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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.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday October 12 2019, @05:40AM (2 children)
I've been saying for ages now, most recently last night, that your biggest problem is you're such a fucking narcissist you couldn't shut your worthless piehole if your life depended on it. You damage yourself more than anything anyone else here could say about you would just by running your idiot foodsucker.
Did you think this journal was going to help you somehow? Did you think you were going to get some crowd of admiring hangers-on posting adoring comments? Did you even think anyone but another half-dozen or so members who, like you, are almost certainly psychopaths, was going to agree with you? What the fuck were you even getting at with this post?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12 2019, @07:20AM
It is the typical nugget of truth twisted into a screaming ghost of Agrajag wailing about the unfairness of the universe as it violates the satisfyingly simple and obvious logic of accomplishment.
These types will only learn by being shoved to the bottom of the pile where they get to see their hard work mean absolutely nothing to someone they previously thought beneath them. Or old age takes them and they finally get some perspective and die hollow shells.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 12 2019, @03:53PM
So what? When you say something useful or interesting, it's worth listening to. When you don't, then we get posts like this one.
It's certainly helping me socialize. I checked that box off. Plus, I like throwing ideas or stories out there and seeing what comes back. It's like a box of chocolates.
Like your posts, for example?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Bot on Saturday October 12 2019, @01:46PM (3 children)
You, like most people and all propagandists, present the issue in light of some unchallenged assumptions. Like that regulation is somehow aimed at the improvement of somebody's economic state, be it the consumers' workers' regulators' ultrarich's whatever.
Uber took investors money, so it's the banks orchestrating the drill. What do banks thrive on? People's debt. So, underpaid workers on one side, taxi drivers with their license getting worthless by the day on the other is a good outcome. Regulation will come when the traditional taxi service has been damaged enough that they won't get many benefits from the operation.
Remember that WWIII is being fought with wombs and money, that the system is already one, that the object of world wars has always been to reshape society.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12 2019, @09:18PM (2 children)
Womb warfare. Good grief. Nothing ever changes on the planet of the apes.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday October 14 2019, @02:38PM (1 child)
"Tragic though it is for the victims of this kind of unconventional coercion, Qaddafi’s threatened use of demographic bombs is neither new nor unique. As I demonstrated in a study published last year, there were at least 56 attempts to employ the direct or indirect threat of mass migrations as a non-military instrument of influence between 1951 and 2006.
In about 73% of cases where it was attempted, would-be coercers got at least some of what they sought; in about 57% of cases, they achieved most, if not all, of their objectives. The majority of these coercive attempts were initiated by authoritarian dictators such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro, East Germany’s Erich Honecker, the former Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Uganda’s Idi Amin. However, it is worth noting that the threat and actual manipulation of mass migrations has also been employed by democratic leaders like West Germany’s Konrad Adenauer and Dwight Eisenhower of the United States."
https://fabiusmaximus.com/2015/11/12/migrations-as-weapons-90745/ [fabiusmaximus.com]
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @02:42AM
I'm not even sure where to start. This is certainly human analysis at its finest, straight from the lizard brain.
Your father smelled of blown caps, and your mother was a Markov chain generator!
(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!
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday October 30 2019, @11:33PM (7 children)
You in turn are utterly missing the fact that the circumstances that cry out for a measure like UBI are ones in which a huge population are simply not required to be part of the workforce, with it still being able to meet the demand for goods, services and a functioning society. This is mainly due to increasing levels of automation and efficiency, globalization, population expansion and widespread poverty (which reduces consumer spending and demand).
When past levels of employment simply are no longer needed, then why does it matter whether the unemployed possess work-specific skills that they will likely never use? I submit it only matters to you because you like the fact that it has more qualified applicants chasing the same number of jobs, which drives down wages and working conditions, theoretically increasing profit margins. Those margins will take a hit though when everyone's so poor that there's no demand left for the products!
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 31 2019, @01:54AM (5 children)
When will those circumstances occur, much less cry out for UBI? I'll note it's not happening today.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 31 2019, @02:47PM (4 children)
To what degree it is or isn't already happening is somewhat a matter of opinion and priorities. From the perspective of an employer, there'll always be a skills shortage, because the larger the pool of qualified candidates, the more the employer can dictate wages and working conditions. You side with that perspective, so for you, it'll never be the right time for a policy like UBI. In reality though, millions can be out of work and civilization doesn't stop functioning. Roles still get filled. The west is rich enough that there's a lot of headroom to increase workers' wages. If a company is really struggling to find an employee, why not offer more money?
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 31 2019, @02:59PM (3 children)
My opinion here is that making most of humanity worthless to employ is not a priority.
Unless, of course, that is not my perspective.
For what reason?
If it costs more to find and employ that employee than the value you get out of the employee, then it's not going to happen. Struggling is better in that situation.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 31 2019, @03:42PM (2 children)
When their work isn't needed, why should they waste time learning how to work? When it is needed, they can be trained.
Tell me more.
It should be obvious, unless you don't you like money?
Not something that is even close to happening often in western capitalism. Hence my reference to the headroom to increase workers' wages.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 31 2019, @04:03PM
"When". You're begging the question. Meanwhile, as I noted, reality isn't fitting the narrative.
First, I already told you enough to steer you away from that straw man. But let's consider your post anyway:
This is merely a summary of someone's interests in a narrow area. One could similarly summarize the employee's perspective of the same situation:
It's unhelpful because that doesn't in any way describe the actual dynamics of a market where multiple interests conflict and are resolved to mutual agreement. Noth sides have to compromise in order for employment to happen.
Employer cooties aren't magic. Just because they want more doesn't mean that they get more. After all, if that were true, then we wouldn't have seen the above two thirds of the world getting 30% increase in income over a two decade period!
So does the employer. You spoke of other perspectives and then just chose one.
Opportunity costs of things like minimum wage are often invisible to those who don't look for them. I think a great example of this is the depopulation of Puerto Rico. There's millions of people missing because they moved out.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 01 2019, @01:14PM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 31 2019, @01:07PM
For the past 50 years, human population has been expanding at a linear rate. I think we'll find in the next decade that human population starts expanded at a sublinear rate. That's the first step to negative population growth, which I think is quite achievable by the end of the century. Meanwhile the global economy continues to expand at a strong exponential rate.
Global poverty has gone down quite a bit in the last 50 years. For example, in my journal [soylentnews.org], I cite two studies. One shows from the 1988-2008 period (the latest covered by the study) two thirds of humanity sorted by income were at least 30% higher income in 2008 than in 1988. The second study showed that for a particular income level of $1.90 per day, adjusted for both cost of living and inflation, the percent of humanity who earned that much started going down in 1820. In absolute number, it started going down in 1970 and as of the study's time (late 2000s decade), had dropped to about 10% of the world's population. "Widespread poverty" is becoming a lot less widespread.
The TL;DR take is that humanity isn't following the scenario. I often get, by this time in an argument, the assertion that it's a future thing. Well, when?