "the system".
Maybe that means some 3 strikes rule where you get your cash for a while, but if you blow it all and still end up showing up at the soup kitchen looking for free meals then you are cut off and go under supervision and are provided services instead of money because you are incompetent to manage money.
The point is that the libertarian view of social programs is that many are a necessary evil, but they should be reformed as much as possible
I get your point, but as it stands now new currency is input into the economy only when the Federal reserve makes a profit and pays the Federal government and the Federal government turns around and increases spending by that amount.
Otherwise all that currency creation which goes into the economy based on loans by the Federal Reserve eventually must be paid back which means taking capital out of the economy. It is a zero sum game and it isn't clear that there is a great deal of understanding about that and the effect it has on the economy to have such restraint on currency creation.
Not that simple. Since the US is a Reserve and Global currency. "Making" trillions more money since 2008 hasn't created much inflation because the US dollar is used not just within our economy, but as a currency used in international trade. In essence the US can tax global trade to some extent before we create inflation at home with additional currency creation in the US.
Libertarians view the UBI as a potential way to eliminate the bureaucracy surrounding the administration of many social welfare programs.
Where you have billions being spent to "help" people helping the helpers rather than those in need. Give all people a UBI and you can let people determine their own needs, rather than having government workers paid to determine people's needs.
Using taxes to provide a UBI is stupid. The only way it works is to have the Federal Reserve create the money to pay out through the Federal government. This is not about wealth redistribution, but providing some basic level of capital that isn't zero.
The only question is what that does to inflation and whether that creates a de facto "tax" on the economy. As long as increases to the basic income are inline with increases in inflation then it is manageable. So the basic income should be enough to live on in the most affordable places, but not so much that it acts merely as an inflation causing subsidy.
...allowed the wholesale search of business records without constitutionally valid warrants.
Remember, the failure isn't just the Legislative branch. It is also the Judicial branch, which doesn't smack these down and punish the offenders. And it's the executive branch, which seeks patently illegal powers. We have a complete breakdown in the checks and balances system, which is supposed to prevent these abuses.
Since the first line of the "judicial branch" is a secret court that works without public oversight or even effective Congressional oversight, I think the real judicial branch gets a bit of a first pass on this. Our courts are set up in an adversarial way where you need to have two sides with clear standing to be able to seek judicial review. Even getting discovery requires some proof of standing. And then you run into state secrets being asserted.
Even with the Snowden disclosures by the time you get to court you have an old document that says you were spied upon in the past and which logically means that you are likely being spied on now, but some courts are saying that it doesn't matter because the order expired or there is a new law now and you can't prove you are being spied on now and whether you are or not it is classified. So I will give you the point that the courts are using esoteric legal theory to bury their (our) heads in the sand even though the clear pattern of abuse of the constitution is being established.
The level of willful disregard for the evidence that we have seen in some 4th amendment court cases would be like the courts saying well you have video of a gun being fired in the direction of the person and then the person falling down with a gunshot wound, but how can we really know that there was a bullet in the air since it isn't hanging in the air now.
Seems a bit late, but OK sure. Just make sure not to "compromise" again after what has already been a huge compromise of our civil rights that has already allowed the wholesale search of business records without constitutionally valid warrants.
Yes, in the day since this was posted and while this "debate" has been going on about a hundred people died in car crashes... just in the US. Hundreds more were seriously injured. That is the reality.
Just fix the damn problem with crashing into trucks that cut people off and carry on trying to save lives with autonomous car controls.
If any cars have proven themselves unsafe it is ones with manual controls.
There is no such thing as what you are describing. A s far as I know states so far have been unwilling to certify cars for unsupervised autonomous operation. For Tesla to claim such a thing would actually violate the law.
Again, I don't disagree with the criticism of this particular design flaw.... the threshold of ethics should be that the car should be designed to try to stop or avoid collisions whenever possible and the default should be to not go if the system isn't working properly.
It appears that some combination of sensor design and software made the car ignore a truck in front of it because the trailer was above a certain height that it didn't view it as an obstacle. That is a design flaw. The car should have been able to tell that there was an obstacle 4 feet off the ground and that the car didn't have clearance. And then beyond that simple emergency braking the control system should have been able to see that the whole truck was now or about to cross its path and applied brakes, projected that the path was going to be obstructed and slowed down at least so that if the truck stopped suddenly there would be enough time to fully brake. And even if the collision was unavoidable, the car should have at least braked to reduce the speed at impact. None of that happened.
So yes it is a design flaw the seriousness of which should require them to fix it immediately or disable the atutopilot until it is fixed. But it does appear to be a fixable problem.
If the car is designed not to crash into stuff then what does it matter if people stop paying attention? Even without a reliance on autonomous driving, people don't pay attention and it causes people to die or get seriously injured. If it does a good job avoiding collisions, then that is the point.
The problem is that it requires humans to behave in an extremely unnatural way - maintaining complete situational awareness for prolonged periods despite the fact that such awareness will almost never actually be needed.
You could use much of the same language to describe driving a car manually in the first place. People aren't good at driving cars in general for the reasons you sighted and tens of thousands of people die annually in the US alone because of this fundamental incompatibility with driving. Cars with manual driving shouldn't be on the roads at all using that same standard of ethics.
I know you are suggesting that there is some arbitrary threshold of safety that hasn't been reached. I don't disagree that in this case there is a design flaw that should have been designed and tested differently, but the broader generalization seems a bit like an impossibly ambiguous threshold. Like trying to prove the negative that a technology isn't dangerous when improperly used by humans. We know that pretty much all technology is dangerous when improperly used by people.
In this case you have several human decisions at play that combined to create a fatality. The only part of this scenario that can be improved to help people going forward is the part where there was autonomous decision making. The other at fault parts of this tragedy are both of the two drivers. And as much as we have tried to address the inconsistencies of human driving with training, laws and regulations we have apparently reached the human limits of safe driving systemically and we need more autonomous driving to make it safer.
To me if it doesn't make the problem worse, but can with more experience and improvements make it better then it makes sense to deploy and learn from and improve.
Seat belts killed people. Saved a lot of people too. But at some point we realized lap belts could do more harm than good. We didn't get rid of seat belts, we installed shoulder belts instead of just lap belts. Then seat belts plus air bags.
This was a tragedy to be learned from in order to improve safety not go backwards.
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No, they will still drive for Uber. People are desperate, obviously. The point is that no one is going to find a $12K vehicle that lasts 130,000 miles so no one is making that $13/hr. Uber is just a bottom feeder that is taking advantage of people who have no other way of making an income. The government is trying to make sure companies treat their workers fairly but apparently Uber has worked around that.
By your numbers 100,000 miles would be about how long a car would have to last to be around the highest state minimum wage. That puts many small cars in the $12k range new, and even more if you considered used cars. Seems there is plenty of room to make what the government currently considers acceptable compensation.
I am all for a higher minimum wage of $15 or even $17 per hour, but to claim the government is trying to protect workers when so many people are wage slaves with brutal and inflexible hours below what the rate Uber is paying is absurd.
It is fairly simple to figure out what the equivalent wage is for Uber drivers. Apply the standard mileage cost estimate for the distance of the requested ride and deduct it from the compensation for Uber drivers would be making. The Uber app should be doing this before the ride using the distance estimate and the minimum wage data for the state to ensure that the price is at or above the minimum wage threshold.
People keep saying that, yet obviously there cannot be too many cars on the road. Also, you want the drivers to actually have some profit potential. This is something that is not currently happening with Uber. There was recently an independent analysis and an Uber driver will make $13 an hour *IF* they only pay $12,000 for their vehicle and it lasts 130,000 miles. That's pretty difficult circumstances to operate in.
If people can't make enough money for it to be worthwhile then they won't drive for Uber and any oversupply will go out of the market. Artificially constraining supply of individual transportation choices could put more cars on the road if the best option then becomes a car rental or owning your own car versus the periodic Uber ride.
Your $13 per hour estimate is at least 30% higher than the highest minimum wage in all 50 states.
The taxi licenses aren't there for safety or any other BS, they are there to give local politicians valuable favors in the form of taxi medallions to hand out to local supporters.
To me it seems easier for Uber just to do the work required to fulfill a cities needs like the taxi services do. Contract some drivers to wait around like the taxis do, force them to go anywhere the fares need to go, have some cars that are up to taxi standards and regulation, and have a certain number of cars for the physically disabled. Then the whole issue goes away.
So the thing that has made Uber successful is that it went around all those regulations that were put into place to protect the politically connected medallion owners. Taxi medallions are a protection racket in restraint of trade and you can't get one unless you play in local politics.
Uber is simply not engaged in "ride sharing". Ride sharing is when a driver is going to make a journey, and takes one or more people with them, in return for covering their costs on the way. No money is made, and the journey happens regardless of the extra people along for the ride.
Uber is certainly not a taxi service. They aren't allowed to just pick up people that don't have a reservation in Massachusetts and most other places with a city medallion based licensing scheme. Uber is closer to a limo service that picks up people that have reservations.
This tax is a very small bone that was thrown to the taxi industry who wanted far more crippling regulation of their competition. The ride sharing companies won big in this law.
Yes, and the taxi subsidy goes away after a few years and then after that state just pockets the tax to do with whatever it wants like any other tax. Also, the state hasn't decided yet how to distribute the subsidy so it is hard to say who is going to benefit. The subsidy could go towards the rich taxi owners or be give to taxi drivers as cash. To the drivers that actually might be impacted with fewer fares and lower tips and could use the money to help transition to new jobs or retire. Or what usually happens is that it could go towards some government boondoggle projects that are designed to do nothing else but give political supporters jobs for a few years at the public expense... either way there is some spreading around money which is what compromises are made of.
Now that is a convincing argument.... bottom line is to go ahead and use as much helium as is economically viable and don't worry about imposing balloon bans or silly restrictions.
That works for all the other delusions as well. Religions, cults, conspiracy theories, SJWs... same shit, different name.
In the end, they all claim to have the moral high ground, they claim they have the truth, they have zero problem with internal contradictions and anyone who dares to tell them that they're crazy, and offer logical, conclusive examples on why they are, are heretics/shills/whatever.
Cynicism about other people's beliefs work that way too.
Certainly. Seems more likely we will see proxy currencies emerging which are baskets of other currencies in order to manage risk of value fluctuations. Really it is the smaller countries that are not aligned with a major currency that are going to be de facto taxed.
I am not actually suggesting that we overnight go towards a UBI, but if you see some sort of steady increases in things like the earned income tax credit and pay for it through borrowing from the Federal Reserve, then I think we could move towards a UBI from there without major disruptions to the economy.
Um, that's the least libertarian thing imaginable. Steal from everyone working, pay people who won't.. . And somehow everything is magically fixed!
Except that it's a stupid fucking idea that would destroy our society in months.
Not an ideal of libertarian thinking no... the point is to give people money they can use towards whatever they freely choose versus a thousand different social welfare programs that create a top down approach and impose solutions on people.
There are many people that are incompetent, so just handing out money won't work for everyone. But for people that are simply without enough money to boot strap themselves, giving them money without strings attached would be better than giving them money with all sorts of hassles and oversight which traps them in "the system".
Maybe that means some 3 strikes rule where you get your cash for a while, but if you blow it all and still end up showing up at the soup kitchen looking for free meals then you are cut off and go under supervision and are provided services instead of money because you are incompetent to manage money.
The point is that the libertarian view of social programs is that many are a necessary evil, but they should be reformed as much as possible
Actually check that... Profit to the Federal government isn't net positive to the money supply either because it is coming out of the economy.
So really the Federal Reserve seems to lack a way to inject money into the economy without having to eventually take it back out.
I get your point, but as it stands now new currency is input into the economy only when the Federal reserve makes a profit and pays the Federal government and the Federal government turns around and increases spending by that amount.
Otherwise all that currency creation which goes into the economy based on loans by the Federal Reserve eventually must be paid back which means taking capital out of the economy. It is a zero sum game and it isn't clear that there is a great deal of understanding about that and the effect it has on the economy to have such restraint on currency creation.
The value is added as it circulates through the economy where people decide what goods and services provide value.
Not that simple. Since the US is a Reserve and Global currency. "Making" trillions more money since 2008 hasn't created much inflation because the US dollar is used not just within our economy, but as a currency used in international trade. In essence the US can tax global trade to some extent before we create inflation at home with additional currency creation in the US.
Libertarians view the UBI as a potential way to eliminate the bureaucracy surrounding the administration of many social welfare programs.
Where you have billions being spent to "help" people helping the helpers rather than those in need. Give all people a UBI and you can let people determine their own needs, rather than having government workers paid to determine people's needs.
Using taxes to provide a UBI is stupid. The only way it works is to have the Federal Reserve create the money to pay out through the Federal government. This is not about wealth redistribution, but providing some basic level of capital that isn't zero.
The only question is what that does to inflation and whether that creates a de facto "tax" on the economy. As long as increases to the basic income are inline with increases in inflation then it is manageable. So the basic income should be enough to live on in the most affordable places, but not so much that it acts merely as an inflation causing subsidy.
...allowed the wholesale search of business records without constitutionally valid warrants.
Remember, the failure isn't just the Legislative branch. It is also the Judicial branch, which doesn't smack these down and punish the offenders. And it's the executive branch, which seeks patently illegal powers. We have a complete breakdown in the checks and balances system, which is supposed to prevent these abuses.
Since the first line of the "judicial branch" is a secret court that works without public oversight or even effective Congressional oversight, I think the real judicial branch gets a bit of a first pass on this. Our courts are set up in an adversarial way where you need to have two sides with clear standing to be able to seek judicial review. Even getting discovery requires some proof of standing. And then you run into state secrets being asserted.
Even with the Snowden disclosures by the time you get to court you have an old document that says you were spied upon in the past and which logically means that you are likely being spied on now, but some courts are saying that it doesn't matter because the order expired or there is a new law now and you can't prove you are being spied on now and whether you are or not it is classified. So I will give you the point that the courts are using esoteric legal theory to bury their (our) heads in the sand even though the clear pattern of abuse of the constitution is being established.
The level of willful disregard for the evidence that we have seen in some 4th amendment court cases would be like the courts saying well you have video of a gun being fired in the direction of the person and then the person falling down with a gunshot wound, but how can we really know that there was a bullet in the air since it isn't hanging in the air now.
Seems a bit late, but OK sure. Just make sure not to "compromise" again after what has already been a huge compromise of our civil rights that has already allowed the wholesale search of business records without constitutionally valid warrants.
Yes, in the day since this was posted and while this "debate" has been going on about a hundred people died in car crashes... just in the US. Hundreds more were seriously injured. That is the reality.
Just fix the damn problem with crashing into trucks that cut people off and carry on trying to save lives with autonomous car controls.
If any cars have proven themselves unsafe it is ones with manual controls.
California required they put the steering wheels back in.
Supervised driving is inherently going to delay human reaction time compared with manual driving. But that doesn't mean it is overall less safe
There is no such thing as what you are describing. A s far as I know states so far have been unwilling to certify cars for unsupervised autonomous operation. For Tesla to claim such a thing would actually violate the law.
I don't think your arbitrary "few more years of work" standard is of much value. If it takes minutes to fix, then so be it.
Just need to make sure it defaults to stopping if the path isn't clear and then the worst thing a distracted driver can do is miss the exit.
Again, I don't disagree with the criticism of this particular design flaw.... the threshold of ethics should be that the car should be designed to try to stop or avoid collisions whenever possible and the default should be to not go if the system isn't working properly.
It appears that some combination of sensor design and software made the car ignore a truck in front of it because the trailer was above a certain height that it didn't view it as an obstacle. That is a design flaw. The car should have been able to tell that there was an obstacle 4 feet off the ground and that the car didn't have clearance. And then beyond that simple emergency braking the control system should have been able to see that the whole truck was now or about to cross its path and applied brakes, projected that the path was going to be obstructed and slowed down at least so that if the truck stopped suddenly there would be enough time to fully brake. And even if the collision was unavoidable, the car should have at least braked to reduce the speed at impact. None of that happened.
So yes it is a design flaw the seriousness of which should require them to fix it immediately or disable the atutopilot until it is fixed. But it does appear to be a fixable problem.
If the car is designed not to crash into stuff then what does it matter if people stop paying attention? Even without a reliance on autonomous driving, people don't pay attention and it causes people to die or get seriously injured. If it does a good job avoiding collisions, then that is the point.
The problem is that it requires humans to behave in an extremely unnatural way - maintaining complete situational awareness for prolonged periods despite the fact that such awareness will almost never actually be needed.
You could use much of the same language to describe driving a car manually in the first place. People aren't good at driving cars in general for the reasons you sighted and tens of thousands of people die annually in the US alone because of this fundamental incompatibility with driving. Cars with manual driving shouldn't be on the roads at all using that same standard of ethics.
I know you are suggesting that there is some arbitrary threshold of safety that hasn't been reached. I don't disagree that in this case there is a design flaw that should have been designed and tested differently, but the broader generalization seems a bit like an impossibly ambiguous threshold. Like trying to prove the negative that a technology isn't dangerous when improperly used by humans. We know that pretty much all technology is dangerous when improperly used by people.
In this case you have several human decisions at play that combined to create a fatality. The only part of this scenario that can be improved to help people going forward is the part where there was autonomous decision making. The other at fault parts of this tragedy are both of the two drivers. And as much as we have tried to address the inconsistencies of human driving with training, laws and regulations we have apparently reached the human limits of safe driving systemically and we need more autonomous driving to make it safer.
To me if it doesn't make the problem worse, but can with more experience and improvements make it better then it makes sense to deploy and learn from and improve.
Seat belts killed people. Saved a lot of people too. But at some point we realized lap belts could do more harm than good. We didn't get rid of seat belts, we installed shoulder belts instead of just lap belts. Then seat belts plus air bags.
This was a tragedy to be learned from in order to improve safety not go backwards.