Posts by BenWilson
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As for Seymour’s comeback, it’s so ignorant as to barely be worth mentioning. He says the govt should change the rules to make ridesharing easier. FFS, they ARE doing this. He says Uber solves the congestion problem??? WTF? How? It’s a car. Students don’t hire them to commute to varsity you moron!! They hire them to go on the piss, and catch the bus to university. Maybe he’s thinking of carpooling? Well Uber doesn’t do that in NZ. He thinks it’s a conspiracy by the Taxi Lobby. Well I’m not a taxi driver, I’m an Uber driver, as is my entire association, and most of us want the government to put the hard word on Uber too.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
Well they could always just not break the law. This is a simple possibility to preserve a million dollar p.a. income. If they can't bring themselves to do that then we are better off without them. But I hold out hope that they might just do as asked, since they were already doing it before April in Auckland and Wellington.
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I'll be on RadioLive 100.6 at 5pm today with Garner, Craig Foss, David Seymour, and the head of the Taxi Federation.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Brent Jackson,
that is a lot more than what they’ve done to date.
Yes, indeedy. Even if it's only rhetoric, at least it's rhetoric. What a difference a few months makes, I can recall Bridges saying that he was of the opinion that whatever the market wanted was the best possible outcome.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Sacha,
I find it very encouraging and hope to hear more about what legal options they come up with, which I would think is the go-to approach at this point, since the crackdown hasn't even slowed Uber down.
Mind you, they did just put up the commission on getting new drivers to $500. The highest I've ever seen it. When I started it was $300 and it went down after April to only $100. Looks like the surge of drivers signing up non-compliant has ended and now there's the backlash of people not wanting to sign up at all because of the bad press, crackdown, and driver feedback on the actual pay.
Pull up, Uber, before it's too late!!!
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Hard News: "Meth contamination": the…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Having recently acquired a new property, it was very strongly presented to me as a good idea (and a very expensive one too) by the guy I hired to do a builder's report. From what I could tell it was a real money spinner. My own feeling was that it was insanely unlikely that the house had been used to make meth, and if it had been consumed there I couldn't care less.
Then I got to thinking that the value of the testing was not so much in how I felt about it, but in how a future buyer might feel about it. I can't account for how ridiculously paranoid other people might be in the future, and that could affect the value of my house.
I never did the testing, but this chain of thought made it clear to me what a winner that property inspector was onto. The more irrational a fear, the better the money that can be made out of it, at times.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
That’s pretty much true, I’d say. It does take a while to learn it, though, and Uber drivers don’t last very long. They’re not meant to, they’re an externalization of the cost of providing a good service. The puke in their car is an externalization, a visceral display of where the driver stands in the order of business – unpaid puke wrangler. Not compensated for lost income, and often not compensated for the cleaning cost without a long time consuming email war. This is not a long term model, of course. It would seem that they’re already finding it hard to get drivers – the commission for new sign ups jumped to $500 last week.
ETA: Already people are talking about gaming it, signing up a mate to do the 20 ride minimum (which would take a single evening), and then leaving it at that and splitting the $500, with whoever actually did the driving keeping the income from the actual rides. You don’t typically get this sort of behavior from a happy satisfied workforce. Nor do you have to literally pay $500 to outsource tricking someone into working for you in your below-minimum-wage-no-barriers-to-entry job.
ETA2: When I say "whoever did the driving", that's because you can literally drive on someone else's license at the moment. There are guys driving Ubers now who haven't even signed up for Uber. Their mate did and he's letting them use his setup when he's not doing it.
ETA3: So whatever background check Uber is doing on the drivers is now rather moot since the people they're checking aren't even necessarily doing the driving. Yet another reason for the P endorsement, which does have a big photo ID, and an ID number you can call NZTA about. The Uber app shows you a little thumbnail, and no one even looks at the driver to check if he's like the thumbnail. Since both the signed up and the non-signed up driver are in trouble with the law if they get caught, there's no reason not to be pulling this scam.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I get several drivers a day complaining that Uber does not reimburse them for soilage because the camera proof that someone puked is not good enough, and the cost of cleaning it can't be proved, and they don't cover lost income. People puke sneakily, that's almost always how it happens. No one wants a puker, but it seems to be biologically programmed to puke sneakily so people do it like that.
Sure you can offload the cost of discovering a puke to the next rider who hired the vehicle, who waited for it and may end up sitting in it. You'll probably also need a process for the inevitable dispute when the puker simply reports the puke as already being in the vehicle, to be charged the previous rider. If that is anything like Uber's current dispute resolution they will simply lose a customer every time.
As I said, after a whole lot of engineering you get something that is not quite as good as what you started with.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Sacha,
They went further than just standing up to them. The not-for-profit "Ride Austin" which is a cooperative version of the same thing got built.
In NZ, there's already several competitors. If Uber pulled out, the hole would be filled in a few weeks. I doubt that they would be better behaved, so far they all just offer the same or worse as a deal to drivers. Because the free market knows best, right?
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<continued from above>
I’m sure that it will one day actually be true that it’s just around the corner. When is that day? How long is a piece of string? Could this ball of string even be of interstellar length? Until we reach the end of it, no one will know. But always the fact that it must be finite drives people along. People seem to forget that a Googol is also finite. As is (10^100)!.
But the part I particularly don’t like, having seen it from close up, is the extent to which the appeal of AI systems is driven by management-by-numbers types. There’s a particularly cynical dislike of skilled workers that pervades all their thinking. Which is why they always fund such unimaginative projects, things that are “technically possible” and have a “provable payback” (saved wages) if successful. The fact that there are way, way, way lower hanging fruit that could multiply the worth of their companies at way less cost seems to them less interesting than the fact that they can see the small step from replacing a skilled local with a lower paid skilled immigrant has a natural progression to replacing even that person with a machine.
So we get a future vision in which we are required not to change our habits at all, nor our infrastructure – we just destroy the human labour to get something that does the same as before, only cheaper. Somehow the vision of driverless Ubers filling our streets is better than, for instance, railways that would actually solve commuter issues for realz. The best thing about the Uber model is that it not only allows government inaction, it actually requires it. This is the most perfect win for management-by-numbers. The perfect neoliberal business model, it actually requires that their main job is going to work on keeping government complacent and the workforce illegal, and in constant churn, and the population kept happy by low prices and dreams of a brighter future, and ignorant of the disgustingly seedy underbelly of the present.
Against THAT, I am certainly railing.