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On April 13 2024 03:35 Introvert wrote: Some jobs suck and are meant to be temporary or means of last resort.
Why should there be jobs that suck so much that people are only willing to do them if the alternative is homelessness / starvation? Shouldn't we aim to provide every member of society with at least a little bit more than that?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, it's super standard to talk gross for W2 jobs. This isn't one of those. That's the whole point. That's why what you did was misleading, you took a standard convention for a completely different thing and misapplied it. Gross is absolutely not what self employed people talk about because they're the owners of a business and gross doesn't help them, profits help them.
Also your large expense allowance is really not large, it's gasoline. If your job is driving a car constantly then you're going to expect a lot of operating expenses. Let's say you're working 2000 hours per year, averaging 30mph, and take the standard mileage rate of $0.67. If a W2 employee drove the same amount then that's $40k of mileage expense reimbursement from the business owner. In this case the Uber driver is the business owner. Your generous allotment of $10k-$14k isn't so big.
It's honestly difficult to respond to your posts because sometimes I don't know if you're pretending to be stupider than you are. I have to wonder if you really forgot that uber drivers need to put gasoline in their cars in order to make them run and whether you're genuinely shocked that you can't treat revenue before expenses for a business as comparable to an individual's income. You express this apparently genuine outrage that a business might have accounting costs that wouldn't be counted against an individual and I have to try to work out what's going on.
I try to respond to you in good faith as if you really did forget that businesses have business expenses and that individual employees do not but it's hard sometimes, you know? If you sit down and think about it I'm pretty sure you can work out why individual employees aren't deducting their business expenses and it's not because of some convention where we don't talk about toilet paper.
Are you just arguing for the sake of arguing again like when you insisted that giving the police more money than the year before was defunding them or do you genuinely believe that Uber drivers are rolling in revenue which is spendable in the same way that an individual's paycheck is?
I see your point however the reason I missed it is because you originally calculated 15.3% FICA tax to be excluded because 1099 workers pay employer and employee FICA taxes. W2 employees would still pay the employee share which is half of that 7.65%. This is the number you should have given for the additional expenses a 1099 worker would have over a W2 employee. If you’re calculating the income of a 1099 worker with employee payroll tax taken out and comparing it to the gross wages of a W2 without the payroll tax taken out then you’re purposefully making the comparison more apples to oranges to be misleading.
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.
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.
I mean BJ also argues that companies in a free market shouldn’t adopt a WFH model because it has negative knock-on effects on associated service industries.
But yet argues the state shouldn’t intervene in this instance because unless delivery services are dirt cheap then people won’t use them. They might, I don’t know venture out of the house and frequent said same businesses previously mentioned.
In combination it’s pretty incoherent. Workers who could save on fuel/public transport, and hours of time should commute to offices because the economy. Wider consumers should be able to sit on their arse and get everything delivered even if it doesn’t pay a living wage, because the economy.
I love this post. Perhaps downtown SF, which has been devastated by the overzealous response to the coronavirus, can be rehabilitated by killing the food delivery companies and forcing everyone to return to the shops that lost the office worker foot traffic. I see a few problems with this theory.
1. As the Seattle law shows us, this law has hurt restaurants just as much as anyone because people are ordering less food delivery and takeout is a large part of their business. 2. Even if people had to go out to get their food they would still go to the restaurants nearby their house and not near the office they no longer commute to. Nobody is driving to the financial district to eat out at the corner cafe. 3. Both Lyft and Uber are headquartered in San Francisco so if we kill them it might just make the office vacancy problem even worse
Otherwise I think it’s brilliant. One self-inflicted would to distract us from another self-inflicted would.
(btw I was in the touristy areas of SF a few nights ago and I heard sooo many people with UK accents. Is this actually a popular holiday spot?)
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.
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.
I mean BJ also argues that companies in a free market shouldn’t adopt a WFH model because it has negative knock-on effects on associated service industries.
But yet argues the state shouldn’t intervene in this instance because unless delivery services are dirt cheap then people won’t use them. They might, I don’t know venture out of the house and frequent said same businesses previously mentioned.
In combination it’s pretty incoherent. Workers who could save on fuel/public transport, and hours of time should commute to offices because the economy. Wider consumers should be able to sit on their arse and get everything delivered even if it doesn’t pay a living wage, because the economy.
I love this post. Perhaps downtown SF, which has been devastated by the overzealous response to the coronavirus, can be rehabilitated by killing the food delivery companies and forcing everyone to return to the shops that lost the office worker foot traffic. I see a few problems with this theory.
1. As the Seattle law shows us, this law has hurt restaurants just as much as anyone because people are ordering less food delivery and takeout is a large part of their business. 2. Even if people had to go out to get their food they would still go to the restaurants nearby their house and not near the office they no longer commute to. Nobody is driving to the financial district to eat out at the corner cafe. 3. Both Lyft and Uber are headquartered in San Francisco so if we kill them it might just make the office vacancy problem even worse
Otherwise I think it’s brilliant. One self-inflicted would to distract us from another self-inflicted would.
(btw I was in the touristy areas of SF a few nights ago and I heard sooo many people with UK accents. Is this actually a popular holiday spot?)
Why do we want San Francisco office sections to thrive? What purpose does that serve the people of Earth? The people having a higher standard of living by not needing to commute does serve more people. Many restaurants will need to close or move location. Many offices will close down but people are still employed. Why is that a negative?
Also Trump can't leave NATO anymore. Congress passed the "Trump is allowed to leave NATO" act. Not its actual name but Trump is the only reason Congress even had to consider passing a law preventing the President from leaving NATO.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, it's super standard to talk gross for W2 jobs. This isn't one of those. That's the whole point. That's why what you did was misleading, you took a standard convention for a completely different thing and misapplied it. Gross is absolutely not what self employed people talk about because they're the owners of a business and gross doesn't help them, profits help them.
Also your large expense allowance is really not large, it's gasoline. If your job is driving a car constantly then you're going to expect a lot of operating expenses. Let's say you're working 2000 hours per year, averaging 30mph, and take the standard mileage rate of $0.67. If a W2 employee drove the same amount then that's $40k of mileage expense reimbursement from the business owner. In this case the Uber driver is the business owner. Your generous allotment of $10k-$14k isn't so big.
It's honestly difficult to respond to your posts because sometimes I don't know if you're pretending to be stupider than you are. I have to wonder if you really forgot that uber drivers need to put gasoline in their cars in order to make them run and whether you're genuinely shocked that you can't treat revenue before expenses for a business as comparable to an individual's income. You express this apparently genuine outrage that a business might have accounting costs that wouldn't be counted against an individual and I have to try to work out what's going on.
I try to respond to you in good faith as if you really did forget that businesses have business expenses and that individual employees do not but it's hard sometimes, you know? If you sit down and think about it I'm pretty sure you can work out why individual employees aren't deducting their business expenses and it's not because of some convention where we don't talk about toilet paper.
Are you just arguing for the sake of arguing again like when you insisted that giving the police more money than the year before was defunding them or do you genuinely believe that Uber drivers are rolling in revenue which is spendable in the same way that an individual's paycheck is?
I see your point however the reason I missed it is because you originally calculated 15.3% FICA tax to be excluded because 1099 workers pay employer and employee FICA taxes. W2 employees would still pay the employee share which is half of that 7.65%. This is the number you should have given for the additional expenses a 1099 worker would have over a W2 employee. If you’re calculating the income of a 1099 worker with employee payroll tax taken out and comparing it to the gross wages of a W2 without the payroll tax taken out then you’re purposefully making the comparison more apples to oranges to be misleading.
I wasn't making that comparison, I was saying that the comparison you made based on misrepresenting gross business revenues $44-$50k/year as if it were pay doesn't work, I was saying it's not comparable to having a job that pays that.
I then went on to explain that businesses have additional business expenses that individuals do not have such as requiring the business tax accounting software. You were weirdly triggered by that one and didn't seem to understand why a business might need business software but individuals might not.
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.
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.
I mean BJ also argues that companies in a free market shouldn’t adopt a WFH model because it has negative knock-on effects on associated service industries.
But yet argues the state shouldn’t intervene in this instance because unless delivery services are dirt cheap then people won’t use them. They might, I don’t know venture out of the house and frequent said same businesses previously mentioned.
In combination it’s pretty incoherent. Workers who could save on fuel/public transport, and hours of time should commute to offices because the economy. Wider consumers should be able to sit on their arse and get everything delivered even if it doesn’t pay a living wage, because the economy.
I love this post. Perhaps downtown SF, which has been devastated by the overzealous response to the coronavirus, can be rehabilitated by killing the food delivery companies and forcing everyone to return to the shops that lost the office worker foot traffic. I see a few problems with this theory.
1. As the Seattle law shows us, this law has hurt restaurants just as much as anyone because people are ordering less food delivery and takeout is a large part of their business. 2. Even if people had to go out to get their food they would still go to the restaurants nearby their house and not near the office they no longer commute to. Nobody is driving to the financial district to eat out at the corner cafe. 3. Both Lyft and Uber are headquartered in San Francisco so if we kill them it might just make the office vacancy problem even worse
Otherwise I think it’s brilliant. One self-inflicted would to distract us from another self-inflicted would.
(btw I was in the touristy areas of SF a few nights ago and I heard sooo many people with UK accents. Is this actually a popular holiday spot?)
Why do we want San Francisco office sections to thrive? What purpose does that serve the people of Earth? The people having a higher standard of living by not needing to commute does serve more people. Many restaurants will need to close or move location. Many offices will close down but people are still employed. Why is that a negative?
Depends who the "we" is in your question. If the "We" is people from San Francisco then I think they have an evolutionary imperative to want to see themselves and their community thrive. It's only rational. If the "we" is people that live far away from San Francisco then I don't really expect them to care much if San Francisco struggles or not. I probably wouldn't lose sleep either if I heard a random city around the globe was struggling.
Seemingly every day another business that someone spent their entire life building has to close down. Here's another one that was on the news a couple days ago
Listen to the pain in that woman's voice. Kind of cold-blooded to be like why should we care. Even I think that's super depressing and I'm the one that takes delight in being cruel to poor people, or whatever Serm's vapid rant was about.
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.
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.
I mean BJ also argues that companies in a free market shouldn’t adopt a WFH model because it has negative knock-on effects on associated service industries.
But yet argues the state shouldn’t intervene in this instance because unless delivery services are dirt cheap then people won’t use them. They might, I don’t know venture out of the house and frequent said same businesses previously mentioned.
In combination it’s pretty incoherent. Workers who could save on fuel/public transport, and hours of time should commute to offices because the economy. Wider consumers should be able to sit on their arse and get everything delivered even if it doesn’t pay a living wage, because the economy.
I love this post. Perhaps downtown SF, which has been devastated by the overzealous response to the coronavirus, can be rehabilitated by killing the food delivery companies and forcing everyone to return to the shops that lost the office worker foot traffic. I see a few problems with this theory.
1. As the Seattle law shows us, this law has hurt restaurants just as much as anyone because people are ordering less food delivery and takeout is a large part of their business. 2. Even if people had to go out to get their food they would still go to the restaurants nearby their house and not near the office they no longer commute to. Nobody is driving to the financial district to eat out at the corner cafe. 3. Both Lyft and Uber are headquartered in San Francisco so if we kill them it might just make the office vacancy problem even worse
Otherwise I think it’s brilliant. One self-inflicted would to distract us from another self-inflicted would.
(btw I was in the touristy areas of SF a few nights ago and I heard sooo many people with UK accents. Is this actually a popular holiday spot?)
You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette and all that.
Nah being serious I sn’t one of the issues with San Francisco is that it’s fucking expensive? If a few bucks are enough to depress demand on certain products, that would hint to me that people’s budgets are pretty tight. One of the issues Belfast is having in hospitality is folks when they do have time off, it’s just too expensive au present.
Commuting is an inefficient, compounding time sink, that is a necessary evil until it is not. We spend a crazy amount of time and money doing it, and largely all at the same time too. It’s idle time on both a leisure as well as economic level, it just makes sense to reduce it wherever possible.
Purely aside from QoL, almost one of the biggest macro reasons I’m in favour of working from home is that it doesn’t necessitate a constant drip drip of relocation from other locales for work, especially higher-salaried work.
For every San Francisco struggling in certain areas, there’s multiple smaller cities and towns that are long in terminal decline due to this ‘brain drain’. You see a similar pattern with London, or Dublin looming like a colossus over the rest of those nations. With the dual issue that those at the bottom of the economic ladder don’t get paid much more for being there, but certainly have far higher costs.
My advocacy for it on a more macro level is as part of a wider strategy of a more diffuse spread of economic resources, and thus sustaining more areas, with a more sustainable cost of living across the board and energising business opportunities in a wider range of places.
It won’t do it alone, but it’s an important piece of the puzzle. A simultaneous dropping of working hours, or the adoption of a 4 day week or whatever you can at least in theory offset some of the decline in demand from work commutes with visits for pleasure.
It’s no advocacy of dismissal of any particular group or sector. It’s a process to move to something better, but I don’t personally think it’s possible to transition without some pain, in some place.
I’m sure most here aren’t in denial on this, perhaps elsewhere this is less the case. We can collectively sit there with decades of evidence of negative trends and go ‘this is fine’ like that meme, or attempt to push to something better with the full knowledge that there will be some teething issues. Tragedy of the commons territory and all that.
This is an energized conversation featuring 3 of the biggest names in progressive online media. I don't necessarily agree with everything Cenk, David, and Brian believe, but discussions like these are super important. I also think Don Lemon did a solid job moderating (and sometimes participating) too.
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.
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.
I mean BJ also argues that companies in a free market shouldn’t adopt a WFH model because it has negative knock-on effects on associated service industries.
But yet argues the state shouldn’t intervene in this instance because unless delivery services are dirt cheap then people won’t use them. They might, I don’t know venture out of the house and frequent said same businesses previously mentioned.
In combination it’s pretty incoherent. Workers who could save on fuel/public transport, and hours of time should commute to offices because the economy. Wider consumers should be able to sit on their arse and get everything delivered even if it doesn’t pay a living wage, because the economy.
I love this post. Perhaps downtown SF, which has been devastated by the overzealous response to the coronavirus, can be rehabilitated by killing the food delivery companies and forcing everyone to return to the shops that lost the office worker foot traffic. I see a few problems with this theory.
1. As the Seattle law shows us, this law has hurt restaurants just as much as anyone because people are ordering less food delivery and takeout is a large part of their business. 2. Even if people had to go out to get their food they would still go to the restaurants nearby their house and not near the office they no longer commute to. Nobody is driving to the financial district to eat out at the corner cafe. 3. Both Lyft and Uber are headquartered in San Francisco so if we kill them it might just make the office vacancy problem even worse
Otherwise I think it’s brilliant. One self-inflicted would to distract us from another self-inflicted would.
(btw I was in the touristy areas of SF a few nights ago and I heard sooo many people with UK accents. Is this actually a popular holiday spot?)
You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette and all that.
Nah being serious I sn’t one of the issues with San Francisco is that it’s fucking expensive? If a few bucks are enough to depress demand on certain products, that would hint to me that people’s budgets are pretty tight. One of the issues Belfast is having in hospitality is folks when they do have time off, it’s just too expensive au present.
Commuting is an inefficient, compounding time sink, that is a necessary evil until it is not. We spend a crazy amount of time and money doing it, and largely all at the same time too. It’s idle time on both a leisure as well as economic level, it just makes sense to reduce it wherever possible.
Purely aside from QoL, almost one of the biggest macro reasons I’m in favour of working from home is that it doesn’t necessitate a constant drip drip of relocation from other locales for work, especially higher-salaried work.
For every San Francisco struggling in certain areas, there’s multiple smaller cities and towns that are long in terminal decline due to this ‘brain drain’. You see a similar pattern with London, or Dublin looming like a colossus over the rest of those nations. With the dual issue that those at the bottom of the economic ladder don’t get paid much more for being there, but certainly have far higher costs.
My advocacy for it on a more macro level is as part of a wider strategy of a more diffuse spread of economic resources, and thus sustaining more areas, with a more sustainable cost of living across the board and energising business opportunities in a wider range of places.
It won’t do it alone, but it’s an important piece of the puzzle. A simultaneous dropping of working hours, or the adoption of a 4 day week or whatever you can at least in theory offset some of the decline in demand from work commutes with visits for pleasure.
It’s no advocacy of dismissal of any particular group or sector. It’s a process to move to something better, but I don’t personally think it’s possible to transition without some pain, in some place.
I’m sure most here aren’t in denial on this, perhaps elsewhere this is less the case. We can collectively sit there with decades of evidence of negative trends and go ‘this is fine’ like that meme, or attempt to push to something better with the full knowledge that there will be some teething issues. Tragedy of the commons territory and all that.
I do think elected officials that were elected to make sure their city thrives should be trying to do exactly that. If you want to have a macro view and say sure San Francisco is struggling but maybe there's less of a brain drain from rural areas or at least non-residents won't have to commute into the city, fine. But it's absolutely not how SF's elected officials should see it. In fact, it's not how they see it. They would love for people and office workers to return to their downtown to bring it back to life instead of it being run down and depressing. I'm just pointing out that their best effort would be outplayed by a ten-year old smashing buttons on the controller. They are too dumb to see the consequences of their own actions and then they want to play take-backsies.
On April 14 2024 06:38 BlackJack wrote: They are too dumb to see the consequences of their own actions and then they want to play take-backsies.
Btw unless you live in this area I really think it's hard to drive home to any foreigner how frequent and insane this problem is. It's not like 1-2 bad decisions. They try to outdo themselves every week.
The new one from last week has to do with a grocery store that is closing down due to rampant shoplifting, with concerns that the community will be left in a food desert. Besides peppering the dialogue with complaints of the store being racist and white supremacist (naturally) because this happened in a minority neighborhood, let's see the proposed solution:
They are trying to pass a law to allow residents to sue grocery stores if they try to close without jumping through hurdles like giving 6 months notice and making an effort to find a successor store or some other way for residents to get groceries.
You know, because San Francisco is already a hard place to do business right now, so the obvious solution is to pass laws that are even more hostile to businesses, right?
A 10 year old could see how this law would backfire but these people don't have the foresight to stop themselves from walking into a pole. But I have no doubt their heart is in the right place. This is the epitome of wokeness to me - when you're so blinded by your desperate attempt to appear compassionate and favoring social justice that there's no room left for common sense.
Who could of guessed who bj though was worth empathizing with. That poor lady having to rejoin the workforce after her company failed like many others do naturally in the face of capitalism. But forget the poors and forget capitalism a rich person is suffering.
Oh I guess they aren't rich anymore so fuck em right bj?
Dude like there’s a world outside of San Francisco, and how au fait can one expect people to be with one specific locale?
I could pop in, post some story about something that seems daft in Belfast (there’s plenty, and yes it would be off-topic) and nobody here is really going to have much ability to argue with my 34 years living here and innate exposure to culture and politics here.
If one zeroes in on this specific topic, to others on face value it’s quite hard to argue against your conclusions. Or not even argue, have some meaningful discourse.
I feel sourcing is often overrated outside of specific claims, a lot can be gleaned from a bit of back and forth. But I do feel some wider context is needed to make much judgement as an outsider for this and other San Franciscan-specific issues that you bring up.
I mean what else has been tried in the past? Is the issue so pronounced that you have seen areas actually end up as de facto food deserts? That kinda thing, one’s assessment will change pretty considerably depending what context surrounds it.
On April 14 2024 09:02 Sermokala wrote: Who could of guessed who bj though was worth empathizing with. That poor lady having to rejoin the workforce after her company failed like many others do naturally in the face of capitalism. But forget the poors and forget capitalism a rich person is suffering.
Oh I guess they aren't rich anymore so fuck em right bj?
Unsurprisingly what you’re offering here is the same as all your posts. “I care more about the poor than you so I’m a better person, you capitalist” “I care more about grandmas dying of covid than you so I’m a better person, you anti-vaxxer.” The premise is always the same, the other words are interchangeable.
Funny how you take zero effort to actually explain why the policies you support are more beneficial than the policies I support. That’s irrelevant to you. What matters to you is making sure everyone knows that your motives are the most morally good, results be damned. It’s purely an exercise in vanity.
EPT
