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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) by aristarchus on Sunday October 13 2019, @06:40AM (2 children)
Obvious Rebuttal, #2674: Khallow, if you are so work experienced, why aren't you learned? I mean, if it did not work in your own case, do you expect us to accept it as a general principle?
(Riff on "If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?" And Donald says, "I got it from my Daddy!")
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 13 2019, @02:32PM (1 child)
I didn't claim work was somehow a replacement for education. But it supplements education in very useful ways.
To give a K-12 example, a common insistence on why even crappy public education is supposed to be better than home schooling is the matter of socialization. That is, if you're home schooled, you're only interacting with a small group of people, meanwhile the typical structure of a high school does have students exposed to a much larger group, which is generally considered better. However, even then the student is interacting with a bunch of people which outside of teachers, is within a few year span, usually three to four years, depending on the school. That is, you're socializing with your age cohort and a few token adults. My take is that leads to the sort of high school drama (social cliques, bullying, cocoon thinking, gang formation, etc) that we all know and love.
Meanwhile in the average workplace, they're interacting with adults on a regular basis. Including as equals! And if they work in a customer facing position, they'll be socializing with the mass of humanity. At my job, we have employees who range between 18 years to somewhere around 80 years working together. In other words, you're learning how to interact with real people in real situations.
I think this particular bit has lead to some serious social problems. When you have people who haven't interacted with anyone outside their age cohort for oh, 25 years, what happens when they finally do way past the time of peaking learning ability? I think that's a part of the problems that young adults are facing today.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 15 2019, @06:43AM
So, still a "trainee" and they haven't dared to let you out of the back office, yet? Someone recently compared the TMB to the Minotaur, on much the same grounds. Looks like we need a Theseus! A real hero, not some hackneyed Ayn Randian sex-fantasy Republican!