These services only thrive in cities. Majority of Uber/Lyft drivers treat this as a secondary source of income rather than a full-time job. If you're doing Uber/lyft full time to "stick it to the man" you're better off doing private limo chauffeur services with VIP clients.

Millions in gig economy can't find better jobs or pay - Oct. 27, 2016
Most of the estimated 68 million gig workers choose the freelance lifestyle for better work-life balance. But nearly 20 million of them do it out of necessity because they can't find better work or pay, according to a report by McKinsey Global Institute, a consulting firm.

Almost all the 10 million jobs created since 2005 are temporary - December 05, 2016

Intuit: Gig economy is 34% of US workforce - May. 24, 2017
"The gig economy...is now estimated to be about 34% of the workforce and expected to be 43% by the year 2020," Intuit (INTU) CEO Brad Smith said Wednesday on an earnings call. "We think self-employed [work] has a lot of opportunity for growth as we look ahead."

These major retailers have closed more than 5,000 stores in 2017 - December 13, 2017

I'm not sure your point, but whatever it is, it doesn't seem to be grounded in the reality many people are experiencing. Even if it is secondary income, that doesn't make exploitation morally okay.

you work three jobs, yes
uniquely American
that is fantastic!
Uniquely American

Isn't the gig economy exploitative, to begin with?

From tipped wages to paying people under the table, Uber/Lyft is no different to QuiBids.

Yes it is! All aboard the Stop Exploiting People for Profit train!

I have no experience with QuiBids, but from some quick googling it does look like some sort of scam to take advantage of people who don't know better. If that's the case, fuck them too.

Still more than the robots who replace them will make.

Robots won't have to pay for gas and maintenance. So that's debatable. As the main article points out, in the long run it is possible to actually lose money doing this work.

When everything goes electric and the self driving cars have a monopoly on the sector that's when the prices will rise and everything will become profitable. That's why VCs are throwing money at these companies. In the meantime, thankful humans who need the cash will be more than happy to protest unfair regulations that would get in the way of investors' future bottom line.

Why would prices go up? There are quite a few different companies building self driving cars. There's not going to be a monopoly.

Correct, there will not be a monopoly. There will be an oligopoly. Just like our internet providers, our banks, our media conglomerates, our credit agencies, our cell phone providers, our food and good manufacturers, our grocery stores. The list goes on and on. It gives the illusion of having choices while enabling price fixing and raising the barrier to entry to beyond that of normal citizens. Don't you remember the lessons of Conspiracy Theory Rock?

its a mediaopoly

Food is a bit of an outlier, though, since the relative cost of food has dropped by about 1/2 over the last 50 years or so. Megamonoculture and factory meat production have succeeded in that area, at least.



It's interesting that the retail prices remain fairly steady, even when the commodities that go into them experience major fluctuations.



Lot of interesting food data here:
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-prices-and-spending/

Yeah, kinda leveled out there these past couple of decades though hasn't it. If I were a betting man (and I am, it was a real problem #tfs) I'd put money on that first graph's blue line taking an upturn in the next couple of decades. Especially with Climate Change revving up.

Actually! What I would really like to see is how many grocery chains and independent grocers there were alongside that first graph. How much you wanna bet (here I go again!) competition drops as that blue line starts to level out.

Yeah, most of the increased efficiencies have been squeezed out by now, so that slope has decreased pretty dramatically. It’ll take some new tech to push it much farther than it is today. That technology may be seriously engineered crops, and I mean way more engineered than the minor tinkering people get so upset about these days. It may include vat grown proteins, lipids and carbohydrates as feed stock for food printers. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that take over a significant fraction of world food production in my lifetime.

And yes, as you mentioned, a big part of the increased efficiency has also come from market consolidation.

I’m not saying any of this is necessarily a good thing, but it’s certainly the way things are heading, and I don’t see any obvious impediments. But who knows? I’d be interested in a few species of symbiotic algae and bacteria that live in my skin and blood that let me photosynthesize a good fraction of my own nutritional requirements.

People have been eating less meat for the past decade. Maybe they had something to do with it.

Condemnation of one is not approval of the other. Do you suddenly care now? You didn't seem to give a shit about either group the other day. As I've said before, WTF?

Care about what? It's all very shortly going to become irrelevant with self driving cars.

Do you have any actual, productive ideas or are you just stamping your feet?

Yeah, self driving cars are 20 years away minimum. none of the present models(of the system, not vehicle models) that I've seen, working at Vehicle Safety Services for DMV and having a great interest in the subject, will work.

Elon the con man notwithstanding, there are about multi-trillion dollars that will need to be spent on infrastructure. The idea that onboard sensors will be able to just drive a vehicle like a person, even with vehicle to vehicle communication(not yet even close to implemented) is a fucking fantasy. The vehicle WILL NEED(and mark my goddamn words) TO COMMUNICATE WITH THE ROAD. That is barely under discussion. I've seen proposals to put transmitters in the guardrails and/or mile markers, but they do not impress me.

Some day, but not today and not for a while. The hype is just that.

Out of curiosity what state do you work in? Because California just made it legal for companies to start testing fully driverless cars on public roads as of this upcoming April. Plus, GM has announced they'll be releasing a fully driverless car sans steering wheel next year and it sounds like they're already experimenting with their own ridesharing plans. As far as goods transport goes Embark just did Los Angeles, California to Jacksonville, FL with their Driverless Semi system that I believe is almost fully automated from onramp to offramp.

The last five years or so has seen some serious advancement in neural networks leading to a massive leap in the hurdles of other tech sectors requiring human emulation. And a lot of people underestimate what it means to have all those cell phones reporting their geolocation 24/7. That's a lot of traffic data.




This is unrelated to your comment but since I'm sharing the link to the embark article I just want to address one thing:

Embark says that its trucks aren't aimed at replacing human drivers but are instead a means of dealing with growing driver shortages. In a statement he made last year, Rodrigues said, "By allowing automation to work together with local drivers to handle less desirable long haul routes, we will be able to increase productivity to address the current 50,000 driver shortage while also creating new local driving jobs that attract younger drivers for the industry."

This is slimeball speak for "We're going to use technology to lower the barrier of entry for drivers by reducing the qualifications needed to be a driver. This will then temporarily flood the market with labor so that we can lower the wages of present drivers even further until such a time when technology advances enough to replace all drivers."

This is also the Uber model, as this is the Disruption model. Flood the sector's labor market, lower wages, replace workers with tech. Rinse and repeat until tech has replaced all labor. The disruptors then have an oligopoly. There's supposed to be a step in there about retraining but it's bullshit and rarely followed through on.

NY, and Vehicle Safety where i work regulates the car industry rather than roads other transportation stuff.

CA can do what it wants, and much respect for its emissions standards, which we use and the redoubtable CARB, bane of VW.

I am not saying not to go forward with development, I am saying that it is not as close as the hype would indicate and will have huge "unanticipated consequences" that are perfectly well anticipatable, but which are just uncool and mean to talk about.

So what road communication do you think will be necessary? I can see accidents and obstruction issues like sinkholes and fallen trees causing the Computer Vision systems to choke, but I think that would be an issue with something like external sensors as well. Do you foresee something necessary beyond the cloud's input regarding traffic and such that our current navigation systems utilize?

i think sensors in the road is going to be the thing. robust, don't move, can be positioned very precisely, and positioned relatively densely like stripes.

Ironically, i think obstructions like trees will be the least of it. Know the precise positions of vehicles will be the hard part, and it's going to want to reference the real world, not compare a GPS reading to an onboard map. Put my address in to Google, it shows my house in the middle of the block, rather than on the corner where it is. I always say 'accurate to within a meter is accurate to within a fatal accident'. I don't want to be the guy whose wife and kid prove that the present model is insufficient.

AND ANOTHER THING

What about the ownership model? Are these vehicles going to be consumer products like cars are today, or will they be more of an enterprise thing, like a bus or a locomotive? You can buy either one of those things if you got he money, but that's not primarily how they are sold.

Seems like the units and associated costs of the system will be fairly pricey to run and staggering to implement in the first place. Who Pays? Tax payers? System operator? Who operates the system? Individual jurisdictions? The Fed? Private industry?

Wet dreams are nice until you wake up.

Care about the people being exploited? If by irrelevant you mean all these exploited people are going to be "freed to pursue other avenues of income" into an economy with even less chances to survive, then yes it will become irrelevant. It will also be a driving factor that leads us into another depression. And by us, I mean us non-10%ers. As usual, the billionaires and upper millionaires doing the exploiting will be fine as long as they've got the government to socialize their losses.

I don't think it's any secret that I'm for Basic Income, organized labor, free education, and a strong social safety net. I also support organizations that push them as part of their agenda.

Do you have anything to add that isn't your typical corporate apologist commentary? Perhaps you just want to dodge the query again? What's the deal, man? Not even judging, you would've loved a Hillary presidency. She was the golden candidate for all the exploitative organizations you're making excuses for.

If I'm being a "corporate apologist" for pointing out that everyone and everything has to balance their books, well, ok.

What, exactly, would you have Uber do differently?

Dodging the question got it.

Pay their workers! If you can't run a business without exploiting your workers, you don't have a valid business, you have a scam. And you continue making excuses for these scammers on a consistent basis. That's being a corporate apologist.

What question?

Uber takes a 20-30% cut. That's a lot less than an employer will expect, and is about what Amazon or any other etailer will. If that's exploitive, all business is.

Questions are the sentences with the question mark at the end of them. ;)

If they're not paying enough to cover minimum wage, they're being exploitative. If they're not paying enough to cover the wear and tear their work is causing on their workers' vehicles and taking advantage of their workers' ignorance then they are scamming their workers. Plain and simple. Uber is a scam. It's scamming their workers and it's scamming society. And in posts pointing that out is you making lame excuses. Did you even bother reading the articles before you dropped your latest lame deflection?

So just to recap.

Why so anti-Hillary if you don't have a problem with her corporate puppetmasters?

Did you read the articles?

3rd and 4th question.
What happened to this foobar? Where did he go? I liked him.

You realize that's how pizza delivery works, to, eh? It's slowly selling your vehicle. But you're not going to pay any more for that pizza, so that's what they get paid.

You're also not going to pay for someone to sit and stare at their phone at 2 pm on a Tuesday on the hopes that someone might hail an Uber, so Uber passes on the 70% of nothing that you are willing to pay for that.

Uber isn't scamming anyone. The deal is laid out plainly, and you can take it or leave it.

If you want Basic Income and all that, get off your fucking ass and fight for it. Don't whine about Uber. If it tried to pay its users what you're suggesting, it would be gone, because that's not sustainable. You're not going to pay the $500 a ride or whatever that would take.

That's what we have taxes, and it if it comes to that, guillotines for, motherfucker.

Why so anti-Hillary if you don't have a problem with her corporate puppetmasters?

Did you read the articles?

3rd and 4th question.
What happened to this foobar? Where did he go? I liked him.

If I have a problem with corporations existing? It's a little early in the revolution to be calling for them to be shuttered, comrade. What would that accomplish?

Yes, I read the articles. Did you read the one I linked, that showed this is normal? That's what you make driving people around if you aren't smart about when and where you do it. If someone starts a business on Uber's platform, why are we supposed to be sympathetic if they don't calculate their own costs?

It's called regulation, here in america we used to have it. It protected people from corporate exploitation. It wasn't perfect, but it was much better than our current conditions. But that's not what I asked you.

I don't think you did. You might have eventually, but not before you posted your link. The ignorance of your replies made that clear. That you've bought into the idea of this being people starting a business tells me everything I need to know.

We can stop dragging this out now, I just wanted to see if you were worth talking to anymore.

I think you are vastly underestimating how long it's going to take to have real-world widespread use of driverless vehicles.

I really don't.

if your time frame is less than 20 years, you sure are.

Well, we'll see.

both of you save a link for this page with the title 3/2/38

see ya then