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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: 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.