Posts by BenWilson
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I should note my comment above is specifically in response to Alfie, not to what HNZ is doing, which strikes me as insanity.
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Hard News: Housing NZ keeps digging the…, in reply to Alfie,
It seems like a reasonable request to me. I think there’s an awful lot of bullshitting going on about how expensive the testing needs to be, and you can’t even get an unmonitored alarm at all. There’s definitely a scramble to own this burgeoning market going on. As a landlord-to-be who lives in the same building, an alarm that simply alerted me personally that it was pinging would be well worth having. An alarm that automatically sends the police around to smash my door in, not so much. Just the existence of the device (that could ping me) would be deterrent enough to meth production, which is the only thing I’d be concerned about.
But fuck it, I think me living upstairs will be deterrent enough, and that’s as much of the moral panic as I can be bothered with.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to David Hood,
Actually, we (the association) have done quite a lot of research into this. Many drivers are IT people, and have explored the API for all sorts of reasons. I can tell you that there's no way to find that information out. It's been carefully engineered not to keep persistent tags that link cars in a way they could be catalogued or tracked.
We were mostly just hoping to find out how many drivers are on the road. But it's can't be done. There's no way to eliminate overlap between areas. The API does not actually give the longitude and latitude of the cars that you can see on the rider app.
Perhaps some very, very aggressive data mining could do it. But it would stick out like a sore thumb to their countermeasures that enforce the Terms and Conditions of access to the API.
What we have collected that is interesting, though, is a time series on all the surge data around the country.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
Not if the fines are not collected in the end. I'm currently pursuing a line of inquiry into the status of how many fines and notices that have been issued have been paid or honored, vs how many frustrated in court or dropped beforehand. Then the huge question, the one on every journalist's lips: Are Uber paying the fines on the drivers' behalf?
This is very important because clearly we have here an organization that is not in the least bit swayed by the moves made by enforcement here. The moves that have been made by the authorities concerned are simply not working.
We have had months of this now. Uber is simply outpacing the ability of enforcement to keep drivers off the road with newly signed up drivers. I've received very credible information recently that they are making no efforts whatsoever to check the rights of the drivers to work in NZ at all. Lots of people on visas that specifically prohibit them working are signing up. These drivers are certainly flying under the IRD radar.
Naturally these drivers are beyond even an organized labour organization like the drivers association to do anything with. They avoid it like the plague. They are happy with earning extremely low pay because it's better for them than the no-pay that they are officially allowed to have.
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Hard News: Obscuring the News, in reply to Russell Brown,
So they’re desperately trying to juice up those metrics to improve the NZME side of the deal.
Death by KPI.
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Hard News: Obscuring the News, in reply to Tze Ming Mok,
Radio NZ website: still news.
FTW
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Hard News: Obscuring the News, in reply to Tze Ming Mok,
I can’t put my finger on when exactly, but within the last 2-4 months perhaps?
Me too, I think it was last week when the thought first popped into my head that reading the Herald homepage was as frustrating as Stuff. But I only formed the thought after my subconscious had clearly been frustrated for some time and my lazy conscious hadn’t got the memo.
It’s a bit scary that our main NZ newspaper has hit about the same level of ability to penetrate my consciousness that televized news does. I’ve got to the point, as Russell suggests, of feeling that these two media are hiding the news, and that it’s actually less frustrating for me to let Twitter mediate it, as northshoreguynz says. Because however much Twitter is also full of banality, it’s still easier to spot actual news.
I’m reluctant to Twitter for my morning news over coffee though. It’s too addictive. There was a happy medium before between a newspaper which could be trusted to bullet point the main real news, and yet also annoy me enough with the fluff that I’d put it down and get on with some serious work. That feels like it’s gone, and now I have to apply serious discipline if I’m to let something as dangerously engaging as Twitter fill my life. I think one Public Address level obsession is bad enough.
Oh bugger. I just noticed I passed 10,000 posts without even realizing. Boom goes my plan of torturing the readers on 9,999 with, like, several hours delay :-).
ETA: False alarm! Still got 30 in the bag. Don’t know why it was showing as 10,020 on one of the other pages.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Alfie,
NZTA say they’ve sent out 2407 warning letters to Uber drivers.
Yes, this has been excellent. Since Uber does not share details on who their drivers are, this list can only have been compiled since Uber started doing their own background checks, which started in April, triggering alerts on who should be sent a warning.
So this means that in 4 months, Uber has signed up 2407 odd drivers under their completely-non-compliant system. So when it comes to who is teaching who a lesson, I'm not sure where the balance currently lies. Our enforcement agencies have managed in their blitzes to issue a few hundred notices. This has involved at least a dozen officers on multiple occasions staking out locations for lengthy periods. Good on them, but it looks like people holding back the tide with their hands.
Makes me wonder if it really is actually too expensive to go after the source, by comparison. It's quite possible a single injunction could net the entire lot. I'd love to hear what options on that have been considered. Sure, their lawyers would fight. But it's not like our government doesn't have lawyers, or that our regulatory agencies don't have strong powers written into our laws.
This whole we-can-hide-offshore-nya-nya thing has to stop. If we can't stop it for something like this, what's to stop seriously criminal activity working through such a front? I simply do not believe our government does not have the powers to force Uber to comply in very short order.
Then it wouldn't be on the poor enforcement officers to carry the whole can for letting an organization that has flooded the market with over two thousand potentially non-compliant drivers in only 4 months.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
Thanks. The biggest problem with the proposed regs is that there is no time frame at all on it. The Minister hints at this year. But that's slipping away. More clarity on this is certainly needed. It will make my job of convincing drivers to get TSLs so much easier if the Minister wasn't hinting they could disappear some time in the next 3 months!!
ETA: For starters I would not have to fight all the little hints that I know Uber give to drivers signing up that this is all going to change soon, so they "may want to hold off on getting the PSL" (which I what I personally got told). They could just be bullshitting, but I got the impression, for once, of genuine honesty from the staff - that they truly believe that they've got a pet Minister who is going to do their bidding this year.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
We may not agree with all the regs in the transport and other acts but that dosn’t give any company or person the right to just ignore the regs.
I agree with this, for the most part. Always in law, there are rules that linger on well past their use-by. Often the will to even enforce them disappears in all but the biggest sticklers, and even then one wonders whether they are enforced arbitrarily, a thin veneer to cover an underlying use of prejudice.
Other laws make good sense, even if they are less than perfect, they catch the main purposes they are for. And there is a continuum in between.
During this period, it is pretty much only by the policy given to enforcement that the spirit of the law, and it's connection through to the spirit of the people whom the law is designed to protect, is maintained.
This is exactly where we are with app based ride sourcing.
The law at the extremely outdated end of this continuum are the laws regarding metering of rides. Technological changes have simply made this into a relic of a time when the only really practical and accurate way to measure the distance of a trip was from the turn of wheels. Now, the app measuring such things is mostly more reliable, especially since there are multiple sources - the driver's GPS, the rider's GPS, and the algorithmic measurement made along the route by a service like Google. A lot of people can see that it's a significant improvement on a taxi meter, since the main purpose of the metering law is to protect the customer, not the driver. There are ways to fiddle meters. But when that is not even really in the driver's hands any more, the customer is probably better protected. Clearly the customers of Uber feel this way about it.
At the other end of the spectrum are the sensible laws: The P Endorsement, the COF, the driving time laws and log books for enforcement of them.
In the middle are the TSL laws, which do not serve a clear purpose when it comes to taxis. There is some sense to the idea of licensing organizations to deliver taxi services, but having gone through the certifications, I know for sure that it delivered nothing more than what the P Endorsement already did. I was able to pass the exam for it off an hour of reading the reference material. I can say that this was actually unnecessary, in hindsight - I would have passed even if I'd gone in raw, because I finished the exam fully an hour before time.
They probably make sense for other kinds of operations, but for taxis a situation of genuine employment under a TSL is vanishingly rare, and almost every single driver is effectively required to get one, to set up their own organization for only themselves to be in it. It's a big waste of time and money. About $600 and about 8 weeks end to end. But it's the law, so I have to grudgingly advise all drivers to go through with it.