Then feel free to point to it.

What you are saying is "It's okay to keep exploiting them because we need the service they provide, and cheap." Fuck you.

That's absolutely not what I'm saying, and fuck you for insinuating it. I'm saying it's more complicated than some eye-grabbing heading will have you think, especially when you're not taking the actual workers' motives into consideration.

Everyone deserves fair pay, job stability, HEALTHCARE and other benefits. If YOU can't afford the LUXURY of an Uber unless the guy who drives you is being fleeced because otherwise he can't feed his family, the solution is not to exploit the workers. It is to not take an Uber.

I agree completely. But some people need an Uber. Ride sharing has offered a lot of people some amount of independence they might not otherwise have, given the state of transit options in their area. In fact, I'd argue that most Uber users do so out of need instead of desire, given how outrageous the prices are.

Yes, but that assumes the workers are at where they will be working. That's not the case with gig work like ride sharing. With a store or a med lab, you know where everybody needs to be, and when they need to be there. But with a gig job, your driver may be coming from the other side of town. A driver can be waiting all day for a request to come in, but if there's just no business in their part of their city that day, there's no work available.

While you can plot for trends on what areas will be busy at what times, the core function of these apps is that they're on-demand, so there will always be a matter of randomness. Sometimes business will spike or plummet in a city for no apparent reason.

The issue stems from the lack of predicability in a volatile market that relies entirely on the whims of the users. People want a service that's available as soon as possible, at all times of day, with zero advance notice. "It's 3am and I want this specific burger from this specific restaurant and I will pay somebody to go right this minute to pick it up for me". That is not easily predicted, and impossible to properly schedule for. It's a flaw in the way these businesses are designed, but ultimately unavoidable based on what users of the platform want the platform to be.

Another factor to consider is that to make it work, the service would need to cost more. Remember, these companies are generally not profitable as it is, so its not as if they're making bank on the fees to begin with, so increasing fees for the users would be an unavailable certainly if drivers were to be considered employees. But there's a limit to what most users are willing to pay, and these apps have all pretty much capped out at those limits already. So upping the fees means pricing out large swaths of their customers, which means less available funding to pay drivers. Now you're introducing layoffs to workers who were previously immune from being laid off.

It's a very complicated and chaotic situation to untangle, and one that doesn't have a simple, punchy solution.

Not surprising. These apps work on an on-demand basis. It's just not feasible to pay somebody an hourly wage when you can't guarantee any work to be available for them to do at any given time. And you could then make the argument of "if they can't afford to pay them like employees, they shouldn't be in business", and I'd like to agree, but ultimately there is a huge demand for this line of business to exist and that isn't going away any time soon, especially as car ownership is decreasing in some areas these days. Most of these apps have yet to ever turn a profitable quarter, as is it, so increasing their cost of business isn't exactly going to result in everybody getting raises.

Also, there's generally a pretty big reason why people take these jobs over a traditional 9-5 in the first place; a large amount of these workers prefer working their own hours and not having to report to a superior. Or due to whatever life circumstances they might be experiencing (mental health issues, homelessness, disability, criminal history, etc) may prevent them from securing a "normal" job. A majority of the people working on these apps would find themselves unable to keep their jobs because they couldn't be available on time for whatever reason they may have. Ultimately, classifying them as employees would hurt a lot of them, and will likely drive them to another gig business (like food delivery or handyman/TaskRabbit, etc) where they'll be exploited the exact same way all over again, but now without any of the stability they had with their previous work.

I'm not saying all this in defense of these apps. But I do work on the corporate side of this industry and talk to the contractors on a daily basis, so I'm pretty familiar with the motives people typically have for signing up to work for these apps. As odd as it may sound, many of these people want to be contractors; they just want a better cut of the payment.

It would be great if there was an alternative that could cut (or at least reduce the need for) the middleman and allow users to be paired with a contractor directly. I'm surprised that there hasn't been any real attempt to make one yet.

I've always had doubts about that being the bullet. Obviously I'm not an expert, I'm just a guy on the internet so don't take this as anything substantial as this is 100% armchair speculation and I'm fully willing to concede any part of this; but given what I know about the speed of a round fired from an AR-15 and how camera shutter speeds work, I'd assume that if a photographer was lucky enough with their timing like this, that the streak would be significantly longer. These rounds can go upwards of 3000 feet per second, so for the streak to be that small, you'd need an really fast shutter speed. But I don't think this was a particularly fast shutter at all, because there's significant motion blur elsewhere in the photo. The streak also seems to be slightly more in-focus than Trump does, but it's also possible that the photographer had the wrong focal length in the first place.

I dunno, I could be wrong and that could be the most legit photo in the world. It just feels very unlikely to me. It just seemed waaaay too convenient, on top of a rather long list of other individual conveniences that happened that day. I try not to think too much about it, because it's very easy to get conspiratorial about it.

What an astoundingly stupid product that has absolutely no right to exist.

I need one.

I disagree. We shouldn't carve exceptions into the law for carelessness, IMO. If bones are making it through the deboning process, then the deboning process is inadequate. The solution is to do better at deboning, not to loosen the requirements on how you label the product.

If anything, the legislation this should've brought about is one that puts a higher requirement on what can or cannot be called "boneless". Words have meaning, and if we just pretend they don't, people get hurt. Hell, we have a stricter legal definition for "cheese" than "boneless". Nobody's going to injure themselves on a slice of Kraft because they mistook it for real cheese, but you can seriously hurt yourself by eating something that was promised to be boneless and that turns out to be untrue.

YouTube isn't remembering your progress for this video. I just opened an incognito window and searched YouTube for "gnu taler" as you mention, and in my results I see the same progress bar. I've never seen this video before, and certainly have never watched it.

For some reason, YouTube is adding a timestamp argument to the URL within the search results. Not sure why, maybe it's a "smart" detection of moving you to the spot in the video that's relevant to the term "gnu taler". But it certainly has nothing to do with you, specifically.

I always hit an arrow key. Just in case it's not actually asleep but just turned off the display, and I don't want to accidentally start typing into something without seeing the screen yet. It's like, 99% unsubstantiated paranoia, admittedly.

One important thing to note (according to the issuing letter I saw) was that this was a 10$ credit no strings attached.

The "strings" are that $10 isn't enough for an order, so in order for anybody to actually use this apology token, they still have to pay money. While the credit itself, may be free, using it is definitely not.

Yup, that's probably the issue then. My Chromebook is running a version of Chrome from like 4 years ago, so most Lemmy instances have broken formatting that stops loading anything beyond a broken header.

It's kinda weird, because Lemmy is generally a pretty low-tech platform, so I'm not sure what about the web UI causes problems with older browsers. Not my area of expertise, so I'm afraid I don't have much in terms of a solution, lol.

I like the web interface (except for the fact that it doesn't work on my PC.....can't figure out why).

Do you happen to be running an outdated system, by chance? I've got a really old Chromebook that's past its lifecycle and doesn't get updates anymore, and it has problems displaying most Lemmy instances properly as a result.

They must think debt collectors are werewolves.

Then what is?

Amazon is always the first place I check whenever I want to buy anything. I order frequently enough that Prime more than pays for itself every year, and I hate making new accounts on new websites to order anything elsewhere unless it's just not available on Amazon.

I don't like that it's this way, but it's the most cost-effective way of shopping for me.

Good.

Oh cool, so they're mixing their 2008 (racism) and 2016 (sexism) campaign strategies together.

These hemp-based highs are every bit as potent as those derived from the marijuana available in legalization states.

How I know the author hasn't tried either product.

I agree. I feel like today's usage of the word "streamer" applies to a person, not an object.

Hey now, don't be too hard on The System. It's not like they were doing nothing all day while these unsolved violent crimes piled up! Those Brave Boys in Blue have been hard at work putting teenagers in prison and destroying their futures over petty drug charges this whole time. There just simply isn't enough manpower to ruin the lives of our youth and solve actual crimes at the same time! We gotta pick one or the other, and we picked one.