So far as I understand it, in most jurisdictions in North America and Europe employers are responsible for collecting withholding taxes for employees. If you're a true private contractor, then it is your obligation to pay the taxes, but in general in most places if you're an employee, it is your employer's job to collect those payroll taxes and pass them on to the government.
And if there are too many parameters set on how you do your work, you may very well be an employee. Uber is just the latest and perhaps largest example of how companies try to evade payroll taxes and labor laws by claiming they're in a contractor relationship with their workers, but they're hardly the first. In general terms, contract work is supposed to give you pretty wide latitude in how the job gets done. Contracts can set up due dates, and to some extent even milestone dates, can set up remuneration schedules, and most certainly include quality assurance requirements, but when you start making those contractual requirements so narrow that the contractor's schedule and duties start to look a lot more like employment, then a line has been crossed. It can be fuzzy, and I've certainly read of cases that have gone to court where the courts have leaned one or the other based on the balance of facts, but talk to any employment lawyer and they will tell you that if you want the status of a contract to hold if a court case or government investigation ensues, the fewer stipulations on how the work is actually conducted, the less likely the relationship is to be seen as an employment relationship.
I've done plenty of contract work in my time, and my contracts have always amounted to "Will deliver product on such-and-such a date", along with a schedule of the exact user requirements. If I have month to do the job, and I don't start it until four days before it's due, then that's my business, and my problem, and if I fail, then the contract language is usually there to spank me very badly indeed. I wouldn't sign a contract to do a job that required me to work on it specific hours, save perhaps where the necessities of testing and implementation required I do the work after hours.
If Uber was actually trying to create a franchise, they might have a better argument. Franchisee agreements still give the mother corp a helluva lot of control over operations, even down to prices, but then again, franchises usually involve contracts between two companies. So if Uber drivers were something like 148123812 Inc. or the like then Uber might have an argument, but in general, the "contract" is between Uber and private individuals, which means even the wall that franchise agreements have doesn't exist.
Save for the problem that Uber isn't making a profit. Even with what amounts to wage slavery and a large-scale payroll tax evasion scheme, it still can't actually turn a profit. It has managed to disrupt taxi services in many places, screwing over drivers, and in some cases fucking up consumers as well, and for what exactly?
The precise rules differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but on a balance what I'm seeing is that in multiple jurisdictions in Europe and North America, Uber's relationship with its drivers is viewed by taxation and labor authorities as being a employer-employee relationship. Here in Canada, I've had experience with how the Canada Revenue Agency (our version of the IRS) views contractor vs employee, and it applies similar standards that basically amount to "if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck". Over the years I've seen many an attempt by employers large and small to treat what are clearly employees as private contractors for the purposes of ducking their responsibility on collecting and remunerating payroll taxes to taxation authorities, not to mention hoping to sneak past overtime pay and other labor rules like meal breaks. It's a scam some employers keep trying over and over again, so Uber is hardly the first company to try to pull this stunt.
Of course, the real irony of Uber is that even with this withholding tax-dodging scheme, they're still losing vast amounts of money, so I expect that once many jurisdictions force it to treat its drivers as employees, it will either collapse or just turn into a regular taxi service.
The problem is that GUIs don't tend to lend themselves to automation tasks with quite the same flexibility. I remember back in the 1990s using one of those "GUI batch script" programs that would automate mouse pointer, mouse clicks and the like. It did work for automation tasks, but it was just bloody awful to develop and debug these "scripts", the source of which looked more like some insane man's version of Logo programs. These did improve a bit over time, but they demonstrated where GUIs become obstacles to rather than facilitators of productivity. Of course, in the late 1990s and early 2000s we had vbscript and jscript coupled with WMI, filesystem and registry objects, and this did fill a lot of the gaps, but of course, were only available for certain Windows system and software, not to mention that the various objects didn't expose all properties and methods, so once again you were forced into unseemly hacks.
What Microsoft refused to acknowledge, though they must have known it as far back as NT 3.5, was that a good scripting language and a set of userland tools that can manipulate even the more esoteric aspects of the operating system are critical to the overall usefulness of a server OS. You're right that Microsoft and its users tended towards believing the GUI gospel, even as they were going into regedit to hack values that weren't supported by the GUI tools. They just refused to work within the KISS philosophy, and thus the GUI-based system tended to become far more complex and error prone than the CLI-based *nix systems (and, using GUI-based *nix tools, these tools too suffer the same problem).
One of the things that frightens me the most about *nix's evolution, whether that be systemd's binary logging or the greater use of XML for configuration, is that it is starting to move into a more complex direction itself, relying ever more heavily on various libraries as interpreters and intermediaries between sysadmins and the configuration and control apparatuses of a *nix system. This too violates KISS, and creates unnecessary complexity, for no other purpose that I can see than someone wants to be hip and modern.
I was born in a hospital. My mother was present (very present indeed, considering I came out of her), and there were nurses and a doctor present. Maybe you're the one human being that was hatched out of egg in the middle of nowhere, but the rest of us weren't alone when we were born.
Yes, they grabbed some chunks of BSD to build Winsock, but that was largely expediency. It's a bloody pity they hadn't just done what Apple did, and grab the whole bloody BSD userland.
It took Microsoft a decade and a half to produce a proper shell for Windows NT/Win32. In that time they seemed to try everything else but a shell; VBscript/Jscript, WMI objects, registry commands, but at every iteration they were told "Look at the Bourne shells, for chrissakes, that's what we want!" The deep fear and hatred of all things *nix at Microsoft inevitably lead them to just implement half-ass solutions. Even Powershell is an overly verbose and frankly rather slow shell, but at least it allows for automation of most aspects of the Windows server.
What it really boils down to me is that Microsoft never really understood, nor did they ever really want to understand how sysadmins used and manipulated servers. Windows carried on the long-standing DOS tradition of pushing in their own direction regardless of what made sense or what the rest of the industry was doing; a willful exercise in refusing to accept long-standing principles of system administration. Everything about Windows administration always made me feel like I was using some idiot's half-ass attempt at remaking Unix, so that you could go to a point, but never beyond that. For years there was a whole industry built on filling in the holes in COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE.
The money is going to have to come from somewhere. Since it's clear that the pre-existing condition part of the ACA is immensely popular, that means that the Republicans are going to have to find a way to keep it alive. All I've heard thus far is talk of block funding and high-risk pools, and you get to fill in the blanks and how those will jive. If you're going to make sure people with pre-existing conditions can get affordable insurance, it means somehow those people are going to have to be subsidized, either by some level of government or by all the other people, and if it's a high risk pool that most certainly means taxpayer funds.
The Republicans attacked the ACA at every opportunity, probably believing much as everyone else did that by the time the Republican Party was in a position to actually do something about the ACA, it would be so deeply embedded that it could never be eliminated. Now suddenly they're in the nightmare position of having to actually square the circle. I suppose the only real advantage they have is that Trump probably won't give a shit what they do, so long as the names "Obamacare" and "Affordable Care Act" disappear so he can talk about another "yuge" victory.
I think a lot of folks who voted Trump and a Republican Congress are about to find that out with Obamacare, as it becomes clearer with each press conference that the Republicans have no actual plan, and are more than likely simply going to tinker with the ACA, and that the "great repeal" is going to be little more than a rebranding, with some funding changes, and probably defunding of Planned Parenthood and a means for Catholic and Evangelical employers to squeak out of having to pay for the birth control.
The block grant plan will be the most fun to watch, because it's going to mean an even greater health care disparity between the poorer (and more often Red states) and the wealthier (more often) Blue states. But overall, the likes of Paul Ryan are making it as clear as they dare that there isn't going to be an overnight repeal of Obamacare, which means the transition is going to be multi-year, and longer than the life of the current Congress. It makes me wonder if the Republicans will simply use the whole thing as a delaying tactic, make the changes I suggest above, rename it and then try to use it as a feather in their own cap.
Do you have any indication at all that Obama intends on defying the Electoral College's decision? Yes, he's trying to leave a few poison pills for Trump, but he's still President until January 21st, and thus enjoys the full powers bequeathed to him by the Constitution and by Congressional statute. If he wishes to use those powers to fuck around with Trump, well, then history will be the judge.
And do you think Congress is just going to sit by and let him turn the US into a pariah trade state? Let's remember here, US manufacturers don't just manufacture for domestic markets, and if Trump's anti-trade tirades continue, this could severely impact US industry. The US has a lot to lose if it gets into tit-for-tat trade wars.
Of course there is, and there are even ways to store that energy (flywheels have been mentioned). It's just that between those who just want to be contrarians due to personality problems and those who want to maintain fossil fuels as the pre-eminent source of energy for profit motives, these strange stories about how the most plentiful energy sources on the planet being forever inadequate keep getting circulated.
Believe me, stick $1000 a ton on CO2 emissions, and you'll find out how quickly oil, natural gas and coal can be shed as energy sources.
Or we can wait a few decades until things are really fucked up and then the costs will be astronomical.
The answer is, of course, to start pricing fossil fuels for the damage they actually are doing and will do, instead of basically subsidizing them by making our descendants pay for the bulk of the damage. If free markets are the answer (and I believe they are), then every ton of CO2 emitted should be taxed. Screw the carbon credits, screw the fantasy sequestering, just tax the CO2 directly, and, if everyone who believes in free markets is right, economics will take care of the rest.
Or we can just let it all go to shit, watch as insurance rates and mitigation costs go up year by year, and the only winners are a bunch of old men looking to eek a few more years profits out of fossil fuels before even the most blatant fossil fuel promoters admit the day is done.
The problem was the idiotic regulations which essentially gave large trucks a huge break. And it sucks to. I have no desire for DodgeFordGMToyota RamFuckerTacomarado 8 cylinder megatruck that can apparently pull D10 cats up the sides of glaciers, and would love to buy another small truck like the old 1992 Mazda B2200 I owned, which was good enough to throw a few sheets of plywood into, but could drive around for two weeks or more on a single tank of gas.
That was the entire intent of extending Canada-US trade agreements to include Mexico; the theory being a prosperous neighbor is a lot better than an impoverished one. If the US basically decides to kick Mexico in the balls and walk away with the jobs that will help Mexico into the community of developed nations, then it's simply going to feed the need of so many to cross the border legally or illegally, as well as assuring that Mexico remains politically and socially chaotic.
But when you're a demagogue using fear to gain power, you need scapegoats, and Mexicans seem to be the scapegoat-of-choice of Trump (well along with anyone from the Middle East).
He's going to need to generate as much political capital as he can before he actually takes office, because wants the rubber hits the road, the quick wins will dry up pretty damned soon.
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So far as I understand it, in most jurisdictions in North America and Europe employers are responsible for collecting withholding taxes for employees. If you're a true private contractor, then it is your obligation to pay the taxes, but in general in most places if you're an employee, it is your employer's job to collect those payroll taxes and pass them on to the government.
And if there are too many parameters set on how you do your work, you may very well be an employee. Uber is just the latest and perhaps largest example of how companies try to evade payroll taxes and labor laws by claiming they're in a contractor relationship with their workers, but they're hardly the first. In general terms, contract work is supposed to give you pretty wide latitude in how the job gets done. Contracts can set up due dates, and to some extent even milestone dates, can set up remuneration schedules, and most certainly include quality assurance requirements, but when you start making those contractual requirements so narrow that the contractor's schedule and duties start to look a lot more like employment, then a line has been crossed. It can be fuzzy, and I've certainly read of cases that have gone to court where the courts have leaned one or the other based on the balance of facts, but talk to any employment lawyer and they will tell you that if you want the status of a contract to hold if a court case or government investigation ensues, the fewer stipulations on how the work is actually conducted, the less likely the relationship is to be seen as an employment relationship.
I've done plenty of contract work in my time, and my contracts have always amounted to "Will deliver product on such-and-such a date", along with a schedule of the exact user requirements. If I have month to do the job, and I don't start it until four days before it's due, then that's my business, and my problem, and if I fail, then the contract language is usually there to spank me very badly indeed. I wouldn't sign a contract to do a job that required me to work on it specific hours, save perhaps where the necessities of testing and implementation required I do the work after hours.
If Uber was actually trying to create a franchise, they might have a better argument. Franchisee agreements still give the mother corp a helluva lot of control over operations, even down to prices, but then again, franchises usually involve contracts between two companies. So if Uber drivers were something like 148123812 Inc. or the like then Uber might have an argument, but in general, the "contract" is between Uber and private individuals, which means even the wall that franchise agreements have doesn't exist.
I think the growing consensus in many jurisdictions is that Uber is operating a taxi service.
Save for the problem that Uber isn't making a profit. Even with what amounts to wage slavery and a large-scale payroll tax evasion scheme, it still can't actually turn a profit. It has managed to disrupt taxi services in many places, screwing over drivers, and in some cases fucking up consumers as well, and for what exactly?
The precise rules differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but on a balance what I'm seeing is that in multiple jurisdictions in Europe and North America, Uber's relationship with its drivers is viewed by taxation and labor authorities as being a employer-employee relationship. Here in Canada, I've had experience with how the Canada Revenue Agency (our version of the IRS) views contractor vs employee, and it applies similar standards that basically amount to "if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck". Over the years I've seen many an attempt by employers large and small to treat what are clearly employees as private contractors for the purposes of ducking their responsibility on collecting and remunerating payroll taxes to taxation authorities, not to mention hoping to sneak past overtime pay and other labor rules like meal breaks. It's a scam some employers keep trying over and over again, so Uber is hardly the first company to try to pull this stunt.
Of course, the real irony of Uber is that even with this withholding tax-dodging scheme, they're still losing vast amounts of money, so I expect that once many jurisdictions force it to treat its drivers as employees, it will either collapse or just turn into a regular taxi service.
The problem is that GUIs don't tend to lend themselves to automation tasks with quite the same flexibility. I remember back in the 1990s using one of those "GUI batch script" programs that would automate mouse pointer, mouse clicks and the like. It did work for automation tasks, but it was just bloody awful to develop and debug these "scripts", the source of which looked more like some insane man's version of Logo programs. These did improve a bit over time, but they demonstrated where GUIs become obstacles to rather than facilitators of productivity. Of course, in the late 1990s and early 2000s we had vbscript and jscript coupled with WMI, filesystem and registry objects, and this did fill a lot of the gaps, but of course, were only available for certain Windows system and software, not to mention that the various objects didn't expose all properties and methods, so once again you were forced into unseemly hacks.
What Microsoft refused to acknowledge, though they must have known it as far back as NT 3.5, was that a good scripting language and a set of userland tools that can manipulate even the more esoteric aspects of the operating system are critical to the overall usefulness of a server OS. You're right that Microsoft and its users tended towards believing the GUI gospel, even as they were going into regedit to hack values that weren't supported by the GUI tools. They just refused to work within the KISS philosophy, and thus the GUI-based system tended to become far more complex and error prone than the CLI-based *nix systems (and, using GUI-based *nix tools, these tools too suffer the same problem).
One of the things that frightens me the most about *nix's evolution, whether that be systemd's binary logging or the greater use of XML for configuration, is that it is starting to move into a more complex direction itself, relying ever more heavily on various libraries as interpreters and intermediaries between sysadmins and the configuration and control apparatuses of a *nix system. This too violates KISS, and creates unnecessary complexity, for no other purpose that I can see than someone wants to be hip and modern.
I was born in a hospital. My mother was present (very present indeed, considering I came out of her), and there were nurses and a doctor present. Maybe you're the one human being that was hatched out of egg in the middle of nowhere, but the rest of us weren't alone when we were born.
Yes, they grabbed some chunks of BSD to build Winsock, but that was largely expediency. It's a bloody pity they hadn't just done what Apple did, and grab the whole bloody BSD userland.
It took Microsoft a decade and a half to produce a proper shell for Windows NT/Win32. In that time they seemed to try everything else but a shell; VBscript/Jscript, WMI objects, registry commands, but at every iteration they were told "Look at the Bourne shells, for chrissakes, that's what we want!" The deep fear and hatred of all things *nix at Microsoft inevitably lead them to just implement half-ass solutions. Even Powershell is an overly verbose and frankly rather slow shell, but at least it allows for automation of most aspects of the Windows server.
What it really boils down to me is that Microsoft never really understood, nor did they ever really want to understand how sysadmins used and manipulated servers. Windows carried on the long-standing DOS tradition of pushing in their own direction regardless of what made sense or what the rest of the industry was doing; a willful exercise in refusing to accept long-standing principles of system administration. Everything about Windows administration always made me feel like I was using some idiot's half-ass attempt at remaking Unix, so that you could go to a point, but never beyond that. For years there was a whole industry built on filling in the holes in COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE.
Maybe they could make it so Powershell doesn't take 15-30 seconds to actually become useful.
The money is going to have to come from somewhere. Since it's clear that the pre-existing condition part of the ACA is immensely popular, that means that the Republicans are going to have to find a way to keep it alive. All I've heard thus far is talk of block funding and high-risk pools, and you get to fill in the blanks and how those will jive. If you're going to make sure people with pre-existing conditions can get affordable insurance, it means somehow those people are going to have to be subsidized, either by some level of government or by all the other people, and if it's a high risk pool that most certainly means taxpayer funds.
The Republicans attacked the ACA at every opportunity, probably believing much as everyone else did that by the time the Republican Party was in a position to actually do something about the ACA, it would be so deeply embedded that it could never be eliminated. Now suddenly they're in the nightmare position of having to actually square the circle. I suppose the only real advantage they have is that Trump probably won't give a shit what they do, so long as the names "Obamacare" and "Affordable Care Act" disappear so he can talk about another "yuge" victory.
Yes, those poor Blue states, with their higher standards of living, and where women won't be forced to die of ectopic pregnancies because "GOD!"
I think a lot of folks who voted Trump and a Republican Congress are about to find that out with Obamacare, as it becomes clearer with each press conference that the Republicans have no actual plan, and are more than likely simply going to tinker with the ACA, and that the "great repeal" is going to be little more than a rebranding, with some funding changes, and probably defunding of Planned Parenthood and a means for Catholic and Evangelical employers to squeak out of having to pay for the birth control.
The block grant plan will be the most fun to watch, because it's going to mean an even greater health care disparity between the poorer (and more often Red states) and the wealthier (more often) Blue states. But overall, the likes of Paul Ryan are making it as clear as they dare that there isn't going to be an overnight repeal of Obamacare, which means the transition is going to be multi-year, and longer than the life of the current Congress. It makes me wonder if the Republicans will simply use the whole thing as a delaying tactic, make the changes I suggest above, rename it and then try to use it as a feather in their own cap.
Wow, you've exhibited a first, a sort of psychopathic apathy, wherein "Everything's fucked, so let's just kill lots of people I think are stupid."
Well, I think you're pretty bloody stupid too, so maybe we could start with you.
Do you have any indication at all that Obama intends on defying the Electoral College's decision? Yes, he's trying to leave a few poison pills for Trump, but he's still President until January 21st, and thus enjoys the full powers bequeathed to him by the Constitution and by Congressional statute. If he wishes to use those powers to fuck around with Trump, well, then history will be the judge.
That is precisely what democracy is. It is a means to throw out a government without the need of guns and high explosives.
And do you think Congress is just going to sit by and let him turn the US into a pariah trade state? Let's remember here, US manufacturers don't just manufacture for domestic markets, and if Trump's anti-trade tirades continue, this could severely impact US industry. The US has a lot to lose if it gets into tit-for-tat trade wars.
Of course there is, and there are even ways to store that energy (flywheels have been mentioned). It's just that between those who just want to be contrarians due to personality problems and those who want to maintain fossil fuels as the pre-eminent source of energy for profit motives, these strange stories about how the most plentiful energy sources on the planet being forever inadequate keep getting circulated.
Believe me, stick $1000 a ton on CO2 emissions, and you'll find out how quickly oil, natural gas and coal can be shed as energy sources.
Or we can wait a few decades until things are really fucked up and then the costs will be astronomical.
The answer is, of course, to start pricing fossil fuels for the damage they actually are doing and will do, instead of basically subsidizing them by making our descendants pay for the bulk of the damage. If free markets are the answer (and I believe they are), then every ton of CO2 emitted should be taxed. Screw the carbon credits, screw the fantasy sequestering, just tax the CO2 directly, and, if everyone who believes in free markets is right, economics will take care of the rest.
Or we can just let it all go to shit, watch as insurance rates and mitigation costs go up year by year, and the only winners are a bunch of old men looking to eek a few more years profits out of fossil fuels before even the most blatant fossil fuel promoters admit the day is done.
The problem was the idiotic regulations which essentially gave large trucks a huge break. And it sucks to. I have no desire for DodgeFordGMToyota RamFuckerTacomarado 8 cylinder megatruck that can apparently pull D10 cats up the sides of glaciers, and would love to buy another small truck like the old 1992 Mazda B2200 I owned, which was good enough to throw a few sheets of plywood into, but could drive around for two weeks or more on a single tank of gas.
Well, there's an answer to that as well. But you have to start somewhere.
That was the entire intent of extending Canada-US trade agreements to include Mexico; the theory being a prosperous neighbor is a lot better than an impoverished one. If the US basically decides to kick Mexico in the balls and walk away with the jobs that will help Mexico into the community of developed nations, then it's simply going to feed the need of so many to cross the border legally or illegally, as well as assuring that Mexico remains politically and socially chaotic.
But when you're a demagogue using fear to gain power, you need scapegoats, and Mexicans seem to be the scapegoat-of-choice of Trump (well along with anyone from the Middle East).
He's going to need to generate as much political capital as he can before he actually takes office, because wants the rubber hits the road, the quick wins will dry up pretty damned soon.
And yet the high arctic has been 30C above normal temperatures this winter...
Keep spinning your fantasy that there isn't a problem