Uber and Lyft Consider Franchise-Like Model in California (nytimes.com) 169
Uber and Lyft, which are facing mounting pressure to classify their freelance drivers as full-time employees in California, are looking for another way. From a report: One option that both companies are seriously discussing is licensing their brands to operators of vehicle fleets in California, according to three people with knowledge of the plans. The change would resemble an independently operated franchise, allowing Uber and Lyft to keep an arms-length association with drivers so that the companies would not need to employ them and pay their benefits.
The idea would effectively be a return to the days of how groups of black cars were run. Lyft has presented the plan to its board of directors, one person said. Uber, which already works with fleet operators in Germany and Spain, is also familiar with the business model. The companies have not committed to the franchise-like plans, said the people with knowledge of the discussions, who asked to remain anonymous because the details are confidential. Uber and Lyft are waiting to see how California's legal situation around drivers, who have been treated as independent contractors, plays out first, they said.
The idea would effectively be a return to the days of how groups of black cars were run. Lyft has presented the plan to its board of directors, one person said. Uber, which already works with fleet operators in Germany and Spain, is also familiar with the business model. The companies have not committed to the franchise-like plans, said the people with knowledge of the discussions, who asked to remain anonymous because the details are confidential. Uber and Lyft are waiting to see how California's legal situation around drivers, who have been treated as independent contractors, plays out first, they said.
How can we make this someone else's problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well said.
Shove labor and fair-wages off on someone else (Score:5, Informative)
So all they're doing is trying to push the figure-out-how-to-pay-drivers part off onto someone else.
My guess is a few unscrupulous businessmen will try it and end up trying it and will be sued within the next few years, or family-businesses will buy franchises and operate them similarly to how family businesses operate restaurants where they can skirt some of the payroll issues, or possibly even more ironic, taxi companies might pick up the franchise contracts and the prices basically come up to parity with taxis or even higher.
They don't seem to understand that if labor wins as it should, this model is hosed. It literally only works if either 1) a driver is a very-occasional driver that's actually picking up the equivalent of paying hitchhikers heading for destinations already near the destination of the driver, or 2) cars are 100% autonomous.
Or they just sell a "franchise" to every driver (Score:2)
On the other hand parts runners get away with this. But then again the ones I know employ mostly ex-cons (usually with violent or excessive records) who nobody cares if they get abused, and Uber can't do that since those guys won't pass a background check.
Basically there won't be enough dodgy drivers that
and the people running the franchises will sue to (Score:2)
and the people running the franchises will sue to be classed as employees as they will have no control.
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and the people running the franchises will sue to be classed as employees
It doesn't work that way. The franchisees will almost certainly be required to incorporate. A corporation has no standing to sue for misclassification of employment.
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I think the GP meant that the franchisees will be sued to get their drivers classified as employees.
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I expect they are trying to make each individual driver a franchise owner. So if their Uber fails, it is all on them.
However I expect it may just end up people not using their services. If they have to create their own company and fill out the paperwork. They might as well start their own business vs Franchise, and deal with the overhead.
Re:Shove labor and fair-wages off on someone else (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah paperwork, and having to fill out business and personal taxes every year will be a super pain in the ass. If you are full time uber maybe, but if it's just a 10-15hr a week side hustle? No thanks. Especially since you know the whole reason you have to do the extra work is to avoid getting properly compensated. Under paid and I get extra business and taxes crap to sort out in my spare time? Sign me up !
IMO these companies are horrible and I won't deal with them. I'd rather deal with the taxi license mafia that at least pays somewhat reasonably than prop up a stupid business model that relies on people being willing to be underpaid and have no benefits.
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The "paperwork" to form a corporation can be done online. It takes about 20 minutes and costs about $200.
Filing business taxes costs about $70 annually. Filing an S-corp tax return is no more effort than preparing a Schedule-C for your personal tax return.
On the plus sign, there are many opportunities to write off expenses. My spouse runs an S-corp out of our house. We write off half our utilities and the car payments on my minivan as tax-deductible business expenses. We recently bought a new set of fu
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Uber is not a transportation company. It is a non-profit engaged in spreading Math knowledge. Only those who cant do math drive for Uber and after 6 months they leave having learnt Math in the school of life. Math disabled folks cant be expected to figure out their own taxes
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We write off half our utilities and the car payments on my minivan as tax-deductible business expenses. We recently bought a new set of furniture for our dining room, and since we occasionally discuss business while eating lunch, it was fully deductible as "office furniture".
If you're deducting the full amount of your dining room furniture, why aren't you deducting the full amount for your utilities? Could it be because S-corp home office deductions [firmofthefuture.com] are an allocated portion of the total expense?
You may want to rethink the wisdom of taking a full deduction
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They don't seem to understand that if labor wins as it should, this model is hosed. It literally only works if either 1) a driver is a very-occasional driver that's actually picking up the equivalent of paying hitchhikers heading for destinations already near the destination of the driver, or 2) cars are 100% autonomous.
I don't think option 2 will work. Autonomous vehicles cost money. If there are no drivers for them to offload these costs, Uber/Lyft have to purchase, maintain, fuel, and insure these vehicles. Most drivers are currently subsidizing Uber/Lyft by eating these costs.
This assumes autonomous vehicles ever exist, which I also question. The best use for autonomous vehicles so far is as a smoke screen when swindling VCs out of their money.
Dunning-Kruger Economics (Score:2)
So all they're doing is trying to push the figure-out-how-to-pay-drivers part off onto someone else.
Unless you crafted that post yourself using primitive hand tools constructed from raw materials in the natural environment, then you "problem pushed" almost the entire effort.
Similar to how you push the problem of growing, harvesting and milling your own wheat off onto someone else when you purchase a bag of flour at the grocery store. Or mining, smelting and alloying raw ores then stamping metal when you buy a stainless-steel butter knife to butter that bread. Or raising the cow, milking the cow and chur
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:this is just getting ridiculous. (Score:5, Interesting)
Once again asking the wrong question. In America the discussion has been forced to "who is going to pay for all this" as a way to stifle progress and prevent a solution. The question you really should be asking is why healthcare is so goddamn expensive here. And the answer simply put is our healthcare industry is inefficient at every level seemingly by design. Just about everything is done wrong. The way billing happens is done wrong, the way hospitals are managed is done wrong. The kinds of business relationships between providers and hospitals is wrong. The way drugs are tested and approved is wrong. The way medical data is compiled, stored, transmitted and protected is all wrong.
Most nations with single payer systems manage to pull it off because their systems are more efficient than ours. If you tried to do single payer in America today without changing anything else it would collapse. You need a top down rework of how we do healthcare first. Who knows, maybe by the time we accomplish that the cost would be lowered so much that who pays for it isn't all that important anymore.
Re:this is just getting ridiculous. (Score:4, Insightful)
. And the answer simply put is our healthcare industry is inefficient at every level seemingly by design.
The drug prices are high. The equipment is expensive and often had costly service contracts and unfavorable interest rates for loans. The doctors' tuition are high. The liability insurance for doctors and clinics are high. The legal settlements and judgement are high.
We'd have to reform every level of our medical system to reverse the past 50 years of fuckery. I've never seen a political candidate that was even remotely close to discussing what it would take to fix healthcare. At best you get people who want to hand wave a single payer system as the only step necessary. Significantly worse than that is to use tax dollars to offset private insurance premiums (thanks Obama). And absolute worst is to pretend nothing is wrong with the status quo and label any solution as a communist plot to corrupt our bodily fluids.
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"death panels meme" is what we used to call spin doctoring back in the olden days of the 80's and 90's. It's propaganda that was effective in the age of sound bites, where most voters have such a shallow understanding of their own government that a simple phrase or short sentence is enough to persuade them. The real innovation is when we found out that those sound bites don't even have to be true to capture the hearts and minds of voters.
We'll fix health care when your average person cares enough to hold th
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We'll fix health care when your average person cares enough to hold their political representative's feet to the fire.
No you won't. The average person doesn't trust that politician with health care. The average person gets health coverage from her job. [census.gov]
Also, the overwhelming majority of politicians are in safe districts.
Average person gets health coverage from her job (Score:2)
The average person gets health coverage from her job.
This is the difference between the US and almost all of the rest of the world, and it's the best example of the Law of Unintended Consequences [wikipedia.org] of which I am aware.
The reason the US worker gets health coverage from her job, and not from the government like everywhere else, arose during World War II, and was almost completely accidental. I quote a 2017 Chicago Tribune article [chicagotribune.com]:
As demand for everything — particularly labor — climbed, Congress passed the Stabilization Act of 1942, which allowed the president to freeze wages and salaries for all the nation's workers. A day after its passage, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order invoking these powers, which applied to "all forms of direct or indirect remuneration to an employee," including but not limited to salaries and wages, as well as "bonuses, additional compensation, gifts, commissions, fees."
But there was an exemption of massive proportions slipped into a fateful clause: "insurance and pension benefits" could grow "in a reasonable amount" during the freeze.
As companies struggled to deal with wartime labor shortages, the wage freeze left them in a serious bind: How could they retain workers if they couldn't give raises? If they didn't soon realize the allure of fringe benefits, insurance companies pressed that case through marketing campaigns, as historian Jennifer Klein has observed.
The Revenue Act of 1942 triggered another rush to enroll employees in health plans. By slapping corporations with tax rates of 80 or even up to 90 percent on any profits in excess of prewar revenue, Congress all but guaranteed a frenzied search for loopholes. Employee benefits, according to the new law, could be deducted from profits. As an anonymous employer observed in a study published on trends in health insurance, "it was a case of paying the money for insurance for their employees or to Uncle Sam in taxes."
In 1943, two rulings helped accelerate the movement toward employer-sponsored health insurance. The first was a directive by the Internal Revenue Service that employees did not have to pay taxes on premiums paid by their employers. The second was a decision by the National War Labor Board reaffirming the exemption of fringe benefits from the wage freeze.
After the war, a series of administrative and legal rulings kept these incentives in place, despite several attempts to reverse them. Meanwhile, the number of people enrolled in health insurance plans skyrocketed, with most of the growth driven by corporate group policies. In 1940, only 9.8 percent of Americans had some kind of medical insurance; by 1946, the number had grown to just under 30 percent.
(For the true insurance nerd, incredible amounts of additional background and detail on the development of health insurance for worker
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The drug prices are high. The equipment is expensive and often had costly service contracts and unfavorable interest rates for loans. The doctors' tuition are high. The liability insurance for doctors and clinics are high. The legal settlements and judgement are high.
Ad a dirty third worlder, one thing that will necer cease to shock is how high the prices of everything are in the US.
Sure, you are getting paid 200k$ a year, and am getting paid 20th of that, but my food expenses cost about 50$ monthly, no joke. A visit to the doctor on the very expensive side is about 20-30$.
Looking at the salaries of the US might make it attractive, but what's the point of those salaries if everything is 20x more expensive than here?
For the worldwide flagship of Capitalism, it sure seems rather inefficient when it comes to prices.
Medicare doesn't pay anywhere near those prices (Score:2)
Tuition is easy to fix, make college free. Doctors are incredibly valuable and they work their asses off in college. They shouldn't have to pay for the privi
Bingo (Score:5, Interesting)
I can fly to Germany and buy insulin and with the airfare its still the cheaper option. And before you open your mouth no its not subsidized its because Germany can negotiate prices. We are getting royally fucked by drug companies.
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Once again asking the wrong question. In America the discussion has been forced to "who is going to pay for all this" as a way to stifle progress and prevent a solution. The question you really should be asking is why healthcare is so goddamn expensive here.
Exactly right. The main problem with the ACA is it considered "affordability" only in the context of who pays. It needed to focus on how much. Right now medical service providers are gaming the system like crazy.
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>And the answer simply put is our healthcare industry is inefficient at every level seemingly by design.
The health insurance system certainly is.
Health insurance is a method for transferring money from healthy people to sick people who need it.
Health insurance companies don't get rewarded for being efficient. Quite the contrary: they get rewarded based on how *inefficient* they are. The more money they take from health people, and the less money they give to sick people, the more profit they make.
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>And the answer simply put is our healthcare industry is inefficient at every level seemingly by design.
The health insurance system certainly is.
Health insurance is a method for transferring money from healthy people to sick people who need it.
Health insurance companies don't get rewarded for being efficient. Quite the contrary: they get rewarded based on how *inefficient* they are. The more money they take from health people, and the less money they give to sick people, the more profit they make.
They don't give money to sick people. They give money to health service providers and drug companies.
To keep costs down they pressure they providers hard to cut costs, and some things they wont pay for.
True story: I went to the ER for a minor ankle fracture. Got a few x-rays and a light splint.
Hospital charges: $3500
Insurance in-network charge: $900
My obligation: $350
Without the insurance company ratcheting it down I would have been directly billed $3500.
The post-insurance $350 seems a lot more reasonable
Re:this is just getting ridiculous. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's because the incentives are misaligned. Honestly, this is exactly why government exists.
If you're a business that makes money from someone that's sick, what's your incentive? It's not to make the person well, it's to keep them sick. (This is on the more macro level—I have no doubt that on a personal level, doctors are trying very hard to make people well.)
If you're in a business that insures sick people, what's your incentive? It's not to pay out insurance money to health providers, it's to be as stingy as possible with payouts, even if that means leaving your customers high and dry.
The health industry is VERY EFFICIENT at turning health problems into money, and that's the problem.
A government's incentive is to have everyone healthy, 100% of the time. For a properly functioning government, keeping people healthy pays off the best. Not only do you not have to pay for care, but healthy people are productive and work and go shopping and pay taxes and all the rest of it.
This is also why there's so little research into antibiotics. In general, antibiotics work really well and you only need one course of them every once in a while and that's it. The ROI is super low compared to something like cholesterol medication that you have to take every day.
So to fix the problem you need to realign everyone with the right incentives. Governments need to take over the business of health care, and private industry needs to take over the business of developing new tech and drugs that make the government better at its role as health care provider. That's it. Virtually every other way to do this ends in disaster or endless, hopeless bureaucracy.
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Another angle is that health care demand is inelastic. If somebody needs health care, they're not going to forgo it because it costs too much. As a result, the "free market" doesn't work for healthcare, which is another way of describing why it's such a big mess (but your post is a much better way to describe why the system doesn't work in the US).
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Most nations with single payer systems manage to pull it off because their systems are more efficient than ours.
Yet a great portion of the advances in care and technology (not all of course) still come from America. Others come from suppliers who sell products in American and indeed charge Americans more for them than they charge or own governments. Its almost like Americans are subsidizing the advancement of medical care for the rest of the world.
Go ahead lets do medicare for all with its current rates and what have you; and watch how expensive high risk R&D grinds to halt because there is no ROI there. People
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Yet a great portion of the advances in care and technology (not all of course) still come from America. Others come from suppliers who sell products in American and indeed charge Americans more for them than they charge or own governments. Its almost like Americans are subsidizing the advancement of medical care for the rest of the world.
While I actually agree with you that we are in large part subsidizing the RnD side I don't think that has much to do with the across the board higher costs you see in the US.
Most of the costs I'm talking about are due to the insane and byzantine billing system we have in place that requires an absurd amount of administrative overhead. Some new revolutionary cancer drug is one thing but why does it cost so much to get a broken bone in a cast? Stuff that should be commodity care are still expensive. I don't l
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why does it cost so much to get a broken bone in a cast?
How much does it cost?
Broken Bone: The average cost for a non-surgical treatment of a broken arm or leg is about $2,500. [guardiandirect.com]
And how much is that?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a median personal income of $865 weekly for all full-time workers in 2017. [wikipedia.org]
3 weeks pay.
Is that a dramatic amount? I’m not sure what point you were trying to make.
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Yes I think that is a dramatic amount. I said as much.
I’m not sure what point you were trying to make.
Have, have you not been reading my posts? My point is healthcare as a whole is too expensive due to serious systemic inefficiencies in the system and that is what everyone should be focused on first. If you switch to single payer before solving the cost issues you will just bankrupt the program.
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Why do you consider 3 weeks pay a dramatic amount?
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Because in reality people have expenses so out of 3 week's pay, 1 week would pay for housing, 1 week towards car, insurance and gas, and some of 3rd week's pay for food and other expenses. So best case this would mean 9 weeks of not spending on anything but absolute necessities and hoping that nothing else goes wrong.
American Healthcare is just fine (Score:2)
That's why the left wing are hammering "Medicare for All". We already have the system in place, we just need to let everybody use it.
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I agree 100% that we need to look at why healthcare costs so much. That was my one big problem with ObamaCare... it didn't actually address costs.
This is honestly a curiosity of mine. Why do you list so many reasons except one of the biggest costs (medical staff). I'm not here to say medical staff are underpaid or overpaid or anything like that. My point is that medical care is expensive because LABOR is expensive.
I'm in Canada and we have universal healthcare. It often takes up almost half our provincial b
Re:this is just getting ridiculous. (Score:5, Interesting)
And that can be accomplished? How? Are doctors and nurses going to volunteer to take big pay cuts? No. Are you going to win a political fight to cut the pay of doctors and nurses? No.
How much they get paid isn't the problem. It's more about how they get paid. Did you know that many doctors working at hospitals are not direct employees of the hospital but are independent contractors? Patients can get billed multiple times by multiples groups that should be one entity but aren't. And even if providers want to stay are independents, Healthcare is the only industry I know of where the customer is billed separately by the various contractors. In every other industry there is a primary and they give the customer the bill.
What this does is complicate billing which increases overhead requiring more staff, and more specialized staff in accounts receivable.
Then you have the issues with how billing works. You have a complicated and byzantine system of billing codes. These vary from state to state and its a professional certification to actually be able to assign the right billing codes to procedures. Annoyingly they call these people coders. These codes change yearly by the way.
So that's another big dollop of bureaucracy and overhead. The next bit is how prices are determined.
Care providers and insurance companies have a very adversarial approach to this where negotiations over prices happen effectively endlessly. Agreement is almost never reached so hospitals will end up using questionable and unethical tactics like massively overcharging for procedures as a way to start the negotiation process with insurance companies ON YOUR BILL. These aren't negotiations that happen in meetings with suits, these are battles fought over with real patients. Larger hospitals often have departments dedicated to this stuff.
Then we get to the IT side of things. HIPAA was supposed to address the issue of PHI portability. But it didn't. It should have specc'd file formats, network protocols and APIs for standard communication between medical records systems but we dont have that. There was an attempt, its called HL7 but its a standard in the same way SQL is. So it isn't.
Because of this you have an industry of completely proprietary medical records software called EMRs or EHRs depending on who you ask. They do not talk to each other by default. To make them do so requires a lot of money if its even possible. And like any other niche industry software its garbage too. Unreliable, poor performance, stupid hacky requirements. You know how it goes. And this stuff is very expensive. Its always amazed me how professionals are willing to accept their core applications are garbage and cost millions. Makes no sense to me.
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And you think someone really smart will get put in charge to dictate 50,000 little details to about the daily work of everyone in the health care industry? For a modest savings. No.
Someone could try to build trust, make a few modest reforms, and spend a couple decades trying to build on that. But not with the wolves circling the industry.
You guys never learn (Score:2)
There aren't enough "billionaires". Tax them all and you don't get enough money to accomplish anything.
Not like that ever happens anyway. You keep advocating for more government power and you never seem to notice that rich people never seem to have any trouble. Every new rule always has a special workaround for rich people with an accountant and a lawyer. Always.
Do you know why? Because people in government care about themselves and are always careful to make sure to patronize those who can help them o
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How does the rest of the world handle a functioning health care system for all, and the US can't?
Same way you get a huge beautiful shade tree in your yard. By starting 60 years ago.
People in other countries also have endless complaints about their health care systems, BTW. So even though they started 60 years ago and kept costs from rising as much as they've risen here, they still have many problems, just like everything involving humanity and the real world.
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So, then, it might take a long time, so we should never bother? Is that what you're saying?
Does anyone trust anyone else enough to allow them to make meaningful changes to health care? Not right now. So if you want it to get better, you need to start rebuilding trust in society. The last guy who tried to mess with our health care used the lie of the year [npr.org] to sell it. So you've got a long way to go to rebuild trust before you can even get started on health care.
Come up with something to help everyone if you want to start rebuilding trust. Making up schemes to steal from out groups shows the op
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You talk about "building trust", yet you call Obama's statement the "lie of the year". Pot, meet kettle.
That's what NPR called it.
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You talk about "building trust", yet you call Obama's statement the "lie of the year". Pot, meet kettle.
Also, how does complaining about me help anything? Does it get you closer to whatever health care goal you have? No. Does it get you closer to any goal? No. Does it accomplish .... anything? No.
Instead of sneery finger-pointing, someone who wanted things to get better should be trying to think of a way to make things better.
My way of doing that is to try to get people to stop fantasizing about magic health care fixes. Believing in a fantasy means you can't actually participate in any discussion about
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People in other countries also have endless complaints about their health care systems, BTW. So even though they started 60 years ago and kept costs from rising as much as they've risen here, they still have many problems, just like everything involving humanity and the real world.
Of course there are problems elsewhere too. But people aren't dying because they can't afford their fucking insulin.
401(k)'s are bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
X rays don't cost that much (Score:2)
$5000 x-rays.
X-ray: On average, X-rays cost around $260 to $460, varying by provider and geographic location. [guardiandirect.com]
Why not simply tell the truth?
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Why is insurance or lack of the issue? I would think 5000 dollar xrays are the problem. Abolish health insurance, abolish licensing, abolish the FDAs right to block treatments (They can still provide approved label and leave it up to consumers if they want to use something without the approved lael). Focus on regulations like all prices for medical care have to be stated up front. If SpaceX can bid fixed cost on literally rocket science doctors can figure out the cost of their time. Have govt cover emergenc
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1. Voting get easier. Universal Vote By Mail & Automatic Voter Registration at a minimum. Universal Suffrage would be good too.
Did you see what happened in the NY primary which was conducted by mail? This is the nightmare we are rushing towards this November. It's insanity:
https://www.theatlantic.com/po... [theatlantic.com]
"More than a month after New York’s June 23 primary elections, state election officials are still counting votes. In some legislative districts, they haven’t even started counting absentee votes. In the best-case scenario, election officials hope to declare winners by the first Tuesday in August—six weeks after
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Hasn't the United States had universal suffrage since the 19th Amendment, a 100 years ago today?
Re:this is just getting ridiculous. (Score:5, Informative)
DarkOx blathered:
Mail in voting could have been a thing since some of the earliest days of the republic but its not because we are supposed to have a secret ballot! Which you can't have with mail in voting.
Nonsense.
I live in Ohio, a Republican-dominated state in all but presidential election years. We have vote-by-mail (absent voting), the integrity of which is well-safeguarded. First, unless you are serving as an election official, you have to specifically request an absent ballot, either by mail or in person, at the county board of elections office (election officials are automatically issued absent voter ballots, because they are, by law, required to be continuously present at the precinct to which they've been assigned from 30 minutes before the polls open until the last eligible voter has cast his/her ballot - the doors are locked at 7:30 pm, but anyone who was in line prior to that time must be permitted to vote - so, since they're never assiged to serve at their own precinct, that's the only method available for poll workers to vote). Second, each ballot comes with two envelopes: an inner one with no distinguishing marks, into which you seal your completed ballot, and an outer one, which you must sign and to which you must affix proper postage, and on which you must print either your driver's license/state ID number, or your social security number. At the county election board, those inner envelopes containing ballots are removed from their outer envelopes and transferred, unopened, into ballot boxes. Those ballot boxes are then opened (by a different team of workers than those who removed the ballots from their individually-identifiable mailing envelopes), and the anonymized ballots within them are tabulated, just as are the similarly-anonymized ballots of voters who declined to use the voting machines and insisted on casting a paper ballot.
Formally-appointed observers from both parties typically oversee the opening and counting of absent ballots to ensure that no hanky is pankied in the counting.
Or, to put it another way, you're an ignoramus who has no actual grasp of the mechanics of vote-by-mail in the USA, and you're simply parroting talking points authored by people who, for purely partisan reasons, have a vested interest in casting doubt on the integrity of the process.
The exact identity of those authors is left as an exercise for the reader ...
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Before you can have automatic voter registration, you need at least one normal registration ... which is to say, you need a national ID.
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State IDs are just fine ... racists expect someone to have ID ... which is it?
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It's a defacto national ID system, but not an ID mandate.
Automatic voter registration would require the latter.
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Voting shouldn't be "easier" than it currently is.
Voting should require some effort to vote. Period. I have YET to have anyone explain to me how our current voting system is "too hard" for people, especially considering Absentee ballots are easy enough to do.
We need certainty when we vote, anything less than 100% is unacceptable. Right now, we're not moving towards 100% certainty, we're moving away from it. Nobody knows anything, and all problems are being ignored.
This is why voting, IN PERSON, on PAPER bal
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Voting should require some effort to vote. Period. I have YET to have anyone explain to me how our current voting system is "too hard" for people, especially considering Absentee ballots are easy enough to do.
It's hard to explain dysfunction to someone who benefits from it. Let's see what you need to do to get an absentee ballot in Texas:
you are 65 years or older;
you are disabled;
you will be out of the county on Election Day and during the period for early voting by personal appearance; or
you are confined in jail, but otherwise eligible, or certified for participation in the address confidentiality program.
So basically, you need to be a Republican voter in order to qualify. And by the way, if you lie on an absentee request form about being out of the state, you can get jailed for up to 5 years.
Crazy (Score:4, Insightful)
How are we going to prop up an unprofitable business? I know: let's introduce a middle man to siphon off a little bit of that profit. That will definitely help.
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I don't think they'll end up doing it. The top-level guys at the iTaxi services are still in the initial phases of figuring out what they're going to do. They never thought this could happen. "We've always just ran over everyone else before. Send the lobbyists off with a little more money, it'll all turn out OK."
Now it's beginning to look like it may not play out that way. So they are just now starting to consider alternatives. It's against their nature to consider paying the ground-level employees more, so
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2017 (Score:2)
The way most of these businesses got away with this "you're a contractor" B.S. was one of two tricks, either they only hired young folks and basically split the cost of benefits with them (relying on the fact that young folks are willing to forgo them in exchange for a bit more pay) or they go after violent ex-c
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2017 reported 34% of workers are in the "gig" economy. That's insane.
It's insane because the BLS never reported anything of the sort. Here is what the BLS said about contingent workers in 2017: [bls.gov]
Now that report didn't look specifically at "short jobs or tasks that workers find through mobile apps", but this supplement did: [bls.gov]
So the BLS say
Fight on (Score:3, Insightful)
On one corner there is the existing taxi companies with their old, broken system, poor service quality, and still low wages with "owner operator" cabs
On the second corner there is Uber, consistently bleeding money, does not employ its drivers, but provides very good service, and many drivers actually can make six figures.
And on the third corner there is State of California with severely underfunded unemployment and pension funds, desperately needing to classify more workers as wage workers instead of independent contractors.
It is fun to watch...
Re:Fight on (Score:5, Insightful)
and many drivers actually can make six figures.
*Citation needed
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Re:Fight on (Score:5, Funny)
and many drivers actually can make six figures.
*Citation needed
I think the six figures look like this:
XXXX.XX
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He isn't making 100k a year from uber.
He's stating "an amount of time uber clocked as one hour, which included three rides, made $167.97 and this is definitely an absolutely typical hour and you can absolutely get forty of these every week".
Which is absolute nonsense, as I am sure you are aware
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That is a story about a guy who don't make 100.000 a year after expenses driving for uber. Are you sure you linked to the correct story?
What's old is new again (Score:3)
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screw their employees out of money and benefits
because the drivers dont want to work for uber but uber is forcing them to stay somehow. Its slavery.
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This. Nobody is forcing anyone to do anything. People contract with Uber/Lyft/Grubhub, etc. because that's what they want to do. It's choice and California doesn't get a say in what sort of contract the companies make with their contractors. What's next, a construction general contractor will be required to force his subs to pay a certain wage? At what point does my business as a subcontractor/driver differ from a sub that does tile or plumbing?
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would not generally be legal for other companies in America
Are you kidding, there are TONs of contractors in this country. just because UBER drivers are paid less (Which they think is fair enough to take the deal, which they can back out of any time) does not make it any less exploitation than when a company pays me to be a firmware/pcb contractor.
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would not generally be legal for other companies in America
Are you kidding, there are TONs of contractors in this country. just because UBER drivers are paid less (Which they think is fair enough to take the deal, which they can back out of any time) does not make it any less exploitation than when a company pays me to be a firmware/pcb contractor.
Just about anyone can drive a car for Uber or Lyft. The pool of people who can work on firmware/pcbs is much, much smaller. You probably have an ability to negotiate your contract, your rates, etc. With Uber/Lyft, if you sign up it's take their terms or none at all, and it's no loss to them if you don't sign up.
Here's a tip for you: you're a contractor. Uber/Lyft drivers aren't. They're underpaid employees who have to provide (and maintain) their own equipment with no benefits.
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The problem that Uber and Lyft are facing is that they fundamentally haven't offered anything new
What about:
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Those are the only two things on your list that Uber/Lyft have innovated. Everything else was in place with the taxi companies prior to that. And it's not clear to me that those "innovations" benefit society at large.
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And it's not clear to me that those "innovations" benefit society at large
So, you've never taken a cab then? And I'm not sure where you're from, but the few places that I've lived recently, their taxi companies didn't offer anything on that list. Once you were finally able to request a cab (by making a phone call) you'd get somewhat of an ETA, once they finally showed up (if they even did), you had no idea what the bill was going to be until you got to your destination, cash payment was required. And the "no benefit to society" is shot to shit as soon as you look at bar close.
Austin Tx did all that just fine (Score:2)
If you look into it the crappy state of our public transportation had more to do with car dealers & companies lobbying to keep it crap than anything else.
Oh, and all the tech that built those things didn't come from Uber. It was cell phones, GPS & Credit Card processors. What Uber brought to the table was a little thing called "Greyball". A system to detect when local law enforcement was on the prowl for illegal taxi cabs and prev
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Providing accurate ETAs for pickups
Completely contactless payment
Providing ride pricing before the ride starts
Sounds like a minicab.
New things (Score:3)
...they fundamentally haven't offered anything new
New things they offered:
- An easy way for people to make a little extra money instead of sitting at home watching TV
- A transportation service that doesn't blacklist specific neighborhoods
- A transportation service that's not an exclusive cartel using artificial scarcity and government force to inflate prices beyond the ability of regular people to pay
- A way to get a ride without making a phone call and waiting on hold
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Nope (Score:2)
No take backs. You already said you'd leave.
Supid... (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole fight goes like this:
Uber/Lyft: We provide short term convience for people to make extra spending cash , we employ no one. AKA, no one should be attempting to do this full time or make a living from it.
California: You are not allowed to help people out by letting them make extra money on the side you need to employee them, or not help them at all.
Uber/Lyft: Um, yeah, .... let me think about that.
Californa: we are the government we have the gues Put up or Shut Up !.
Re:Supid... (Score:4, Insightful)
You say these companies employ no one and yet they are paying people to complete a task. When I pay for an Uber ride does the money go to Uber or the driver?
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Tens of thousands poorer (Score:3)
Whatever they do, tens of thousands of people will lose the income they used to get from giving people car rides. And millions of people will lose an economic transportation alternative.
Rich people won't mind paying. And a very few other drivers will get slightly better -- but still not at all good -- paychecks.
That's the governing model: help connected people and unions because they give the ruling class part of their union dues. Make everyone else poorer and take away things that make their lives better.
Absolving responsibility (Score:2)
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Most of them do. Uber is (was) just a side gig for extra money. It worked because people could do it for a few hours whenever. Now they'll sit at home watching TV instead.
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If the drivers are getting "fucked" so much, then why don't they just work somewhere else?
Where, exactly, is this "somewhere else?" A lot of them drive because they've been laid off and this is the only kind of work they can get easily/quickly.
Affordable Transportation is not Profitable (Score:2)
- Public Transportation runs on grants
- Legally run taxis are expensive per mile (and the cost is passed on to users)
- Airlines operate on thin margins (funded by premium amenities)
- Passenger Rail (Amtrak) is expensive per mile for the first 200 or so miles and slow due to sharing the same rail as freight
Private automobile transportation is actually pretty expensive, as well. It doesn't seem like it because we have a HUGE multi-faceted industry that has evolved to facilitate and promote private automobile
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I am not defending Uber or Lyft here. They have been scoff laws in all kinds of ways and I think whatever the rules are they should be followed by everyone or changed but I don't think we should miss-characterize the problem either. Before COVID-19 happened we had one of the lowest unemployment rates in decades. If ever there was time when folks had other options for low-skill irregular work this was until recently it, yet they were still choosing to drive for Uber. So if you don't think the rules sh
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Legally run taxis are expensive per mile (and the cost is passed on to users)
In my experience, they end cost is close enough that a taxi isn't prohibitively expensive. I don't take Uber/Lyft because they are the cheapest, I take them because they are convenient and readily available. Maybe some taxi companies have caught up (I haven't tried iHail yet) but at this point I'm comfortable with Uber/Lyft, until they give me a reason to change.
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The fossil fuel industry is only profitable because it is subsidized. That means it's not really profitable either, but collecting subsidies is.
Uber and Lyft affected the DUI economy (Score:2)
The state can't have that happen.
Yay, another middle man (Score:2)
Anyone remember the day when you could just walk out into the street, count to six, wave your hand in the air, and a random taxi pulled over for you? Anyone remember when that random taxi didn't need to be a part of any fleet?
Remember how many people you used to be able to hire to do a job for you, and pay them directly?
This adds yet another greasy palm between me and the person working for me. Between MY money and THEIR money. There's just no way that this can be any better for anyone that matters in th
Do drivers actually want this? (Score:2)
How many of the people who actually drive for Uber and Lyft in California actually want to be considered employees with all the things that come from that (good and bad)?
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who are IC's
Do they get imported from Taiwan?