Setting his own availability is pretty much a contractor privilege.
Normally, an employee would be paid by the hour - whether they're driving or not. An Uber driver is allowed to do anything they want while waiting for a ride to come up. He gets to chose when he'll drive.
The limit, of course, is that Uber only offers rides as they become available. So it's in a driver's best interests to be available when there's more rides. Of course, one could also make 'good' money driving only during the price-up surges with minimal time invested.
When I was a contractor, my hours were fixed. I worked for one client. The price was negotiated, but I negotiate my salary the same way.
You might have a case in court then that you were actually an employee.
The real question is do you pay them by W2 or 1099?
Courts lately have been looking askance at companies essentially using contracting rules to avoid paying benefits and minimum wage to people who are effectively employees.
Monitoring and firing people based on their performance sounds like a boss/employees type of relationship. That sounds more like dealing with an underling/employee rather than partnering with an independent contractor, the term Uber usually uses to describe its relationship to the taxi drivers.
It's actually standard for contractors as well. Note that they're not monitoring performance other than by customer satisfaction - If a contractor does a shoddy job you're certainly allowed to blackball them from further contracts with you. It's also tied into their service - you can be much more certain to get a 'good' driver with Uber than with some taxi services.
Hmm... That's rather informative. It's good to see the 'wider' picture.
There's a vast difference between saying 'You have to pick the customers up in a clean vehicle that was made before the year 2011' because clean is just 'good business' for a service provider and NYC requires vehicles driving paying passengers around be less than 5 years old, and requiring drivers lease 'their' vehicle from the same company they're getting loads from. For that matter, for basic service Uber requires: "Any mid-size or full-size 4-door vehicle, in excellent condition." in other cities. You could technically pick customers up in a Model T Ford. The shipping equivalent could be something like 'DOT compliant semi capable of hauling the load'. If you have a fancy car like a Model S in NYC, you can sign up for 'uberBlack', which is for passengers wanting something fancier.
Not so much as it has to abide by the following conditions; 1. Started within a specific time period. 2. Done in an approved vehicle. 3. Done by the driver contracted. 4. Done by the shortest reasonable route. 5. Done for a rate set by Uber
1. Uber says when you have to start working? Or is it more that they're offering you the chance to take job X with standards Y, which includes 'must start within Z time'? 2. Happens all the time with contracting work. Federal contracts will specify stuff like how much you have to pay your employees. Also, how much of this is 'pass-through' regulation that's more Uber making sure it's contractors are following the law? Many jurisdictions have age limits on commercial passenger vehicles like taxis. Buses and such can be older. 3. Is this really specified? 4. The Uber driver is paid on the basis of the 'shortest reasonable route', but is he really required to take it? Other than that would be a sure way to get 1 star ratings, and Uber stops referring clients to you if you drop too low. 5. Yeah, this is employee-like, but there are contracting companies that buy piece-work at set prices.
By that logic anyone who has more than one job is a contractor. Whether or not benefits are required is based on the number of hours one works for a company not the number of companies one works for.
Perhaps. But a company typically tells you what hours you're working, when, on what, etc.... Uber can't really do anything if you're signed into their app, a lyft fare comes up, and you mark yourself unavailable during that trip, at which point the driver signs into all 3 apps again.
At least, not if you're a contractor. That's a bit different than an employee who works 5 am - 1 pm MWF at McD's, and 10 am - 7 pm at Wendy's THSa.
Opportunity of P/L test. Uber sets the fare cost, and takes a cut, the driver gets no options.
They have at least some in their selection of vehicles, diving ability(fuel efficient), etc... What about their ability to select jobs? I mean, sign up for Uber, Lyft, etc... all at once?
You bring up some good examples. Still, I do have a few comments on the difference between 'Contractors' and 'Employees'. It can become quite complicated, which is why this is a court case, and still subject to appeal.
In many cases, the difference between a 'contractor' and a 'employee' is the level of control you have over the workers.
To boil it down as best I can, with an employee you're buying hours of work. With a contractor you're buying product.
So yeah, you can dictate the materials they use, and very much specify quality, but dictating the tools is more iffy. Case law wise, dictating the hours of a contractor is a possible indicator that they're actually an employee, but you're allowed to specify which hours the job site is open.
So long as the contractor delivers the materials in the contract per the conditions of the contract - quantity, time, location, quality, and such, you aren't generally to dictate things like methods* and times worked**.
In the case of Uber drivers, if you have a guy who owns his own car, insurance, sets his own hours, is free to sign up with any ride services he wants to for offering his services(or deliver pizza, or run packages), has right of refusal for any given ride*, etc... He starts looking like a contractor.
*though he doesn't get paid if he doesn't accept it.
*Though specifying that they follow the safety rules of the location/job site is standard **If an hourly employee gets a 5 hour task done in 1, you've made out. If a contractor gets a 5 hour task done in 1, he's made out.
Do the math. Investigate reclamation. Look into the 11th dimension. Truly, this defies not only credulity, but physics itself.
And you're just being obtuse. There's minimal amounts of water in a finished car, for example, but making a car, especially all the sub-components in one, requires LOTS of water. The plant growing the almond needs water for itself.
Now, as you say, you can indeed reclaim that water. It's not lost from the planet or anything. However, the water is used by the growing almond plant to support it's biological processes. Generally speaking, almost 50% is lost to vaporization, run-off, and such before it even reaches the plant, and that's with a farmer careful with how he waters(which is indeed becoming more common in California). After that, a 'vast' amount of water is lost to biological processes - essentially sweated out of the plant. It's water vapor at that point.
So how do you recover it? About the only 'practical' way would be enclosing your almond trees into greenhouses. At that point there's all sorts of 'fun' stuff you can do like hydroponics, and you can indeed recycle 99% of the water involved in the system (you'd only need to replace less than an ounce of water per almond). But that requires a rather large amount of infrastructure, which isn't yet fiscally sound.
I understand there's different rules in different states about rainwater harvesting, but surely if you have a "dry" cabin, i.e. no piped water supply from the local mains, you'd want to catch the water falling on your roof?
There's no rules against it here. Rainwater tends to form around microscopic dust particles, plus you get dust and bird poop and such on your collectors, so you want a settling tank and treatment system, but nothing that can't be handled. But then you probably already know all that.
Still, while there's no rules against rainwater harvesting, in my area for six months out of the year the precipitation is solid in form, so none of the cabins I've visited have rainwater collection systems. It's cheaper/easier to just keep having water delivered.
The last two might be self-service in the form of a well and septic system (hopefully not too close together) but you can be pretty sure they're in place or the home wouldn't be on the market.
'Dry Cabins' are a thing up here where I live. It's where you don't have water/septic, nor a well/septic system due to the location. So you either truck water in yourself or have it delivered, and use an outhouse or composting toilet.
Still, such are explicitly stated to be so rather clearly in any advertisements.
Oh, sure. "Hi, I'm some random stranger. Can I come in and run some speed tests on your internet connection? I promise I'm not a serial killer."
Talking with the neighbors where you're going to be living for possibly decades? Who would want to do that? You know, make sure your neighbors aren't meth-heads, Jehova's witnesses, or other annoying types?
My suggestion: Introduce yourself, mention that you're looking to buy the house next door, ask about the neighborhood, any concerns they have, and slide the internet question into there somewhere.
That was my thought. It's much easier to simply get the key out of somebody(costing a few hundred k for the real world intelligence operation), than it is to try to force decrypt anything but the weakest encryption techniques.
Those poor companies! They will make a few billions less after getting truckloads of money from the government to introduce backdoors in their supposed secure products. Maybe next time those companies choose to protect the privacy of their customers...
Do you have any citations of them being paid large sums of money, much less 'billions' for those backdoors?
Hell, one story was that the CIA was intercepting shipments of equipment like cisco routers, opening them, and replacing their OS with a hacked version. Without Cisco's knowledge.
Honestly, the control part is fucking simple. It's not so simple to have something controlling 30-year-old systems that still running on a 30-year-old system, but the actual job it's doing is pretty minimal.
That all depends on how fancy you want to be. When I say 'complicated', I should really have specified 'compared to your average house'. My parent's house has a single thermostat device to control the heating and AC. Mine has two - but doesn't have AC. It's two heating zones.
I figure the 'update' includes replacing the sensors with more capable ones - going from ones that report only that they're requesting heating or cooling, to ones that actually report the temperature, along with other changes.
What if something goes horribly wrong with the system and causes damage to the building? May not be Jeff's fault, but Jeff may be involved in the legal fallout.
Also, what happens if Jeff gets hit by a bus tomorrow? Who will maintain it then?
Environmental control and monitoring becomes complicated when you're considering large buildings. At that size you need a system that controls how much your heat plant or cooling system is producing, as well as controlling fans and baffles to ensure that the cooking classroom, with a dozen ovens operating(or 30 computers) on the 3rd floor of the sunny side of the building stays comfortably cool while the the traditional English room on the shaded side of the first floor doesn't actually freeze.
The reason it's $2M is the amount of programming and equipment replacement necessary, standard government waste, and the fact that they're no longer willing to let students/staff do it.
Believe it or not, being a registered taxi service and running it as one could actually benefit Uber.
That depends on the market. While being a registered taxi service might benefit them in some areas(and they actually are in some areas), in others being so merely runs them up against existing taxi companies that have twisted the markets to protect themselves - medallions, work requirements, method of operation, what they're allowed to charge*, etc... Some of the requirements are good, others are just to help insure that a new business doesn't come along and put the old taxi companies out of theirs.
Basically, Uber investigates each market and makes the decision on what form their service will take, and to be honest, what regulations they're going to follow. In NYC, for example, they don't follow taxi rules, but they do follow for-hire car rules, which means no taximeter, no responding to street hails, and a few other things, but relieves them of a large amount of other rules. Their cars are still insured, and the drivers have the proper endorsements to be a for hire driver in NYC.
*Some people get upset with the Uber's demand charge system that raises prices when demand is high enough to exceed supply. I think it's only fair in most cases.
I can't say about China, but: 1. The fare meter wouldn't help if the 'problem' is that the driver is taking 'fake' fairs and still driving in order to 'satisfy' the fare. Remember, the GPS system tracks the drivers much more closely than a meter would. 2. Can't say about Chinese law(ergo, there's probably nothing against it, they're actually less regulated than the USA is), but I know that in the USA and England that in many spots having a taximeter is actually illegal unless you're a taxi, and they don't want to be a taxi because that implies you have to follow taxi rules. 3. Simplest fix would be to make the bonus conditional on having more in fare income to Uber than the bonus is worth. IE it would cost these types money. Done.
Slashdot Mirror
Setting his own availability is pretty much a contractor privilege.
Normally, an employee would be paid by the hour - whether they're driving or not. An Uber driver is allowed to do anything they want while waiting for a ride to come up. He gets to chose when he'll drive.
The limit, of course, is that Uber only offers rides as they become available. So it's in a driver's best interests to be available when there's more rides. Of course, one could also make 'good' money driving only during the price-up surges with minimal time invested.
PS I refuse to call it "ride sharing" because it is not.
Heh, I do that as well. There are other apps that expedite actual ride sharing.
When I was a contractor, my hours were fixed. I worked for one client. The price was negotiated, but I negotiate my salary the same way.
You might have a case in court then that you were actually an employee.
The real question is do you pay them by W2 or 1099?
Courts lately have been looking askance at companies essentially using contracting rules to avoid paying benefits and minimum wage to people who are effectively employees.
Monitoring and firing people based on their performance sounds like a boss/employees type of relationship. That sounds more like dealing with an underling/employee rather than partnering with an independent contractor, the term Uber usually uses to describe its relationship to the taxi drivers.
It's actually standard for contractors as well. Note that they're not monitoring performance other than by customer satisfaction - If a contractor does a shoddy job you're certainly allowed to blackball them from further contracts with you. It's also tied into their service - you can be much more certain to get a 'good' driver with Uber than with some taxi services.
Hmm... That's rather informative. It's good to see the 'wider' picture.
There's a vast difference between saying 'You have to pick the customers up in a clean vehicle that was made before the year 2011' because clean is just 'good business' for a service provider and NYC requires vehicles driving paying passengers around be less than 5 years old, and requiring drivers lease 'their' vehicle from the same company they're getting loads from. For that matter, for basic service Uber requires: "Any mid-size or full-size 4-door vehicle, in excellent condition." in other cities. You could technically pick customers up in a Model T Ford. The shipping equivalent could be something like 'DOT compliant semi capable of hauling the load'. If you have a fancy car like a Model S in NYC, you can sign up for 'uberBlack', which is for passengers wanting something fancier.
Not so much as it has to abide by the following conditions;
1. Started within a specific time period.
2. Done in an approved vehicle.
3. Done by the driver contracted.
4. Done by the shortest reasonable route.
5. Done for a rate set by Uber
1. Uber says when you have to start working? Or is it more that they're offering you the chance to take job X with standards Y, which includes 'must start within Z time'?
2. Happens all the time with contracting work. Federal contracts will specify stuff like how much you have to pay your employees. Also, how much of this is 'pass-through' regulation that's more Uber making sure it's contractors are following the law? Many jurisdictions have age limits on commercial passenger vehicles like taxis. Buses and such can be older.
3. Is this really specified?
4. The Uber driver is paid on the basis of the 'shortest reasonable route', but is he really required to take it? Other than that would be a sure way to get 1 star ratings, and Uber stops referring clients to you if you drop too low.
5. Yeah, this is employee-like, but there are contracting companies that buy piece-work at set prices.
By that logic anyone who has more than one job is a contractor. Whether or not benefits are required is based on the number of hours one works for a company not the number of companies one works for.
Perhaps. But a company typically tells you what hours you're working, when, on what, etc.... Uber can't really do anything if you're signed into their app, a lyft fare comes up, and you mark yourself unavailable during that trip, at which point the driver signs into all 3 apps again.
At least, not if you're a contractor. That's a bit different than an employee who works 5 am - 1 pm MWF at McD's, and 10 am - 7 pm at Wendy's THSa.
Opportunity of P/L test. Uber sets the fare cost, and takes a cut, the driver gets no options.
They have at least some in their selection of vehicles, diving ability(fuel efficient), etc... What about their ability to select jobs? I mean, sign up for Uber, Lyft, etc... all at once?
You bring up some good examples. Still, I do have a few comments on the difference between 'Contractors' and 'Employees'. It can become quite complicated, which is why this is a court case, and still subject to appeal.
In many cases, the difference between a 'contractor' and a 'employee' is the level of control you have over the workers.
To boil it down as best I can, with an employee you're buying hours of work. With a contractor you're buying product.
So yeah, you can dictate the materials they use, and very much specify quality, but dictating the tools is more iffy. Case law wise, dictating the hours of a contractor is a possible indicator that they're actually an employee, but you're allowed to specify which hours the job site is open.
So long as the contractor delivers the materials in the contract per the conditions of the contract - quantity, time, location, quality, and such, you aren't generally to dictate things like methods* and times worked**.
In the case of Uber drivers, if you have a guy who owns his own car, insurance, sets his own hours, is free to sign up with any ride services he wants to for offering his services(or deliver pizza, or run packages), has right of refusal for any given ride*, etc... He starts looking like a contractor.
*though he doesn't get paid if he doesn't accept it.
*Though specifying that they follow the safety rules of the location/job site is standard
**If an hourly employee gets a 5 hour task done in 1, you've made out. If a contractor gets a 5 hour task done in 1, he's made out.
Do the math. Investigate reclamation. Look into the 11th dimension. Truly, this defies not only credulity, but physics itself.
And you're just being obtuse. There's minimal amounts of water in a finished car, for example, but making a car, especially all the sub-components in one, requires LOTS of water. The plant growing the almond needs water for itself.
Now, as you say, you can indeed reclaim that water. It's not lost from the planet or anything. However, the water is used by the growing almond plant to support it's biological processes. Generally speaking, almost 50% is lost to vaporization, run-off, and such before it even reaches the plant, and that's with a farmer careful with how he waters(which is indeed becoming more common in California). After that, a 'vast' amount of water is lost to biological processes - essentially sweated out of the plant. It's water vapor at that point.
So how do you recover it? About the only 'practical' way would be enclosing your almond trees into greenhouses. At that point there's all sorts of 'fun' stuff you can do like hydroponics, and you can indeed recycle 99% of the water involved in the system (you'd only need to replace less than an ounce of water per almond). But that requires a rather large amount of infrastructure, which isn't yet fiscally sound.
Hardly. Stroustrup first introduced C with classes at Bell Labs in 1979. It wouldn't be known as C++ until at least 1983.
While related and mostly compatible, C and C++ are different languages.
You won't look back. It's great.
I understand there's different rules in different states about rainwater harvesting, but surely if you have a "dry" cabin, i.e. no piped water supply from the local mains, you'd want to catch the water falling on your roof?
There's no rules against it here. Rainwater tends to form around microscopic dust particles, plus you get dust and bird poop and such on your collectors, so you want a settling tank and treatment system, but nothing that can't be handled. But then you probably already know all that.
Still, while there's no rules against rainwater harvesting, in my area for six months out of the year the precipitation is solid in form, so none of the cabins I've visited have rainwater collection systems. It's cheaper/easier to just keep having water delivered.
and it probably will not have water or sewage service.
Not sure why you feel the need to point this out when he mentions that they might be 'self-service' in the next sentence.
Generally speaking though, if you're going to be restricted to an outhouse, it's going to mention that in the documents.
The last two might be self-service in the form of a well and septic system (hopefully not too close together) but you can be pretty sure they're in place or the home wouldn't be on the market.
'Dry Cabins' are a thing up here where I live. It's where you don't have water/septic, nor a well/septic system due to the location. So you either truck water in yourself or have it delivered, and use an outhouse or composting toilet.
Still, such are explicitly stated to be so rather clearly in any advertisements.
Oh, sure. "Hi, I'm some random stranger. Can I come in and run some speed tests on your internet connection? I promise I'm not a serial killer."
Talking with the neighbors where you're going to be living for possibly decades? Who would want to do that? You know, make sure your neighbors aren't meth-heads, Jehova's witnesses, or other annoying types?
My suggestion: Introduce yourself, mention that you're looking to buy the house next door, ask about the neighborhood, any concerns they have, and slide the internet question into there somewhere.
That was my thought. It's much easier to simply get the key out of somebody(costing a few hundred k for the real world intelligence operation), than it is to try to force decrypt anything but the weakest encryption techniques.
Those poor companies! They will make a few billions less after getting truckloads of money from the government to introduce backdoors in their supposed secure products. Maybe next time those companies choose to protect the privacy of their customers...
Do you have any citations of them being paid large sums of money, much less 'billions' for those backdoors?
Hell, one story was that the CIA was intercepting shipments of equipment like cisco routers, opening them, and replacing their OS with a hacked version. Without Cisco's knowledge.
A large factory might employ 25 people and produce enough goods for 1M people.
Indeed. However, people 'demand' a lot of widgets today, and there's still plenty more that we could use.
Honestly, the control part is fucking simple. It's not so simple to have something controlling 30-year-old systems that still running on a 30-year-old system, but the actual job it's doing is pretty minimal.
That all depends on how fancy you want to be. When I say 'complicated', I should really have specified 'compared to your average house'. My parent's house has a single thermostat device to control the heating and AC. Mine has two - but doesn't have AC. It's two heating zones.
I figure the 'update' includes replacing the sensors with more capable ones - going from ones that report only that they're requesting heating or cooling, to ones that actually report the temperature, along with other changes.
Students do complicated things all the time. Doesn't meant that the individual bits can't be simple.
What if something goes horribly wrong with the system and causes damage to the building? May not be Jeff's fault, but Jeff may be involved in the legal fallout.
Also, what happens if Jeff gets hit by a bus tomorrow? Who will maintain it then?
Environmental control and monitoring becomes complicated when you're considering large buildings. At that size you need a system that controls how much your heat plant or cooling system is producing, as well as controlling fans and baffles to ensure that the cooking classroom, with a dozen ovens operating(or 30 computers) on the 3rd floor of the sunny side of the building stays comfortably cool while the the traditional English room on the shaded side of the first floor doesn't actually freeze.
The reason it's $2M is the amount of programming and equipment replacement necessary, standard government waste, and the fact that they're no longer willing to let students/staff do it.
Believe it or not, being a registered taxi service and running it as one could actually benefit Uber.
That depends on the market. While being a registered taxi service might benefit them in some areas(and they actually are in some areas), in others being so merely runs them up against existing taxi companies that have twisted the markets to protect themselves - medallions, work requirements, method of operation, what they're allowed to charge*, etc... Some of the requirements are good, others are just to help insure that a new business doesn't come along and put the old taxi companies out of theirs.
Basically, Uber investigates each market and makes the decision on what form their service will take, and to be honest, what regulations they're going to follow. In NYC, for example, they don't follow taxi rules, but they do follow for-hire car rules, which means no taximeter, no responding to street hails, and a few other things, but relieves them of a large amount of other rules. Their cars are still insured, and the drivers have the proper endorsements to be a for hire driver in NYC.
*Some people get upset with the Uber's demand charge system that raises prices when demand is high enough to exceed supply. I think it's only fair in most cases.
I can't say about China, but:
1. The fare meter wouldn't help if the 'problem' is that the driver is taking 'fake' fairs and still driving in order to 'satisfy' the fare. Remember, the GPS system tracks the drivers much more closely than a meter would.
2. Can't say about Chinese law(ergo, there's probably nothing against it, they're actually less regulated than the USA is), but I know that in the USA and England that in many spots having a taximeter is actually illegal unless you're a taxi, and they don't want to be a taxi because that implies you have to follow taxi rules.
3. Simplest fix would be to make the bonus conditional on having more in fare income to Uber than the bonus is worth. IE it would cost these types money. Done.
You need people to maintain the robots, so while productivity skyrockets due to the automation, you don't get rid of workers completely.