One of my close friends killed himself. I don't wish suicide on anyone.
I'm sure Doug Schifter's fallacies are obvious to us. He was committing the CBT cognitive distortions of "Personalization" and "magnification". He failed to recognize that his taxi job was an ill-gotten gain, gotten through lobbying, government control, and harming consumers.
Our species is built around the principle of adaptation. When the world changes, you must change with it. Or you die.
That you've so internalized this oppressive ideology as natural or just is why I imagine people like Schifter feel so hopeless in the face of their circumstances.
Perhaps think on this before dismissing another's life so glibly.
No, I've just done a lot of CBT. Killing yourself for a chance at a NYT article is flawed thinking, plain and simple.
I graduated at 2009, after the recession, with a degree that wasn't particularly useful. I was unemployed for a long time, but I figured out how to lower my standards, get something to survive on, and then use that foundation as an opportunity to retrain myself. It's hard, but it's not impossible, and millions of people take new jobs that are in different fields.
Eh, Uber is driving taxi companies out of business with billions of dollars in VC money. Offering a dramatic discount in a unsustainable way to ruin your competition is anti-competitive and pretty unethical.
In NYC 88,000 is a livable wage. NYC metro is a very expensive place to live. Calling a livable wage for a weeks work “ill gotten gains” is a bit far fetched. Unions and state controlled monopolies exist for a reason, not the least of which is protecting the broader workforce who don’t have leverage against their wealthy employers otherwise.
I find it hard to blame Uber for doing something that companies have done for hundreds of years in the US. So what if it's 2018 and a venture capital backed tech company is at the center of it this time? Unions don't prevent new competition, otherwise they'd be rather unethical themselves..one (with a capitalist mindset) might argue.
This is capitalism and if it's too emotionally painful to watch disruption unfold then as a society we need to find a different mode of operation. Why get distracted by the players when the game is the problem?
I've been largely okay with capitalism I guess because I've benefitted from it. But human lives have decreased in value. In a society where making $500, literally, is more valuable than a human life, we'll choose the money every time. That's the game.
Of course I have no idea what to do, in the face of this almost existential crisis, but getting mad a Uber for disrupting an industry is wasted effort.
This somehow crosses into personal attack, which is not ok in HN comments. The man who killed himself may not be here to read it, but the reason we have this rule is because of community effects.
A little more in depth, the article specifically mentions the depreciation of taxi medallions.
"Medallions, which grant the right to operate a taxi in New York City, were now depreciating assets and drivers who had borrowed money to pay for them, once a sound investment strategy, were deeply in debt."
Just like any investment, you are not guaranteed a right to a return, or even to keep the money you put into an investment, and there is no reason why taxi medallions should be any different. The only reason these medallions were so valuable and such a "sound investment" for so long is because of government-induced artificial scarcity. There are good arguments behind that model, but if you depend on a model like that, eventually, you will have problems.
"He was now sometimes forced to work more than 100 hours a week to survive he said; when he had started out in the 1980s a 40-hour week was fairly typical."
In 5+ years, he never had the opportunity to change careers or do something about his situation? I know it's not easy, especially as you get older, but it's a lot easier than leaving your family behind. I apologize if I sound harsh, but he had years to come to terms with the changes in his profession and adapt, and he chose not to.
"For taxi drivers staring down an even bleaker future of driverless cars" - in other words, the changes brought about by Uber and Lyft and every other service of that sort is inevitable anyway. What do these drivers think will happen the moment they can reasonably be replaced by the very cars they drive?
A lot of this feels like the death throes of an industry that had its time and served its purpose, but an arguably better alternative came along, and the industry now feels as though it is owed something by virtue of existing, rather than by virtue of providing something of value. Pardon me, my buggy whip was left in the beginning of last century.
What’s stopping them from switching to driving for Uber and Lyft? Whether or not those are devasting to Taxis the fact still remains those systems are superior to traditional Taxis.
Taxi medallions are hellishly expensive. Most of the time, you have a loan to purchase your medallion, that you then spend a long, long time paying off. It's essentially a form of indentured servitude. You can switch to Uber/Lyft. But you still have to pay off that loan for your medallion. And if Uber/Lyft aren't paying the same rate as driving a cab used to, you can find yourself without the money to pay your medallion loan and still make ends meet.
That said, I disagree with the headline blaming this on the gig economy. There's lots to blame the gig economy for, but this is pretty squarely showing the flaws in the old medallion system -- that you need a crippling amount of financial debt in your name to participate in the system.
I thought taxi companies owned the medallions -- hoarding them like gold coins -- and charged the driver what amounted to a "rental fee" for using them. IIRC it's unusual for a single driver to own their own medallion.
> Over the years, many medallions once owned by individual drivers were sold to large taxi fleets. As of 2012, about 18% of all taxis were owner operated, while the rest were leased; this is a decline from the 29% ownership rate in 2006.
1. Superior by offering app-based hailing, real time location updates
2. Ability to share rides
3. Ability to review/report bad behavior (on both driver and customer side)—this along was a notorious problem with cab drivers. And I bet terrible customers used to be rampant too, but they were paying the drivers so nobody cared.
4. No cash. No tip (arguably more controversial thing they got rid of).
In the city I live in I can hail a standard taxi with the app of the local taxi company, of course I can share a ride, and I can pay with bank card/credit card.
I never had to report bad behaviors, but I could just look at the taxi number, displayed clearly near the dashboard, and report it to the taxi company.
I am it that Uber can have minor advantages, but I boycott it due to the huge disadvantages in terms of worker rights.
Also they have been working at a loss to kill competitors: refusing to use Uber means defending your right to choose a service in the future.
I knew drivers in New Zealand who switched from Wellington Combined to Uber and earned a ton more. But I have a feeling that's not true in most American cities. I've met very few Uber/Lyft drivers here who switched from cabs. Drivers in Seattle earn less and less every year; driving several times more.
It would be nice to see some numbers in this article to see comparable rates from all the other app services like Uber/Lyft/Via etc. I mean if it's a $10k/year pay cut .. well then just do it and take night courses to do something else more worthwhile. If it's way more than that; non-sustainable, then you're just going to have to wait for Uber to tank and prices to go back up (you might need to wait a few years).
I'm still waiting for one of these companies to show up in Dunedin. Dunedin Taxis charges me nearly $20 for a 6 minute trip home - and their app never works. Sometimes I'm waiting 25 minutes.
Also, impossible for me to ring them as I'm deaf so... I have to text my wife to ring one! :( I seriously do not understand why no NZ taxi companies have banded together, raised some investment and created a good app then strengthened the market in the places that Uber etc don't exist in yet.
It's almost like they don't want to be taxis anymore.
Because building a basic app is actually pretty complex and there are only 4 million people who live there. It's why all the IT powerhouses (Frondi, Datacom, Catalyst, Sol-sucking-net, etc.) are all based in Wellington and contract out to everyone else.
I'm kinda surprised Uber isn't in Dunedin yet though. I know they're in Welly/Auckland .. and I suspect Chch as well.
There's plenty of taxi apps as well as other ride sharing apps like Zoomy.
Often Uber drivers in NZ work for a smaller taxi company and have multiple ride sharing apps on their phone.
Building apps is actually simple. I work with one of those large powerhouses and they're actually really bad at it. Smaller teams can usually do a better job.
Has nothing to do with population size.
Also, I think Uber is in CHCH and the Tron. No doubt Dunedin is in their expansion plans.
What would all these drivers do once self driving taxis become the norm?
They would instantly go from severely underpaid to completely unemployed. Considering that a market disrupter like Uber has affected them to this extent, do people honestly believe 100,000 new jobs would be available once automation takes their jobs?
This is a larger problem than just livery drivers, automation threatens nearly every industry over the next 30 years. The vocations requiring less training will go first but eventually jobs that no one expected will become automated.
This is a bigger societal problem than just livery drivers, what do we do when there is no work for people? What do we do when technology drives the market value of an individuals labor to zero?
To be clear, I don't believe letting them kill themselves is a good answer.
Just because we're not sure what the jobs of the future will be like doesn't mean there won't be any. In the 1800's, 90% of people worked in agriculture. Tell anyone back at the time that in the 21st century it'd be < 2% and they'd freak out just like you are now.
I think the increase in leverage provided through the industrial revolution will pale in the comparison of that provided in the upcoming age of automation.
Just because historically there was job replacement with the innovation doesn't mean that we'll see that in the coming century. If we are unprepared it could threaten our society for decades.
Airplanes do in fact have the capability to complete a flight from point A to point B without a pilot. Yet, we still embed pilots in the cockpit. Cars might be simpler, but there's way too many gotchas while driving a computer cannot be programmed to handle that a human driver can intuit or defend against.
A completely driver-less future might happen, but it won't be with the current infrastructure. IMHO, you'd need to isolate self-driving lanes from human driver lanes completely before it can become a reality, and slowly phase out driver-only cars with self-driving cars/lanes. Even at that rate, I'm still not certain it would work better than what we have now...
planes are big enough that 1 or 2 pilots is a small component of the airfare. you would probably pay 1% or 2% more for a piloted plane, would you pay 40% more for a human driven taxi?
good point. maybe an outright ban on small vehicles and mandate public, driver-less, mass transit for everyone in a city like NY. Everyone walk the last mile or two - we're all fat anyway.
>...but it won't be with the current infrastructure... slowly phase out driver-only cars with self-driving cars/lanes.
Upvoted!
I've posted it before and I'll post it again: what advantages does driverless car-based transportation infrastructure offer over a rail system of the same scale? I am genuinely interested to hear counter arguments since, to my mind, well planned/maintained rail systems can better leverage centrally generated power, have better driver (conductor) : passenger ratios, are easier to maintain in aggregate (ie. tracks vs. roads, total number of train cars < total number of motor vehicles, etc.), and so forth.
Infrastructure. You can reach a lot further using roads than you can using tracks. A system that would replace roads with tracks would be completely impractical and we'd end up with the same as the road system with all its problems.
The last mile problem [0]. A rail system could work for a very densely populated area, but there is way too much sprawl. It's part of the reason why cars are basically seen as a necessity in the US.
Come on. Make those trolleybusses (which share most advantages of rail if they get dedicated driving space) and infrastructure problem almost disappears if they have proper batteries to drive like buses through less dense areas.
The problem is not last mile. It idea that last 30 miles are not viable to run extended routes through as it gets too slow to follow the winding paths as plain buses.
The solution is actually pedestrian traffic and biking optimization for last few miles access, not tossing more cars at the problem. Not building areas in cities with crummy access to public transport. Making it less necessary to carry heavy loads personally relying on improved delivery systems instead. (Which should also create some jobs.)
Technological disruption can often be a good thing - more/better product/services can be had for less money - I don’t think the HN crowd needs to be convinced of this.
However, it also means that in the short term, the people doing the work that has been disrupted are going to be impacted. And while a few Stanford grads can push an app at the click of a button, it takes humans much longer to adapt to the changes engendered, particularly if they’ve been doing the same job in the same city for 30 years, supporting a family with that income, and all of a sudden that job only generates a fraction of the money it once did.
Ideally, the society in which this occurs would have a number of safety nets (public healthcare, housing/food assistance, cheap/free education, reliable and affordable public transportation, etc) to ensure that those people do not suffer too much because of the transition.
Put simply, the US does not have many of these safety nets. Labor protection laws are a joke - the US still has no laws mandating paid maternity leave, for one example amongst many. Healthcare is a disaster, meaning that if you are unemployed and get seriously sick, it could literally spell the end of your life. Education is very expensive, making a professional reconversion hard to fathom for most. And housing prices in large cities are spiraling out of control, meaning that if you can’t make rent, homelessness is often the next step.
Uber, and so many companies like it, are improvements in some ways - who knows how long it would have taken for taxi companies to let people summon a car from a tap of a button on their phone. But in doing so, they’re also destroying the livelihoods of many. If the taxes that Uber paid were put to good use by the US government to offer support in all the ways we’ve seen above to those affected, it wouldn’t be as much of a problem. But here we are.
I can agree with most of this - the taxes of the disruptors destroying an industry should absolutely be used to help those displaced. At the same time, people affected need to be realistic. There is no protection for them, so complaining about the changes while doing nothing to help yourself is just a losing game.
Complaining draws attention which can lead to interest and eventually actionable conditions for a greater group of individuals than just the affected.
Also, when one is scrambling to make ends meet, it's not always so easy to be more proactive. Surviving in such situations consumes a lot of mental, emotional, and temporal resources.
Nice in theory, but implementing well functioning safety nets is easier said than done. A lot of the problems you allude to in healthcare, housing, education stem from previous well meaning attempts that ended up making things worse.
You'd need basic minimum income, and that's not possible with the current currency distribution in America.
It'd require radical changes in so many things, including the American attitude to social welfare (which is shameful compared to our European counterparts where people who disabilities get enough to buy houses and maintain a decent standard of living).
You don't see a lot of elevator operators anymore. That used to be a job. It became "deprofessionalized" as now anyone with a finger can operate an elevator. Should we have erected a wall of legislation to protect their jobs?
> For taxi drivers staring down an even bleaker future of driverless cars
These are not "taxi drivers". They are human beings. They are not single-purpose machines who are incapable of doing anything else. Humans are capable of learning a variety of different skills, even if they have already learned one. Articles like this treat them like specially made parts that are only suited for one thing.
Humans are capable of learning new things, but in general they don't like to. And they HATE when learning new things is not optional and is a requirement for continued employment.
Just because we can adapt doesn't mean this transition won't be extremely difficult for society and have major consequences. Just look at the riots in Greece when people were told the age of retirement eligibility for state pensions was going from 61 to 63.
I'm sure at some point in human history some group of humans depended on, say, a herd of bison who grazed on a certain plain. I'm sure they had a really good system and they knew all about that herd of bison and how to best hunt them. Then maybe something changed and the bison weren't there anymore.
Did they complain that they now had to learn a new way to hunt bison or perhaps a new way to find food entirely? Probably some of them did. Maybe they didn't like that they were forced by circumstances to learn something new. Still, nature doesn't care whether you like what you have to do to survive or not. Adapt or die. Such is life.
This isn't nature we're talking about here. It's other humans.
When I spend 20 or 30 years of my life specializing in a particular task, and doing it to generate a large amount of wealth for my employer, who passes a much smaller amount of wealth on to me, there are and should be strings attached to that from the employer's side.
In the US at least, there are already PLENTY of strings attached from the employee side. I can't see a doctor without a job. I can't borrow money without a job. I can't smoke grass, yadda yadda yadda. And I live in an "at will" state as well.
Sorry. This is not nature we're dealing with. It's humans exploiting other humans. The "adapt or die" philosophy is not justified.
Unless adapt means squeeze your own workers better and more efficiently.
The adaptation here is not to switch or become the slave master yourself. It is to resist and fight the problematic system of exploitation in all available alternative ways.
The "job" system is enforced at as low level as getting or not credit based on whether you get paid regularly or by whom.
It is enforced by preferential rated for insurance and taxes for employers. Etc.
Unfortunately the solution, which is organized resistance to these ideas, is easy to pervert or bribe away.
In terms of your ability as an individual to effect the situation, the difference between nature and other humans is mostly academic. What's going to be more successful: forcing millions of other humans to pay more for a less convenient service than the alternative or just learning a different way to make a living?
> I can't see a doctor without a job.
I wasn't aware doctors ran employment checks before seeing patients. I haven't been to the doctor in a long time, though.
> I can't borrow money without a job.
Uh, yeah? People who lend you money like to see that you have some means of paying it back. How is that relevant?
> I can't smoke grass
Depends on the job, but that is a legal issue. I doubt most employers would care if the law didn't force them to.
> The "adapt or die" philosophy is not justified.
This is not a philosophy, it's a statement of the reality of the situation. Circumstances change due to forces beyond your control This will happen to everyone at some point. You can stamp your feet and whine and moan and demand that someone else (Who exactly?) put them back the way they were, or you can figure out how to deal with them.
Do you advise individuals to ignore problems and not deal with them? What do you propose as the alternative to dealing with a problem? Sit around and wait for somebody else to fix it for you?
Driving, as a job, is going away. Not much is going to change that, nor should it. What is your advice for the drivers? "Sit on your hands, and hope that someone gives you some free money at some point"? Would they not be better served by taking some action to find a new line of work now?
That's fine for the long term. But telling someone who's getting automated out of their job "Just support companies that care for their employees" does not improve their situation at all.
Plus you start way at the bottom. I was sick of software and though about going into photography. But I realized I'd be shelling out a lot for equipment, schooling/certificates (unless I could find an apprenticeship). Then I'd have to build back up to a decent income.
I knew another Computer Scientist who got his EMT certificate and worked in an ambulance service for two years, but ended up coming back to IT.
If I personally leave the work force again, it would be after getting funding for a PhD. I'd gladly take a greatly reduced wage if I could be on my way towards teaching and researching in a university.
"Humans are capable of learning new things, but in general they don't like to. And they HATE when learning new things is not optional and is a requirement for continued employment."
The attitude towards learning really depends on what one is learning, what the experience of learning is like, and why one is learning it.
People tend to view learning very positively when they are learning something they are intensely interested in, that they feel is very important, and when the process of learning feels effortless and fun.
When learning is painful and frustrating, when it's learning of something one is not at all interested in, that one feels indifferent or even hostile towards, that one thinks is unimportant, and when one feels forced to learn because of economic or other considerations where the power dynamic is highly skewed against the learner, and where the learner has little control over what and how they learn, yes, people tend not to like that.
That's exactly what I was trying to say, but you said better. People LOVE learning skills in certain environments like a video game. But I think the serious consequences of NOT learning when you lose your job tends to make learning more difficult.
So even though you want what you are learning to be important. If it is TOO IMPORTANT the scale tips in the opposite direction.
I feel like there is much psychological research that concludes the opposite of this. People love learning new things, if there's a clear reward, for instance being jobless and finding a new job because of a new skill. By contrast, people in a cushy job "settle in", and learn nothing, or even unlearn things over time.
In addition to the research, one seems to find many stories of exactly this happening.
Quite the opposite is true: people don't like learning UNLESS there is a clear reward. That's even true for the video game case, where it's simply that the reward is social rather than economical.
I disagree. I was unemployed for a few months and I could not get myself to do the things I needed to in order to get the jobs I was interested in. There was so much anxiety associated with this that it triggered avoidance anxiety. What saved me is that studying the things I am naturally drawn to that have a lot of tangential offerings. My advice: find the biggest tree of knowledge that you're interested in and hope that the branches that you can reach will take care of you.
I get what you are saying, I am not familiar with the research. But the video game analogy was proving my point, not the opposite.
I love to learn a new level or video game characters future is at stake. Mario's death is not a loss that triggers great anxiety for me.
Needing to get certification in a field that I am not familiar with, so that my family can stay fed and not be homeless, tends to take the "joy" out of learning for me.
> These are not "taxi drivers". They are human beings. They are not single-purpose machines who are incapable of doing anything else. Humans are capable of learning a variety of different skills, even if they have already learned one. Articles like this treat them like specially made parts that are only suited for one thing.
The thing is that here in the US, we (collectively) tend to define a large part of our identity by the job that we do. We are definitely more than just cab driver, just developers, and just data scientists. We are also parents, musicians, woodworkers, authors, gamers, teachers, pilots, and a number of innumerable things. Yet before we even stop to ask what people do for fun, we ask, "What do you do," with an implicit "For money?" tacked on the end.
From my experience there is far less of this "what do you do" pertaining to work than of their primary hobby or interest. Might be a younger generation thing since there are so many of us that acknowledge we aren't working in the job or industry we would like to, and can blatantly see that in others.
For more insight into this, look into the US's history with the decline of the auto industry, the steel industry, and the coal industry. (These are just the ones that immediately pop into mind. I'm sure there are plenty of others, not just in the US, too.) In short, people don't like to change their jobs very much.
Part of this does involve exactly what you're saying: people need to see their options and learn there is more they can do.
Often seeing a therapist or clinical social worker doesn't mean someone will tell you what to do. They'll help you see options you can't.
"I'm so sick of my career" "Well then go back to school." "I can't, I have to live and provide." "Well there are night programs and scholarships and grants."
The medallion system is probably the worst part of this. Either the state needs to come in and offer some form of debt relief (which they failed to do in 2008 with outright fraud in the housing market; bailing out lenders and screwing over homeowners) or taxi drivers need to declare bankruptcy. This is the worst option, because they could forfeit all their savings, retirement investments, housing .. everything because what was sold to them as a sound investment didn't pan out.
What I want to know is: can an Uber/Lyft driver earn that $80k/year, or even $60/year if they drove full time (and minus what they have to pay in comparable health coverage).
The thing I hate to say, but is the reality, is that the Taxi drivers might just need to stick it out. They should get into jobs they can live on, but keep paying off the medallions/permits.
Uber is not sustainable. Lyft has already increases rates in a lot of cities to be more livable (I think they realize a lot of people will use them just to avoid Uber). If Uber's IPO doesn't do well, it could be dead in a few years, and ride sharing services will have to start charging sustainable prices to not end up like them. Prices will probably be cheaper than cabs, but more expensive than what they are now.
If they can switch fields and still make the principal/interest payments on those permits, they might just need to bank on them being sellable one day or sell them at a loss when they retire.
Of course the part about night programs and scholarships is a lie. Only very few of the best qualify or can afford those programs. Try to spend 12h driving a car or doing deliveries then say 4h in school. I dare anyone who espouses this to actually try to do it. (Note: due to commutes you're forced to sleep a few hours less than typical and so are additionally disadvantaged.)
If this were reduced to say 12h total it is (barely) workable but now were talking about a part time job which can sustain the person for a few years. That mythical beast exists only in a few specialties. (All of them high tech and very well paid. Not something you would expect a typical taxi driver to be able to pull off without education and training.)
Most construction trades can be learned within a few years. You're not going to get a robot to fix your shower, for example, anytime soon.
Here in the UK we have people who have become, kinda, qualified tradesmen in a few weeks. Some of them go on to be fairly proficient, others still get by when (atm) demand far outstrips supply.
The job pool will shrink though as the appliances start to report early maintenance issues. Thus the demand for skill intensive repairs will fall. Therefore the job will be less valued due to competition from almost unskilled labour driving wages down.
The temporary lack only pertains too skilled technicians and nor people who can install and uninstall a ready made module.
I agree with your point, the trend to 'de-skill' a lot of trades is a real one.
However, there's still plenty of old buildings around and, in the UK at least, a real shortage of people with the necessary skills to maintain them.
In the context of the tread, a middle-aged taxi driver, looking at a future of redundancy, only has to worry about the next 15 years or so, not how things are going to play-out in the distant future. Maybe?
This is a pretty dim and insulting view of the capabilities of taxi drivers. Take London black cab drivers for example. They have to basically memorize every street in London and the best routes to get from anywhere to anywhere, depending on time of day, events, weather, etc. I'm certain anyone capable of doing that would be able to learn how to do a wide variety of well-paying jobs.
Shaking like a moulding crab, the homo informaticus, removes part of the responsibility of the damage his work inflicts on humanity.
Its not my doing, its part of the law of the world, its physics basically, im just a cog who has to turn. And if i want to be king of the cogs, i have to break all other nearbys teeth- im not a responsible adult human when it not suits me, im just a animal, killing my prey, so i may be where it is not.
Have you ever considered, that if you remain a cog in this machine, those we churn to dust, might turn on us and we might all end up in gas chambers, classified together by some revolutionary junta - as the stewards of the evil machine, sacrificed by fat layer on top.
I have heard that with enough money, you can buy a collar that stops a guiliotines blade- but i sincerely doubt it.
I don't at all feel like we live in a society that helps people through job transitions at all, especially when you're older. Even as someone who is relatively young and in tech, it isn't easy to switch between "job families" even within the same company i.e. going from marketing to software engineering , engineer to a PM, etc.
Stop being so rational. Please instead appeal to my existentialism of a professional in a young, pubescent nation rising in the world, carried safely around by a uncongenial immigrant who, demeanor notwithstanding, bestows me with a nostalgic feeling of brotherhood in a baleful urban jungle. Now, it's all fading away.
We're ruining these people's lives in the same way that we ruined the lives of those who were talented at manually separating cotton. In a way, I feel bad for these people, in the same way anybody who has to re-evaluate their identify and path in life and develop a new skillset or profession. And frankly, most of the people on this site have a stable career path, savings, and little threat to their immediate survival (at the very least), so we probably can't really even empathize, but still - that's the entire point of survival - adaptation to meet the needs of a changing world.
uber does follow the law in NYC. You need a taxi/limousine license and plates to drive for uber there.
There are several classes of taxi/limousine in NYC regulations and the medallion'ed yellow cabs are only one of them, ubers just count as a different kind. I think as a livery cab ("black car") where the number of them was never fixed like the medallions were. Distinction is you're only allowed to hail yellow (and green) cabs on the street. Black cars have to scheduled and or sent from a dispatch, which uber counts as.
BTW, the black cars pre-uber were notorious for brazenly ignoring the hailing law, they would show up where the yellow cabs didn't and you could still "hail" them and you would have to play hardball negotiation on the price like you were in a third world country or else they would try to demand an abusive price.. Much more clearly illegally competing with the yellow cabs but not centralized into a single corporate villain and therefore more difficult to feel outraged towards.
I've lived here for ~4 years, which is not a long time, but anecdotally, every other taxi or uber driver has given me an earful of their opinion on regulation (or lack of).
If I were a taxi driver 5 years ago, I would have began driving for Uber and potentially looking for other career paths and finding opportunities to invest. I think there are a lot of people who come over with families and poor language skills and taxi driver is the obvious job. I really would not want to be a person in that position.
Yes, I absolutely think that whether or not it was Travis Kalanick or any other tech entrepreneur rolling the initial die, but that it's inevitable that in 10 years we're going to press a button on our phone and a self-driving car will pick us up with less people owning vehicles. It was a great idea that was going to succeed unless it was deliberately quashed. The concept of a taxi driver will be memory in 20 years from now.
If a country is structured with lots of social safety nets, etc. so you can survive more than five minutes without a decent job, then it’s reasonable to think of occupations as things that can be swapped with a little hard work. Otherwise, there is a terrible dependency to resolve.
Unfortunately for lots of people, where do you find the time to learn how to do something else? Are there jobs overflowing with compassion that will hire you with no experience and teach you for months? Are there lots of places to live where you don’t need money for rent, food, health care, etc. while you find your next career? You see the problem.
About 66% of the United States' annual federal budget of 4 trillion dollars goes towards social safety nets, and that doesn't count local and state budgets. Please note that the federal debt is currently 20.6 trillion dollars.
Why are people downvoting this? The US is 2nd in social protection spending (total as % of GDP) in the OECD it’s second to bloody France the only problem is that it seems to be much less efficient.
I can't help but feel that your statement is highly misleading or possibly outright false. The US population is estimated around 323 million. That would make social safety net spending at an average of $8,173 per PERSON per year.
Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid consist of almost 50% of the federal budget. If you include "Other," which includes other welfare programs such as veterans benefits, federal food stamps, as well as "Non-defense," which includes additional veterans benefits/housing/health, you can see that a very large percentage of the federal budget is on social safety nets.
And again, that is only federal. The amount of money locally and statewide that is put into affordable housing, homeless shelters, planned parenthood, etc at the local level contributes to what amounts to a nontrivial amount spent on social safety nets.
The term "social safety net" or "welfare program" as applied to veterans' benefits doesn't seem appropriate for this discussion. After all, people who don't work for the military also have benefits, which are not considered welfare programs, so it's inconsistent to throw this category in.
Social Security and Medicare are not particularly redistributive, so I don't think it's appropriate to include them either. The terms "welfare" or "safety net" implies to me taking from the well off and helping a relatively small number who are in need.
As long as you apply the same rules to other countries you compare to, that's great.
But then, again, the US is going to look pretty good compared to others.
(and I would like to add that there are plenty of economists saying that in fact most or all of a country's military budget is a social welfare program, as it's a job-of-last-resort for young people, which definitely helps them)
You'd never know it from the contempt for the deceased individual drenching this discussion.
Not only are humans capable of serial careers, they are capable of having lives outside of their careers, and emotional experiences which completely exceed the context of the role they play within their careers.
Would it kill folks here to dredge up a mote of sympathy for those whose time has gone by? Ever see "Death of a Salesman"?
> Humans are capable of learning a variety of different skills, even if they have already learned one. Articles like this treat them like specially made parts that are only suited for one thing.
that has always been true, however looking at my father and friends' experiences it seems it was a lot easier in the past to switch to completely different careers due to entry level jobs being widely available, previous experience not being as important, career paths where joining entry level and being "promoted from within" were the norm rather than the exception, and the "youth cult" where a new graduate is seen as a safer hiring bet compared to a 40+ hire did not exist. In addition the workplace was seen as the workplace, the place you go to work, which you leave and go home to live your life, it wasn't seen as a "24/7 place" where you have to "culture fit" and you are always available.
Nowadays everybody wants previous experience, and the specific experience for your particular position too, because you have to "hit the ground running" from day 1 and the "a single bad hire can doom your company". You also should not be too old, or too experienced, be good at the interviewing gauntlet (which often has little to do with the actual job) and you must fit in whatever arbitrary "culture" the prospective company has. This means it can get difficult to switch jobs in the same industry, let alone move to something unrelated.
Talking about our field, everybody knows that if you have a 10-15 years solid track record in several different languages and environments you could be adding value in most companies after a couple months ramp-up, but would you even be invited to an interview if you don't have a specific X years of experience in language Y with Z1,Z2,Z3... libraries? I mean, some job postings I've seen even express preference for candidates familiar with a particular IDE, if that is not treating people like single-purpose machines I don't know what is...
If you are in your 50s, with health insurance tied to your disappearing job, knowing there is no safety net and you're a few months away from living on the sidewalk, don't you think you would be desperate? If there was a safety net where you could live somewhere while you are retrained and have a chance, of course you would take it, but in today's world that doesn't seem to be in the cards.
You are a human resource therefore you're managed as such. An humanity you can retain is only allowed when it is not detrimental to the job performance.
Write yourself a note to revisit this sentiment when you are 60.
Personally I feel compassion for people that have made a living doing something they love for 30 years only to find that livelyhood made obsolete virtually overnight.
Unfortunately, learning new skills is time consuming. There is no pause button on life while you research a new job. I don't know the percentage off hand, but I would not be surprised if more than half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
Perhaps if you had a year of runway, were smart (as in able to learn quickly), you could weather such a catastrophe and keep your dignity along with a place to live.
It's possible to have compassion for people and disagree with them at the same time.
The problem is we're looking at a future where you're constantly going to have to retrain and then eventually the amount of jobs will be limited.
A lot of countries are looking at UBI others are looking at options for having more people working less hours and sharing the jobs. Whatever the solution the future is very scary, I can't think of many jobs that won't be disrupted by automation and AI.
Neural networks will make humans obsolete. How could they not? They're just connections of mathematical objects...kind of like the way we describe reality. If we can accurately describe reality, then we can accurately instruct a computer to perform real life tasks.
Barring any severe economic catastrophe, I do not expect to have to work for a living by the time I'm 60. It's unfortunate that an entire generation was led to believe that some institution, either an employer or the government, would be responsible for their well-being in old age. Hopefully anyone younger than 40 knows better by now. Nobody else is going to take care of you, so make sure you take care of yourself.
I imagine a lot of Venezuelans did not expect their assumption of a fat bank account equaling self sufficiency to fall through.
Self sufficiency is a fallacy. There are degrees of dependence, and if you lose enough of your dependencies, you may find yourself the subject of such an article.
If the US goes the way of Venezuela, the world will have much more serious problems than my retirement. It's unlikely anyone will be interested in writing some sappy article about me.
You mitigate the risks you can, within reason. I can do something about the possibility of social security failing and not having a pension. There's not much I can personally do about the US economy completely collapsing. I guess I could buy a farm and learn small-scale farming and stock up on canned goods and ammunition, but at some point you have to balance preparing for the future with living your life in the present.
Well, let's say all electricity stopped existing one year from now. What would I be? From engineer to... I don't know, maybe farm worker? I know enough about farming and distribution to get by, but would I be able to assert that? I'd probably be just a picker on the field. I imagine that's how these people feel about their future. What do I do now? I still have a full time job so no time to re-educate. Not enough savings to re-educate while out of a job either...
It's a sad story and an unfortunate part of capitalism. But the alternative is worse. You don't (or shouldn't) have a right to make people purchase your product or service at whatever price you want.
"He blamed politicians — mayors Michael R. Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo — and their acquiescence to the rich for permitting so many cars to flood the streets."
Sounds like this guy didn't really believe in a free market and wanted the politicians to make sure supply was tightly controlled so that he could profit from reduced competition. I'm sorry but I can provide no sympathy for someone with this mentality because I'm quite sure he saw no issue with restricted competition and a very, very significant barrier to entry when he was able to profit from it (those medallions cost more than most people's houses in NYC).
To be fair, there is no such thing as the free market. Markets only exist thanks to States. They have never existed independently of a state (I recommend the book Debt: The First 5,000 Years).
Now back to the free market, Uber is operating at a loss. They're undercutting Taxis and taking huge hits to keep their business running. That kind of pricing is illegal, and we've seen companies like airlines get into huge trouble for operating at a loss to try to kill smaller airlines. It's literally anti-competitive.
If the playing field were fair, it'd be different. But it's not. Uber constantly ignores laws on an international scale, under the name of "disruption." They might be laws you don't like, but they do exist for a reason, and somewhere you have to draw a line.
Agree 100% on Uber's anti-competitive practices and pricing structure. Amazon does the same thing - it's retail business which is what Amazon is famous for produces a substantial loss every quarter (and it's increasing). They have been subsidizing their losses with the profits from the high margin cloud business. This is supposedly a very serious felony when you have pricing/market power (and obviously Amazon does have that), yet Jeff Bezos and his executive team remain handcuff-free.
I haven't read that book, but your statement about markets only existing with the state strikes me as very odd. Conceptually, no government is required for a simple barter system - you and I can simply agree to trade X for Y. Perhaps that is key point - if you want to use "money", then the state is required. Although even then you can theoretically just use gold/silver coins.
> no government is required for a simple barter system
Ah but we never started with barter. That's the myth the book goes into. The very earliest systems of money were all credit based. Money came about through war (you conquer an area, leave a garrison, force people who have never used coins to pay taxes, coins they only get from soldiers) and barter only appeared when a state failed.
Barter only exists in the void left by states. There is no evidence trading oxen for grain every existed. It's too small scale. Early pre-historical civilizations were more likely to be communistic where everyone helped everyone else (native american tibes were like this .. more like ant colonies).
Even when a barter market emerged, it semi-state like thing had to rise with it. It's a really good book; highly recommended.
the "free" modifier is sort of meaningless but markets exist anywhere that things are traded repeatedly. If markets require a state, then what are black markets?
I forget what it's called, but there's a type of market where people belonging to different, warring societies find ways to negotiate and trade by using something like dead drops necessarily without ever meeting face to face. Edit, found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_trade
As a consumer (driver), if rich VC's want to subsidize my rides (wages) they can be my guest.
Anti-competitive practices are bad in theory, but I think a lot of time the effects are overstated and businesses trot them out as a convenient excuse to get government to regulate their competition. The political and legislative process is pretty messed up. You can't just assume government will be able to wave a magic wand and fix it with no side effects. Keep in mind the original NYC medallion system was put in place via regulation, and it's the root of many of these problems.
There was a lot of similar anti-competitive talk around firms like Walmart and Barnes and Noble. Neither could have been THAT anti-competitive, seeing as how both are now having trouble competing with companies like Amazon. And meanwhile, consumers have enable to enjoy low prices and get more for their money.
I feel bad that the state promoted the medallion system and then allowed competing taxis in without compensation or relief to those who bought into it. I agree that the medallion system was bad, but the pain caused to those who bought in should be alleviated.
I wish people would stop blaming companies for doing exactly what they are designed/incentivized to do. That is the capitalist system. We should be blaming the system that allows for the circumstances that many people being displaced by technology are experiencing. Individuals should not have their financial viability completely compromised by shifts in technology or society. Sure, I feel for the existential problems that shifts cause (e.g. seeing your life’s work commoditized), but the material, economic harm that comes from it is entirely systemic. Is not Uber’s fault that taxi drivers are becoming homeless. It is the government’s fault for not providing an adequate social safety net.
It sounds like a cliche, but capitalism = freedom. People can choose whether or how they want to get around -- whether it's calling an uber, hailing a taxi, or walking -- and whether the cost of doing so is worth it to them. Similarly, people can decide whether the money they'd make ($69k annually according to this article) driving a taxi is worth it to them, and if not, do something else. There are alternatives.
Capitalism is just the aggregation of all these micro-transactions. Most of the time, intervening in this system means preventing win-win transactions between consenting adults.
Simultaneously complaining about monopoly, which allows firms to keep prices artificially high, and "price dumping" makes little sense.
I have issues with both. It's obviously not a monopoly. Apart from Uber AND Lyft, you have regular taxi's, public transit, personal cars, bicycles and the ability to walk.
As for price dumping, again -- if rich VC's want to compete with each other to subsidize my rides and my drivers wages -- I'm not going to complain about it. Uber and Lyft are the epitome of options vs what was going on in the NYC taxi scene before them.
Not at all. Price dumping (also loss leading) is a tactic to build a monopoly or a dominant position on the market. Once competition is driven out, raise prices and barriers to entry to cement the advantages.
Those rich VCs get their money from somewhere. Usually us poor suckers who do not get paid the proper wage. Even a free taxi does not offset it.
What alternative are you proposing besides capitalism with robust anti-trust laws?
Today, many people are proposing socialism/communism, which ironically is just a system where the state has a monopoly on almost everything and there is no anti-trust organization to break up that monopoly.
One question no one explains is since the value of a medallion is obviously lower now why doesn't the commission have some kind our revaluation and give back money to the people who purchased it at a higher price.
Because our baking system is hopelessly corrupt and doesn't favor the struggling US citizen. Look at the 2008 financial collapse.
Banks were bailed out, the US government buying debt $1 for $1 (instead of for cents on the dollar like they should have). They could have, instead of bailing out the banks, forced those banks to sell debt (their mortgages) back to consumers at fractions of a dollar. Most people struggled and fought to get basic loan adjustments. The smart ones walked away from their houses.
The reality is, yes the State needs to step in and adjust the medallion prices and cut the independent owners a break. But only a fraction are owned by individuals. Most are owned by the big companies, which many would argue shouldn't get a break.
Plus it's not like the city of NY has a lot of money to even suggest this. They can't even keep transit funded enough to maintain MTA and keep Penn Station from falling apart.
Only temporarily. Without true job creation to sustain things like UBI, welfare, unemployment insurance, etc - you're just living on borrowed dollars and hoping for a better future. Of course, we could always print some dollars and quantitatively ease them into the economy ;)
I really believe that UBI would be sustainable by tapping into the concentrated wealth that arises as an unfortunate and unfair side effect of the economic rules we put in place.
I am surprised that most comments here have zero empathy for a worker in that age group that had been (for lack of a better way to put it) 'put out to pasture'.
Under the same type of thinking (and I wouldn't say that I am a union sympathizer in any way) there would be little use for unions since there will always be a large group of people that are willing and able to take the job at a vastly lower pay rate (for many union jobs).
There has to be a balance but the balance isn't simply removing all restrictions and letting people loose their living.
And no when you are in your 60's you are not going to simply learn and pursue a new career either everything becomes harder and your obligations are such that many times it's simply not practical.
Sucks for who ever invested in the medallions at the wrong time. Other than that I find it hard to feel sorry for the taxi industry.
Cabs refusing to pick people up based on race, refusing to go to certain areas, flat out cheating people by manipulating routes, some times not showing up if called. I've seen it all. Uber seems to eliminate all of those issues as far as I can tell.
Most of the comments in here are along the lines of "are we expected to protect the outdated taxi driver? Let them drive for Uber or get a new job!"
In a vacuum, that logic holds. But remember that the government has made taxi driving very regulated for a long time. To become a driver you had to buy their medallion and follow all of their regulations. These regulations imposed a high fixed cost and many recurring costs on taxi drivers. Yes of course these regulations were also beneficial to taxi drivers by restricting their competition, but the point is that this deal was struck between the industry and the government and a lot of individuals staked their livelihood on the details here.
Now the same city governments are basically saying "thanks for all that investment, we are deleting it" when they let Uber and Lyft come in. The city officials also did this with an uncharacteristic speed, basically capitulating immediately in a world where it takes years and years to get anything done. Taxi drivers were rightly surprised and individually harmed, they played by the rules as they were written and were told to fuck off by a bunch of VC-funded engineers with big lawyers and bigger budgets.
The taxi union teamed up with city governments to restrict competition at the expense of consumers. It's not the rules as they were written so much as the rules they wrote. Getting rid of them is great precedent. What's unfortunate is that it'll be much harder to get rid of rules like this in other, not as consumer facing industries.
Also, re: the "speed" at which this happened. Seems like driving for Uber or Lyft (less money but on your own time) would in theory be a great way for drivers to transition to something else.
If you're only analyzing this from the side of the drivers, I would agree. As someone who has used public transpiration my whole life, the service that taxis provide has been average to blatantly discriminatory.
I have stories from Washington D.C., New York City, Chicago, and L.A. where I've not been able to get a ride because of how I look. In some cases I've been denied rides at cab stands and been forced to walk to a friends house (over a mile). I've had to ask caucasian women to hail a cab and then do a quick swap to get a ride. I've been asked "where I'm going" and then been told "no sorry I'm not going there." I've been given a joy ride around a city, using my iPhone to realize that the driver is doing loops and taking me out of the way to run up the fare.
Not all taxi drivers were like this, but I have real experiences that make it difficult for me to empathize with a community that really didn't care about my dollar in the first place. I can't speak for riders that never had problems getting a cab, but the traditional U.S. taxi market was barely accessible to me; Uber and Lyft were never like that.
Honestly, I don't know — but I'm sure there is some history or context to their actions. I'm actually mixed — Dad is caucasian/Austrian and mom is African/Sierra Leonian. I grew up in a mixed race household and lived in 5 countries on 4 continents before I was 16. I don't really try to guess people's motivation for their actions, I would rather someone be overt and tell me what's going on. What I can say is that the taxi industry did absolutely nothing to attempt to improve its product for customers like myself.
I'll also say that I work at Uber now. Part of my motivation for working here is motivated by my personal experiences and a desire to improve transportation for everyone.
Taxi and Limo drivers were setting themselves up for such disruption for quite some time. Forget the cost of the ride, if only they (as in, all drivers) had provided respectful and quality service without denying rides or throwing a tantrum for those who chose to pay by card, Uber and Lyft wouldn't have benefited from such anti-incumbency sentiment.
During the pre Uber/Lyft days, a driver himself told me how he worked: Basically, give enough rides till he get's his next meal's money or a bit more. Thats the kind of job security they had. Of course, they were benefiting from the regulatory bubble before Uber and Lyft deflated it instead of popping it.
I feel bad for those who joined the taxi industry just before Uber/Lyft juggernaut started, and were probably singed the worst.But I guess such things happen for those who join industries that are about to be disrupted..
The incumbent Taxi and Limo drivers didn't realize that with Uber and Lyft, they (cab drivers) had lesser political clout, to get favorable terms in regulations.
Maybe if they didn't provide shitty service and lobby for self-serving, anti-consumer laws to limit how many taxis can be on the road, I'd have some sympathy, but no.
They shit their own bed, now they get to sleep in it.
I don't like it that uber is coming to my country also and taxis are being deregulated.
Until now you could make a decent living driving a cab, and all the cab drivers were skilled and professional and trustworthy. If you forgot your wallet in the cab you could be sure to pick it up at the lost and found.
It just isn't possible to operate a quality servicde with uber's model and prices.
You will have unskilled labour for less than minimum wages, ie. they won't be able to afford to buy a home for themselves driving for uber.
This is key from the article: "Implicit in his testament was the anger he felt over the de-professionalization of his life’s work"
Somebody here compared this to elevator operators. Come on, what a silly comparison. Driving optimally in a city and finding your way and not crashing is actually a job that takes skill and practice.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadI'm sure Doug Schifter's fallacies are obvious to us. He was committing the CBT cognitive distortions of "Personalization" and "magnification". He failed to recognize that his taxi job was an ill-gotten gain, gotten through lobbying, government control, and harming consumers.
Our species is built around the principle of adaptation. When the world changes, you must change with it. Or you die.
Perhaps think on this before dismissing another's life so glibly.
I graduated at 2009, after the recession, with a degree that wasn't particularly useful. I was unemployed for a long time, but I figured out how to lower my standards, get something to survive on, and then use that foundation as an opportunity to retrain myself. It's hard, but it's not impossible, and millions of people take new jobs that are in different fields.
In NYC 88,000 is a livable wage. NYC metro is a very expensive place to live. Calling a livable wage for a weeks work “ill gotten gains” is a bit far fetched. Unions and state controlled monopolies exist for a reason, not the least of which is protecting the broader workforce who don’t have leverage against their wealthy employers otherwise.
This is capitalism and if it's too emotionally painful to watch disruption unfold then as a society we need to find a different mode of operation. Why get distracted by the players when the game is the problem?
I've been largely okay with capitalism I guess because I've benefitted from it. But human lives have decreased in value. In a society where making $500, literally, is more valuable than a human life, we'll choose the money every time. That's the game.
Of course I have no idea what to do, in the face of this almost existential crisis, but getting mad a Uber for disrupting an industry is wasted effort.
"Medallions, which grant the right to operate a taxi in New York City, were now depreciating assets and drivers who had borrowed money to pay for them, once a sound investment strategy, were deeply in debt."
Just like any investment, you are not guaranteed a right to a return, or even to keep the money you put into an investment, and there is no reason why taxi medallions should be any different. The only reason these medallions were so valuable and such a "sound investment" for so long is because of government-induced artificial scarcity. There are good arguments behind that model, but if you depend on a model like that, eventually, you will have problems.
"He was now sometimes forced to work more than 100 hours a week to survive he said; when he had started out in the 1980s a 40-hour week was fairly typical."
In 5+ years, he never had the opportunity to change careers or do something about his situation? I know it's not easy, especially as you get older, but it's a lot easier than leaving your family behind. I apologize if I sound harsh, but he had years to come to terms with the changes in his profession and adapt, and he chose not to.
"For taxi drivers staring down an even bleaker future of driverless cars" - in other words, the changes brought about by Uber and Lyft and every other service of that sort is inevitable anyway. What do these drivers think will happen the moment they can reasonably be replaced by the very cars they drive?
A lot of this feels like the death throes of an industry that had its time and served its purpose, but an arguably better alternative came along, and the industry now feels as though it is owed something by virtue of existing, rather than by virtue of providing something of value. Pardon me, my buggy whip was left in the beginning of last century.
That said, I disagree with the headline blaming this on the gig economy. There's lots to blame the gig economy for, but this is pretty squarely showing the flaws in the old medallion system -- that you need a crippling amount of financial debt in your name to participate in the system.
I could be misremembering though.
> Over the years, many medallions once owned by individual drivers were sold to large taxi fleets. As of 2012, about 18% of all taxis were owner operated, while the rest were leased; this is a decline from the 29% ownership rate in 2006.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_New_York_City#Logi...
For some definition of superior. For instance, Uber is for sure superior in stripping the taxi drivers of their rights.
https://stallman.org/uber.html#abuse
2. Ability to share rides
3. Ability to review/report bad behavior (on both driver and customer side)—this along was a notorious problem with cab drivers. And I bet terrible customers used to be rampant too, but they were paying the drivers so nobody cared.
4. No cash. No tip (arguably more controversial thing they got rid of).
I never had to report bad behaviors, but I could just look at the taxi number, displayed clearly near the dashboard, and report it to the taxi company.
I am it that Uber can have minor advantages, but I boycott it due to the huge disadvantages in terms of worker rights.
Also they have been working at a loss to kill competitors: refusing to use Uber means defending your right to choose a service in the future.
It would be nice to see some numbers in this article to see comparable rates from all the other app services like Uber/Lyft/Via etc. I mean if it's a $10k/year pay cut .. well then just do it and take night courses to do something else more worthwhile. If it's way more than that; non-sustainable, then you're just going to have to wait for Uber to tank and prices to go back up (you might need to wait a few years).
Also, impossible for me to ring them as I'm deaf so... I have to text my wife to ring one! :( I seriously do not understand why no NZ taxi companies have banded together, raised some investment and created a good app then strengthened the market in the places that Uber etc don't exist in yet.
It's almost like they don't want to be taxis anymore.
I'm kinda surprised Uber isn't in Dunedin yet though. I know they're in Welly/Auckland .. and I suspect Chch as well.
Often Uber drivers in NZ work for a smaller taxi company and have multiple ride sharing apps on their phone.
Building apps is actually simple. I work with one of those large powerhouses and they're actually really bad at it. Smaller teams can usually do a better job.
Has nothing to do with population size.
Also, I think Uber is in CHCH and the Tron. No doubt Dunedin is in their expansion plans.
They would instantly go from severely underpaid to completely unemployed. Considering that a market disrupter like Uber has affected them to this extent, do people honestly believe 100,000 new jobs would be available once automation takes their jobs?
This is a bigger societal problem than just livery drivers, what do we do when there is no work for people? What do we do when technology drives the market value of an individuals labor to zero?
To be clear, I don't believe letting them kill themselves is a good answer.
Just because historically there was job replacement with the innovation doesn't mean that we'll see that in the coming century. If we are unprepared it could threaten our society for decades.
A completely driver-less future might happen, but it won't be with the current infrastructure. IMHO, you'd need to isolate self-driving lanes from human driver lanes completely before it can become a reality, and slowly phase out driver-only cars with self-driving cars/lanes. Even at that rate, I'm still not certain it would work better than what we have now...
Upvoted!
I've posted it before and I'll post it again: what advantages does driverless car-based transportation infrastructure offer over a rail system of the same scale? I am genuinely interested to hear counter arguments since, to my mind, well planned/maintained rail systems can better leverage centrally generated power, have better driver (conductor) : passenger ratios, are easier to maintain in aggregate (ie. tracks vs. roads, total number of train cars < total number of motor vehicles, etc.), and so forth.
What am I missing?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_(transportation)
The problem is not last mile. It idea that last 30 miles are not viable to run extended routes through as it gets too slow to follow the winding paths as plain buses.
The solution is actually pedestrian traffic and biking optimization for last few miles access, not tossing more cars at the problem. Not building areas in cities with crummy access to public transport. Making it less necessary to carry heavy loads personally relying on improved delivery systems instead. (Which should also create some jobs.)
However, it also means that in the short term, the people doing the work that has been disrupted are going to be impacted. And while a few Stanford grads can push an app at the click of a button, it takes humans much longer to adapt to the changes engendered, particularly if they’ve been doing the same job in the same city for 30 years, supporting a family with that income, and all of a sudden that job only generates a fraction of the money it once did.
Ideally, the society in which this occurs would have a number of safety nets (public healthcare, housing/food assistance, cheap/free education, reliable and affordable public transportation, etc) to ensure that those people do not suffer too much because of the transition.
Put simply, the US does not have many of these safety nets. Labor protection laws are a joke - the US still has no laws mandating paid maternity leave, for one example amongst many. Healthcare is a disaster, meaning that if you are unemployed and get seriously sick, it could literally spell the end of your life. Education is very expensive, making a professional reconversion hard to fathom for most. And housing prices in large cities are spiraling out of control, meaning that if you can’t make rent, homelessness is often the next step.
Uber, and so many companies like it, are improvements in some ways - who knows how long it would have taken for taxi companies to let people summon a car from a tap of a button on their phone. But in doing so, they’re also destroying the livelihoods of many. If the taxes that Uber paid were put to good use by the US government to offer support in all the ways we’ve seen above to those affected, it wouldn’t be as much of a problem. But here we are.
Also, when one is scrambling to make ends meet, it's not always so easy to be more proactive. Surviving in such situations consumes a lot of mental, emotional, and temporal resources.
It'd require radical changes in so many things, including the American attitude to social welfare (which is shameful compared to our European counterparts where people who disabilities get enough to buy houses and maintain a decent standard of living).
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1888367364808997...
> For taxi drivers staring down an even bleaker future of driverless cars
These are not "taxi drivers". They are human beings. They are not single-purpose machines who are incapable of doing anything else. Humans are capable of learning a variety of different skills, even if they have already learned one. Articles like this treat them like specially made parts that are only suited for one thing.
Just because we can adapt doesn't mean this transition won't be extremely difficult for society and have major consequences. Just look at the riots in Greece when people were told the age of retirement eligibility for state pensions was going from 61 to 63.
Did they complain that they now had to learn a new way to hunt bison or perhaps a new way to find food entirely? Probably some of them did. Maybe they didn't like that they were forced by circumstances to learn something new. Still, nature doesn't care whether you like what you have to do to survive or not. Adapt or die. Such is life.
This isn't nature we're talking about here. It's other humans.
When I spend 20 or 30 years of my life specializing in a particular task, and doing it to generate a large amount of wealth for my employer, who passes a much smaller amount of wealth on to me, there are and should be strings attached to that from the employer's side.
In the US at least, there are already PLENTY of strings attached from the employee side. I can't see a doctor without a job. I can't borrow money without a job. I can't smoke grass, yadda yadda yadda. And I live in an "at will" state as well.
Sorry. This is not nature we're dealing with. It's humans exploiting other humans. The "adapt or die" philosophy is not justified.
The adaptation here is not to switch or become the slave master yourself. It is to resist and fight the problematic system of exploitation in all available alternative ways.
The "job" system is enforced at as low level as getting or not credit based on whether you get paid regularly or by whom. It is enforced by preferential rated for insurance and taxes for employers. Etc.
Unfortunately the solution, which is organized resistance to these ideas, is easy to pervert or bribe away.
> I can't see a doctor without a job.
I wasn't aware doctors ran employment checks before seeing patients. I haven't been to the doctor in a long time, though.
> I can't borrow money without a job.
Uh, yeah? People who lend you money like to see that you have some means of paying it back. How is that relevant?
> I can't smoke grass
Depends on the job, but that is a legal issue. I doubt most employers would care if the law didn't force them to.
> The "adapt or die" philosophy is not justified.
This is not a philosophy, it's a statement of the reality of the situation. Circumstances change due to forces beyond your control This will happen to everyone at some point. You can stamp your feet and whine and moan and demand that someone else (Who exactly?) put them back the way they were, or you can figure out how to deal with them.
Sounds callous and egotistical.
Driving, as a job, is going away. Not much is going to change that, nor should it. What is your advice for the drivers? "Sit on your hands, and hope that someone gives you some free money at some point"? Would they not be better served by taking some action to find a new line of work now?
I think it's called capitalism.
I knew another Computer Scientist who got his EMT certificate and worked in an ambulance service for two years, but ended up coming back to IT.
If I personally leave the work force again, it would be after getting funding for a PhD. I'd gladly take a greatly reduced wage if I could be on my way towards teaching and researching in a university.
The attitude towards learning really depends on what one is learning, what the experience of learning is like, and why one is learning it.
People tend to view learning very positively when they are learning something they are intensely interested in, that they feel is very important, and when the process of learning feels effortless and fun.
When learning is painful and frustrating, when it's learning of something one is not at all interested in, that one feels indifferent or even hostile towards, that one thinks is unimportant, and when one feels forced to learn because of economic or other considerations where the power dynamic is highly skewed against the learner, and where the learner has little control over what and how they learn, yes, people tend not to like that.
So even though you want what you are learning to be important. If it is TOO IMPORTANT the scale tips in the opposite direction.
In addition to the research, one seems to find many stories of exactly this happening.
Quite the opposite is true: people don't like learning UNLESS there is a clear reward. That's even true for the video game case, where it's simply that the reward is social rather than economical.
I love to learn a new level or video game characters future is at stake. Mario's death is not a loss that triggers great anxiety for me.
Needing to get certification in a field that I am not familiar with, so that my family can stay fed and not be homeless, tends to take the "joy" out of learning for me.
The thing is that here in the US, we (collectively) tend to define a large part of our identity by the job that we do. We are definitely more than just cab driver, just developers, and just data scientists. We are also parents, musicians, woodworkers, authors, gamers, teachers, pilots, and a number of innumerable things. Yet before we even stop to ask what people do for fun, we ask, "What do you do," with an implicit "For money?" tacked on the end.
This turn of phrase tickled me.
Attachment to stories keeps us where we are, good or bad..
Often seeing a therapist or clinical social worker doesn't mean someone will tell you what to do. They'll help you see options you can't.
"I'm so sick of my career" "Well then go back to school." "I can't, I have to live and provide." "Well there are night programs and scholarships and grants."
The medallion system is probably the worst part of this. Either the state needs to come in and offer some form of debt relief (which they failed to do in 2008 with outright fraud in the housing market; bailing out lenders and screwing over homeowners) or taxi drivers need to declare bankruptcy. This is the worst option, because they could forfeit all their savings, retirement investments, housing .. everything because what was sold to them as a sound investment didn't pan out.
What I want to know is: can an Uber/Lyft driver earn that $80k/year, or even $60/year if they drove full time (and minus what they have to pay in comparable health coverage).
The thing I hate to say, but is the reality, is that the Taxi drivers might just need to stick it out. They should get into jobs they can live on, but keep paying off the medallions/permits.
Uber is not sustainable. Lyft has already increases rates in a lot of cities to be more livable (I think they realize a lot of people will use them just to avoid Uber). If Uber's IPO doesn't do well, it could be dead in a few years, and ride sharing services will have to start charging sustainable prices to not end up like them. Prices will probably be cheaper than cabs, but more expensive than what they are now.
If they can switch fields and still make the principal/interest payments on those permits, they might just need to bank on them being sellable one day or sell them at a loss when they retire.
If this were reduced to say 12h total it is (barely) workable but now were talking about a part time job which can sustain the person for a few years. That mythical beast exists only in a few specialties. (All of them high tech and very well paid. Not something you would expect a typical taxi driver to be able to pull off without education and training.)
Here in the UK we have people who have become, kinda, qualified tradesmen in a few weeks. Some of them go on to be fairly proficient, others still get by when (atm) demand far outstrips supply.
The temporary lack only pertains too skilled technicians and nor people who can install and uninstall a ready made module.
However, there's still plenty of old buildings around and, in the UK at least, a real shortage of people with the necessary skills to maintain them.
In the context of the tread, a middle-aged taxi driver, looking at a future of redundancy, only has to worry about the next 15 years or so, not how things are going to play-out in the distant future. Maybe?
Operating elevators was not.
Its not my doing, its part of the law of the world, its physics basically, im just a cog who has to turn. And if i want to be king of the cogs, i have to break all other nearbys teeth- im not a responsible adult human when it not suits me, im just a animal, killing my prey, so i may be where it is not.
Have you ever considered, that if you remain a cog in this machine, those we churn to dust, might turn on us and we might all end up in gas chambers, classified together by some revolutionary junta - as the stewards of the evil machine, sacrificed by fat layer on top.
I have heard that with enough money, you can buy a collar that stops a guiliotines blade- but i sincerely doubt it.
We're ruining these people's lives in the same way that we ruined the lives of those who were talented at manually separating cotton. In a way, I feel bad for these people, in the same way anybody who has to re-evaluate their identify and path in life and develop a new skillset or profession. And frankly, most of the people on this site have a stable career path, savings, and little threat to their immediate survival (at the very least), so we probably can't really even empathize, but still - that's the entire point of survival - adaptation to meet the needs of a changing world.
Trying to flesh this out. In the case of taxi drivers that need to adapt shouldn't they have the benefits of the same environment?
Ride sharing services are unencumbered by the regulations/laws facing taxi drivers. The taxi drivers "environment" doesn't allow the adaptation.
Had Uber needed to follow the regulations/laws in place for taxis in a city like New York would they have succeeded?
There are several classes of taxi/limousine in NYC regulations and the medallion'ed yellow cabs are only one of them, ubers just count as a different kind. I think as a livery cab ("black car") where the number of them was never fixed like the medallions were. Distinction is you're only allowed to hail yellow (and green) cabs on the street. Black cars have to scheduled and or sent from a dispatch, which uber counts as.
BTW, the black cars pre-uber were notorious for brazenly ignoring the hailing law, they would show up where the yellow cabs didn't and you could still "hail" them and you would have to play hardball negotiation on the price like you were in a third world country or else they would try to demand an abusive price.. Much more clearly illegally competing with the yellow cabs but not centralized into a single corporate villain and therefore more difficult to feel outraged towards.
If I were a taxi driver 5 years ago, I would have began driving for Uber and potentially looking for other career paths and finding opportunities to invest. I think there are a lot of people who come over with families and poor language skills and taxi driver is the obvious job. I really would not want to be a person in that position.
Yes, I absolutely think that whether or not it was Travis Kalanick or any other tech entrepreneur rolling the initial die, but that it's inevitable that in 10 years we're going to press a button on our phone and a self-driving car will pick us up with less people owning vehicles. It was a great idea that was going to succeed unless it was deliberately quashed. The concept of a taxi driver will be memory in 20 years from now.
Unfortunately for lots of people, where do you find the time to learn how to do something else? Are there jobs overflowing with compassion that will hire you with no experience and teach you for months? Are there lots of places to live where you don’t need money for rent, food, health care, etc. while you find your next career? You see the problem.
I can't help but feel that your statement is highly misleading or possibly outright false. The US population is estimated around 323 million. That would make social safety net spending at an average of $8,173 per PERSON per year.
That's incredibly difficult to believe.
Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid consist of almost 50% of the federal budget. If you include "Other," which includes other welfare programs such as veterans benefits, federal food stamps, as well as "Non-defense," which includes additional veterans benefits/housing/health, you can see that a very large percentage of the federal budget is on social safety nets.
And again, that is only federal. The amount of money locally and statewide that is put into affordable housing, homeless shelters, planned parenthood, etc at the local level contributes to what amounts to a nontrivial amount spent on social safety nets.
Social Security and Medicare are not particularly redistributive, so I don't think it's appropriate to include them either. The terms "welfare" or "safety net" implies to me taking from the well off and helping a relatively small number who are in need.
But then, again, the US is going to look pretty good compared to others.
(and I would like to add that there are plenty of economists saying that in fact most or all of a country's military budget is a social welfare program, as it's a job-of-last-resort for young people, which definitely helps them)
You'd never know it from the contempt for the deceased individual drenching this discussion.
Not only are humans capable of serial careers, they are capable of having lives outside of their careers, and emotional experiences which completely exceed the context of the role they play within their careers.
Would it kill folks here to dredge up a mote of sympathy for those whose time has gone by? Ever see "Death of a Salesman"?
that has always been true, however looking at my father and friends' experiences it seems it was a lot easier in the past to switch to completely different careers due to entry level jobs being widely available, previous experience not being as important, career paths where joining entry level and being "promoted from within" were the norm rather than the exception, and the "youth cult" where a new graduate is seen as a safer hiring bet compared to a 40+ hire did not exist. In addition the workplace was seen as the workplace, the place you go to work, which you leave and go home to live your life, it wasn't seen as a "24/7 place" where you have to "culture fit" and you are always available.
Nowadays everybody wants previous experience, and the specific experience for your particular position too, because you have to "hit the ground running" from day 1 and the "a single bad hire can doom your company". You also should not be too old, or too experienced, be good at the interviewing gauntlet (which often has little to do with the actual job) and you must fit in whatever arbitrary "culture" the prospective company has. This means it can get difficult to switch jobs in the same industry, let alone move to something unrelated.
Talking about our field, everybody knows that if you have a 10-15 years solid track record in several different languages and environments you could be adding value in most companies after a couple months ramp-up, but would you even be invited to an interview if you don't have a specific X years of experience in language Y with Z1,Z2,Z3... libraries? I mean, some job postings I've seen even express preference for candidates familiar with a particular IDE, if that is not treating people like single-purpose machines I don't know what is...
If you are in your 50s, with health insurance tied to your disappearing job, knowing there is no safety net and you're a few months away from living on the sidewalk, don't you think you would be desperate? If there was a safety net where you could live somewhere while you are retrained and have a chance, of course you would take it, but in today's world that doesn't seem to be in the cards.
Personally I feel compassion for people that have made a living doing something they love for 30 years only to find that livelyhood made obsolete virtually overnight.
Unfortunately, learning new skills is time consuming. There is no pause button on life while you research a new job. I don't know the percentage off hand, but I would not be surprised if more than half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
Perhaps if you had a year of runway, were smart (as in able to learn quickly), you could weather such a catastrophe and keep your dignity along with a place to live.
It's possible to have compassion for people and disagree with them at the same time.
A lot of countries are looking at UBI others are looking at options for having more people working less hours and sharing the jobs. Whatever the solution the future is very scary, I can't think of many jobs that won't be disrupted by automation and AI.
Self sufficiency is a fallacy. There are degrees of dependence, and if you lose enough of your dependencies, you may find yourself the subject of such an article.
You mitigate the risks you can, within reason. I can do something about the possibility of social security failing and not having a pension. There's not much I can personally do about the US economy completely collapsing. I guess I could buy a farm and learn small-scale farming and stock up on canned goods and ammunition, but at some point you have to balance preparing for the future with living your life in the present.
Sounds like this guy didn't really believe in a free market and wanted the politicians to make sure supply was tightly controlled so that he could profit from reduced competition. I'm sorry but I can provide no sympathy for someone with this mentality because I'm quite sure he saw no issue with restricted competition and a very, very significant barrier to entry when he was able to profit from it (those medallions cost more than most people's houses in NYC).
Now back to the free market, Uber is operating at a loss. They're undercutting Taxis and taking huge hits to keep their business running. That kind of pricing is illegal, and we've seen companies like airlines get into huge trouble for operating at a loss to try to kill smaller airlines. It's literally anti-competitive.
If the playing field were fair, it'd be different. But it's not. Uber constantly ignores laws on an international scale, under the name of "disruption." They might be laws you don't like, but they do exist for a reason, and somewhere you have to draw a line.
I haven't read that book, but your statement about markets only existing with the state strikes me as very odd. Conceptually, no government is required for a simple barter system - you and I can simply agree to trade X for Y. Perhaps that is key point - if you want to use "money", then the state is required. Although even then you can theoretically just use gold/silver coins.
Ah but we never started with barter. That's the myth the book goes into. The very earliest systems of money were all credit based. Money came about through war (you conquer an area, leave a garrison, force people who have never used coins to pay taxes, coins they only get from soldiers) and barter only appeared when a state failed.
Barter only exists in the void left by states. There is no evidence trading oxen for grain every existed. It's too small scale. Early pre-historical civilizations were more likely to be communistic where everyone helped everyone else (native american tibes were like this .. more like ant colonies).
Even when a barter market emerged, it semi-state like thing had to rise with it. It's a really good book; highly recommended.
I forget what it's called, but there's a type of market where people belonging to different, warring societies find ways to negotiate and trade by using something like dead drops necessarily without ever meeting face to face. Edit, found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_trade
Anti-competitive practices are bad in theory, but I think a lot of time the effects are overstated and businesses trot them out as a convenient excuse to get government to regulate their competition. The political and legislative process is pretty messed up. You can't just assume government will be able to wave a magic wand and fix it with no side effects. Keep in mind the original NYC medallion system was put in place via regulation, and it's the root of many of these problems.
There was a lot of similar anti-competitive talk around firms like Walmart and Barnes and Noble. Neither could have been THAT anti-competitive, seeing as how both are now having trouble competing with companies like Amazon. And meanwhile, consumers have enable to enjoy low prices and get more for their money.
Capitalism is just the aggregation of all these micro-transactions. Most of the time, intervening in this system means preventing win-win transactions between consenting adults.
And War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength.
The natural end state of capitalism is an efficient and aggressive monopoly or cartel. (Including a cartel with the government.)
How is lack of proper options freedom?
I have issues with both. It's obviously not a monopoly. Apart from Uber AND Lyft, you have regular taxi's, public transit, personal cars, bicycles and the ability to walk.
As for price dumping, again -- if rich VC's want to compete with each other to subsidize my rides and my drivers wages -- I'm not going to complain about it. Uber and Lyft are the epitome of options vs what was going on in the NYC taxi scene before them.
Those rich VCs get their money from somewhere. Usually us poor suckers who do not get paid the proper wage. Even a free taxi does not offset it.
Today, many people are proposing socialism/communism, which ironically is just a system where the state has a monopoly on almost everything and there is no anti-trust organization to break up that monopoly.
Banks were bailed out, the US government buying debt $1 for $1 (instead of for cents on the dollar like they should have). They could have, instead of bailing out the banks, forced those banks to sell debt (their mortgages) back to consumers at fractions of a dollar. Most people struggled and fought to get basic loan adjustments. The smart ones walked away from their houses.
The reality is, yes the State needs to step in and adjust the medallion prices and cut the independent owners a break. But only a fraction are owned by individuals. Most are owned by the big companies, which many would argue shouldn't get a break.
Plus it's not like the city of NY has a lot of money to even suggest this. They can't even keep transit funded enough to maintain MTA and keep Penn Station from falling apart.
I really believe that UBI would be sustainable by tapping into the concentrated wealth that arises as an unfortunate and unfair side effect of the economic rules we put in place.
Under the same type of thinking (and I wouldn't say that I am a union sympathizer in any way) there would be little use for unions since there will always be a large group of people that are willing and able to take the job at a vastly lower pay rate (for many union jobs).
There has to be a balance but the balance isn't simply removing all restrictions and letting people loose their living.
And no when you are in your 60's you are not going to simply learn and pursue a new career either everything becomes harder and your obligations are such that many times it's simply not practical.
Cabs refusing to pick people up based on race, refusing to go to certain areas, flat out cheating people by manipulating routes, some times not showing up if called. I've seen it all. Uber seems to eliminate all of those issues as far as I can tell.
In a vacuum, that logic holds. But remember that the government has made taxi driving very regulated for a long time. To become a driver you had to buy their medallion and follow all of their regulations. These regulations imposed a high fixed cost and many recurring costs on taxi drivers. Yes of course these regulations were also beneficial to taxi drivers by restricting their competition, but the point is that this deal was struck between the industry and the government and a lot of individuals staked their livelihood on the details here.
Now the same city governments are basically saying "thanks for all that investment, we are deleting it" when they let Uber and Lyft come in. The city officials also did this with an uncharacteristic speed, basically capitulating immediately in a world where it takes years and years to get anything done. Taxi drivers were rightly surprised and individually harmed, they played by the rules as they were written and were told to fuck off by a bunch of VC-funded engineers with big lawyers and bigger budgets.
This is not a good precedent.
Also, re: the "speed" at which this happened. Seems like driving for Uber or Lyft (less money but on your own time) would in theory be a great way for drivers to transition to something else.
If you're only analyzing this from the side of the drivers, I would agree. As someone who has used public transpiration my whole life, the service that taxis provide has been average to blatantly discriminatory.
I have stories from Washington D.C., New York City, Chicago, and L.A. where I've not been able to get a ride because of how I look. In some cases I've been denied rides at cab stands and been forced to walk to a friends house (over a mile). I've had to ask caucasian women to hail a cab and then do a quick swap to get a ride. I've been asked "where I'm going" and then been told "no sorry I'm not going there." I've been given a joy ride around a city, using my iPhone to realize that the driver is doing loops and taking me out of the way to run up the fare.
Not all taxi drivers were like this, but I have real experiences that make it difficult for me to empathize with a community that really didn't care about my dollar in the first place. I can't speak for riders that never had problems getting a cab, but the traditional U.S. taxi market was barely accessible to me; Uber and Lyft were never like that.
I'll also say that I work at Uber now. Part of my motivation for working here is motivated by my personal experiences and a desire to improve transportation for everyone.
During the pre Uber/Lyft days, a driver himself told me how he worked: Basically, give enough rides till he get's his next meal's money or a bit more. Thats the kind of job security they had. Of course, they were benefiting from the regulatory bubble before Uber and Lyft deflated it instead of popping it.
I feel bad for those who joined the taxi industry just before Uber/Lyft juggernaut started, and were probably singed the worst.But I guess such things happen for those who join industries that are about to be disrupted..
The incumbent Taxi and Limo drivers didn't realize that with Uber and Lyft, they (cab drivers) had lesser political clout, to get favorable terms in regulations.
Maybe if they didn't provide shitty service and lobby for self-serving, anti-consumer laws to limit how many taxis can be on the road, I'd have some sympathy, but no.
They shit their own bed, now they get to sleep in it.
This is key from the article: "Implicit in his testament was the anger he felt over the de-professionalization of his life’s work"
Somebody here compared this to elevator operators. Come on, what a silly comparison. Driving optimally in a city and finding your way and not crashing is actually a job that takes skill and practice.