Posts by BenWilson
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Alfie,
Uber’s plan to fill the streets with cheap, unlicensed drivers can only spread the potential income and guarantee that nobody makes a living.
Especially since those drivers will also have to factor in the extremely punitive fines and other punishments that they can receive. They could Uber for a year and lose the entire year’s income, their car, their license and their job in one single moment at a check point.
Or they could have a crash into an expensive car, and find that non-commercial insurance will not pay out and they will be pursued into bankruptcy by the other party.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Perhaps it was more fun in the olden days.
Oh, I enjoy the work. Particularly on Friday night, there’s like 15 different parties in the car that evening. Been listening to a much wider range of music recently. It’s been a surprising discovery for me that the biggest fans of gangsta rap would seem to be teenaged white girls.
Young men, surprisingly, seem to be much bigger fans of R&B. I always thought it was the other way around.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Alfie,
Yes, my maintenance and depreciation calculations are only based on a few months of data. I’m getting plenty more in the pipeline, though, so the true picture will emerge over the next few weeks. It’s been a job to convince hundreds of drivers that this data is a very valuable contribution to their cause.
By hundreds, I mean there are about 400 odd drivers on the various FB pages, most of them in Auckland. A whole lot of them want to go on strike and don't see the worth of the long game. I can't convince them otherwise, indeed the People's Liberation Front of Judea dynamic has been hard at work for weeks. I've had to leave those who think striking would work as independent contractors to their own devices. Unfortunately, anyone committed to that path is usually there on grounds of a total misunderstanding of how things work in NZ and around the world, when it comes to the rights of independent contractors, and people with such severe misunderstandings are hard to get into a rational camp of people committed to the more progressive pathway of organizing together as a strong team. I doubt their ability to even organize anything that would come up on the radar as a strike.
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But there's no way to skin $10/hour into a high income. The median income is a bit over $20/hour for wage and salary earners, so even if you do 70 hours/week, you're going to be on a below average income. For busting your arse doing several hundred trips a week, and basically having a life that is either working or sleeping, except for your mandatory day off per week.
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I'm not personally across that. It would be interesting to hear from anyone who actually is a taxi driver. My information came from the bank when I went to get another mortgage for my new house. They told me that it was considered by the bank to be a high-income profession. Since they pretty much demand to see the details of your income when giving a mortgage, I can only surmise they base that heuristic on actual facts. I think it is likely, though, that it's "high income" because they work extremely long hours. In other words, the pay is not great, but you can do 70 hours a week, which takes an average hourly rate into an above average yearly income.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to Bob van Ruyssevelt,
That's my position in a nutshell. Uber is mostly better than taxis, particularly for when you have to call it rather than just get in one that's waiting for you. The app conveys several advantages in safety and convenience and customer service, and provides the driver with safety and convenience too, as well as the ability to rate the customers (although that is a very weak power indeed compared to the customer's ability to rate the driver). It's also cheaper, although the above points mean that a lot of people would prefer it, even if it wasn't cheaper.
So moves to aggressively exploit drivers and flout the law make no sense at all. It's a perfectly good business model just as a "normal" business. Because, for the most part, it IS a normal business. It's providing something that's been possible for thousands of years (giving people a lift for money) via a better interface. It was growing just fine, and NZ was even getting on with making the laws more convenient for it. Why they think they get the right to just unilaterally fuck with their drivers and the whole NZ laws, government and public without warning is beyond me. It's beyond arrogant.
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Cracker: Breaking the Silence, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I'd be more than a little worried about Sir Isaac Newton being in charge of the Mint, that's for sure. Charming fellow, he brought back the ancient punishment of being hung, drawn and quartered for the crime of counterfeiting, and then hung around bars catching counterfeiters personally. Loved his work, apparently.
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Cracker: Breaking the Silence, in reply to Rich Lock,
it’s more than a little troubling to directly compare a model where you’re literally asked to take everything on faith, with a model where your results ultimately only survive if your peers can’t tear them apart.
If your model is some chain of command over science, then you could quite literally set a up a model where the peers can't tear apart falsehood, because they're not even peers any more. Furthermore, one could argue that the divine authority of Popes only came from a peer review in which they were selected by a council of wise religious elders. As I understand it, this is exactly how the Pope is elected.
But yes, I think the discussion is more than a little academic. I doubt that scientists themselves would really want such a model. A top position would presumably have a term attached, and other processes for early removal on grounds of wrongdoing. It could presumably be designed to be robust to empire building. Rather like democratic institutions already are. But, if modeled that way, such an organization would ultimately be a democracy, and it would thus have many of the same failings anyway - inertia, mass stupidity, etc. But I can see that something like that could be built. Would love to see a proposal, with the detail, and all the devils therein.
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Cracker: Breaking the Silence, in reply to Damian Christie,
I just mean that it’d be great if many of our important national decisions were a bit more evidence-based rather than contrary to evidence, or based on ideology.
To that I fully agree. My own hope is that as time passes, this already is happening. There's setbacks, definitely. But the overall trend is for scientific thinking to become far more prevalent and trusted. No need to force it too fast, and thus break other aspects of the system. But how fast is too fast? Tough one, as I originally said. A democratic system held back by the unreason of vast quantities of people is a slow thing to move, and in the meantime there's stupid people taking the flouride out of town water supplies. I can see the appeal of it being institutionally hard for them to do that, on account of the sheer weight of scientific evidence about the human cost involved.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to goforit,
Actually when you think about Uber it runs the worlds biggest pozi scheme.
It doesn't really need to be a Ponzi scheme. It just runs that way now while they're growing market share. But there is real work being done at the bottom, so it's not like a Ponzi scheme in that respect. Uber do provide a real service, Uber riders really do get something for their money, and Uber drivers really do get paid for the work, which is real work. It's also a shitload of money, so it's not so clear why they need such an aggressive policy. I think they literally just don't know any better.