Posts by BenWilson
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
Also, if you notice the gas is getting low, it's not something that takes planning and foresight to fix up. It takes 5 minutes at a servo.
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Hard News: This. Is. Crazy., in reply to Carol Stewart,
Not exactly.
Well, no, I was only talking about the cases of “contamination by users”. But yes, with those qualifications, that was my TLDR. In the other kind of contamination, the meth residue itself would hardly seem to be the issue. It’s the fact that highly concentrated and toxic chemicals of all kinds have been used in there in large quantities. It would be equally bad if the house had been used to make a perfectly legal substance with no side effects, but with the same kinds of chemicals in the production.
BTW, meth is very seldom smoked. It’s usually vaporized, if it’s not ingested by eating/drinking.
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When I played waterpolo a lot, I had a frequent dream of being able to "eggbeater" (tread water without using hands) so efficiently that I could almost walk on the water. It wasn't really that much of a progression to treading air with powerful strokes.
In my early 20s I experimented with lucid dreaming where you try to set up the dream in advance. I never had much success.
I also tried this. I put my lasting insomnia down to it. The habit of checking whether you are asleep might be great for causing waking dreams, but it's even better for causing you to have trouble letting go of your conscious, which is what sleeping is mostly about. The few times I did have lucid dreams, I didn't think they were worth the trouble. And I've heard that it's quite possible to have particularly unpleasant experiences of bodily paralysis when doing this, the "night watchman syndrome". I've had something like it once, and it was really not nice. Sleeping causes some kind of muscle control suppression, and being "awake" when that happens can be quite frightening.
Different thing, but two or three times I've woken up to go for a pee, come back to bed and thought "I liked that dream" and been able to go back into it. That was cool.
Not so cool is thinking you've woken up to go for a pee, and finding out that you haven't actually woken up, or gotten up, at all. Fortunately that's only happened to me once, when I was about 8. But yes, finding your way back to a good dream is something I can definitely do. Mostly in the morning. It's part of why I value my morning sleep ins so much.
These days I hardly ever recall dreams so it's hard to know whether they actually happen or I just don't remember them.
I'd bet you are having them, and just not remembering. Experiments have been done on people about this, and dreaming is strongly associated with REM states, which are very much common. People who think they don't dream are woken during REM, and find that they were dreaming. And people who have been denied REM have suffered terrible side effects. It seems to be quite vital to us to sometimes dream.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
It would certainly seem more clear cut, because the crimes that the people are being caught for certainly are crimes, as laid out quite clearly in acts of parliament. Copyright violations are far more nebulous crimes, full of jurisdictional issues. But driving passengers for hire or reward without a P endorsement in this country is a crime without any reservations. NZTA can and have busted people for it.
The issue of the meter is perhaps the one that is more KimDotcomish in its nebulousness. Is this method of charging a meter? I think this has always been the part the NZTA sees as the innovation that they don’t want to “stand in the way of”. But putting people on the road, en masse, without proper licenses, logbooks, medical checks, history checks, or insurance, is NOT innovation. It’s inciting or inducing crime for their direct profit. It has to stop.
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Not sure if this got posted already. It's NZTA clarifying its position that Uber drivers without the compliance are breaking the law.
Note that they undertake no remedy against Uber whatsoever, despite clearly acknowledging what the current situation is. Their only recourse is to go for the drivers.
I think their hands are tied in some way that is not clear. The statement:
“As a safety regulator we have no interest in standing in the way of innovation, but we have a responsibility to ensure that people carrying passengers for a living have been properly vetted and understand their responsibilities under the law.”
kind of says it all. Somehow, because it's innovation, they don't want to actually go for the source of the trouble, which would be to take strong steps against Uber itself. So they will pick up the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, in the form of severe punishments for the tiny fraction of Uber drivers that they can catch. Their recent statement that they've issued dozens of notices says it all. The drivers know for a simple fact that the number of people being signed up in this way is enormous. Legal drivers could soon be in a minority. We are talking about hundreds of people per week being signed up. It's now been a month since this happened. We could be pushing a thousand illegal drivers in Auckland now. But we don't know because Uber is beholden to no one to say how many they are doing, and anything they do say can only be taken with a grain of salt, considering how often they simply lie to people making queries.
It's literally on us, the public, and the drivers, to try to answer questions statistically that they could answer with a database query.
I suggest to any corporate clients of Uber that you should have a very close look at your health and safety policies, and consider the reputational damage you could suffer when this blatant lawbreaking becomes clear.
I don't really want to name the corporations here. You guys know who you are, and we're contacting you privately, to give you a chance to beat all the other ones to the punch.
I would not want to be the last one putting my staff into Uber vehicles that are being driven by people that have literally not got passenger licenses, have not had their backgrounds thoroughly checked, have not had recent medical examinations, have not recently re-sat their drivers licenses, are not keeping log books of their hours spent in the car, and in their other jobs, are in cars without passenger vehicle safety checks, and are not required to have commercial insurance.
I absolutely would not want to be the one putting my customers in them. I'd be calling Uber management directly with all of corporate bigwig clout I could muster and tearing them a new one, threatening to dump their platform publicly if immediate reversal of all of that doesn't happen.
I would not want to be that company, after the other ones have all come out loudly decrying something that could land them in extremely hot water with their staff and customers, and taking steps to fix that.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
dealers where very cagey over the range but it varied between 160 to 180 Km
They pretty much have to be cagey because the range is variable depending how hard you drive the vehicle, and over what kind of terrain, and how much is stop-start, and how many passengers you're carrying (and how big they are).
Definitely 180km would not be enough for me.
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Hard News: This. Is. Crazy., in reply to Carol Stewart,
So the TLDR is that:
1. No one knows for sure, because no one has studied it, and it's unlikely that a controlled study could be conducted
2. Given that, the overall impression of the scientists is that the risk is minimal.Minimal being an unspecified very small amount.
I'm just getting my head around how small an amount 0.5 micrograms is. One two millionth of a gram.
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An actual taxi company could certainly make it viable by having multiple depots for charging up around the city. They could even be the driver's houses, since the drivers would probably want a charging setup at home anyway.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Russell Brown,
What’s the obstacle to more drivers going electric? Vehicle cost? They just don’t know it’s an option?
My first guess would be vehicle range and recharge time. You want to be able to do hundreds of kilometers in a shift, and you certainly can't afford for it to conk out. Since Uber drivers don't even get to know the destination before the passenger gets in, you are rather stuck if you're near the end of a trip on 30% battery charge and someone gets in asking to go to Pukekohe from the city.
However, if you're doing shorter shifts, it could work out well. Definitely the petrol savings are a massive incentive to drivers - they don't like Priuses because of how sexy they feel in them.
The up front cost is probably the other main barrier.
MargaretB might have a different usage pattern to an Uber driver though. Taxis tend to do fewer jobs, so recharging between them at some base station could well be a viable choice, particularly if you are in a smaller town, where getting back to base (or home) is not something that might take hours.
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Hard News: This. Is. Crazy., in reply to Russell Brown,
How many houses actually have harmful levels of residues as a result of past meth use?
For that matter, is meth residue even harmful at all? What is a harmful level? How harmful? I expect most money that we touch with our hands a lot has meth residue on it, because somewhere along the line of the last few hundred people handling it there will have been a meth user. I expect most taxis, buses, public seats, you get into have been got into by people literally covered in meth residue, having just used it. Probably a non-zero proportion of the food you eat will have been handled by a meth user. Probably any time you visit your lawyer, the client chair you sit in will be covered in meth molecules. Putting people in a prison cell? Human rights violation! It had a meth user in it, only hours before. Has it been stripped back to the joists and rebuilt? The policeman who arrests you has literally been handling massive baggies (like maybe even a few grams!!) of meth. The boot of his car is meth molecule central, all the bacteria in there are off their nuts. The evidence lockers at the cop shop will never be free of those molecules.