I'm not sure what life issues you are referring to, but I sometimes find that when things are crazy in my working life, it helps to just switch it all off and do the laundry and clean the house.
Standing out in the yard, pegging my shorts to the clothes line, surrounded by leafy trees and chirping bird can be nice.
> sometimes find that when things are crazy in my working life, it helps to just switch it all off and do the laundry and clean the house.
I'm not talking about work.
Keeping my personal life off the InterTubes, let's say your aging parent is in hospice, and you spend most of your non-work time visiting them and ensuring their last days on earth are as comfortable as possible. That occurred for an extended family member recently. Other scenarios are quite plausible as well.
When I get to the end of a stressful ten hour workday, personally, I'd rather not stare down the barrel of another 3-4 hours of house chores that have piled up due to the aforementioned ten hour work days.
And that's just normal life. Anyone living as a caregiver, for example, would probably love to do away with your idyllic vision of pegging clothes on the line in lieu of, say, taking a breath and going for a walk...
While for the individual, this may seem true in the short term, fostering a perpetually desperate underclass tends to have quite negative long term consequences for everyone's health and safety. From what I've seen of California, the well-off are fine with this tilt towards Central American-style stratification. But at some point, this trajectory comes at the cost at allying themselves with some grotesque form of thuggery (corrupt police state, rule by organized crime, etc). Maybe that's what we're inching towards.
Disintermediation itself isn't tied to the creation of an underclass, rapid technological innovation destroying jobs might be but that's something we need to solve with welfare (and Americans are really going to have to get over their brainwashing that accepting government aid makes you scum). Literally the alternative to redistribution is making everyone poorer and manipulating the system so that factory workers can feel like they're worth the money they're paid. Eg. Brexit/Trump - protectionism.
What constitutes "rapid technological innovation" these days is just exceptionally bright people acting as middlemen to concentrate wealth into a new class of financiers. It's not structurally different from Wall St. UBI is just a story being peddled to keep the engineers on board because they're (right now) more moral and science fiction optimistic than their investment banker counterparts. Americans will gladly embrace (maybe have) authoritarianism before they'll abandon the just world fallacy of Capitalist individualism.
I'd like to see a Gig Economy Union myself. Sure I can hire an Uber, get my laundry handled, my shopping done, but I want to know the poor s.o.b. doing the work has benefits and a decent wage, and isn't being screwed over by the app-company-of-the-month.
I'm personally looking forward to the IRS reaping its pound of flesh from Uber for contractor misclassification and the hundreds of millions of dollars in employer payroll back taxes and penalties that will be due.
Is it irony that, if this comes to pass, the government will use that money, made on the backs of mostly poor people in the USA, to drop bombs on mostly poor people on the other side of the world?
I don't dream, I do. I apply political and financial pressure against my Congressional reps, and have even threatened (with someone else's financial backing) running someone against them (which secured their vote for a socially progressive bill I wanted passed).
But you do you. I enjoy applying pressure in the political space, and I play a long game.
I'm not disagreeing about representative pressure. Listen, I've been in almost every congressional office building on the hill and participated in several house campaigns, including a successful one.
But I also don't kid myself: this kind of action is not playing the long game.
The agenda is set such that congress really doesn't even get to vote on the important matters directly. For example, there will never be a vote directly on the matter of whether to spend money gleaned from taxing gig economy companies on shoring up services or bombing brown people.
But that's not even the point.
Government is not the long game. The state is temporary and its time is nearly over.
The long game is human evolution, especially what we today call "technology."
Check out how much cash the Clinton's and DNC poured into her campaign. A lot of good tech did there! /s
"The state is temporary"? How outlandish. The state will outlive you, and will crush you if the people don't use effort to coerce it in the right direction.
Tech might help or hurt a cause, but people will be the ones who are needed to win the day, not tech. But don't believe me; just watch who is getting inaugurated.
Why should Uber driver be considered employees but not taxi drivers driving for Yellow Cab? Pretty much all taxi drivers are independent contractors, and I don't see how they are different from Uber drivers.
It might just be due to the labor laws that define what a contractor and an employee are, and how taxi drivers and uber drivers are thus classified. You might check into those!
Look into the 20-point list the IRS uses to make the W2/1099 distinction yourself, and you'll find Uber drivers as far (or further) to the "contractor" side as many yellow-car cabbies are.
I don't believe so; they are related though. A union can force enforcement of laws, or simply strike; a law has to be enforced. Many laws on the books are unenforced.
Generally, to be frank, I think the labor movement in the US is due for a revival and unions should take the lead in that.
It's in my mind that gig workers are properly neither contractors nor employees, as understood commonly (not legally - they can fall into either bucket legally, iirc). They deserve a spot in the law and protections thereof.
I'd like to think that a startup in this space structured around profit sharing would quickly outcompete their competitors by attracting all the best laborers. But I think the reality is that some more feudal tech entity would do whatever it takes to destroy them. Structuring working relationships this way is as deeply ideological as it is opportunistic. At some point we're going to have to realize that this isn't just cutthroat Capitalism, but the explicit way some people want this to be.
Really? You have Significant Life Issues and you can't even manage to clean up your house or cook a meal? Do you really think you can organize your life when you can't even manage to organize your home or your own sustenance?
What a joke. You don't need time, you need perspective.
> What a joke. You don't need time, you need perspective.
Your ignorant remark about me does you no credit.
Many situations exist where there is simply either no time or no energy. Musicians touring, hospitalizations, illnesses - the list is long and varied. It's often much simpler to pay someone else to take care of things.
More technology in our current economic system only reduces the overall number of 'good' jobs available, creating more inequality and increasing the divide of the haves and have-nots. Technology may not be inherently a bad thing, but when you combine it with an open global economic model built on unchecked capitalism, it will eventually create a distressing situation for many.
However, after reviewing my Uber receipts, I realized how awful the drivers side of the deal was. Take gas, car milage, Ubers cut and then you have literally a fraction of minimum wage with no health insurance or 401k.
Then I start to think, well heck, if this kind of gig economy displaces traditional employment, a lot of people will be one crisis from poverty.
The future is really exciting, but unless we proceed carefully, we could end actually making things worse for the working class than they were decades ago.
It's already the case that things are far worse for the working class. The precipice we're on is creating a "nothing to lose" permanent underclass, with all the instability and desperation that entails.
That ship sailed. Here's what working class prospects looked like decades ago:
- Stable lifetime employment with a single firm was not unusual.
- Plentiful well-paying work was available for individuals with a grade school education.
- Overtime pay kept work over 40 hours in a week to a minimum and it was considered unusual bordering on pathological to take work home.
- Retirement pensions were a common company benefit.
- Interests rates on savings routinely beat inflation.
- Strong organized labor held even non-unionized employers in check.
To summarize: a highschool grad with a modicum of luck could land an entry level job at a firm, work their entire life for that company, and retire without having to worry about eating cat food to pay for medicine.
Call me a crank, but personally, I'm getting annoyed by people who love to blame tech companies for everything. "This unending hamster wheel of capitalism and technology is driving us all to the brink of insanity" Maybe that's true, but instead of blaming tech companies and brogrammers, maybe try taking a look in the mirror. You want to escape the rat race? Pack up your bags, move to bumfuck nowhere, and spend all your time reading medium blog posts. I guarantee you, you don't need a whole lot of money to do that. Or if that sounds too drastic, just sit at home for the holidays, take the subway, cook your own meals, and clean your own house.
Personally, that sounds like hell to me. I like traveling to other cities and staying in people's homes. I like taking an uber to get around sometimes. I like ordering food on seamless and hiring house cleaners on Handy, so I'll have more time to do the things I actually enjoy. And if you don't want to do any of the above, that's fine too. Just pretend all of the above companies don't exist and do what you want with your life, instead of complaining about tech companies and "brogrammers" providing services that cater to other people besides yourself.
> And if you don't want to do any of the above, that's fine too
Most people have no choice on this. They have to work and it's just to subsist. Typical of hacker news that this would be the most up-voted comment.
Regarding tech, the main change tech has brought is to allow very accurate tracking of debt. Most debt is created through land. Surplus value goes to the landlords and banks.
Before this was not completely efficient, now banks can react to productivity changes much faster. Prices are set by the highest bidder. Tech has enabled "side jobs" which means they can outbid others for rent / mortgage (renting fiat money from a bank). Banks scale up fiat money creation in response. Other workers must respond and they too need a side job.
If we all worked 3 days a week it would be enough to pay the rent. If we all worked 7 days a week it would be enough to pay the rent.
But we cannot coordinate this as workers. Tech is working against workers. Economic rent extraction is now fully efficient.
Not everybody is struggling out there... tech has some of the highest salaries for any industry. It is workers that are not in tech like traditional taxi drivers which are losing out badly to these innovations.
yes, which is a hell of a lot more than people who work in tech, hence my point that these people don't choose this, it's thrust upon them by our flawed system which sees surplus value flow to the banks who create credit out of nothing to capture said surplus value.
You're right, that that the markets will reprice very quickly, and roughly speaking the more there is (stuff, workers, etc.) the lower the price will be. This would be much less of a problem if money was more evenly distributed, or if there was an efficient tax system in the US. Mostly the problem (if it can be described as singular one) in the US, and elsewhere, is the failure to tax the financial sector properly and redistribute that money back into the public infrastructure.
I think we should cut this at the source. I never like taxing bad things where alternatives exist, let's just stop banks creating money. They should be intermediaries of funds not creators.
I think it's not possible to stop land speculation so it should be taxed to pass the gains onto the people. As most money is issued against land let's have a land value tax.
Secondly let the state decide how much money can be created each year via an agreed growth target, set by...look away now if you are a neo-liberal zealot...the state. Thirdly use LVT to provide an efficient basic income and to do away with income tax. Why do we tax work? We tax carbon to stop people emitting carbon.
The current "system", if one can even confer such a name on such a dog's dinner, is insane.
Regarding US M2, do we really have step jumps in productivity? Is it not reasonable that we see this trend upwards in a smooth(-ish) fashion? If so then bank issuance tracks productivity gains, no?
#### EDIT #####
Will have to stop posting now as whenever I post about finance and question banks hacker news emits a fake "you are submitting too fast" message which I just got now replying to a different thread about zsh on a different page.
I also cannot edit my top level comment two above this.
What a great platform for debat HN has. Clearly they are confident in their model of lending and taking a cut and someone posting conflicting information that questions usury is no threat to them at all!
I imagine a system where all capital gains associated with land (not the structures on the land) outside of the real inflation rate were captured via capital gains tax.
> If we all worked 3 days a week it would be enough to pay the rent. If we all worked 7 days a week it would be enough to pay the rent.
This is wrong. The reason rent is going up is because there's more demand than supply. Reducing the amount of money everyone has by a constant factor (in this case 3/5) will not change the supply/demand imbalance, so it won't solve the problem. Put another way: the reason rent is so high is to prevent some people from being able to purchase the product. There's not enough of it to go around. You're basically blaming the best known system for allocating scarce goods for the fact that scarce goods exist.
If you look at countries that try to act on the above notion, you'll find that high prices are replaced with impossibly long lines. And shortages. This is because reducing the price will only increase the demand for that good.
A better world view would be: if the baby boomers hadn't all had kids at the same time, we wouldn't be experiencing housing shortages. This theory (though incomplete) at least puts demand increases front and center. You could also blame cities for not allowing/supporting the construction of new housing. That theory (though incomplete) at least puts the supply shortages front and center.
People live in one home, whether we work 3 or 7 days. You are confusing cheaper products garnering more demand with a flat need. This is why we should tax land: the supply is constant.
Demand is up due to financialization of housing by the banks and greedy landlords are their foot soldiers.
Edit can submit no more due to the usual HN censorship so this last edit for the guy below:
You are just talking across me with no regard to my point at all. The graph is from the ft and the y axis is linear, it's from 2012 with no cutoff due to a change in trend.
I'm not saying don't compete, my earlier post stated that when we all work more or smarter in aggregate the banks take the gains and we all end up running to stand still. That was my point.
NO. Prices are set by supply and demand. No one is being forced to take out a loan, and if they could buy a given home with a lower loan, they would. Hence the loan is only enabling demand. You could say the same thing about employment, or inheritance, or tax breaks. The only reason prices change is because supply or demand changes.
You are basically saying that you'd like everyone to just accept their lot in life, and not compete with you for your current house. And in exchange you'll not compete with those in houses you'd prefer. And you're blaming the banks because they're helping those who don't agree that you deserve the hose more than they do.
When supply is scarce, prices go up. The value of the good does not go up. What is that extra price doing? That's you bribing the owner of the good to sell to you, and not to some other guy. You're paying to make the price so high that the next guy in line would rather live somewhere else, share a room, or go homeless.
The image, though interesting looking, is missing context. What units is the Y-axis in, and why does the X-axis only go to (what I assume is) 2012?
> People live in one home, whether we work 3 or 7 days.
People aren't born with homes. If you lost yours, someone would move in. Where do you think this other person is currently living? Why do you deserve your home more than they do? How should homes be allocated if not by whoever is willing and able to pay the most? Who will make new homes in this new system of yours? (an especially worrying problem since I think you suggested all the construction workers only need to work 3 days per week, and housing is already scarce)
> The only reason prices change is because supply or demand changes.
We are living in year 16 of the era of government pushing loan prices lower than the market would set them. 8th year since they've been pushing the loan pricing down VERY hard (ie. essentially to the zero bound, where you're only paying for the (also artificially lowered) risk of the banks, admin (ie. people employed to check payment and tax and ...) and a small profit margin for the banks).
While of course it is not really known how high the market would set loan prices, it seems the long term average is 4%. Since we've been below that for a while, let's call it 6%. Add the 3%-4% of risk, admin, tax and bank profit and mortgage rates should be somewhere between 8% and 10%, if you have really good credit.
What would house prices be with 9% interest rates instead of 3% ? That's quite normal a rate for mortgages, long term. My back of the envelope calculation says that they'd be, with the same monthly payment, a bit more than double what they should be, in market prices. Prices should be 60% less, or put it another way houses are 120% overvalued.
At a very optimistic 7% (the long term average), house prices would be about 45% less, or they're 75% overvalued.
(example calculation: with 3% mortgage payment, a 4000$ monthly payment will get you 1.12 million dollars, at 9% it will get you 0.52 million dollars, or a little less than half. At 7% it will get you 0.8 million dollars, or 45% less)
Hence I strongly disagree with your notion that house prices are determined by supply and demand. House princes are as high as the government can get them, and damn the consequences.
I mean, in some sense you're right. The literal USD figure is determined that way. However, if you doubled the number of dollars in circulation, and so "doubled the cost" of every home... you've also changed nothing in terms of real cost to consumers. As you say, they're still working just as many hours on the job, still giving the same percentage of their labor to the lender, and they still end up with a house at the end of ~xx years.
If the banks weren't giving the same risk adjusted rates to everyone, you can at least make the argument now that you've got two consumers (the bank is essentially donating money for the purchase to the buyer). But I don't see where that gets us here.
Nope. They change lending from 3 times primary income to way over 3 times household income. People are literally working longer for the same pile of bricks.
The cost of carry remains associated with wages just as rent does because we have to pay more, however as the cost of other items falls (due to efficiency / progress) the bankers hoover up the rest.
Banks don't get to decide what people will pay, people get to decide what people pay. People make this decision in terms of real cost, not in terms of USD (since real cost determines their access to USD). People are not making that decision because the banks are putting a gun to people's heads and forcing them to pay more.
This is a separate point from real estate costs increasing historically -- that is caused by supply and demand. People are (as your graph nicely shows) choosing not to move as more people enter a given area, driving up the cost of real estate. This is to say that their demand is inelastic.
Unless you are suggesting banking as an industry is engaged in trust like behavior, they're not able to set the terms of rates in a way that will change their risk-free profit from a given individual at a given market price. If the price rises due to a supply and demand imbalance, they may be able to charge more to offset the increased risk of the purchase they are financing.
Banks set the amount. If banks start lending $1MM to employees on the basic wage that is how much basic housing costs.
For example recently in the UK the govt said they would "help" buyers by contributing a certain % for buyers. Housing went up by that amount. Available credit sets prices.
Banks can't magically choose to write loans at unprofitable terms. They also can't write loans at noncompetitive rates in any sort of realistic quantity. These two forces (fear of principal loss through nonpayment/default, and loss of customers due to competition) dictate bank rates.
> If banks start lending $1MM to employees on the basic wage that is how much basic housing costs.
No. It will only cost that much for people unwilling to move away from highly competitive markets where construction is barred. For those living in areas which can be developed, housing prices will also be dictated by the cost of construction, which is presumably less than $1MM. Buyers will be pocketing the difference between the available $1MM and the cost of construction. This is to say that banks do not dictate prices for housing, but rather are only (sometimes) enabling (fools?) to go higher in an auction.
If banks did set prices for housing, they would have to also be setting the price of, for example, construction. Which is not the case, as that is dictated by the supply and demand of labor and materials.
Put another way: I'm sure in wherever you are, not every housing option is the same price. Do you honestly believe that banks are somehow dictating those price differences? If not, what is that force, and does accounting for it also account for the effect of increased credit availability on house prices? (A: supply and demand, yes)
> recently in the UK the govt said they would "help" buyers by contributing a certain % for buyers. Housing went up by that amount.
Yes, just like if you give everyone a raise by x% you'll see housing jump by that amount. As I've said in this thread several times already. This jump does not, however, represent a change in real cost to consumers (a change in the what percentage of their labor is being spent on a given good). As I've also said in this thread several times already.
If someone wants to fight the "unending hamster wheel of capitalism and technology", then certainly shutting up is a bad strategy. The reasons for making noise about this given in the article are not personal, but ideological. Presumably, it works as intended if it feels annoying.
But the enemies he's railing against have nothing to do with the cause he's trying to champion. The central message of the blog post is to let go of consumerism, which I can certainly get behind. But consumerism has nothing to do with the latest generation of tech companies. Costly hotels existed long before AirBNB came along. Taxis existed long before Uber came along. Restaurants and maids existed long before Handy or Seamless.
If you want to be anti-consumerist, if you want to minimize your living expenses, go right ahead. But vilifying Seamless, and the people who would rather use Seamless and spend the extra hour reading instead of cooking, is just masturbatory righteous-indignation.
> "unending hamster wheel of capitalism and technology", then certainly shutting up is a bad strategy
Whut? I'm not sure that has ever been effective at reversing course. Sometimes a society has changed course, but that's just because this message got lumped in with the have-nots, which is unrelated. This sentiment has never been satisfied, so I'll disagree that shutting up and moving on is a bad strategy. It's the ONLY strategy since it's tied to frontiersman thinking of having too much after enduring risk.
The point isn't preventing YOU, the consumer, from doing this.
The point is that most people as the supplier aren't doing Uber, AirBnB, etc because they like it. They're doing it because they don't have any other good alternatives.
Most of the people on the supply side of the serfdom economy are gaining very little benefit. This is a real problem.
> They're doing it because they don't have any other good alternatives.
So champion proposals that would grow the economy, create more jobs, increase the median hourly wages, and/or improve the social safety net. I don't see how vilifying Uber or AirBNB is going to help accomplish any of the above.
P.S. There is no way for you as an individual to be a supplier on the Seamless, but that still hasn't spared them the author's wrath. I don't think the author really has a clear idea of what he's complaining about.
Can't we rant and wail a bit about how increasingly broken shit looks? Why always champion a proposal to fix things? But thanks for the idea that vilifying Airbnb is not going to help anyone. I agree. They exist only because we let them fill that particular part of the biosphere. Maybe we shouldn't let them.
To keep the analogy, some species we remove from the biosphere and replace with others. Airbnb and Uber etc look like the fast spread of an invasive species.
> I don't see how vilifying Uber or AirBNB is going to help accomplish any of the above.
These companies are part of a greater force eroding the role and rights of labor. I think it's right to vilify the "sharing" company - especially with the type of "this is great for the world" propaganda that they spew out.
If we accept these conditions as the norm, they will only continue to slide. We have laws and regulations for a reason. Bypassing said laws with billions in 1%, connected money, should rightfully be called out. Conveniences for the noble class aside, this is just part of a larger scheme to transfer capital from the poor/middle class into the pockets of the existing wealthy. It's a bit tone-deaf of you not to see the other side of the picture. Next time you're in an Uber, talk to the driver. You'd be surprised how many are doing this full-time because they can't find employment elsewhere... and even more when you discover how many actually understand the underlying economics of their "side hustle" (aka side-scammed).
Where did all of their jobs go? Also, aren't they experimenting with self driving vehicles so that those people don't have to work those kinds of jobs?
What conditions are you referring to? The ability to work when you want for as long as you want? The ability to take an otherwise idle asset like your car or your house and make extra money with it?
Anecdotally, I've taken dozens of Uber rides and never once heard the driver complain about Uber. I have, however, heard many drivers complain about proposed legislation that will harm Uber.
Then you're not a lawyer. Tell an Uber driver that you're a lawyer, and you're nearly guaranteed a conversation about their rights, and ability to sue Uber.
This isn't true for all sharing economy companies, but it's true for Uber.
They might not complain if all they think it'll do is ding their star rating, but many of them are very upset with Uber. Most of these folks feel trapped by what they perceive to be an abusive monopsony buyer of labor.
So complain about Uber. There's lots to complain about, for sure. But don't make it about the "serfdom economy" or tech in general.
Seriously, we're sitting here on our pocket supercomputers [1] using wireless city-wide broadband to complain about how tech doesn't make anyone's lives better.
[1] Ownership of which largely transcends class, at least in the USA, which is amazingly wonderful and is a consequence of the capitalist system TFA's author seems to hate so much.
Also the author Matt Ruby is a circuit comedian and vlogger: professional complaining is his own personal form of brogramming: he has no actual solutions provided, he hasn't organized any communities, and the advertisement promotions on his startup comedy site "vooza" are indistinguishable from ones on the sites of some of the startups he's complaining about.
Those who spend time consuming tripe like this or Silicon Valley, over some internet service, and then bitch about brogrammers are the problem. The efforts of greater people past are rotting under the asses of loud observers and you're no fucking Cesar Chavez.
Right, but to bring it back to the article, how is that a complaint against eg Seamless? All those restaurants in nyc delivered 10 years ago (well, Seamless was there then too) but you just called, dealt with the terrible English of whomever answered the phone at your various local ethnic food places, and played a bit of food bingo. The value of Seamless is discovery, ie not having to troll through the phone book, and an easier ability to order w/o language issues.
And Uber is a taxi that comes. You just have to have experienced SF -- admittedly run by idiots playing city, badly -- pre Uber to understand why people love it. I mean, it's fair to criticize how Uber treats drivers, and I try to have cash to tip, but it's not exactly like taxi drivers were being treated particularly well before Uber. And they treated their customers like absolute shit.
they have to do that because they live in an expensive area, hence living within your means, this is the part of the comment which you completely ignored. I make good money but I dont work an extra job just so I can live in sf, I just don't live there, its no ones right to live anywhere in particular and if you remove that constraint then "any other good alternatives" doesnt hold true but only for the very few people who literally cannot go somewhere reasonable to live for good reasons other than "it sucks".
Everyone wants to make it sound like these people had a gun to their had and the only option was to be a wage slave to the uber type oppressors, this is completely lacking in perspective to the vast expanse of inexpensive areas there are in which unskilled labor can live comfortably.
>The point is that most people as the supplier aren't doing Uber, AirBnB, etc because they like it. They're doing it because they don't have any other good alternatives.
How do you know this? The last five uber drivers I've had have been
- a bloke on the way home from the gym
- the owner of a small accountancy firm, also on the way home
- an IT student from China who talked about PHP with me
- a Korean migrant who really hated taxi companies and was saving up for a house
- a CFO for a smallish company who was driving people around because he had to pick up his wife from the airport in a few hours
They all seemed pretty okay with uber. Only one, the student, was driving as a primary source of income, and he was doing about 20 hours a week and making more than he would in any other job.
Here's another anecdote from a very old account. A boy from Bihar, moved to the big city, wanted to drive an auto rickshaw but the Marathis have all the licenses on lockdown.
All Uber cares about is that he has a rating > 4.3 stars - ethnicity is irrelevant.
(This is also why the racist political party is trying to get Uber shut down.)
2. When you ask a stranger about themselves, they put their best foot forward. People are pretty varied.
3. My experience has been that uber drivers in my city work part time for supplementary income. This is a verifiable assertion, but I don't have the means to carry out that verification. However, the assertion that I was responding to has no verification either. Plus, it probably varies from city to city and country to country
5. There are a lot of reasons why Uber is awful, from monopolistic bullying of governments, to not letting drivers set prices, to exposing drivers to market forces at an unprecedented level, but the drivers I've talked to have nearly all worked part time and seemed pretty happy to do so.
I'm not in sales, I don't work for Uber, and that's all I'll say about the personal stuff.
> The point is that most people as the supplier aren't doing Uber, AirBnB, etc because they like it. They're doing it because they don't have any other good alternatives.
Well, sure.
Why is it the fault of Uber/AirBnB/Seamless/TaskRabbit/DishDash/Handy/whatever that they don't have better alternatives?
And moreover, how exactly would these people's lives be better if they couldn't work for Uber etc.? Aren't they choosing to work for Uber etc. because it's better than the alternative (namely, not working for Uber etc.)?
There are lots of fucked up things about our economic policy. I won't give my top ten because HN is trying not to be a place for political debates, but I'm sure you can name a few off the top of your head. We just had a long discussion about the importance of the ACA on HN -- taking that away hits the poor the hardest. We can go on.
The governmental policies that perpetuate income inequality should be the target of your ire, not the fact that someone deigned to create yet another company that doesn't pay its employees "enough" money.
I think the point that the author was trying to make was SV/startup/tech company bulshytt all touts technology* as equating to progress, and progress equalling some kind of unambiguous improvement to individual quality of life or society as a whole. This claim is open to critique given the exploitative nature of some/most/all sharing economy services, the frequently pointless and often time consuming nature of apps, etc.
The idea here is if technology was in fact improving the economy, society, or the world the individuals who are stuck working 2nd and 3rd jobs would have other options available, especially in light of how many jobs/career tracks/industries software has eaten in the last 20 years.
While I agree with a lot of what you've said, I think you missed much of the point of the article.
It was written by a comedian, and therefore I read it as meaning to be provocative and not to be taken entirely at face-value (eg, the title of the article). Therefore, I think answering something intentionally provocative with another polemic (eg, "move to bumfuck nowhere" etc) only prevents you from engaging with the actual issues being raised in the original piece.
What I think the piece really is talking about is where things are headed on the cultural and socio-economic compass for the peons (sic), and how that's being framed through this clever, winking, yet ultimately Orwellian language of the culture that validates and encourages what are arguably destructive social forces: being "always on" and "shut-in"-style social isolation.
You know I did pack my bags, bailed on Silicon Beach, (Silicon Beeeeyaaatch!!!) and moved to bum-fuck nowhere. It actually cost me a considerable amount of money to sew up all my affairs. (cancel contracts, get rid of a lease, make arrangements) It's incredibly cost-prohibitive to break a routine in an American city, and relocate. It took some clever bureaucracy hacks, negotiating a complex sea of contingencies, and ultimately a good deal of material sacrifice to make it happen. The 'rat race' is not exactly 'designed' at all. As an inadvertent consequence, it is not designed to allow one to leave it easily.
It seems that you view these services, which are luxuries, as options for the people that have to provide these services in order to survive in the modern American urban environment. They generally can't afford these luxuries. Nobodies blaming, or complaining about tech companies providing services. People are blaming tech companies and complaining about the effects of tech companies arbitraging value from economic systems that already existed, further increasing the concentration of wealth (which is ostensibly access to resources) among those who can already afford to invest in building the mechanisms to arbitrage said value. And, quite frankly, some of us are getting annoyed with people who defend companies that actually influence legislature on local and national levels to enable this arbitrage to the detriment of the citizenship of these regions, while shoving advertising, and news stories in our faces, labeling this arbitrage as the quintessential if not sole definition of human progress.
What the article misses is that consumers drive startups like Seamless and Uber up the totem pole. Sure, some have more money than others, but clearly, if Seamless is succeeding then it must've hit a nerve.
I mean I don't live in NYC, but whenever I'm there, I honestly hate it. It feels like the biggest concentration of assholery in the entire US. And I'm not saying this like some hippie pot-smoking LA liberal (because I adore LA), but as a European that is used to the hustle and bustle of city life. I was born in a small European city where people greeted each other and the streets were busy, etc. I grew up in Romania in the late 80s/early 90s.. I'd prefer living in the dilapidated Eastern Bloc to living in New York. Unless I was Donald Trump or something, but that misses the point.
If people are riding in Ubers and if people are working for Uber, then, hey, maybe it's not such a terrible "soul-sucking" idea. I mean God knows I'm no Uber fanboy (I think their skirting of regulations and squeezing out markets is pretty dodgy at best), but maybe something needed to wake up the taxi companies and make cities take a serious look at their public transit systems.
Silicon Valley may not always be a beacon of hope and joy, but Uber and Seamless are hardly the problems. If the author argued against companies like Theranos, he'd have a much better argument imo.
"It feels like the biggest concentration of assholery in the entire US."
I guess you haven't been to San Francisco. Take what you hate about New York, and wrap it with a thick layer of smug, futurist, "we're saving the world" self-adulation. At least in the 80s, the leveraged buyout assholes weren't trying to convince people that they were making the world a better place. Gordon Gekko was a satire. Now he's a "growth hacker" at a unicorn.
I have never in my life met so many people who are excited about the idea of creating systemic unemployment as I have since living in bubble SF. Self-driving cars? Man...when Uber can fire all of those profit-sucking drivers, we'll be living the dream, won't we? And anyone who questions the premise of our glorious, pure capitalist future gets:
"If people are riding in Ubers and if people are working for Uber, then, hey, maybe it's not such a terrible "soul-sucking" idea."
OK seriously, dear HN: just because consumers want something doesn't make it good. Consumers want dirt cheap electronics, but don't want to think about the Chinese kid who is getting lead poisoning from his "side hustle" of pulling e-waste apart with his teeth. Consumers want to pay a bit less for their burrito, but not worry about the illegal immigrants who cooked it, and are being evicted from their five-man hovel in the Mission to make room for luxury condos. Capitalism doesn't optimize for "good". It optimizes for profit.
Shitty jobs have always existed. These "gig economy" companies are celebrating this lifestyle, and trying to make it more prevalent and less lucrative for the labor. That's what sucks.
> OK seriously, dear HN: just because consumers want something doesn't make it good. Consumers want dirt cheap electronics, but don't want to think about the Chinese kid who is getting lead poisoning from his "side hustle" of pulling e-waste apart with his teeth. Consumers want to pay a bit less for their burrito, but not worry about the illegal immigrants who cooked it, and are being evicted from their five-man hovel in the Mission to make room for luxury condos. Capitalism doesn't optimize for "good". It optimizes for profit.
I think that's really worth thinking about. And I guess that was kind of my original point. Startups like Seamless are around because everyone in NYC is kind of a dick, maybe self-absorbed, etc. We should focus fixing that root problem, instead of solving it with some panacea.
Uber is getting a lot of its "efficiency" over regular cab companies by side-stepping regulatory burdens.
People are riding uber because it's cheaper or they can deliver a better service at the same price point because they have the comparative advantage of lower regulatory burdens.
You can't infer from this that people are voting with their heart. They are voting with their wallet, which is to say they are existing within the framework of capitalism whilst at the same time Uber exist outside parts of the framework for taxis.
I do agree there are bigger problems, but I don't think that precludes criticising these companies.
To add to your points, Uber is currently operating at a loss (1) due having so much runway. Once they've smited your local cab company, do you really think they're going to maintain bargain fares?
Yeah I kind left that out as it's their choice how they spread their gains and losses over the medium term. I agree it's likely a monopoly play but it doesn't feed straight into my point about their "efficiency" coming from a non-level playing field. One can debate if taxis should be registered or not however those stating that uber is more efficient are not comparing like for like.
Even that is a side-point to my main comment stating that credit expands to capture new productivity via land and that tech has made a marginal activity possible such as uber part-time-drivers has given access to more credit for early entrants which then forces everyone to "earn more" so that they can all bid more and pay greater interest on greater loans to the bankers.
And you can be as productive as you like because the bankers keyboards are not going to run out of zeros any time soon.
How do banks create money, and why can other firms not do the same? An explanation for the coexistence of lending and deposit-taking:
I... don't really think this is a good read, for a few reasons. Let's look at (what I think is) the thesis:
> Unfettered capitalism doesn’t give you time back or freedom or relaxation. It drills every orifice you have until a few more pennies drop out so the Q4 numbers look good for shareholders.
The article then moves on to (albeit articulately) name "gig economy" companies as the vehicle for this exploitation.
But are they? Without even thinking too hard, I think can of monstrous entities which are enemies of any notion of free market and which are far more easily understood as the machina of this phenomenon:
* We have 2 million people in prison in the United States. Many of them have done nothing wrong, at least in any common sense set of definitions. It's not a stretch to say that many of them, while in prison, are victims of torture and intentional emotional and mental destruction. Even those that aren't are marked with a scarlet letter essentially for life. And thus they are left unable to be anything but victims of this corpratocratic predation upon their release.
* The "health care" industry, empowered (in fact sustained almost entirely) by state-enshrined gatekeeper complexes and IP holdings, restrains these same people who "need a side hustle" from becoming healthy and independent of pharma, insurance, and hospitals.
* The US government debt is about to hit $20 trillion, leaving these folks holding a bag they never agreed to pick up.
* People are afraid to protest, much less disrupt, the above treatment. Police brutality, endemic and senseless state surveillance, the (accurate) sense that action in the streets is typically fruitless - these and other causes have people feeling lonely at home instead of realizing how common their dreams are.
I just don't think that the gig economy is any harbinger of horror, not does it exist today in an environment of "unfettered capitalism" - not that I advocate such a thing.
Nevertheless, with the elements I've named (and a dozen more like them) removed, these people looking for a "side hustle" might also be able to enjoy the fruits of the labor pool of which they're a part.
I'm actually quite optimistic that that insurgent companies and methodologies are a sign that we will overcome these hardships. We have an utterly impotent incoming president, faith in government nearly nonexistent, and at the same time, incredible innovation and radical thinking. This doesn't seem like a formula for continued exploitation to me.
I probably agree with the essay's argument that the gig economy (or maybe, more specifically, a particular set of dystopian ads for it) is a sign of the apocalypse. It's just that, as you say, I don't think the gig economy is causing it.
1) There is no apocalypse (and if there were, it'd be climate change or antibiotic-resistant bacteria, not side hustles)
2) "Unfettered capitalism" is not a sufficiently broad or complex boogeyman to blame what ills we do have in society
3) The gig economy is probably not a particularly accurate sign of #1 or #2, and if it were, it's more a sign that things are going in a better direction.
That a few companies use investor capital to screw customers and service providers alike says pretty much nothing about Silicon Valley. It is sad this guy saw an ad that offended him but why did he watch it in the first place?
One of the innumerable problems with advertising is that you can't "unsee" it. For instance: can you unread this reply to your comment? To suggest that it is the responsibility of an individual to ignore advertising in their environment, is to suggest that it is their responsibility to not pay attention to their surroundings, or read any signs. I think it is a perfectly natural reaction to see something that you understand to be a sardonic misrepresentation of a reality, and respond negatively.
Whatever, man. Personal autarky is as inefficient an endeavour as the type practised by nations. Each man is as subject to the law of comparative advantage as a nation is.
This disparagement of 'mom-tech' is the nth iteration of the same anti-trade nonsense that people have tried to peddle since before we had economists we called economists.
My time is worth more to me than the other guy's time is to him. Stopping me from paying him is going to make both of us worse off.
That feeling when you realize that without the side hustle, you'd have even less, because the rich get richer and the poor, well, they don't have cars.
This is driving me up the wall: why do people use pull quotes in this manner? What does it accomplish, besides tricking me into thinking that I'm accidentally re-reading the paragraph I just read, and thereby interrupting the flow of the article?
Pull quotes are a technique designed for print! You use them in magazines that have tens of articles and you want to grab the attention of somebody browsing the articles so that they read yours. But here on the web, I'm already reading your article! There's nothing else on the page - you already have my attention.
Just look at the way this article ends:
This unending hamster wheel of capitalism and technology is driving us all to the brink of insanity. “These days, everyone needs a side hustle.” Now that I think about it, that should be Elizabeth Warren’s campaign slogan in 2020.
“These days, everyone needs a side hustle.” Now that I think about it, that should be Elizabeth Warren’s campaign slogan in 2020.
Why not just say that last part once? Literally JUST present it in the fancy pull-quote "this is important" format, instead of once as normal text and immediately again as fancy text. Why are you having me read this twice?
I don't deny that stylizing text like this can be useful for people who skim. My proposal doesn't prevent that: only present those select bits of information in the big front-and-center style that grabs people's attention, and don't repeat them in the normal flow of text.
The author needs to get outside of the SV bubble. The proletariat generally don't need two jobs to eek out an existence except in handful of expensive cities on the coast.
Not sure it's that much better off outside SV. Drive thru eastern Kentucky or anywhere in WV. High unemployment and opiate addiction rates are the norm. This will of course intensify as technology progress marches forward, though we might see a slowdown with the incoming administration's rejection of globalism.
Uber's not really viable as a part-time job. In LA, I've driven 20 hours this week and grossed $12.25/hour. Plus a $65 35-ride bonus, it comes to about $16/hour. If you miss the ride bonuses (offered Mon-Fri morning, Fri-Sun), you can't make any money.
If you drive enough, you should be able to earn $19-20 an hour, minus gas (e.g. $3/hour), car and insurance. Your net profits will be around $12 to 15/hour.
As a side job, it's probably better to get a flexible 1-2 day shift at a restaurant.
The take-away about Seamless I overheard in real time in a frightening way. Sitting in the smoking area, waiting for a coworker to come grab me for work, two of my neighbors were talking about how they actively avoided becoming friends with other neighbors, they just didn't want that kind of connection and preferred that neighbors just stayed in their lane as people who ostensibly share a dwelling in the same high-rise.
And it wasn't the first time I'd heard people expressing that viewpoint. In a completely different part of town when I rented an apartment I hard that same conversation.
Maybe I'm overly sentimental or looking at the idea of 'neighborhoods' and 'communities' with rose-tinted glasses but that shook me, it bothered me to my core-deeply. I've always looked at neighborhoods as the bedrock of citizenry, the most basic form of what it means to be among people who shared your at least some of your interests of home and hearth because of said proximity.
People now actively avoid those kinds of relationships. I still think about it to this day, despite having walked to pubs with the very people I heard talking about this. Maybe I'm thinking too much about it.
I think this tends to happen once density of the place people live goes above a certain threshold. People don't have to rely on their neighbours because they know so many people (friends/family/coworkers) close by they can contact if they need help with anything.
On the flip side your neigbours are most likely potential see you arguing with a partner, coming home drunk late at night, going out after calling in sick etc. See things that tarnish your reputation, more downside than upside if you find out you have connections and potential gossip.
>People now actively avoid those kinds of relationships.
Let's not act like people haven't avoided these kinds of 'polite' relationships forever. Most people in cities do not know nor do they want to know their neighbors. I personally feel no interest whatsoever in forcing social interaction between some people I happen to live in physical proximity to. Seamless has nothing to do with that.
My mommy used to go to the store for me: Amazon
My mommy used to do errands for me: Task Rabbit
My mommy used to sell my stuff at garage sales: OfferUp
I had been working on a pitch for Uber for Wet Nurses but didn't realize my target demographic was actually 20's to 30's white males. Maybe I should crunch the numbers again.
Now to counteract the 'Seamless effect', we should build an Uber for Companionship & Human Contact, you know.. like an Uber for 'Dating'. We can reap a percentage of the income the companion makes from the date...
What exactly is the alternative? What's the proposed solution? Agrarian utopia? Creating artificial jobs for people whose skills are no longer needed by society? Basic income?
I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to be upset about here. Working more to make more money isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's certainly the most realistic option available for people who want or need more money. Money solves a lot of problems in life. Money can make your life better. If there was a $30 minimum wage or universal income many people would still choose to work more if the option was available. You shouldn't assume the hamster on the wheel isn't enjoying the experience.
I think the fundamental premise of this article is wrong. The author seems to assume that the "side hustle" is on top of a full time job. But I think the intended implication is that uber drivers are for the most part people who do not have a full time job. They are semi-retired, or only working part time at another job, or between "real" jobs and working at uber to help make ends meet until they can find a new "real" job, or they're mostly househusbands or something like that.
I just took an uber ride where the driver told me she left her granddaughter's birthday party to drive people. Maybe she has different priorities than I would, but I think it's more likely that she's economically desperate enough that she has to miss those moments to make ends meet. As much as I like the service uber provides, I don't think we should pretend people are working for uber without duress.
I mean, sure, but how is that Uber's fault? The same lady would have to have otherwise worked at McDonalds if Uber didn't exist. And if Uber paid its drivers more, it wouldn't be able to hire as many drivers, which means that the lowest level of worker has an implicit denial of a job.
Minimum wage sucks, but when there's an excess of supply, it's the unfortunate truth.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] thread> Mommy used to clean my room. A: Handy.
> Mommy used to do my laundry. A: Flycleaners.
You'd be surprised how desirable this is when you have Significant Life Issues and you don't want your home to be a disaster.
While the "side hustle" being mandatory is not a good place to be, having services which make your life easier is a good thing.
Standing out in the yard, pegging my shorts to the clothes line, surrounded by leafy trees and chirping bird can be nice.
I'm not talking about work.
Keeping my personal life off the InterTubes, let's say your aging parent is in hospice, and you spend most of your non-work time visiting them and ensuring their last days on earth are as comfortable as possible. That occurred for an extended family member recently. Other scenarios are quite plausible as well.
When I get to the end of a stressful ten hour workday, personally, I'd rather not stare down the barrel of another 3-4 hours of house chores that have piled up due to the aforementioned ten hour work days.
And that's just normal life. Anyone living as a caregiver, for example, would probably love to do away with your idyllic vision of pegging clothes on the line in lieu of, say, taking a breath and going for a walk...
This is called "labor law".
I'm personally looking forward to the IRS reaping its pound of flesh from Uber for contractor misclassification and the hundreds of millions of dollars in employer payroll back taxes and penalties that will be due.
But you do you. I enjoy applying pressure in the political space, and I play a long game.
But I also don't kid myself: this kind of action is not playing the long game.
The agenda is set such that congress really doesn't even get to vote on the important matters directly. For example, there will never be a vote directly on the matter of whether to spend money gleaned from taxing gig economy companies on shoring up services or bombing brown people.
But that's not even the point.
Government is not the long game. The state is temporary and its time is nearly over.
The long game is human evolution, especially what we today call "technology."
"The state is temporary"? How outlandish. The state will outlive you, and will crush you if the people don't use effort to coerce it in the right direction.
Tech might help or hurt a cause, but people will be the ones who are needed to win the day, not tech. But don't believe me; just watch who is getting inaugurated.
Look into the 20-point list the IRS uses to make the W2/1099 distinction yourself, and you'll find Uber drivers as far (or further) to the "contractor" side as many yellow-car cabbies are.
Generally, to be frank, I think the labor movement in the US is due for a revival and unions should take the lead in that.
It's in my mind that gig workers are properly neither contractors nor employees, as understood commonly (not legally - they can fall into either bucket legally, iirc). They deserve a spot in the law and protections thereof.
What a joke. You don't need time, you need perspective.
Your ignorant remark about me does you no credit.
Many situations exist where there is simply either no time or no energy. Musicians touring, hospitalizations, illnesses - the list is long and varied. It's often much simpler to pay someone else to take care of things.
...
More technology in our current economic system only reduces the overall number of 'good' jobs available, creating more inequality and increasing the divide of the haves and have-nots. Technology may not be inherently a bad thing, but when you combine it with an open global economic model built on unchecked capitalism, it will eventually create a distressing situation for many.
However, after reviewing my Uber receipts, I realized how awful the drivers side of the deal was. Take gas, car milage, Ubers cut and then you have literally a fraction of minimum wage with no health insurance or 401k.
Then I start to think, well heck, if this kind of gig economy displaces traditional employment, a lot of people will be one crisis from poverty.
The future is really exciting, but unless we proceed carefully, we could end actually making things worse for the working class than they were decades ago.
- Stable lifetime employment with a single firm was not unusual.
- Plentiful well-paying work was available for individuals with a grade school education.
- Overtime pay kept work over 40 hours in a week to a minimum and it was considered unusual bordering on pathological to take work home.
- Retirement pensions were a common company benefit.
- Interests rates on savings routinely beat inflation.
- Strong organized labor held even non-unionized employers in check.
To summarize: a highschool grad with a modicum of luck could land an entry level job at a firm, work their entire life for that company, and retire without having to worry about eating cat food to pay for medicine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Personally, that sounds like hell to me. I like traveling to other cities and staying in people's homes. I like taking an uber to get around sometimes. I like ordering food on seamless and hiring house cleaners on Handy, so I'll have more time to do the things I actually enjoy. And if you don't want to do any of the above, that's fine too. Just pretend all of the above companies don't exist and do what you want with your life, instead of complaining about tech companies and "brogrammers" providing services that cater to other people besides yourself.
Most people have no choice on this. They have to work and it's just to subsist. Typical of hacker news that this would be the most up-voted comment.
Regarding tech, the main change tech has brought is to allow very accurate tracking of debt. Most debt is created through land. Surplus value goes to the landlords and banks.
Before this was not completely efficient, now banks can react to productivity changes much faster. Prices are set by the highest bidder. Tech has enabled "side jobs" which means they can outbid others for rent / mortgage (renting fiat money from a bank). Banks scale up fiat money creation in response. Other workers must respond and they too need a side job.
If we all worked 3 days a week it would be enough to pay the rent. If we all worked 7 days a week it would be enough to pay the rent.
But we cannot coordinate this as workers. Tech is working against workers. Economic rent extraction is now fully efficient.
> Banks scale up fiat money creation in response
The US money supply approximately doubles every 10 years, it's remarkably consistent modulo the occasional hiccup.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2
You're right, that that the markets will reprice very quickly, and roughly speaking the more there is (stuff, workers, etc.) the lower the price will be. This would be much less of a problem if money was more evenly distributed, or if there was an efficient tax system in the US. Mostly the problem (if it can be described as singular one) in the US, and elsewhere, is the failure to tax the financial sector properly and redistribute that money back into the public infrastructure.
https://bankunderground.co.uk/2015/06/30/banks-are-not-inter...
I think it's not possible to stop land speculation so it should be taxed to pass the gains onto the people. As most money is issued against land let's have a land value tax.
Secondly let the state decide how much money can be created each year via an agreed growth target, set by...look away now if you are a neo-liberal zealot...the state. Thirdly use LVT to provide an efficient basic income and to do away with income tax. Why do we tax work? We tax carbon to stop people emitting carbon.
The current "system", if one can even confer such a name on such a dog's dinner, is insane.
Regarding US M2, do we really have step jumps in productivity? Is it not reasonable that we see this trend upwards in a smooth(-ish) fashion? If so then bank issuance tracks productivity gains, no?
#### EDIT #####
Will have to stop posting now as whenever I post about finance and question banks hacker news emits a fake "you are submitting too fast" message which I just got now replying to a different thread about zsh on a different page.
I also cannot edit my top level comment two above this.
What a great platform for debat HN has. Clearly they are confident in their model of lending and taking a cut and someone posting conflicting information that questions usury is no threat to them at all!
I imagine a system where all capital gains associated with land (not the structures on the land) outside of the real inflation rate were captured via capital gains tax.
Bring it on.
This is wrong. The reason rent is going up is because there's more demand than supply. Reducing the amount of money everyone has by a constant factor (in this case 3/5) will not change the supply/demand imbalance, so it won't solve the problem. Put another way: the reason rent is so high is to prevent some people from being able to purchase the product. There's not enough of it to go around. You're basically blaming the best known system for allocating scarce goods for the fact that scarce goods exist.
If you look at countries that try to act on the above notion, you'll find that high prices are replaced with impossibly long lines. And shortages. This is because reducing the price will only increase the demand for that good.
A better world view would be: if the baby boomers hadn't all had kids at the same time, we wouldn't be experiencing housing shortages. This theory (though incomplete) at least puts demand increases front and center. You could also blame cities for not allowing/supporting the construction of new housing. That theory (though incomplete) at least puts the supply shortages front and center.
http://i.imgur.com/oWxV1po.jpg
People live in one home, whether we work 3 or 7 days. You are confusing cheaper products garnering more demand with a flat need. This is why we should tax land: the supply is constant.
Demand is up due to financialization of housing by the banks and greedy landlords are their foot soldiers.
Edit can submit no more due to the usual HN censorship so this last edit for the guy below:
You are just talking across me with no regard to my point at all. The graph is from the ft and the y axis is linear, it's from 2012 with no cutoff due to a change in trend.
I'm not saying don't compete, my earlier post stated that when we all work more or smarter in aggregate the banks take the gains and we all end up running to stand still. That was my point.
NO. Prices are set by supply and demand. No one is being forced to take out a loan, and if they could buy a given home with a lower loan, they would. Hence the loan is only enabling demand. You could say the same thing about employment, or inheritance, or tax breaks. The only reason prices change is because supply or demand changes.
You are basically saying that you'd like everyone to just accept their lot in life, and not compete with you for your current house. And in exchange you'll not compete with those in houses you'd prefer. And you're blaming the banks because they're helping those who don't agree that you deserve the hose more than they do.
When supply is scarce, prices go up. The value of the good does not go up. What is that extra price doing? That's you bribing the owner of the good to sell to you, and not to some other guy. You're paying to make the price so high that the next guy in line would rather live somewhere else, share a room, or go homeless.
> http://i.imgur.com/oWxV1po.jpg
The image, though interesting looking, is missing context. What units is the Y-axis in, and why does the X-axis only go to (what I assume is) 2012?
> People live in one home, whether we work 3 or 7 days.
People aren't born with homes. If you lost yours, someone would move in. Where do you think this other person is currently living? Why do you deserve your home more than they do? How should homes be allocated if not by whoever is willing and able to pay the most? Who will make new homes in this new system of yours? (an especially worrying problem since I think you suggested all the construction workers only need to work 3 days per week, and housing is already scarce)
> The only reason prices change is because supply or demand changes.
We are living in year 16 of the era of government pushing loan prices lower than the market would set them. 8th year since they've been pushing the loan pricing down VERY hard (ie. essentially to the zero bound, where you're only paying for the (also artificially lowered) risk of the banks, admin (ie. people employed to check payment and tax and ...) and a small profit margin for the banks).
While of course it is not really known how high the market would set loan prices, it seems the long term average is 4%. Since we've been below that for a while, let's call it 6%. Add the 3%-4% of risk, admin, tax and bank profit and mortgage rates should be somewhere between 8% and 10%, if you have really good credit.
What would house prices be with 9% interest rates instead of 3% ? That's quite normal a rate for mortgages, long term. My back of the envelope calculation says that they'd be, with the same monthly payment, a bit more than double what they should be, in market prices. Prices should be 60% less, or put it another way houses are 120% overvalued.
At a very optimistic 7% (the long term average), house prices would be about 45% less, or they're 75% overvalued.
(example calculation: with 3% mortgage payment, a 4000$ monthly payment will get you 1.12 million dollars, at 9% it will get you 0.52 million dollars, or a little less than half. At 7% it will get you 0.8 million dollars, or 45% less)
Hence I strongly disagree with your notion that house prices are determined by supply and demand. House princes are as high as the government can get them, and damn the consequences.
If the banks weren't giving the same risk adjusted rates to everyone, you can at least make the argument now that you've got two consumers (the bank is essentially donating money for the purchase to the buyer). But I don't see where that gets us here.
The cost of carry remains associated with wages just as rent does because we have to pay more, however as the cost of other items falls (due to efficiency / progress) the bankers hoover up the rest.
http://imgur.com/XS99m5v.jpg
We work longer, we work harder, and the bankers kick back.
This is a separate point from real estate costs increasing historically -- that is caused by supply and demand. People are (as your graph nicely shows) choosing not to move as more people enter a given area, driving up the cost of real estate. This is to say that their demand is inelastic.
Unless you are suggesting banking as an industry is engaged in trust like behavior, they're not able to set the terms of rates in a way that will change their risk-free profit from a given individual at a given market price. If the price rises due to a supply and demand imbalance, they may be able to charge more to offset the increased risk of the purchase they are financing.
For example recently in the UK the govt said they would "help" buyers by contributing a certain % for buyers. Housing went up by that amount. Available credit sets prices.
This is a waste of my time, I'm out.
Banks can't magically choose to write loans at unprofitable terms. They also can't write loans at noncompetitive rates in any sort of realistic quantity. These two forces (fear of principal loss through nonpayment/default, and loss of customers due to competition) dictate bank rates.
> If banks start lending $1MM to employees on the basic wage that is how much basic housing costs.
No. It will only cost that much for people unwilling to move away from highly competitive markets where construction is barred. For those living in areas which can be developed, housing prices will also be dictated by the cost of construction, which is presumably less than $1MM. Buyers will be pocketing the difference between the available $1MM and the cost of construction. This is to say that banks do not dictate prices for housing, but rather are only (sometimes) enabling (fools?) to go higher in an auction.
If banks did set prices for housing, they would have to also be setting the price of, for example, construction. Which is not the case, as that is dictated by the supply and demand of labor and materials.
Put another way: I'm sure in wherever you are, not every housing option is the same price. Do you honestly believe that banks are somehow dictating those price differences? If not, what is that force, and does accounting for it also account for the effect of increased credit availability on house prices? (A: supply and demand, yes)
> recently in the UK the govt said they would "help" buyers by contributing a certain % for buyers. Housing went up by that amount.
Yes, just like if you give everyone a raise by x% you'll see housing jump by that amount. As I've said in this thread several times already. This jump does not, however, represent a change in real cost to consumers (a change in the what percentage of their labor is being spent on a given good). As I've also said in this thread several times already.
> This is a waste of my time, I'm out.
Cya.
If you want to be anti-consumerist, if you want to minimize your living expenses, go right ahead. But vilifying Seamless, and the people who would rather use Seamless and spend the extra hour reading instead of cooking, is just masturbatory righteous-indignation.
Whut? I'm not sure that has ever been effective at reversing course. Sometimes a society has changed course, but that's just because this message got lumped in with the have-nots, which is unrelated. This sentiment has never been satisfied, so I'll disagree that shutting up and moving on is a bad strategy. It's the ONLY strategy since it's tied to frontiersman thinking of having too much after enduring risk.
The point isn't preventing YOU, the consumer, from doing this.
The point is that most people as the supplier aren't doing Uber, AirBnB, etc because they like it. They're doing it because they don't have any other good alternatives.
Most of the people on the supply side of the serfdom economy are gaining very little benefit. This is a real problem.
So champion proposals that would grow the economy, create more jobs, increase the median hourly wages, and/or improve the social safety net. I don't see how vilifying Uber or AirBNB is going to help accomplish any of the above.
P.S. There is no way for you as an individual to be a supplier on the Seamless, but that still hasn't spared them the author's wrath. I don't think the author really has a clear idea of what he's complaining about.
These companies are part of a greater force eroding the role and rights of labor. I think it's right to vilify the "sharing" company - especially with the type of "this is great for the world" propaganda that they spew out.
If we accept these conditions as the norm, they will only continue to slide. We have laws and regulations for a reason. Bypassing said laws with billions in 1%, connected money, should rightfully be called out. Conveniences for the noble class aside, this is just part of a larger scheme to transfer capital from the poor/middle class into the pockets of the existing wealthy. It's a bit tone-deaf of you not to see the other side of the picture. Next time you're in an Uber, talk to the driver. You'd be surprised how many are doing this full-time because they can't find employment elsewhere... and even more when you discover how many actually understand the underlying economics of their "side hustle" (aka side-scammed).
Isn't it a good thing that companies like Uber are creating jobs? Particularly for people who can't find employment elsewhere.
Are they, overall? Are they expanding the total amount of money paid out to workers in this industry? I'm not so sure that's the case.
What conditions are you referring to? The ability to work when you want for as long as you want? The ability to take an otherwise idle asset like your car or your house and make extra money with it?
Anecdotally, I've taken dozens of Uber rides and never once heard the driver complain about Uber. I have, however, heard many drivers complain about proposed legislation that will harm Uber.
This isn't true for all sharing economy companies, but it's true for Uber.
They might not complain if all they think it'll do is ding their star rating, but many of them are very upset with Uber. Most of these folks feel trapped by what they perceive to be an abusive monopsony buyer of labor.
Seriously, we're sitting here on our pocket supercomputers [1] using wireless city-wide broadband to complain about how tech doesn't make anyone's lives better.
[1] Ownership of which largely transcends class, at least in the USA, which is amazingly wonderful and is a consequence of the capitalist system TFA's author seems to hate so much.
Those who spend time consuming tripe like this or Silicon Valley, over some internet service, and then bitch about brogrammers are the problem. The efforts of greater people past are rotting under the asses of loud observers and you're no fucking Cesar Chavez.
And Uber is a taxi that comes. You just have to have experienced SF -- admittedly run by idiots playing city, badly -- pre Uber to understand why people love it. I mean, it's fair to criticize how Uber treats drivers, and I try to have cash to tip, but it's not exactly like taxi drivers were being treated particularly well before Uber. And they treated their customers like absolute shit.
Everyone wants to make it sound like these people had a gun to their had and the only option was to be a wage slave to the uber type oppressors, this is completely lacking in perspective to the vast expanse of inexpensive areas there are in which unskilled labor can live comfortably.
How do you know this? The last five uber drivers I've had have been
- a bloke on the way home from the gym
- the owner of a small accountancy firm, also on the way home
- an IT student from China who talked about PHP with me
- a Korean migrant who really hated taxi companies and was saving up for a house
- a CFO for a smallish company who was driving people around because he had to pick up his wife from the airport in a few hours
They all seemed pretty okay with uber. Only one, the student, was driving as a primary source of income, and he was doing about 20 hours a week and making more than he would in any other job.
2. Wide array of feel-good details to check lots of boxes
3. Completely anecdotal and therefore unverifiable
4. Facebook-level knowledge of people you likely spent 10 minutes with
5. Glowing review of Uber
Isn't Fear Uncertainty and Doubt great?
All Uber cares about is that he has a rating > 4.3 stars - ethnicity is irrelevant.
(This is also why the racist political party is trying to get Uber shut down.)
3. My experience has been that uber drivers in my city work part time for supplementary income. This is a verifiable assertion, but I don't have the means to carry out that verification. However, the assertion that I was responding to has no verification either. Plus, it probably varies from city to city and country to country
5. There are a lot of reasons why Uber is awful, from monopolistic bullying of governments, to not letting drivers set prices, to exposing drivers to market forces at an unprecedented level, but the drivers I've talked to have nearly all worked part time and seemed pretty happy to do so.
I'm not in sales, I don't work for Uber, and that's all I'll say about the personal stuff.
Well, sure.
Why is it the fault of Uber/AirBnB/Seamless/TaskRabbit/DishDash/Handy/whatever that they don't have better alternatives?
And moreover, how exactly would these people's lives be better if they couldn't work for Uber etc.? Aren't they choosing to work for Uber etc. because it's better than the alternative (namely, not working for Uber etc.)?
There are lots of fucked up things about our economic policy. I won't give my top ten because HN is trying not to be a place for political debates, but I'm sure you can name a few off the top of your head. We just had a long discussion about the importance of the ACA on HN -- taking that away hits the poor the hardest. We can go on.
The governmental policies that perpetuate income inequality should be the target of your ire, not the fact that someone deigned to create yet another company that doesn't pay its employees "enough" money.
Edited for formatting.
The idea here is if technology was in fact improving the economy, society, or the world the individuals who are stuck working 2nd and 3rd jobs would have other options available, especially in light of how many jobs/career tracks/industries software has eaten in the last 20 years.
* poorly defined term in this context
It was written by a comedian, and therefore I read it as meaning to be provocative and not to be taken entirely at face-value (eg, the title of the article). Therefore, I think answering something intentionally provocative with another polemic (eg, "move to bumfuck nowhere" etc) only prevents you from engaging with the actual issues being raised in the original piece.
What I think the piece really is talking about is where things are headed on the cultural and socio-economic compass for the peons (sic), and how that's being framed through this clever, winking, yet ultimately Orwellian language of the culture that validates and encourages what are arguably destructive social forces: being "always on" and "shut-in"-style social isolation.
The problem is that many people are doing all of that and still hustling frantically just to afford meals to cook and a house to clean.
They more I look at your post, the more it seems like you're genuinely unaware that poor people exist.
Vive la différence!
There's never been a time in human history where moving to bumfuck nowhere has been a better or more stimulating option.
It seems that you view these services, which are luxuries, as options for the people that have to provide these services in order to survive in the modern American urban environment. They generally can't afford these luxuries. Nobodies blaming, or complaining about tech companies providing services. People are blaming tech companies and complaining about the effects of tech companies arbitraging value from economic systems that already existed, further increasing the concentration of wealth (which is ostensibly access to resources) among those who can already afford to invest in building the mechanisms to arbitrage said value. And, quite frankly, some of us are getting annoyed with people who defend companies that actually influence legislature on local and national levels to enable this arbitrage to the detriment of the citizenship of these regions, while shoving advertising, and news stories in our faces, labeling this arbitrage as the quintessential if not sole definition of human progress.
Also, this article was comedy, and hilarious.
It's not that far to this from the apps that tell the drones of Uber, TaskRabbit, and DoorDash where to go and what to do.
Machines should think. People should work.
[1] https://vimeo.com/166807261
I mean I don't live in NYC, but whenever I'm there, I honestly hate it. It feels like the biggest concentration of assholery in the entire US. And I'm not saying this like some hippie pot-smoking LA liberal (because I adore LA), but as a European that is used to the hustle and bustle of city life. I was born in a small European city where people greeted each other and the streets were busy, etc. I grew up in Romania in the late 80s/early 90s.. I'd prefer living in the dilapidated Eastern Bloc to living in New York. Unless I was Donald Trump or something, but that misses the point.
If people are riding in Ubers and if people are working for Uber, then, hey, maybe it's not such a terrible "soul-sucking" idea. I mean God knows I'm no Uber fanboy (I think their skirting of regulations and squeezing out markets is pretty dodgy at best), but maybe something needed to wake up the taxi companies and make cities take a serious look at their public transit systems.
Silicon Valley may not always be a beacon of hope and joy, but Uber and Seamless are hardly the problems. If the author argued against companies like Theranos, he'd have a much better argument imo.
I guess you haven't been to San Francisco. Take what you hate about New York, and wrap it with a thick layer of smug, futurist, "we're saving the world" self-adulation. At least in the 80s, the leveraged buyout assholes weren't trying to convince people that they were making the world a better place. Gordon Gekko was a satire. Now he's a "growth hacker" at a unicorn.
I have never in my life met so many people who are excited about the idea of creating systemic unemployment as I have since living in bubble SF. Self-driving cars? Man...when Uber can fire all of those profit-sucking drivers, we'll be living the dream, won't we? And anyone who questions the premise of our glorious, pure capitalist future gets:
"If people are riding in Ubers and if people are working for Uber, then, hey, maybe it's not such a terrible "soul-sucking" idea."
OK seriously, dear HN: just because consumers want something doesn't make it good. Consumers want dirt cheap electronics, but don't want to think about the Chinese kid who is getting lead poisoning from his "side hustle" of pulling e-waste apart with his teeth. Consumers want to pay a bit less for their burrito, but not worry about the illegal immigrants who cooked it, and are being evicted from their five-man hovel in the Mission to make room for luxury condos. Capitalism doesn't optimize for "good". It optimizes for profit.
Shitty jobs have always existed. These "gig economy" companies are celebrating this lifestyle, and trying to make it more prevalent and less lucrative for the labor. That's what sucks.
I think that's really worth thinking about. And I guess that was kind of my original point. Startups like Seamless are around because everyone in NYC is kind of a dick, maybe self-absorbed, etc. We should focus fixing that root problem, instead of solving it with some panacea.
Which is why it's so problematic corporations violate regulations, either by outsourcing the violation or outright flouting the law.
It's literally exploiting the limited computational resources of consumers to bypass their expressed wishes.
People are riding uber because it's cheaper or they can deliver a better service at the same price point because they have the comparative advantage of lower regulatory burdens.
You can't infer from this that people are voting with their heart. They are voting with their wallet, which is to say they are existing within the framework of capitalism whilst at the same time Uber exist outside parts of the framework for taxis.
I do agree there are bigger problems, but I don't think that precludes criticising these companies.
(1) http://www.businessinsider.com.au/uber-2016-losses-2016-8
Even that is a side-point to my main comment stating that credit expands to capture new productivity via land and that tech has made a marginal activity possible such as uber part-time-drivers has given access to more credit for early entrants which then forces everyone to "earn more" so that they can all bid more and pay greater interest on greater loans to the bankers.
And you can be as productive as you like because the bankers keyboards are not going to run out of zeros any time soon.
How do banks create money, and why can other firms not do the same? An explanation for the coexistence of lending and deposit-taking:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521914...
normal people have so little income that working multiple jobs to get by is mainstream.
this is a bad thing. it means that the people of our country are poor. defend it however you want.
> Unfettered capitalism doesn’t give you time back or freedom or relaxation. It drills every orifice you have until a few more pennies drop out so the Q4 numbers look good for shareholders.
The article then moves on to (albeit articulately) name "gig economy" companies as the vehicle for this exploitation.
But are they? Without even thinking too hard, I think can of monstrous entities which are enemies of any notion of free market and which are far more easily understood as the machina of this phenomenon:
* We have 2 million people in prison in the United States. Many of them have done nothing wrong, at least in any common sense set of definitions. It's not a stretch to say that many of them, while in prison, are victims of torture and intentional emotional and mental destruction. Even those that aren't are marked with a scarlet letter essentially for life. And thus they are left unable to be anything but victims of this corpratocratic predation upon their release.
* The "health care" industry, empowered (in fact sustained almost entirely) by state-enshrined gatekeeper complexes and IP holdings, restrains these same people who "need a side hustle" from becoming healthy and independent of pharma, insurance, and hospitals.
* The US government debt is about to hit $20 trillion, leaving these folks holding a bag they never agreed to pick up.
* People are afraid to protest, much less disrupt, the above treatment. Police brutality, endemic and senseless state surveillance, the (accurate) sense that action in the streets is typically fruitless - these and other causes have people feeling lonely at home instead of realizing how common their dreams are.
I just don't think that the gig economy is any harbinger of horror, not does it exist today in an environment of "unfettered capitalism" - not that I advocate such a thing.
Nevertheless, with the elements I've named (and a dozen more like them) removed, these people looking for a "side hustle" might also be able to enjoy the fruits of the labor pool of which they're a part.
I'm actually quite optimistic that that insurgent companies and methodologies are a sign that we will overcome these hardships. We have an utterly impotent incoming president, faith in government nearly nonexistent, and at the same time, incredible innovation and radical thinking. This doesn't seem like a formula for continued exploitation to me.
1) There is no apocalypse (and if there were, it'd be climate change or antibiotic-resistant bacteria, not side hustles)
2) "Unfettered capitalism" is not a sufficiently broad or complex boogeyman to blame what ills we do have in society
3) The gig economy is probably not a particularly accurate sign of #1 or #2, and if it were, it's more a sign that things are going in a better direction.
This disparagement of 'mom-tech' is the nth iteration of the same anti-trade nonsense that people have tried to peddle since before we had economists we called economists.
My time is worth more to me than the other guy's time is to him. Stopping me from paying him is going to make both of us worse off.
Pull quotes are a technique designed for print! You use them in magazines that have tens of articles and you want to grab the attention of somebody browsing the articles so that they read yours. But here on the web, I'm already reading your article! There's nothing else on the page - you already have my attention.
Just look at the way this article ends:
This unending hamster wheel of capitalism and technology is driving us all to the brink of insanity. “These days, everyone needs a side hustle.” Now that I think about it, that should be Elizabeth Warren’s campaign slogan in 2020. “These days, everyone needs a side hustle.” Now that I think about it, that should be Elizabeth Warren’s campaign slogan in 2020.
Why not just say that last part once? Literally JUST present it in the fancy pull-quote "this is important" format, instead of once as normal text and immediately again as fancy text. Why are you having me read this twice?
Have you ever worked out how many hours you need to support more than zero children at minimum wage and also pay rent in even rural areas?
Any time asking cashiers or retail workers---even in rural areas---what their lives are like is likely to reveal multiple jobs to just make ends meet.
If you drive enough, you should be able to earn $19-20 an hour, minus gas (e.g. $3/hour), car and insurance. Your net profits will be around $12 to 15/hour.
As a side job, it's probably better to get a flexible 1-2 day shift at a restaurant.
And it wasn't the first time I'd heard people expressing that viewpoint. In a completely different part of town when I rented an apartment I hard that same conversation.
Maybe I'm overly sentimental or looking at the idea of 'neighborhoods' and 'communities' with rose-tinted glasses but that shook me, it bothered me to my core-deeply. I've always looked at neighborhoods as the bedrock of citizenry, the most basic form of what it means to be among people who shared your at least some of your interests of home and hearth because of said proximity.
People now actively avoid those kinds of relationships. I still think about it to this day, despite having walked to pubs with the very people I heard talking about this. Maybe I'm thinking too much about it.
On the flip side your neigbours are most likely potential see you arguing with a partner, coming home drunk late at night, going out after calling in sick etc. See things that tarnish your reputation, more downside than upside if you find out you have connections and potential gossip.
Let's not act like people haven't avoided these kinds of 'polite' relationships forever. Most people in cities do not know nor do they want to know their neighbors. I personally feel no interest whatsoever in forcing social interaction between some people I happen to live in physical proximity to. Seamless has nothing to do with that.
Everyone's different. Find the neighborhood that you're comfortable with.
I had been working on a pitch for Uber for Wet Nurses but didn't realize my target demographic was actually 20's to 30's white males. Maybe I should crunch the numbers again.
Now to counteract the 'Seamless effect', we should build an Uber for Companionship & Human Contact, you know.. like an Uber for 'Dating'. We can reap a percentage of the income the companion makes from the date...
Where to begin to describe how out of touch this comment is with working class America.
Minimum wage sucks, but when there's an excess of supply, it's the unfortunate truth.