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And, the genius of Uber is:
- people enjoy driving, so it doesn't feel like work, so why not get "paid" even if it's barely break-even for the risk and actual expenses for doing something you enjoy?
- people are stupid about what they call "sunk costs" - your car is only a sunk cost if you are never going to replace it, tires wear by the mile, as do timing belts, alternators, water pumps, and all the other things that are going to need service before you send the car to the junk heap. Even the window seals and other things not normally serviced wear faster when exposed to driving as opposed to being parked, particularly if you park in a shelter.
What's missing from the above analysis is also "- people learn from experience" and "- people aren't going to get out of bed, if their cut of the action is too low."
Let's consider that first bullet point. People learn from experience. I doubt, for example, that JoeMerchant learned of the many costs of car ownership from a class or via hearsay. Similarly, how is one to learn the many niggling details of the cost of being their own employer (or an employer of others!), if they never experience it?
It's no secret that Uber has massive turnover, in part due to the heavy competition by drivers who are not fully clued in. So what? That's thousands of drivers who each year will learn what competition and costs mean at low cost to the rest of us (we get a lot of cheap rides out of this, remember?). And as bonus, they'll get a piece of JoeMerchant's hard-earned tax dollars and we get a quality bellyache from a guy who wouldn't have cared in the least otherwise, if Uber weren't somehow peripherally involved.
Let's consider another example which occasionally is seen in universal basic income (UBI) arguments. When people don't have to work, they'll instead pour their time into hobbies which somehow will be better for us than the work would be. We'll get like one or two orders of magnitude more awesome guitar solos. That surely more than compensates for having fewer people who actually know how to do stuff that keeps societies functioning, right?
That's also ignoring that most peoples' hobbies will be watching porn and other push media on the internet.
How does one learn to manage their time, or manage other people, if they never do it? The nuts and bolts of particular industries? How to help people? The huge thing missed is that all this work has created a huge population of people who know what they are doing. Take it away and you take away the competence as well.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11 2019, @02:58PM (24 children)
is a decent point about learning through doing.
Your asinine screeed about regulation and social darwinism aside, it would be great if more employers hired people as investments instead of disposable tools. Of course that requires regulation to keep wealth inequality down so we don't have the constant race to the bottom with wages. Sadly khallow is too shallow to understand -sad face-
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Friday October 11 2019, @03:30PM (9 children)
You need a more competitive employer market. I got ways to do that.
Because the more we discourage employment and treating employees as investments- which is what any regulation would do at this point of overkill, the less wealth inequality there will be? Sure.
Also wealth inequality is one of the crappiest metrics out there. No consideration of future expected income and you get huge inequalities just between the people who try to build their wealth and the people who'd rather load up the credit card instead. Are you going to force people to save and invest money? Because otherwise you're not doing a thing about the majority of wealth inequality.
What race to the bottom? The world doesn't work [soylentnews.org] that way.
IT;DR - even by the very useless measures you choose to measure progress by, we're doing better. Why ignore that?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday October 11 2019, @08:55PM (8 children)
You know, statistics are really nice when you're not the guy being shot
It's like, I know my chances of winning the lottery if I don't play
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Saturday October 12 2019, @03:39PM (7 children)
Two thirds of the world is definitely in that category, having seen a huge increase in their income in recent times. The rest isn't doing badly either. So what was the point of that observation?
Here, a lottery that most people in the world win.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 31 2019, @02:33PM (6 children)
Except, of course, the ones that aren't. But then they're collateral damage, acceptable losses under ideologies like yours.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 31 2019, @02:55PM (5 children)
Come up with a better ideology and then we'll talk. But it's not the idea of making everyone's life worse just because there's someone suffering somewhere.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 31 2019, @03:54PM (4 children)
Sounds like they are indeed acceptable losses to you, then.
As I'm sure you know, it wouldn't be a matter of making everyone's life worse to improve the plight of those currently suffering. It would rather be a matter of making the one percenters' lives almost imperceptibly "worse". In this sense "worse" refers purely to monetary wealth, because someone might judge that those small monetary losses would be more than made up for by improvements in the state of their society.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 31 2019, @04:25PM (2 children)
Sounds like they should be to you as well. Doing something merely because someone is suffering somewhere is an example of the perfect solution [wikipedia.org] fallacy. What I think is particularly remarkable is the absence of a better solution. UBI doesn't solve the problems that we still need a huge amount of human labor for.
Those "losses" will happen whether or not you accept them.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday November 01 2019, @02:22PM (1 child)
Here the callousness of your philosophy is laid bare for all to see, khallow. You are just fine with acceptable losses where such losses are of those who cannot afford food and shelter and may therefore die prematurely without them. You are less fine when losses are from the total wealth of an affluent individual who, rather than starving, might have to maintain one less yacht, or, in the case of the richest individuals, merely have marginally diminished political influence and slightly lesser bragging rights because they still have more money than they'd ever be able to spend directly on personal consumption in their own lifetime.
According to Wikipedia: [wikipedia.org]
So, if I support policies that aim to try to eradicate suffering, but you come along and tell me those policies should be abandoned because it's impractical to eradicate all suffering, then according to the above you yourself are exhibiting the second form of the fallacy!
I would only be exhibiting the first part of the fallacy if I were to claim that it were possible to enact a policy to bring every individual in a population out of poverty. I accept that that's not possible but that doesn't mean a safety net cannot be offered to all. There may be edge cases that are unable or simply unwilling to take advantage of such a safety net, but that's absolutely no justification for giving up on it.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 02 2019, @12:54AM
So what? I'm interested in doing good for the most people not in uncallow philosophy that kills people.
So what? Come up with a better approach not a morally bankrupt criticism that means nothing.
"IF" and "aim". Good intentions, even when you do have them rather than merely pretend you do, do not automatically translate into good outcomes. And given that you deliberately ignore statistics [soylentnews.org] that show the status quo works amazingly well at bettering everyone's life on Earth, who should credit you with morality at all? Not I.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @02:02AM
Imperceptibly only from the viewpoint of the working class. From the viewpoint of the bourgeoisie, it would mean losing their privilege to exploit labor, control the lives of other people, to be the alphas of the planet of the apes. At least in Brave New World, they provided class-specific brainwashing and ethanol fuel. Not even soma would help the big bourgeois cope with the blow to their ego.
And of course, the petite bourgeois carry their crosses, chased by the demon called proletarianization.
tl;dr As much as Fuckerberg deserves the negative attention, the Chads at Boeing avoid even an inquiry into holding them criminally responsible for the 737 crashes, and where is #metoo? That has got to be a rush.
(Score: 1, Touché) by khallow on Friday October 11 2019, @03:36PM (13 children)
I'd say more like social Lamarckism [wikipedia.org]. The more you do something, the more fit you become at doing it? That's learning by experience in a nutshell.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11 2019, @03:59PM (5 children)
"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them. They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 11 2019, @04:06PM (4 children)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12 2019, @03:55AM (3 children)
This is some pretty weak sauce TBH.
(Score: 1, Troll) by aristarchus on Saturday October 12 2019, @10:14AM (1 child)
Spencerism, not the loser Richard Spencer of the neo-Nazi white-supremacist group, Richard B. Spencer [wikipedia.org], but the more famous (like Lamark, I am amazed that khallow knew about Lamark!) Herbert Spencer [wikipedia.org] who ended up a ethnic purifier. Failed theories of the past, like Phrenology [wikipedia.org] and the near and close examination of the king's bowels [bettergutbetterhealth.com], all of which unconciously move us to the position of the Chinese Communist Party, which, by the way, I side with totally, even against guys with basketball shoes or yuppies with cells Phones betrayed an abandoned by American corporations. Marsh Arabs? Anyone? Siberian White forces? Operation Mustang? If you trust America, you have already lost.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12 2019, @09:46PM
Relevant CCP links for the peanut gallery:
70 years since the Chinese revolution [worldsocialist.net]
Intro [wsws.org] - SWP resolution: The Third Chinese Revolution and its Aftermath [wsws.org]
Selected Works of Mao Zedong [marxists.org] - all works [marxists.org]
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Saturday October 12 2019, @03:42PM
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Saturday October 12 2019, @02:06PM (6 children)
Both social Darwinism and social Lamarckism share as their common focus outcomes for societies or organisms. They ignore the consequences to individuals on the fringes. Indeed, your Wiki link says nothing about learning at the individual level. It also says that Lamarckism in biology has largely been abandoned or discredited.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 12 2019, @03:47PM (4 children)
So you claim. But what is the point of paying such attention to individuals on the fringes when in the process you ignore everyone else? For example, there's not much point to taking one individual away from the fringe, if you put two back.
Yes, and what does that have to do with our discussion? I wasn't planning to advocate for biological Lamarckism. Were you?
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Saturday October 12 2019, @10:21PM (2 children)
What do you mean by “paying such attention to people on the fringes”? I’m just saying they shouldn’t be ignored. Why do you think that would cause us to “ignore everyone else”?
As to Lamarckism, you were the one that brought it up. Why do you think something that failed in its original biological context would be applicable to societies?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday October 13 2019, @01:31AM
Look this guy's post history up. There are a few people on this site I'm pretty sure are primary psychopaths, and this guy's probably one of them. Just...watch what he does when someone demands evidence or hits him particularly hard in the bullshit-gland.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 13 2019, @04:54AM
I really should say "Obsessing over people on the fringes".
What is the point of that observation? First, you conflated two different scopes: societies and organisms. A better analogy would be societies and species or ecosystems. Or individuals and organisms. It's a subtle distinction in that Lamarckism is the idea that individuals adapt over time by their own efforts (or rather over generations, but locally) - a single organism can change its future generations by stretching its neck for food (as the case of the giraffe). While Darwinism only works over populations because there's selection in aggregate (the giraffes with the longer necks survived to reproduce more often than the ones with shorter necks leading to an aggregate shift in the population).
Second, "individuals on the fringes" is just another group like the norms. My take here is that Social Darwinism doesn't ignore this group, it's simply the people who either die out via the SD idea of lack of fitness, and/or have unusually fit social/cultural/memetic "mutations" that will eventually enter the main population and make the more general groups fitter. My impression is that some of the earlier SD advocates thought that fringe populations would never have beneficial mutations, and would just go extinct due to their inferior nature. So sure, that's ignoring the group, but I doubt it's in the way you meant.
SL doesn't have much to say about this group in comparison since the little it does say about groups is what they try. The effort is what makes that part of the population more fit to do what the effort attempts to do. "Individuals on the fringes" might have a more exotic and broader range of things that are tried, but that's it. Maybe it would imply that the fringe gets even "fringier" over time?
But my take is that a lot of the would-be solutions to the existence of fringe populations operate by taking wealth away from people who weren't part of the fringe and make things overall a bit worse. Maybe the policy creates a permanent underclass with little work experience or competence, worsening the state of the fringe it was supposed to help. Maybe it merely destroys jobs and makes everyone a little poorer. That has little to do with biologically inspired economics theory.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 15 2019, @06:39AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12 2019, @07:09PM
Much like khallow itself.