Poaching is just entirely the wrong word. Poaching is a legal term which describes the unlawful killing of a wild animal. It would be illegal (in the U.S.) to make a law which made it illegal to hire away an individual from another company. It is NEVER illegal to hire an individual from another company. It is sometimes against a contract to do so. So the word poaching definitely does not apply because there is no illegal activity.
Well, here in the UK, "poaching" is the standard term for luring someone away from a competitor, there is no suggestion of illegality, though there is of course an implication of illicitness. Poaching itself is not seen as a particularly bad thing (except by land owners and gamekeepers) it sort of harks back to Robin Hood in the general imagination.
This. Uber may be run by (as stated by another/.er) "the most punchable management shit weasels" but at least they are committing to this free market idea we supposedly support instead of trying to suppress wages.
Why do you assume that everyone supports the pure "free market idea" so completely? And why do you let Uber off the hook simply because they are spending a lot of other people's money to try to build up a monopoly, sorry leverage earl-entry competitive advantage?
The problem with your line of reason is that most Taxi drivers are NOT paid by the hour. They rent the Taxi, and have to pay for the fuel as well.
Getting paid by the hour, they would make money.
I cannot speak to how its done in New York City, but in this state drivers are contract labor with no benefits and pay by the hour.
Being a Taxi driver is very much like being a Truck driver and they are both jobs that no one who has ever done would WANT to do.
Most times it's that they need 'quick' money to pay bills and don't have the time or money to get a better education since in this county you have to PAY quite a bit for that education.
I believe that lower income contract jobs are basically a way to get around the minimum wage. If you look at places that pay contract rates for things like taxis, newspaper delivery, magazine subscriptions, envelope stuffing etc., you will often find if you do the math that they are not making the minimum hourly wage. Not only that, but because they are contract labor, the company "employing" them does not have to pay Social Security, Medicare or Unemployment insurance.
Some of these jobs it is POSSIBLE to make more than minimum wage if you really work your butt off.
In the UK, you aren't allowed to get round paying at least the minimum wage by calling your workers contractors or paying impossible-to-reach piece-rates. This seems to me to be self-evidently necessary in a predatory free market which would ideally pay as little as they could get away with.
I question what the bulk of those people are going to be doing.
Since you can't just let the bulk of your population starve to death without precipitating a revolution, at some point governments will have to introduce some sort of guaranteed minimum income, which is to say re-brand welfare to avoid stigmatising the 90% of the people who have no traditional work available to them once things like cleaning toilets, serving burgers, or stacking supermarket shelves are all automated too.
You only have to solve this problem once, and everyone can enjoy the benefits forever in every vehicle. Not to say that it isn't a hard problem to solve. Personally, I value human life and intelligence enough to think that there is something better a person can be doing with their time than driving others around.
Yes, let me guess, they can all retrain as Computer Science PhDs and run their own start up making everyone in the whole world a billionaire?
The truth is that automation has resulted in an expansion of the super rich, the squeezing of the middle class, and the creation of a large underclass who circle between welfare and crappy part time minimum wage jobs.
What happened to the idea that automation would generate free time for humans?
Do you work in the fields at a farm all day? Do you have more than one TV/video device in your house... or even on your person? Can an average person afford to buy a car?
Note most of these things apply to Americans or Europeans... but to suggest that automation does society no good is silly.
Back in the 1950s it was widely believed that in fifty years' time people would be working less than ten hours a week, as since the Industrial Revolution people had been slowly working fewer hours while over all prosperity increased.
Automation has obviously done much good, but we still have a society where the majority of our days are spent working, and if anything people are feeling more cash rich but time poor than they were 50 years ago.
... that they'll even spend probably billions trying to replace the minimum wage guy at the wheel of the taxi with some automated system that probably won't work as well for decades if ever?
Someone explain this techno nerd obsession with replacing people with robots, I just don't get it.
I'm waiting to see the reaction of all the "I'm a libertarian wannabe billionaire programmer" types when someone works out that getting a robot to program a computer is a fuck sight easier than getting one to drive a car.
Bzzzz! Stop that Collectivist talk right there — none of "us" is a party to the transaction discussed (unless you are one of them or an Uber stock-holder). It is entirely between Uber and the engineers in question. To assert any right to control, regulate or even criticize their decision is to make a first step towards slavery (and there aren't many steps to it)...
This is the free market libertarian position taking to its logical extreme: the only thing that matters is economic activity, and nothing must be allowed to interfere in that, even if it means prohibiting the mere discussion of said activity. Economic might is the only right.
I tend to be more of an optimist. If Uber gets self driving cars up and running, we will have potentially very cheap and effective public transportation. We could probably reduce the total number of cars to a fraction of what we have now. We wouldn't need parking spaces anymore. Even cities with horribly bad or non-existent public transportation systems can have an incredibly versatile system without all the infrastructure costs.
Why would it be cheap? A bus that carries 50 passengers doesn't cost 50 times as much as a car.
Unless you get people to share huge coaches, I fail to see how self driving cars will reduce the number of vehicles on the road. If I currently drive to work on my own, I am going to want my own individual car too. And everyone will be driving to and from work at similar times to what they do already.
As for parking, the vehicles have to go somewhere while they're not being used, and there's a limit to how far away from their customers you can store them, since people aren't going to want to book them hours in advance.
But, in CS at least, grants cover a ton of travel. To publish in CS, you have to go to the conferences you're publishing in, unlike the rest of science which just has journals. That more than makes up for the lack of bonuses as far as fringe benefits go
no no no no no. I take it you don't have to travel for work? I find it one of the worst aspects of my job, and definitely not a "perk" let alone a benefit that offsets cash.
Quite, I can only assume that the OP is the stereotypical slashdot basement dweller who thinks travelling for work is some sort of exotic James Bond affair.
Absolutely correct, but the number of people building their own machines and installing the OS from scratch is relatively small. Most people's experience of Windows is buying a computer, turning it on and after a couple of minutes ringing up to get an authorisation code then pressing go.
That link doesn't say anything about the inevitable updates for Windows 10 being free.
Perhaps I'm being paranoid, but this IS microsoft we're talking about here.
There has to be something here which is screwing over users, we just have to figure out what it is.
So there's a conspiracy, but it's so sinister and subtle that you don't even know what it is they're conspiring to do.
You seem to have omitted the usual heartrending back story of how your five kids drowned in a beer barrel, your wife left you for the garbage men and you had become an alcoholic ebola victim..
Slashdot Mirror
Poaching is just entirely the wrong word. Poaching is a legal term which describes the unlawful killing of a wild animal. It would be illegal (in the U.S.) to make a law which made it illegal to hire away an individual from another company. It is NEVER illegal to hire an individual from another company. It is sometimes against a contract to do so. So the word poaching definitely does not apply because there is no illegal activity.
Well, here in the UK, "poaching" is the standard term for luring someone away from a competitor, there is no suggestion of illegality, though there is of course an implication of illicitness. Poaching itself is not seen as a particularly bad thing (except by land owners and gamekeepers) it sort of harks back to Robin Hood in the general imagination.
This. Uber may be run by (as stated by another /.er) "the most punchable management shit weasels" but at least they are committing to this free market idea we supposedly support instead of trying to suppress wages.
Why do you assume that everyone supports the pure "free market idea" so completely? And why do you let Uber off the hook simply because they are spending a lot of other people's money to try to build up a monopoly, sorry leverage earl-entry competitive advantage?
As one can imagine owning a large part of the infrastructure necessary for all public and private transportation is a lucrative proposition.
The obvious solution is to nationalize the whole lot, but I don't suppose that's going to go down too well in the US.
The problem with your line of reason is that most Taxi drivers are NOT paid by the hour. They rent the Taxi, and have to pay for the fuel as well. Getting paid by the hour, they would make money. I cannot speak to how its done in New York City, but in this state drivers are contract labor with no benefits and pay by the hour. Being a Taxi driver is very much like being a Truck driver and they are both jobs that no one who has ever done would WANT to do. Most times it's that they need 'quick' money to pay bills and don't have the time or money to get a better education since in this county you have to PAY quite a bit for that education.
I believe that lower income contract jobs are basically a way to get around the minimum wage. If you look at places that pay contract rates for things like taxis, newspaper delivery, magazine subscriptions, envelope stuffing etc., you will often find if you do the math that they are not making the minimum hourly wage. Not only that, but because they are contract labor, the company "employing" them does not have to pay Social Security, Medicare or Unemployment insurance. Some of these jobs it is POSSIBLE to make more than minimum wage if you really work your butt off.
In the UK, you aren't allowed to get round paying at least the minimum wage by calling your workers contractors or paying impossible-to-reach piece-rates. This seems to me to be self-evidently necessary in a predatory free market which would ideally pay as little as they could get away with.
I question what the bulk of those people are going to be doing.
Since you can't just let the bulk of your population starve to death without precipitating a revolution, at some point governments will have to introduce some sort of guaranteed minimum income, which is to say re-brand welfare to avoid stigmatising the 90% of the people who have no traditional work available to them once things like cleaning toilets, serving burgers, or stacking supermarket shelves are all automated too.
You only have to solve this problem once, and everyone can enjoy the benefits forever in every vehicle. Not to say that it isn't a hard problem to solve. Personally, I value human life and intelligence enough to think that there is something better a person can be doing with their time than driving others around.
Yes, let me guess, they can all retrain as Computer Science PhDs and run their own start up making everyone in the whole world a billionaire?
The truth is that automation has resulted in an expansion of the super rich, the squeezing of the middle class, and the creation of a large underclass who circle between welfare and crappy part time minimum wage jobs.
What happened to the idea that automation would generate free time for humans?
Do you work in the fields at a farm all day? Do you have more than one TV/video device in your house... or even on your person? Can an average person afford to buy a car?
Note most of these things apply to Americans or Europeans... but to suggest that automation does society no good is silly.
Back in the 1950s it was widely believed that in fifty years' time people would be working less than ten hours a week, as since the Industrial Revolution people had been slowly working fewer hours while over all prosperity increased.
Automation has obviously done much good, but we still have a society where the majority of our days are spent working, and if anything people are feeling more cash rich but time poor than they were 50 years ago.
... that they'll even spend probably billions trying to replace the minimum wage guy at the wheel of the taxi with some automated system that probably won't work as well for decades if ever?
Someone explain this techno nerd obsession with replacing people with robots, I just don't get it.
I'm waiting to see the reaction of all the "I'm a libertarian wannabe billionaire programmer" types when someone works out that getting a robot to program a computer is a fuck sight easier than getting one to drive a car.
Bzzzz! Stop that Collectivist talk right there — none of "us" is a party to the transaction discussed (unless you are one of them or an Uber stock-holder). It is entirely between Uber and the engineers in question. To assert any right to control, regulate or even criticize their decision is to make a first step towards slavery (and there aren't many steps to it)...
This is the free market libertarian position taking to its logical extreme: the only thing that matters is economic activity, and nothing must be allowed to interfere in that, even if it means prohibiting the mere discussion of said activity. Economic might is the only right.
Have fun sucking up to your corporate overlords.
Textbook display of managerial ineptitude. The parent fails to realize that programming is the doing part of things, not managing.
+1, Would Dilbert again.
Textbook display of sense of humour failure. Clearly an embittered code monkey.
I tend to be more of an optimist. If Uber gets self driving cars up and running, we will have potentially very cheap and effective public transportation. We could probably reduce the total number of cars to a fraction of what we have now. We wouldn't need parking spaces anymore. Even cities with horribly bad or non-existent public transportation systems can have an incredibly versatile system without all the infrastructure costs.
Why would it be cheap? A bus that carries 50 passengers doesn't cost 50 times as much as a car.
Unless you get people to share huge coaches, I fail to see how self driving cars will reduce the number of vehicles on the road. If I currently drive to work on my own, I am going to want my own individual car too. And everyone will be driving to and from work at similar times to what they do already.
As for parking, the vehicles have to go somewhere while they're not being used, and there's a limit to how far away from their customers you can store them, since people aren't going to want to book them hours in advance.
But, in CS at least, grants cover a ton of travel. To publish in CS, you have to go to the conferences you're publishing in, unlike the rest of science which just has journals. That more than makes up for the lack of bonuses as far as fringe benefits go
no no no no no. I take it you don't have to travel for work? I find it one of the worst aspects of my job, and definitely not a "perk" let alone a benefit that offsets cash.
Quite, I can only assume that the OP is the stereotypical slashdot basement dweller who thinks travelling for work is some sort of exotic James Bond affair.
Five, of course, being an odd number.
Thanks for that, I was a bit confused until you explained it.
Maybe you should not put Windows 10 on a PC that is 20 years old?
For those youngsters who don't recognise it, it's an adaptation of this old troll about Macs.
Ubuntu was way easier and faster than Windows.
Absolutely correct, but the number of people building their own machines and installing the OS from scratch is relatively small. Most people's experience of Windows is buying a computer, turning it on and after a couple of minutes ringing up to get an authorisation code then pressing go.
It could very well be that Microsoft has decided to give something away without expecting anything in return.
Given their track record, it seems somewhat unlikely.
Well, as a minimum they get you to go on using Windows, which in turn makes it highly likely you will pay to use the next version of Office.
That link doesn't say anything about the inevitable updates for Windows 10 being free. Perhaps I'm being paranoid, but this IS microsoft we're talking about here. There has to be something here which is screwing over users, we just have to figure out what it is.
So there's a conspiracy, but it's so sinister and subtle that you don't even know what it is they're conspiring to do.
Bastards.
Not everyone is on a particular side of the Microsoft / Linux holy war.
I think I can hear the sound of pitchforks being sharpened, and smell the torches being lit...
And if you happen to live in Australia or any of 100+ other countries, you wont even get Cortana.
So just move to New Zealand. As a bonus, you won't have to worry about man-eating spiders and drop bears ever again.
Why is the onus on me to be FORCED to try it?
An icon telling you an update is available is forcing you? Oh you poor oppressed victim.
windows is literally hitler
I am one of six people, planet wide, that had ME running quite stable and well
Don't exaggerate.
It was nowhere near as many as six.
I USE MY CLEAN PC
You seem to have omitted the usual heartrending back story of how your five kids drowned in a beer barrel, your wife left you for the garbage men and you had become an alcoholic ebola victim..
so which is it? Long weekend, or gathering more information?
Clearly these are mutually exclusive, and so it is a CONSPIRACY.
btw, his name is Bennett Haselton.
And alas! he is no longer a regular contributor.