Classic Rock is music that come about in the '60s and '70s and continues to be played with just about the same frequency today while music of the '80s, '90s and '00s faded into obscurity, and by all appearances, the '10s will go the same way, and Classic Rock will still be getting airplay after this decades music succumbs to bitrot.
Is he more popular with the 50-60 crowd I take it?
Nah, he's just not very good. Let's take the Rolling Stones as an example. Everybody has heard of them and most people have at least heard a few of their songs, regardless of their age. They are timeless.
Neil Young never had more than a small following and was quickly forgotten by time.
I Think you got that backwards. Rolling Stones get constant airplay on Classic Rock, but they are very forgettable musically. Neil Young is a far, far better musician than any or all of the Rolling Stones. Songs like "Old Man" and "Cinnamon Girl" are timeless. Then there is the harmonies he lent to the compositions of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
I'm sure he sits well with the 50-60 crowd, but I'm only 45, and there are plenty in my age group who like him.
I love the irony of people saying "who is Neil Young" because they are listening to some pop star who in 1 year will be getting less airplay than Neil Young will be getting.
If you think there's nothing you can do on a mobile that can't be done better on a desktop then you are massively compounding the problem and I suggest you try lugging your multi-monitor desktop machine into starbucks so you can run a quick query or look up a quick fact while you drink your coffee.
Well, I don't go to Starbucks, so maybe that is why I don't bother looking up quick facts on my mobile, when I could just look them up on my laptop or desktop when I get back to the office and not only will it take me 1/10th as long to enter the information I want to search for, but the search will come back quicker and the facts will be presented in a more readable fashion.
Traditional rail is also built to support several tons of weight per foot, because it's primarily used for freight transport in the US. The hyperloop plans don't aim to replace freight rail; their target is passenger transport, which means they don't have to support as much weight. When the weight per unit area you need to support is smaller, things get cheaper.
I'm sure the cost savings over having to not carry as much weight is offset by the cost increase of having to deal with increased speed.
I'm quite fine with not seeing the genitals of a man who was streaking through a stadium. But that's still censorship, and we need to acknowledge that, and consider it as such.
No, that's not censorship.
Yes, that is censorship. Censorship is a big boy and is capable of existing without the word government in its definition.
Non-government entities can feel free to censor all they want. But we don't have to change the definition of the word just because some people can't understand the concept that censorship is not always illegal or even always a bad thing.
Notably it is also too expensive on Mars. It may cost $6B here, but it'll cost $6 trillion on Mars (my quick thumbnail estimate).
It won't cost $6 billion here. Land aquisition alone will be in the billions. Terminals will cost multiple millions for small stations and hundreds of millions to billions for the LA and San Francisco terminals. Building the elevated tube system will cost easily 100 times what traditional rail cost, so figure about $80 billion for the tubes. The train capsules will cost millions each.
Compare this to the 40 mile proposed Baltimore to DC maglev route, which at 40 miles is estimated to cost far more than $10 billion. Multiply by 10 and you have $100 billion. But maglev is a known technology, and cheaper than the hyperloop will be, so I figure the hyperloop at the very least is going to be $200 billion.
Last I heard the price per foot of track is $125 so it's going to be around $132m lay the track. Grading, earthwork, tunneling, and anything else that needs to be done to prepare for laying the track would cost extra.
I find it very difficult to believe that a large tube capable of holding a near vacuum is going to be 1/3 cheaper than traditional rail. If anything, I would think it would be 10 to 100 times as expensive as traditional rail. Traditional rail can be from $250-$500 per foot not including land acquisition, crossings, bridges, signalling, sidings, etc.
The trouble is that different situations require different sorts of application designs. Mouse/keyboard and touchscreen are not even remotely equivalent; different things work better or worse on each. Small screens require very different tradeoffs from larger screens or multiple screens. 'Best experience' on a heavily battery constrained device likely involves a variety of very careful restrictions on any resource usage that isn't strictly necessary.
Exactly this.
People don't really want a 'universal app',
While this is true, they unfortunately THINK they do, or at least Management thinks that people want a universal app.
As a developer, I am often asked to make my desktop application work on Mobile. There are many things that just suck on Mobile. You can't display vast amounts of data on a 3 inch screen like you can on a 24 inch monitor. You can't type in data very efficiently on a mobile. Honestly, there is nothing on a mobile that works better than it does on a desktop. A mobile is what you are forced to use if you don't have a desktop handy. But everybody wants your wizbang application that looks and works great on a desktop to be available on a Mobile.
I even play mobile games on my desktop using BlueStacks App Player. I hate the UI on the phone, but it plays great and looks awesome on the desktop.
Buy some real helicopters, then you can get humans there to do something about the problem. You could probably get about 5 well equipped medevac equipped helicopters on the used market for $5.7 million.
5.7 million wouldn't buy you ONE reasonable sized, used, helicopter that was airworthy, much less a medevac equipped one.
You are apparently severely misguided about the prices of used helicopters. The most expensive one on this page is $1.195 million, and happens to be a Medevac equipped helicopter, and all of them are absolutely airworthy. Here is another article in which the NJ police department tried and failed to sell their old Medevac helicopters for $3.3 million each. The NJ Port Authority did manage to sell a 2004 model for $3.3 million and a 1984 model for $1 million. The NJ Police craft we 20 years old (in 2010) and obviously weren't going to sell for what a 6 year old one sold for, but the NJ Police budgeted for $6.6 million in sales anyway and spent the money. They did end up selling an old Bell for $645,000.
This will change as use of robots becomes widespread.
The first industrial robot in use was installed in 1959. 56 years later, industrial robot has not yet become widespread. When should we expect it to become widespread?
Buy some real helicopters, then you can get humans there to do something about the problem. You could probably get about 5 well equipped medevac equipped helicopters on the used market for $5.7 million.
I mean its kinda hard to say if the economics really do make sense or not, but its at least plausible. And frankly, if the location and purpose of use for each drone is available in near-real-time, then its hardly a spying tool, though it could still be used for surveillance in some sense.
The economics do not make sense. They are trying to save money on already sunk costs. Here's the problem:
They say 95% of the fire calls are false alarms. Fine. 95% of the time, their firefighters respond and - nothing. Wasted trip. However, the firefighters were already on duty. They are getting paid whether or not they're on a call. All you did was waste some diesel. So....you say cut the number of firefighters. Ok, problem is when you do have an event, you need all of those firefighters. So....you can't cut them. They're assuming the mean will cover all cases...when they really have to staff for the worst case scenario. Then, supposing you do use the drone for one of those real events, you have now lost that amount of time to respond. (e.g. if the drone takes 4 minutes to fly somewhere, the real equipment will be delayed by that amount of time.) This could be a big deal as a house fire can double in size every 1-2 minutes and a person can drown and suffer brain damage in 4-6 minutes.
Yes, I was firefighter and paramedic for ten years, and I saw this kind of corner-cutting all the time. It will come back to bite them.
Well, I figure that the firefighters and paramedics will still have to respond despite the drone, or they will lose precious minutes. So, the drone just adds another dollar to the equation. There is no way to cost justify the drones. What they really should say is "we want shiny drones".
...We need to figure out how to kill it with regulations so that my big corporate donors can sleep soundly at night.
Good news! We don't have to figure out how to kill it with regulations, because the regulations are already there which clearly state that they cannot do what they are doing. If they want to go ahead and buy medallions or whatever, then they are welcome to operate. The cab companies had to buy medallions. Why should Lyft and Uber be able to perform the same service and then not have to play by the same rules?
I don't know how the development costs were distributed. But that's an issue, usually, for the manufacturer, not the operator.
Development costs were heavily subsidized by a joint venture of French and U.K governments. But the failure to recoup development costs was caused by not selling enough units, due to a lot of buyers backing out when the U.S. would not allow the plane to fly at supersonic speed over U.S. land. The U.S was not the only one to put restrictions on the Concorde, but it was probably the biggest factor in airlines not purchasing more Concordes. The Concordes that were sold were sold to British Airways and Air France again with heavy government subsidies, which did not help recoup costs.
Concorde stopped flying for three reasons. A crash, which was due to debris on the runway, not any fault of the airframe. The 2001 terrorist attacks and the resulting worldwide economic downturn, and the Airbus company, which had evolved from the British Aerospace/BAC developer of the Concorde, decided to stop providing maintenance for the airframe. Up until then, the flights had been profitable, if not wildly so.
Not sure how this summary was approved with no mention of the Concorde. Honest mistake or intentional obfuscation?
Because compared to the Concorde, this little upstart isn't even a flash in the pan. Who would bother to read the article and click on links if they knew in advance that there was nothing to this story?
How have the economics changed that this will be viable where Concorde wasn't?
Concorde made operational profit, but they never recouped development costs. If we can get some dimwitted investors involved to put money up front, and then let the development company go bankrupt and lose all their money, then somebody else (probably the original founders) buy up the hardware for pennies on the dollar, then this thing could actually get to market.
This does appear to be how cell phone infrastructure got spread across the U.S., and a lot of small plane manufacturers have done the cycle several times.
Computers got better, therefore everything gets better at the same rate.
If you are being sarcastic, then I agree with you. We certainly haven't seen huge leaps in fuel efficiency of aircraft in the last 50 years. The 747, introduced way back then, is still produced. Other airframes have come and gone in the interim. We had rockets that went to the moon, but no longer have the technology. We had reusable shuttles 40 years ago, but no longer have them. We had Concorde, and only now someone is trying to recreate a smaller version of it, and who knows if it will even get to market. We had bombers that whose lifespan was, well, 60 years and still counting, while more modern bombers have come and gone. Let's face it, as far as transportation goes, we have de-innovated. Yes, computers have gotten faster, and the gadgets in cars, trucks and planes have improved, but the transportation systems themselves? Stagnant at best and losing ground in many ways.
In the Chicago suburbs, a public transportation option would be at least twice as long in time for a commute.
And free does not make up for the lost time !
I used to take public transportation to work when I worked in downtown Chicago. It ate up an additional 3 hours of my day. At the time I didn't consider it a big deal, but when I look back now I wonder why I allowed going back and forth to work to eat up 1/8th of my day. What a stupid waste of time! Also, if I had to work late then I had to sleep in the office because the trains only run so long and with no car, there was no option to get home except maybe a $200 cab ride. After awhile, I started driving in with a couple of coworkers. The monthly cost for the garage and gas was cheaper than public transportation and it took about half as long to get to work, and we could work more flexible hours.
Where I live now, public transportation would take 3 hours each way, including the 30 minute walk to the nearest bus stop, and if I caught the earliest bus, I would be late for work, and I would have to leave work early in order to catch the last bus that would get me home in the evening. In order to work the hours required by my job, I would literally only be able to visit my home during the weekend. I would actually have to walk home Friday night into Saturday morning after leaving work after the buses start running, and in order to get to work on time on Monday, I would have to start walking from my house at 3:30 in the morning. Then the rest of the week, I would only be able to walk 3/4 of the way home before having to turn around and walk back to work.
There is no "cure culture". Medicine is all about treating the symptoms, hiding the symptoms, masking the symptoms, naming the disease after the symptoms. The doctors don't know what is wrong with you. They tell you you have "Red spots on arms and upset stomach" disease, but that is not a disease, those are just symptoms, and they won't cure you of the disease because they don't know what is wrong with you. Instead, they will put you on medicine, that will hide those symptoms...until you stop taking your medicine, and then the symptoms are right back again. My grandmother was having seizures, so they put her on anti-seizure medication. Do they know what was causing the seizures? No. Do they care? No. They just put her on medicine that she has to take for the rest of her life, and as long as she takes it every single day, she won't have seizures. This is not Medical Science.
Treating symptoms should only ever be a short term comfort solution while Medical Science looks for a cure. It should ALWAYS be all about the cure. Article is exactly wrong.
Too much traffic is causing accidents, but limiting hired vehicles based on medallions system is EVIL. Well, evil for new startups who want to do livery services. The new startups are just fine with existing companies being limited by the medallion system.
You are wrong. The people they work next to are not contractors. They are employees of contracting houses. There is a big difference. I have worked as a 1099 before and as a 'contractor' for a contracting house. The 'contractor' things was not a 1099 gig, it was an employee/employer relationship.
I'm confused. You say that there are no contractors, there are only employees of contracting houses. Yet you go on to say that you have been both a contractor (paid on 1099) and you have been a contractor (paid W2 by a contracting house).
Now you were probably an employee of your own contracting house when you were paid 1099. Either that or you had another employee/employer job. The government gets pissy if somebody somewhere isn't paying into the Social Security Ponzi scheme.
Uber drivers are independant conractors. Obviously. Why is there even any question?
There is a question because unlike independent contractors, they cannot:
Set their own rates.
Choose to turn down 99 out of 100 jobs if they so desire.
Work simultaneously for other organizations.
Choose the method by which they will perform the delivery. By car, rickshaw, train, or whatever so long as they do it within the negotiated time and for the negotiated price.
3. EIN on the 1099? Contractor. Social Security Number on the 1099? Employee.
If you are getting a 1099, then you are a contractor. An employee gets a W-2. If you are getting a 1099 with a SSN on it, it could be that you are "self-employed" which allows you to use your SSN as your EIN. But for a very small price ($25 in my state), you can set up an LLC which will provide you much more protection of personal assets.
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What's classic rock?
Classic Rock is music that come about in the '60s and '70s and continues to be played with just about the same frequency today while music of the '80s, '90s and '00s faded into obscurity, and by all appearances, the '10s will go the same way, and Classic Rock will still be getting airplay after this decades music succumbs to bitrot.
Is he more popular with the 50-60 crowd I take it?
Nah, he's just not very good. Let's take the Rolling Stones as an example. Everybody has heard of them and most people have at least heard a few of their songs, regardless of their age. They are timeless.
Neil Young never had more than a small following and was quickly forgotten by time.
I Think you got that backwards. Rolling Stones get constant airplay on Classic Rock, but they are very forgettable musically. Neil Young is a far, far better musician than any or all of the Rolling Stones. Songs like "Old Man" and "Cinnamon Girl" are timeless. Then there is the harmonies he lent to the compositions of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
I'm sure he sits well with the 50-60 crowd, but I'm only 45, and there are plenty in my age group who like him.
I love the irony of people saying "who is Neil Young" because they are listening to some pop star who in 1 year will be getting less airplay than Neil Young will be getting.
If you think there's nothing you can do on a mobile that can't be done better on a desktop then you are massively compounding the problem and I suggest you try lugging your multi-monitor desktop machine into starbucks so you can run a quick query or look up a quick fact while you drink your coffee.
Well, I don't go to Starbucks, so maybe that is why I don't bother looking up quick facts on my mobile, when I could just look them up on my laptop or desktop when I get back to the office and not only will it take me 1/10th as long to enter the information I want to search for, but the search will come back quicker and the facts will be presented in a more readable fashion.
Traditional rail is also built to support several tons of weight per foot, because it's primarily used for freight transport in the US. The hyperloop plans don't aim to replace freight rail; their target is passenger transport, which means they don't have to support as much weight. When the weight per unit area you need to support is smaller, things get cheaper.
I'm sure the cost savings over having to not carry as much weight is offset by the cost increase of having to deal with increased speed.
I'm quite fine with not seeing the genitals of a man who was streaking through a stadium. But that's still censorship, and we need to acknowledge that, and consider it as such.
No, that's not censorship.
Yes, that is censorship. Censorship is a big boy and is capable of existing without the word government in its definition.
Non-government entities can feel free to censor all they want. But we don't have to change the definition of the word just because some people can't understand the concept that censorship is not always illegal or even always a bad thing.
Notably it is also too expensive on Mars. It may cost $6B here, but it'll cost $6 trillion on Mars (my quick thumbnail estimate).
It won't cost $6 billion here. Land aquisition alone will be in the billions. Terminals will cost multiple millions for small stations and hundreds of millions to billions for the LA and San Francisco terminals. Building the elevated tube system will cost easily 100 times what traditional rail cost, so figure about $80 billion for the tubes. The train capsules will cost millions each.
Compare this to the 40 mile proposed Baltimore to DC maglev route, which at 40 miles is estimated to cost far more than $10 billion. Multiply by 10 and you have $100 billion. But maglev is a known technology, and cheaper than the hyperloop will be, so I figure the hyperloop at the very least is going to be $200 billion.
Last I heard the price per foot of track is $125 so it's going to be around $132m lay the track. Grading, earthwork, tunneling, and anything else that needs to be done to prepare for laying the track would cost extra.
I find it very difficult to believe that a large tube capable of holding a near vacuum is going to be 1/3 cheaper than traditional rail. If anything, I would think it would be 10 to 100 times as expensive as traditional rail. Traditional rail can be from $250-$500 per foot not including land acquisition, crossings, bridges, signalling, sidings, etc.
The trouble is that different situations require different sorts of application designs. Mouse/keyboard and touchscreen are not even remotely equivalent; different things work better or worse on each. Small screens require very different tradeoffs from larger screens or multiple screens. 'Best experience' on a heavily battery constrained device likely involves a variety of very careful restrictions on any resource usage that isn't strictly necessary.
Exactly this.
People don't really want a 'universal app',
While this is true, they unfortunately THINK they do, or at least Management thinks that people want a universal app.
As a developer, I am often asked to make my desktop application work on Mobile. There are many things that just suck on Mobile. You can't display vast amounts of data on a 3 inch screen like you can on a 24 inch monitor. You can't type in data very efficiently on a mobile. Honestly, there is nothing on a mobile that works better than it does on a desktop. A mobile is what you are forced to use if you don't have a desktop handy. But everybody wants your wizbang application that looks and works great on a desktop to be available on a Mobile.
I even play mobile games on my desktop using BlueStacks App Player. I hate the UI on the phone, but it plays great and looks awesome on the desktop.
Buy some real helicopters, then you can get humans there to do something about the problem. You could probably get about 5 well equipped medevac equipped helicopters on the used market for $5.7 million.
5.7 million wouldn't buy you ONE reasonable sized, used, helicopter that was airworthy, much less a medevac equipped one.
You are apparently severely misguided about the prices of used helicopters. The most expensive one on this page is $1.195 million, and happens to be a Medevac equipped helicopter, and all of them are absolutely airworthy.
Here is another article in which the NJ police department tried and failed to sell their old Medevac helicopters for $3.3 million each. The NJ Port Authority did manage to sell a 2004 model for $3.3 million and a 1984 model for $1 million. The NJ Police craft we 20 years old (in 2010) and obviously weren't going to sell for what a 6 year old one sold for, but the NJ Police budgeted for $6.6 million in sales anyway and spent the money. They did end up selling an old Bell for $645,000.
This will change as use of robots becomes widespread.
The first industrial robot in use was installed in 1959. 56 years later, industrial robot has not yet become widespread. When should we expect it to become widespread?
Buy some real helicopters, then you can get humans there to do something about the problem. You could probably get about 5 well equipped medevac equipped helicopters on the used market for $5.7 million.
I mean its kinda hard to say if the economics really do make sense or not, but its at least plausible. And frankly, if the location and purpose of use for each drone is available in near-real-time, then its hardly a spying tool, though it could still be used for surveillance in some sense.
The economics do not make sense. They are trying to save money on already sunk costs. Here's the problem:
They say 95% of the fire calls are false alarms. Fine. 95% of the time, their firefighters respond and - nothing. Wasted trip. However, the firefighters were already on duty. They are getting paid whether or not they're on a call. All you did was waste some diesel. So....you say cut the number of firefighters. Ok, problem is when you do have an event, you need all of those firefighters. So....you can't cut them. They're assuming the mean will cover all cases...when they really have to staff for the worst case scenario. Then, supposing you do use the drone for one of those real events, you have now lost that amount of time to respond. (e.g. if the drone takes 4 minutes to fly somewhere, the real equipment will be delayed by that amount of time.) This could be a big deal as a house fire can double in size every 1-2 minutes and a person can drown and suffer brain damage in 4-6 minutes.
Yes, I was firefighter and paramedic for ten years, and I saw this kind of corner-cutting all the time. It will come back to bite them.
Well, I figure that the firefighters and paramedics will still have to respond despite the drone, or they will lose precious minutes. So, the drone just adds another dollar to the equation. There is no way to cost justify the drones. What they really should say is "we want shiny drones".
...We need to figure out how to kill it with regulations so that my big corporate donors can sleep soundly at night.
Good news! We don't have to figure out how to kill it with regulations, because the regulations are already there which clearly state that they cannot do what they are doing. If they want to go ahead and buy medallions or whatever, then they are welcome to operate. The cab companies had to buy medallions. Why should Lyft and Uber be able to perform the same service and then not have to play by the same rules?
I don't know how the development costs were distributed. But that's an issue, usually, for the manufacturer, not the operator.
Development costs were heavily subsidized by a joint venture of French and U.K governments. But the failure to recoup development costs was caused by not selling enough units, due to a lot of buyers backing out when the U.S. would not allow the plane to fly at supersonic speed over U.S. land. The U.S was not the only one to put restrictions on the Concorde, but it was probably the biggest factor in airlines not purchasing more Concordes. The Concordes that were sold were sold to British Airways and Air France again with heavy government subsidies, which did not help recoup costs.
Concorde stopped flying for three reasons. A crash, which was due to debris on the runway, not any fault of the airframe. The 2001 terrorist attacks and the resulting worldwide economic downturn, and the Airbus company, which had evolved from the British Aerospace/BAC developer of the Concorde, decided to stop providing maintenance for the airframe. Up until then, the flights had been profitable, if not wildly so.
Not sure how this summary was approved with no mention of the Concorde. Honest mistake or intentional obfuscation?
Because compared to the Concorde, this little upstart isn't even a flash in the pan. Who would bother to read the article and click on links if they knew in advance that there was nothing to this story?
How have the economics changed that this will be viable where Concorde wasn't?
Concorde made operational profit, but they never recouped development costs. If we can get some dimwitted investors involved to put money up front, and then let the development company go bankrupt and lose all their money, then somebody else (probably the original founders) buy up the hardware for pennies on the dollar, then this thing could actually get to market.
This does appear to be how cell phone infrastructure got spread across the U.S., and a lot of small plane manufacturers have done the cycle several times.
Computers got better, therefore everything gets better at the same rate.
If you are being sarcastic, then I agree with you. We certainly haven't seen huge leaps in fuel efficiency of aircraft in the last 50 years. The 747, introduced way back then, is still produced. Other airframes have come and gone in the interim. We had rockets that went to the moon, but no longer have the technology. We had reusable shuttles 40 years ago, but no longer have them. We had Concorde, and only now someone is trying to recreate a smaller version of it, and who knows if it will even get to market. We had bombers that whose lifespan was, well, 60 years and still counting, while more modern bombers have come and gone. Let's face it, as far as transportation goes, we have de-innovated. Yes, computers have gotten faster, and the gadgets in cars, trucks and planes have improved, but the transportation systems themselves? Stagnant at best and losing ground in many ways.
In the Chicago suburbs, a public transportation option would be at least twice as long in time for a commute. And free does not make up for the lost time !
I used to take public transportation to work when I worked in downtown Chicago. It ate up an additional 3 hours of my day. At the time I didn't consider it a big deal, but when I look back now I wonder why I allowed going back and forth to work to eat up 1/8th of my day. What a stupid waste of time! Also, if I had to work late then I had to sleep in the office because the trains only run so long and with no car, there was no option to get home except maybe a $200 cab ride. After awhile, I started driving in with a couple of coworkers. The monthly cost for the garage and gas was cheaper than public transportation and it took about half as long to get to work, and we could work more flexible hours.
Where I live now, public transportation would take 3 hours each way, including the 30 minute walk to the nearest bus stop, and if I caught the earliest bus, I would be late for work, and I would have to leave work early in order to catch the last bus that would get me home in the evening. In order to work the hours required by my job, I would literally only be able to visit my home during the weekend. I would actually have to walk home Friday night into Saturday morning after leaving work after the buses start running, and in order to get to work on time on Monday, I would have to start walking from my house at 3:30 in the morning. Then the rest of the week, I would only be able to walk 3/4 of the way home before having to turn around and walk back to work.
There is no "cure culture". Medicine is all about treating the symptoms, hiding the symptoms, masking the symptoms, naming the disease after the symptoms. The doctors don't know what is wrong with you. They tell you you have "Red spots on arms and upset stomach" disease, but that is not a disease, those are just symptoms, and they won't cure you of the disease because they don't know what is wrong with you. Instead, they will put you on medicine, that will hide those symptoms...until you stop taking your medicine, and then the symptoms are right back again. My grandmother was having seizures, so they put her on anti-seizure medication. Do they know what was causing the seizures? No. Do they care? No. They just put her on medicine that she has to take for the rest of her life, and as long as she takes it every single day, she won't have seizures. This is not Medical Science.
Treating symptoms should only ever be a short term comfort solution while Medical Science looks for a cure. It should ALWAYS be all about the cure. Article is exactly wrong.
Too much traffic is causing accidents, but limiting hired vehicles based on medallions system is EVIL. Well, evil for new startups who want to do livery services. The new startups are just fine with existing companies being limited by the medallion system.
I have no problem with this as long as they teach the "science" of homeopathy.
You are wrong. The people they work next to are not contractors. They are employees of contracting houses. There is a big difference. I have worked as a 1099 before and as a 'contractor' for a contracting house. The 'contractor' things was not a 1099 gig, it was an employee/employer relationship.
I'm confused. You say that there are no contractors, there are only employees of contracting houses. Yet you go on to say that you have been both a contractor (paid on 1099) and you have been a contractor (paid W2 by a contracting house).
Now you were probably an employee of your own contracting house when you were paid 1099. Either that or you had another employee/employer job. The government gets pissy if somebody somewhere isn't paying into the Social Security Ponzi scheme.
Uber drivers are independant conractors. Obviously. Why is there even any question?
There is a question because unlike independent contractors, they cannot:
Set their own rates.
Choose to turn down 99 out of 100 jobs if they so desire.
Work simultaneously for other organizations.
Choose the method by which they will perform the delivery. By car, rickshaw, train, or whatever so long as they do it within the negotiated time and for the negotiated price.
3. EIN on the 1099? Contractor. Social Security Number on the 1099? Employee.
If you are getting a 1099, then you are a contractor. An employee gets a W-2. If you are getting a 1099 with a SSN on it, it could be that you are "self-employed" which allows you to use your SSN as your EIN. But for a very small price ($25 in my state), you can set up an LLC which will provide you much more protection of personal assets.
Maybe in the made up universe in which Star Wars exists, there isn't a great deal of racial and sexual diversity.