US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4186

On April 13 2024 00:04 GreenHorizons wrote:
This presumption would be incorrect, but a key component in maintaining the scam. Nearly a third of Uber drivers are actually losing money
.
They just hire new people that don't realize they are getting scammed

The following sort of elitism is also a key component in maintaining the scam:

The overlap between jobs US society deemed "essential" and the same society treats as "undeserving of a comfortable life" is remarkable.

On April 13 2024 00:26 Gorsameth wrote:
Why do there need to be winner in everything? Who wins? Society as a whole wins because they are no longer paying for a CEO's 5th yacht? is that good enough?

These people are not just earning a bit of extra income, for most of them this is their full time job.

So because John Doe has trouble finding a job and America has a failed social security net I should be allowed to exploit his labour for below minimum wage (because the 'gig economy' gets around that dumb little law) and pay him so little he still lives off of government assistance?

"But if they pay him a fair wage he doesn't have a job". So what did people do for a living before Uber-eats existed? Why is exploitative slave labour the only option we have?

The notion that in with all the wealth in the modern world we can somehow not give everyone a comfortable life via their job does not make mathematical sense.

ps.
As for your gilded age, we still have that. its called Walmart employees living off of food stamps that they spend at Walmart.

On April 13 2024 01:02 KwarK wrote:

But it’s the scenario they meant when they legislated to fix it. Let’s say you legalize child labour so that kids can help out their sole proprietor parents and pick up weekend jobs pulling weeds or whatever. A scenario in which kids are pressured to drop out of school to help their disabled or addicted parents pay rent or to pay for medical care for a sibling isn’t what they envisioned. But it’s what was being envisioned when they banned it in the first place.

Nobody bans these things due to the cases where everything actually worked out fine. They ban them because frequently things don’t work well in a way that causes negative social externalities.

On April 12 2024 23:32 Introvert wrote:


Point 1 is that no one can actually identify a winner here.

Point 2, which is related, is that we are only looking at this from one side and it's confusing things. It's kind of odd to complain that these companies only exist because of indirect subsidy when we can't even know of that's true. It's like we are subtracting from one side of the equation but not the other, the relationship doesn't hold.

As a particular, there's a reason so many places have these contractor designations in the fist place. It's simplistic to the point of being wrong to say a company like these that can't offer the min wage shouldn't exist. Presumably the people working these jobs aren't doing it at a loss. We are not in the gilded age, you aren't in a mine for 12 hours and forced to buy all your necessities from the company store. If people want to drive around either for extra income or in a pinch of need then they should be allowed to do that. I just don't think every job is supposed to provide a comfortable lifestyle, and it's silly to try and make that a reality. I'd rather open up new opportunities for people. But here I tread old and tired ground.

I think it's a more useful exercise to ask, from the left, who actually gained here? It's the question people are stubbornly refusing to answer. As I said before, at least the wage, hour, and safety laws that arose in the last century+ had some obvious upside!

On April 13 2024 01:29 Introvert wrote:



See I think this is part of the underlying philosophical difference. I'm not shocked by that at all. It's not just about what's essential but so many other things, including the size of the pool of people who could do the job, for instance. I'm not convinced these are the types of jobs that people should be prevented from doing by choice. Nor do they seem to be essential, although I take that as being a part of a bigger point.



Why are you doing it, or more precisely, preventing people from doing it, if not for a reason? No, making sure a rich guy only has 4 yachts is not really a good reason to me.

The notion that just because I can take all the estimated wealth in the world, divide by the number of people, and have a large-ish looking number isn't really convincing since there are so many more variables.



It was? Are you sure? This goes back to your post last night. These are obviously unintended consequences because if they were intended they wouldn't be rolling them back or considering that possibility. They really were naive enough to think this would mean the system would work more or less the same. They ban then for the reasons people are giving in thread: because they think it's bad and it's better to have no job than the one they don't like. Now you take care of your drug addicted relative and have no money at all. Your own examples show why just removing these jobs from existence can have negative consequences for the people you claim to care about.

On April 13 2024 00:04 GreenHorizons wrote:
This presumption would be incorrect, but a key component in maintaining the scam. Nearly a third of Uber drivers are actually losing money

On April 13 2024 02:09 JimmiC wrote:
I find morality so confusing. You have people who are all about putting rules on all sorts of businesses and health care facilities because they determine it to be against their morality, but having people make almost nothing or lose money to deliver lazy people burgers should not be touched? It is not that they do not like rules, it is just really strange rules they want or hate.

On April 13 2024 01:30 WombaT wrote:

I don’t think there is much upside to this particular example, granted I haven’t delved particularly deep into the specifics.

However as per the European side of the ledger, or at least what I know of such companies here, or what Acrofales outlined, I think you’re just seeing an intervention at a different time, with a different outcome accordingly.

They were at least somewhat regulated via industry standards, or chose not to try to enter the market, relatively early on. Versus not being so, undercutting the rest of the market and becoming ubiquitous to the extent that after the fact attempting to regulate them has those knock-on effects on drivers.

As a species we’ve been to the moon and back, it’s perfectly within our abilities to ensure a relative degree of comfort for everyone. It’s a very conscious, systemic decision to not do such a thing. Indeed, if anything we’re actively going backwards in this regard.

This specific example may well be a misstep, but if we stack it up against well, a hell of a lot of generally negative trends it’s absolute small fry.

On April 13 2024 01:46 KwarK wrote:

Can we drop the pointless “you claim” shit? It’s as cringeworthy as saying Drumpf or putting “so called” in front of every word.

And as for this “well they voluntarily consented to exploitation because they had no better choice so helping them is hurting them”, that’s pretty much the nadir of morality. If people didn’t travel to Cambodia to fuck children then those children wouldn’t have any income, is that what you want? Those kidfuckers are heroes who give money to vulnerable children falling through the cracks.

I stand by it being better to have no job than some of the jobs in existence. Obviously we should do a better job at ensuring that those kind of coercive scenarios never exist in the first place by providing a better safety net. But the failure of the safety net does not make exploitation and coercion a good thing.

I also find it contradictory that conservatives pretend that they don’t like exploitation but that they think allowing it for individuals who believe being exploited is the best option for them due to systematic failures is okay. I can somewhat see the basic justification, as you say, better to have any job than no job. But then those same conservatives keep adding to that systemic failure. They keep stripping away the safety nets that would give people better options.

Better the kid drops out of school to keep his family from being evicted than becomes homeless and drops out of school anyway somewhat makes sense. But you can’t act like you don’t like it either but your hands are tied when you’re the one doing the evicting and you’re the one profiting from the child labour. At a certain point conservatives need to own up to just liking exploitation. This handwringing nonsense doesn’t pass the sniff test, it’s not that they tried their very best to make a society that protects the most vulnerable but people fell through the cracks. They want this.

On April 13 2024 02:09 JimmiC wrote:
I find morality so confusing. You have people who are all about putting rules on all sorts of businesses and health care facilities because they determine it to be against their morality, but having people make almost nothing or lose money to deliver lazy people burgers should not be touched? It is not that they do not like rules, it is just really strange rules they want or hate.

On April 13 2024 03:35 Introvert wrote:


I am hesitant to pick on your example of the space program but I think that's a perfect representation of another criticism of left-wing thinking in this genre. I think of the moon landing as a very particular engineering problem with a definite goal and a very particular set of rules to follow (physics). I don't view providing people with a "degree of comfort" as an apt comparison at all. But I think much of left view society and it's troubles as one big Apollo program.




Ok, I could see someone being ticked off at my choice of phrase there, but I don't really think you of all people could complain about casting aspersions on people's motive. But I'm sorry, it didn't help the point I was trying to make and was needlessly antagonistic.

Your example about child trafficking is absurd. Being a low paid uber driver is nothing like that, if being a driver paid a "living wage" then suddenly it would cease to be "exploitation" which puts it in a different moral category than abusing kids. But I think you know that.

Some jobs suck and are meant to be temporary or means of last resort. By raising the minimum wage for these jobs yo u price out everyone, buyers and sellers. I'd rather address the job supply side and let demand take care of itself.

This ties in with your second half. These municipalities didnt do half the work. Sure, those jobs no longer exist... but now what? You toom away a "bad" thing but didn't give anyone a good thing, and now they have no thing, which for many is a bad thing. Good work. Apparently being a driver is a form of "exploitation" so horrid people must be prevented from choosing it at all.



It's not strange. Your last sentence is perfectly logical and applies to everyone. No one here is arguing for no rules at all. But about using right principles to make the right rules

Sergio Avedian, an Uber driver who is a senior contributor to the gig-driver-advocacy blog and YouTube channel The Rideshare Guy, told Insider that based on his research in Los Angeles, the typical driver earns between $22 and $25 an hour before expenses. He said vehicle expenses like gas and maintenance generally cost a driver $5 to $7 an hour.

On April 13 2024 04:23 BlackJack wrote:
Coming out with an exact number of driver pay is difficult but it's obviously a lot higher than GH's retracted study. From a Business Insider article



RideShareGuy is presumed to be fairly reputable considering the MIT study that GH cited sources the data it used in its study from RideShareGuy. $22-25 hours comes out to about $44k-50k a year based on a 2,000 hour work year (40 hours a week x 50 work weeks with 2 weeks off)

A conservative estimate, even after expenses, for a full-time Uber Driver would be $30-35k USD a year. They're not rolling in dough by any means but the fact that people need to constantly conflate this with child/sweatshop labor to make their point is absurd.

On April 13 2024 07:30 KwarK wrote:

Not sure why you're listing $44-$50k when that's revenue, not income. That's a wholly misleading number, gas is not an optional expense for an uber driver. The $30-$35k/year is the base. You pay both employer and employee side of FICA so you're losing another 15.3% so let's call it $25k-$29k after self employment taxes. Plus, of course, the $250 that it'll cost you to buy self employment tax-prep software. I'll let them file their own taxes and keep their own records, presumably they're a competent bookkeeper. If not that'll be another few grand.

Insurance also wasn't listed there. Originally they would just drive completely uninsured for commercial use and if anything happened would just lie to their insurers and attempt to use personal policies. Uber used to just tell them to comply with whatever insurance requirements there were while paying so little that nobody could reasonably afford commercial use coverage.

After years of illegal uninsured driving became an unavoidable issue Uber was eventually forced by regulatory agencies to provide their own policy. It doesn't cover much, for example, the driver. That's all extra coming out of your $25k.

Also we're still not getting health insurance etc. with this.

Also drivers have one of the most dangerous jobs in America.

They're just not doing well. As a rule of thumb it's normal to ask for double what you make W4 if you go 1099 to cover the difference in taxes, benefits, various matches/contributions and so forth. So if you're making $100k/year salaried and someone asks you to go independent contractor you'd be quoting $100/hr for $200k/year gross. If you dispute that then consider it for your own job and ask yourself what you'd be willing to take to go self employed. For me my 401k match is worth about $6k, employer paid HSA contributions $2k, health benefits for a family of 4 are a good $20k, SE taxes are going to be $12k, loss of PTO and other traditional benefits easily $10k. You just can't compare uber driving to a normal job using the top line alone. I suppose you could make the argument that lots of other people are also doing badly but that's not a good argument not to help gig workers.

On April 13 2024 07:30 KwarK wrote:

Not sure why you're listing $44-$50k when that's revenue, not income. That's a wholly misleading number, gas is not an optional expense for an uber driver. The $30-$35k/year is the base. You pay both employer and employee side of FICA so you're losing another 15.3% so let's call it $25k-$29k after self employment taxes. Plus, of course, the $250 that it'll cost you to buy self employment tax-prep software. I'll let them file their own taxes and keep their own records, presumably they're a competent bookkeeper. If not that'll be another few grand.

Insurance also wasn't listed there. Originally they would just drive completely uninsured for commercial use and if anything happened would just lie to their insurers and attempt to use personal policies. Uber used to just tell them to comply with whatever insurance requirements there were while paying so little that nobody could reasonably afford commercial use coverage.

After years of illegal uninsured driving became an unavoidable issue Uber was eventually forced by regulatory agencies to provide their own policy. It doesn't cover much, for example, the driver. That's all extra coming out of your $25k.

Also we're still not getting health insurance etc. with this.

Also drivers have one of the most dangerous jobs in America.

They're just not doing well.

On April 13 2024 02:09 JimmiC wrote:
I find morality so confusing. You have people who are all about putting rules on all sorts of businesses and health care facilities because they determine it to be against their morality, but having people make almost nothing or lose money to deliver lazy people burgers should not be touched? It is not that they do not like rules, it is just really strange rules they want or hate.

On April 13 2024 08:03 BlackJack wrote:


Because it's super standard when discussing income to talk in pre-tax figures and not include costs like tax preparation since everyone's taxes are different?

"How much does this job pay"
"Well that depends, are you planning to purchase a copy of TurboTax or go with H&R block? Also are you going to commute to work on public transit or purchase costly gasoline? Are you going to save any money on toilet paper by taking your mondo dukes in the office?"

The figure I cited leaves $5-7 / hr to cover your expenses. On 2,000 a year that's $10,000 - $14,000. It's not a miniscule allotment that you need to nickel and dime it further. Additionally, the idea that an Uber driver is giving up an alternative career with a generous benefits package they are forfeiting is equally silly.

On April 13 2024 08:12 WombaT wrote:

Has anyone claimed that Uber drivers are forfeiting that?

The general tenor has been that Uber drivers don’t have a huge amount of choice as to employment avenues but that’s no excuse to fuck them over.

Indeed the oft-mentioned example of Walmart being one of the biggest beneficiaries of the US benefits system has been alluded to

On April 13 2024 08:03 BlackJack wrote:


Because it's super standard when discussing income to talk in pre-tax figures and not include costs like tax preparation since everyone's taxes are different?

"How much does this job pay"
"Well that depends, are you planning to purchase a copy of TurboTax or go with H&R block? Also are you going to commute to work on public transit or purchase costly gasoline? Are you going to save any money on toilet paper by taking your mondo dukes in the office?"

The figure I cited leaves $5-7 / hr to cover your expenses. On 2,000 a year that's $10,000 - $14,000. It's not a miniscule allotment that you need to nickel and dime it further. Additionally, the idea that an Uber driver is giving up an alternative career with a generous benefits package they are forfeiting is equally silly.

On April 13 2024 08:15 BlackJack wrote:


The last paragraph of his post suggests it in an indirect way. He explains how burdensome it would be for him to go 1099 because he would be given up his matched 401k contributions, HSA contributions, PTO, etc. and suggests we should apply the same standard for Uber drivers that are 1099. Except they'd probably be giving up a career at a fast food joint that doesn't have $2k HSA contributions among other things.

On April 13 2024 08:11 Sermokala wrote:

Again the cruelty is the point. They don't believe in capitalism they believe in cruelty and exploitation. If they believed in capitalism they would believe that people should be more productive in the market. Minnesota has low employment, the business sector bitches and moans about a labor shortage, but none of these things matter when the solution eases cruelty to the people in an industry. I mean just look at what BJ just posted "Additionally, the idea that an Uber driver is giving up an alternative career with a generous benefits package they are forfeiting is equally silly." No faith in the market, no appreciation for the actual numbers of a job. Poor people just don't deserve comfort and should remain in exploitative positions for the betterment of CEO's. Don't even try to argue the morals or talk about the reality of the situation when cruelty and exploitation is the position they're trying to advance.

You had a guy on fox that claimed someone making $20 an hour in a California McDonalds is making six figures a year. The disconnect that even paying a poor person $20 is outrageous to the point where they're far too comfortable than they deserve is the message not a mistake. At some point its not a coincidence or a pattern its just a fact you have to acept.