Or every so often a Senator Obama comes along, wins, and then we end up with President Obama, a far cry from what we were sold,
[...]He tried to shut down Guantanamo[...]
He issued the executive order.
Which he then rescinded.
As commander in chief, he could have, in fact, just ordered the troops out, period.
Guantanamo is politically useful for its extraterritoriality. Even to Obama, who has ordered the execution of U.S. citizens, without trial, via drone strike, in Afghanistan.
The fatal flaw is when people don't pay attention. If the public doesn't pay attention, than the ones who do will get into power.
No constitution you can conceive will save ignoramuses from themselves.
What about one that said "people who do not vote will be taken out into the street and hung by the neck until dead; one in ten people who voted for the losing side in any election will be taken out into the street, placed up against the wall, and then shot"?
In other words, forced participation, with forced collaboration on outcome.
Yes, that's a reductio ad absurdum of your argument.
If they didn't want people using the outlets, they'd either omit them, or use an outlet/plug design that was incompatible with standard plugs, and there wouldn't be a problem. It's not like the vacuum cleaners are being taken home and used by the transit staff, so a permanent modification wouldn't be a problem.
The UK does not have the equivalent of the U.S. 2nd amendment; that's how they get way with things like "The Right to be Forgotten" and their ridiculous libel laws, when it comes to public persons.
Also, in the U.S., he would also have been arrested for mouthing off. You are only allowed to mouth off in a "Free Speech Zone".
We just added two letters to the DNA sequence. Are you sure we should be poking about in there before we have a better understanding? This is not me being negative or dismissive. I truly do not know.
Actually, islet cell adenocarcinoma is detectable. You can do it with a rather simple/cheap blood test.
However, nearly no insurance carrier will pay for this blood test (I just had a friend who died from islet cell adenocarcinoma (pancreatic cancer), which was in fact treatable, but Kaiser Permanente did not cover the testing at the point she had her first symptoms.
NB: The following is NOT medical advice; consult an oncologist, if you have any of the following situations...
It was a type that would have been resistant to the standard Paclitaxel & Gemcitabine chemo combination; however, with the addition of an O6 methyl transferase inhibiter to reduce the effect of the MGMA gene on the long arm of chromosome 20 (the DNA repair mechanism), it's likely the chemo would have been able to be made effective, as a combinatoric therapy (without the inhibiter, the repair mechanism repairs the targeted cancer cells DNA as well, so the chemo -- most chemo relies on methylation of the gene sequences -- would not be able to sufficient damage the cancerous cells DNA to stop the cancer.
BTW: This is the same mechanism that causes Temozolomide insensitivity in glioblastoma multifome (a type of frequently fatal brain cancer, due to the ineffectiveness of the chemo).
So if you've got either one of those, and you have an "adventurous" oncologist, ask them if they are willing to try the chemo again, in combination with an inhibiter. Note that they will want to ramp the chemo dose, since the inhibiter will make *all* the cells more sensitive to the DNA damage (the usual dose will be too high, because the balance is between "just enough to kill some healthy and all cancer cells", and this effectively will disable the repair mechanism entirely).
--
Most pharma companies don't investigate combinatoric therapies, except as a last ditch effort to rescue a drug that's looking like it's ineffective, since doing so means cooperating with competing companies.
Isn't the problem the exact opposite? That we struggle to find cures when treatments are so much more profitable?
That's *a* problem certainly, but it's not *the* (not that there's any singular problem in the first place), and it's a problem that's tied to Big Pharma. But the article isn't about Big Pharma. It's about Big Charity, which has a separate set of problems.
Isn't the article actually about... "You big charities concentrating on finding a cure when there are treatments for CF are really annoying the piss out of those of us who are currently making an ass-ton of money off of selling treatments".
So the *actual* problem they are addressing is the problem that big charity isn't funding their treatment research, and they are instead having to fund treatment research themselves, and that cuts into their profits. In other words, it's not enough that all of the public funding going toward the disease is spent in big pharma labs on deriving *yet more* treatments, they also want all of the privately funded research to *also* be directed at more treatments.
Yeah, I'm a little cynical, but then again, I'd personally be happy flying to Eastern Europe and subsequently living with Porcine Endogenous Retro Virus to have my Parkinson's cured, should I ever have to deal with the disease, than living with what passes for treatment in the U.S. everywhere but in clinical trials.
Better treatments are possible but all of the funding and hype on finding a cure is holding them back.
This is bullshit.
I think the major reason that the CFF is ignoring treatments is that any treatment which does not result in a cure is, by definition, an ongoing revenue stream for big pharma, and therefore big pharma has that angle covered: if they come up with a treatment that works, they have a customer for the rest of that customers life. And there is no incentive for big pharma to then work on a cure.
In fact, if you were to come up with a cure for something which represented a huge existing revenue stream, you would likely have an "accident" before you were published.
In terms of CF itself, the current state of things is that researchers have demonstrated CRISPR/Cas9-mediated repair of the CFTR locus in human intestinal stem cells -- which means, were they reimplanted in the donor, they would replicate and replace the defective intestinal cells over time.
If the technique can be successfully used in vivo (we have so far been reluctant to use CRISPR/Cas9-mediated modifcation on living humans, since it can impact germ line cells), then it represents a cure. See also:
I assume you have never been outside the US. We are the exception, not the rule. Generally everyone else in the entire world takes public transportation and lives in multi-unit dwellings.
Hi. My sister lives in Alaska. The population density is one person every 2 square kilometers (1.3 people per square mile).
Where exactly should she go to catch the public transportation from her cabin, and into Barrow?
Thanks for any info!
(Validity of public transportation as an option is proportional to population density).
Curious... can I... list the names of organizations, tools, and resources that I've unconsciously gravitated to via unconscious bias to combat unconscious bias?
I'm sorry, what is that supposed to be telling us? What do you think you added to the conversation?
A couple of things:
(1) There isn't actually a class action lawsuit yet, since there are certain legal disclosures which must be made in order for it to legally qualify as a class action lawsuit. Among these, is going to a court, and getting a registered class.
(2) It's a solicitation for business; the article attempts to make it look like Uber drivers spontaneously banding together, but the domain name is registered to a lawyer at a Boston law firm. The Boston law firm, incidentally, went to the trouble of anonymizing who registered the domain where the domain contact from the lawsuit site has their email address, but they forgot to do the same thing for the lawsuit site.
(3) If you want to unionize Uber drivers, which would have long term benefits for the Uber drivers (assuming the courts hold them to be employees; the case in question applied only to a single person, not all Uber drivers, as a class), then by all means, attempt to unionize them. Just don't try and backdoor it as if this were a collective bargaining situation, collect a single class action payday, and then leave the drivers high and dry.
(4) They lied about opt-out for the class, rather than opt-in.
Uber requires many things of the worker (vehicle can't be "too old", conduct and dress standards, etc.), collects time and attendance data, maintains umbrella insurance for the worker, and issues paychecks. All work products remain the property of Uber.
Car analogy...
OK, I lied, it's not an analogy. It's specifically about cars.
This is exactly how the service departments work at automobile dealerships, down to the requirement that the mechanic provide a certain class of tools, codes of conduct towards customers, wear a dealership logo'ed coverall, collects time and attendance data (contractors are paid by hours worked in the contract, so this has to be collected), attendance data (reserving a bay is expensive, and you want contractors who are eager to be present; you also have to collect this information to know how much liability insurance to carry), maintains umbrella insurance for the worker based on worker liability for faulty repairs, or injury while on the dealer premises), and issues checks (they aren't actually paychecks unless the worker is on a payroll; they're just checks). All work products remain the property of the contracting agency (in this case, the auto dealership).
% whois llrlaw.com... Registrant Organization: Registrant Street: 100 Cambridge Street, 20th Floor Registrant City: Boston Registrant State/Province: Massachusetts Registrant Postal Code: 02114 Registrant Country: United States Registrant Phone: 6179945800 Registrant Phone Ext: Registrant Fax: Registrant Fax Ext: Registrant Email: ssimpson@llrlaw.com...
% lynx llrlaw.com... Welcome to Lichten & Liss-Riordan, P.C. The Labor, Employment & Class Action Specialists Lichten & Liss-Riordan, P.C. is a plaintiffs’-side employment and union-side labor law firm, whose attorneys have achieved national recognition for their work representing employees and unions in wage and hour, discrimination, and other employment-related litigation....
So.
Is it an ambulance chaser that's trying to assemble a class for a class action lawsuit?
Not sure. But indications from the original link are that they are not stating the primary plaintiffs, they aren't stating a docket number, and they aren't stating the percentage they will be taking of any settlement.
They also, as madsenj37 has previously pointed out, made claims on forced class membership based on a misinterpretation of the provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
But it will be fun to sit back and watch them go fishing in deep pockets that don't exist in terms of Uber not yet having IPO'ed, but the timing is a bit coincidental, isn't it?
Drivers are not making good enough wages once you factor in depreciation and other costs.
Let's assume this is true, for the sake of argument. It isn't, as published financials demonstrate, but let's ignore them as propaganda, and assume your statement is true.
Your argument boils down to:
(1) Uber drivers are bad at math
(2) I am better at math, so I can see how they are being cheated
(3) Uber drivers must be protected by society from being bad at math
(4) Despite the fact that society condones state run lotteries, which are a tax on people who are bad at math
It's more about screwing workers. Not paying benefits to workers and social security etc saves companies money, that's why big evil companies want to avoid paying it.
How is an employer holding that money back and giving it to the government, instead of paying it to the worker directly, any different than paying the whole thing to the worker, and the worker making the payments to the government out of what they receive?
How is it any different from paying it to a contracting agency that hass full time employees, and the contracting agency holding that money back and giving it to the government, instead of paying it to the worker directly?
Sure, some govt agencies are in search of tax revenues, and we should not waste our money, but one day your will be old, one day you will need govt health insurance. Unless you are a very fortunate 1%. 99% change you won't be one of them:-)
Over 23% of the U.S. workforce, including former congressmen, presidents, mail carriers, and military personnel, will receive some form of government pension which covers these things already. The rest of us are expected to have to pay for either ACA or medigap insurance ourselfs -- for which we can receive a tax credit, but we only get that if we paid taxes in that fiscal year, and it only comes back to us as a tax refund. Otherwise, the money is just "gone"; for example, if we are retired.
My mom worked her whole life (and had health insurance), then in her 50s she had some health issues, got really sick, and lost her health insurance. And she died. My family had some money to help her pay for her medical bills, but if she wasn't so fortunate, should she just have had no place to live, no money for food?
That's an important part of where the taxes go to pay for.
You seem to have the stupid idea that contractors are not responsible for paying their taxes, or that they will get away with not paying them, and that this will kill people like your mom, because the federal government isn't already running at a deficit, and is loathe to go into debt to pay benefits.
At the very worst, enforcement becomes a bigger job; and while states don't like it, it will mean more jobs for enforcement personnel, including auditors, and more jobs for CPAs and for tax preparers, and so on. So it will result in a net creation of jobs by making tax collection a more manual process.
From my point of view (jobs creation, disruption of a taxi industry who won't do pickups in the Inner Sunset in San Francisco, even if you schedule your trip to the airport days ahead of time), Uber contractors are a win all the way around.
And yeah, if it starts becoming a big issue, I'm going to follow up on the "incorporation as a private contracting agency franchise" idea myself. I've already had some emails from a couple of interested VCs.
Land is scarce. Roads are scarce. Seats at the concert are scarce. Seats on the airplane are scarce. Etc.
And, regardless, labor is scarce. Somebody has to do the work to make any of this happen. How are you going to incite the laborers to work if everything is already free?
There is still a need for rationing, and for labor, so there is still a need for wealth, even if we have replicators.
I think we will just program the labor to do the work, given that the labor won't be done by humans anyway.
Alternately, we could gameify remotely operated manipulators, or require a certain amount of work, if you wanted access to zero-gee for all sorts of fun stuff. Call it an "air tax", if you want.
At this point, as Brunner predicted, the population of the Earth would no longer fit completely on the Island of Zanzibar, but we still have a huge amount of empty space avaiable, but if you're right, perhaps you don't get more than Basic Cable once you have more than 2 children?
Planet-based renewables, other than breeder reactors, are pretty iffy. Space-based solar (SPS) is very reliable, and doesn't suffer downtime from weather conditions, just like breeders.
Of course all of those things take extensive materials that we do not have an unlimited supply of. And Space Based Solar, if widely adopted, would increase the imported heat to the planet faster then fossil fuels.
Planet based nuclear is more heat-cycle efficient than planet-based petroleum. Regardless, it'd be possible to use other space-based technology to lower the amount of incident thermal.
As far as materials, we have an entire solar system and Oort cloud.
The Star Trek economy only works with no scarcity. And while there is a surplus of labor, there is NOT a surplus or resources or energy. And energy is the big one here, as everyone keeps telling us.
OK, I'll tell you different, if it'll make you happy. Energy is an artificial scarcity. Nuclear and space based solar power, or some combination of the two, can pretty easily eliminate that problem.
Sure there is solar, and wind, but they run up against some rather hard resource limitations.
Planet-based renewables, other than breeder reactors, are pretty iffy. Space-based solar (SPS) is very reliable, and doesn't suffer downtime from weather conditions, just like breeders.
(Especially plastics which depend on oil...)
Actually, like food, they depend for a vast amount of their input on CHON (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen), and on energy.
The more interesting answer to ask for... at some point down the road, will be: "After having trained with both companies, which vehicle would you prefer to crew?".
As previously noted: the Tritium will remain cryogenically suspended, or it will "boil off". It's not an issue.
As for U-238: cadmium and Neodymium have the same level of "danger" as U-238, and are probably in your cell phone and the bluetooth headset you stick in your ear. They are closely followed by the following, to which you are generally exposed environmentally every day: xenon, molybdenum, barium, gadolinium, osmium, calcium, selenium, platinum, germanium, zirconium (quick, remove your rings!), tungsten, potassium, and bismuth.
But you know, feel free to get all pedantic, and we can throw in charcoal briquettes, if you want. Imagine the environmental horror, if a train carrying a bunch of Brita water filters derailed, instead of, you know, getting to the store, and having all your drinking water go through them.
P.S.: Pedantry helps no one but alarmists, who want a technical detail hook on which to hang their argument.
Deuterium and tritium are not in fact "fissile material", but are inert, non-radioactive materials. The "pellets" are cryogenic hydrogen gas isotopes fond in natural hydrogen.
Fusion is the opposite of fission, and while it's a nuclear process.
The U-238 that they would line the engines with is *also* not "fissile", and is not radioactive (the radioactive isotope is U-235), and is used for neutron absorption from the fusion process to turn the neutrons into heat so that no one is exposed to fast neutrons.
Note that these are *FAST* neutrons; to turn U-238 into Pu-239 requires *SLOW* neutrons. Even if some idiot put the one foot of paraffin required into the combustion chamber between the U-238 and the fusion reaction, it'd be burn out immediately by the temperatures involved (which is why we use reactor reactors to make Pu-239, and not straight Beryllium/Polonium or other less conventional neutron sources).
Basically, if one of these crashed, it would result in a bunch of inert wreckage, just like any other plane crash, although instead of starting a fire or anything, the pellet storage, if breached, would boil off (meaning the hydrogen isotopes would "heat" up to the point they became gas, not that anything would be hot).
In other words, no radiation anywhere.
P.S.: To the idiots who claim "this is how we make Pu-239 today" -- no, we do not use neutrons from fusion reactions to make Pu-239; also, if it were that easy to make Pu-239 *on purpose*, as opposed to *as a by-product of a design intended to avoid its production entirely*, Iraq would have had nuclear weapons already.
Slashdot Mirror
Or every so often a Senator Obama comes along, wins, and then we end up with President Obama, a far cry from what we were sold,
[...]He tried to shut down Guantanamo[...]
He issued the executive order.
Which he then rescinded.
As commander in chief, he could have, in fact, just ordered the troops out, period.
Guantanamo is politically useful for its extraterritoriality. Even to Obama, who has ordered the execution of U.S. citizens, without trial, via drone strike, in Afghanistan.
The fatal flaw is when people don't pay attention. If the public doesn't pay attention, than the ones who do will get into power.
No constitution you can conceive will save ignoramuses from themselves.
What about one that said "people who do not vote will be taken out into the street and hung by the neck until dead; one in ten people who voted for the losing side in any election will be taken out into the street, placed up against the wall, and then shot"?
In other words, forced participation, with forced collaboration on outcome.
Yes, that's a reductio ad absurdum of your argument.
Attractive nuissance.
If they didn't want people using the outlets, they'd either omit them, or use an outlet/plug design that was incompatible with standard plugs, and there wouldn't be a problem. It's not like the vacuum cleaners are being taken home and used by the transit staff, so a permanent modification wouldn't be a problem.
Yeah, fuck freedom of speech.
The UK does not have the equivalent of the U.S. 2nd amendment; that's how they get way with things like "The Right to be Forgotten" and their ridiculous libel laws, when it comes to public persons.
Also, in the U.S., he would also have been arrested for mouthing off. You are only allowed to mouth off in a "Free Speech Zone".
Language consists not of what is written in reference books, that is a mere snapshot of language use. Language is what is in daily use.
Hear, hear!
It's a perfectly cromulent use of the word!
the police man was just enforcing the laws written by the legislature. He was just doing the job he was supposed to be doing.
So what you are essentially saying... is that he was "just following orders".
Too soon in the comments?
We just added two letters to the DNA sequence. Are you sure we should be poking about in there before we have a better understanding? This is not me being negative or dismissive. I truly do not know.
Of course we should poke.
The only way to learn is to poke.
Actually, islet cell adenocarcinoma is detectable. You can do it with a rather simple/cheap blood test.
However, nearly no insurance carrier will pay for this blood test (I just had a friend who died from islet cell adenocarcinoma (pancreatic cancer), which was in fact treatable, but Kaiser Permanente did not cover the testing at the point she had her first symptoms.
NB: The following is NOT medical advice; consult an oncologist, if you have any of the following situations...
It was a type that would have been resistant to the standard Paclitaxel & Gemcitabine chemo combination; however, with the addition of an O6 methyl transferase inhibiter to reduce the effect of the MGMA gene on the long arm of chromosome 20 (the DNA repair mechanism), it's likely the chemo would have been able to be made effective, as a combinatoric therapy (without the inhibiter, the repair mechanism repairs the targeted cancer cells DNA as well, so the chemo -- most chemo relies on methylation of the gene sequences -- would not be able to sufficient damage the cancerous cells DNA to stop the cancer.
BTW: This is the same mechanism that causes Temozolomide insensitivity in glioblastoma multifome (a type of frequently fatal brain cancer, due to the ineffectiveness of the chemo).
So if you've got either one of those, and you have an "adventurous" oncologist, ask them if they are willing to try the chemo again, in combination with an inhibiter. Note that they will want to ramp the chemo dose, since the inhibiter will make *all* the cells more sensitive to the DNA damage (the usual dose will be too high, because the balance is between "just enough to kill some healthy and all cancer cells", and this effectively will disable the repair mechanism entirely).
--
Most pharma companies don't investigate combinatoric therapies, except as a last ditch effort to rescue a drug that's looking like it's ineffective, since doing so means cooperating with competing companies.
That's *a* problem certainly, but it's not *the* (not that there's any singular problem in the first place), and it's a problem that's tied to Big Pharma. But the article isn't about Big Pharma. It's about Big Charity, which has a separate set of problems.
Isn't the article actually about... "You big charities concentrating on finding a cure when there are treatments for CF are really annoying the piss out of those of us who are currently making an ass-ton of money off of selling treatments".
So the *actual* problem they are addressing is the problem that big charity isn't funding their treatment research, and they are instead having to fund treatment research themselves, and that cuts into their profits. In other words, it's not enough that all of the public funding going toward the disease is spent in big pharma labs on deriving *yet more* treatments, they also want all of the privately funded research to *also* be directed at more treatments.
Yeah, I'm a little cynical, but then again, I'd personally be happy flying to Eastern Europe and subsequently living with Porcine Endogenous Retro Virus to have my Parkinson's cured, should I ever have to deal with the disease, than living with what passes for treatment in the U.S. everywhere but in clinical trials.
Better treatments are possible but all of the funding and hype on finding a cure is holding them back.
This is bullshit.
I think the major reason that the CFF is ignoring treatments is that any treatment which does not result in a cure is, by definition, an ongoing revenue stream for big pharma, and therefore big pharma has that angle covered: if they come up with a treatment that works, they have a customer for the rest of that customers life. And there is no incentive for big pharma to then work on a cure.
In fact, if you were to come up with a cure for something which represented a huge existing revenue stream, you would likely have an "accident" before you were published.
In terms of CF itself, the current state of things is that researchers have demonstrated CRISPR/Cas9-mediated repair of the CFTR locus in human intestinal stem cells -- which means, were they reimplanted in the donor, they would replicate and replace the defective intestinal cells over time.
If the technique can be successfully used in vivo (we have so far been reluctant to use CRISPR/Cas9-mediated modifcation on living humans, since it can impact germ line cells), then it represents a cure. See also:
http://www.cell.com/cell-stem-...
The full paper itself is downloadable, without charge, from that location.
As to the major question of why concentrate on a cure ... so that your children and grandchildren don't inherit the disease, of course.
I assume you have never been outside the US. We are the exception, not the rule. Generally everyone else in the entire world takes public transportation and lives in multi-unit dwellings.
Hi. My sister lives in Alaska. The population density is one person every 2 square kilometers (1.3 people per square mile).
Where exactly should she go to catch the public transportation from her cabin, and into Barrow?
Thanks for any info!
(Validity of public transportation as an option is proportional to population density).
Curious... can I... list the names of organizations, tools, and resources that I've unconsciously gravitated to via unconscious bias to combat unconscious bias?
I'm sorry, what is that supposed to be telling us? What do you think you added to the conversation?
A couple of things:
(1) There isn't actually a class action lawsuit yet, since there are certain legal disclosures which must be made in order for it to legally qualify as a class action lawsuit. Among these, is going to a court, and getting a registered class.
(2) It's a solicitation for business; the article attempts to make it look like Uber drivers spontaneously banding together, but the domain name is registered to a lawyer at a Boston law firm. The Boston law firm, incidentally, went to the trouble of anonymizing who registered the domain where the domain contact from the lawsuit site has their email address, but they forgot to do the same thing for the lawsuit site.
(3) If you want to unionize Uber drivers, which would have long term benefits for the Uber drivers (assuming the courts hold them to be employees; the case in question applied only to a single person, not all Uber drivers, as a class), then by all means, attempt to unionize them. Just don't try and backdoor it as if this were a collective bargaining situation, collect a single class action payday, and then leave the drivers high and dry.
(4) They lied about opt-out for the class, rather than opt-in.
In the Uber model, you are the lottery ticket, and Uber is the gambler.
In your analogy, Uber is the state and the driver is the gambler.
Only it isn't gambling, if the slot machine always pays out to the gambler.
Uber requires many things of the worker (vehicle can't be "too old", conduct and dress standards, etc.), collects time and attendance data, maintains umbrella insurance for the worker, and issues paychecks. All work products remain the property of Uber.
Car analogy...
OK, I lied, it's not an analogy. It's specifically about cars.
This is exactly how the service departments work at automobile dealerships, down to the requirement that the mechanic provide a certain class of tools, codes of conduct towards customers, wear a dealership logo'ed coverall, collects time and attendance data (contractors are paid by hours worked in the contract, so this has to be collected), attendance data (reserving a bay is expensive, and you want contractors who are eager to be present; you also have to collect this information to know how much liability insurance to carry), maintains umbrella insurance for the worker based on worker liability for faulty repairs, or injury while on the dealer premises), and issues checks (they aren't actually paychecks unless the worker is on a payroll; they're just checks). All work products remain the property of the contracting agency (in this case, the auto dealership).
% whois llrlaw.com ... ...
Registrant Organization:
Registrant Street: 100 Cambridge Street, 20th Floor
Registrant City: Boston
Registrant State/Province: Massachusetts
Registrant Postal Code: 02114
Registrant Country: United States
Registrant Phone: 6179945800
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax:
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email: ssimpson@llrlaw.com
% lynx llrlaw.com ... ...
Welcome to Lichten & Liss-Riordan, P.C.
The Labor, Employment & Class Action Specialists
Lichten & Liss-Riordan, P.C. is a plaintiffs’-side employment and union-side labor law firm, whose attorneys have achieved national recognition for their work representing employees and unions in wage and hour, discrimination, and other employment-related litigation.
So.
Is it an ambulance chaser that's trying to assemble a class for a class action lawsuit?
Not sure. But indications from the original link are that they are not stating the primary plaintiffs, they aren't stating a docket number, and they aren't stating the percentage they will be taking of any settlement.
They also, as madsenj37 has previously pointed out, made claims on forced class membership based on a misinterpretation of the provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
But it will be fun to sit back and watch them go fishing in deep pockets that don't exist in terms of Uber not yet having IPO'ed, but the timing is a bit coincidental, isn't it?
Drivers are not making good enough wages once you factor in depreciation and other costs.
Let's assume this is true, for the sake of argument. It isn't, as published financials demonstrate, but let's ignore them as propaganda, and assume your statement is true.
Your argument boils down to:
(1) Uber drivers are bad at math
(2) I am better at math, so I can see how they are being cheated
(3) Uber drivers must be protected by society from being bad at math
(4) Despite the fact that society condones state run lotteries, which are a tax on people who are bad at math
Is there anything I have missed?
It's more about screwing workers. Not paying benefits to workers and social security etc saves companies money, that's why big evil companies want to avoid paying it.
How is an employer holding that money back and giving it to the government, instead of paying it to the worker directly, any different than paying the whole thing to the worker, and the worker making the payments to the government out of what they receive?
How is it any different from paying it to a contracting agency that hass full time employees, and the contracting agency holding that money back and giving it to the government, instead of paying it to the worker directly?
Sure, some govt agencies are in search of tax revenues, and we should not waste our money, but one day your will be old, one day you will need govt health insurance. Unless you are a very fortunate 1%. 99% change you won't be one of them :-)
Over 23% of the U.S. workforce, including former congressmen, presidents, mail carriers, and military personnel, will receive some form of government pension which covers these things already. The rest of us are expected to have to pay for either ACA or medigap insurance ourselfs -- for which we can receive a tax credit, but we only get that if we paid taxes in that fiscal year, and it only comes back to us as a tax refund. Otherwise, the money is just "gone"; for example, if we are retired.
My mom worked her whole life (and had health insurance), then in her 50s she had some health issues, got really sick, and lost her health insurance. And she died. My family had some money to help her pay for her medical bills, but if she wasn't so fortunate, should she just have had no place to live, no money for food?
That's an important part of where the taxes go to pay for.
You seem to have the stupid idea that contractors are not responsible for paying their taxes, or that they will get away with not paying them, and that this will kill people like your mom, because the federal government isn't already running at a deficit, and is loathe to go into debt to pay benefits.
At the very worst, enforcement becomes a bigger job; and while states don't like it, it will mean more jobs for enforcement personnel, including auditors, and more jobs for CPAs and for tax preparers, and so on. So it will result in a net creation of jobs by making tax collection a more manual process.
From my point of view (jobs creation, disruption of a taxi industry who won't do pickups in the Inner Sunset in San Francisco, even if you schedule your trip to the airport days ahead of time), Uber contractors are a win all the way around.
And yeah, if it starts becoming a big issue, I'm going to follow up on the "incorporation as a private contracting agency franchise" idea myself. I've already had some emails from a couple of interested VCs.
Land is scarce. Roads are scarce. Seats at the concert are scarce. Seats on the airplane are scarce. Etc.
And, regardless, labor is scarce. Somebody has to do the work to make any of this happen. How are you going to incite the laborers to work if everything is already free?
There is still a need for rationing, and for labor, so there is still a need for wealth, even if we have replicators.
I think we will just program the labor to do the work, given that the labor won't be done by humans anyway.
Alternately, we could gameify remotely operated manipulators, or require a certain amount of work, if you wanted access to zero-gee for all sorts of fun stuff. Call it an "air tax", if you want.
At this point, as Brunner predicted, the population of the Earth would no longer fit completely on the Island of Zanzibar, but we still have a huge amount of empty space avaiable, but if you're right, perhaps you don't get more than Basic Cable once you have more than 2 children?
Planet-based renewables, other than breeder reactors, are pretty iffy. Space-based solar (SPS) is very reliable, and doesn't suffer downtime from weather conditions, just like breeders.
Of course all of those things take extensive materials that we do not have an unlimited supply of. And Space Based Solar, if widely adopted, would increase the imported heat to the planet faster then fossil fuels.
Planet based nuclear is more heat-cycle efficient than planet-based petroleum. Regardless, it'd be possible to use other space-based technology to lower the amount of incident thermal.
As far as materials, we have an entire solar system and Oort cloud.
Why is this an "ask slashdot"? You are asking the wrong people.
https://www.eff.org/pages/lega...
mailto:info@eff.org
The Star Trek economy only works with no scarcity. And while there is a surplus of labor, there is NOT a surplus or resources or energy. And energy is the big one here, as everyone keeps telling us.
OK, I'll tell you different, if it'll make you happy. Energy is an artificial scarcity. Nuclear and space based solar power, or some combination of the two, can pretty easily eliminate that problem.
Sure there is solar, and wind, but they run up against some rather hard resource limitations.
Planet-based renewables, other than breeder reactors, are pretty iffy. Space-based solar (SPS) is very reliable, and doesn't suffer downtime from weather conditions, just like breeders.
(Especially plastics which depend on oil...)
Actually, like food, they depend for a vast amount of their input on CHON (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen), and on energy.
The more interesting answer to ask for... at some point down the road, will be: "After having trained with both companies, which vehicle would you prefer to crew?".
So many more mistakes:
[ ... ]
As previously noted: the Tritium will remain cryogenically suspended, or it will "boil off". It's not an issue.
As for U-238: cadmium and Neodymium have the same level of "danger" as U-238, and are probably in your cell phone and the bluetooth headset you stick in your ear. They are closely followed by the following, to which you are generally exposed environmentally every day: xenon, molybdenum, barium, gadolinium, osmium, calcium, selenium, platinum, germanium, zirconium (quick, remove your rings!), tungsten, potassium, and bismuth.
http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/
But you know, feel free to get all pedantic, and we can throw in charcoal briquettes, if you want. Imagine the environmental horror, if a train carrying a bunch of Brita water filters derailed, instead of, you know, getting to the store, and having all your drinking water go through them.
P.S.: Pedantry helps no one but alarmists, who want a technical detail hook on which to hang their argument.
So many terrible mistakes...
Deuterium and tritium are not in fact "fissile material", but are inert, non-radioactive materials. The "pellets" are cryogenic hydrogen gas isotopes fond in natural hydrogen.
Fusion is the opposite of fission, and while it's a nuclear process.
The U-238 that they would line the engines with is *also* not "fissile", and is not radioactive (the radioactive isotope is U-235), and is used for neutron absorption from the fusion process to turn the neutrons into heat so that no one is exposed to fast neutrons.
Note that these are *FAST* neutrons; to turn U-238 into Pu-239 requires *SLOW* neutrons. Even if some idiot put the one foot of paraffin required into the combustion chamber between the U-238 and the fusion reaction, it'd be burn out immediately by the temperatures involved (which is why we use reactor reactors to make Pu-239, and not straight Beryllium/Polonium or other less conventional neutron sources).
Basically, if one of these crashed, it would result in a bunch of inert wreckage, just like any other plane crash, although instead of starting a fire or anything, the pellet storage, if breached, would boil off (meaning the hydrogen isotopes would "heat" up to the point they became gas, not that anything would be hot).
In other words, no radiation anywhere.
P.S.: To the idiots who claim "this is how we make Pu-239 today" -- no, we do not use neutrons from fusion reactions to make Pu-239; also, if it were that easy to make Pu-239 *on purpose*, as opposed to *as a by-product of a design intended to avoid its production entirely*, Iraq would have had nuclear weapons already.