Whoops bad editing. I originally was only going to compare biking but then changed it and missed the mileage edit.

And paragraph markup

Hopefully my points are still understood.

On the one hand. Yeah. This industry especially is already made up entirely of people who are desperate for any kind of work, and now they plan to fire even them. On the other hand 1.5 miles in 30 minutes? A human can go 10 miles in the same amount of time just walking, let alone roller blading, biking, scootering, or by car. It's kind of sad really, that a company this shit at robotics is one of the first to enter the market. College students in the 80s could have made a better robot, with 80s technology and only a couple years schooling. It's sad that tech is backsliding because all the people with capital are utter morons. I also worry... Knight Foundation does some good work, but hopefully they don't make the mistake of interpreting the results as though they are comparable to how citizens would react to a well made robot or in a different industry. Unfortunately when the press inevitably writes about it they will jump to all sorts of (wrong) conclusions about automation.

Many of the things you mention are completely separate from employee vs contractor. There are a lot of misconceptions about it. Employee doesn't even mean 40 hour work week. Employee does mean that above 40 hours, 1.5x payrate applies (at least in US, it might be 2x in Europe?). Smart contractors will also put an overtime provision in their contracts. The real smart contractors will make it apply after only 20 hours ;)

The biggest thing about being a contractor, is you can either negotiate the terms of your contract, or name your price, sometimes both. But Uber doesn't allow either thing. They dictate how much gets paid, and they write the contract. They are an employer.

Another key factor is of course the "core business" thing. So Uber claims their core business isn't as a taxi service. So what is their core business? Is it app development? Well they don't get paid by other companies to write apps, so no. Is it transportation network? They claim no, but they have been forced to abide by transportation network regulations (handicap accessibility, driver safety, and others). Is it gig-work marketplace? No, because customers aren't offered a listing of contractors to choose from. There core business, the entire economic underpinning of their revenue and profits, is their matching algorithm.

What type of company is it, if their core business is matching workers with assignments? Employment agency. There are laws covering employment agencies and aside from a few edge cases in a few specific job fields, you are the employee of the agency. Not a contractor. The company that needs the worker hires a contractor (the employment agency), then the agency sends one of their employees to do the work. The work can be for just one hour. It can be different jobs on different days or even on the same day (8hr overtime and 5 hour employee breaks apply). There can be days where no work is assigned. None of this changes the employee status.

Try and tell me how a company that matches Gig Workers with Gig Work is not an employment agency.

What's really frustrating about that, is they then just said "oh well" about all of the law-violating that happened prior. It's like the whole Trump thing really. What about making the victims whole? It was illegal before it wasn't. That should still be prosecuted!

Don't be so naive. The company is built to never be profitable. It has nothing to do with how much they (don't) pay workers. They are currently skimming 95% of all costs paid by the customers. They then waste all that money on bloat, bonuses for execs, and other bullshit. Then they take that super-inflated number and subtract it as operating costs before calculating that they in fact only skimmed "25%" according to their filings. And don't forget they aren't just taking money from customers, they are taking 30% from restaurants as well. The fact they aren't profitable is by design, it's to hide all of the embezzlement.

And that's how good their propaganda was. You got it backwards. Uber already had to classify as employees based on long-settled federal and state law. Then an additional *redundant* law was passed in the state assembly that again, required Uber to stop misclassifying. The ballot initiative was Uber's, and was to permanently misclassify all "app-based" work as independent, no matter what, exempting themselves from all prior laws.

Yes. Hurry up before they make it illegal like they did in california. That's what these laws are really about.

AKA "Regulatory Capture". IOW make all new apps have to follow the exact same business model that Uber already follows.

That's scary. Sounds like they can push it through without even asking voters. Here in California, the dumbass voters believed the propaganda that said this is what drivers want, and actually thought they were voting on behalf of their fellow worker (so dumb), but it would be even easier to convince a few bureaucrats of the same.

CNBC printing lies like this doesn't help. There were no "proposals" other than the assholes actually follow existing law and stop misclassifying. There was an additional *redundant* law that was passed that they still refused to follow. That's not the same thing as "fighting against proposals".

It's very sad to see this, but we all knew it was coming.

No, it's not. Moot anyway since google fonts and JS framework bundles of all kinds are already used to put spyware on so many sites. I guess by adversaries these days they mean non-approved spyware makers.

Not with that heat dissipation profile. A high-powered intel processor, a grip of RAM, and a high end graphics card pushing 40 megapixels? No way you can put that over your crotch.

I didn't want to hear all the stupid news stories, late night shows, and podcasters talking about it incessantly, didn't liked how it spammed all of reddit on every subreddit for a week (and still remains as like 70% of the posts, and 20% super-duper sportsball game), and definitely won't see any stupid movie about it. Especially if it's in the style of the social network (will never watch that either).

A "shallow" fake is more than sufficient. Our brains do most of the work, However, you are right about all of your other points. In case you're curious, the use-cases of an avatar vs zoom are things like anti-discrimination, characters (service-oriented jobs), virtual make-up/clothing, just for starters. These aren't really widespread use cases but important ones nonetheless.

Except intricate remote surgery is something that has been done for a decade now. Spend some time on youtube.

It's not even a new idea, it's the obvious application of the tech that has been talked about for over a generation. It has been possible (affordable) for about 10 years for most jobs. It would provide a distinct advantage in many dangerous jobs (to have an avatar/bot perform the dangerous work). It's pretty disgusting to think of people using suckerbergs evil hardware/servers to do it though.

LinkedIn? Really?