A mathematician, physicist, and engineer are taking a math test. One question asks "Are all odd numbers prime?"
The mathematician thinks, "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not prime -- nope, not all odd numbers are prime."
The physicist thinks, " 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not prime -- that could be experimental error -- 11 is prime, 13 is prime, yes, they're all prime."
The engineer thinks, " 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, 11 is prime, ..."
New Zealand has just had to quarantine 1/3 of their population, again, because of 4 cases. Until the virus is contained everywhere you will yo-yo between closing everything and opening it.
Unless we build a wall around every developing country this will be going on for years.
The economy can bounce back from one quarantine, can it bounce back from 12?
After 100 days clean and zero deaths, Vietnam just discovered a few cases from some Chinese who had snuck into the country illegally. Those have now grown into many more cases... and deaths.
NZ is seeing what has just happened in VN only days before and acting on it because they know what will happen if they don't.
If I owned slaves and called them unpaid indefinite interns the law would rightly disagree. You can call the relationship whatever you like, but the law is there to keep the playing field level for everyone. That it's taken Uber so long to play by the same rules as everyone else is a travesty and should take a billion dollar law suit or two for damages to sort out.
> They are employees in that they cannot negotiate rates.
Hmm... How is an Uber driver different from a plumber here?
Let's say Google needs some pipes fixed at one of its offices and they tell me how much they'll pay, refusing to budge from that figure. That doesn't make me Google's employee. I can choose to do the work for that price, or I can go fix Apple's pipes instead. What am I missing?
I don't see how Uber's relationship with the passenger has any bearing on a driver's relationship with Uber.
If instead, my analogy were that I was a general contractor who built water slides and a water park put out a bid on construction of a water slide and refused to negotiate, my only option is to take that bid or leave it. Why does it matter what the water park is going to charge the people to ride the slide?
Your analogy doesn't map to this situation. Google and Apple would be the people you're driving around, not Uber. The company that employs you as a plumber maps to Uber, which of course would just be you if you were self employed.
Many service companies are passed down in the family, or bought out for plum rates by star employees. Others are sole proprietorships. The service worker analogy is problematic because of the storied history of regulatory capture in the taxi industry, and the century of bad legal rulings that allowed it to continue. I guess licensed professions and gatekeeping like the AMA does to limit residency spots are the closest analogues I can think of off the cuff, but I also think those things are wrong for similar reasons, so moving on.
Now that the app driving companies turned over the apple cart by essentially cyber-squatting on the legal system while backed by high power lawyers paid by VC cash, the driving companies themselves want to cry foul when they don’t get the way they bought and paid for. I guess what they didn’t foresee is the long view of judgeship, and their concomitant dim view of cheaters, no matter the problem domain.
It’s too ironic to be believed. The judges apparently agree with me.
Seems like it maps to me. Google and Apple are hiring me to do work, then they are selling the output of that work to someone else (indirectly, in this case, but I don't see how that matters.)
Given that rates are determined collectively by deciding whether or not it's worth your time to go online given the current level of surge. If enough drivers decide it's not worth it, the price will change. This is a pretty standard pricing mechanism in any market for an easily fungible good or service (read: commodity).
I'm not interested in digging up the information on this because it was over 10 years ago, so take it with a huge grain of salt.
He had this huge presentation about a laser zapping mosquitoes. The patent was fed to a patent troll, the whole board was stacked with his friends, the company produced nothing and was set up to sue anyone who did try and produce anything. 10 years later they still haven't produced more than the one prototype. The 'charitable' donations were literally just tax write offs that paid for his friends salary.
Since then I really don't take him seriously at all. His charities are just a way to reduce his tax bill and look like he cares, while he's just paying his friends to work on projects they find interesting regardless of the chance of success.
In short: hubris, corruption, white collar rico and tax evasion.
The only difference would be that you don't need to do industrial espionage on google to see what works first, so the cost of the seo would drop.