Gig workers are a genuine and serious regression in workers rights and employer vs. employee power balance. These "jobs" should not be allowed to exist, at all.
Tech companies have figured out a way to subvert the protections all other employees are subject to. I see absolutely no reason why they should be allowed to do this.
I really do not understand why governments aren't working hard to make this kind of gig-economy illegal.
>These "jobs" should not be allowed to exist, at all.
Piece work is nothing new in the economic landscape of history. I'm not saying I absolutely defend it or think it shouldn't be subject to some sorts of protective rules for workers, but you saying it shouldn't exist at all begs the question of what exactly these many, many workers should do instead to make extra, necessary money instead.
If you're of a mind to answer, don't mention something from some neat ideal you have in your mind, describe something practical and accessible in the real world of the present, right now, that could replace their gig wages under existing market dynamics.
It's easy to dislike something and say it should be made to go away, but it helps to know how that will affect those who depend on it, and also to ask what they think of its disappearance in their practical lives.
This is true. it also hurts the public, as the drivers are dependent on the number of deliveries the succeed making, thus hurrying up and constantly stressed. This hurts not only their health and quality of delivery, but also increases the risk for traffic accidents.
It is in the best of interest of everyone that these people would get a normal salary.
As long as they get tips, they will continue to speed.
See: pizza delivery people for decades.
In CA at least, Uber effectively bought the protection through an effective ad campaign to pass by popular vote an effectively unrecoverable law to protect themselves.
You tell the truth. That said, every other special interest already had a carve out from the authors of the bill. Uber/Doordash/Lyft just wanted the same special treatment.
I voted against the proposition but I also understood why Californian consumers would vote for it.
Voters have no agency? Kind of a dim view on democratic processes.
Voters are heavily influenced by propaganda. If they weren't, then there wouldn't be advertising.
Functional democracy is much more than just "everyone casts a vote"
I recently learned that a courier in Panama can earn around $1,400 a month. Yes, you likely have to work six days a week, but that's well above the average salary in the country.
I'm not sure how the sentiment is in developed countries like the US and the UK. Still, here in Latin America, this presents an opportunity for poorer communities to provide dinner for a family.
In most of the western world the sentiment is that basic worker rights are a necessary element of social stability. And that just because a job "presents an opportunity for poorer communities to provide dinner for a family" it should not be excluded from receiving basic labor protections.
> basic worker rights are a necessary element of social stability
That's the argument for the owners of capital - give them rights so that you can have social stability. The argument for most people is that rights are universal, and it is fair, just, and essential for workers to have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, etc.
I’m not arguing that it’s an unnecessary element. Rather, I don’t agree with the original statement that the government should shut down the services.
How did you learn that? Did someone tell you or is there something we can read? I appreciate you mentioning it, I just want to know more about it. Thanks.
I’m investing in EM startups. Talked to the founder of the leading food delivery company there.
Will try to visit the country in March and share some notes in public web
> I really do not understand why governments aren't working hard to make this kind of gig-economy illegal.
It makes money and the current governing/legal doctrine says the government should give a lot of leeway to that. Biden has been touted as the most pro-labor president since about LBJ, but a lot of this is just letting the NLRB mediate every individual starbucks that unionized.
Because it provides an extremely convenient service that has made life better for most people? People seem to forgot that this class of job used to not exist in our lifetimes. Was it better to be a low-skill worker on the job market in 2010 when these apps didn't exist?
If there are specific labor violations you think are taking place, the appropriate remedy is regulation, not banning.
>Was it better to be a low-skill worker on the job market in 2010 when these apps didn't exist?
If you had a job certainly. Basically any job is superior, as you actually do have some rights.
>If there are specific labor violations you think are taking place, the appropriate remedy is regulation, not banning.
The whole concept is a violation of labor laws. Every aspect is bad.
I don't know enough about it, but a general statement like "every aspect is bad" isn't helpful if I wanted to learn more. Do you have some specific issues?
Look at the protections employees have that independent contractors don't. There's also very little transparency over pay and how you get assigned jobs.
I have a personal experience that might be relevant. I used to work for Instacart. One day I was leaving a store with groceries and discovered my car's windshield had been smashed. There was shattered glass all over the inside of my car so I reported that I had vehicle problems through the app amd handed off the order to another driver. I was an independent contractor and didn't get compensated for the damage for my car but I also got flagged for failing to complete a delivery and I stopped getting work. I never tried to get compensated for the windshield but I tried to get the incomplete order removed from my record. I finally got driver support on the phone and the guy just yelled at me for being ungrateful that I could still work for Instacart at all. I'm lucky that I no longer need to work gig apps but my heart goes out to people that have to use those to support themselves.
I see. Sorry you had a shitty experience
Not sure if Uber Eats falls under gig work (think so) but I'm glad to have it, I can just turn it on and go. Granted in my case it's not my only job. I usually get $20/hr I know I'm destroying my own car in the process, get in a car crash I'm on my own. But again it's extra money on demand.
I thought you were covered by Uber's car insurance when you were on their clock?
I would not think/expect that. There is even a commercial insurance you're supposed to have vs. regular
> I really do not understand why governments aren't working hard to make this kind of gig-economy illegal.
Because there's a large number of people who take the writings of Ayan Rand and the policies of Ronald Regan as the best way to run government.
Workers' rights are being eroded because we've slowly dismantled and privatized as much of the government as possible.
Workers' rights are incompatible with small government and or libertarian ideals. Much like other rights such as civil rights. Or rights to clean water, air, and food.
Big government isn't perfect, but for its flaws there are benefits having a large organization with a bigger stick to beat in line robber barons whose entire goal is to undermine rights as much as possible to leach maximum profit from society.
>Because there's a large number of people who take the writings of Ayan Rand and the policies of Ronald Regan as the best way to run government.
Are these people currently running e.g. the UK?
Well first off, yes for a very long time the party in charge of the UK was the Tories from 2010 all the way up to 2024.
But further, the current prime minister of the UK got there by and large by abandoning Labour party positions in favor of explicitly supporting nothing. Starmer literally used Margret Thatcher, the UK equivalent of Regan, as an example of an excellent prime minister. Starmer is very much the UK equivalent of Bill Clinton, a conservative leader of the historically "progressive" party.
Starmer has been in power all of 7 months now.
It seems very weird that they somehow do have labor laws over there, though. They even forced Uber to make their drivers have worker protections, quite strange to be honest. Maybe Thatcherite neo-liberals sometimes mistake the oppress everyone check box, with the worker rights check box. Who knows...
They also still have the NHS even though torys hate it.
Labor laws and social programs are very hard to eliminate once created because they are very popular. The US has weaker labor laws and social programs than the UK and they've been eroded since the 80s by nearly every Congress and administration. Yet we still have social security and Medicare not because Republicans love those programs, but because the remain hugely popular.
You'll note that the torys and conservatives haven't enacted or pushed for their own social programs. They've simply failed to fully eliminate what's already there.
The social programs conservatives in the US have been effective at eliminating and neutering mostly happened because of racist narratives. "Welfare queen" was very much a pejorative used to paint a picture of "urban" women living off of government assistance. That allowed for huge cuts to previous programs because they hurt the right people.
Gig workers are a perfect example of how inhumanly ruthless our capitalistic overlords are.
Once you actually read the article .. you see a similar kind of thing to complaints about Youtube or bank demonetization. People are accused of fraud, and have their access withdrawn - but nobody will explain what they allegedly did, because that would leak information about the fraud detection.
It's a kind of automated low trust economy. The drivers don't trust the apps, and the app doesn't trust the drivers, so the thing has to be held together by surveillance and micromanagement.
I am currently in a nightmare scenario at a new job. I just finished building their website, and it got flagged as a phishing website by Google Safebrowsing because Google seems to think that our analytics subdomain which is a self-hosted instance of Umami Analytics is a phishing attempt.
I requested a review once, they removed the flag. It came back a couple of days ago. I then had to move Umami to its own domain because I couldn't risk this ever happening again (visitors to our root domain were also getting the huge red warning, and our business was coming off as a scam).
Then they flagged the new domain as well. They've removed it again at my request, but I am just counting down the days until it happens again.
There is no way for me to get through to a human to talk about why this is happening.
They've clearly implemented prejustice, but not correctly. Find that class action lawyer and go fishing!
Have legal send Google a C&D and shoot an email to the FTC about anticompetitive behavior. That's how you get a human involved.
Even if this works, it represents a failure in the system that needs to be fixed.
(I assume you're just trying to help the parent solve their problem so I'm not trying to be dismissive of your comment)
I am not sure this aphorism is helping in any way though? of course system needs to be fixed, there are about 829 things google/bigtech-wise that needs to be fixed but of course they won't be fixed. the only course of action in vast majority of cases like this is legal action
California’s labor board could state that anyone impacted by algorithmic decisions has the right to review the algorithm used, and that all algorithms used must be deterministic and diagrammable. If clearly stated, “flip a coin” or “choose one at random” is fine, but “trained AI network” is not.
This would shine light on algorithms used at Uber, DoorDash, Amazon, Microsoft, Workday (based in Oakland). Anyone with a worker in California whose work is subject to algorithmic intervention would have the right to request the source code to all algorithms impacting their gig, temporary, or permanent employment.
I cannot imagine a more frightening regulatory path for California tech. They would spend a billion dollars trying to stop it.
> all algorithms used must be deterministic
There are also many optimization algorithms that require random processes. This can even include things like finding the area under a curve because it may be faster to use Monte Carlo Integration. You might not even be able to do it otherwise.
> and diagrammable
I understand the intent of your words and even agree with it. I think openness and transparency are critical. But because I care and agree I want to make sure we recognize how difficult that the wording is. Because it is often easy to implement a solution that creates a bigger problem than the thing we sought to solve.
Personally, I'd love to see that things become "Software Available." I mean if it was a requirement for everyone, then it is much easier to "prove" when code is cloned. Of course, this is easier said than done since there's many "many ways to skin a cat" but in essence, this is not too dissimilar from physical manufacturing. It's really hard to keep secrets in hardware. Plus, there's benefits like you can fix your fucking tractor when it breaks down. Or fix a car even if it is half a century old. I do expect if this would become reality that it'd need a lot more nuance and my own critique applies, but I just wanted to put it out there (in part, to get that critique).
Obviously a diagram of an ANN is ‘possible’ and just as obviously it’s not in compliance relative to an algorithm with a runbook as most governments recognize and use. I’m not writing a forum comment with the law or rule as I would craft it to ensure that a judge can reasonably find against such examples. HN is not a useful place to workshop legalese :)
No law or rule will be able to, in ‘legal’ code terms, fully exclude attempts to slip through loopholes in the proposed restriction. That doesn’t at all invalidate the threat of it; that’s just the cost of doing business with any legal code — which, itself, cannot be interpreted fully deterministically at all.
You’re welcome to propose better wording, of course; and: I also recommend writing a letter to an elected representative or state board if you do! I think they would jump at the chance to even the odds without being seen as disadvantaging their sponsors.
Fair enough. Though I suspect that it will be quite difficult to find the right words, even with substantial legalese. But I did want to make the note of caution. Especially as this even permeates into the public language, which in turn ends up being what politicians use because they just care about signaling instead of solving the actual problems...
“Decision processes can be analyzed and reproduced by a typical citizen without burdensome preconditions” is a nice simple way to put it. Neural network training is not accessible to a typical citizen (one that you might find on a jury) without burdensome effort involving terabytes of input data and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a black-box pre-trained network does not satisfy the terms of replicable as it cannot be interpreted by analysis. Techies will object that ‘burdensome’ is poorly defined, but it serves to concentrate the subjective judgement into a measurable test that can be evaluated and justified by the judiciary; I expect that a judge would not find “download and execute an AI” to pass that test, but you could always explicitly analysis to be possible in a reasonable length of time without a computer. Similarly, language regarding ‘typical citizens’ is already well-known and understood in the field.
This is all moot if no one asks for it, though :) The exact wording of the deck chairs has no bearing on the course of the ship and all.
I'd settle for "interpretable".
Because frankly, I don't think the average citizen can understand a lot of even basic algorithms used in data analysis. I teach undergrads and I can say with high certainty that even many senior CS students have difficulties understanding them. There's PhDs in other STEM feilds that have issues (you can have a PhD in a STEM field without having a strong math background. Which "strong" means very different things to different people. For some Calculus means strong while others PDEs isn't sufficient)
Why I'd settle for interpretable is since someone could understand and explain it. There needs to be some way we can verify bias, and not just by means of black box probing. While black box probing allows to detect bias it only allows us to do so by sampling and requires us to sample just right. Black box probing makes it impossible to show non-bias.
What I want is __causal__ explanations. And I think that's what everyone wants. And causal explanations can be given even with non-deterministic algorithms.
For the most sensitive algorithms, if the algorithm cannot be explained in easily understandable language (as determined by a jury), then it's illegal.
(It's how we use paper ballots rather than machines, and especially not everyday computers for voting : the extra risk just isn't worth it.)
> if the algorithm cannot be explained in easily understandable language (as determined by a jury), then it's illegal.
- A*
- VNMC Sampling
- Runge–Kutta
- PDE solvers
- Integrals
- Monte Carlo Integration
I disagree, but mainly because we're here on HN. We're in a location where many engineers and engineering managers of these things exist. Many of these problems can be solved WITHOUT legal. In fact, arguably this MUCH cheaper.
For developers:
This means to stop rushing, to do things the "right" way. To not just write code to pass the unit tests, but to write code that is more robust than that. To write code that is modifiable and modular (that whole monad thing that the PL people keep yelling at us about). To not just be someone who glues code together (be that from stack overflow or GPT), but _writes_ code. To actually know the entire codebase and beyond just what you're in charge of. To push back against your managers and write better code. To fix problems without being asked. To fix issues __before__ they're asked. Sure, writing fast and dirty code will get you done quicker but it is just putting off more work later. Because why do today what will be twice as much work tomorrow?
For managers:
Recognize that good and efficient code are important and make your business better and more profitable. To stop this "don't let perfection get in the way of good" nonsense, because perfect code doesn't exist. If an developer is writing "perfect code" then either there's a miscommunication between dev and manager about what is "good enough" or the dev is dumb (junior) and thinks perfect code exists. Give time for devs to go back and clean up the messes. Realize it is _cheaper_ and easier to clean a mess today than it is tomorrow since messes compound. Don't wait for something to break to fix it, fix it before it breaks. Maintenance is FAR cheaper than replacement. To be careful how you evaluate your devs because things like lines of code written, number of commits, or tickets resolved are all extremely noisy measurements[2]. All can actually be indicative of a bad developer as much as it can be of a good developer. Because when you have a true 10x developer 10x fewer tickets will be created in the first place. It's very hard to evaluate a future that didn't happen. Look for your developers who are foreseeing problems. Hire a few "grumpy devs", people who are pointing out problems AND trying to solve them. A good developer is good at recognizing and finding problems (see example below: stop testing if your devs can fizzbuzz or leetcode and instead see if they can anticipate problems and think about solving them. The more you believe LLMs will do the coding in the future the more important this skill is!).
(I've often been told that a difference between "academic code" and "business code" is that the business cares about if something "works". That what matters is the product in the customer's hands. My experience has been that business do not in fact care. This experience involves working in production and even demonstrating how to fix problems that more than double the performance of the product. Not like "made a 10ms process a 5ms process" but "customers can make 1 widget per hour, now customers can make 2 widgets per hour at half the cost")
For both:
To recognize that things compound and thus the little things add up. To stop being dismissive of small improvements, especially if they are quick to resolve. Small issues compound, but so do small improvements. Stick your neck out a little. If there's never enough time to do it right but there's always enough time to do it twice, then something is wrong (there is time to do it right).
Here's a simple example of how a small thing can compound while requiring almost no extra dev time (5 minutes? 30 max?):
If you have a forum that people need to fill out and it has values you can know or reasonably guess (e.g. country and timezone can be reasonably guessed even if not logged in), provide those as defaults.
Better, add a copy -- don't remove from the alphabetical list! -- of the most frequent/likely to the top.
(Seriously, as a US person why am I always scrolling to the bottom of a list to enter country of origin on a page that is expecting me to be a US citizen... We're writing software. Software automates. Fucking automate this shit for me).
I'm not just speaking out of my ass here. I write tons of small scripts and programs to take care of little things for me. They add up in surprising ways. Honestly, I'd get much more utility if other developers made this process more accessible to me. But the reason to write accessible code is not for others, but for yourself[1].
[0] Might seem like a nothing burger but this can be quite timely. My partner is Korean, so she never knows if her country is "Republic of Korea", "ROK", "Korea", "South Korea", or even some others. She has to guess and check, and it isn't like these things are near one another.
[1] I write a lot of research code. Many of my peers write just quick and dirty code. This is fine, I do this on my first pass too. But once something gets going it is incredibly important to have flexible code, even at the cost of optimization! (obviously depends on need and stage of code) because you have to constantly modify things. They may often be faster to first result but I'm faster to "completion" and often can be more thorough. If things are hardcoded then it is hard to modify and easy to make mistakes (did you check all the places?). If things are hard to change, then you're discouraged to answer questions as they arise. But I also worked as a mechanical engineer and an experimental physicist previously doing R&D. So I saw that development has various stages and it requires rebuilds along the way with the new build being aimed at the stage of development not the final goal. A beautiful thing about software is that the performance costs of "repairability" or "modifiability" are extremely low and often non-existent. So it is almost always advantageous to write that way. First dirty, then modifiable, then optimize what and only what needs to be optimized.
[2] There's an important concept here: Randomness/Noise is the measurement of uncertainty. You can't know something to infinite precision, so you have to include some uncertainty. Meaning, if you want to be more accurate, you have to account for "randomness" or "noise". If you just take numbers at face value then you are evaluating incorrectly. Numbers aren't enough, in any situation. Ignoring them will make you less precise and often bit you in the ass. It always does this at the worst possible time and worse, it is often hard to recognize where the ass biting came from.
Nice blogpost (genuinely, not ironic), but entirely unrelated to the issue being discussed.
> Nice blogpost (genuinely, not ironic)
> but entirely unrelated to the issue being discussed.
Side note: Always happy to see physicists in the ML space. Biased as an ex-physicist working in ML myself lol. I'm sure you can see how physics influenced my outlook haha
Clearly you should move to google’s analytics product.
Almost certainly the correct inference about why this is happening.
It's called criminalisation of compliance and pre-crime. It exists because there is a compliance-industrial complex selling software to create compliance. More compliance, more revenue. Social discussion does not matter, because what's good and what's bad is determined by software and compliance companies.
Here is a book about it:
https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati...
> The drivers don't trust the apps, and the app doesn't trust the drivers, so the thing has to be held together by surveillance and micromanagement.
Exactly. And a large dose of gaming the system (or trying to), which reduces trust even further. Why play fair with an unaccountable algorithm?
That and the use of black box models whose predictions are not explainable.
What's fun is you can still do black box probing. And guess what, spammers have done this.
I get these emails that look like classic spam like a link to a home depot or wallmart giftcard, but they're addressed to someone who isn't me. After getting a bunch of these I decided to look at the original email. They are being sent to an outlook (e.g. notmyname@biggerish.someShortName01.shortname.outlook.com) and appear from something that looks like a store (e.g. contact_support.csz@fakestore.fr>). It passes SPF and DMARC but fails DKIM.
The content?
It used to be PAGES of stuff like "here's your email password reset link" or "thank you for signing up <legitimate place>". I was confused at first but then realized that yeah, this stuff likely bypass a ML filter. But the spammers have gotten better at it and now they can do it with only a page of content.
Of course, I can easily filter these by just parsing the "To Address" (I use Thunderbird). But I reported tons of these and was deleting them. But in middle of last year I decided to just start collecting them. I have over 50...
This is low hanging fruit stuff... Like a Naive Bayes could handle this. The current solution could probably handle it if they started actually fucking labeling the examples as spam and assumed that the labeling process was noisy (dear god I hope they use at least "legit" "unknown" "spam" and don't assume legit if it isn't marked as spam...)
I have EVEN TALKED TO A PERSON and the issue couldn't be escalated... Which IMO is being complacent in spam.
With regards to bank demobilization here is an interesting article.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...
About Fetlife from 2017, 8 years ago.
With the movement to a cashless world .. many people will loose there whole life because banks will close there accounts.
I disagree with using "debanking" as an example. At least in the US, banks are required by law (the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), et al) to not divulge certain information. As far as I'm aware, YouTube et al are not under such a legal requirement.
While we did not divulge your certain information, we regret to tell you that your certain information was access in a hack that was discovered (9 months later).
if they intentionally or unintentionally were the source of that certain information, there's little recourse for you after the fact
The effect is the same, though.
Sounds pretty close to the dystopian predictions…….
There's more egregious cases though that I think illustrate the problem at large: no one wants accountability.
A very famous and egregious example is the XBox user who got banned for listing "Fort Gay" as their place of residence[0]. This is a problem that was caused by automation and honestly, could have entirely been resolved with automation too[1]. But it was also a problem that could have been resolved in under a minute were a human given real power to do anything (or recognize that the cheapest labor usually isn't the cheapest labor).
Another is how there's a family suing Google for directing a man to drive off a bridge[2]. Hold your reservations because this is kinda like the McDonald's Coffee lawsuit[3]. The bridge had collapsed in 2013 and the man drove off in 2022. There's multiple parties that share some fault here (like city for not marking and barricading the bridge[4]), but the issue was reported many times and what kind of live map system isn't updating their maps within a decade?
I frequently report spam, phishing attacks, and all sorts of stuff. Nothing gets through. Same with Google maps. Same with literally any app. I can even send to dev channels with patches and things often do not go through. I can sit on a PR for months while others are asking for a merge and then a dev comes back and says "oh, change color to colour" or something, I'll repatch that night, and then the dev goes radio silent (seriously, it is more work to ask me to make that change than it is to do it yourself...).
I have so many frustrations, but the root of it all is that I can't fix problems I find. Even if I can create the fix myself, I can't get them upstream so I don't have to patch every fucking patch that comes down. I think a lot comes down to our mentality of "move fast and break things." This is fine for learning but not fine for production. Who cleans up all the mess left behind? The debt just grows and compounds. I know mitigating future costs is "invisible" but often we're talking about 15 minutes of work. If you don't have that kind of slack in your system then you're doomed. It's like having exactly the number of lifeboats on a ship such that you can accommodate every passenger. That's dumb. You have to over accommodate. Or else you get the Titanic (which underaccommodated, despite being capable of overaccomodating).
[0] https://kotaku.com/xbox-live-gamer-suspended-for-living-in-f...
[1] Step 1: Check user's location. If they aren't masking it, you'll find that they are located in "Fort Gay". Step 2: If it is masked, plug the fucking location into Google Maps or some database with a list of cities and check for a match. Done. Yay. 30 minutes of programming and you saved the company hundreds of dollars in customer service fees and millions of dollars in reputation rebuilding "fees".
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/21/us/father-death-google-gps-dr...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
[4] I highly advocate citizen action here. If you live near there, put a pile of rocks or anything in the way to make a barricade. Law comes after you? Fuck the law. Besides, I'm sure it'll make a great news story. We have those for people filling in potholes, this seems much more sensational.
XBox Fort Gay was a classic example of the Scunthorpe Problem[0]. I suppose we need a formal Scunthorpe Test, but this seems like you could solve the Problem with a popup checkbox and text field whenever your filter flags an account.
The seminal Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names[1] looks at similar territory from a different perspective.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
I agree. But also at the root of it is that a problem can't be escalated such that a thinking human that has actionable power can be involved.
The fallacy here is a belief that the filter is perfect. Or really, that any process can be perfect. Even if one could be perfect at a specific moment in time, well time marches on and things change.
I'm all for automation but it has to be recognized that the thing will always break and likely in a way you don't expect. Even in ways you __couldn't__ expect. So you have to design with that failure in mind. A lot of these "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About <X>" could summarized as "Programmers Believe They Can Accurately Predict All Reasonable Situations". I added "reasonable" on purpose. The world is just complex and we can only see a very limited amount. The best way to be accurate is to know that you're biased, even if you can't tell in which way you're biased.
Yeah, I don't really get the idea behind automatic filtration without an edge case basket. Hubris or lack of resources?
> Hubris or lack of resources?
To be more specific, I don't think there's a inherent lack of resources, but rather it is about resource allocation. There's also a big difference if we're talking about a startup vs a big tech giants (or even non tech focused companies). In the latter, there's no doubt that the resources exists, so it has to be allocation. And this is definitely true w.r.t. the above examples.
So... Hubris
The Scunthorpe effect
low trust economy is basically techno fascism. This is what a pre-cyberpunk distopia looks like, and while the first impacts appear towards progress, it's unlikely going to be about progress but cementing the technocrats and oligarchs.
I don’t think we need to use the pre prefix anymore. This is legit with all hallmarks.
Don't let them take the work cyberpunk, they dont deserve it, we can just call it technocratic dystopia and be fine.
Well, there arnt yet the cyber punks so ill keep the pre.
There is an old Charlie Chaplin movie about turning factory workers into an extension of machines.
If an app pretty much tells you how to do your job there's no place for personal expression and you become a zombie.
> A few hours later he received an email explaining that the app company had “taken the decision to revoke access” to his account because he had been elongating his journey to the pickup point, taking longer than reasonable. It didn’t add up, but there was no straightforward way to find out more.
>It wasn’t until weeks later, when he exercised his legal right to request data held about himself, that he was told something completely different: the app company believed he had tried to manipulate the system to undeservedly earn extra fees for waiting at restaurants to pick up orders.
>This had been spotted by team members, the app company claimed. An apparent algorithmic intervention was now being described as a human one. But when Myron looked back at his pay records, he could see none of the fees he was accused of taking. It was discombobulating.
On top of putting the risk of demand for the business changing onto employees… it seems these companies can pass on the risk of even being accurate or honest with those employees.
There is room for a food delivery horror game. Procedurally generated delivery instructions that never make sense. Contact support, have a real voice chat with a LLM that leads nowhere. Don’t make quota? Get hunted and eaten by The Manager. All for tips that don’t pay your crippling medical bills nor allow you transition into better jobs. The horror writes itself.
Sorry We're Open is a similar idea except focused on working retail rather than the gig economy. I recommend it!
The real challenge would be how you soften the game enough that players don't immediately lose all hope and go outside to touch grass.
In game crypto currency betting!
What could go wrong?
Great idea! The PC has a phone which they interact with to use the food delivery app, accept orders, get directions, etc. we can also add some other apps like a crypto stock exchange. Here’s where it gets good, we can add a mock of TikTok and X with infinite scrolling. The content is AI generated as well. Makes the game more immersive and more horrific. Imagine getting chased by a monster, carrying someone’s burger and fries, while doomscrolling IckTok. Time to download Godot!!
Once you unlock payment in crypto, you get to accept various coins for delivery payment, and then try to arbitrage better compensation for deliveries. At higher levels, you'be been working the cypto side long enough to get invited to ICOs, but watch out for rug pulls!
The Grubbyhub whale you delivered whale vomit to gave you a $1Million tip in Crypto!
Ohhh, snap too bad when you tried to deposit it they stole your whole account. Sleep in your car tonight so it doesn't get repossessed.
i'm surprised that more gig work delivery folks haven't tried to 'go independent' and become a new sort of personal assistant: select a handful of good clients and get them pay a retainer for you to drive around doing their busywork all day.
for the driver, consistent pay and the ability to weed out bad clients. for the client, you'd get a trustworthy assistant that should be able to take on a wider range of things that a single app wouldn't do. it may not be as fast as an on-demand delivery apps, but for most things that doesn't really matter.
My (wealthy) father in law does this, he has a handful of people he can call upon day or night to do whatever he needs, anything from pick something up two hours away to put some additional overnight security on one of his sites/properties... most of them are ex-military Eastern European. I've no idea how he compensates them but they seem happy with him and stick around, and the couple I've spoken to over the years seem nice enough.
To be honest I wouldn't want to know more details, he's a dodgy fuck
I think those kind of assistants are called henchmen ;-)
My father in law (not so wealthy), has a few people near his beach rental that will do various different things. Including one handyman who will help with whatever.
There are whole management companies who do this type of stuff for vacation rentals. I’d bet there are similar ones for rich people’s primary and secondary homes.
Estate/house managers are a very real thing, especially at the high end.
It can vary from basically part time concierge work (get the beds made, and make sure that the fridge is full when I arrive), all the way to full-time management of a property including managing additional full-time staff (maids, chefs, gardeners, etc).
I only brushed against it in being part of the yachting world, but it is fascinating how much money people like this absolutely blow away on making their lives slightly more convenient.
Don't even think about cheating on your wife
Startup idea: TaskRabbit but for ex-military Eastern Europeans who will do whatever a dodgy fuck wants.
Executive Outcomes?
That's such a better movie title than name of a company
HenchRabbit?
"Execute like a billionaire"
> My (wealthy) father in law
> I've no idea how he compensates them
I'm going to guess with a lot of money. That likely doesn't get reported to relevant tax authorities.
this sounds like the kind of thing you shouldn't post on the internet :)
Some years ago, I met a guy at a bar in New York who said that he was Donald Trump's personal courier. He rode a bike around the city, and he'd deliver things to Trump in person, who would always give him at least $100 cash on the spot. I didn't believe the guy's story, and it offended him. Maybe he was telling the truth.
This is not unbelievable. I don't even live in a coastal city and I still know a handful of active couriers. They're faster than drivers in congested areas and pretty much get a pass on all traffic control/regulation if they don't truly endanger pedestrians. Not to mention that they don't need parking, can carry their vehicles up stairs and into buildings etc.
Plenty of people know these guys exist and having someone known to you and reliable on speed dial is worthwhile. The $100 also makes sense because it isn't just a tip, it is the 'retainer' to make sure the calls get maximum priority.
Trump paying the courier is what makes the story unbelievable, tbh.
Further, if we take this story at face value, a "personal" courier, by definition, has no other clients to prioritize.
IIRC the climax of the merger deal described in /Barbarians at the Gate/ essentially comes down to a bike courier race between various offices in Manhattan as last-minute bid adjustments got ferried about. Makes me wonder what the value of the truly fastest bike courier in New York would be to some large investment bank/PE firm/whatever. I imagine they are massively underpaid compared to the value they provide.
My father in law worked as a project manager for a locally big construction firm. Back in the 90s/00s they were basically sitting in a room with as many phones and fax machines as they could handle, with binders and Rolodexes of subcontractors spread around the tables.
Bid adjustments were a huge thing they had to optimize for and it created Seinfeld worthy situations.
SpiderMan should have got in to this business.
These are primarily people delivering food orders at lunch time for less than $10.
The people paying for these services will not pay what it would cost to have a “personal assistant”.
Also they can only deliver so many orders at a time. If all of your clients order lunch around the same time, it’s not possible to deliver in a reasonable amount of time.
For food delivery, I imagine going back to pre-apps and have restaurant employed couriers for local takeout could be beneficial for both parties.
The problem for restaurant-employed delivery staff is nearly the same as the customer-employed delivery staff mentioned above. The driver sits around in the restaurant parking lot twiddling his thumbs and then 10 lunch orders come in over the course of an hour, most of which while the driver’s out delivering the first order. The last order ends up taking 2 hours to get to the customer who is not at all pleased with cold, soggy food long after the lunch break ended.
The food delivery app business works like the insurance business: the aggregate drivers form a risk pool [1] to protect restaurants from the variability of demand. This allows a single restaurant to be able to accept 10 food delivery orders in a matter of minutes just as easily as they would for orders coming in from the tables in their dining room. The app would dispatch up to 10 drivers to handle those orders and even automatically batch them according to proximity of destination.
Of course the app can also handle multiple restaurants in a similar area in the same way so that drivers can be dispatched most efficiently to handle all the demand for an entire city. The more drivers, restaurants, and customers centralize on a single delivery app, the more efficient the system can be (assuming the app developers know how to optimize the transshipment problem [2]).
What businesses need is delivery drivers.
If the business has a delivery driver, that driver should get priority on the app. But that'll never happen, because that's a slippery slope to just being an ordering platform - a much smaller moat.
I was a driver. When not delivering, we waited, checked out, cooked food, got ahead on end-of-night cleaning, etc.
If the orders piled in, we made them ourselves then delivered them. If it was a slow night, they let a line cook go and we took over, while the manager filled in while we were out on delivery.
We were the ones who stayed late to clean the kitchen, because we delivered right up until close. On slow nights, we got out the door right at close. On busy nights, it might be two hours later as we handled the backlog of cleanup / closeout.
Delivery drivers are efficient flexible resources with less overhead than the apps.
I thank the lord I got to have a driver job as you describe in the 2000s before the gig economy. I would have ground myself to dust for an extra dollar under the current conditions.
This is how it worked for me catering breakfast and sandwiches. There’s not much down time unless it was in between lunch and dinner shifts.
We handled all the breakfast and fruit trays until the kitchen staff came it at 7am. We got there at 5:30.
You can't really fix the problem that everyone tends to order during lunch and dinner hours. No matter how you arrange the delivery staff, there will be too much demand during those times, and too little the rest of the day.
There's arguably been some efficiency lost, as some restaurants had the drivers cross trained to help with making the food.
But that's true of staffing across the whole restaurant, and yet, it seems to work.
Yes. You can not fix every problem, and still make money.
Lovely, it’s really a useful tool.
Unfortunately it’s management is opaque and manipulative, in the hands of a one self-interested actor.
If anything, this sort of market would be well served by a publicly funded (not necessarily by a Government, let’s throw blockchains into the mix) neutral and transparent platform
The problem for restaurant-employed delivery staff is nearly the same as the customer-employed delivery staff mentioned above.
And yet somehow we had restaurant delivery for 50 years before the invention of the cell phone. And grocery delivery for a hundred years before that.
Both pizza joints, and the Chinese place I order from employ their own people.
The only thing that's changed is that a certain cohort of people are terrified to pick up a phone and speak to another human being, and so delegate that most basic of human functions to a computer program.
The only actual utility of these apps is the ability to track and obsess over the precise location of my food, as if I'm going to die of starvation if I don't know exactly where it is.
And for that I am happy with simple web site. List of options I can have, basic modifications like remove or add. Some extras, and option to pay there and then.
It is sadly too small market nowadays...
Both pizza joints, and the Chinese place I order from employ their own people.
This is the crux of the matter. We're not living in the "2 pizza joints and a Chinese place" world anymore. In my city there are hundreds of restaurants serving cuisines from half the countries on the planet. Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, British, Nigerian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Mexican, Salvadoran, Peruvian, Brazilian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese (including Cantonese, Sichuanese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, and Hakka), Indian (too many to count, likely from every province in the country), Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Thai, Vietnamese, ...
We also have movie theatres selling popcorn, Dairy Queen selling Blizzards, StarBucks selling frappuccinos, and McDonald's selling McFlurries, doughnut shops selling Boston creams, dessert shops selling matcha roll cakes, ... I didn't even mention pizza joints!
In other words, the delivery apps bring customers an explosion of options they never had before. That is their highest utility for customers (while offering the risk pool solution to restaurants).
In my city there are hundreds of restaurants serving cuisines from half the countries on the planet. Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, British, Nigerian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Mexican, Salvadoran, Peruvian, Brazilian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese (including Cantonese, Sichuanese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, and Hakka), Indian (too many to count, likely from every province in the country), Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Thai, Vietnamese, ...
In my city, too. But I don't presume that I have the right to have every single cuisine that exists delivered to me at near-zero cost. Sometimes you have to make an effort in life.
What do rights have to do with it? We’re talking about supply and demand. There is supply, there is demand, and the delivery apps provide the logistics to connect the two.
If we go back to the way things were 30 years ago then we have fewer restaurants, less economic activity, less diversity, and a less interesting life for everyone!
then we have fewer restaurants
No, we don't. People still have to eat. If anything, we have fewer restaurants today because of consolidation in the industry and the way massive-scale delivery enables ghost kitchens that take customers away from actual restaurants.
less economic activity
Uber Eats barely generates any "economic activity." It doesn't rate against the economic activity generated when people go outside.
less diversity
Now you're just making things up. People don't become Ethiopian because they sat on their couch to eat at Ethiopian delivery compared with actually going to an Ethiopian restaurant.
a less interesting life for everyone!
Leaving your house is more interesting than being inside. It's pretty much the definition of "living."
It’s -15 C outside here and the snow is blowing sideways. NO ONE is going outside to grab lunch. They’re all ordering Uber Eats. If Uber Eats didn’t exist they’d be eating egg salad sandwiches for lunch, not ordering a pizza from a place that pays a full time driver.
NO ONE is going outside to grab lunch.
Sure someone is. The Uber Eats guy. Because of you. Not considering other people to be equal human beings is the root of the problem.
Part of being an adult is to be prepared. Surely you knew it was going to be -15 more than an hour before you got hungry. You DO have a smart phone, after all. It comes with a weather app built in.
What do you think people did before we had smartphones? They didn't sit around and whine about the temperature and not eat lunch. They bought stuff ahead of time, including egg salad sandwiches.
Oh, the horror of having to pack a lunch like a caveman, and not a self-entitled knowledge worker!
I hope you somehow manage to recover. Perhaps clutching your emotional support water bottle will help.
Not only do a few of my local restaurants employ their own drivers, but they also use websites to allow for online ordering so I do not have to pick up the phone anyway.
Well, you can also - shock horror - drive (or bike, if possible) over to the restaurant and pick up your order yourself! That's of course assuming that the restaurant has another means of placing orders than through the delivery apps (e.g. a phone number)...
While I personally make 95% of my food, I order delivery when I am so busy that if I don't, I will not eat.
While I personally make 95% of my food, I order delivery when I am so busy that if I don't, I will not eat.
Sounds like a problem that solves itself.
Or at least a wake-up call that you're doing something wrong. Unless you're safeguarding nuclear launch codes, there's no such thing as "too busy to eat." It's just people trying to make themselves and others think they're important. Guess what? You're not. The actually important people do eat. It's their lackies who pretend they're too busy to do the same.
Yes, I've owned my own company. Yes, it required extensive complicated international travel. It's still true. If you can't plan meal breaks, you can't plan.
And even the nuclear launch people get lunch.
"Important people" eat because they can afford to pay people to make eating convenient for them. "Unimportant people" are busy because they have to actually work to pay their bills and do their laundry and dishes and clean their homes and take out the trash and do all the stuff that "important people" magically don't have to do, because "unimportant people" do it for them.
This is what I do. Dealing with the uncertainty of the delivery apps as a customer in my area is approaching the levels of nightmare it is as a driver in others. I didn't keep track when I was using them but let's just say it was a pleasant surprise when I received everything I ordered. Usually something was "forgotten".
I like food delivered to me but I am willing to pay for it. The minimum wag applies to gig workers too- and with an aging society and shrinking workforce the pay is usually a lot better than that.
Ofcourse in the US with tens of millions of illegal immigrants who will do anything to survive the situation must be very different.
most of the folks getting ubereats delivery are not the target demo for being a PA client. but you don't have to be super wealthy for the economics of it to work out.
most tech employees make enough that they could pay 10-15 hrs of low wage work every week to do stuff like pick up your laundry/groceries, pick up a food order that you've called in, take stuff to the post office, etc.
most tech employees in SF
most very high staff or director+ level tech employees of a handful of top FAANG companies in SF
I mean, really?
An L5 at FAANG is making close to $450-500k/yr in total comp. Let’s assume the minimum wage is $15/hr, and the people doing the tasks get paid $25/hr (on the higher end). With 15 hours of simple errands a week, it comes out to $375/week or $1500/mo.
Maybe it is a bit of a stretch for an L5 to spend that much in a month on helping with chores (gotta consider taxes, after all), but it doesn’t seem that wild at all to have $1500 in spending on getting chores taken care of. And it is definitely very doable for an L6. No need to be at L7 to be able to comfortably afford that at all.
No need to live in SF for that either. Seattle pays pretty much comparably, no state income tax, a bit cheaper cost of living, and all big FAANG companies have a major presence there. At director level, you would be able to afford much more (been to a director’s house once for a team bbq, and yeah, the gap between director level and L5/L6 is rather large; and it wasn’t a director of one of the higher-paying FAANG-tier companies either).
L7 is where you get servants?
Ill keep that in mind.
It depends on the gig. Attempts to farm out housecleaning as a gig fail in exactly that way - people find the cleaner they want, and they arrange to make it permanent. Making the gig app as a discovery mechanism.
That's why none of the attempts at making housecleaning part of the gig economy have succeeded.
It depends on the gig. Attempts to farm out housecleaning as a gig fail in exactly that way - people find the cleaner they want, and they arrange to make it permanent.
That used to be considered a success, not a failure.
When agencies like Kelly place someone in a position like that, the person is required to work for Kelly for x number of months/years. Once that obligation is complete, they are free to jump to working directly with the Kelly client. Been there. Done that.
This is a solved problem. And solved a hundred years ago.
Part of that solution is to either sell a cleaning service that people only use occasionally, like deep cleaning of your floors, or to lock the client in to a contract that allows you to detect those private deals.
But the basic, "I'd like someone to clean my house once a week" doesn't work so well. People sometimes stop the cleaning after a bad experience. And sometimes hire the cleaner after a good one. And from the company's point of view, those look exactly the same. Customers will refuse 6 month contracts, and so there is no real recourse.
> i'm surprised that more gig work delivery folks haven't tried to 'go independent' and become a new sort of personal assistant: select a handful of good clients and get them pay a retainer for you to drive around doing their busywork all day.
I think you might be over-estimating how much of a personal connection gig work delivery drivers have with the people they deliver to.
How many do you recognize? How many do you even know the names of? I'm not even sure if I've ever had a repeat delivery person, except from one restaurant that does delivery in-house instead of farming it out to one of the services.
they don't have connections to them because they're still gig workers going through the app.
but all they need to do to start those relationships would be to drop off a business card if doordash/ubereats/etc sent them to somebody that seemed pleasant/tipped well/etc. then network effects from their as they recommend among their (presumably wealth) friends
Don't get on Uncle Enzo's bad side though.
UpWork would let people do this today.
big companies care more about how easy it is to automate the labels, the accounting, the scheduling, ... Saving 2 euro per delivery but requiring a few hour of human effort is typically not worth it
That's already a thing, it's a just a normal courier service.
> select a handful of good clients
Probably because the gig worker's client is Doordash, not the individuals ordering delivery, to which they have little to no contact and most likely wont ever see them again. As a delivery-orderer in NYC, I cannot recall ever having the same delivery person more than once, let alone so often that we developed a client-relationship.
Could even make an app for that.
Unionize. Collective action is the only way to stand up to Uber and co.
How?
There's no workplace to speak in hushed tones. There's no manager or de facto leader to make first contact with union representatives. There's no way to know when you've reached a quorum of local drivers.
Make no mistake, I sympathize with you. Rideshare/third-party delivery drivers have become America's new techno-feudalist underclass.
“It’s not unusual, except that Manna is telling you exactly what to do every second of every day. If it asks you to go to the back and get merchandise, it tells you exactly where to walk to go get it. And here is the weirdest part — I never see another employee the entire day. The way it makes me walk, I never run into anyone else. I can go for a full shift and never see another employee. Even our breaks are staggered. Everyone takes their breaks alone. We all arrive at staggered times. It’s like Manna is trying to totally eliminate human interaction on the job.”
All described in prescient classic: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
this sounds like my personal nirvana no human contact but able to exist maybe the buddhists were right nirvana exists...
It wasn't "no human contact", it was "no contact with other employees/coworkers". Big difference.
restaurants/pickup you can just walk in with headphones wave and show phone customers usually want stuff left at door
no workplace cliques, meetings a win is a win. when I pray to the poofy guy in the sky I thank him for creating the humans that created this
The ADCU has been representing app drivers and couriers in the UK for years, but they're probably not the best model.
https://www.wired.com/story/adcu-gig-economy-union-toxic-rep...
The reality is that a large proportion of app workers are undocumented. Worker accounts are rented or sold to people who do not have the legal right to work. We can't reasonably address the issue of working conditions on these platforms if we don't acknowledge that fact.
https://inews.co.uk/news/deliveroo-uber-eats-just-eat-illega...
Exactly - anywhere you have undocumented or unregistered or undereducated workers you have exploitation. I don't know why this isn't discussed more widely as being a core element of the gig economy.
There isn't a technology or unionization fix for this as it's a social and polite problem. I've looked into cooperative worker-owned solutions but for certain strata of society there are more gaping problems than the algorithm.
I’ve often felt like there would be a lot of value for an app that’d simply let gig workers in an area find each other to talk and actually create a “workplace”.
But I’m not sure how you’d fund its creation. No VC would want it and there’s not a wealthy user base to bootstrap it.
Typically such things are bootstrapped not by a wealthy user base but by a talented user base who write the code and set up the organization themselves.
However, if you do need some money for boostrapping, there are likely unions out there that would be willing to grant/lend the sums needed, which should be five figures.
Taking VC money would be counter-productive, making you beholden to conflicting interests.
P.S. The motivation for setting something like this up doesn't necessarily need to be purely selfless. It's not going to make you a billionaire, but if successful a non-profit or co-op you set up to do this can pay you a six figure salary for a job that has significant meaningfulness and significant agency (aka control over your own work). And by being a non-profit or co-op the lack of conflict of interest should make it more likely to be successful.
That's a smart idea. It seems like it shouldn't be too expensive to get something like this up and running, but scalability once it's available will be an issue.
Estimates for how many gig workers there are in the US vary between "over 20 million" and "about 60 million." They're already tech-literate, they probably talk to each other, so there's a chance that an app like this would experience very quick growth.
I wonder how gig services would react to something like this. They'd probably try to identify users and deplatform them, so in addition to the financial aspects, one difficult part would be how to protect and anonymize such a platform's users.
yeah, i think that the value proposition for a platform like this over just setting up some sort of discord/message board would be based having a central trusted entity that's able to provide user accounts that are verified AND anonymous.
you'd want to know that the people you're talking to are actually your coworkers and not corporate plants, but you also want to be sufficiently anonymous to avoid workplace retaliation OR weird stalkers.
> I’ve often felt like there would be a lot of value for an app that’d simply let gig workers in an area find each other to talk and actually create a “workplace”.
What would that mean, to be a workplace?
it could be anything that just allows social connection between people that are doing the same job in the same geographic region but are largely invisible to one another.
i'd try not to be prescriptive about it, but it could cover anything from a light 'random chat' channel to vent about petty workplace annoyances, 'tips and tricks' for success, or more serious channels to talk about workplace safety/conditions/unionization
But if it's a gig, where's the workplace? E.g. if all the domestic builders in my town got together, who would they unionise against? They're not employed; that's not a gig.
Domestic builders aren’t really what come to mind for “gig workers”.
This would be for folks who have some app controlling their work- uber drivers, door dashers, etc.
> No VC would want it and there’s not a wealthy user base to bootstrap it.
More to the point, VCs invented these apps specifically to disenfranchise workers and vaccuum up the lost cost as a bullshit "service fee".
I’m guessing there a discord server somewhere with 90% management agents just waiting to honeypot potential union workers.
Seems like digital workplace should be easier to organize with all the community tools we have.
The much greater problem is that they are not employed. They are just self employed people, who take on gigs from various platforms.
They can, by definition, not unionize. Even striking is basically out of the question, as organization is near impossible and most of these people could not sustain months with zero pay.
This needs to be just made illegal, it is just a subversion of labor laws.
In the UK you can (and usually do) unionize without a workplace.
Many are industry-specific such as the "Communications wokers' union", but there are also general workers' unions such as GMB [1] or Unite.
It would be possible, indeed probably preferable, to form a "Delivery workers' union". It would be a union of delivery drivers who would pool resources to fight for common rights.
There's no workplace to speak in hushed tones.
There's no way to know when you've reached a quorum of local drivers.
SMS. When I drove for Uber, there were massive group chats amongst the drivers. They even organized planned shortages in certain parts of the city when rates got too low.
Well, those companies have a CEO, Director of Something, etc...
They already have: https://www.gmb.org.uk/campaigns/deliveroo/
The critical industry of McDonald's delivery will never pay a living wage. There's not enough value. Folks will have to self-select out.
McD’s has doubled prices with rising profits
That's true, but the delivery people do not work for McD's. They do not legally work for the delivery companies (although practically they do). People that pay for delivery will not pay very much for delivery, generally less than minimum wage. They'll instead get the food themselves.
McD's is a franchise in the US. Franchisees set prices.
I don't know how this actually works, but this can't _always_ be the case if they run national ad campaigns [1] for $5 meal deals, right? Unless they're baking a lot into "pricing and participation may vary"
[1] https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/full-menu/5-dollar-meals....
If you scroll down, in small text you'll see:
*Prices and participation may vary.
That said, McDonalds corporate isn't running promotions unilaterally. Instead, promotions are proposed by committees elected by franchisees and voted on by franchisees themselves, so participation rates tend to be high.
So? What I said is correct
And it gets those without having to pay drivers (and technically even workers in most McDonalds’ restaurants since they are franchised), so why would they start?
Delivery and final assembly of food is not McDonald’s’ business.
"final assembly of food"?
I haven't eaten McDonald's in a while, but from what I remember the food arrived fully assembled.
McDonald’s sells their marketing and logistics, and rents real estate, to franchisors. The franchisors’ business is the one that employs people who do final assembly of the food.
The franchisors’ profits and profit margins are nowhere near McDonalds’.
They would start if workers organized against them. I'm responding to the notion that there's not enough value on the table for collective action
"Hundreds of delivery riders injured as food app boom creates 'deadly cocktail'"
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/hundreds-of-deli...
That's AI working as intended. Your labor isn't considered, only efficiency and profitability. We all better get used to it.
This has been the game of capital since the 1700s. What's new with AI is actually a novel apex of irrationality, wherein the efficiency and profitability is being abandoned somewhat in favor of preservation and control over production (businesses are electing to sacrifice efficient deterministic modes of analysis in favor of less reliable stochastic approaches just because these technologies will allow them to continue to divest the laboring masses of any power over capital)
The true paperclip problem is done with human hands, enslaved by the efficiency algorithm holding Damocles.
The “paperclip maximizer” thing is funny. Change “paperclips” to “money” and you have inscrutable superhuman entities doing it right now.
That can be fixed with more capitalism, for example there is a business opportunity right there:
> Why, when the restaurant is busy and crying out for couriers, does the app say there are none available?
Let the restaurant know they can call you.
I found this firsthand account of a gig worker trapped by the algorithm pretty compelling: https://zerohplovecraft.substack.com/p/the-gig-economy
> we’re pointless argument vegetables growing in walled gardens, harvested for the benefit of robots that serve us ads.
That line hooked me
This is fascinating writing, but there's no way it isn't fiction.
Spoiler!
I didn’t open that, but I love the domain name.
I don't know if food delivery apps will be here to stay long term, their economics just don't work. It seems that everyone involved looses, the tech companies are constantly running in the red, the restaurants get screwed and the drivers get screwed.
Long term, food delivery will still be a thing but likely run by restaurants and smaller local apps.
Food delivery run by restaurants has existed fine for decades for pizza and chinese food. I guess the delivery app puts too many fingers into the pie.
It reminds me of the early days of Uber - the value add over taxis wasn’t in the ride itself*, it was the app and the fact that a car would actually show up. I suspect DoorDash et al are similar - the value add is the restaurant selection and the app ordering, not the actual delivery.
(* yes, yes, I too have stories about taxis. I now have stories about Uber drivers, too.)
Yes. Though at least in my market, that used to have delivery fees or minimum orders that made it unlikely you would order a single sandwich for lunch and have it delivered. The food delivery app services really emphasize that model of consumption but I'm not sure it's viable.
Re: delivery fees and minimum orders - for all intents and purposes, a burrito delivered via door dash costs $30. I’m pretty sure if you’d offered the sandwich shop $20 more to deliver the sandwich, they’d at least have thought about it. It’s actually kind of wild how much DD & all have managed to change expectations on the cost of food delivery.
Here in the UK, food delivery companies are required to itemise their fees. The amount they take per order makes no sense to me. Their marginal cost should be tiny. Presumably they have investors and marketing fees to pay, but these aren’t costs that are fundamental to the business model, only to their growth model. Long term I think things will settle down as competition trims out this fat.
When I think about what a reasonable hourly wage is, I don't see it working in my country at all. My understanding is that the main portion of drivers in Copenhagen is made up of exchange students, who have to work some hours per week to qualify for student aid, so it makes sense for them because the state basically tops up their wages.
That actually sounds like an ideal system for providing opportunities to low-wage workers without locking them into low wages indefinitely
I think it sounds like a misplaced subsidy. If we're going to use students as state-sponsored labour, surely we can think of a better job for them to do than prop up some foreign enterprise with an unworkable business model...
we as society should think more about who is doing the lower wage jobs that nobody wants to do than students that are pursuing their dream career.
I was really hoping one of the P2P apps would take off. There's no real reason why we need a middle man injecting themselves and taking fees. The apps just get better marketing.
We literally just need an app to connect restaurants to couriers.
I see the reason for the middle man is to:
1. develop the platform
2. set standards for what “delivery” is
3. be liable for orders not delivered, or orders fraudulently placed
With a P2P app, wouldn’t you be engaging with a courier directly? That would mean that any problems would have to be taken up with the courier, I would think. It makes sense for restaurants to engage directly with couriers because they may have enough volume and repeat business that they can vet the couriers. But it does not make sense to me for individuals to engage with couriers directly, not for small-value items like meals.
Also payment processing. One charge to credit card or whatever is much simpler than having to individually send payment to first restaurant and then to courier.
P2P app could display (orders taken ever), (orders successfully delivered) for every courier. That would be good enough for 90% of costumers, but wouldn't cover the cost of actual fraud for the client.
Is there something stopping a malicious peer client from lying about those numbers?
Genuinely curious; I've been wondering about how to make a zero-knowledge P2P protocol for turn-based imperfect knowledge games and this sounds directly applicable to that.
I disagree with that—I don’t think it would be good enough for 90% of customers. I think it would be about the reverse. Maybe it would be good enough for 10% of customers.
In principle, you could have independent review services that publish ratings for couriers. Perhaps they could even make money insuring orders. But then this would run into just the same levels of frustrating opaqueness from the couriers' perspective.
Slice is a delivery platform that focuses on mom-and-pop pizza places. At least when I was involved years ago, they only charged a flat $1/order fee. They helped stores get their menus into the system, and then stores did their own deliveries. This model worked well because a lot of pizza places already had their own delivery drivers—probably more so than any other restaurant type.
I used to use Slice to order because the extra cost was nominal, and the drivers were local and worked directly for the pizza place. Issue with your order? Tell the driver, or tell the store, and it'd be addressed immediately, by real humans. Need to make last-minute changes to your order? Call the place directly and talk to a human. Get to know your driver because it's the same person most nights. Lots of upside.
Except everyone used DoorDash and GrubHub, even though Slice was both a better user experience and a far better experience for the restaurant owner. Slice cost restaurants less, cost consumers far less, and was a better solution in every way. But because the vast majority of the restaurant's deliver business came through DoorDash and other large delivery companies, most small restaurants have gotten rid of their own delivery drivers.
Slice still exists, but I expect it won't experience much growth. The big guys are dominant.
The competitors might have had better profit margin and therefore more ad spending, and more opportunity to expand area. Still, it's better to be akin Slice than to succumb to inevitable enshittification.
As a customer, I need a middleman/market maker to select participants and provide quality control.
There’s not a good reputation system so I would not use p2p cabs or food delivery because I don’t trust the drivers. At least with Uber, they will give me a refund, etc etc
That's a job for the government, it already has a lot of reputation data about everyone.
It would be nice if the government ran an identity server and you could check for arrests and convictions and such.
But I wouldn’t really want a government to onboard restaurants, or process refund requests. That seems like a nightmare.
sure not, just the reputation API
In my area we have FB marketplace. People have been doing grocery shopping, delivery, etc for a long time. Heck there's a whole underground restaurant system as well.
I have been posting about cutting out the middleman for all sorts of ecosystems. Drivers and Passengers for instance.
For that we need an open decentralized source platform with no profit motive.
That’s what I built: https://intercoin.org/applications
But it takes time to make actually compelling alternatives to platforms that have BILLIONS of dollars behind them, a huge network effect already, and if needed, monopoly lock-in where they can say “it’s either us or them” to market participants.
> Applications of Intercoin: Making Crypto Mainstream
> Combining Web 2.0 (social) with Web 3.0 (transactional) we call it Web 5.0
I'm sure you mean well, but things like this will never speak to the working class performing the gigs/work itself. You already alienate them by naming the project *Coin ("cryptocurrency is only for the rich to get richer"), and the more flowery language about technology you use, you alienate them further.
If you're aiming to get those folks onboard you need to 1) skip any details about the technical internals, the organization-side internals are much more important to non-tech people and 2) target a specific audience and write specifically addressing their specific needs/problems.
And what do you think of this messaging to celebrities, comics etc: https://intercoin.org/community.pdf
QBix link returns response in a format not for humans
What do you mean? It shows fine for me on every machine
It is not complicated why this is happening. Even very low wage jobs in wealthy countries pay 10x what people can make in poor countries. The gig economy advances a race to the bottom for wages, in particular because there is zero identity verification or language skills needed for most of these guys.
Of course the number of deliveries that must be completed in an hour increases. Of course the pay per delivery decreases. Of course the delivery bikers are constantly running red lights and getting killed. Of course the shoddy ebikes are burning down the tenements. That is the logic of the market: more, cheaper, all the time.
The one lesson companies refuse to learn from Apple and Nvidia is that a race to the bottom isn't the optimal strategy in the short, medium, or long term. It only hold both in the super long term in which you assume that innovation is dead or that innovation can be done at no extra cost.
If people had a slightly different perspective on this we would already have drones delivering food, but because of this mistaken belief drones won't be economically viable for the foreseeable future.
I don't consider myself a xenophobe but it feels somewhat strange the first thing I ask when interacting with the new servant class is "do you speak Dutch". It's already considered normal that the delivery guy or Uber driver is an immigrant.
Very few locals want to do these jobs and maybe there is something wrong with that I don't know.
Unfortunately, multi-tiered societies ("those people do THAT work") have been a thing ever since people got the idea to settle down. Maybe for a brief period of time, these tiers could be in entirely separate hemispheres, but things tend to diffuse over time.
The behavior of service work employers only makes sense when we consider that it's all geared towards the profits of owners and shareholders. There are few or no worker-owned companies, nonprofits or even corporate charters that make workers a priority. So without viable competition, profit-driven (as opposed to wage-driven) companies will continue to dominate.
We need a new mental framework for organizing companies to be worker-owned:
https://www.noemamag.com/overthrowing-our-tech-overlords/
Worker-owned companies would receive a seal of approval from employees so they know where to apply, and companies that exploit workers would risk losing their seal and having their employees jump ship.
To use courier apps as an example: since there is little complexity in matching vendors with delivery workers, then a worker-first app should be able to compete. After all, it's pretty easy to save millions of dollars when employees vote on who gets bonuses and their sizes, rather than just paying the board (CEO, CFO, etc) whatever it skims for itself.
There's still the chicken-and-egg problem of needing users in order to scale. But I think we've been looking at it as a tough sell for too long, instead of offering a product (consistent employment and income with low constraints and commitments) that workers are eagerly looking for already.
My assumption would be that the orgs aren't quite sure how they work either.
I'm in the US, if these apps are going to depend on customers tipping for their drivers to get a reasonable wage, then tipping/delivery fee should be required. If people aren't willing to pay the drivers for their labor, they shouldn't place the order.
If tipping is required it is no longer tipping. It’s a tax/fee.
I don’t get why people are expecting to receive tips even if the service provided is fine at best.
It’s not about people being entitled it’s about employers recognizing an opportunity to subsidize their labor costs.
The employer is the one building in the expectation for tips.
Lots of people get paid a normal wage to do subpar work. Why should delivery drivers be any different? If those jobs actually pay a decent wage, then better quality employees will be interested in doing them and the lower tier workers will get pushed out. It should naturally drive up the quality.
Won’t happen. It’s the perfect way to underpay people. You can overpromise and underdeliver without breaking the law. When your workers get upset about poor pay, they’ll mostly direct their ire at your customers rather than at you.
I would be happier to do it if there was transparency about how much of the delivery costs the restaurant is covering. Delivery services benefit both producers and consumers. I'm not willing to be on the hook for the whole thing.
Why should the restaurant cover any of the cost of delivery?
Because as a matter of fact, restuarants have been employing (paying wages) to emplyees who's role is to deliver food. They charge a delivery fee which they have rationalized will cover this "cost", and then have historically fell on the consumer to actually pay the driver.
if delivery where NOT offered by these traditional restaurants, they would have gone out of business. Typical market force at work here, nothing new; needing to modify service to increasee value proposition.
Now, Food delivery apps came in and promised restuaranteurs that they could remove the pesky delivery drivers, but still keep those sweet seeet delivery-meal profits. That is of course, until all these apps just sucked money from both the restaurants AND the drivers.
So, Why should the restautant cover the cost of delivery? Because, they provide a historical good and service, which they outsourced, and now everyone loses. They would make more money if they went back to handling employment of drivers. It's way easier for me to pay a 2 dollar deliveyr fee and 5 dollar tip when I know that there isn't another an arbitraty app in the middle collecting my money.
edit: to explain my ramble, I haven't had food delivered since like college because it's so confusing/a money grab. To order delivery from the pizza place I've gone to since I was a kid, I need to download an app and pay twice as much? And they make less? Why?
Searching for deeper meaning in some javascript gluecode bug made by an intern, now thats whathehackernews worthy.
I worked as a courier, running anything, sometimes it was this crazy route, picking and dropping envelopes, businuses and banks, in a set order, othertimes some little box, or a 10000gallon water tank, hot asphalt anyone? Had an ancient 1 ton dully, with hoist, built 390 that would set off car alarms, if I dropped it back a gear and made it jump. Never did meet the people doing dispatch, payed cash, wierd rules on getting paid.Liked my truck, didnt like doing courier so much. It was very strange before someone tried to automate it, what I am saying.
As long as they have a deep bench of zero barrier to entry replacements this likely wont change
> Why, when the restaurant is busy and crying out for couriers, does the app say there are none available?
Good thing they test their developers so hard on DS&A. We don't want to let in those substandard developers who don't have a grasp on the advanced theoretical underpinnings on how to bring food to people.
Currently in an idle search of a new position.
Got denied for a car insurance company, one of the questions I bombed was "what is the topological sort algorithm make uses to build headers, and how do you implement it". The company doesn't use C.
This is a feature, not a bug. The goal of the algorithm is to reduce the labor cost of delivery.
Welcome to our shiny AI future, folks.
The developers who freely, voluntarily, and willingly work on these projects, min-maxing human suffering to add 0.01% to a cell in a spreadsheet somewhere, deserve everything that's coming for them.
Eh, I feel the same way about google search
Why are they all indian?