I agree with you there's a lot of anti SF content floating around these days. Just wanted to point out that in this article the author does go on to say he loves SF and thinks any uptick in crime will inevitably be countered. In that respect I felt it was a little different from the rhetoric you mentioned.
Content creator posts content on their site that they own and pay to operate. Mega-3rd-party shares links of this content, sometimes posting blurbs from this content, driving traffic to Mega-3rd-party site and (to a much lesser extent) boosting traffic to content creator's site. However, Mega-3rd-party site also derives revenue from this by extracting information from user behavior and user interests, enabling them to improve ad-sales.
Am I misunderstanding something? Why is everyone here so pro mega-3rd-party?
Another question is this similar to remixing in the music industry? Feels like royalties in a twisted kind of way.
Me bringing Tacos to a party may bring people to the party and I may parlay the social experience into a profitable new job but I'm not going to pay a portion of my income to taco bell.
Taco bell's defined benefit in the situation is selling 100 tacos.
The content creator's benefit is 100 clicks.
People are pro facebook because allowing someone to force others to pay to link to you presupposes controlling interpersonal communications for the purpose of monetization.
It would be such an ill turn that removing copyright entirely would be preferable.
It's like if someone was planning on murdering Zuckerberg they would suddenly be the bad guy even if you hate him.
I actually found the second link quite informative. I'm quite willing to admit that I was ignorant to the fact that different types of glass are not recyclable (or at least not easily so).
It doesn't help when comments like this are flagged. People need to get over their insecurities.
Hey @moultano in response to your argument about walls and Nets not being in a minima, its my understanding nets always live on high dimensional saddle points and that's commonly referred to in literature. Even when you're optimizing you're just moving towards ever lower cost saddles that are closer to the optimum but almost never a local optimum (for the reasons spelled out in your post).
Thank you. Several people have pointed that out, and I'm probably not reading the right papers. Is it common when people introduce a new flavor of adaptive SGD to address how it handles saddles specifically? It is probably just a a matter of what manages to bubble up to me rather than what work is actually getting done, but I felt like the non-convergence of ADAM got talked about a lot, but haven't seen people talking as much about how optimizers behave differently on the landscapes we actually observe.
Saddles are a way of conceptualizing high dimensional optimization problems. If you have a 3 dimensional surface you can imagine a saddle as an isocurve that follows a minima in at least one dimension.
Another way to conceptualize these is to think of being at the minima of a parabola in 2 dimensions, but then seeing you're not in a minima in a 3rd dimension. Any time you're in a minima in at least 1 dimension, you're on a saddle.
You can extend this concept to a neural net which lives in millions of dimensions, undergoing SGD. When beginning an optimization run SGD moves in some direction to minimize the a bundled cost, inevitably stumbling into minima in (usually) many dimensions. Subsequent iterations will shift some dimensions out of minima and other dimensions into minima, the net is always living on a saddle during this process.
There are many papers that discuss the process in these terms and others that implicitly use it. I wouldn't say its a "hot area of research" but more of a tool for thinking about these processes and sometimes gaining some insight in to why things get stuck during training.
This paper makes the points that it's the saddles and not local minima that are the problem:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2572
It was the basis for adding 'momentum' to optimizers - so that you could skate across the saddles.
I am so against prop22 it pains me so here I am ranting on the internet.
What's going on is a negotiation between the state and these companies that are able to take advantage of a gap in how insurance and other benefits work. Instead of actively negotiating with the state, Uber/Lyft/Doordash and many others have simply asked to maintain the status quo, screw the drivers, just business as usual.
Drivers do not get benefits. They deserve benefits. Lets fix that.
Instead Uber/Lyft and others have chosen absolutely insane negotiating tactics. Literally their only solution is to
1. exempt all drivers from getting basic benefits like health insurance
It seems to me like this would have been the perfect opportunity to become the first state to decouple benefits from employment. Recognize that gig jobs are going to become more of a thing in various ways, and set up state sponsored benefit plans for gig workers. Start a mini UBI that covers 4 weeks PTO at the median California wage, open up medicaid eligibility, etc. If the problem is these people don't have benefits, give them the benefits. Trying to force Uber et al to book these people as employees is just propagating the issue in the first place.
>Recognize that gig jobs are going to become more of a thing in various ways
Is that a law of nature or something? An interesting way seeing ideology at work is when people start framing policy choice as the natural state of things.
To what degree gig work permeates the economy is entirely in the hands of the lawmakers of California, and if they care about the long term accumulation of human capital they better nip it in the bud right now.
I completely and entirely disagree with the idea that taxpayers are supposed to be on the hook for ever increasing benefits. Promote the creation of firms that are able to take stakeholder interests into account and invest into stable long-term employment rather than trying to make Snowcrash a reality.
It's interesting that people frame social safety issues as "taxpayers money sharking". The reality is that privatized healthcare in the US means middle class americans typically pay quite a bit more than socialized healthcare countries (see medical debt collection industry).
It's even more mind boggling because the ones that stand to benefit the most from socialized infrastructure are older people (who typically pay the most for healthcare), yet they seem to be the most opposed group. When you put companies in charge of basic country infrastructure, you ought to expect that they're going to optimize for their own profits, over even stakeholder interests (see also telecom sector, energy sector, etc).
There's this weird pervasive idea that not paying a company out of pocket means you are funding hobo lifestyle rather than funding a systems that passes savings back to you and fuels a healthier and more diversified economy. The reality is that all that extra money spent on private healthcare ends up either being spent in clerical bureaucracy like the US healthcare insurance payments dance, or profit margins for a company.
With a private model, by definition, there's no socialized safety net for the less privileged. But then you get rich people like Ben Shapiro complaining that there are druggies around his mansion in LA. As a Canadian, I find that hard to relate to.
I'm also not American and not old and I don't know if it sounded that way but I didn't come at this from a "hobos leeching money" standpoint. My point is that social safety doesn't just happen at the government level, and a plurality of entities, including private ones, can be responsible for it.
In my country employees at sizeable firms have guaranteed representation on the board of their firm. (30%). Stakeholdership can be enshrined in law. Small and middle-sized business doesn't just optimise for profit but employs people for life. (the unemployment during covid did not go past 6-7%).
Is that less 'efficient' in a direct sense? Yes, but it's also autonomous and decentralised and robust and gives people real stake in their workplace and control over their life. The perversity of gig work is how it alienates and atomises workers.
You're essentially building a super fragile system in which benevolent government taxes single minded competitive companies to send checks to fluid workers who get ordered around by an algorithm. That system has so many single points of failure it's not even funny. the US, ironically enough, already suffers from a version of this. What happens when the army of Uber drivers and table cleaners doesn't get their 2 trillion relief fund because one guy in charge of the entire thing throws a tantrum?
That's a great point. I was mostly speaking about a common line of rhethoric specific to the US situation. There are certainly many interesting models outside of north america that ought to come to light more.
The employment security thing is something I sometimes see being argued as a weakness in the sense that it reinforces incumbents as opposed to promoting entrepreneurship (and indeed, the US being the polar opposite does show anedoctal evidence of strong entrepreneurship).
Even in the US, there are relatively common ways that companies provide stakeholdership (equity programs, for example). But I'm not convinced that this type of stakeholdership is necessarily aligned with the interests of the population at large. Unions, for example, are notorious for disruptive strikes.
IMHO, the gig economy falls into a weird area: drivers are technically independent and ought to be free to set their own prices, much like say freelance programmers can be sole proprietorships who are on the hook for their own healthcare expenses, but the ridesharing industry is extremely price sensitive, to the point drivers could easily put themselves out of work by increasing prices.
There are many lines of thought about how that dynamic ought to play out, ranging from "side gigs are just hustling between real jobs", to sacrificing some drivers in favor of allowing a subset to earn a higher minimum income, to the socialist "it's only fair if everyone gets the same treatment, even if it's not ideal for everyone", to the "this industry is important enough that government should subsidize no matter what" sort of thing you see in agriculture and many public transit systems. I'm not sure there's a right answer there.
> one guy in charge of the entire thing throws a tantrum
I think the model that makes the most sense here is the one in the name of the social safety net in Canada: employment insurance. Insurance in the traditional sense of the word: a collective pool of money from a diversified population which can be deployed systematically to bail out some subset of said population in rare emergencies. Naturally, in real life, that's not exactly how it works, especially in such large scale prolonged emergencies, but still, it's a model I like.
>> Recognize that gig jobs are going to become more of a thing in various ways
> Is that a law of nature or something? An interesting way seeing ideology at work is when people start framing policy choice as the natural state of things.
It isn't, but it's a clever propaganda trick to make people think it is. How much opposition will you get if you convince people that to oppose you would be like arguing against having the tide coming in tomorrow?
How work is organized is a political decision for a society, and some people want that decision to be gigs for larger segment of workers. It's pretty easy to see who, when you think about who's taking more risk in such arrangements.
There is a huge demand for gig work and not a great demand for gig workers, exploring more ways to create demand for gig workers is a good thing. Lots of people don't want a stable job and I don't see why we should force them to get one just to feed themselves.
yeah, don't you just know tons of people who love to have no job security, don't know how much they'll make on any given day or whether they'll be unemployed in a month?
Of course people love stable jobs, some people however are dependent on gig work because of institutional failure on several fronts within California in particular. The solution to this is, as Russ Ackoff put it, not to do the wrong thing right, which will only will have you end up in a situation that is even wronger, and not to solve problems, but to dissolve them by changing the environment in a way such that the problem does not exist any more.
In pratictal terms this means for California, reform zoning laws and actually build housing, build mass transit, create good jobs. Don't build the UBI white collar welfare dystopia that the 10% of the state love who happen to own Uber stock.
Unemployment is a nonsense term for gig work. The fact that you view people as "employed" or "unemployed" speaks so much how damaged you are. I don't want to be "employed", I want to be a person who can work when I want instead of being forced to be a stable worker who predictably clocks in half of my time every week. Gig work moves us in this direction and is therefore a good thing. Americans instead want to force even more people to go full time and get tied down to a job, isn't that the horrible dystopia we all want to avoid?
> dependent on gig work because of institutional failure on several fronts within California in particular.
Those aren't most drivers though, and hurting most drivers just so that you can take the last lifeline of these poor drivers you speak of away since it doesn't meet some arbitrary standards you think these people should have makes you a horrible person imo. Also, Prop 22 actually ensures gig workers gets health benefits and minimum wage, so I am not sure why you are against it except you wanting to force people to tie themselves to a company via employment contract.
> I want to be a person who can work when I want instead of being forced to be a stable worker who predictably clocks in half of my time every week.
My job mostly requires me to be there for meetings and that my hours match up at the end of the year. As long as I can get my work done nobody really cares (except for laws against overwork).
> except you wanting to force people to tie themselves to a company via employment contract.
What kind of employment contract comes with a life time slavery clause?
I think " not wanting stable work" was a poor choice of words, and the previous commenter meant more along the line of "people want more flexible work". There is a great deal of people who are happy working jobs that allow them to pick their hours, days worked, or even just stop working for weeks at a time with no notice.
Having healthcare tied to full-time employment is almost entirely incompatible with this type of employment, as it is priced at half-time / full-time employment, not super flexible gig jobs.
> yeah, don't you just know tons of people who love to have no job security, don't know how much they'll make on any given day or whether they'll be unemployed in a month?
parent probably meant something like "consistent and mandatory" more than "uncertain.
I don't even see why the state should fund anything here. Healthcare is available for contract workers already (obamacare/covered CA). PTO is irrelevant for contract work, and not just rideshare/gig contracts (the whole point is that you can accept work when it is convenient for you).
The only potential area of "benefits" I can see that might need some rethinking for the gig workforce is sick leave (I don't want rideshare drivers continuing to work while sick just so that they can make rent, so it would be nice if they could accumulate some amount of sick leave proportionate to the number of hours they drive).
This is easily handled by having initiation periods. For example a Canadian cannot just return to Canada, after not paying taxes for years, and get immediate free healthcare.
No state is able to afford healthcare (including mental) and/or UBI because benefit recipients would end up flooding into the state, and payers would probably end up leaving if the costs got too high, especially if they had an alternative such as other states not offering those benefits.
It isn’t normal for a company to negotiate with the government to figure out how much it pays its employees! If you want rules like minimum wage or mandatory health insurance for all, by all means make those rules and apply them to everyone. But there are so many exceptions to AB5, it’s clear that it isn’t a rule designed to apply fairly to the whole economy, it’s only designed to hit a particular list of companies that one political faction doesn’t like.
People should be able to contract with each other flexibly, without swallowing big cookie-cutter compensation/benefit templates dictated by the state, herding people into 20th-century interest-groups.
If the legislature of the State of California wants some of its citizens to get certain "benefits", it can and should provide them directly, not hold other voluntary activity hostage unless it subsidizes their list-of-goodies.
Uber/Lyft tried other accommodations with their haters, & arguably conformed with the laws as they existed. Then, a clumsy bit of legislation (AB5) from a legislator with an implacably anti-Uber/Lyft agenda outlawed what had been legal, for both Uber/Lyft & a bunch of other freelancer-centric industries, destroying lots of work for Californians.
Those on the warpath against Uber/Lyft have since added exemptions for other industries that they like. The exemptions now include:
* (in AB5) Doctors, dentists, insurance agents, lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, and hairstylists
* (since) Fine artists, Freelance writers, Still photographers, Photojournalists, Freelance editors, Newspaper cartoonists, Translators, Copy Editors, Producers, Cartographers, Musicians with single-engagement live performances, Musicians involved in sound recordings or musical compositions, Insurance inspectors, Real estate appraisers, Manufactured housing salespersons, Youth sports coaches, Landscape architects, Professional foresters
I think drivers deserve the same freedom to flexibly contract as those other dozens of professions. I wish Prop 22 were simpler, but it's better than AB5, so I'm an enthusiastic "Yes".
Drivers providing services via Uber can do all three now in California. Drivers can choose a rate multiplier to advertise their services at, decline as many trips as they want, and can directly connect with riders for scheduled rides.
But all the exceptions were carved out because the people who would be affected directly by the law hate it so much. Doesn't it seem like a law that draws this much antipathy from the people it's meant to help should be tabled and rethought?
It is really disgusting how Silicon Valley has embraced the tactic of holding other people's livelihoods hostage while they try to make a few percent more profit.
Epic is doing the same thing with the Unreal Engine code. They deliberately violated Apple TOS knowing it would get the account banned, and then they try to leverage all those other developers who are going to lose iOS support against the big bad Apple who is taking away your livelihood, all so they can establish their own store and make a higher percentage of the revenue from the sales other people's work (to be clear: they already make money from the sales of games based on Unreal, they just want to make more).
It's not just Uber, it's part of a broader trend tech companies adopting this tactic. It's seriously disgusting, this is the lowest thing to come out of the Silicon Valley techbros in a long time.
Epics concerns are of an utterly and completely different dimension - and to make the statement 'making money off of other's people's work' while the nature of the contention is Apple's 30% fee is rich.
The issue with Uber v. California is really an issue of materially new kinds of workforces requiring new and effective kinds of legislation.
We just need some responsible leaders to think a little bit, maybe the feds, other states, other countries, and make some simple legislation. There doesn't need to be a referendum, nor does the gov. need to 'negotiate' with anyone per se. Just find something that works for the new world and do it. Subject to change obviously.
While I generally agree, I don't think Epic is an accurate comparison.
They obviously knew that Fortnight would get banned from the Appstore, and it was a business decision for them to make.
However, it would have been reasonable for them to assume that they would maintain their ability to still develop UnrealEngine, so they can publish source code for other developers to publish games from their own accounts. That overreach was Apple's doing.
It appears that the courts agreed as well, requiring Apple to allow Epic to continue UE4 development, while maintaining the Fortnight ban.
That seems like an after-the-fact justification, I don't think they knew for sure that courts would force apple to allow downstream development. I think that may be courts saving people's bacon from an upstream that was willing to let them burn if that's what made the upstream profit, until the court case is decided.
Not referring to Uber specifically, or a specific dollar figure, just the general tactic of "if you don't give in to our demands then we'll shut down and really screw all the people who rely on us!". Which is what Uber and Epic are doing.
They didn't go under when they had to start doing background checks in Austin. They don't go under when they have to pay benefits in Germany. This is a stunt to make another couple percent profit.
At the end of the day that's what this boils down to - they will make a little more money if they succeed, they will make a little less money if they don't, nobody is going under. They're using people's livelihoods as leverage so that they can make a couple percent more profit.
That's funny how you say here that Uber and Epic are equal while in your mind Apple totally deserve it's 30% cut.
Say what you want about Epic, but they totally forced Valve to publicly commit to decrease it's cut for every big publisher out there without directly profi ting from it.
But yeab ofc it's poor Apple being forced to screw developers a bit less. Unacceptable!
It's what happens when you become powerful. The world is mostly just a few powerful actors playing games with each other, using the not-so-powerful as pawns. The powerless occasionally get angry about that, but it's not like they can do anything about it, because that's what it means to be powerless. Understand that it's not personal, though - big companies and governments are not specifically targeting you when they do something that harms you, they just don't know (or care) that you exist. You're just collateral damage in the games between the big players.
Embrace that and you actually have a chance of real freedom. Being invisible is both a boon and a detriment; you occasionally get stomped on for no apparent reason, but it also means that the big players are unlikely to know (or care about) the moves that you do make.
And they include language in the bill that it can't be overturned except by a 7/8ths majority which would make it functionally immune to being overturned, ever.
Is that even possible?! I’m not aware of the ÇA constitution but bills in my state descend from the constitution they can’t exceed it. To do that would require a referendum to change the constitution. Which they are trying to do now by making a referendum to make voters vote 2x to pass (ie make laws take a long time and very expensive to vote in).
California ballot propositions have the possibility of amending the state constitution (see Prop 13 [1] as one of the historic examples), and once you're allowing that, anything is possible.
These initiatives amend the state constitution, so they can set any requirements they want. Prop 13 famously added a requirement for 2/3 vote to change it, and this was sustained by the US Supreme Court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
> exempt all drivers from getting basic benefits like health insurance
I've yet to hear a solid argument for why something as personal & private as health insurance should be decided by my employer. Expanding this to gig workers (who typically work multiple jobs) seems like madness to me.
I would be far more interested in seeing California lead the country in designing a better model than attempting to shoe horn contract work into an outdated system.
Well, the elephant in the room is the status of health insurance as a non-taxable benefit. If you removed that rule or made all healthcare tax-deductible, you'd de-couple health insurance and employment... But insurers like this system because they get the kinds of clients they like, and the government doesn't want to expand the tax exemption because it would cost them revenue.
No, large employers like the tax benefits of employer provided health insurance because it gives them an edge over small employers and makes it harder for employees to hop around jobs. Employees of large companies that mainly employ younger, healthier people with less risky white collar jobs might also like employer sponsored healthcare, because then their insurance pool excludes people with chronic illnesses and those who need more healthcare, as they wouldn’t be employed.
It makes no difference to insurance companies if the premiums are paid by the employer with pre tax dollars or the directly by an individual vis healthcare.gov with post tax dollars.
Large employers seem to vary; some like the current rules, but others don't. I am not sure what the balance is.
I see you added to your comment after I'd responded:
>"It makes no difference to insurance companies if the premiums are paid by the employer with pre tax dollars or the directly by an individual vis healthcare.gov with post tax dollars. "
It actually makes a huge difference to their business model who is paying, and whether the dollars are pre-tax or post-tax. When the dollars are pre-tax, people try to get the most comprehensive coverage possible, so that everything, even routine expenditures (like eyeglasses) are covered by insurance, which increases insurance company revenue. Additionally, selling to businesses is very different from selling to consumers; with the former, you're in more of an enterprise B2B market, which is totally different from a B2C.
Seems like something California could invest their energy into (at least for state taxes, which would spark a conversation nationally) rather than trying to outlaw contract work :)
I really wish they would, but the current political climate seems to be more about stoking rage than engaging in nuanced conversations about trade-offs.
It's worse than "maintain the status quo". It prohibits the state legislature from making any amendments to prop 22 without a 7/8ths majority, and requires any such amendment be "consistent with, and furthers the purpose of" prop 22.
Wait, how does that even work? You can make a law that says the law can't be repealed by a majority vote? They're not proposing an amendment to the state constitution are they?
(Excuse me if I'm not quite so read up on this topic—I don't live in California.)
It's not saying the law can't be repealed by majority vote. It's saying the legislature can't change the law without a seven-eights vote. The law can be repealed by voters via another ballot initiative with a simple majority.
By default, laws enacted via ballot initiatives in California can't be amended by the legislature without voter approval. California has some of the strongest protections for citizen initiatives in the country, which comes with plusses and minuses depending on your perspective.
Prop 22 is a state amendment, but not all propositions are. Some are referendums from the legislature that just pass/enact/repeal normal laws, and others are just new laws without being amendments to the state constitution.
> exempt all drivers from getting basic benefits like health insurance
That wasn't my understanding of it. This[1] says:
> Companies that employ drivers through apps — among them, Lyft, Uber, DoorDash and Instacart — would instead keep workers classified as contractors and be able to offer narrower benefits, including pay at least 120% of minimum wage, health care subsidies and accident insurance.
> Benefits under Prop. 22 would be tied to drivers’ “engaged time” completing passenger routes, excluding any wait time on apps between rides.
So if I understand right, current status quo is that companies aren't obligated to pay squat, "yes" on prop 22 commits to certain pay guarantees (which I assume means some increase in price to cover for those costs), and "no" on prop 22 means companies have to use employee model (which they argue means large increases in prices, as well as reduction of coverage due to needing to follow taxi density logistics)
I tend to think about Uber in a similar way as McDonalds (i.e. lots of competition, but strong worldwide presence and strong brand), and I suspect that it will be more or less fine regardless of the outcome because of its strengths.
Personally, I've had enough bad experiences with taxis that I can see the appeal for these companies wanting to maintain high driver volume. I guess what remains to be seen is whether "yes" would provide someone working 40 hours a week to get the same level of compensation as an employee would, while still allowing casual drivers to pocket extra money in between part time jobs or whatever.
The 120% of minimum wage + the possibility to earn linearly more given more hours certainly seems like a better outcome than an employee that makes exactly minimum wage for a maximum of exactly 40 hours, and hopefully other benefits are equally sensible, rather than a loophole for undercutting drivers. It would be great to get more clarity on how the rest of benefits numbers work out.
I wasn’t even against prop 22 originally... Uber improves my QoL! But the campaign they are running is so extremely dirty that it pushed me against prop 22.
The sheer dollar amount of contribution comparing support (~10 mil) vs opposition (~$184 mil) shows how much power imbalance exists between workers vs. corporations.
The drivers are the essential part of their business so those who work full-time should be entitled to get benefits. Period.
What's the threat of Uber going away? What's the moat? Wouldn't another company simply fill the vacuum? That is, unless Uber's whole venture is unprofitable.
This was always the plan. Operate at a loss on both riders/drivers until you can turn the screws. In the past, you could say you'll just switch to Lyft, but here they're working together. That should tell you something about who they're competing with. Their drivers.
I heard one plan was to gain market share and eventually replace drivers with self-driving vehicles altogether, but I should note I'm spreading at least third-degree hearsay.
Uber works by making drivers responsible over their time. By making Uber responsible for the drivers time they need to change their business model to that of a normal taxi service where they have more control over the drivers, since being responsible for something you don't have control over isn't a position you want to be in. And when they have to work as a normal taxi service then there is no point to Uber, they can't survive as a taxi service so they just have to pull out.
It forces uber to employ them and pay them minimum wage and minimum benefits for their time. When you do that you start caring about how much money they make during the hours they work, meaning that Uber is now responsible to ensure their hours are spent productively instead of the worker deciding that himself. At this point there is no difference between Uber and a traditional Taxi company, since that is how Taxis operators. Uber can't survive as a traditional Taxi company since the laws and regulations around Taxis and employments are so different all over the world and they don't have the inhouse expertise to compete with local Taxi companies under those circumstances.
So the end result of AB5 is that Uber and Lift will exit California or become traditional taxi companies there.
Either way California taxi state will go back to where it was before Uber and Lyft entered the market.
Both Uber and Lyft have stated they would pull out of California if they could not operate w/ contractor drivers. Any competitor left over would have to follow the taxi model, until Uber made changes to its platform to be able to come back.
This already sort of happened in Austin. Uber left, then a few years later it came back. When it did, everyone went back to Uber and a lot of the competitors flopped.
Your post has a lot of misinformation I'd like to correct. What you're stating about the current situation is factually incorrect.
1. Prop 22 gives app-based workers healthcare, minimum wage, and other protections and benefits. From the text: "For an average of 25 hours or more per week of engaged time in the calendar quarter, a payment greater than or equal to 100 percent of the average ACA contribution for the applicable average monthly Covered California premium for each month in the quarter." 15-25 hours would require a 50% payment.
2. The companies are exploring other options to stay in California, which is actually required as part of the appeal which happened recently. The current publicly proposed model is franchising out to local businesses: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/technology/uber-lyft-fran...
Disclaimer: I work @ Uber but I do not work on driver-related stuff
EdJiang, please note this isn't to you directly (either as a poster or Uber employee), my engineer-brain is sort of thinking of loopholes and unintended consequences. I'm not expressing an opinion here.
How many "real" working hours does it take to get 25 working hours? I only found one reference (Berkeley Law) that estimated 1/3 of the time is downtime, so very roughly 40 hours a week? Of course depends on location, chosen time of work, and much more.
More cynically, would these companies be able to distribute work such that rides are given to drivers with more "buffer" before hitting these ACA payouts?
Again, not at Uber, Lyft and others specifically but the USA is a country where if we mandate workers with 30 hours get healthcare, employers may try to schedule for 29. I think it's unfortunate, but that's the incentive.
(opinion mode on: we need to fix healthcare as a country; the current state of affairs and likely the state after the Supreme Court hears Texas v. California in three weeks is ridiculous)
Good point. The amount of downtime definitely depends on local market conditions. For instance if you go online at 3AM in Tracy, CA, you might have way lower utilization than someone at 6pm in downtown San Francisco.
I see your point about locking people out of access once they get past a certain number of hours. I think there are two reasons why this is probably not realistic. (1) the hourly count is over a quarterly basis, so harder to track. If a user has 25 engaged hours in week 1, why lock the app if week 2 or 3 the user may have 0 engaged hours? (2) the apps commonly have "bonuses" for hitting certain trip count goals, and you don't see apps trying to lock users out before they hit that goal.
However, Uber has put out a proposal asking governments to establish a "benefits fund" that all gig-companies are required to deposit into, on an hourly basis. That way someone working 5 hours on one app and 20 hours on a second would get benefits partially paid from both companies, without an incentive for any company to shirk their duties.
See the following link, under page 12 - "we want to contribute to funds that workers can individually direct toward the benefits that matter most to them. We are asking states to require our industry to accrue such funds":
>More cynically, would these companies be able to distribute work such that rides are given to drivers with more "buffer" before hitting these ACA payouts?
We already know the answer to this, from how Walmart and others schedule their employees to just under full-time status in order to avoid paying them benefits. If Walmart is doing it, it will be considered to be an orthodox business practice and Uber/Lyft/DoorDash/etc. have probably already planned for it as a contingency.
I appreciate your response but respectfully disagree. (1) you posted above completely miss-states the facts. From the voter pamphlet text itself;
"A YES vote on this measure means: App-based rideshare and delivery companies could hire drivers as independent contractors. Drivers could decide when, where, and how much to work but would not get standard benefits and protections that businesses must provide employees."
If you drive full time you deserve full time benefits. That means more than a 50% payment of ACA (which is downright offensive to suggest someone can live off of while making minimum wage).
The text I quoted is directly from the ballot measure. If you click my link then click on "Text of Proposed Law (PDF)" in the sidebar, you will find:
> 7454. Healthcare Subsidy. (a) Consistent with the average contributions required under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a network company shall provide a quarterly health care subsidy to qualifying app-based drivers as set forth in this section. An app-based driver that averages the following amounts of engaged time per week on a network company’s platform during a calendar quarter shall receive the following subsidies from that network company:
> (1) For an average of 25 hours or more per week of engaged time in the calendar quarter, a payment greater than or equal to 100 percent of the average ACA contribution for the applicable average monthly Covered California premium for each month in the quarter.
> (2) For an average of at least 15 but less than 25 hours per week of engaged time in the calendar quarter, a payment greater than or equal to 50 percent of the average ACA contribution for the applicable average monthly Covered California premium for each month in the quarter.
No matter the nuances, the 7/8th modification provision is a deal-breaker, period. It casts the whole measure in a crooked light, which history advises us should come as no surprise.
The company always has the option to lower wages, or raise prices on their product.
It would, of course, mean that their law-compliant competitors would eat their marketshare.
They are trying to tell us with a straight face, that a taxi-in-an-app business is impossible to operate under Prop 22. This is, of course, completely untrue.
To be clear, just so people don't vote mistakenly: these companies want to "operate under Prop 22"; Uber & Lyft are the primary supporters of Prop 22.
They do not want to operate under AB5, the current law, which Prop 22 seeks to invalidate.
If you want to compel Uber and others to follow the current law (which requires them to give employee benefits to drivers), you should vote NO on Prop 22.
I'm not sure I follow. The company can lower wages or raise prices to comply with the law. But then other companies, that also comply with the law, will eat their marketshare? How?
Where are all these competitors that offer full-time with benefits driver positions at Uber prices? Why aren't they sucking up the entire pool of available drivers right now? Why do we need a law to force Uber / Lyft to provide benefits if other companies already do it?
> I'm not sure I follow. The company can lower wages or raise prices to comply with the law. But then other companies, that also comply with the law, will eat their marketshare? How?
Uber and sharecropping firms like it compete with eachother, as well as with traditional taxi firms.
As I understand it, traditional taxi firms are already largely in compliance with the proposed legislature.
The demand for taxis is not going to go away anywhere. You can operate a taxi company (traditional, or sharecropper) with, or without prop 22. The only difference will be in the price of rides - for what is largely a luxury good.
Something can't simultaneously have inelastic demand and also be a luxury good. Those things are kind of opposite.
Demand for taxis has dropped a lot because of Uber. Uber also gets passengers who would have otherwise not made the trip, taken a bus, or driven drunk. If Uber is no longer an option they'll go back to those options,not to taxis.
> The only difference will be in the price of rides - for what is largely a luxury good.
The price of rides makes a big difference and hugely effects demand. I don't know why you're treating it like it doesn't matter. Lower prices open the service up to more people. Indoor plumbing was once a luxury good. Generally progress means turning luxuries into commodities, not the opposite.
Their competitors that are obeying the law are taxis. Uber and Lyft were able to get lower costs, because they were using loopholes in the law, which AR5 fixes.
Currently Uber and Lyft don't even compete against each other, they compete against their drivers.
I really don't understand why drivers should be considered employees, or even independent contractors, to Uber. Maybe someone can fill me in.
To me, Uber seems more like a marketplace that connects buyers and sellers of a particular service (rides).
If I sell something on eBay, should eBay consider me an employee and give me benefits? What about if I sell my service on Fiverr or Upwork? How is that Upwork any different than Uber?
As an aside, I fell like the whole idea of benefits being tied to employers is a horrible anti-pattern. It reminds me of the old days when you got paid in company dollars to spend at the company store.
Isn't it primarily the state's responsibility to come up with a reasonable solution? California has nearly unlimited power in this situation, so it's not much of a negotiation.
Uber and lyft have one tool left: ask the people to override the assembly. If rideshare is more popular than no rideshare, it'll pass.
If you want a more nuanced solution, well, California had a chance to offer one. I don't see it.
It seems to me Prop22 is aiming to address the issue on the wrong policy.
To me the minimum wage policy should be updated to include healthcare insurance as compensation, and possibly raise the minimum wage as well.
That way those companies w/o health insurance have to pay more $$ per hour and those with health insurance are equally competitive to those who do not.
In places where Uber/Lyft are absent, other apps quickly fill their place. All they have is network effects - they're not nearly as irreplaceable as they'd like you to think.
Instead of CA requiring private companies to cover health costs, they should step in to lower them and to provide coverage for the residents, it's as simple as that.
The answer is no, if I'm freelancing the company I work for should not pay me benefits. I could be working for five companies at once. Should they all be giving me Healthcare?
Should any app that pays you a few bucks for doing small jobs pay you Healthcare now?
Uber will have to redo its software systems to account for the concept of full time drivers. This is why they will turn off the app, it takes time to make changes to comply with the new law.
Regarding your other point, why do you think employers should be the providers of healthcare in the first place? This isn't the way it works in most countries.
Not the parent, but personally, I don't think employers should be the providers of healthcare, but we live in a country where that is currently the case. We should have the Universal Healthcare debate/option, but that's not the issue at hand.
Perhaps instead of trying to make 22 law, Uber/Lyft should put their weight/support behind a Universal Healthcare initiative.
Posted it in an other thread [0] but do we really want to go back to the medallion system? Pre-Uber, either the driver rented the car to a middleman who rented the medallion from a rich owner, or said owner was selling and financing (most banks won't touch these medallions!) a medallion at a ridiculous interest rate to a driver that planned to use it as his retirement savings (an extremely volatile asset and not very liquid).
The more I spoke to cab drivers the more it seemed their industry was a pyramid scheme aimed at helping established rent-seeker take advantage of often poor new immigrants.
Don't tell me these shady day-to-day medallion rental businesses offered benefits to the drivers...
How are you getting from "Uber shouldn't be able to hire its drivers as independent contractors to skirt worker-protection laws" to "we should go back to the medallion system"?
I'm sure a non-profit service like in Austin run by the city could, anyway so Uber/Lyft still ride on their funding and driver's aren't paid much of you include their expenses, so it is obvious that either prices should go up or something needs to change to make it sustainable (and by sustainable it probably means self driving cars) if that's the end goal then what are really voting for? Continuing exploiting these people?
This is a common misperception. You cannot estimate the shape of simple things in low light. Even humans are susceptible to optical illusions and are effectively blind during certain times of day (try driving in the direction of the sun during sun rise/set). Lidar is not susceptible to any of these things.
Similarly ML will never solve low light or direct light situations, that is a physical limitation of cameras.
From what I can read of the press release, they are claiming a reduction of 30% in the amount of pesticide used. So, a significant incremental improvement, but certainly not something truly smart like using a camera to identify individual pests and targeting those pests with directed blasts of insecticide. Still a few years from that version of this tech.
