This is ok as long as society either 1. Stops increasing the population and/or 2. Redistributes wealth so that the new unemployed can live and find creative and entertaining ways to spend their lives.
The study concluded that productivity increased while hours worked stayed the same. As the human population grows and automation increases, it's not enough that jobs are not lost. New jobs must be created.
In the absence of robots, the higher level of production would have meant new jobs, but that is not longer the case. In effect, a job not created is a job lost.
Moridineas : "LIght rail seems unlikely to substantially change any of the numbers"
There are two reason why light rail matters: 1. You are correct about suburbanization in Durham and Chapel Hill (Not in Carrboro because it is built out) As population and traffic increases, travel slows down on roads. But light rail does not slow down as passenger volumes increase. It's easy to add more cars to the train. So the more pressure there is for transportation, the bigger advantage light rail has. Light rail gets MORE economical as demand increases.
2. Development is already beginning to aggregate around the announced light rail stations, even though the system will not begin to operate until 2026. If development is randomly dispersed, centralization of transportation is difficult. But if you plan your transportation system in advance rather than just reacting to the sprawl, development will adjust to maximize use of transit.
I frequently ride public transit in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. It is the largest fare free system in the US. It is used by many people but growth in usage depends on many factors. Park and Ride lots make a big difference for people who live outside of town and must drive to get even close to their destination. Sidewalks make a difference because people who live close enough to walk to a bus stop have to have a safe place to walk. The Chapel Hill buses have bike carriers on the front so that bike riders can take the bus for part of their trip.
But one of the biggest factor is how easy it is to find parking. Cities use a huge amount of their space just to store cars during the day. The more expensive and hard to find parking becomes, the more people will use free public transit.
And all of this takes time. People have to adjust to the new reality of bus transportation being easier and cheaper than owning and driving a car. Over time, people will make decisions about where to live based in part on the presence of public transit. And if businesses also locate in areas served by transit, then it's easier for people to live and work on a transit line.
" 1099 contractors often work the same hours and conditions as employees, in a desk next to employees, indistinguishable from employees, for some fixed duration."
I'm aware that happens lgw, but that's not what the law says. So it is a game. In any particular state, depending on the political leanings of the legislature or the opinion of the current US Atty. Gen, the "contracting company" may get away with it for awhile. But the law and the clear meaning of the words "contractor" and "employee" make clear what a farce this is.
" the time & place are agreed upon between contractor & client on a per-instance basis."
If the "contractor" is working on a defined time and place basis for the same client (Uber) over and over and does NOT work for any other client (Lyft) , then that "contractor" is an employee.
Based on your definition, there are no employees at all anywhere. If you are a bank teller and you agree about time and place of each customer interaction on a per-instance basis, are you a contractor? I'm sure banks could create an app that would direct a customer to the next teller if you didn't accept the assignment. But that's not the meaning of "contractor".
If instead you are an employee of a bank teller company, they could provide your services to the bank on a contractor basis. But you, yourself would not be the contractor.
Straif, if you were working on my kitchen as a contractor, you would not continue to work on my kitchen after the work was finished. You would do a particular piece of work and move on. That is a sign of a contractor. Uber drivers finish a piece of work (driving a customer to a location) and then take another piece of work from Uber and another and another. That is a sign of an employee.
The critical point is that the driver is working for Uber and not the customer. So the driver has persistent employment with Uber.
Aaden42: "The time & place situation muddies the contractor status, but that's not unheard of in 1099. "I need this done by 5pm!" is still a valid 1099 gig. (You can bet you're getting my "you pissed me off and I don't like you" rate, but...) That's the time covered. Say I'm contracting to do hardware maintenance for a company, then it's, "We need you here by 5pm!" Time & place, but still clearly contractor status."
If the employer tells you every day that you need to be there at 5 PM, then you are an employee. If your continued association with the employer is dependent on constantly meeting a time and place requirement, you are an employee. I think, rather than showing that Uber drivers are contractors, you are showing that many supposed contractors are really not contractors at all. This is a common game played by employers who don't want to pay social security, workers comp, minimum wage, etc. But it's not working in the courts. That's why Uber is now calling for a 3rd classification.
If a driver accepts a particular piece of work (i.e. drive a particular customer), that work must be done at a time and place which is defined by Uber. A contractor would be able to do the work at the time and place of the contractors choosing. That's why car rides don't fit the contractor model.
The illusion that the assignment is coming from the customer is part of the confusion. The assignment comes from Uber via the app. Yes, a driver can accept for reject a particular piece of work, but the time and place (and the standards that apply to the driving) are all decided by Uber.
If you want to test my logic, just imaging that an Uber driver accepts the piece of work but then decides that he/she will perform the work half an hour later and will drive to a different place that that requested by Uber. If that is not ok, then this is not contractor work. The driver is an employee.
What you say is true gcnaddict. But at an even more fundamental level, the app which is used by the driver is controlled by Uber. The customer may use an app to submit their request to Uber but it is Uber that passes that to the driver. There is no direct connection between customer and driver. If there were, Uber could be cut out of the revenue stream. If Uber takes the money, Uber must take responsibility for the work assignment. And if Uber is responsible for the work assignment (time and place), the driver is not a contractor.
There is no reason why Uber can't have work rules for employee drivers that fit the current Uber business model. They just don't want to pay for benefits and offer employment protection like unemployment compensation and minimum wage. Uber wants to take the profits while transferring all the risk to the driver.
There is no question that the current taxi system is a relic of another time and should be dismantled. But that can be done without dis-empowering the workers. The current trend in the courts is to classify drivers as employees rather than contractors since it is Uber that decides (via their app) when and where the work can be done. A contractor is free to decide when and where the work is done. So Uber does not fit the contractor model.
They want to make rhino horn so they are sequencing the genes? These two ideas have almost nothing to do with each other. If they were raising funds for chemical analysis of horn material or for purchasing 3D printers, it might make sense. They are unlikely to get much helpful information from a genetic analysis that will help with making fake horns. Seems like the person who posted this story was not paying attention.
It's a good idea to contact the credit reporting agencies and place a security freeze on your accounts. That prevents anyone from taking out loans etc using your personal information. You can temporarily lift the freeze for a particular company if you need to allow a credit check for your own purposes.
You can use Hangouts for Google Voice calls without moving SMS to Hangouts. Just keep the SMS messages in Gmail. They appear as emails and you can reply to them as emails. The only trick is that to initiate a new SMS you have to go to https://www.google.com/voice#s... but after that first one, all the rest are treated as emails.
Apparently the human mind is also lacking in the grammar department. " bequeathed unto we humans" contains a prepositional phrase, the object of which should be in the... wait for it.... objective case. Thus the correct version is "bequeathed unto us humans". Get the simple stuff right and the more complex will follow.
Yeah, judges are sloppy sometimes. Copyright "holder" would be a better term. In our super-capitalist country, people are conditioned to think in terms of property and ownership. The common good gets short shrift.
And this is the problem with industry thinking. It is NOT stealing. Copyrights, patents, and trademarks are separate types of law. They are NOT property law. If they were, we would not need a separate part of the Constitution (Art. 1, Sec 8) to define what they mean.
Violating copyright is NOT stealing because the copyright is NOT property. The term "intellectual property" is an intentional obfuscation designed to blur the difference between universal ideas of property ownership and the proposition that ideas can be owned. Ideas can NOT be owned. Copyrights are just temporary monopolies for the purpose of encouraging the arts and sciences. They do NOT exist because "Hey, that's mine". They do not exist for the benefit of the copyright holder. They exist for the benefit of society as a whole. Don't believe me? Read Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution.
"Hearing 'White cop kills yet another unarmed black man' is enough."
Absolutely not. Cops have been killing unarmed black men for a long, long time. It is only now, when video is frequently available and the media has decided to pursue the matter, that we see a national awakening to the problem. It is hard for most Americans to imagine what it's like to be a young black man living under the control of a brutal police force. We all want to believe that the police are there to protect and serve. It is only when we can see the evil with our own eyes that it becomes real and becomes intolerable.
It's 8 years old. I don't know if you can still buy them. It has had one battery change about 3 years ago and works great. It's a CDMA phone on the Verizon network. I pay $5.94 (including tax and fees) per month for 20 minutes of talk time. I have disabled voice mail and text messaging on the phone. So the phone rings and I talk, but not for long. In an emergency I can make calls... short calls. That's all I need in a mobile phone.
I should mention that I have a google voice number that rings my cell phone and my computer (Google Talk/ Hangouts). With a Plantronics headset, that computer-phone is the best sound quality I've ever had on a phone call. And it's free assuming you already have a wifi connection. Google records voice mail and allows free texting. So I have all the features of a quality smart phone for a very low cost.
Cooper tried to split the difference by being against Amendment 1 banning gay marriage and being against gay marriage at the same time. The Attorney General is charged with upholding the law. The highest law is the US Constitution and the NC Constitution makes that clear. After the Windsor decision, there was no excuse for any state official to defer to state law because it was clear that the US Constitution (equal protection and due process clauses) confer equal rights on everyone. And state law did not prevent the Attorneys General from Colorado and other similarly situated states from moving ahead on gay marriage.
I'm a Democrat living in North Carolina. Roy Cooper is the Democratic Attorney General who plans to run for Governor in two years. He is interested in campaign contributions from the telecom industry. That's why he opposes municipal broadband even when private companies have no intention of offering it to an area. He thinks regular voters are not paying attention so there is only upside for him in this. This is the same Att. Gen. Cooper who opposed gay marriage in NC until the courts forced it to happen. He is not impressing me. Hope he has some competition in the 2017 Democratic Primary for Governor.
becasue you love peace and quiet, well screw you. Is it ok to hit folks in low population areas with a shocking, loud noise. Helpful hint: NO, it is not.
what percentage of valid mobile 911 calls are made from NIS phones? Strangely, that number does not appear in the federal report. Saying that 30% of NIS calls are valid focuses on the problem. But if 1% (or more) of valid mobile 911 calls come from NIS phones, that is a valuable service that definitely should not be terminated without a plan for cost-free replacement.
Also, the blather about how inexpensive mobile phones are is seriously flawed. I recently dropped my full featured Verizon plan and changed instead to a minimal pre-paid plan. What I discovered is that Verizon plays lots of dirty tricks to cheat poor people of their money. For example, they tell you that you must pay monthly, but what they mean is every 30 days. If you set up auto-pay via credit card based on their web site, you will be ok until there is a month with 31 days. Then they cancel your service and seize the balance in your account, which could be hundreds of dollars. Even if you owe only $5, they take all the money in your account.
If you read the Linux Kernel Mailing List http://lkml.org/ for a while, you will see why Linux was successful. Over and over again, Linus Torvalds over-rides the antics of his minions and explains to them (again) that the changes they made must be backed out because they break something that users actually need. Linux is elegant and beautiful, but not just because it's a work of art. Linux is the most functional piece of code in existence. It is the beauty of function.
Slashdot Mirror
This is ok as long as society either
1. Stops increasing the population and/or
2. Redistributes wealth so that the new unemployed can live and find creative and entertaining ways to spend their lives.
else: Revolution
The study concluded that productivity increased while hours worked stayed the same. As the human population grows and automation increases, it's not enough that jobs are not lost. New jobs must be created.
In the absence of robots, the higher level of production would have meant new jobs, but that is not longer the case. In effect, a job not created is a job lost.
Moridineas : "LIght rail seems unlikely to substantially change any of the numbers"
There are two reason why light rail matters:
1. You are correct about suburbanization in Durham and Chapel Hill (Not in Carrboro because it is built out)
As population and traffic increases, travel slows down on roads. But light rail does not slow down as passenger volumes increase. It's easy to add more cars to the train. So the more pressure there is for transportation, the bigger advantage light rail has. Light rail gets MORE economical as demand increases.
2. Development is already beginning to aggregate around the announced light rail stations, even though the system will not begin to operate until 2026. If development is randomly dispersed, centralization of transportation is difficult. But if you plan your transportation system in advance rather than just reacting to the sprawl, development will adjust to maximize use of transit.
http://ourtransitfuture.com/pr...
I frequently ride public transit in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. It is the largest fare free system in the US. It is used by many people but growth in usage depends on many factors. Park and Ride lots make a big difference for people who live outside of town and must drive to get even close to their destination. Sidewalks make a difference because people who live close enough to walk to a bus stop have to have a safe place to walk. The Chapel Hill buses have bike carriers on the front so that bike riders can take the bus for part of their trip.
But one of the biggest factor is how easy it is to find parking. Cities use a huge amount of their space just to store cars during the day. The more expensive and hard to find parking becomes, the more people will use free public transit.
And all of this takes time. People have to adjust to the new reality of bus transportation being easier and cheaper than owning and driving a car. Over time, people will make decisions about where to live based in part on the presence of public transit. And if businesses also locate in areas served by transit, then it's easier for people to live and work on a transit line.
Your comments remind me of Julia Roberts in the film "Pretty Woman".
"I say where, I say when, I say who." Yep, that's a contractor alright. :)
" 1099 contractors often work the same hours and conditions as employees, in a desk next to employees, indistinguishable from employees, for some fixed duration."
I'm aware that happens lgw, but that's not what the law says. So it is a game. In any particular state, depending on the political leanings of the legislature or the opinion of the current US Atty. Gen, the "contracting company" may get away with it for awhile. But the law and the clear meaning of the words "contractor" and "employee" make clear what a farce this is.
" the time & place are agreed upon between contractor & client on a per-instance basis."
If the "contractor" is working on a defined time and place basis for the same client (Uber) over and over and does NOT work for any other client (Lyft) , then that "contractor" is an employee.
Based on your definition, there are no employees at all anywhere. If you are a bank teller and you agree about time and place of each customer interaction on a per-instance basis, are you a contractor? I'm sure banks could create an app that would direct a customer to the next teller if you didn't accept the assignment. But that's not the meaning of "contractor".
If instead you are an employee of a bank teller company, they could provide your services to the bank on a contractor basis. But you, yourself would not be the contractor.
Straif, if you were working on my kitchen as a contractor, you would not continue to work on my kitchen after the work was finished. You would do a particular piece of work and move on. That is a sign of a contractor. Uber drivers finish a piece of work (driving a customer to a location) and then take another piece of work from Uber and another and another. That is a sign of an employee.
The critical point is that the driver is working for Uber and not the customer. So the driver has persistent employment with Uber.
Aaden42: "The time & place situation muddies the contractor status, but that's not unheard of in 1099. "I need this done by 5pm!" is still a valid 1099 gig. (You can bet you're getting my "you pissed me off and I don't like you" rate, but...) That's the time covered. Say I'm contracting to do hardware maintenance for a company, then it's, "We need you here by 5pm!" Time & place, but still clearly contractor status."
If the employer tells you every day that you need to be there at 5 PM, then you are an employee. If your continued association with the employer is dependent on constantly meeting a time and place requirement, you are an employee. I think, rather than showing that Uber drivers are contractors, you are showing that many supposed contractors are really not contractors at all. This is a common game played by employers who don't want to pay social security, workers comp, minimum wage, etc. But it's not working in the courts. That's why Uber is now calling for a 3rd classification.
If a driver accepts a particular piece of work (i.e. drive a particular customer), that work must be done at a time and place which is defined by Uber. A contractor would be able to do the work at the time and place of the contractors choosing. That's why car rides don't fit the contractor model.
The illusion that the assignment is coming from the customer is part of the confusion. The assignment comes from Uber via the app. Yes, a driver can accept for reject a particular piece of work, but the time and place (and the standards that apply to the driving) are all decided by Uber.
If you want to test my logic, just imaging that an Uber driver accepts the piece of work but then decides that he/she will perform the work half an hour later and will drive to a different place that that requested by Uber. If that is not ok, then this is not contractor work. The driver is an employee.
What you say is true gcnaddict. But at an even more fundamental level, the app which is used by the driver is controlled by Uber. The customer may use an app to submit their request to Uber but it is Uber that passes that to the driver. There is no direct connection between customer and driver. If there were, Uber could be cut out of the revenue stream. If Uber takes the money, Uber must take responsibility for the work assignment. And if Uber is responsible for the work assignment (time and place), the driver is not a contractor.
There is no reason why Uber can't have work rules for employee drivers that fit the current Uber business model. They just don't want to pay for benefits and offer employment protection like unemployment compensation and minimum wage. Uber wants to take the profits while transferring all the risk to the driver.
There is no question that the current taxi system is a relic of another time and should be dismantled. But that can be done without dis-empowering the workers. The current trend in the courts is to classify drivers as employees rather than contractors since it is Uber that decides (via their app) when and where the work can be done. A contractor is free to decide when and where the work is done. So Uber does not fit the contractor model.
They want to make rhino horn so they are sequencing the genes? These two ideas have almost nothing to do with each other. If they were raising funds for chemical analysis of horn material or for purchasing 3D printers, it might make sense. They are unlikely to get much helpful information from a genetic analysis that will help with making fake horns. Seems like the person who posted this story was not paying attention.
It's a good idea to contact the credit reporting agencies and place a security freeze on your accounts. That prevents anyone from taking out loans etc using your personal information. You can temporarily lift the freeze for a particular company if you need to allow a credit check for your own purposes.
You can use Hangouts for Google Voice calls without moving SMS to Hangouts. Just keep the SMS messages in Gmail. They appear as emails and you can reply to them as emails. The only trick is that to initiate a new SMS you have to go to https://www.google.com/voice#s... but after that first one, all the rest are treated as emails.
Apparently the human mind is also lacking in the grammar department. " bequeathed unto we humans" contains a prepositional phrase, the object of which should be in the ... wait for it.... objective case. Thus the correct version is "bequeathed unto us humans". Get the simple stuff right and the more complex will follow.
Yeah, judges are sloppy sometimes. Copyright "holder" would be a better term. In our super-capitalist country, people are conditioned to think in terms of property and ownership. The common good gets short shrift.
And this is the problem with industry thinking. It is NOT stealing. Copyrights, patents, and trademarks are separate types of law. They are NOT property law. If they were, we would not need a separate part of the Constitution (Art. 1, Sec 8) to define what they mean.
Violating copyright is NOT stealing because the copyright is NOT property. The term "intellectual property" is an intentional obfuscation designed to blur the difference between universal ideas of property ownership and the proposition that ideas can be owned. Ideas can NOT be owned. Copyrights are just temporary monopolies for the purpose of encouraging the arts and sciences. They do NOT exist because "Hey, that's mine". They do not exist for the benefit of the copyright holder. They exist for the benefit of society as a whole. Don't believe me? Read Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution.
"Hearing 'White cop kills yet another unarmed black man' is enough."
Absolutely not. Cops have been killing unarmed black men for a long, long time. It is only now, when video is frequently available and the media has decided to pursue the matter, that we see a national awakening to the problem. It is hard for most Americans to imagine what it's like to be a young black man living under the control of a brutal police force. We all want to believe that the police are there to protect and serve. It is only when we can see the evil with our own eyes that it becomes real and becomes intolerable.
It's 8 years old. I don't know if you can still buy them. It has had one battery change about 3 years ago and works great. It's a CDMA phone on the Verizon network. I pay $5.94 (including tax and fees) per month for 20 minutes of talk time. I have disabled voice mail and text messaging on the phone. So the phone rings and I talk, but not for long. In an emergency I can make calls... short calls. That's all I need in a mobile phone.
I should mention that I have a google voice number that rings my cell phone and my computer (Google Talk/ Hangouts). With a Plantronics headset, that computer-phone is the best sound quality I've ever had on a phone call. And it's free assuming you already have a wifi connection. Google records voice mail and allows free texting. So I have all the features of a quality smart phone for a very low cost.
Cooper tried to split the difference by being against Amendment 1 banning gay marriage and being against gay marriage at the same time. The Attorney General is charged with upholding the law. The highest law is the US Constitution and the NC Constitution makes that clear. After the Windsor decision, there was no excuse for any state official to defer to state law because it was clear that the US Constitution (equal protection and due process clauses) confer equal rights on everyone. And state law did not prevent the Attorneys General from Colorado and other similarly situated states from moving ahead on gay marriage.
I'm a Democrat living in North Carolina. Roy Cooper is the Democratic Attorney General who plans to run for Governor in two years. He is interested in campaign contributions from the telecom industry. That's why he opposes municipal broadband even when private companies have no intention of offering it to an area. He thinks regular voters are not paying attention so there is only upside for him in this. This is the same Att. Gen. Cooper who opposed gay marriage in NC until the courts forced it to happen. He is not impressing me. Hope he has some competition in the 2017 Democratic Primary for Governor.
becasue you love peace and quiet, well screw you. Is it ok to hit folks in low population areas with a shocking, loud noise. Helpful hint: NO, it is not.
what percentage of valid mobile 911 calls are made from NIS phones? Strangely, that number does not appear in the federal report. Saying that 30% of NIS calls are valid focuses on the problem. But if 1% (or more) of valid mobile 911 calls come from NIS phones, that is a valuable service that definitely should not be terminated without a plan for cost-free replacement.
Also, the blather about how inexpensive mobile phones are is seriously flawed. I recently dropped my full featured Verizon plan and changed instead to a minimal pre-paid plan. What I discovered is that Verizon plays lots of dirty tricks to cheat poor people of their money. For example, they tell you that you must pay monthly, but what they mean is every 30 days. If you set up auto-pay via credit card based on their web site, you will be ok until there is a month with 31 days. Then they cancel your service and seize the balance in your account, which could be hundreds of dollars. Even if you owe only $5, they take all the money in your account.
If you read the Linux Kernel Mailing List http://lkml.org/ for a while, you will see why Linux was successful. Over and over again, Linus Torvalds over-rides the antics of his minions and explains to them (again) that the changes they made must be backed out because they break something that users actually need. Linux is elegant and beautiful, but not just because it's a work of art. Linux is the most functional piece of code in existence. It is the beauty of function.