Posts by BenWilson
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Sacha,
The directorship of Uber NZ is entirely foreign, and some of them are merkins. There's not one single resident who could be held to account for anything. The closest is an Australian.
-
Link to the PA discussion that went into detail on the NZES 2011. Just for comparison.
-
Speaker: What we think and how we vote, in reply to BenWilson,
Not that there were specific poverty questions in what I looked at. And I guess the general cluster of Left questions was around income differences, housing, benefit cuts, unemployment. I guess what I find interesting is that in the words of the respondents this would be summed up as "poverty". Sometimes the hive mind really does nail it. Poverty is our big problem in NZ, if you are "of the Left". It sure feels that way to me.
-
Speaker: What we think and how we vote, in reply to David Hood,
I think the left/right axis Ben found in the previous election results from the survey generally looks like it is mirrored in the economy/poverty axis (which are inverses of each other except in the middle).
So “economy” is associated with the “Right” of the PCA1 and “poverty” is associated with the “Left” of PCA1? Curious what’s the most extreme in each direction in PCA2. In other words, what terms are orthogonal to those two, when it comes to explaining the variance (not that you don’t understand that, I’m just saying what I’m interested in finding).
ETA: I think that what you have is an interesting finding because, AFAIK, that has changed since the prior election. The Left was not so aligned around poverty before.
-
Speaker: What we think and how we vote, in reply to David Hood,
Perhaps normalizing the size of the groups? You'll have to drop off the smaller parties to do that. Then you can at least explore the associations. Pick a size for each of the top, say, 5 parties, and sample out 5 groups that large.
-
Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Sacha,
I guess I've got that sort of shit to look forward to.
-
Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
looking at the industry as a whole we are over vehicled at the moment.
Sure. Or you could say that the country is underemployed, which is why people are accepting such shitty wages and conditions.
I don't really see any solution to that side of it, beyond what I'm already doing. So long as people know what they are getting themselves in for, then at least it won't come as any shock to people entering the industry. I don't see how we can hold wages up without the industry of such drivers admitting to basically being employees, and thus subject to their protections. And I expect that the drivers themselves would be the biggest opponents to that. It's the great paradox of the independent contractor, that they will literally beggar themselves for their independence. It's one future of work, and not a bright one.
But I'm not about predicting the future any more, I'm about setting up systems and organizations and information for the present. It's fun and I better get back to it.
-
Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Paul Campbell,
I do think the open source model will be what Uber ultimately is destroyed by. It does have basically no assets except its software and the software is not really that impressive. It's not on the scale of Linux.
As that article says, it's a paper tiger. I think that's why they act the way they do, because they know their days are inherently numbered.
-
You are correct though, since I originally said "without demand dropping off". That is, however, a completely incorrect assumption. Demand would drop off. By how much, no one can predict.
-
Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Jeremy Andrew,
Yes, it's very hard to generalize. These numerical workings don't shed anywhere near the light that they should.
You're right in that doubling the per km rate only requires doubling what the driver gets, which is why the 20% price drop was met with such outrage. Because it was 20% of the total price to the rider, but it was a much, much higher proportion of the driver's piece.
Throw into the mix that there is also the per minute charge and you'll see that it's even harder to work out. Then the really hard bit, which can't be worked out at all, but can only be collected as statistics, is what that does to demand. Because the driver is not paid per hour, it matters what happens to demand. You could be on a high per km rate, but not getting many rides, and thus on a low hourly rate.
Which is why I'm going back to the actual analysis of trips km and time spent, empty and full. It's the only way to really know.