Posts by BenWilson
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Paul Campbell,
This is the model our association is considering. Haven't yet gone a long way down the path of investigating the best options for it, but I see it as the only solution that will really make a difference FOR drivers. The other competing apps are all just different masters looking to clip the ticket on the drivers. That's exactly how it's playing out here.
The hard sell, of course, will be how such a service can really compete with Uber. Even without Uber's commission, it's still well below the taxi market, still a subsistence wage. Essentially, the sell is still that riders have to pay more.
My own approach is mostly to make the facts available, and aim for them to be widely known, to show that the Uber price model is simply exploitative. Since IRD rates the cost of running a car at about 74c/km, to be paid only $1.35/km less 25% Uber cut = $1.08/km means the driver gets about 32c/km. They also get 30c/min. It's hard to work out the real average pay rates from such stats, though. The best I can do (and am doing) is to take a large sample of drivers and their payouts, kms travelled, and hours worked, to get a picture. So far it's coming in somewhere in the range $10-$15/hour.
So if we want them to make, say, a living wage of more like $20/hour, then prices are going to have to roughly double, without demand dropping off. But that will not happen. As the price rises, the demand will drop. How much is hard to predict - we can really only work backwards to what things were like before the prices did, in fact, drop. Which is what we're doing. But there's LOT of work involved. And we still have no knowledge of a very important factor, what the supply is like, how many drivers there actually are and how much they work.
I have no recourse by a massive data collection program. Which is precisely what I'm doing. It's going to take time. A whole lot of time.
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OK, I think I get that. So you would get a -economy for a group if, for example, economy was not one of the terms mentioned at all for that group, putting it well below the mean?
It’s idiosyncratic but I think I get what you’re trying to do. Kind of like an ANOVA, looking for significant differences (in spirit, obviously, not in the detail)?
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So the + or - is whether the term occurs more or less proportionately per group than the mean proportion across all groups? So if "economy" occurs in, say, 50% of responses, but in 51% of National voter responses, then it's a +? Just trying to get my head around what you're doing there.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
I guess the currant church involvement will be to put there unemployed members to work, could work this time as there is no cash for the drivers to help them selves to.
I don't know. Not really that keen to find out. I hope not, but I doubt that it's going anywhere fast. You can't have a professional organization in NZ competing in this market fronted by a ESL zealot. I expect it won't grow market share.
Looks like the rot is spreading throughout the industry.
Uber don't even operate in Queenstown. But yes, Uber's "disruption" simply exposes how easy it is to break the law in this industry. I still have to wonder how long it is before organized crime decides that Uber has provided the perfect front for a pool of drivers they can happily use for all sorts of things. If it hasn't already. Picking people up from their houses provides the perfect opportunity for burglar groups. Driving around randomly for hire is an excellent front for drug dealing. Vehicles without COFs are perfectly equipped with unmarked child locks for kidnapping people. No one is going to question an Uber about its right to loiter, why it's hanging around somewhere.
Which is why the P endorsement always had the "Fit and proper person check", which is an extensive background check. Not that it's a catch all, but I don't think reducing that diligence is that good of an idea.
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Speaker: What we think and how we vote, in reply to David Hood,
Love it. "Dirty", a reason to vote National, or not at all!
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Speaker: What we think and how we vote, in reply to David Hood,
There are both a series of questions rating the importance of a standard issues from the last election
Yes, although rating and ranking are not the same thing. Not that either is clearly superior, but I do think that ranking is a pretty normal mental process when faced with massive numbers of issues. I don't know how many people genuinely make decisions by aggregating hundreds of ratings of, say, parties performance on policies, and then impartially looking at the highest score and choosing the party that matches. I'd say that they mostly choose first and then crystallize their decision down to what small subset of questions matter most to them and claim the decision boils down to that. Which it might even have done, at a subconscious level. Maybe there was some wavering over the critical issue, if more than one of the parties credibly contested it in their minds.
, and a free text “what is the most important issue to you” kind of question where people could write whatever they feel (which has also been coded into general and specific subject categories).
Which is very important. But suffers from having so many possibilities and many interpretations, such that it might be hard to get robust numbers except for the large parties and most common platitudes.
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Speaker: What we think and how we vote, in reply to linger,
I'd say prioritizing is a big part of what we do when making decisions. I'd go further, though, to say that most people probably essentialize their thinking, homing in on a small group of issues that they think matter. But these are different for everyone, and even if the same, who they believe will sort out these issues can be very different. It's also very hard to tell whether someone claims a particular issue is the most important thing, but is actually making their decision based on factors they can't admit - possibly not even to themselves. I'd say racist factors are like this.
In short, prediction of humans is hard! Even if they actually tell you who they would vote for, that's not 100% accurate.
That was what was really interesting to me, that despite a far richer set of questions, the ability to guess who they would vote for wasn't a great deal better than just asking them if they are left or right wing.
I never looked into the influence of demographic factors. It's an interesting question. I bet it's highly collinear in many instances to opinion, so the predictive effects would not stack. But I'm guessing.
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Speaker: What we think and how we vote, in reply to linger,
Yes, the NZES was not built for the purpose I was using it, so it's not that surprising it wasn't that fit for it. Still a very interesting resource though, there's nothing else like it in NZ.
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Speaker: What we think and how we vote, in reply to David Hood,
It's kind of interesting that if you ask the right questions, then the left to right scale does seem to form the most important principal component axis, and the parties do seem to order themselves according to the self-rated left/rightness of the respondents. I don't know if that shows more than a vague consensus on what these terms actually mean, though.
I wasn't able to model that much of an improvement in accuracy based on political opinions than the null model (which is that everyone votes National). That would be 42% right, and the best prediction model using random forests and taking hundreds of opinions into account got that up to 57% (crossvalidated). So maybe a 15% improvement in ability to guess how someone votes was attained off the answers to 74 questions.
Not sure what to make of that. Either the wrong questions were being asked (obviously I eliminated questions like "which party did you vote for" and "which party are you most sympathetic to"), or political opinion (divorced from specific knowledge of their opinion on particular parties) accounts for very little of the way people actually vote. Or a bit of both.
There was me hoping to build a 10 question tree that could ascertain who you were going to vote for without ever mentioning a party name (or a proxy for it, like "the government"). But no.
It's not like this is the terrible fault of people not knowing what they want. I think it's much more of a factor of the parties being broad churches that very significantly claim to offer much the same things. The weak signal is not in what people want, it's in which party will give that to them. But this is speculation on my part. Can't prove any of that.
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Hard News: The Unitary Plan and grown-up…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Yes, where to start with the undemocratic nature of Singapore? But let’s not, because it’s a derail.
ETA: My gf of 8 years in my 20s wrote her doctoral thesis on this. The number of times I had to proofread stuff about Singapore and its system! She was fascinated by the mechanisms of control that were exerted. The one I found most interesting was what she called "Manufactured discourse", in which people would disagree with each other in public about how the awesome the government was. Some thought it was super awesome, whereas others thought it was just simply not repressive enough and let kids get away with murder, and only rated as quite awesome. Meanwhile you need police permission to assemble more than 5 people to talk about anything more interesting than shopping. Which would seem to be the nation's only past-time.