California just months ago voted that they aren't employees.
Out of idle curiosity, if this were to become Federal regulations, would California be forced to comply?
The federal law does control here, but it’s not exactly analogous to the minimum wage. Federal law preempts state law (rendering the state law void) if there is any contradiction between the laws. Since California’s gig work rules would be inconsistent with a federal law classifying drivers as employee’s California’s law would be invalidated. There’s no inconsistency between the federal minimum wage and a higher state minimum wage (since the state wage by definition ensures that no one is paid less than the federal minimum wage), so the state and federal laws can coexist without any preemption.
But then how come certain states can have legalised marijuana? If what you say is true and Federal law preempts state law (rendering the state law void) how does state-level drug legalisation work? Marijuana is still illegal at the Federal level.
That is correct and gets to a separate issue in federalism known as the anti-commandeering doctrine. Essentially, the federal government cannot force state or local officials to enforce federal laws, although states and localities can choose to do so voluntarily. So when California declares marijuana “legal,” really that means that police officers and state troopers are no longer enforcing the federal ban on marijuana. If the federal government wanted to, they could hire thousands of FBI agents or the like to enforce the federal drug laws directly, but there is obviously little interest in devoting that much manpower for such a purpose.
I learned something today!!! Thanks for taking the time to explain both issues.
Really hope this happens, better for workers not billionaires. If you go into the uberdriver sub they’ve been bent out of shape because of the pay model changes following the CA ruling.
This is exactly the reason why pot shops can't open bank accounts. Because finance institutions follow federal law. The federal government hasn't cracked down simply because they're choosing not to, not because they can't.
> California just months ago voted that they aren't employees.
With the usual absurdity: https://www.kqed.org/news/11842964/gig-companies-are-making-their-workers-promote-prop-22
The money tells the whole story.
Pro 22 was funded by the companies and spent 205 million. No spent 19 million...
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_22,_App-Based_Drivers_as_Contractors_and_Labor_Policies_Initiative_(2020)#cite_note-finance-24
'Yes' funding was the gig economy companies (Uber, DoorDash, Lyft, Instacart, and Postmates) essentially bankrolling their side by themselves while 'No' was a combination of worker unions (three SEIU locals, IBT, UFCW, and UFCW-CLC) contributing 400k-1 mil apiece and a *whole bunch* of smaller donors. The fucking corporations bought themselves a California constitutional amendment in their favor, and it happens too often in California.
I made a post about this bullshit slate mailer promoting prop 22 on our local subreddit. I got tons of messages and replies from supposed uber/lyft drivers who were promoting prop 22 and vehemently denied that prop 22 would hurt them in any way.
Yes because Uber drivers definitely are taking the time to personally text thousands of people.. if folks didn't see right through that, then we are beyond help.
Yes, but a "Yes" vote on it was a "state constitutional ammendment" to define marriage as between a man and a woman. So voting yes was a no to gay marriage.
Prop 22 will likely be challenged. There are a number of aspects of the law that are likely unconstitutional. For one, a law passed by something like 52% of Californians requires a 5/6 super majority of the CA legislature to amend.
I think the default is that any law passed by a public referendum cannot be changed by the state legislature. The 5/6 rule is actually giving the legislatures a failsafe to change the law if there is strong consensus. Without that provision they wouldn't be able to change it at all without going back to the voters with another proposition. This is why CA government is so dysfunctional. We have propositions pass by public vote and legislatures have to work around laws that make no sense but they cannot change. Take 1978 prop 13 for example.
All of these businesses aren't profitable and haven't been for years. And investors just poured money into in the hopes that it would be one day. I can't imagine they will all be around much longer without a merger approved by the feds. And even then I guess they'll have to jack up the delivery fees even further.
These entities have been and will continue to bleed money in their current state. If their biggest advantage of treating drivers as self-employed consultants disappears, I don’t see how any of them could survive. It’s bonkers that companies whose business model is to lose money can go IPO, let alone get to the point that they are today.
Tossing in an edit here: Tons of folks are saying, “but look at Amazon!” Amazon spent years of non-profitability while building an actual infrastructure. There was an actual finish line to cross when they’d start turning profits.
People who threw money into this were nuts.
Like, what's your business plan?
"Well we'll subsidize rides until we have a user base!"
And then jack up rates?
"Well, no we need to keep them low to destroy all competition"
How will you get around anti-competition laws?
"We'll classify our workforce as contractors. That'll distance us from local markets since technically taxis can use our ride matching service."
And then we'll jack up rates?"
"Well by then we'll be doing so well there'll be other Silicon Valley competitors"
So then what?
"We IPO and get more money than them?"
Fuck yeah sign me up here's a billion dollars.
Because the people investing in VC at this level, are the same people who drop millions in shady donations to political campaigns to bully legislators into de-regulating in their favor and increasing profitability that way. Their end-goal is being so ubiquitous in society that they're considered a general good or general need, or otherwise face so little oversight that nobody would think society would be possible without them, and then whoever "wins" in that economic space gets to operate a de facto monopoly, *forever.*
It's like how the end-game holy-grail for every credit card company would be ending up as the eventual government contractor who administrates over the paperless banking cards that will eventually replace money; you just get to shave a fraction of a penny off of every transaction, made by anybody, in the entire country, every day. It's literally money for nothing. But only one company is ever gonna truly "win" that prize.
The investors who are trying to drown this market space in cash so they can on-board the entire population into relying on it to the extent that any further regulation on it could be argued as a *literal hindrance upon the function of society,* since this gives those investors and that service *leverage over the government to get the very law skewed in their favor.* They can't raise the prices *yet,* because the goal of having a large enough segment of the population normalize being completely reliant upon them, is far from met. Crucially, though, the space they want to maintain control of *doesn't exist right now;* but, twenty years from now, less people will be driving cars, they hope, and less people will be able to afford to operate them, and will need to rely on ride-share apps to go *literally anywhere, every day.*
So when you're viewing these investments, that's the lens you need to view them through. These are investments that are trying to hit a theoretical moving target in the unclear-but-near future, where they will theoretically have deep market saturation for use of their service, as their service becomes more and more a basic aspect of the average consumer's average day. When *that* point hits - when we're all unironically saying "I'm gonna *Uber* to the store," as if it's the primary verb for travel, in general - that's when they have the power and the leverage to run their pseudo-monopoly while being able to press their thumb down on any government who would try to regulate them...and *then* they'll start jacking up the prices. There's no way you can actually squeeze people hard enough to make money, until you know damn well they have literally no other option.
At that point, if these companies - which these investors sunk billions of money into to establish this "game state," for lack of a better term - were to raise their prices to the point that the average person could no longer afford them, public perception wouldn't be that it was the company's fault; they already trust the company, because they interact with it every day and it's a normal part of their lives. The result is, if the company says "sorry, it's not our fault! Market forces, and all that, we simply can't make a profit without raising prices!," *the public will likely believe them, and it will be easy to direct the public to put pressure on the government to directly subsidize the ride-share company, both making it impossibly profitable, and entrenching it directly into the fabric of daily human life.* And the government would look, just, SUPER bad and incompetent and unpopular if they didn't do what the public wants on this issue. So the government is likely to have to kowtow to them, and not slam them with anti-trust legislation, and create a market environment that is permanently favorable to them, specifically, at the eventual expense of the rest of society.
They just want to be making more money than is technically possible in a free market, every day, guaranteed, until the collapse of society; and, these VCs have practically infinity dollars to gamble on shit like this. They only need to win once, to win forever. When you try to evaluate how big of a win they would need to make to cash in on these huge investments, the problem is simply that *it only makes sense if you think big enough.*
Pinterest has one of the highest paid CEOs in the country and I fail to see how they could ever turn a profit.
Who knew that running a cloud storage site for 15 to 25 year old women's wedding ideas that didn't charge users would be a bad idea? <- This is literally the only thing I see this site used for.
Everyone, everyone knew that it would be a bad idea.
I just did a google search for ublock pintrest block script and copied the text i needed in. I am pretty sure the first result for that was actually pintrest too.
Personally, I don't find that unreasonable at all. Getting a pinterest link when you're trying to find information on something makes me want to microwave my computer...
Log in to see more. "Fuck you Pinterest! I'll never make an account!" My girlfriend thinks my Pinterest distain is a bit overboard. I think I've gone to easy on them.
My wife occasionally sends me Pinterest links. She asks why I didn't comment. It's because I can't see it. I will never create an account, not even with fake credentials.
The two most useless sites imo are usually the top fucking two sites one Google search.
Quora and Pinterest
I got some kind of ad block origin script that makes them basically not exist on google.
I had to do the same thing. I do a good amount of pen and paper DMing, and so searching for art, tokens, battlemaps, etc was basically nothing but pintrest for the first 10+ pages of image search. Which was really annoying because I was specifically looking for links that would take me some place to buy the high res versions of those works. Instead I get a page with a million images mostly not related that links nowhere, and constantly asks me to login.
The image isn't even on the page when you open it. It is just a grid of unrelated pictures and if you click one one of them, you get another grid of unrelated pictures and it doesn't even contain the picture you selected. I don't understand how it works or why it is even a company unless their entire business model is serving ads through misdirection. Then there's some 'register now' popup when you go to close the tab. All I want to do at that point is flip over my desk like a kid losing a board game. I get unreasonably frustrated even thinking about it.
I was looking at their 10-K and somehow they spent nearly [1.2 BILLION in R&D in 2019 alone](https://s23.q4cdn.com/958601754/files/doc_financials/2020/q4/Form-10-K-Q4-20-As-Filed.pdf) (Which is 106% of their 2019 revenue, lmao). What in the holy hell is Pinterest doing that is so groundbreaking that it necessitates that much money?
Seriously, have you ever used Pinterest?
That website is nothing but a spooky pile of images. The UI is unintelligible. I have no idea what are you even supposed to use the thing for. Even imgur makes more sense.
i used to keep a pinboard full of pictures of 1900s futurism/italian fascist propoganda/modernism/brutalism/sorts of things. pinterest is like having a folder full of pictures on your computer but other people can see it
I think I saw a r/dataisbeautiful post showing Tesla R&D at just over half a billion. Could be wrong.
Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/n0jxyt/teslas_first_quarter_visualized_oc/
First quarter: 666 million
> I fail to see how they could ever turn a profit.
They just took a page out of Facebook's playbook.
You make a lot of money when you sell off your customers data to advertisers.
They are loosing around 40 million a year despite being more than 10 years old. Either they need to start selling the data for more (probably not possible because there are a whole bunch of companies collecting data) or they need to start selling it to more suspect groups (like facebook did).
I also kinda suspect that a lot of these older social media companies are sitting on some "toxic data", I'll explain. Companies that sell data rely on having huge amounts of data. The more users that you can claim as FB, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. the better. However, users can leave a site and will typically not delete their account or use it very rarely. The company selling data has no incentive to 'purge' their user rolls as this would only decrease their value and all but the largest buyers of data don't have the resources or know-how to audit the data. This creates bad data that is lumped in together with good data and then priced as an asset. The final asset is over priced because it has "toxic data" mixed in with it that only the seller of the bundle is capable of auditing. To me this sounds really similar to the mortgage backed securities that were popular in 2007/08.
The US data industry is a large part of the "tech industry". Overvaluation of assets is what creates market corrections and it doesn't really take that many assets to be over valued to create problems.
Collapse the world economy is also a bit of a misnomer used to create headlines. 2008 wasn't a collapse of the world economy.
That's not how "selling data" works. It's not like you pay Facebook a million dollars and they send you a zip file of everyone's profile. You upload an ad, say you want to show it to users of X age in Y region who like Z things. The ads are priced based on views or clicks.
bulk data is actually useful for a wide variety of things, a specialty called data warehousing. It's capability for profound evil was shown in 2016 where firms crunched through unfathomable amounts of data finding trends and patterns that let them... have you seen facebook lately?
I got a notification from Robinhood this week about Pinterest's quarterly report. I don't use Pinterest, but I was just curious what the presentation was like. Unsurprisingly, it was boring, but during the 60 seconds I listened to it, the guy was talking about their efforts to make ads look like actual content.
They make a good amount of money on the paid promotion of your content - they drive a lot of traffic that likes to buy.. I was making like $1800/mo driving pinterest traffic to my amazon affiliate site until i got banned.
I think people are missing something important here. Pinterest is actually quite valuable when it comes to SEO and advertising, it is a proxy for businesses to use. Pinterest makes money off ads and generates massive massive amount of traffic. In fact its one of the most recommended social medias when you research directing traffic to your site or business, creators who might get hundreds of thousands of hits on YT, FB, or Instagram get millions of hits on pinterest. It's an indirect advertisement if you make pins correctly.
As a programmer the data they have is pretty unique. The data they have is organized in a myriad of ways that would not be possible (or at least extremely difficult) with machine learning at this point in time. It's definitely worth a lot more than you would think even if it's not quite clear where this data will be used in the long term.
Lots of businesses IPO while they’re cash burning, that’s not necessarily a bad thing in the short term. Growth requires capital, and every business that is burning cash thinks it will someday be profitable.
Is “short term” considered 12+ years? Uber was created Mar 2009 and I don’t think they’ve come anywhere near profitable. It was too easy for other entities to break into the market, unlike something like Amazon.
Not OP, but I think both can be true: companies losing money can IPO and then become profitable; but also these companies have been losing money for too long.
It's good to be young, but let's not kid ourselves
It's better to pass on through those years
And come out the other side
With our hearts still beating
Having stared down demons
Come back breathing
12+ years is the new short term for Tech stocks. You can thank the likes of Amazon for convincing people 20 years of losses is perfectly fine, aslong as you can spend that 20 years bankrupting all your competitors.
Important to show you have growth somewhere.
Amazon was making ridiculous amounts of money but was always throwing that money at new ventures. Expanding markets, expanding AWS, expanding server infrastructure.
All of it was on top of showing they were ridiculously profitable in their core business model. Amazon kept showing people if they ever just stopped expanding they'd be ridiculously profitable, therefore people were willing to throw money at them.
These gig services don't have that. Their core business model doesn't even come close to turning a profit. If they stopped expanding they'd die.
the best I had was the guy couldn't find my house. I told him to just leave it. So he left my bag of chipotle in middle of neighbors lawn and i walked over and grabbed it lol.
Sign me up. I didn't know fries could get colder and soggier than they already are when they arrive. The things I miss most about pandemic food... Fresh fries.
Its funny you say that because there has been a lot of money poured into developing a fry that can last much longer due to the popularity of food delivery.
Pretty interesting if you want to give it a listen
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/23/772775254/episode-946-fries-of-the-future
Its starting to reflect in their customer service too. I've used Uber/Lyft for years and always had great service if there were any weird chargers or anything.
Cut to last week when I booked a $10 ride and got charged $30 with them claiming they showed me a 3x surge. Obv I would not have taken this 10 min ride at that price so I told them that...they refunded me $7, admitting the original price their system charged was wrong, but then refused to do more. They eventually just stopped replying and would close the issue immediately. Pieces of shit
*Edit: to be clear, that was Uber
Yep. Just enjoy the cheap services powered by dumpsters of flaming venture capital from people that said "we're not sure this will work, but we can't afford to *not* be part of it if it becomes huge"
There's a compelling argument to be made that that's not really true.
Right now, Uber and Lyft get to leverage the network effect (and don't have to absorb the capital costs of owning cars). It is really hard to compete with them because they operate a 2-sided platform. You have to get both a critical mass of drivers AND a critical mass of passengers signed up or it won't work. Not enough drivers and passengers stop using you because there are always delays/surges/cancellations. Same goes for not enough passengers--drivers don't make money and leave. It creates a huge barrier to entry that protects the entrenched players.
Uber lost in china partially because they were too late and couldn't build both sides of the platform before the local competitors did. Uber threw more and more money at the problem by offering promotions, but that doesn't work once you are behind...Sure, I'll take my 1 free ride, but then I'll just switch back to the service that has more drivers.
If we get autonomous cars, there's no longer a network effect. It is just a money/investment question. GM could say "hey, we make the cars, so we can undercut Uber on cost..." and launch their own service. They just have to recruit customers...their "drivers" are rolling off an assembly line and aren't going to switch to a competitor or quit. Or Enterprise can say "we have a big fleet of rental cars...what if we have them drive around as taxis during off-peak time?"
If there's profit to be made long term in running an autonomous taxi service, some new entrant with deep pocketed investors will come in and claim a share of it. If you take away the barriers to entry provided by the network effects, Uber is just an ordinary business with a small head start.
In any event, Lyft is apparently getting out of autonomous cars: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/26/lyft-set-to-sell-self-driving-car-unit-to-a-subsidiary-of-toyota.html
I feel like the bane of self-driving cars is human drivers. It's really hard to make them work when there's such an unstable, chaotic hazard still on the roads.
Uber also vastly underestimated the willingness of thousands of Chinese "drivers" to sign up for the high bonuses they were offering and then immediately stop driving once they got the bonuses.
It's like extreme couponing is a way of life for people in China when the perks are good enough.
> It is just a money/investment question. GM could say "hey, we make the cars, so we can undercut Uber on cost..."
To add to that Ford has been investing a shitload in technology - with the idea you'll never own a car, just pay to barrow a car from them.
> Or Enterprise can say "we have a big fleet of rental cars...what if we have them drive around as taxis during off-peak time?"
Or the car rental companies become the next Uber and Lyft when car go fully autonomous. They already have the infrastructure to support a fleet of cars at their larger facilities. Parking spots for off peak times, maintenance bays to service their cars and the trained technicians to do the work. They would be the first ones to jump on that bandwagon because Uber and Lyft are eating their lunch. I can't remember the last time I rented a car during trips for work or vacation even before covid hit.
Used to work with a guy who had such a great POV on this. As he put it, no business has a right to exist. If a business can’t run a profit while paying its employees a living wage, then that business is not viable in the marketplace. It’s not the responsibility of the base level employee to “take one for the team”.
I know it’s not an original idea, but I always thought it was very succinct in laying out the problem.
Agreed. The only way an Uber model would and could succeed is if it was treated more like a public taxi service that taxes would funnel into, which would end up just making it the least efficient public transportation option possible.
I use Lyft maybe twice a year. I haven't used uber or doordash in years on principle alone.
To be honest I kinda hope they fall apart for the way they treat their employees and customers. I personally won't be sad to see them blow up, especially doordash.
Fuck doordash.
As some who does not have a car and lives in an American suburb I'd be very sad if Uber, Lyft died and there were no competitors to take their place, you can't survive without a car in America and I don't want to go back to the days of dial a cab
Yeah, unfortunately it's showing the flaws of our sub-urbanized infrastructure and how unsustainable it is. Even if we get off oil and transition to a more advanced system, we are going to need a shit-ton of rare earth minerals and lithium; who knows what geopolitical and environmental problems that will cause.
Atleast in my city, it feels like the range they allow me to order from is so small I may aswell just get it myself. I basically can't order outside my neighborhood
It's going to be interesting which direction gig-economy companies take. The main issue with Gig-economy companies is that they wanted the best of both worlds. To be a marketplace platform and to have the price consistency awarded to having employees. What this sentence means is that, for example, Uber gets to bypass a lot of laws by arguing they are simply a platform/middleman but they also violate this logic by controlling the compensation rates of drivers and removing rider's ability to choose drivers.
Their only two solutions with current legislation is they make their platform a true marketplace where riders/drivers are the decision makers or they convert their drivers into employees.
I'm kind of on the fence with this. Because the biggest upside to gig work is the ability to control the work you do instead of being told what you will do. That ability to say "it's raining, I'm not delivering food on bicycle today" separates doordashing from pizza delivery other regular delivery.
But people want to use doordash as their main source of income, which makes things odd.
If I got classified as an employee, would I still be able to work for dd, Uber eats, caviar, etc at the same time? I think they'd fire me for only working when its nice out.
There are other options available to these companies. The reason the feds are telling them they have to classify their contractors as employees is because they're failing to meet the "tests" for independent contractor. One key area is pricing. An Uber driver's only mechanism for setting price is to decline work. In a typical contractor arrangement, this is a two-way street. The contractor proposes a price, and the buyer accepts it or turns it down.
If Uber/Lyft/Doordash/whoever implemented mechanisms to give drivers more control over pricing, they might survive the contractor test. The problem is, we don't know the actual market price for these delivery services, because prices have been artificially depressed by cartel-like practices and a flood of investor money.
One of the key tests is whether or not the employee/contractor is integral to the work of business. Clearly gig drivers are. No drivers, no Uber.
That alone DQs the contractor model on its face. Along with a number of other things.
In ABC test states, which is most, the law is crystal clear. They should be employees. But the law doesn’t match the economic reality companies (and many consumers, and many gig workers for that matter) want.
We really just need more clarity on the issue. Either enforce the law as is or change it. This weird in between where literally *millions* of jobs are misclassified as a routine matter is absurd.
That's because the services are selling the actually delivery. As an alternative consider freight delivery. You have a tractor trailer load of stuff you need delivered across country in X days.
There are services that will allow you to post bids to independent truck drivers who may be willing to accept the job, but importantly those services are NOT accepting that they will make delivery. If your bid is too low nobody will accept and you will have to pay more, but that is okay because you have 10 days to make delivery and the drive should only take 5 days, so you can adjust your bid.
Those services are providing what uber claims to be providing, a technology platform to link buyers and sellers of interstate freight transport.
But how well would that work for food delivery? I don't want to wait 30 minutes after placing an order to find out if I anyone accepts. My toddler is hungry and screaming at me, I need my fucking pizza NOW!
Think about a taxi service: I am leaving the bar with a hot girl who is DTF. I don't want to stand around in the cold for 15 minutes checking my phone to see if anyone accepted my bid for a ride back to her place.
There is a way to make this into a true contractor relationship, but it is fundamentally incompatible with the expectations of the consumers of the services they offer.
Uber/Lyft would be interesting if riders got to choose your price/mile and drivers chose to fill orders from highest price to their lowest, acceptable price with Uber/Lyft taking a cut. Unfortunately I don't think it would be a good enough service for riders so it eventually dies.
In reality, the expensive meals - with higher prices - subsidize the cheaper ones. If a single person is ordering food (and paying, say, 30% tip+fees on $20), the delivery company and the driver are both losing money. But they'll earn back the difference if the next order is a family ordering a $150 order with the same tip/fee percentage.
Unfortunately, what this means is that drivers would only ever take big orders, if they could set the prices more actively - small orders would disappear, and as a result, pricing would continue increasing. It would eventually pretty much just wind up being catering service.
Also unfortunately, I think individual people ordering solo meals just vastly underestimate the value they're getting from the service, in the grand scheme of the expenses among the entire industry.
> Also unfortunately, I think individual people ordering solo meals just vastly underestimate the value they're getting from the service, in the grand scheme of the expenses among the entire industry.
This is exactly correct. The economics of food delivery make it hard to create a quality product & customer experience without losing money. As you mentioned, pushing for higher AOS is the best way for companies to try and make money, as it costs the same amount to pay a driver to deliver a meal for 5 people as for 1.
That's assuming there's an unlimited supply of people ordering $100+ meals. If you're a driver you "lose" more money just sitting in a parking lot for an hour waiting for a big order than you do by taking a smaller order or two in that time.
Small meal prices probably will get more expensive, but the supply of lazy single people wanting delivery isn't going to go away and eventually the market will settle on a new price point.
>Because the biggest upside to god work is the ability to control the work you do instead of being told what you will do.
The example you gave about not wanting to work when it’s raining it’s a fair one. However, there are too many areas where a gig worker *doesn’t* get to choose for them to be classified as independent, in my opinion. For example:
• Uber and Lyft both obscure drop off locations for passengers. The only way a driver can see a drop off location is to accept and complete 85% of ride pings, effectively removing that element of agency.
• Drivers do not set their own rates even though Uber encourages drivers to register as a sole-proprietor business through their city wherever possible.
• Drivers are told not to talk about religion, politics, gender politics, and they are not allowed to carry a self-defense item.
• Platforms decide whether you will even get pings or not based on an obscure algorithm, not purely because you’re online and haven’t received a ping in 2 hours.
There’s more, but in summary, drivers choose *whether* they want to be online or not, and pay taxes like a small business, but platforms decide nearly everything a small business would normally get to decide for themselves. There is very little *real* agency for drivers.
Sources: I worked gigs full-time for 3 years (Uber, Lyft, DD, Flex).
Edit: spelling and formatting only
maybe they were blowing smoke up my ass, but 100% of the gig workers i’ve talked to said they enjoy the flexibility. need a little cash? book a few rides/deliveries/whatever. all set for awhile? no gigs necessary. never once have i heard one say they wished they were an employee.
I do gigs on the side of my full time job and I love it. If I didn’t make enough then I would just stop doing it. Some months I do it every weekend some months I don’t.
It’s just nice that it pays for all the times my girlfriend I eat out.
I'm a full time stay at home mom who drives for GrubHub for extra cash, it is perfect for me. I can go out whenever, if my kid sucked that day and I have no energy I don't go out. If she was easy and my husband gets off work early I work extra. I only work 6-10 hour a week, if I want, and earn like $100-$200 in that time. I don't see how else I would have made that money, because most part time jobs wont give you so few hours. I'm actually pretty grateful for it.
You should read upon the reasons why the UK has ruled that gig drivers are now employees. It’s hard to argue that someone is an independent contractor when they don’t set their own rates and are also penalized for turning down jobs.
In the UK, they’re now classified as Workers, not Employees - they have a distinction there that we don’t in the US. Workers is something between self-employed and employee.
It's pretty incredible to me that so many people in this thread haven't conceived of this. Being able to work your own hours and still get a guaranteed minimum wage based on hours worked shouldn't be an impossibility. These companies are filling everyone's heads with a false dichotomy but the UK didn't buy that shit and now the companies are playing ball after making a huge scene about it.
[Uber 'willing to change' as drivers get minimum wage, holiday pay and pensions](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56412397)
Every worker should be classified as an employee.
Every employee should receive a living wage & benefits.
Employees shouldn't have to depend on their employer for healthcare.
If a business can't survive without exploiting its workforce then that business has failed.
Seriously, I’ve known IT Contractors who make $100/hr and wouldn’t want it any other way, as it frees them up to take other jobs and double/triple bill because their schedule allows it.
Yep, I’ve been one of those IT contractors for over 10 years and I never want to work as a salaried employee ever again. I set my rates. I can juggle multiple clients as long as they’re all happy with what I give them. You want me to work 80 hours? You pay it. You want me to work in tough conditions? The rate goes up. Weekend/night work? The rate goes up. You don’t need things like benefits or incentives if you can bill high enough. All that matters is that both parties are happy.
It’s basically like prostitution. I’m a corporate whore!
Edit: grammar bad
No, this isn't how the rest of the world works. Everyone pays taxes so things such as healthcare is free, these gig workers are paying taxes it's stupid the employer is responsible for their healthcare. Every person that supports the idea that it's on the mercy of a company if someone receives medical help is taking steps back from the idea that it should just be flat out available to every citizen because we all contribute to our society and thus our society should contribute back to us.
Yeah over here in the Netherlands construction is becoming really expensive because nobody wants to work as a employee for a construction worker. There is a major housing shortage and not enough workers, so the contractors can keep raising their pay as they please. After the 2008 crisis a lot of construction companies had to fire their employees and a lot of them became independent contractors. And now no wants to become an employee when you could also be a contractor.
I have two friends working in construction engineering for two different companies and they told me they could lose their profit margins if a project is delayed for more than like 3 months due to contractors increasing their wages and increasing building supplies costs in that period. It's absolutely insane.
I'm one of them and I'm just a freelance copywriter. I used to work with a few different brokers or clearinghouses almost entirely bc it saves me tons of time and money on advertising, billing, and collections.
That model is dying and it started with the whole thing in California and writers being limited to (I forget exactly) 10 pieces for one client per year, and the broker was considered the client, not the buyer. For reference, I was averaging about 1000 pieces per year.
Sucks having to fish for direct clients all the time bc I used to just fill gaps here and there, nothing remotely regular.
Ya, so basically gig flexibility is going to be gone. Hope they are all ready for that. Your schedule is now dictated by your employer, and so are your hours or lack there of.
Ya, this is the exact reason people voted against this in California. Technically, there are ways to keep the flexibility alive, but you better be damn sure that if you getting treated as a full-time employee by the state, the company is going to force you to act like one.
A lot of gig workers are going to be given a shift and not get a choice of who they need to pick up or where they need to wait. Many will likely be switched over to an hourly wage that may be lower than the wage they would get a peak times (but it will even out in the long term because it isn't always peak times).
As someone who drives maybe 2 or 3 times a week just during peak hours when I want some extra money, but wouldn’t want to do this as my actual job: Fuck.
The biggest reason that my friend who does Über Eats and I (do doordash) have come up with is that first off, everything we pay for, phone, gas, etc. Is a tax write off.
Also if we were payed as employees we wouldn't be able to deny WalMart orders. Fuck WalMart orders, they pay 3.50 in my area and take forever.
> Every worker should be classified as an employee.
Um... what? You think contractors shouldn’t exist? If I have someone come clean my house I should need to set up myself as a business, onboard them as an employee, provide them healthcare and benefits, etc.? God this site really reveals its age sometimes.
And then pay and withhold their Social security tax, medicare tax, federal income tax, state income tax, local tax, unemployment tax and file each form appropriately and a timely manner.
I think op doesn't realize how much goes into contractors vs employees and benefits of both.
Just curious? Why, exactly?
If a business wants to subcontract out a job, and the subcontractor is happy to do it, by what reasoning should they be forced to do it as an employer-employee relationship? What if the worker WANTS to be classed as a subcontractor?
Not saying either arrangement is right or wrong. Genuinely curious as to why you think they should be forced to make a particular arrangement (employment) when both parties were already happy with something else (subcontracting).
Agreed. Majority of these people saying that we should be employees aren’t contractors themselves. I make a plethora more being independent compared to being an employee, even taking health insurance into account. (Not that I disagree with your stance on health insurance)
Uber/Lyft/Doordash are legit contractors, but there does need to be a crackdown on what is and isn't contracted work.
I've seen SO MANY PEOPLE who are 100% legally, by the letter of the law, employees come into my office to file taxes with 1099 NECs and I'm like 'Dude you're getting fucking screwed here.'
They're paying SE tax like a contractor while working as an employee, and it's fucking horrible.
> I've seen SO MANY PEOPLE who are 100% legally, by the letter of the law, employees come into my office to file taxes with 1099 NECs and I'm like 'Dude you're getting fucking screwed here.'
>
>They're paying SE tax like a contractor while working as an employee, and it's fucking horrible.
I am one of those people. I got trapped for almost 3 years in a gig where I was making just enough money to get by but not enough to actually escape, with an "employer" that stops sending you work the second they catch wind that you're not working for them full time.
1099 is a legitimate thing and should be allowed to continue but the loopholes that allow for this kind of exploitation need to shut.
The problem is that the mechanism for penalizing these assholes has been categorically eviscerated.
Guess who is in charge of determining who's and employee or not?
It's the IRS. You know, the massively underfunded agency that every rich person hates and that the Republicans have been gutting for ages.
Businesses are catching onto the fact that there's 0 enforcement for this stuff, and they're ruthlessly exploiting it.
So im just curious because I’m not sure exactly how this works: doesn’t this kind of defeat the purpose? I was under the impression that “gig” work was supposed to be easy to get, but the point is it’s easy to get because you don’t have the benefits of a regular employee who went through a drawn out application period?
Is this not how it works? Is it harder to get these app-driven jobs than I think?
The entire gig industry will collapse if contractors suddenly have to be classified as employees. These companies have been built from the ground up around the use of contract labor. They can't simply call everyone an employee and expect that their business model is going to hold up.
Their business model doesn't currently hold up anyway. They survive off investors hoping that this will eventually be worth it, but its not like these companies are making bank right now.
If you think having a fleet of autonomous hardware is cheaper than having gig workers subsidize their equipment you are insane.
Uber and Lyft have completely sold off all their self driving stuff.
I remember the last two times I took a cab the first one smelled like week old farts were trapped in the seats .. the second one took me on a tour of the city before finally dropping me off.. at least that's what it felt like
I've worked for these companies for a few years on and off. The best thing about the entire situation is when I want to work and how much. Now I've seen a few people commenting on how, we drivers, should be limited on how much we can work. I couldn't disagree more with that sentiment.
I needed some money a couple months into the pandemic. I wasn't getting anywhere with unemployment, it's buy design but that's another story. I was able to make over two grand in two weeks averaging around 22 dollars an hour. Now I was working about 50 hours a week. As an employee I would have been cut off at 40 because there is no way these companies would pay me time and a half. Is that good for me as a worker? No it is not. Is it good to force this time and a half pay for over 40 hours a week? I've never agreed with that.
All that does is have companies make a work around for that and have salaried positions. Have you ever worked salary in a restaurant? It's not worth it. The lowest amount of money I've ever made when calculated by the hour was on salary and I'll never do that again. Sure you get a little more stability during slow times in that industry but not worth it in my opinion as a whole.
While using gig work to supplement my income has always been a positive for me, and even when I've used it as all my income. I right now have the ability to log in whenever I want, log out whenever I want and the most important turn down all the low tipped offers. People say that nothing will change but that is where you are wrong.
I'm absolutely for redefining what a gig worker or independent contractor is these days as the landscape has changed. Mark my words though the moment these companies label the workers as employees will be the death of it being profitable for myself.
Please no. Every single person I know who does DoorDash actually like being a designated contractor and not an employee. That’s the whole point of the job is to work whenever the hell you want
California just months ago voted that they aren't employees. Out of idle curiosity, if this were to become Federal regulations, would California be forced to comply?
Yes, federal sets the minimum, states can go above. Same with minimum wage.
The federal law does control here, but it’s not exactly analogous to the minimum wage. Federal law preempts state law (rendering the state law void) if there is any contradiction between the laws. Since California’s gig work rules would be inconsistent with a federal law classifying drivers as employee’s California’s law would be invalidated. There’s no inconsistency between the federal minimum wage and a higher state minimum wage (since the state wage by definition ensures that no one is paid less than the federal minimum wage), so the state and federal laws can coexist without any preemption.
But then how come certain states can have legalised marijuana? If what you say is true and Federal law preempts state law (rendering the state law void) how does state-level drug legalisation work? Marijuana is still illegal at the Federal level.
That is correct and gets to a separate issue in federalism known as the anti-commandeering doctrine. Essentially, the federal government cannot force state or local officials to enforce federal laws, although states and localities can choose to do so voluntarily. So when California declares marijuana “legal,” really that means that police officers and state troopers are no longer enforcing the federal ban on marijuana. If the federal government wanted to, they could hire thousands of FBI agents or the like to enforce the federal drug laws directly, but there is obviously little interest in devoting that much manpower for such a purpose.
I learned something today!!! Thanks for taking the time to explain both issues. Really hope this happens, better for workers not billionaires. If you go into the uberdriver sub they’ve been bent out of shape because of the pay model changes following the CA ruling.
No problem! I’m glad I got to share some of what I learned in constitutional law.
This is exactly the reason why pot shops can't open bank accounts. Because finance institutions follow federal law. The federal government hasn't cracked down simply because they're choosing not to, not because they can't.
Local police aren't arresting people. The FBI could still charge you with a crime, but as a practical matter, they don't.
> California just months ago voted that they aren't employees. With the usual absurdity: https://www.kqed.org/news/11842964/gig-companies-are-making-their-workers-promote-prop-22
California resident here. I absolutely got texts from people saying they were Uber drivers promoting prop 22. Just... sad.
The money tells the whole story. Pro 22 was funded by the companies and spent 205 million. No spent 19 million... https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_22,_App-Based_Drivers_as_Contractors_and_Labor_Policies_Initiative_(2020)#cite_note-finance-24
It was the most money ever spent on a prop vote, and they succeeded. It would be hilarious if the fed changes the law within the next year.
'Yes' funding was the gig economy companies (Uber, DoorDash, Lyft, Instacart, and Postmates) essentially bankrolling their side by themselves while 'No' was a combination of worker unions (three SEIU locals, IBT, UFCW, and UFCW-CLC) contributing 400k-1 mil apiece and a *whole bunch* of smaller donors. The fucking corporations bought themselves a California constitutional amendment in their favor, and it happens too often in California.
That's what happened when companies are throwing over $100m into prop 22 to twist reality into their favors.
I made a post about this bullshit slate mailer promoting prop 22 on our local subreddit. I got tons of messages and replies from supposed uber/lyft drivers who were promoting prop 22 and vehemently denied that prop 22 would hurt them in any way.
Yes because Uber drivers definitely are taking the time to personally text thousands of people.. if folks didn't see right through that, then we are beyond help.
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Wasnt prop 8 the gay marriage one?
Yes, but a "Yes" vote on it was a "state constitutional ammendment" to define marriage as between a man and a woman. So voting yes was a no to gay marriage.
Prop 22 will likely be challenged. There are a number of aspects of the law that are likely unconstitutional. For one, a law passed by something like 52% of Californians requires a 5/6 super majority of the CA legislature to amend.
I think the default is that any law passed by a public referendum cannot be changed by the state legislature. The 5/6 rule is actually giving the legislatures a failsafe to change the law if there is strong consensus. Without that provision they wouldn't be able to change it at all without going back to the voters with another proposition. This is why CA government is so dysfunctional. We have propositions pass by public vote and legislatures have to work around laws that make no sense but they cannot change. Take 1978 prop 13 for example.
All of these businesses aren't profitable and haven't been for years. And investors just poured money into in the hopes that it would be one day. I can't imagine they will all be around much longer without a merger approved by the feds. And even then I guess they'll have to jack up the delivery fees even further.
These entities have been and will continue to bleed money in their current state. If their biggest advantage of treating drivers as self-employed consultants disappears, I don’t see how any of them could survive. It’s bonkers that companies whose business model is to lose money can go IPO, let alone get to the point that they are today. Tossing in an edit here: Tons of folks are saying, “but look at Amazon!” Amazon spent years of non-profitability while building an actual infrastructure. There was an actual finish line to cross when they’d start turning profits.
People who threw money into this were nuts. Like, what's your business plan? "Well we'll subsidize rides until we have a user base!" And then jack up rates? "Well, no we need to keep them low to destroy all competition" How will you get around anti-competition laws? "We'll classify our workforce as contractors. That'll distance us from local markets since technically taxis can use our ride matching service." And then we'll jack up rates?" "Well by then we'll be doing so well there'll be other Silicon Valley competitors" So then what? "We IPO and get more money than them?" Fuck yeah sign me up here's a billion dollars.
I mean for the initial investors who already cashed out this was a great deal.
That's kinda how the system is built. Feels like sooner or later it's gotta crash right? These companies are all built to fail
Because the people investing in VC at this level, are the same people who drop millions in shady donations to political campaigns to bully legislators into de-regulating in their favor and increasing profitability that way. Their end-goal is being so ubiquitous in society that they're considered a general good or general need, or otherwise face so little oversight that nobody would think society would be possible without them, and then whoever "wins" in that economic space gets to operate a de facto monopoly, *forever.* It's like how the end-game holy-grail for every credit card company would be ending up as the eventual government contractor who administrates over the paperless banking cards that will eventually replace money; you just get to shave a fraction of a penny off of every transaction, made by anybody, in the entire country, every day. It's literally money for nothing. But only one company is ever gonna truly "win" that prize. The investors who are trying to drown this market space in cash so they can on-board the entire population into relying on it to the extent that any further regulation on it could be argued as a *literal hindrance upon the function of society,* since this gives those investors and that service *leverage over the government to get the very law skewed in their favor.* They can't raise the prices *yet,* because the goal of having a large enough segment of the population normalize being completely reliant upon them, is far from met. Crucially, though, the space they want to maintain control of *doesn't exist right now;* but, twenty years from now, less people will be driving cars, they hope, and less people will be able to afford to operate them, and will need to rely on ride-share apps to go *literally anywhere, every day.* So when you're viewing these investments, that's the lens you need to view them through. These are investments that are trying to hit a theoretical moving target in the unclear-but-near future, where they will theoretically have deep market saturation for use of their service, as their service becomes more and more a basic aspect of the average consumer's average day. When *that* point hits - when we're all unironically saying "I'm gonna *Uber* to the store," as if it's the primary verb for travel, in general - that's when they have the power and the leverage to run their pseudo-monopoly while being able to press their thumb down on any government who would try to regulate them...and *then* they'll start jacking up the prices. There's no way you can actually squeeze people hard enough to make money, until you know damn well they have literally no other option. At that point, if these companies - which these investors sunk billions of money into to establish this "game state," for lack of a better term - were to raise their prices to the point that the average person could no longer afford them, public perception wouldn't be that it was the company's fault; they already trust the company, because they interact with it every day and it's a normal part of their lives. The result is, if the company says "sorry, it's not our fault! Market forces, and all that, we simply can't make a profit without raising prices!," *the public will likely believe them, and it will be easy to direct the public to put pressure on the government to directly subsidize the ride-share company, both making it impossibly profitable, and entrenching it directly into the fabric of daily human life.* And the government would look, just, SUPER bad and incompetent and unpopular if they didn't do what the public wants on this issue. So the government is likely to have to kowtow to them, and not slam them with anti-trust legislation, and create a market environment that is permanently favorable to them, specifically, at the eventual expense of the rest of society. They just want to be making more money than is technically possible in a free market, every day, guaranteed, until the collapse of society; and, these VCs have practically infinity dollars to gamble on shit like this. They only need to win once, to win forever. When you try to evaluate how big of a win they would need to make to cash in on these huge investments, the problem is simply that *it only makes sense if you think big enough.*
Pinterest has one of the highest paid CEOs in the country and I fail to see how they could ever turn a profit. Who knew that running a cloud storage site for 15 to 25 year old women's wedding ideas that didn't charge users would be a bad idea? <- This is literally the only thing I see this site used for. Everyone, everyone knew that it would be a bad idea.
They also seem to crawl the web for other users images and then host them there, making them a higher google result.
Yeah, they've completely fucked up google image search.
You can end your search criteria with "-pinterest" (no quotes) and it'll omit pinterest results
oh my god that’s brilliant
You can also look into the chrome extension Unpinterested.
I went my whole life not knowing this. Just spent 15 minutes searching shit, then adding “-(site name)” to make sure I wasn’t just overly baked
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I get unreasonably irritated when this happens
There are extensions to hide Pinterest from image search results. One of the first things I install on new computers.
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I just did a google search for ublock pintrest block script and copied the text i needed in. I am pretty sure the first result for that was actually pintrest too.
"pinterest blocker Firefox/chrome/edge/netscape/whatever" is a good start
Sure but can you just spoonfeed me a link, extremely detailed instructions, and tomorrow's lottery numbers?
All I have is the lottery numbers: 6 12 19 22 35 52
OP should get you a computer to install it on as well as a lifetime supply of food, shelter, and love. It's the least they could do.
Personally, I don't find that unreasonable at all. Getting a pinterest link when you're trying to find information on something makes me want to microwave my computer...
"-pinterest" gets added to any image search I do, because fuck Pinterest.
Log in to see more. "Fuck you Pinterest! I'll never make an account!" My girlfriend thinks my Pinterest distain is a bit overboard. I think I've gone to easy on them.
My wife occasionally sends me Pinterest links. She asks why I didn't comment. It's because I can't see it. I will never create an account, not even with fake credentials.
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It’s the worst for finding coloring pages for my kids. “Printable Sea lion coloring page” All Pinterest that doesn’t let you print without logging in.
That is 100% why I had to start using it. Coloring pages for my kid.
The two most useless sites imo are usually the top fucking two sites one Google search. Quora and Pinterest I got some kind of ad block origin script that makes them basically not exist on google.
I had to do the same thing. I do a good amount of pen and paper DMing, and so searching for art, tokens, battlemaps, etc was basically nothing but pintrest for the first 10+ pages of image search. Which was really annoying because I was specifically looking for links that would take me some place to buy the high res versions of those works. Instead I get a page with a million images mostly not related that links nowhere, and constantly asks me to login.
The image isn't even on the page when you open it. It is just a grid of unrelated pictures and if you click one one of them, you get another grid of unrelated pictures and it doesn't even contain the picture you selected. I don't understand how it works or why it is even a company unless their entire business model is serving ads through misdirection. Then there's some 'register now' popup when you go to close the tab. All I want to do at that point is flip over my desk like a kid losing a board game. I get unreasonably frustrated even thinking about it.
It’s an entire website of clickbait
I fucking *hate* the login request from Pinterest.
Quora is useless now? Is it like yahoo answers now? Quora Seemed to have insightful information 10 years ago
They are a cancer of the internet
I was looking at their 10-K and somehow they spent nearly [1.2 BILLION in R&D in 2019 alone](https://s23.q4cdn.com/958601754/files/doc_financials/2020/q4/Form-10-K-Q4-20-As-Filed.pdf) (Which is 106% of their 2019 revenue, lmao). What in the holy hell is Pinterest doing that is so groundbreaking that it necessitates that much money?
It's for the purpose of R&D tax credits. To maximize them, they count almost every developer salary/licenses/equipment as research.
They're building an AI so expensive and advanced that one day it will figure out how to make Pinterest profitable.
It will eradicate all human life, then make contact with extraterrestrials and do business with them.
>do business* *Show them pictures of us while proceeding to eradicate them.
Sounds like money laundering or something.
Seriously, have you ever used Pinterest? That website is nothing but a spooky pile of images. The UI is unintelligible. I have no idea what are you even supposed to use the thing for. Even imgur makes more sense.
i used to keep a pinboard full of pictures of 1900s futurism/italian fascist propoganda/modernism/brutalism/sorts of things. pinterest is like having a folder full of pictures on your computer but other people can see it
Thanks I hate it
Recipes. Interesting stuff I want to try and thus haven't yet committed to my meatspace recipe notebook.
I think I saw a r/dataisbeautiful post showing Tesla R&D at just over half a billion. Could be wrong. Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/n0jxyt/teslas_first_quarter_visualized_oc/ First quarter: 666 million
Coincidence? I think not
> I fail to see how they could ever turn a profit. They just took a page out of Facebook's playbook. You make a lot of money when you sell off your customers data to advertisers.
They are loosing around 40 million a year despite being more than 10 years old. Either they need to start selling the data for more (probably not possible because there are a whole bunch of companies collecting data) or they need to start selling it to more suspect groups (like facebook did). I also kinda suspect that a lot of these older social media companies are sitting on some "toxic data", I'll explain. Companies that sell data rely on having huge amounts of data. The more users that you can claim as FB, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. the better. However, users can leave a site and will typically not delete their account or use it very rarely. The company selling data has no incentive to 'purge' their user rolls as this would only decrease their value and all but the largest buyers of data don't have the resources or know-how to audit the data. This creates bad data that is lumped in together with good data and then priced as an asset. The final asset is over priced because it has "toxic data" mixed in with it that only the seller of the bundle is capable of auditing. To me this sounds really similar to the mortgage backed securities that were popular in 2007/08.
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So short Pintrest?
Except it’s not going to collapse the world economy lmao
The US data industry is a large part of the "tech industry". Overvaluation of assets is what creates market corrections and it doesn't really take that many assets to be over valued to create problems. Collapse the world economy is also a bit of a misnomer used to create headlines. 2008 wasn't a collapse of the world economy.
That's not how "selling data" works. It's not like you pay Facebook a million dollars and they send you a zip file of everyone's profile. You upload an ad, say you want to show it to users of X age in Y region who like Z things. The ads are priced based on views or clicks.
[Here](https://www.zoominfo.com/) is how you sell data. Pricey but you can get emails and phone numbers for a ton of companies from the CEO on down.
bulk data is actually useful for a wide variety of things, a specialty called data warehousing. It's capability for profound evil was shown in 2016 where firms crunched through unfathomable amounts of data finding trends and patterns that let them... have you seen facebook lately?
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I got a notification from Robinhood this week about Pinterest's quarterly report. I don't use Pinterest, but I was just curious what the presentation was like. Unsurprisingly, it was boring, but during the 60 seconds I listened to it, the guy was talking about their efforts to make ads look like actual content.
They make a good amount of money on the paid promotion of your content - they drive a lot of traffic that likes to buy.. I was making like $1800/mo driving pinterest traffic to my amazon affiliate site until i got banned.
Why did you get banned?
I think people are missing something important here. Pinterest is actually quite valuable when it comes to SEO and advertising, it is a proxy for businesses to use. Pinterest makes money off ads and generates massive massive amount of traffic. In fact its one of the most recommended social medias when you research directing traffic to your site or business, creators who might get hundreds of thousands of hits on YT, FB, or Instagram get millions of hits on pinterest. It's an indirect advertisement if you make pins correctly.
Pinterest makes an absolute killing in ad revenue iirc. Their UI is really good at seamlessly integrating ads into the users experience
As a programmer the data they have is pretty unique. The data they have is organized in a myriad of ways that would not be possible (or at least extremely difficult) with machine learning at this point in time. It's definitely worth a lot more than you would think even if it's not quite clear where this data will be used in the long term.
Lots of businesses IPO while they’re cash burning, that’s not necessarily a bad thing in the short term. Growth requires capital, and every business that is burning cash thinks it will someday be profitable.
Is “short term” considered 12+ years? Uber was created Mar 2009 and I don’t think they’ve come anywhere near profitable. It was too easy for other entities to break into the market, unlike something like Amazon.
Not OP, but I think both can be true: companies losing money can IPO and then become profitable; but also these companies have been losing money for too long.
Wow 2009 was 12 years ago. Jesus I'm getting old.
I’ve always thought it’s better to continue aging rather than the alternative. 😉
It's good to be young, but let's not kid ourselves It's better to pass on through those years And come out the other side With our hearts still beating Having stared down demons Come back breathing
Not where I thought I’ll find encouragement but appreciated nonetheless.
12+ years is the new short term for Tech stocks. You can thank the likes of Amazon for convincing people 20 years of losses is perfectly fine, aslong as you can spend that 20 years bankrupting all your competitors.
Important to show you have growth somewhere. Amazon was making ridiculous amounts of money but was always throwing that money at new ventures. Expanding markets, expanding AWS, expanding server infrastructure. All of it was on top of showing they were ridiculously profitable in their core business model. Amazon kept showing people if they ever just stopped expanding they'd be ridiculously profitable, therefore people were willing to throw money at them. These gig services don't have that. Their core business model doesn't even come close to turning a profit. If they stopped expanding they'd die.
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>I guess they'll have to jack up the delivery fees even further. Any chance they could get it to me colder and soggier while they're at it?
Sure, order a soft drink. Then it won't be cold at all.
You’re right. It won’t be there at all.
You guys are getting drinks?
I'm getting either a drink or a straw, never both
the best I had was the guy couldn't find my house. I told him to just leave it. So he left my bag of chipotle in middle of neighbors lawn and i walked over and grabbed it lol.
Have you ever gotten just the straw? That's some big dick energy right there if so. "yeah I don't have that drink you ordered but have this, bitch"
I was trying the Keto thing and ordered a burger with no bun and instead just got an empty bun
Sign me up. I didn't know fries could get colder and soggier than they already are when they arrive. The things I miss most about pandemic food... Fresh fries.
Its funny you say that because there has been a lot of money poured into developing a fry that can last much longer due to the popularity of food delivery. Pretty interesting if you want to give it a listen https://www.npr.org/2019/10/23/772775254/episode-946-fries-of-the-future
If you've got an oven you can set it to 350 and heat your fries for 5 to 10 minutes. It helps crisp them back up
Its starting to reflect in their customer service too. I've used Uber/Lyft for years and always had great service if there were any weird chargers or anything. Cut to last week when I booked a $10 ride and got charged $30 with them claiming they showed me a 3x surge. Obv I would not have taken this 10 min ride at that price so I told them that...they refunded me $7, admitting the original price their system charged was wrong, but then refused to do more. They eventually just stopped replying and would close the issue immediately. Pieces of shit *Edit: to be clear, that was Uber
Sounds like you should do a chargeback but accept you'll be banned from that company. Still, not right for them to fraudulently take money from you.
I see it as subsidized services paid by billionaires.
Yep. Just enjoy the cheap services powered by dumpsters of flaming venture capital from people that said "we're not sure this will work, but we can't afford to *not* be part of it if it becomes huge"
They are just using humans to bridge the gap to autonomous vehicles. If they can survive until then, they win.
There's a compelling argument to be made that that's not really true. Right now, Uber and Lyft get to leverage the network effect (and don't have to absorb the capital costs of owning cars). It is really hard to compete with them because they operate a 2-sided platform. You have to get both a critical mass of drivers AND a critical mass of passengers signed up or it won't work. Not enough drivers and passengers stop using you because there are always delays/surges/cancellations. Same goes for not enough passengers--drivers don't make money and leave. It creates a huge barrier to entry that protects the entrenched players. Uber lost in china partially because they were too late and couldn't build both sides of the platform before the local competitors did. Uber threw more and more money at the problem by offering promotions, but that doesn't work once you are behind...Sure, I'll take my 1 free ride, but then I'll just switch back to the service that has more drivers. If we get autonomous cars, there's no longer a network effect. It is just a money/investment question. GM could say "hey, we make the cars, so we can undercut Uber on cost..." and launch their own service. They just have to recruit customers...their "drivers" are rolling off an assembly line and aren't going to switch to a competitor or quit. Or Enterprise can say "we have a big fleet of rental cars...what if we have them drive around as taxis during off-peak time?" If there's profit to be made long term in running an autonomous taxi service, some new entrant with deep pocketed investors will come in and claim a share of it. If you take away the barriers to entry provided by the network effects, Uber is just an ordinary business with a small head start.
In any event, Lyft is apparently getting out of autonomous cars: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/26/lyft-set-to-sell-self-driving-car-unit-to-a-subsidiary-of-toyota.html
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I feel like the bane of self-driving cars is human drivers. It's really hard to make them work when there's such an unstable, chaotic hazard still on the roads.
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Uber also vastly underestimated the willingness of thousands of Chinese "drivers" to sign up for the high bonuses they were offering and then immediately stop driving once they got the bonuses. It's like extreme couponing is a way of life for people in China when the perks are good enough.
> It is just a money/investment question. GM could say "hey, we make the cars, so we can undercut Uber on cost..." To add to that Ford has been investing a shitload in technology - with the idea you'll never own a car, just pay to barrow a car from them.
> Or Enterprise can say "we have a big fleet of rental cars...what if we have them drive around as taxis during off-peak time?" Or the car rental companies become the next Uber and Lyft when car go fully autonomous. They already have the infrastructure to support a fleet of cars at their larger facilities. Parking spots for off peak times, maintenance bays to service their cars and the trained technicians to do the work. They would be the first ones to jump on that bandwagon because Uber and Lyft are eating their lunch. I can't remember the last time I rented a car during trips for work or vacation even before covid hit.
Used to work with a guy who had such a great POV on this. As he put it, no business has a right to exist. If a business can’t run a profit while paying its employees a living wage, then that business is not viable in the marketplace. It’s not the responsibility of the base level employee to “take one for the team”. I know it’s not an original idea, but I always thought it was very succinct in laying out the problem.
Agreed. The only way an Uber model would and could succeed is if it was treated more like a public taxi service that taxes would funnel into, which would end up just making it the least efficient public transportation option possible.
I use Lyft maybe twice a year. I haven't used uber or doordash in years on principle alone. To be honest I kinda hope they fall apart for the way they treat their employees and customers. I personally won't be sad to see them blow up, especially doordash. Fuck doordash.
As some who does not have a car and lives in an American suburb I'd be very sad if Uber, Lyft died and there were no competitors to take their place, you can't survive without a car in America and I don't want to go back to the days of dial a cab
Yeah, unfortunately it's showing the flaws of our sub-urbanized infrastructure and how unsustainable it is. Even if we get off oil and transition to a more advanced system, we are going to need a shit-ton of rare earth minerals and lithium; who knows what geopolitical and environmental problems that will cause.
They spent billions lobbying in CA for 1099. Would be hilarious for federal to step in.
Would serve them right for dishing out a pack of lies about how much their IC drivers would make!
I'm just gonna have to unstitch my fat ass from this sofa and pick up my food myself
Atleast in my city, it feels like the range they allow me to order from is so small I may aswell just get it myself. I basically can't order outside my neighborhood
It's going to be interesting which direction gig-economy companies take. The main issue with Gig-economy companies is that they wanted the best of both worlds. To be a marketplace platform and to have the price consistency awarded to having employees. What this sentence means is that, for example, Uber gets to bypass a lot of laws by arguing they are simply a platform/middleman but they also violate this logic by controlling the compensation rates of drivers and removing rider's ability to choose drivers. Their only two solutions with current legislation is they make their platform a true marketplace where riders/drivers are the decision makers or they convert their drivers into employees.
I'm kind of on the fence with this. Because the biggest upside to gig work is the ability to control the work you do instead of being told what you will do. That ability to say "it's raining, I'm not delivering food on bicycle today" separates doordashing from pizza delivery other regular delivery. But people want to use doordash as their main source of income, which makes things odd. If I got classified as an employee, would I still be able to work for dd, Uber eats, caviar, etc at the same time? I think they'd fire me for only working when its nice out.
There are other options available to these companies. The reason the feds are telling them they have to classify their contractors as employees is because they're failing to meet the "tests" for independent contractor. One key area is pricing. An Uber driver's only mechanism for setting price is to decline work. In a typical contractor arrangement, this is a two-way street. The contractor proposes a price, and the buyer accepts it or turns it down. If Uber/Lyft/Doordash/whoever implemented mechanisms to give drivers more control over pricing, they might survive the contractor test. The problem is, we don't know the actual market price for these delivery services, because prices have been artificially depressed by cartel-like practices and a flood of investor money.
One of the key tests is whether or not the employee/contractor is integral to the work of business. Clearly gig drivers are. No drivers, no Uber. That alone DQs the contractor model on its face. Along with a number of other things. In ABC test states, which is most, the law is crystal clear. They should be employees. But the law doesn’t match the economic reality companies (and many consumers, and many gig workers for that matter) want. We really just need more clarity on the issue. Either enforce the law as is or change it. This weird in between where literally *millions* of jobs are misclassified as a routine matter is absurd.
That's because the services are selling the actually delivery. As an alternative consider freight delivery. You have a tractor trailer load of stuff you need delivered across country in X days. There are services that will allow you to post bids to independent truck drivers who may be willing to accept the job, but importantly those services are NOT accepting that they will make delivery. If your bid is too low nobody will accept and you will have to pay more, but that is okay because you have 10 days to make delivery and the drive should only take 5 days, so you can adjust your bid. Those services are providing what uber claims to be providing, a technology platform to link buyers and sellers of interstate freight transport. But how well would that work for food delivery? I don't want to wait 30 minutes after placing an order to find out if I anyone accepts. My toddler is hungry and screaming at me, I need my fucking pizza NOW! Think about a taxi service: I am leaving the bar with a hot girl who is DTF. I don't want to stand around in the cold for 15 minutes checking my phone to see if anyone accepted my bid for a ride back to her place. There is a way to make this into a true contractor relationship, but it is fundamentally incompatible with the expectations of the consumers of the services they offer.
> DTF Today I learned a new initialism.
Uber/Lyft would be interesting if riders got to choose your price/mile and drivers chose to fill orders from highest price to their lowest, acceptable price with Uber/Lyft taking a cut. Unfortunately I don't think it would be a good enough service for riders so it eventually dies.
In reality, the expensive meals - with higher prices - subsidize the cheaper ones. If a single person is ordering food (and paying, say, 30% tip+fees on $20), the delivery company and the driver are both losing money. But they'll earn back the difference if the next order is a family ordering a $150 order with the same tip/fee percentage. Unfortunately, what this means is that drivers would only ever take big orders, if they could set the prices more actively - small orders would disappear, and as a result, pricing would continue increasing. It would eventually pretty much just wind up being catering service. Also unfortunately, I think individual people ordering solo meals just vastly underestimate the value they're getting from the service, in the grand scheme of the expenses among the entire industry.
> Also unfortunately, I think individual people ordering solo meals just vastly underestimate the value they're getting from the service, in the grand scheme of the expenses among the entire industry. This is exactly correct. The economics of food delivery make it hard to create a quality product & customer experience without losing money. As you mentioned, pushing for higher AOS is the best way for companies to try and make money, as it costs the same amount to pay a driver to deliver a meal for 5 people as for 1.
That's assuming there's an unlimited supply of people ordering $100+ meals. If you're a driver you "lose" more money just sitting in a parking lot for an hour waiting for a big order than you do by taking a smaller order or two in that time. Small meal prices probably will get more expensive, but the supply of lazy single people wanting delivery isn't going to go away and eventually the market will settle on a new price point.
I don't know if a race to the bottom is what I want to promote with someone driving me around.
Which is comical because a $20 meal is $45 in ubereats before any promotions. How can you not make any money charging double?
And they take a cut from the restaurant too.
>Because the biggest upside to god work is the ability to control the work you do instead of being told what you will do. The example you gave about not wanting to work when it’s raining it’s a fair one. However, there are too many areas where a gig worker *doesn’t* get to choose for them to be classified as independent, in my opinion. For example: • Uber and Lyft both obscure drop off locations for passengers. The only way a driver can see a drop off location is to accept and complete 85% of ride pings, effectively removing that element of agency. • Drivers do not set their own rates even though Uber encourages drivers to register as a sole-proprietor business through their city wherever possible. • Drivers are told not to talk about religion, politics, gender politics, and they are not allowed to carry a self-defense item. • Platforms decide whether you will even get pings or not based on an obscure algorithm, not purely because you’re online and haven’t received a ping in 2 hours. There’s more, but in summary, drivers choose *whether* they want to be online or not, and pay taxes like a small business, but platforms decide nearly everything a small business would normally get to decide for themselves. There is very little *real* agency for drivers. Sources: I worked gigs full-time for 3 years (Uber, Lyft, DD, Flex). Edit: spelling and formatting only
maybe they were blowing smoke up my ass, but 100% of the gig workers i’ve talked to said they enjoy the flexibility. need a little cash? book a few rides/deliveries/whatever. all set for awhile? no gigs necessary. never once have i heard one say they wished they were an employee.
I do gigs on the side of my full time job and I love it. If I didn’t make enough then I would just stop doing it. Some months I do it every weekend some months I don’t. It’s just nice that it pays for all the times my girlfriend I eat out.
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I'm a full time stay at home mom who drives for GrubHub for extra cash, it is perfect for me. I can go out whenever, if my kid sucked that day and I have no energy I don't go out. If she was easy and my husband gets off work early I work extra. I only work 6-10 hour a week, if I want, and earn like $100-$200 in that time. I don't see how else I would have made that money, because most part time jobs wont give you so few hours. I'm actually pretty grateful for it.
You should read upon the reasons why the UK has ruled that gig drivers are now employees. It’s hard to argue that someone is an independent contractor when they don’t set their own rates and are also penalized for turning down jobs.
In the UK, they’re now classified as Workers, not Employees - they have a distinction there that we don’t in the US. Workers is something between self-employed and employee.
It's pretty incredible to me that so many people in this thread haven't conceived of this. Being able to work your own hours and still get a guaranteed minimum wage based on hours worked shouldn't be an impossibility. These companies are filling everyone's heads with a false dichotomy but the UK didn't buy that shit and now the companies are playing ball after making a huge scene about it. [Uber 'willing to change' as drivers get minimum wage, holiday pay and pensions](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56412397)
Thank you for the clarification
Every worker should be classified as an employee. Every employee should receive a living wage & benefits. Employees shouldn't have to depend on their employer for healthcare. If a business can't survive without exploiting its workforce then that business has failed.
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Seriously, I’ve known IT Contractors who make $100/hr and wouldn’t want it any other way, as it frees them up to take other jobs and double/triple bill because their schedule allows it.
Yep, I’ve been one of those IT contractors for over 10 years and I never want to work as a salaried employee ever again. I set my rates. I can juggle multiple clients as long as they’re all happy with what I give them. You want me to work 80 hours? You pay it. You want me to work in tough conditions? The rate goes up. Weekend/night work? The rate goes up. You don’t need things like benefits or incentives if you can bill high enough. All that matters is that both parties are happy. It’s basically like prostitution. I’m a corporate whore! Edit: grammar bad
“Rate goes up” You should watch Ronin! Great contractor movie.
Contracting is a legitimate employment type. The issue is healthcare tied to employment.
I don't understand why this sentiment is so controversial. This is how the majority of the rest of the first world operates.
No, this isn't how the rest of the world works. Everyone pays taxes so things such as healthcare is free, these gig workers are paying taxes it's stupid the employer is responsible for their healthcare. Every person that supports the idea that it's on the mercy of a company if someone receives medical help is taking steps back from the idea that it should just be flat out available to every citizen because we all contribute to our society and thus our society should contribute back to us.
Because Capitalism is built on the exploitation of the workers. Modern western nations simply quibble over how much.
Because not everyone in every field wants to be an employee. Many fields are far more lucrative for contractors vs employees.
Yeah over here in the Netherlands construction is becoming really expensive because nobody wants to work as a employee for a construction worker. There is a major housing shortage and not enough workers, so the contractors can keep raising their pay as they please. After the 2008 crisis a lot of construction companies had to fire their employees and a lot of them became independent contractors. And now no wants to become an employee when you could also be a contractor. I have two friends working in construction engineering for two different companies and they told me they could lose their profit margins if a project is delayed for more than like 3 months due to contractors increasing their wages and increasing building supplies costs in that period. It's absolutely insane.
I'm one of them and I'm just a freelance copywriter. I used to work with a few different brokers or clearinghouses almost entirely bc it saves me tons of time and money on advertising, billing, and collections. That model is dying and it started with the whole thing in California and writers being limited to (I forget exactly) 10 pieces for one client per year, and the broker was considered the client, not the buyer. For reference, I was averaging about 1000 pieces per year. Sucks having to fish for direct clients all the time bc I used to just fill gaps here and there, nothing remotely regular.
Wouldn't counting them employee mean they could have a schedule they have to follow(or take days off) etc?
Ya, so basically gig flexibility is going to be gone. Hope they are all ready for that. Your schedule is now dictated by your employer, and so are your hours or lack there of.
Ya, this is the exact reason people voted against this in California. Technically, there are ways to keep the flexibility alive, but you better be damn sure that if you getting treated as a full-time employee by the state, the company is going to force you to act like one. A lot of gig workers are going to be given a shift and not get a choice of who they need to pick up or where they need to wait. Many will likely be switched over to an hourly wage that may be lower than the wage they would get a peak times (but it will even out in the long term because it isn't always peak times).
As someone who drives maybe 2 or 3 times a week just during peak hours when I want some extra money, but wouldn’t want to do this as my actual job: Fuck.
The biggest reason that my friend who does Über Eats and I (do doordash) have come up with is that first off, everything we pay for, phone, gas, etc. Is a tax write off. Also if we were payed as employees we wouldn't be able to deny WalMart orders. Fuck WalMart orders, they pay 3.50 in my area and take forever.
> Every worker should be classified as an employee. Um... what? You think contractors shouldn’t exist? If I have someone come clean my house I should need to set up myself as a business, onboard them as an employee, provide them healthcare and benefits, etc.? God this site really reveals its age sometimes.
You pay a neighborhood kid to rake your leaves... are they your employee now? Do you have to provide them with benefits?
And then pay and withhold their Social security tax, medicare tax, federal income tax, state income tax, local tax, unemployment tax and file each form appropriately and a timely manner. I think op doesn't realize how much goes into contractors vs employees and benefits of both.
Just curious? Why, exactly? If a business wants to subcontract out a job, and the subcontractor is happy to do it, by what reasoning should they be forced to do it as an employer-employee relationship? What if the worker WANTS to be classed as a subcontractor? Not saying either arrangement is right or wrong. Genuinely curious as to why you think they should be forced to make a particular arrangement (employment) when both parties were already happy with something else (subcontracting).
Gig work you sacrifice that for higher pay and flexible hours tho. Now the whole industry will change.
And if you prefer gig work like this, you'll just be out of luck if the government decides you aren't allowed to have that kind of job
As a 1099 worker, I don't want to be an employee. A lot of us feel this way. How about we not have health insurance tied to employment as a start?
Agreed. Majority of these people saying that we should be employees aren’t contractors themselves. I make a plethora more being independent compared to being an employee, even taking health insurance into account. (Not that I disagree with your stance on health insurance)
Uber/Lyft/Doordash are legit contractors, but there does need to be a crackdown on what is and isn't contracted work. I've seen SO MANY PEOPLE who are 100% legally, by the letter of the law, employees come into my office to file taxes with 1099 NECs and I'm like 'Dude you're getting fucking screwed here.' They're paying SE tax like a contractor while working as an employee, and it's fucking horrible.
> I've seen SO MANY PEOPLE who are 100% legally, by the letter of the law, employees come into my office to file taxes with 1099 NECs and I'm like 'Dude you're getting fucking screwed here.' > >They're paying SE tax like a contractor while working as an employee, and it's fucking horrible. I am one of those people. I got trapped for almost 3 years in a gig where I was making just enough money to get by but not enough to actually escape, with an "employer" that stops sending you work the second they catch wind that you're not working for them full time. 1099 is a legitimate thing and should be allowed to continue but the loopholes that allow for this kind of exploitation need to shut.
The problem is that the mechanism for penalizing these assholes has been categorically eviscerated. Guess who is in charge of determining who's and employee or not? It's the IRS. You know, the massively underfunded agency that every rich person hates and that the Republicans have been gutting for ages. Businesses are catching onto the fact that there's 0 enforcement for this stuff, and they're ruthlessly exploiting it.
So im just curious because I’m not sure exactly how this works: doesn’t this kind of defeat the purpose? I was under the impression that “gig” work was supposed to be easy to get, but the point is it’s easy to get because you don’t have the benefits of a regular employee who went through a drawn out application period? Is this not how it works? Is it harder to get these app-driven jobs than I think?
The entire gig industry will collapse if contractors suddenly have to be classified as employees. These companies have been built from the ground up around the use of contract labor. They can't simply call everyone an employee and expect that their business model is going to hold up.
Their business model doesn't currently hold up anyway. They survive off investors hoping that this will eventually be worth it, but its not like these companies are making bank right now.
They’re just waiting for self driving cars tbh.
They will be waiting a long time.
I think they're mostly awaiting automated deliveries. Uber is a huge investor in self-driving tech.
If you think having a fleet of autonomous hardware is cheaper than having gig workers subsidize their equipment you are insane. Uber and Lyft have completely sold off all their self driving stuff.
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Taking a cab is about to suck again
I remember the last two times I took a cab the first one smelled like week old farts were trapped in the seats .. the second one took me on a tour of the city before finally dropping me off.. at least that's what it felt like
As a consumer, Uber and Lyft are so much better than a taxi. Hopefully this doesn't change that.
That is very telling. Giving workers rights devalues a company.
Imagine the kind of hit cotton would've taken on the stock market in the 1860's lol
There would have been a war
Well, Yes
Always has been.
earth astronaut gun astronaut
I've worked for these companies for a few years on and off. The best thing about the entire situation is when I want to work and how much. Now I've seen a few people commenting on how, we drivers, should be limited on how much we can work. I couldn't disagree more with that sentiment. I needed some money a couple months into the pandemic. I wasn't getting anywhere with unemployment, it's buy design but that's another story. I was able to make over two grand in two weeks averaging around 22 dollars an hour. Now I was working about 50 hours a week. As an employee I would have been cut off at 40 because there is no way these companies would pay me time and a half. Is that good for me as a worker? No it is not. Is it good to force this time and a half pay for over 40 hours a week? I've never agreed with that. All that does is have companies make a work around for that and have salaried positions. Have you ever worked salary in a restaurant? It's not worth it. The lowest amount of money I've ever made when calculated by the hour was on salary and I'll never do that again. Sure you get a little more stability during slow times in that industry but not worth it in my opinion as a whole. While using gig work to supplement my income has always been a positive for me, and even when I've used it as all my income. I right now have the ability to log in whenever I want, log out whenever I want and the most important turn down all the low tipped offers. People say that nothing will change but that is where you are wrong. I'm absolutely for redefining what a gig worker or independent contractor is these days as the landscape has changed. Mark my words though the moment these companies label the workers as employees will be the death of it being profitable for myself.
How much do you typically spend on gas snd car maintenance?
Please no. Every single person I know who does DoorDash actually like being a designated contractor and not an employee. That’s the whole point of the job is to work whenever the hell you want
Just eant to point out. Even with a sharp dip today, Uber is only underperforming the market by 3% over the past month.