I don't understand how people can be tricked by the branding of the 'sharing economy.'
The average seven year old is capable of understanding the difference between actual sharing (A friend giving you a lift), and 'sharing' (An unmarked taxi.) They could also probably grasp the difference between CouchSurfing[1], and AirBnB.
[1] Couchsurfing was the actual sharing economy, but as it turns out, you can't make billions of dollars from people letting out their couches to strangers, for the cost of company, and a home-cooked meal.
I've found myself drinking someone's branding kool-aid before, and this is how it happened. You think to yourself what you've just laid out, that this is so obvious a seven year old should know better. So obvious, in fact, that it can't be real.
"This is just an unmarked taxi."
"No, we're way different."
You think to yourself how no one could be that blatant, and you notice other people are buying into it, so you start to question you own worldview. Then it reaches a critical mass, where there's enough self-perpetuation to make you throw skepticism to the wind. And after some time, after seeing a few cracks in the brand, you think to yourself, god damn it, should have stuck to my guns.
"Except hailing/billing isn't stuck in the past so you don't have to get lucky to find an empty one on the street or call a surly dispatcher and wait 45 minutes. You also get the bill up front so you know how much it will cost before you even say yes. You can always pay by credit card too, you'll never arrive at the destination and then only be informed that the credit card reader is 'broken' and the cabbie can only accept cash. Added bonus: it's about half the price of a regular taxi."
It's definitely better, no arguments here. My point is that Silicon Valley has branded everything it does as 'tech' when in reality, it's just a better taxi company, a better hotel company, etc. unencumbered by the old ways. Like, the reality would have been good enough, 'We're a taxi (or insert whatever industry you want) company doing things way better than before." Instead, it's 'We're using algorithms and this shit is out of this world!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'
There is something about traditional engineering culture that sees marketing as big lie, but one of the reasons these companies have been so successful at transitioning public opinion is because they treat the whole business as iterative. Instead of thinking "boring finance dept" and "slimey marketing guys", they think "financial and social engineering".
I would classify using GPS, internet, apps, servers, mapping algorithms, pricing algorithms, etc to be tech. Not sure how much more tech you would want, but certainly not a regular taxi company doing things better, it’s changing the basic mechanics of how taxis used to work.
I think that's really unfair to what Uber has built. I routinely take UberPool in Manhattan for 30-40 minutes during rush hour for around $5. Along the way, it's not uncommon to share the car with another 4-6 passengers, as people are picked up and dropped off along the way. That's not just a better taxi company, that's a whole new modality of transportation that's only possible because of technology.
It’s cool af, and revolutionary. Uber also seems to have a cutting-edge machine learning presence. I don’t want to diminish in any way how great the new technologies coming out of Silicon Valley are.
The thing about it, though, is that ‘technology’ has been around for millions of years, if we’re being honest. Fifty years ago, on top of a network of cutting edge phone communication tech, automotive tech, oil and gas tech, the ‘old guard’ taxi industry was doing its thing.
It’s a fine line between pride and arrogance, and the idea that Silicon Valley has somehow invented even the idea of technology is...well, it’s pretty arrogant. Publishing, advertising, transportation, etc. are not new things.
Which is another way of saying that, yes, it is just an unmarked taxi but with a different way of doing business.
Look, I'm totally cool with businesses essentially protesting stifling regulation by loudly ignoring them and providing better service. But once you get the regulators' attention you need to be willing to sit down with them and hash out the details of what needs to change.
Well, that may be true if you're building a better transportation company, but why should a lowly mobile app company have to get embroiled in all that regulation when all they do is facilitate a 3rd party transaction?
Your experience is almost exactly the opposite of mine.
1. Without fail, taking Uber costs me more than taking a taxi, same trip, same time of day.
2. The bill up front point is fair
3. As far as paying by credit card, know the rules of your city. In many cities, they must take credit cards or are not allowed to drive. As such, if they tell you at the end of the trip that you must pay cash, just tell them you can't. If they won't let you pay by credit then, just walk away. Even if it's not a city where they have to accept credit, just tell them you don't have cash and stick to it. If their credit machine really wasn't working, they should/would have told you at the beginning of the trip.
4. I never have a problem getting a cab (though, to be fair, I only do it in NYC... they're everywhere)
I live in NYC and Uber / Lyft are sometimes cheaper and sometimes more expensive. Their premium is correlated with how hard it'll be to catch a cab. So if it's raining, it'll be hard to catch a cab. Uber / Lyft will be more expensive than a cab, but easier to take.
UberPool and Lyft's equivalent are basically always cheaper though, and I've found they work very well in Manhattan.
The point was not to trick average people, it was to trick regulators by creating sufficient ambiguity around whether these companies were different enough from their already-existing counterparts to justify not applying the same regulations to them.
And it worked! For as long as it needed to, anyway.
It didn’t trick regulators...in my county (Miami-Dade) Uber racked up millions in fines and “settled” for $4M.
There are ~3,000 counties in the US...and significant outstanding debts/legal liabilities.
The only people tricked is investors who are unaware of the real legal liabilities and whose funds are being used to float the illegal operations and some drivers who now have criminal records from doing a job they were paid to do.
Now they are going to trick the public with a public offering and offload these toxic shares.
Well there are some grey areas in sharing - would a neighbor agreeing to drive you to the airport for gas money be sharing still? What about a friend? Probably a deliberate fuzzy borders exploitation.
The set rates are the real breaker of sharingin my opinion - a tip and rating system would be truer sharing but would certainly exist on a smaller scale. It would be an interesting sociological experiment but it would probably end in disaster.
And before you get excited about the safety we get with regulation. Capitalism has proven with billion dollar companies, we don't want regulated taxis.
And to be clear, the local businesses would benefit from tourists staying in real hotels just as much, if not more, than the ones staying in AirBnBs, because such tourists are more likely to dine out and do things around town.
But restaurants dislike tourists because most tourists tip less than Americans, so a high concentration of these "mini-hotels" is detrimental to restaurants and their staff.
Taxi licensing was not cronyism, it was simple economics. Taxicabs can either have x drivers all at a subsistence level, or 0.5x drivers with a reasonable standard of living. Licensing with a cap and fixed rates becomes a policy decision driven by the public interest.
That's ridiculous. $140K taxi medallions are simple economics? Each $140K a company had to pay for some stupid medallion could have employed two people for a year. Medallions and protectionism just created localized monopolies that had few incentives to improve service, innovate on tech, and even provide clean vehicles. There's no other industry that needs this artificial cap, as if demand and supply can be accurately controlled for by government policy officials. What a joke.
Why is this not true for every type of market? Taco stands, barbershops, web designers, attorneys, parking lots, dog walkers, etc? Couldn't you just replace "taxicabs" and "drivers" with any kind of business or industry?
Isn't the collective end goal of the competitive marketplace supposed to be razor thin margins due to competition? I live in NYC and prior to Uber, 1) taxi medallions were valued at high six figures, 2) service was terrible, 3) prices were too high, and 4) actual drivers still made shit money.
I think Uber and Lyft and others have improved all of that, to be honest. Competition is a beautiful thing.
I mean, you get more than that, no one looked at Uber and went "ooh, illegal taxis". They looked at it and went "ooh I can use it from my phone with the push of a button and it's cheaper". The whole point of the "sharing economy" is to compete on efficiency, ease of use and price.
Ridiculous, anti-competitive laws were in place in these systems, I applaud their death.
I mean, Uber Black was allowing existing private car services to float their services on an on-demand market and soak up excess capacity.
Sidecar/UberX/Lyft etc have always just been wildcat taxis, except at least a real wildcat taxicab probably has some experience. In my experience, most uberx/lyft drivers have been doing it less than a year, the good ones all leave as soon as they see how bad the pay is, and nobody knows what the fuck they're doing.
It's amazing they haven't killed more people, tbh.
> no one looked at Uber and went "ooh, illegal taxis"
That's because it was falsely framed as "ride sharing" to begin with, when it was obviously a taxi service.
It should also go without saying that millions in VC cash can prettify anything and buy enough positive PR and lobbying to give the service an air of legitimacy.
> Why didn’t we see it coming? How did sharing economy companies manage to evade scrutiny for so long?
Plenty of people saw it coming. As much as fellow members of my generation enthusiastically embraced the sharing/gig economy for survival, most of them acknowledged that the companies were in the end going to be worse. They were just less worse than having no income. Those that thought this were the future were just deluding themselves because of how fucking terrible the job market is.
It's kind of funny that most of the people that recognized that the headline unemployment number wasn't a complete picture of the job market when Obama was President have somehow forgotten that since late January of 2017.
Every time the ruling party switches, followers of both parties warp into parallel universes with entirely different realities. Same thing happens for Democrats and their opinions of foreign military adventures. It's an unnecessary war when a Republican is in office, but it's a "peacekeeping mission" or a "humanitarian mission" when a Democrat is in office.
Opinion polling doesn't support your neat "both sides do it" narrative:
> In 2013, when Barack Obama was president, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that only 22 percent of Republicans supported the U.S. launching missile strikes against Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons against civilians.
> A new Post-ABC poll finds that 86 percent of Republicans support Donald Trump’s decision to launch strikes on Syria for the same reason. Only 11 percent are opposed.
> The Post-ABC poll indicates somewhat greater consistency on the part of Democrats. Some 37 percent of them back Trump’s strike, compared to a statistically indistinguishable 38 percent who backed a strike in 2013.
No they don't. You are just presenting false equivalence while ignoring the magnitude of the reality distortion field that republicans push with no close equivalent from democrats.
- Name a 10 year war democrats have championed...
- Name a democrat that questions the legitimacy of employment numbers or the objectivity of the data being provided...
- Name an rejection of scientific consensus like Global Warming (and before you say anti-vaxxers, that is not a mainstream democrat policy like Global Warming denial is...again, no false equivalence please)...
- Name a democrat zombie policy like "trickle down economics" that keeps being proven wrong and yet they insist will work...
I don't know if it is helpful to jump into political discussions, but I'll give it a try...
>...- Name a 10 year war democrats have championed...
I think the OP might have been referring to the seeming disappearance of the anti-war demonstrations once Obama took office. What changed, other than the POTUS? We ended up leaving Iraq at the same timetable that Bush had proposed.
>... Name a democrat that questions the legitimacy of employment numbers or the objectivity of the data being provided...
Well the unemployment numbers don't include the long term unemployed who would still like a job, etc so I would assume everyone should look beyond the simple number reported in the press.
>... - Name an rejection of scientific consensus like Global Warming
GMOs? Nuclear power?
>...- Name a democrat zombie policy like "trickle down economics" that keeps being proven wrong and yet they insist will work...
No economist has ever proposed a policy called "trickle down economics". The pejorative is simply used by people to attack someone else's economic polices. Using a perjorative is simply an attempt to poison the well and prevent discussion. In terms of policies that don't work. but still get support... A couple that come to mind:
- wasting money to require registration for the draft
- war on drugs
- DARE program
- three strikes (voted in CA, a heavy democratic state)
Conservatives also support many/all(?) programs, but that just means both sides are wrong.
> the seeming disappearance of the anti-war demonstrations once Obama took office. What changed, other than the POTUS?
"Other than the POTUS" seems to brazenly ignore the significance. For example, it would be absurd to ask, 'When Trump took office, what changed from Obama other than the POTUS'?
When Obama took office, the new POTUS' policies aligned to a significant degree with the anti-war protestors. Obama had opposed the Iraq war from the start and promised to withdraw, which he did (though the withdrawal was also required by the agreement Bush made with Iraq). Obama also wanted out of Afghanistan and, after a policy review, set a timeline for it (a criticized decision that was later changed).
> both sides are wrong
This is true "political correctness" (a term that I think is almost always misused). The odds of both sides begin equivalent seem slim; it's not at all unlikely that of two parties, one would be significantly worse than the other. It's sort of like looking at two software programs and saying 'both have bugs'; sure, but that's meaningless - it's not at all surprising when one is much superior to the other.
But people like to be even-handed, out of some misguided (IMHO) view of fairness or not wanting to offend. But the stakes are too high; you wouldn't say that if you were choosing between airplane autopilot programs. In this case, if you make the worse choice then it can result in catastrophic climate change, nuclear proliferation, war, mass oppression, the undermining of democracy and liberty, and more.
>...When Obama took office, the new POTUS' policies aligned to a significant degree with the anti-war protestors.
What actually changed? We left Iraq at the timetable Bush proposed and I think Obama wanted to extend it past that but couldn't come to terms with the Iraq government. There was a troop surge in Afghanistan - the thing that was criticized when Bush did it. People have a right to their opinion and the right to protest, but it does appear the anti-war democrats weren't quite as active once the POTUS had a D by the name.
I don't have space to go over the foreign military adventures done by Obama, here is an overview:
Not really. The OP asked for politics that didn't work and got consistent support. I listed a few ones that came to mind. I also think these bad polices are also endorsed by conservatives. Rather than attack the idea that people could ever be wrong, why don't you address the policies I brought up and explain why either they are great polices or that democrats don't support them.
I wish national politics were as simple and predictable as a computer program, but trying to paint an analogy there is quite troublesome, for the simple reason that there are hundreds, if not thousands of issues that government has to tangle with...and it often is the case that one party has a better approach to certain issues while the other party is better suited to deal with a completely different set of issues.
Yes, that's the sort of stuff I was thinking of. Obama ran on "change" and little changed. We also continued our relentless march toward total surveillance panopticon under Obama, and he did little to nothing to reign in the financial industry.
I do not believe there's a perfect equivalence. Lately the Republicans have been more enthusiastic about denying reality. But there's certainly a sense in which people view politics like a football game and just mindlessly root for their side.
We won't be rid of Trump and his ilk until we stop caring about parties and start caring about ideas.
> I think the OP might have been referring to the seeming disappearance of the anti-war demonstrations once Obama took office.
IME, The regular anti-war protestors continued the same recurring protests at the same locations during Obama's term that they had been carrying out under Bush (the same ones are, in many cases, still carrying them out under Trump.)
Media focus may have changed, but that's about alignment of the facts with pre-conceived media narratives, not the underlying reality.
> wasting money to require registration for the draft
But... that's a bipartisan thing, not a Democratic thing: no Republican Administration (which could do this alone, as an executive action) or Republican majority Congress has proposed ending registration since Carter reopened it as an executive action to prepare for potential war in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
In fact, bipartisan legislation creating a committee to consider expanding the uses of the draft was passed in 2016.
> war on drugs
Again, not a Democratic policy.
> DARE program
Not a Democratic policy (and it works quite well to improve it's targets opinions of law enforcement; it doesn't do anything about drug abuse.)
> three strikes (voted in CA, a heavy democratic state)
About half of states and the federal government have three strikes laws, and they are not more supported by Democrats than Republicans.
You will notice at the bottom of my posting, I had written:
>Conservatives also support many/all(?) programs, but that just means both sides are wrong.
The fact that conservatives support many or all of these programs doesn't make them good.
The OP had asked to name a democrat zombie policy ... that keeps being proven wrong and yet they insist will work... I don't think it is difficult to do that.
>... I think the OP might have been referring to the seeming disappearance of the anti-war demonstrations once Obama took office. What changed, other than the POTUS? We ended up leaving Iraq at the same timetable that Bush had proposed.
I recall many democrats complaining about not closing Guantanamo, or leaving Iraq faster. I don't recall any saying that it should continue and using going to war as a tool for pseudo-patriotic posturing.
>... Well the unemployment numbers don't include the long term unemployed who would still like a job, etc so I would assume everyone should look beyond the simple number reported in the press.
I am not talking about the subtlety of the different measures of unemployment and whether we should quote the U6 or U3 numbers when we speak about unemployment. I am talking about large parts of the Republican Party calling all unemployment data fake, rigged, designed to help Obama and all of the other demonstrably false descriptions used to support their agenda. If you want me to dig up some news articles I will, but it was basically how republicans said hello for the last two years of Obama's administration.
>... Name an rejection of scientific consensus like Global Warming
Democrats don't reject that it is scientifically possible to genetically modify food, or even that any assertion that is is totally safe is false. Rather, there are three main arguments against GMO: 1. The risk posed to humans is still uncertain and poses an outsized risk, 2. Allowing a company to patent food, along with monopoly rights, is a dangerous social policy, especially when farmers are being sued out of business by GMO crop contamination (even when they take great pains not to use GMO seed), 3. Consumers should at least be notified about the presence of GMO in food so they can make an informed choice.
Democrats are not saying nuclear fission is fake, but the severity of an accident makes even a very low risk of an accident a very asymmetric harm that should be weighed carefully. Further, we don't have a legitimate storage facility for nuclear waste.
I don't see how these two issues represent a "rejection of the science".
>...No economist has ever proposed a policy called "trickle down economics". The pejorative is simply used by people to attack someone else's economic polices. Using a perjorative is simply an attempt to poison the well and prevent discussion. In terms of policies that don't work. but still get support... A couple that come to mind:
- Umm President Bush gave a speech describing his supply side policies as trickle down...that is not me being pejorative, that is, and has been, the common descriptive phrase first suggested by a republican president. It has become pejorative because the policy has never delivered the outcomes it predicted and seems to also be casually linked to a large increase in income inequality. You can question the causal relationship, but when a policy is predicted to have a certain outcome, and seems to have a different, and seemingly negative outcome, it seems expected that it would get a bad popular opinion.
>...
- wasting money to require registration for the draft
- war on drugs
- DARE program
- three strikes (voted in CA, a heavy democratic state)
All of these are republican policies, I asked for one example of a zombie policy that democrats keep pushing in the face of overwhelming factual evidence that such policy doesn't work.
>...I don't recall any saying that it should continue and using going to war as a tool for pseudo-patriotic posturing.
It isn't hard to see that opposition to the war dwindled drastically after the president had a D after their name in 2009. Why was that? We only left Iraq at the time proposed by Bush (and even then Obama tried to extend it but couldn't get agreement from the Ira government)
>...Democrats don't reject that it is scientifically possible to genetically modify food, or even that any assertion that is is totally safe is false. Rather, there are three main arguments against GMO: 1. The risk posed to humans is still uncertain and poses an outsized risk, 2. Allowing a company to patent food, along with monopoly rights, is a dangerous social policy, especially when farmers are being sued out of business by GMO crop contamination (even when they take great pains not to use GMO seed), 3. Consumers should at least be notified about the presence of GMO in food so they can make an informed choice.
Right - and the above is a rejection of the scientific consensus.
>...Democrats are not saying nuclear fission is fake, but the severity of an accident makes even a very low risk of an accident a very asymmetric harm that should be weighed carefully.
Even including Chernobyl (which was an unsafe design that would have been illegal to built anywhere other than the Soviet Union), the scientific consensus is that nuclear power has been the safest form of power generation.
The positions of the conservatives on global warming is disgusting, but the refusal to accept the science on things like the above is also bad.
>...Further, we don't have a legitimate storage facility for nuclear waste.
It was a democrat who stopped that. Though next generation reactors will be able to use nuclear waste as fuel, so keeping the spent fuel around above ground might turn out to be the best approach. For example:
Well let's see... It was libertarians like Milton Friedman who helped end the draft after the Viet Nam war. The registration for the draft was put back into place by Carter who was a democrat. Influential democrats like Charles Rangel have argued for actually implementing the draft:
Same goes for the rest - as I said in my original message, conservatives support many if not all of the programs I've listed. If you want to argue that democrats don't support "zombie&q...
Every democrat except one voted in favor of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists. To be fair, just because 99.5% of them voted in favor of something doesn't mean they championed it, although Obama did use the AUMF to justify the US's continued presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. As well as expanding military activities in Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Turkey, Libya, Djibouti, etc.
Nothing that Obama or Clinton did even came close to comparing to the wars started by Bush II. In order to find a comparable mishap on the part of Democratic governance and war you have to go back to Truman, and you won't find me defending the Vietnam War, nor Obama's use of drones.
> Every time the ruling party switches, followers of both parties warp into parallel universes with entirely different realities.
There is plenty of information that shows this to be untrue, especially in this case of warfare that you talk about, example:
> 37 percent of Democrats back Trump’s missile strikes. In 2013, 38 percent of Democrats supported Obama’s plan. That is well within the margin of error.
> In 2013, when Barack Obama was president, a Washington Post–ABC News poll found that only 22 percent of Republicans supported the U.S. launching missile strikes against Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons against civilians.
> A new Post-ABC poll finds that 86 percent of Republicans support Donald Trump’s decision to launch strikes on Syria for the same reason. Only 11 percent are opposed.
Truman started Vietnam because of anti-communist fervor? Seriously? That was his fault and not Johnson's (who was actually president at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin)? That's... a pretty strange interpretation of history.
> Truman started Vietnam because of anti-communist fervor? Seriously? That was his fault and not Johnson's (who was actually president at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin)?
The US was fighting in Vietnam, against VC, before the Gulf of Tonkin. The French fight against the VC from 1950 was paid for by the US and supported by US military advisers and equipment, and the US took over the French military role in 1955 (which is why 1955 is the usual cited start date of the Vietnam War, though even that is arguably late); there was a major escalation in direct US troop involvement in the Vietnam War under President Kennedy.
Johnson didn't start the US involvement in the war in Vietnam, unless you think he was running US foreign policy (including directing the military) out of his Senate office, independent of the White House.
I didn't know we had advisors there starting in 1950 (under Eisenhower). I was dating from Tonkin. Still, those were (mostly?) advisors rather than front-line troops. Per Wikipedia, ground combat troops first came after Tonkin, which means under Johnson.
Still, in no case is it reasonable to say that Truman started it.
Which discusses, among other things, the 1964 MACV/MAAG-Vietnam reorg due to the scale of combat deployments straining the advisory-oriented command structure, and a similar issue prompting a naval command structure reorg in 1966.
(Those reports were under Johnson, but thet largely addressed strains produced by the ramp up under Kennedy.)
> Still, in no case is it reasonable to say that Truman started it.
> By 1964 there were 23,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, but this escalated further following the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which a U.S. destroyer was alleged to have clashed with North Vietnamese fast attack craft. In response the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave Lyndon B. Johnson authorization to increase U.S. military presence, deploying ground combat units for the first time and increasing troop levels to 184,000.
"Ground combat units for the first time" was the phrase that, to me, said that the US was now there in a full war condition.
>it's a "peacekeeping mission" or a "humanitarian mission" when a Democrat is in office.
Bull-fucking-shit. The Boston Commons tankies were out every Saturday protesting "illegal war" this and "unconstitutional" that through all of Obama's term.
Even if you look at those number they seem to be improving or relatively stable. Like it or not, the job market is getting better.
EDIT: I don't mean to say that's due or not due to anyone being in or out of office, you can observe those market trends dating back several years at least. Interest rate increases may put a setback on this growth going forward though, definitely something to watch.
I'm well aware of the ability to twist statistics, but the unemployment rate is a decent yard stick for measuring changes in the labor force. And barring some underlying change in methodology for finding the statistic, it shows a trend over time in a positive direction: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000
Even on HN, you're going to use the intentionally politicized value (people still tracked on unemployment, contractors sometimes, etc):
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000
No its not, unless of course you are implying the growing elderly population should be working and the fact that they are not is somehow a problem.
The metric(U3/U6) has also been measured the same way forever. Is trumpler now measuring people as employed once their unemployment runs out at a greater/lesser rate than before? I would guess no. This means comparisons across time are valid, despite the metric having flaws.
The movie Sorry to Bother You has a satirical look at the sharing economy gone awry. In the movie a controversial company called WorryFree exists that promises lifelong security where people willingly become slaves to live in dorms and survive without worry but for free. The movie is excellent.
How is it a look at the sharing economy in particular? It was a satirical take on modern capitalism, sure, but I didn't see how WorryFree was supposed to remind you of a person working a contracting job such as an Uber driver. Quite the opposite in fact, the employees of WorryFree seemed to be signing up for lifelong, permanent and inflexible employment terms. Uber drivers may get a raw deal but surely one would acknowledge at least that they have more flexibility w.r.t. when and where they work than the other typical jobs in a capitalist economy.
It is more about modern sharecropper capitalism I agree but WorryFree is the endgame of the sharing/gig economy, basically people fed up with hustling in the gig economy or sharecropper systems can become slaves and have their worries handled for them (dorm, food etc) almost like a mix of prison mixed with dorms at work like Foxconn.
In the movie Cassius "Cash" Green, the main character, works as a telemarketer and all the telemarketers are looking to unionize but there is little control or solace in any work in their look at modern society.
Throughout the movie, when the work is a complete hustle, WorryFree draws these people in by marketing that they don't have to worry about the hustle anymore, just become a slave to make the hustle easier. In the future of Sorry to Bother You, you can either be a sharecropper/hustler/sales or slave.
Here's a look at all the elements in the movie regarding modern economies and their drive for cheap labor and ultimately pliant slaves [1] Boots Riley, who created the movie and was previously a rapper, made one hell of a movie director/screenwriter debut, it is already a cult classic.
I am more bothered by the fact that these companies establish a permanent record of your behavior across a large swathe of “businesses”. So things cannot be forgotten. There is a legitimate need for that in some cases but in most cases is unnecessary. This is the capitalist equivalent of the coduct based credit imposed by China. Somehow feels too drastic and draconian to me.
The basic premise of the article seems sound, that money corrupted an arrangement that might otherwise be innocent.
Uber / Lyft were upgrades to Craiglist ads for rides / carpools - more convenient for riders, and drivers make a few bucks taking someone somewhere they were going anyway.
AirBnB was a way for travelers to access a more "charming" experience, maybe a little more conveniently than booking a hotel/BnB or scanning CL ads for rooms for rent.
Where they went wrong was professionalization, i.e. people driving full-time or renting for the income.
That's when it became obvious that Uber/Lyft was actually a taxi company and AirBnB a rental broker.
In fairness, if in certain cities (NYC) taxis weren't intentionally managed to scarcity, Uber/Lyft probably would have had more difficulty gaining traction.
Nor would I begrudge a homeowner making a little money boarding guests.
But of course the economic opportunity proved too much for too many to resist, which is why we have the problems mentioned in the article.
The sharing economy works because of the American tendency to own/buy way more capacity that is usually required. People own cars but don't use them all the time or people buy extra rooms for their homes for the two times a year they have visitors. People saw this untapped capacity and exploited it. We should encourage better utilization of resources assuming the proper regulations are in place to do so.
It's weird to spend so many words arguing against a word used as branding. There was never a sharing economy, because it is people paying money for things. What was created was a piecework economy, which was obviously going to be successful if it could figure out a way to skirt the laws that made piecework jobs illegal. Investors could see that, and added so much cash in anticipation of a monopoly (and with the understanding that it would take quick growth and a bunch of expensive legislative and marketing work to take this monopoly) that these companies could afford to sell dollars for $0.90.
I'm going to start a business utilizing children as hospital, hospice, and old age home laborers and call it "the childcare industry" just to see it debunked 10 years and 100 billion dollars later: "Revealed: The Childcare Industry Was Never About Caring For Children."
I'll then press release that it was shameful that slate dot com chose to diminish the experiences and character growth of millions of children, dismiss the importance of our elders and their health, shill for the interests of big healthcare, and denigrate the millions of relationships formed between the oldest generations and the youngest.
It does seem that many of the business models were really just regulatory arbitrage, but were presented as some fundamental innovation.
It also seems that they fooled some investors into believing hyper growth that was fueled with negative unit economics would eventually lead to a monopoly market position, maybe some will...but I doubt it as the barrier of entry is to low an the "network effect" that was believed make the monopoly quasi-permanent doesn't seem to exist for most industries.
Is the article really about the sharing economy, or rather about discrediting Lessig and the people who believe publicly funded research should be public? Seems a little odd the way it relates Uber and AirBnB with Lessig.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadThe average seven year old is capable of understanding the difference between actual sharing (A friend giving you a lift), and 'sharing' (An unmarked taxi.) They could also probably grasp the difference between CouchSurfing[1], and AirBnB.
[1] Couchsurfing was the actual sharing economy, but as it turns out, you can't make billions of dollars from people letting out their couches to strangers, for the cost of company, and a home-cooked meal.
"This is just an unmarked taxi."
"No, we're way different."
You think to yourself how no one could be that blatant, and you notice other people are buying into it, so you start to question you own worldview. Then it reaches a critical mass, where there's enough self-perpetuation to make you throw skepticism to the wind. And after some time, after seeing a few cracks in the brand, you think to yourself, god damn it, should have stuck to my guns.
"This is just an unmarked taxi."
"Except hailing/billing isn't stuck in the past so you don't have to get lucky to find an empty one on the street or call a surly dispatcher and wait 45 minutes. You also get the bill up front so you know how much it will cost before you even say yes. You can always pay by credit card too, you'll never arrive at the destination and then only be informed that the credit card reader is 'broken' and the cabbie can only accept cash. Added bonus: it's about half the price of a regular taxi."
"Cool"
That sounds even worse to me. "Turning lying and scamming people into an engineering discipline".
I concur with that sounding much worse. I like my lizards to be green and scaly, not wearing people-suits.
The thing about it, though, is that ‘technology’ has been around for millions of years, if we’re being honest. Fifty years ago, on top of a network of cutting edge phone communication tech, automotive tech, oil and gas tech, the ‘old guard’ taxi industry was doing its thing.
It’s a fine line between pride and arrogance, and the idea that Silicon Valley has somehow invented even the idea of technology is...well, it’s pretty arrogant. Publishing, advertising, transportation, etc. are not new things.
I guess you have never been to Egypt or any other third world country where this is completely normal and not an app in sight
Look, I'm totally cool with businesses essentially protesting stifling regulation by loudly ignoring them and providing better service. But once you get the regulators' attention you need to be willing to sit down with them and hash out the details of what needs to change.
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1. Without fail, taking Uber costs me more than taking a taxi, same trip, same time of day.
2. The bill up front point is fair
3. As far as paying by credit card, know the rules of your city. In many cities, they must take credit cards or are not allowed to drive. As such, if they tell you at the end of the trip that you must pay cash, just tell them you can't. If they won't let you pay by credit then, just walk away. Even if it's not a city where they have to accept credit, just tell them you don't have cash and stick to it. If their credit machine really wasn't working, they should/would have told you at the beginning of the trip.
4. I never have a problem getting a cab (though, to be fair, I only do it in NYC... they're everywhere)
UberPool and Lyft's equivalent are basically always cheaper though, and I've found they work very well in Manhattan.
And it worked! For as long as it needed to, anyway.
There are ~3,000 counties in the US...and significant outstanding debts/legal liabilities.
The only people tricked is investors who are unaware of the real legal liabilities and whose funds are being used to float the illegal operations and some drivers who now have criminal records from doing a job they were paid to do.
Now they are going to trick the public with a public offering and offload these toxic shares.
You're right, they'll offload them right into a bunch of retirement funds.
The set rates are the real breaker of sharingin my opinion - a tip and rating system would be truer sharing but would certainly exist on a smaller scale. It would be an interesting sociological experiment but it would probably end in disaster.
Well, so much for that! Which I guess just further proves the article's point.
And before you get excited about the safety we get with regulation. Capitalism has proven with billion dollar companies, we don't want regulated taxis.
(And, to be clear, "the ones making money" includes local businesses benefiting from increased tourism, and their employees.)
But restaurants dislike tourists because most tourists tip less than Americans, so a high concentration of these "mini-hotels" is detrimental to restaurants and their staff.
Isn't the collective end goal of the competitive marketplace supposed to be razor thin margins due to competition? I live in NYC and prior to Uber, 1) taxi medallions were valued at high six figures, 2) service was terrible, 3) prices were too high, and 4) actual drivers still made shit money.
I think Uber and Lyft and others have improved all of that, to be honest. Competition is a beautiful thing.
Ridiculous, anti-competitive laws were in place in these systems, I applaud their death.
Sidecar/UberX/Lyft etc have always just been wildcat taxis, except at least a real wildcat taxicab probably has some experience. In my experience, most uberx/lyft drivers have been doing it less than a year, the good ones all leave as soon as they see how bad the pay is, and nobody knows what the fuck they're doing.
It's amazing they haven't killed more people, tbh.
I can disprove that all by myself, since that's exactly how I reacted when I first heard of Uber.
That's because it was falsely framed as "ride sharing" to begin with, when it was obviously a taxi service.
It should also go without saying that millions in VC cash can prettify anything and buy enough positive PR and lobbying to give the service an air of legitimacy.
... Rebrand existing services with unregulated, zero-hours contractors, using their own unregulated assets, with a layer of brokering software.
It's marketing wank, for both consumers and workers.
Plenty of people saw it coming. As much as fellow members of my generation enthusiastically embraced the sharing/gig economy for survival, most of them acknowledged that the companies were in the end going to be worse. They were just less worse than having no income. Those that thought this were the future were just deluding themselves because of how fucking terrible the job market is.
> In 2013, when Barack Obama was president, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that only 22 percent of Republicans supported the U.S. launching missile strikes against Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons against civilians.
> A new Post-ABC poll finds that 86 percent of Republicans support Donald Trump’s decision to launch strikes on Syria for the same reason. Only 11 percent are opposed.
> The Post-ABC poll indicates somewhat greater consistency on the part of Democrats. Some 37 percent of them back Trump’s strike, compared to a statistically indistinguishable 38 percent who backed a strike in 2013.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
- Name a 10 year war democrats have championed... - Name a democrat that questions the legitimacy of employment numbers or the objectivity of the data being provided... - Name an rejection of scientific consensus like Global Warming (and before you say anti-vaxxers, that is not a mainstream democrat policy like Global Warming denial is...again, no false equivalence please)... - Name a democrat zombie policy like "trickle down economics" that keeps being proven wrong and yet they insist will work...
Should I go on?
>...- Name a 10 year war democrats have championed...
I think the OP might have been referring to the seeming disappearance of the anti-war demonstrations once Obama took office. What changed, other than the POTUS? We ended up leaving Iraq at the same timetable that Bush had proposed.
>... Name a democrat that questions the legitimacy of employment numbers or the objectivity of the data being provided...
Well the unemployment numbers don't include the long term unemployed who would still like a job, etc so I would assume everyone should look beyond the simple number reported in the press.
>... - Name an rejection of scientific consensus like Global Warming
GMOs? Nuclear power?
>...- Name a democrat zombie policy like "trickle down economics" that keeps being proven wrong and yet they insist will work...
No economist has ever proposed a policy called "trickle down economics". The pejorative is simply used by people to attack someone else's economic polices. Using a perjorative is simply an attempt to poison the well and prevent discussion. In terms of policies that don't work. but still get support... A couple that come to mind:
- wasting money to require registration for the draft
- war on drugs
- DARE program
- three strikes (voted in CA, a heavy democratic state)
Conservatives also support many/all(?) programs, but that just means both sides are wrong.
"Other than the POTUS" seems to brazenly ignore the significance. For example, it would be absurd to ask, 'When Trump took office, what changed from Obama other than the POTUS'?
When Obama took office, the new POTUS' policies aligned to a significant degree with the anti-war protestors. Obama had opposed the Iraq war from the start and promised to withdraw, which he did (though the withdrawal was also required by the agreement Bush made with Iraq). Obama also wanted out of Afghanistan and, after a policy review, set a timeline for it (a criticized decision that was later changed).
> both sides are wrong
This is true "political correctness" (a term that I think is almost always misused). The odds of both sides begin equivalent seem slim; it's not at all unlikely that of two parties, one would be significantly worse than the other. It's sort of like looking at two software programs and saying 'both have bugs'; sure, but that's meaningless - it's not at all surprising when one is much superior to the other.
But people like to be even-handed, out of some misguided (IMHO) view of fairness or not wanting to offend. But the stakes are too high; you wouldn't say that if you were choosing between airplane autopilot programs. In this case, if you make the worse choice then it can result in catastrophic climate change, nuclear proliferation, war, mass oppression, the undermining of democracy and liberty, and more.
What actually changed? We left Iraq at the timetable Bush proposed and I think Obama wanted to extend it past that but couldn't come to terms with the Iraq government. There was a troop surge in Afghanistan - the thing that was criticized when Bush did it. People have a right to their opinion and the right to protest, but it does appear the anti-war democrats weren't quite as active once the POTUS had a D by the name.
I don't have space to go over the foreign military adventures done by Obama, here is an overview:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/ob...
>...This is true "political correctness"
Not really. The OP asked for politics that didn't work and got consistent support. I listed a few ones that came to mind. I also think these bad polices are also endorsed by conservatives. Rather than attack the idea that people could ever be wrong, why don't you address the policies I brought up and explain why either they are great polices or that democrats don't support them.
I do not believe there's a perfect equivalence. Lately the Republicans have been more enthusiastic about denying reality. But there's certainly a sense in which people view politics like a football game and just mindlessly root for their side.
We won't be rid of Trump and his ilk until we stop caring about parties and start caring about ideas.
IME, The regular anti-war protestors continued the same recurring protests at the same locations during Obama's term that they had been carrying out under Bush (the same ones are, in many cases, still carrying them out under Trump.)
Media focus may have changed, but that's about alignment of the facts with pre-conceived media narratives, not the underlying reality.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/politics/mother-takes-pro...
According to wikipedia, there were a couple of anti-war protests after Obama took office, but nothing compared to when Bush was president:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
But... that's a bipartisan thing, not a Democratic thing: no Republican Administration (which could do this alone, as an executive action) or Republican majority Congress has proposed ending registration since Carter reopened it as an executive action to prepare for potential war in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
In fact, bipartisan legislation creating a committee to consider expanding the uses of the draft was passed in 2016.
> war on drugs
Again, not a Democratic policy.
> DARE program
Not a Democratic policy (and it works quite well to improve it's targets opinions of law enforcement; it doesn't do anything about drug abuse.)
> three strikes (voted in CA, a heavy democratic state)
About half of states and the federal government have three strikes laws, and they are not more supported by Democrats than Republicans.
>Conservatives also support many/all(?) programs, but that just means both sides are wrong.
The fact that conservatives support many or all of these programs doesn't make them good.
The OP had asked to name a democrat zombie policy ... that keeps being proven wrong and yet they insist will work... I don't think it is difficult to do that.
I recall many democrats complaining about not closing Guantanamo, or leaving Iraq faster. I don't recall any saying that it should continue and using going to war as a tool for pseudo-patriotic posturing.
>... Well the unemployment numbers don't include the long term unemployed who would still like a job, etc so I would assume everyone should look beyond the simple number reported in the press.
I am not talking about the subtlety of the different measures of unemployment and whether we should quote the U6 or U3 numbers when we speak about unemployment. I am talking about large parts of the Republican Party calling all unemployment data fake, rigged, designed to help Obama and all of the other demonstrably false descriptions used to support their agenda. If you want me to dig up some news articles I will, but it was basically how republicans said hello for the last two years of Obama's administration.
>... Name an rejection of scientific consensus like Global Warming
Democrats don't reject that it is scientifically possible to genetically modify food, or even that any assertion that is is totally safe is false. Rather, there are three main arguments against GMO: 1. The risk posed to humans is still uncertain and poses an outsized risk, 2. Allowing a company to patent food, along with monopoly rights, is a dangerous social policy, especially when farmers are being sued out of business by GMO crop contamination (even when they take great pains not to use GMO seed), 3. Consumers should at least be notified about the presence of GMO in food so they can make an informed choice.
Democrats are not saying nuclear fission is fake, but the severity of an accident makes even a very low risk of an accident a very asymmetric harm that should be weighed carefully. Further, we don't have a legitimate storage facility for nuclear waste.
I don't see how these two issues represent a "rejection of the science".
>...No economist has ever proposed a policy called "trickle down economics". The pejorative is simply used by people to attack someone else's economic polices. Using a perjorative is simply an attempt to poison the well and prevent discussion. In terms of policies that don't work. but still get support... A couple that come to mind:
- Umm President Bush gave a speech describing his supply side policies as trickle down...that is not me being pejorative, that is, and has been, the common descriptive phrase first suggested by a republican president. It has become pejorative because the policy has never delivered the outcomes it predicted and seems to also be casually linked to a large increase in income inequality. You can question the causal relationship, but when a policy is predicted to have a certain outcome, and seems to have a different, and seemingly negative outcome, it seems expected that it would get a bad popular opinion.
>... - wasting money to require registration for the draft - war on drugs - DARE program - three strikes (voted in CA, a heavy democratic state)
All of these are republican policies, I asked for one example of a zombie policy that democrats keep pushing in the face of overwhelming factual evidence that such policy doesn't work.
It isn't hard to see that opposition to the war dwindled drastically after the president had a D after their name in 2009. Why was that? We only left Iraq at the time proposed by Bush (and even then Obama tried to extend it but couldn't get agreement from the Ira government)
>...Democrats don't reject that it is scientifically possible to genetically modify food, or even that any assertion that is is totally safe is false. Rather, there are three main arguments against GMO: 1. The risk posed to humans is still uncertain and poses an outsized risk, 2. Allowing a company to patent food, along with monopoly rights, is a dangerous social policy, especially when farmers are being sued out of business by GMO crop contamination (even when they take great pains not to use GMO seed), 3. Consumers should at least be notified about the presence of GMO in food so they can make an informed choice.
Right - and the above is a rejection of the scientific consensus.
>...Democrats are not saying nuclear fission is fake, but the severity of an accident makes even a very low risk of an accident a very asymmetric harm that should be weighed carefully.
Even including Chernobyl (which was an unsafe design that would have been illegal to built anywhere other than the Soviet Union), the scientific consensus is that nuclear power has been the safest form of power generation.
The positions of the conservatives on global warming is disgusting, but the refusal to accept the science on things like the above is also bad.
>...Further, we don't have a legitimate storage facility for nuclear waste.
It was a democrat who stopped that. Though next generation reactors will be able to use nuclear waste as fuel, so keeping the spent fuel around above ground might turn out to be the best approach. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
Unfortunately it was a democrat who stopped work on that design.
>...President Bush gave a speech describing his supply side policies as trickle down...
Let me guess, this was at a charity event or the white house corresponds dinner where you are expected to make fun of yourself.
>...that is not me being pejorative, that is, and has been, the common descriptive phrase first suggested by a republican president.
No. The first use of this was by William Jennings Bryan at the 1896 democratic national convention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics
>All of these are republican policies,
Well let's see... It was libertarians like Milton Friedman who helped end the draft after the Viet Nam war. The registration for the draft was put back into place by Carter who was a democrat. Influential democrats like Charles Rangel have argued for actually implementing the draft:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/this-democratic-congressm...
A republican tried to insert language to end the registration but failed as democrats pushed to add women to the registration:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/06...
Same goes for the rest - as I said in my original message, conservatives support many if not all of the programs I've listed. If you want to argue that democrats don't support "zombie&q...
Every democrat except one voted in favor of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists. To be fair, just because 99.5% of them voted in favor of something doesn't mean they championed it, although Obama did use the AUMF to justify the US's continued presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. As well as expanding military activities in Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Turkey, Libya, Djibouti, etc.
> Every time the ruling party switches, followers of both parties warp into parallel universes with entirely different realities.
There is plenty of information that shows this to be untrue, especially in this case of warfare that you talk about, example:
> 37 percent of Democrats back Trump’s missile strikes. In 2013, 38 percent of Democrats supported Obama’s plan. That is well within the margin of error.
> In 2013, when Barack Obama was president, a Washington Post–ABC News poll found that only 22 percent of Republicans supported the U.S. launching missile strikes against Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons against civilians.
> A new Post-ABC poll finds that 86 percent of Republicans support Donald Trump’s decision to launch strikes on Syria for the same reason. Only 11 percent are opposed.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/04/gop-voters-love-same-...
anti-communistic fervor was, and is, a massive boondoggle.
The US was fighting in Vietnam, against VC, before the Gulf of Tonkin. The French fight against the VC from 1950 was paid for by the US and supported by US military advisers and equipment, and the US took over the French military role in 1955 (which is why 1955 is the usual cited start date of the Vietnam War, though even that is arguably late); there was a major escalation in direct US troop involvement in the Vietnam War under President Kennedy.
Johnson didn't start the US involvement in the war in Vietnam, unless you think he was running US foreign policy (including directing the military) out of his Senate office, independent of the White House.
Still, in no case is it reasonable to say that Truman started it.
Initially, but that stopped being true well before Tonkin.
> Per Wikipedia, ground combat troops first came after Tonkin
Not sure which Wikipedia page you got that from but see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Assistance_Command,...
Which discusses, among other things, the 1964 MACV/MAAG-Vietnam reorg due to the scale of combat deployments straining the advisory-oriented command structure, and a similar issue prompting a naval command structure reorg in 1966.
(Those reports were under Johnson, but thet largely addressed strains produced by the ramp up under Kennedy.)
> Still, in no case is it reasonable to say that Truman started it.
Sure, Eisenhower or Kennedy are more reasonable.
> By 1964 there were 23,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, but this escalated further following the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which a U.S. destroyer was alleged to have clashed with North Vietnamese fast attack craft. In response the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave Lyndon B. Johnson authorization to increase U.S. military presence, deploying ground combat units for the first time and increasing troop levels to 184,000.
"Ground combat units for the first time" was the phrase that, to me, said that the US was now there in a full war condition.
Bull-fucking-shit. The Boston Commons tankies were out every Saturday protesting "illegal war" this and "unconstitutional" that through all of Obama's term.
EDIT: I don't mean to say that's due or not due to anyone being in or out of office, you can observe those market trends dating back several years at least. Interest rate increases may put a setback on this growth going forward though, definitely something to watch.
Wage growth is also ticking up: https://www.frbatlanta.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker.aspx?pan...
Which aligns well with the low unemployment rate.
instead of something close to the actual? https://www.cbo.gov/publication/53452
I don't understand how people are still this lazy.
You didn't give the value.
Look around any city and see the homeless. It’s been increasing, and not just in SF.
The metric(U3/U6) has also been measured the same way forever. Is trumpler now measuring people as employed once their unemployment runs out at a greater/lesser rate than before? I would guess no. This means comparisons across time are valid, despite the metric having flaws.
In the movie Cassius "Cash" Green, the main character, works as a telemarketer and all the telemarketers are looking to unionize but there is little control or solace in any work in their look at modern society.
Throughout the movie, when the work is a complete hustle, WorryFree draws these people in by marketing that they don't have to worry about the hustle anymore, just become a slave to make the hustle easier. In the future of Sorry to Bother You, you can either be a sharecropper/hustler/sales or slave.
Here's a look at all the elements in the movie regarding modern economies and their drive for cheap labor and ultimately pliant slaves [1] Boots Riley, who created the movie and was previously a rapper, made one hell of a movie director/screenwriter debut, it is already a cult classic.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffewing/2018/07/13/could-sorr...
Uber / Lyft were upgrades to Craiglist ads for rides / carpools - more convenient for riders, and drivers make a few bucks taking someone somewhere they were going anyway.
AirBnB was a way for travelers to access a more "charming" experience, maybe a little more conveniently than booking a hotel/BnB or scanning CL ads for rooms for rent.
Where they went wrong was professionalization, i.e. people driving full-time or renting for the income.
That's when it became obvious that Uber/Lyft was actually a taxi company and AirBnB a rental broker.
In fairness, if in certain cities (NYC) taxis weren't intentionally managed to scarcity, Uber/Lyft probably would have had more difficulty gaining traction.
Nor would I begrudge a homeowner making a little money boarding guests.
But of course the economic opportunity proved too much for too many to resist, which is why we have the problems mentioned in the article.
I'm going to start a business utilizing children as hospital, hospice, and old age home laborers and call it "the childcare industry" just to see it debunked 10 years and 100 billion dollars later: "Revealed: The Childcare Industry Was Never About Caring For Children."
I'll then press release that it was shameful that slate dot com chose to diminish the experiences and character growth of millions of children, dismiss the importance of our elders and their health, shill for the interests of big healthcare, and denigrate the millions of relationships formed between the oldest generations and the youngest.
It also seems that they fooled some investors into believing hyper growth that was fueled with negative unit economics would eventually lead to a monopoly market position, maybe some will...but I doubt it as the barrier of entry is to low an the "network effect" that was believed make the monopoly quasi-permanent doesn't seem to exist for most industries.
You can fool some of the people ...