to enforce the existing laws for _everyone_? Instead of just saying "Well, the plat owners are violating the law so it's OK if Uber does it too"?
Oh, and while I'm on the subject, Uber's choice of prey is slightly different. Uber requires a pretty nice car. The sort that you're run of the mill cabbie doesn't have. That's why cabbies get stuck renting their cars. Uber drivers are mostly desperate folks who just lost their job with a decent car from when they had one. The cab companies prey on recent immigrants. Uber preys on the recently unemployed.
Both practices are abhorrent. Let's shut 'em both down.
Que Grumpy Cat Meme. Uber is a major part of the global race to the bottom all us wage slaves are caught up in. In every way possible their "drivers" are employees. They can't work for competitors, they have to carry the Uber phone and if they turn down too many rides they get fired (what the hell else would you call it?). The only little difference is they don't pay benefits, reimburse expenses, pay unemployment insurance or any of the other things regular employers do. In a society where your entire quality of life depends on your job it's kinda important to clearly define what a "job" is.
And for all you young comp-sci majors out there who want to chime in with how great your 1099 gig is; Uber is NOT THE SAME THING...
at least not in their banking laws. The way the laws are written is if you violate the spirit of the law but not the letter you're still in trouble. Of course, Rich people lose money when banking laws are violated. You know, we could learn something from those people. Violating the spirit of the law should carry the same weight. Screw this noise where corps just maneuver around laws. Put a little more power in our Judicial system to interpret intent, and maybe a few odds/end checks and balances to prevent abuses and problem solved. I know I'm over simplifying it, but it's better than throwing our hands up and saying we're all done for...
Um... the reduction in McDonald's is nationwide, while the study makes the point that there are more hospital visits near fracking, which is a localized thing. You're point isn't relevant.
there was a time after WWII that we didn't tolerate it. It's also coincidentally the best time in US History economically.
One thing I know for sure, the "State" is really our only hope. I can't think of anything that can stand up to the might of a Mega-Corp. Maybe the won't; maybe they'll always just be in cahoots. But I'm watching local gov'ts get picked apart one by one. They just don't have the power. If you want to get something done in America you use the federal gov't. That's how we got rid of Apartheid (we called it "Separate but Equal") and that's how we got Gay Marriage. I've never once seen a bunch of small disconnected states do anything about real oppression. It always took a bigger, better organized power stepping in.
The Republican party intentionally underfunded them to prevent enforcement. They also gave them a directive to audit a certain percentage of low income tax earners as part of the "compromise" that came with the earned income tax credit from the 90s. Both of these are verifiable facts. We've got a substantial part of the political power base that wants to lower wages. Discuss amongst yourselves if that's a good thing or not.
now what happens when you're 50 an you actually need medical care? You've been in and out of contract gigs your whole life and you're past your "sell-by" date now. Good luck getting one of those cushy jobs with benefits after your relentless pursuit of a quick dollar causes them all to go away.
You're also skirting unemployment insurance. Remember, unemployment is _not_ for you to take. It's there so you don't end up competing in a race to the bottom with desperate wage slaves when the economy takes a minor dip. That way when you're contract comes up for renewal they don't say "that's great cayenne8, but we've got 80 folks with your same skill set offering to do the job for 1/3 the pay. Will you take 1/6?".
where the hell have you been? Plus you're not paying into unemployment. It's not there for when _you're_ laid off, it's there to keep you from competing with desperate people when _they_ get laid off.
What are my options to stop it? That's all he's asking. It's especially scary because the same govt that should be looking out for these abuses is actively participating in them. This is what happens when workers lose solidarity. They'll come for you and your wages next.
look at the jobs that are being created. They're low paying service sector jobs that are impossible to Unionize. I know, the anti-Union hate on/. is pretty strong, but there really isn't any other way to raise wages for the general populace (excluding geniuses and a few lucky/.ers who didn't see their jobs outsourced).
Basically the Manufacturing jobs from the 70s were replaced by McJobs in the 90s. You traded $70k/yr + benefits for $20k/yr without (unless you're lucky enough to live in a state with socialized medicine for the poor).
After 20 years of Karl Rove and Fox News a sizable number of Americans are opposed to any regulation. Rand Paul (or maybe his dad) argued that instead of govt regs you let the folks who own the contaminated land Sue for damages. If it's international waters I guess you'd have to prove your land was contaminated...
but can't let this slide. A _good_ Uber driver makes about $15/hr after accounting for the cost of driving. That's not even $30k/year. Dude, they're not anywhere near the level's your thinking about, nor will they ever be. If they worked 80 hours a week (which would be incredibly dangerous) they _might_ clear $60k... You've spent too much time in cushy Computer Science and/or engineering gigs. These folks don't have anything to save. The best of the best barely qualify as "Working Poor"...
Uber will drop you. Also you have to have an Uber phone. Calling it a "lease" does change a thing.
Uber just wants to get out of paying the employer expenses everyone else has to. As a society we've built our entire quality of life around our employers, so I can't see that ending well. Plus without trashing their employees quality of life their business model doesn't really work.
Um.. So what you're saying is you have so little faith in the police that when they show up and nobody dies it's a"miracle "? I think we've got bigger problems than a few socially maladjusted teens
That only counts if they're not using deceptive and immoral tricks to bring in more cash. There's two really nasty things the investor class is doing that invalidates your argument.
First, they pump, dump and then get bailed out as too big to fail. They've been doing this for at least a hundred years, maybe longer. Please read this and maybe even the book it references.
Then there's the more recent phenomenon called getting "Bained". Remember Kay-B-Toys? Mervyns? They weren't failed companies. They were doing just fine. They got bought out by venture capitalists who used their good name & credit to borrow a tonne of money, pay themselves huge bonuses, and then shut the whole thing down. Ever wonder what happened to all those cool Sci-Fi anthologies from the 70s? Issac Asimov's Stories and what not. Folks didn't stop reading them, their distributor was sitting on a mountain of valuable property they weren't keeping track of. Some wealthy asshat noticed, bought them up and liquidated them. Suddenly no distributor and being small but successful they collapsed before they could get another one.
So even if I ignore the fact that just about every rich person relied on the gov't directly to make their fortune, even if I ignore the fact that they're wealth is largely build on the infrastructure and education system of our civilization, even if I ignore the commons and the meaning of natural resources. Even if I ignore _all_ that, you're still left with a bunch of dirty thieves who couldn't survive in the imaginary "real" world of capitalism that's never existed anyway.
We've been cutting taxes on the 1% while cutting wages for the only folks left to tax for 40 years. We're running out of money. Not because it isn't there but because we can't seem to give it to the rich fast enough.
It's practically free. Run the program, wait a bit and your done. A child or a well trained monkey could do it. You OTOH, cost dollars per hour. Seriously, is anyone else scared shirtless that something so abstract and complex as this can be automated? Is any job safe (outside of being a member of the ruling class)?
sorry, I wasn't clear. It's not just sitting around doing nothing. The ultra wealthy are hording wealth in order to create artificial scarcity so they can use their control of society's wealth to bend it to their whims. There's more too it than that in order for them to stay in power, but the basic element is conservationism. e.g. making sure _nothing_ changes. Controlling all of society's wealth is a very effective way to achieve that. The constant desperation brought on by artificially induced poverty makes everyone else very conservative and very opposed to change out of fear that things will get worse; that you'll lose what little you have. The 1% use this to keep folks from questioning why they have so little when the top guys have so much. It's also very important that no one ever notices that if the 1% didn't exist we could all live pretty well. This isn't me pulling $h!t out of my proverbial back side. We're already producing enough food to feed the world's population. And giving poor folks access to birth control & education has shown to control population perfectly (maybe even a bit too much). We can do it, but not when we've got 1% of the world consuming 60% of the resources.
Sorry, again it's complicated. I don't know how to boil it down to sound bites that work. I've got a few (e.g. "I don't want insurance, I want health care") but if I was as good as Karl Rove I'd probably use those skills for the other side. With everything in the world so horrible it takes a saint to use that kind of power for good...:(
but I'm not clever enough to explain why. Please read this. Also follow the link in the article to "This Time is Different" and read that too. We've been doing this little song and dance where banks screw up and blame the public for centuries...
Greece is getting thrown under the bus, "austerity". Aka lower living standards for the working class. It's already " live within your means " with you people. The Greeks weren't living the high life. A bunch of Rick asshats were passing bad debt around during the housing boom and Greece got caught holding the bag. If a big country like Germany had done it no harm no foul. It was too much for Greece though. And the powers that be are gonna use this to steal a bunch of old v folks pensions.
_after_ gov't subsidies. It's also a tiny little car that does poorly in crashes. Why in hells name would I spend that kind of money? I could buy a Versa or an egg (excuse me, the Yaris) for $10k less and get the same features. There's no way in hell that car is going to save me $10k over the course of it's life. It doesn't help that it's a Chevy...
it's that wages aren't coming close to matching real inflation. By "real" I mean inflation of necessities (food, shelter and in this case transportation). It's a fact that wages have been declining for 40 years. Also when I was a kid I could get a pretty nice beater for a grand. Work part time over a summer and you had a car you could putz around in. That same kind of beater is $3-$5k now...
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to enforce the existing laws for _everyone_? Instead of just saying "Well, the plat owners are violating the law so it's OK if Uber does it too"?
Oh, and while I'm on the subject, Uber's choice of prey is slightly different. Uber requires a pretty nice car. The sort that you're run of the mill cabbie doesn't have. That's why cabbies get stuck renting their cars. Uber drivers are mostly desperate folks who just lost their job with a decent car from when they had one. The cab companies prey on recent immigrants. Uber preys on the recently unemployed.
Both practices are abhorrent. Let's shut 'em both down.
Que Grumpy Cat Meme. Uber is a major part of the global race to the bottom all us wage slaves are caught up in. In every way possible their "drivers" are employees. They can't work for competitors, they have to carry the Uber phone and if they turn down too many rides they get fired (what the hell else would you call it?). The only little difference is they don't pay benefits, reimburse expenses, pay unemployment insurance or any of the other things regular employers do. In a society where your entire quality of life depends on your job it's kinda important to clearly define what a "job" is.
And for all you young comp-sci majors out there who want to chime in with how great your 1099 gig is; Uber is NOT THE SAME THING...
I use power point. Does that count?
at least not in their banking laws. The way the laws are written is if you violate the spirit of the law but not the letter you're still in trouble. Of course, Rich people lose money when banking laws are violated. You know, we could learn something from those people. Violating the spirit of the law should carry the same weight. Screw this noise where corps just maneuver around laws. Put a little more power in our Judicial system to interpret intent, and maybe a few odds/end checks and balances to prevent abuses and problem solved. I know I'm over simplifying it, but it's better than throwing our hands up and saying we're all done for...
Um... the reduction in McDonald's is nationwide, while the study makes the point that there are more hospital visits near fracking, which is a localized thing. You're point isn't relevant.
there was a time after WWII that we didn't tolerate it. It's also coincidentally the best time in US History economically.
One thing I know for sure, the "State" is really our only hope. I can't think of anything that can stand up to the might of a Mega-Corp. Maybe the won't; maybe they'll always just be in cahoots. But I'm watching local gov'ts get picked apart one by one. They just don't have the power. If you want to get something done in America you use the federal gov't. That's how we got rid of Apartheid (we called it "Separate but Equal") and that's how we got Gay Marriage. I've never once seen a bunch of small disconnected states do anything about real oppression. It always took a bigger, better organized power stepping in.
The Republican party intentionally underfunded them to prevent enforcement. They also gave them a directive to audit a certain percentage of low income tax earners as part of the "compromise" that came with the earned income tax credit from the 90s. Both of these are verifiable facts. We've got a substantial part of the political power base that wants to lower wages. Discuss amongst yourselves if that's a good thing or not.
now what happens when you're 50 an you actually need medical care? You've been in and out of contract gigs your whole life and you're past your "sell-by" date now. Good luck getting one of those cushy jobs with benefits after your relentless pursuit of a quick dollar causes them all to go away.
You're also skirting unemployment insurance. Remember, unemployment is _not_ for you to take. It's there so you don't end up competing in a race to the bottom with desperate wage slaves when the economy takes a minor dip. That way when you're contract comes up for renewal they don't say "that's great cayenne8, but we've got 80 folks with your same skill set offering to do the job for 1/3 the pay. Will you take 1/6?".
where the hell have you been? Plus you're not paying into unemployment. It's not there for when _you're_ laid off, it's there to keep you from competing with desperate people when _they_ get laid off.
What are my options to stop it? That's all he's asking. It's especially scary because the same govt that should be looking out for these abuses is actively participating in them. This is what happens when workers lose solidarity. They'll come for you and your wages next.
look at the jobs that are being created. They're low paying service sector jobs that are impossible to Unionize. I know, the anti-Union hate on /. is pretty strong, but there really isn't any other way to raise wages for the general populace (excluding geniuses and a few lucky /.ers who didn't see their jobs outsourced).
Basically the Manufacturing jobs from the 70s were replaced by McJobs in the 90s. You traded $70k/yr + benefits for $20k/yr without (unless you're lucky enough to live in a state with socialized medicine for the poor).
After 20 years of Karl Rove and Fox News a sizable number of Americans are opposed to any regulation. Rand Paul (or maybe his dad) argued that instead of govt regs you let the folks who own the contaminated land Sue for damages. If it's international waters I guess you'd have to prove your land was contaminated...
but can't let this slide. A _good_ Uber driver makes about $15/hr after accounting for the cost of driving. That's not even $30k/year. Dude, they're not anywhere near the level's your thinking about, nor will they ever be. If they worked 80 hours a week (which would be incredibly dangerous) they _might_ clear $60k... You've spent too much time in cushy Computer Science and/or engineering gigs. These folks don't have anything to save. The best of the best barely qualify as "Working Poor"...
Uber will drop you. Also you have to have an Uber phone. Calling it a "lease" does change a thing.
Uber just wants to get out of paying the employer expenses everyone else has to. As a society we've built our entire quality of life around our employers, so I can't see that ending well. Plus without trashing their employees quality of life their business model doesn't really work.
I3 with 4gb and 500 gigs? I can get that here for $300. $600 if it's "business class"...
Um.. So what you're saying is you have so little faith in the police that when they show up and nobody dies it's a"miracle "? I think we've got bigger problems than a few socially maladjusted teens
That only counts if they're not using deceptive and immoral tricks to bring in more cash. There's two really nasty things the investor class is doing that invalidates your argument.
First, they pump, dump and then get bailed out as too big to fail. They've been doing this for at least a hundred years, maybe longer. Please read this and maybe even the book it references.
Then there's the more recent phenomenon called getting "Bained". Remember Kay-B-Toys? Mervyns? They weren't failed companies. They were doing just fine. They got bought out by venture capitalists who used their good name & credit to borrow a tonne of money, pay themselves huge bonuses, and then shut the whole thing down. Ever wonder what happened to all those cool Sci-Fi anthologies from the 70s? Issac Asimov's Stories and what not. Folks didn't stop reading them, their distributor was sitting on a mountain of valuable property they weren't keeping track of. Some wealthy asshat noticed, bought them up and liquidated them. Suddenly no distributor and being small but successful they collapsed before they could get another one.
So even if I ignore the fact that just about every rich person relied on the gov't directly to make their fortune, even if I ignore the fact that they're wealth is largely build on the infrastructure and education system of our civilization, even if I ignore the commons and the meaning of natural resources. Even if I ignore _all_ that, you're still left with a bunch of dirty thieves who couldn't survive in the imaginary "real" world of capitalism that's never existed anyway.
We've been cutting taxes on the 1% while cutting wages for the only folks left to tax for 40 years. We're running out of money. Not because it isn't there but because we can't seem to give it to the rich fast enough.
It's practically free. Run the program, wait a bit and your done. A child or a well trained monkey could do it. You OTOH, cost dollars per hour. Seriously, is anyone else scared shirtless that something so abstract and complex as this can be automated? Is any job safe (outside of being a member of the ruling class)?
sorry, I wasn't clear. It's not just sitting around doing nothing. The ultra wealthy are hording wealth in order to create artificial scarcity so they can use their control of society's wealth to bend it to their whims. There's more too it than that in order for them to stay in power, but the basic element is conservationism. e.g. making sure _nothing_ changes. Controlling all of society's wealth is a very effective way to achieve that. The constant desperation brought on by artificially induced poverty makes everyone else very conservative and very opposed to change out of fear that things will get worse; that you'll lose what little you have. The 1% use this to keep folks from questioning why they have so little when the top guys have so much. It's also very important that no one ever notices that if the 1% didn't exist we could all live pretty well. This isn't me pulling $h!t out of my proverbial back side. We're already producing enough food to feed the world's population. And giving poor folks access to birth control & education has shown to control population perfectly (maybe even a bit too much). We can do it, but not when we've got 1% of the world consuming 60% of the resources.
:(
Sorry, again it's complicated. I don't know how to boil it down to sound bites that work. I've got a few (e.g. "I don't want insurance, I want health care") but if I was as good as Karl Rove I'd probably use those skills for the other side. With everything in the world so horrible it takes a saint to use that kind of power for good...
but I'm not clever enough to explain why. Please read this. Also follow the link in the article to "This Time is Different" and read that too. We've been doing this little song and dance where banks screw up and blame the public for centuries...
Greece is getting thrown under the bus, "austerity". Aka lower living standards for the working class. It's already " live within your means " with you people. The Greeks weren't living the high life. A bunch of Rick asshats were passing bad debt around during the housing boom and Greece got caught holding the bag. If a big country like Germany had done it no harm no foul. It was too much for Greece though. And the powers that be are gonna use this to steal a bunch of old v folks pensions.
_after_ gov't subsidies. It's also a tiny little car that does poorly in crashes. Why in hells name would I spend that kind of money? I could buy a Versa or an egg (excuse me, the Yaris) for $10k less and get the same features. There's no way in hell that car is going to save me $10k over the course of it's life. It doesn't help that it's a Chevy...
it's that wages aren't coming close to matching real inflation. By "real" I mean inflation of necessities (food, shelter and in this case transportation). It's a fact that wages have been declining for 40 years. Also when I was a kid I could get a pretty nice beater for a grand. Work part time over a summer and you had a car you could putz around in. That same kind of beater is $3-$5k now...
Seriously. I've got to see this.