When I'm bicycling, it's important to realize that my maximum speed is much lower, so I'm approaching the stop at a lower speed, giving me more time to assess the intersection
Oh, if only you were the only vehicle on the road.
I see bikers treat stop signs as yields every day. I live in a college town where the students just don't think obeying traffic laws is an important thing to do. As a driver, I just LOVE it when I'm traveling on the through-street and a high-speed biker comes to the stop sign on an intersecting road. Stop? Of course not. Blow through the stop sign at full speed, get halfway into the intersection, and then lay the bike over to the right and turn onto the street I'm on.
Why is that a problem? Well, as a defensive driver I cannot assume that this joker is going to turn (he didn't bother to signal one, but that is just another pesky traffic law he's ignoring). He's headed for a direct collision with me, so I have to slam on the brakes just in case. That usually isn't enough to stop before I'd hit him if he doesn't turn, though, so if he manages to hit a stone in the road and his turn becomes a slide -- he's dead. And I'll have been the one to run him over.
And then there's the ones who are actually crossing the street I'm on, and instead of stopping at the stop sign until the through-traffic clears, they jog over into the crosswalk and pretend they are pedestrians -- forcing everyone on the through street to slam on the brakes to stop for them.
Sharing the road means both sides have to share. You have to do things you don't want to do for the safety of everyone, just like I have to.
If the intersection is busy, well, then I stop,
Oh, if only you were the only bicyclist on the road. I've seen too many bikers who ignore everything else at an intersection and blow through the stop. They ignore cars, and they especially ignore pedestrians in crosswalks. If every ped who had to jump out of the way of a biker breaking the law paid me a nickel, I'd be a 1%er.
Plus, well, not making me stop all the time encourages me to bicycle more,
Making me stop all the time is inconvenient for me, too. It wastes gas, so it's bad for the environment. Letting you play chicken with traffic by blowing through a stop sign to make a hard right turn raises my blood pressure, which is bad for my health, and it is potentially deadly for you.
If not having to obey the traffic laws is what compels you to ride a bicycle, then you really don't have the right attitude about bike riding. Expecting special treatment as a vehicle sharing the public streets because that would make your life more pleasant is, well, kind of selfish.
There is no need for an "odometer version". Cars already have odometers. And an odometer version may be in testing, but it will never survive the desire to put higher taxes on people who drive where and when the government doesn't want them to. The use of taxation for social engineering and not just provision of mandatory services is too great in the modern politician and government worker.
No, because that's not all you're tracking. You're tracking the miles traveled *in Oregon*.
Since an explicit goal of this system is to charge higher taxes for congested roads at congested times, it's not just the miles in Oregon that have to be tracked, it is WHICH roads and WHAT times. That demands a GPS and recorded data.
I know an engineer who was working on this kind of system for Oregon a decade ago, and she admitted the data needed to be collected by could not imagine that the government might abuse it.
Please don't ever get lost in the mountains in my area, because my driving to a search to save your ass doesn't benefit you so I won't bother doing it.
It doesn't have to be that way. There could simply be an annual check of your odometer when you get your annual emissions check,
What is an "annual emissions check?"
Yes, if you are going to tax someone on what roads they drive on and when ('congestion fee'), you need to know what roads they drive on and when. An odometer doesn't provide that information.
but really, we could have per mile taxation without big brother intrusions if we as a society would stand up and demand it.
Why would we as a society stand up and demand more taxes?
Why even go high tech? Every year I have to renew my license tags on my birthday. Just report the odometer reading then and pay the appropriate taxes at that time.
Oregon tags (mine) renew every two years, by mail.
It would not take more than 5 minutes for an employee to check an odometer.
It would take much longer than 5 minutes for an employee of DMV to come to my house, break into my garage, and read my odometer.
An odometer cannot report that none (or most) of my miles were on I5 in downtown Portland at 9AM (or 2AM) so it cannot be used to charge a higher tax for use during congested times and places.
You pay at the pump and then get a refund by filing Form 1220, at least in Oregon. Other states have the same kind of thing.
I can see the benefit of saving those few tax dollars, but at the expense of having The Man attach a GPS tracker to your car? It seems like a no-brainer to me.
Yep. But since knowing which roads and when is an important part of the pricing structure, a GPS will be required.
A large number of people benefit from the truck, but only the passengers benefit from the car.
I'm a search and rescue volunteer enroute to an active search, where we find and extract a lost mushroom hunter -- alive. A week ago I was staff on an overnight training exercise that graduated 13 new SAR volunteers. Three weeks ago I was involved in a lost aircraft search. You say the only person who benefits from my car is myself?
i.e. an old diesel would be taxed more than a new Euro-5 compliant one.
I.e., the poor who drive older, used cars would be taxed more than the rich who can afford a new car every year.
The big disadvantage was the privacy concerns.
This. I knew someone who was involved with this idea a few years ago, in Oregon, and I could not convince her that to tax someone based on which roads were used at which times a complete log of where the car was and when would have to be kept so the tax could be computed correctly. And so the taxpayer could dispute the tax. You can't point to a GPS log of position and claim "I was driving on my own property which abuts I5, not on I5 at peak time" if there is no GPS log to point at.
And the propensity of government to keep all the data it gets was quite beyond her imagination. Before the idea was killed the last time, (apparently not dead enough) there was some acceptance of the idea that "gee, this would be great data for police to have if they're looking for an abducted child" (i.e., "Amber alerts".) I mean, the public seems accepting of Amber alerts going to their cellphones at all times of the day and no matter where they are. Think of the Children(TM)! From that use, it is just a short step to "any criminal", and then to "any terrorist" (if the latter doesn't precede the former.)
To the later poster who asks about toll roads: Oregon has no toll roads that I know of, and if it did it is usually easy to select a different route if you want to avoid them. Cameras that record your passing are stationary and do not record every place you go and when.
Given the arguments over GPS trackers used by police, and how the argument that it's really no different than a full-time tail was shouted down, I'm amazed that anyone on/. could claim that a full-time government mandated GPS tracker on every car is no different than "toll roads" or "fixed cameras". Keep in mind, those "tax" trackers are no different than the temporary installations that monitor your car on private property and 24/7.
I sent an FOIA request on myself to the NSA for fun/curiosity.
I can understand the reason why someone can ask about themselves, but I don't understand why a third-party request like this hasn't caused more of a reaction. "OMG 19 pages" isn't what I mean.
I mean "the government is collecting info we don't think they should and THEN handing it out to anyone who asks for it." Why should a FOIA request about someone completely unrelated to you be approved? If the government shouldn't collect it, why should they hand it out? (Yeah, I know, He's Dead Jim, but his family isn't.)
The company would be very smart to settle out of court.
I agree. They are in the wrong. My point is that she agreed to work for the pay she was getting (so has no complaint about being on call 24/7 and the company isn't in the wrong for expecting it.) Her mistake was installing the app on her phone before reading the information about the app. When I google "Xora app" today, the first result is for Xora.com which has various links shown, one for "Employee Location Tracking." When you click that link, it takes you to a page that tells you:
GPS
Get Visibility with GPS Location Services.
See the location of every mobile worker on a Google Map.
Kind of hard to see where every worker is on a Google Map without it tracking where you are, I'd say. Basic info about an app that someone wants you to install on your phone. It's not hidden info like the fact that the cell company tracks the phone already, it's kinda right out there.
She did not agree to the last part when she was hired.
I didn't say she did. You quoted but did not read what I wrote. I said she agreed to them all. I didn't say they all happened at the same time or before she was hired.
She admitted she had no problem being tracked during work.
There's no version of the story that says it's her phone. It IS a company phone. RTFA!
The version of the story in the court filing says the app was installed on employee phones and she was told she had to keep her phone on 24/7 etc. That's the official legal version of the story; what ars Technica comes up with is modern journalism.
Being on-call without being compensated should simply be illegal. Agreeing to the requirement is meaningless -
She was compensated, at a rate she agreed to. Note that her complaint is not that she was on call 24/7. Agreeing to the requirement meant she thought it was adequate compensation. You MIGHT have an argument were she unemployed and this was the only job offer and it was take it or starve, but she was being poached from another company. She was lured from another job by the money.
I don't think you can call $7200/mo an inappropriate wage or "abuse", especially for white-collar work. Even were she working a constant 20 hours outside normal hours, that's an average of $28/hr. She's complaining about neither the number of work hours nor the rate of pay.
there are a lot more people desperate to not starve to death in the US than there are jobs for them to work in.
And SHE had TWO jobs. Apparently she's causing someone else to starve to death, according to your hyperbole.
In April 2014, Intermex asked Plaintiff and other employees to download an application ("app") called Xora to their smart phones.... ever since she had installed the app on her phone.... she was required to keep her phone's power on...
Do we believe arsTechnica or the actual court document?
Being a civil suit, she doesn't even have to convince a majority - just 9 of the 12 jurors.
I do not think that word means what you think it means...
Oh it means what they said. Civil suits only require a simple majority of the jurors to agree with you.
Criminal Juries must be 100%, civil juries only require more votes for one side than the other.
Does criminal law define "majority" some way other than "more votes for one side than the other", because that's what it means in standard English.
That's in the Arstechnica article. The actual filing for the lawsuit says the phones were the employee's. Words like "they were required to install an app on their phones."
24/7 on call isn't the same as having an alien tracking probe in your anus like cartman.
I didn't say it was. Read what I actually wrote and not what you want to rant about. The comment I replied to was talking about being on call 24/7, and I thought I made it pretty clear that out of all the things to complain about in this scenario, that's about the least objectionable part. Period.
A school has already gotten in trouble for intruding on students outside of school time through monitoring software on the laptops, so this company is most likely going to get a nasty slap from the judge.
The students did not agree to that as a condition of employment. That makes it different enough not to be a precedent.
A "holodeck" is when you take a deck of cards and mix in a large number of blank index cards. Then pull a few "cards" at random, mix them up with more blank index cards. Do that a few times until there may only be one of the original cards in the deck and you have a "holodeck". Oh, wait, that would be a "homeodeck". I always gets those two confused. Nevermind.
Does it spell out that she was compensated on a 24 hour basis? Didn't think so. F U company, and every other company that requires 24/7 support for 8/5 wages.
$7200/month is pretty good wages, and she knew the 24/7 on call requirement before she took the job. She was, apparently, also working for another company doing the same kind of job. Of all the things to object to, this is about the least objectionable.
The first claims in her case are shaky because she agreed to them all. Use your personal phone for work, check. Have it with you 24/7, check. Install the app so you can be tracked, check. She's pretty much got them by the shorts when it comes to them telling her other employer she was disloyal, though.
Of course, it's hard to understand why any company would let you work for three months for a competitor while they're paying you to work for them.
Was there anything like the Wright Brothers flyer before they created it?
Yes.
In 1890 the French engineer Clement Ader completed the first of three steam-driven flying machines, the Eole. On 9 October 1890 Ader made an uncontrolled hop of around 50 m (165 ft); this was the first manned airplane to take off under its own power.
On May 6, 1896, Langley's Aerodrome No. 5 made the first successful sustained flight of an unpiloted, engine-driven heavier-than-air craft of substantial size.
Gustave Weisskopf was a German who emigrated to the U.S., where he soon changed his name to Whitehead. From 1897 to 1915 he designed and built early flying machines and engines. On August 14, 1901, two and a half years before the Wright Brothers' flight, he claimed to have carried out a controlled, powered flight in his Number 21 monoplane at Fairfield, Connecticut. The flight was reported in the Bridgeport Sunday Herald local newspaper.
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When I'm bicycling, it's important to realize that my maximum speed is much lower, so I'm approaching the stop at a lower speed, giving me more time to assess the intersection
Oh, if only you were the only vehicle on the road.
I see bikers treat stop signs as yields every day. I live in a college town where the students just don't think obeying traffic laws is an important thing to do. As a driver, I just LOVE it when I'm traveling on the through-street and a high-speed biker comes to the stop sign on an intersecting road. Stop? Of course not. Blow through the stop sign at full speed, get halfway into the intersection, and then lay the bike over to the right and turn onto the street I'm on.
Why is that a problem? Well, as a defensive driver I cannot assume that this joker is going to turn (he didn't bother to signal one, but that is just another pesky traffic law he's ignoring). He's headed for a direct collision with me, so I have to slam on the brakes just in case. That usually isn't enough to stop before I'd hit him if he doesn't turn, though, so if he manages to hit a stone in the road and his turn becomes a slide -- he's dead. And I'll have been the one to run him over.
And then there's the ones who are actually crossing the street I'm on, and instead of stopping at the stop sign until the through-traffic clears, they jog over into the crosswalk and pretend they are pedestrians -- forcing everyone on the through street to slam on the brakes to stop for them.
Sharing the road means both sides have to share. You have to do things you don't want to do for the safety of everyone, just like I have to.
If the intersection is busy, well, then I stop,
Oh, if only you were the only bicyclist on the road. I've seen too many bikers who ignore everything else at an intersection and blow through the stop. They ignore cars, and they especially ignore pedestrians in crosswalks. If every ped who had to jump out of the way of a biker breaking the law paid me a nickel, I'd be a 1%er.
Plus, well, not making me stop all the time encourages me to bicycle more,
Making me stop all the time is inconvenient for me, too. It wastes gas, so it's bad for the environment. Letting you play chicken with traffic by blowing through a stop sign to make a hard right turn raises my blood pressure, which is bad for my health, and it is potentially deadly for you.
If not having to obey the traffic laws is what compels you to ride a bicycle, then you really don't have the right attitude about bike riding. Expecting special treatment as a vehicle sharing the public streets because that would make your life more pleasant is, well, kind of selfish.
There is no need for an "odometer version". Cars already have odometers. And an odometer version may be in testing, but it will never survive the desire to put higher taxes on people who drive where and when the government doesn't want them to. The use of taxation for social engineering and not just provision of mandatory services is too great in the modern politician and government worker.
No, because that's not all you're tracking. You're tracking the miles traveled *in Oregon*.
Since an explicit goal of this system is to charge higher taxes for congested roads at congested times, it's not just the miles in Oregon that have to be tracked, it is WHICH roads and WHAT times. That demands a GPS and recorded data.
I know an engineer who was working on this kind of system for Oregon a decade ago, and she admitted the data needed to be collected by could not imagine that the government might abuse it.
When you drive your car, I don't benefit.
Please don't ever get lost in the mountains in my area, because my driving to a search to save your ass doesn't benefit you so I won't bother doing it.
It doesn't have to be that way. There could simply be an annual check of your odometer when you get your annual emissions check,
What is an "annual emissions check?"
Yes, if you are going to tax someone on what roads they drive on and when ('congestion fee'), you need to know what roads they drive on and when. An odometer doesn't provide that information.
but really, we could have per mile taxation without big brother intrusions if we as a society would stand up and demand it.
Why would we as a society stand up and demand more taxes?
Why even go high tech? Every year I have to renew my license tags on my birthday. Just report the odometer reading then and pay the appropriate taxes at that time.
Oregon tags (mine) renew every two years, by mail.
It would not take more than 5 minutes for an employee to check an odometer.
It would take much longer than 5 minutes for an employee of DMV to come to my house, break into my garage, and read my odometer.
An odometer cannot report that none (or most) of my miles were on I5 in downtown Portland at 9AM (or 2AM) so it cannot be used to charge a higher tax for use during congested times and places.
You pay a gas tax today for all of those things.
You pay at the pump and then get a refund by filing Form 1220, at least in Oregon. Other states have the same kind of thing.
I can see the benefit of saving those few tax dollars, but at the expense of having The Man attach a GPS tracker to your car? It seems like a no-brainer to me.
Yep. But since knowing which roads and when is an important part of the pricing structure, a GPS will be required.
A large number of people benefit from the truck, but only the passengers benefit from the car.
I'm a search and rescue volunteer enroute to an active search, where we find and extract a lost mushroom hunter -- alive. A week ago I was staff on an overnight training exercise that graduated 13 new SAR volunteers. Three weeks ago I was involved in a lost aircraft search. You say the only person who benefits from my car is myself?
"Drivers will be able to install an odometer device without GPS tracking."
All cars already have a mandated "odometer device". It's installed by the factory.
What that device doesn't record is:
1) where the vehicle was driven. There should be no tax on miles driven on private property.
2) what road the vehicle was on. Charging more for main roads and less for local roads needs this data. and,
3) what time the vehicle was there. Charging a "congestion fee" requires this data.
i.e. an old diesel would be taxed more than a new Euro-5 compliant one.
I.e., the poor who drive older, used cars would be taxed more than the rich who can afford a new car every year.
The big disadvantage was the privacy concerns.
This. I knew someone who was involved with this idea a few years ago, in Oregon, and I could not convince her that to tax someone based on which roads were used at which times a complete log of where the car was and when would have to be kept so the tax could be computed correctly. And so the taxpayer could dispute the tax. You can't point to a GPS log of position and claim "I was driving on my own property which abuts I5, not on I5 at peak time" if there is no GPS log to point at.
And the propensity of government to keep all the data it gets was quite beyond her imagination. Before the idea was killed the last time, (apparently not dead enough) there was some acceptance of the idea that "gee, this would be great data for police to have if they're looking for an abducted child" (i.e., "Amber alerts".) I mean, the public seems accepting of Amber alerts going to their cellphones at all times of the day and no matter where they are. Think of the Children(TM)! From that use, it is just a short step to "any criminal", and then to "any terrorist" (if the latter doesn't precede the former.)
To the later poster who asks about toll roads: Oregon has no toll roads that I know of, and if it did it is usually easy to select a different route if you want to avoid them. Cameras that record your passing are stationary and do not record every place you go and when.
Given the arguments over GPS trackers used by police, and how the argument that it's really no different than a full-time tail was shouted down, I'm amazed that anyone on /. could claim that a full-time government mandated GPS tracker on every car is no different than "toll roads" or "fixed cameras". Keep in mind, those "tax" trackers are no different than the temporary installations that monitor your car on private property and 24/7.
I sent an FOIA request on myself to the NSA for fun/curiosity.
I can understand the reason why someone can ask about themselves, but I don't understand why a third-party request like this hasn't caused more of a reaction. "OMG 19 pages" isn't what I mean.
I mean "the government is collecting info we don't think they should and THEN handing it out to anyone who asks for it." Why should a FOIA request about someone completely unrelated to you be approved? If the government shouldn't collect it, why should they hand it out? (Yeah, I know, He's Dead Jim, but his family isn't.)
The company would be very smart to settle out of court.
I agree. They are in the wrong. My point is that she agreed to work for the pay she was getting (so has no complaint about being on call 24/7 and the company isn't in the wrong for expecting it.) Her mistake was installing the app on her phone before reading the information about the app. When I google "Xora app" today, the first result is for Xora.com which has various links shown, one for "Employee Location Tracking." When you click that link, it takes you to a page that tells you:
Kind of hard to see where every worker is on a Google Map without it tracking where you are, I'd say. Basic info about an app that someone wants you to install on your phone. It's not hidden info like the fact that the cell company tracks the phone already, it's kinda right out there.
She did not agree to the last part when she was hired.
I didn't say she did. You quoted but did not read what I wrote. I said she agreed to them all. I didn't say they all happened at the same time or before she was hired.
She admitted she had no problem being tracked during work.
Majority of employers have it state when you get an update to the employee contract terms, you "Agree to these new terms by continuing to work here.
It's much more direct than that. We know she agreed to install the app because ... she installed the app on her phone.
Not only was it not her phone,
The official court document linked to in the summary says it was her phone.
she removed pre-installed software.
She didn't install the Xora app on her phone until two months after she started working for the company. That's not "pre-installed."
There's no version of the story that says it's her phone. It IS a company phone. RTFA!
The version of the story in the court filing says the app was installed on employee phones and she was told she had to keep her phone on 24/7 etc. That's the official legal version of the story; what ars Technica comes up with is modern journalism.
Being on-call without being compensated should simply be illegal. Agreeing to the requirement is meaningless -
She was compensated, at a rate she agreed to. Note that her complaint is not that she was on call 24/7. Agreeing to the requirement meant she thought it was adequate compensation. You MIGHT have an argument were she unemployed and this was the only job offer and it was take it or starve, but she was being poached from another company. She was lured from another job by the money.
I don't think you can call $7200/mo an inappropriate wage or "abuse", especially for white-collar work. Even were she working a constant 20 hours outside normal hours, that's an average of $28/hr. She's complaining about neither the number of work hours nor the rate of pay.
there are a lot more people desperate to not starve to death in the US than there are jobs for them to work in.
And SHE had TWO jobs. Apparently she's causing someone else to starve to death, according to your hyperbole.
Do we believe arsTechnica or the actual court document?
Being a civil suit, she doesn't even have to convince a majority - just 9 of the 12 jurors.
I do not think that word means what you think it means...
Oh it means what they said. Civil suits only require a simple majority of the jurors to agree with you. Criminal Juries must be 100%, civil juries only require more votes for one side than the other.
Does criminal law define "majority" some way other than "more votes for one side than the other", because that's what it means in standard English.
That's in the Arstechnica article. The actual filing for the lawsuit says the phones were the employee's. Words like "they were required to install an app on their phones."
Tracking app was April. 24/7 was when she was hired.
24/7 on call isn't the same as having an alien tracking probe in your anus like cartman.
I didn't say it was. Read what I actually wrote and not what you want to rant about. The comment I replied to was talking about being on call 24/7, and I thought I made it pretty clear that out of all the things to complain about in this scenario, that's about the least objectionable part. Period.
A school has already gotten in trouble for intruding on students outside of school time through monitoring software on the laptops, so this company is most likely going to get a nasty slap from the judge.
The students did not agree to that as a condition of employment. That makes it different enough not to be a precedent.
A "holodeck" is when you take a deck of cards and mix in a large number of blank index cards. Then pull a few "cards" at random, mix them up with more blank index cards. Do that a few times until there may only be one of the original cards in the deck and you have a "holodeck". Oh, wait, that would be a "homeodeck". I always gets those two confused. Nevermind.
Does it spell out that she was compensated on a 24 hour basis? Didn't think so. F U company, and every other company that requires 24/7 support for 8/5 wages.
$7200/month is pretty good wages, and she knew the 24/7 on call requirement before she took the job. She was, apparently, also working for another company doing the same kind of job. Of all the things to object to, this is about the least objectionable.
The first claims in her case are shaky because she agreed to them all. Use your personal phone for work, check. Have it with you 24/7, check. Install the app so you can be tracked, check. She's pretty much got them by the shorts when it comes to them telling her other employer she was disloyal, though.
Of course, it's hard to understand why any company would let you work for three months for a competitor while they're paying you to work for them.
Was there anything like the Wright Brothers flyer before they created it?
Yes.