Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: This. Is. Crazy., in reply to Bart Janssen,
When did our society become so uncaring?
I'd say it's been a steady progression. A gradual erosion of the concept of social welfare that's been going on for as long as I can remember.
This housing stuff is particularly crazy though. Our economic system went through the looking glass decades ago when it stopped including the biggest cost in our lives (housing) as part of inflation. Then we set up a system whereby the means to control inflation is primarily driven through interest rates that mostly affect the cost of housing, that being by far the largest source of borrowing.
So we have the body that is charged to keep inflation within a range deliberately holding down inflation of wages, whilst our main cost rises in double digits for years on end. And the way they hold inflation down is to dick around with how much money home owners can borrow, which has a huge effect on that unmeasured statistic that's driving the real inflation figures through the roof.
When your economic system is run in a way that is essentially cray, right from the get-go, anyone who is looking out for their interests has to do it by getting with the cray. You're either in property, or you're going backwards, in this country. Now we're at the point that so many people are going backwards that they're not only not owners of property, they're not even renters. They're homeless.
But this stuff is boring economics that no one really understands. I don't, that's for sure. When you're faced with an incomprehensible and systematically fucked economy, it's the easy choice of many to just find a way to try to make it work within it's own rhetorical structure. The idea of reward for worth and work, and the corollary of punishment for worthlessness and indolence is something people cling to, to make sense of an insane system. It's easier than just admitting that this system is so out of control that it is hard to imagine how it could be fixed short of highly drastic measures. It's difficult for "pragmatic centrists" to do anything else at this point, because all the ways out of this hole involve multiple uphill movements, made at the same time, together. A system this broken can't be fixed by incremental movements.
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Which comes to $77, 906 for the year, or about $77.90/hour (if you worked 50 weeks = 1000 hours). Which is where the idea that taxi-ing is high income comes from, I would presume. Whereas Ubering is making about $10/hour. So to get your taxi at a third of the price you have to pay your Uber driver about 8 times worse than a taxi driver….
That’s if all of your calculations are correct, and all of those km were for work. Were they? Or is that just the odometer at the start and end of the year?
ETA: I have also assumed that your cost calculation is all of your costs. But you might not have meant that, and not put in the fixed costs, for example, like depreciation, insurance, compliance. Let me know. This is interesting data.
ETA2: BTW, I'm not at all judgmental about that high income. To me it should be about that high because it is ultimately dangerous work with a physical cost to the body, and you are running your own business, taking all your own risk on the capital expenditure.
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Hard News: This. Is. Crazy., in reply to Brent Jackson,
The decision to do something about it is a binary. Presumably set off a threshold of the amount. But the setting of the threshold simply positions you along the ROC curve somewhere. It’s certainly not handed down by a meth-a-magic god. Make the threshold too low and you get too many false positives. Make it too high and you get too many false negatives. But how many is too many? It all depends on the cost of a false negative or a false positive (and these 2 costs are not usually the same). In fact, a false negative on whether meth had simply once been vaporized by a user in the house has almost no cost, whereas a false positive could be the turfing out of a human onto the street, a very high cost. So I would think the end of the curve we’d want to be at is to get a very low false negative rate.
Which is what Bart said, just longer. And you knew all this anyway :-)
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Hard News: This. Is. Crazy., in reply to Bart Janssen,
If this was a medical test we’d know exactly what the false positive rate was because lives would be at stake.
Yes, if it was done properly, we’d be able to see the entire ROC curve, and judge for ourselves how worthless it was. The sensitivity/specificity trade off occurs in all binary tests, and just adjusting where you are on the curve to massage results is the oldest trick in the classification book.
But wait lives ARE at stake.
Very much so. This is drug war paranoia fallout, and it’s literally destroying lives.
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This. Is. Crazy.
I think this is the year we really went through the rabbit hole. If we re-elect the government that presided over this rapid slide into shocking poverty, we will have gone through the looking glass.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to goforit,
Some probably have. But no, those that are organizing are growing in number quite rapidly. It's a long fight, though. A marathon, not a sprint. If you're referring to this thread, there's a new one: Here
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Russell Brown,
So how many drivers have the Bluetooth? Should I ask when I get in?
Not sure! I can probably find out, will get back to you. I prefer old school cabling myself. It's reliable and quick. Just hand people the aux. Has the advantage that there's a master volume control, which I think Bluetooth might override in many setups.
It can't hurt to ask to connect. I know some drivers don't like it. But plenty do. It's always amusing to see how much people appreciate me equalizing it properly, when there's distortion in any range.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Katharine Moody,
I’ve found this series fascinating, so thanks for the time you’ve put into explaining it, Ben.
My pleasure, and thank you. I'm enjoying the one unrivalled superpower of unpaid citizen journalism - the ability to speak truth to power. No one is going to spin my story but me. But the thank yous I've really enjoyed from this article have been those of the drivers themselves, the sheer gratitude of having their story told, in a way they can totally relate to.
I wonder whether the Silicon Valley ‘vision’ of Uber corporate is, in the longer-term, to dominate a true ride-sharing business.
I'd say it's an option they'd like to cover. They can't see the future, but they want a big piece of it. There are merits to the idea, but I think that we still are allowed, as a society, the right to choose the nature of that service, rather than apathetically allow some multinational to choose it for us. They don't get to just decide our laws. Particularly not the ones designed for the protection of the public safety, the fair collection of revenue, and the fair treatment of workers. NZ has already engaged in a process of reforming the industry, and it is already lining up to say that ridesharing drivers need P endorsements and COFs for their vehicles. Since no representatives of the rights of drivers have ever even been consulted in this process, it's on us to organize ourselves to make our views heard. I think this is the missing piece that will suddenly empower all the regulators who have been unable to do much more than sit back and watch as their entire purpose gets swept aside.
I feel reasonably confident that openly encouraging crime in this country by literally paying people to commit it is something we are actually able to stop. There is a path by which we reform to allow new technological developments to make things better, and it isn't littered with the victims of corporate greed.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to st ephen,
I think the company sees it less as exploitation, and more as providing a hobby for the lonely.
LOL, touche. I think that's the hidden idea behind calling it "ridesharing". The implication is that the driver really wants to go to your place and is happy to share the cost of that.
What I find a bit freaky is the number of times I've been invited into the house of people who got a ride. So far, I've not taken anyone up on that, but there's definitely a strange implication in the whole process that I'm actually somehow the rider's new mate. I guess it's beyond their experience to have had their musical drinking party continue all the way home, and they don't want it to end. I can be their DJ all night long, and maybe even marry their sister.
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I certainly agree with the basic sentiment that I can see a UBI helping my own disabled child in future. It won't be enough, but it would sure help not to have to fight for that part of it.