How quickly we accepted that it’s normal to pay someone to go get our groceries for us. To drive us around when public transportation is available. To run errands for us. To bring us fast food.
Covid capitalized on it.
People don’t want to give up that luxury now that they’ve had it. Even if it makes things cost 2x-3x as much.
Even when we all know its exploitive labor.
It’s true delivery and driver services have been around for hundreds of years but now instead of companies with full time employees (with benefits) , the gig employee gets paid less while taking on risk that aren’t compensated by the employer (car accidents, gas, car repairs, injury or attacks).
Gig work is a much worse thing than maybe a lot of people realize. And it’s also making more people servants to others.
It’s moving full time employees with benefits and using company property to no benefits and using their own property that they have to pay for.
I don’t understand the people paying $50+ to get McDonald’s delivered.
Yeah, a lot of mom and pops burger places have better food.
The poor class has always been servants, don’t let a office job fool you
I think you are missing my point.
Servants with zero benefits using their own “tools” they pay for (like a car), are different from labor jobs with benefits and a living wage. Not that there are many of those so called benefits for minimum wage workers either.
I mean it all sucks under capitalism. But gig work is ramping up end stage capitalism. It takes more, and takes it more aggressively from the working class.
Gig work is exasperating the inequality that already existed. It’s robbing and exploiting people far more aggressively than seen before.
I think people don’t realize how harmful these systems are.
Capitalism crash is inevitable. Through a few possible routes. But the suffering it will inflict and how widespread can be curtailed by stopping these predatory practices.
Gig work is absolutely fantastic if you get into the right type of gig work. And it allows people that wouldn’t be able to work to actually work and make money. If you’re paying for a service you’re paying for a service you have to think about it that way every business out there is some sort of service every business out there turns somebody else into a servant. You really think going to a restaurant and having a waiter take your order and bring you your food is not making them into a servant? You really think going to a grocery store and having somebody scan your groceries and bag your groceries for you doesn’t mean that you have two servants sitting there. What an idiotic thought to think that somebody working a job and doing something that they can do creates a servant out of them. Grow the fuck up.
I’m not saying people who do gig work are at fault here or should feel bad about doing gig work. I think you have misunderstood
I’m saying the business model of gig work is predatory towards its employees and its customers.
And that people are forced into gig work because better paying practical jobs are being phased out. They are manipulated into believing it’s a great option when it’s not. It’s just the only option.
When you consider the additional cost and risk that gig workers take on, you surely see how these companies are predatory.
They don’t exist to help people get work. They aren’t there to help you out. They exist to make you dependent on them so they can profit.
Acknowledging this doesn’t mean you are a fool for doing gig work. Acknowledging it means you are aware of how you have been manipulated, even if you realize you don’t really have alternative options.
Most of us work for shitty companies. Some are worse than others. We all have bills to pay. We are all trapped in the system. But that’s no excuse to ignore what’s going on even if we don’t have alternative options and have to stay with these companies.
You don’t owe them anything. Certainly you don’t have to talk them up. They aren’t there to help you out. They lobby to pay you the least $ and screw you over as much as possible.
A full time employee isn’t a servant?
The economy is bifurcating into haves and have-nots. The haves paying for more services from the have-nots closes that gap. Maybe not by much, but at least in the right direction.
Just because gig work makes inequality more visible, doesn’t mean it’s causing it.
During COVID, wages for the lowest paid people increased more than other classes. I think it was partially the rise of gig work giving alternatives to people who were otherwise stuck working at Walmart because that’s the only job in town.
Supply and demand. Unemployment benefits were extended. People didn’t have to work. To attract employees they had to increase wages. But they fixed that by increases in product cost that far exceeds wage increases.
Plus rent went up for everyone.
Some people using their cars for gig work are barely making more than the value they are depreciating from their car through wear and tear.
People rent cars to do it, which just blows my mind. I don’t get how they can be making any money at all.
Wouldn’t renting be the ultimate way to know if it was profitable as there’s no hidden costs?
No insurance, no depreciation, no maintenance, no repairs.
You do a shift and whatever you make you make.
Renting doesn’t mean no insurance. If you’re operating a vehicle, you need to be an insured driver. Where you get the insurance is up to you.
Depreciation, maintenance, those are lumped into the cost of the rental. Whomever you are renting from isn’t giving you the car and taking a loss on it.
Insurance comes with the rentals or your credit card in most cases.
And duh. Thats my point. You pay, and that’s it. No more hidden costs.
Any given day is profitable or not, and you immediately know.
edit: we even have a car share service here that includes gas in the rental.
Please don’t duh.
Renting a car for use as a ride share is not covered under any rental agreement, nor under whatever your credit card may provide, which as far as I know covers damage to the vehicle at most. Liability insurance is a whole separate animal and the one that’s most necessary.
Not only that, but basic liability usually doesn’t cover gig work either, you need a special and more expensive policy for that.
There are limited exceptions where you can self insure, I think New Hampshire is the only place you can do that in the US. However if you can self insure then you probably aren’t doing gig work.
You can add gap to your regular insurance to cover your job as a rideshare. You just need to tell your carrier.
The thing is, if you’re renting, you’ve added someone in between you and the insurance carrier. Uber does not self insure. I see them often using Progressive. So you rent a car from Uber, pay for the insurance from Uber, but there’s also Avis and Progressive now taking their cut.
It’s just scammy, and the fact that they’re getting people to rent cars to do so is just crazy to me.
If you’re allowed to rent the car for gig work, they’ll almost assuredly offer the insurance for it, and not all gig work is ride share.
Depreciation, maintenance, those are lumped into the cost of the rental.
And the duh was about that, I handled the insurance comment separately.
edit: e.g
https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/misc/index.jsp?targetPage=delivery_rentals.jsp
They offer the rental and insurance. They don’t let you carry another person though, so not all gig work, at least on this specific plan.
So Avis, for example, offers an insurance from Uber for rideshare via Rasier and Portier, and so you’re basically renting and insuring cars from the company you’re being paid by. Yes, Avis is an intermediary there, but the whole idea is crazy to me, that you’d pay your employer to work.
So are they having profitable days? I guess I’m as curious as you are, but I just can’t imagine a scenario where you’re making decent money in exchange for the time you put in. I suppose reliance on tips makes the difference, but Uber is over here cleaning up, charging you and the customer.
A lot of gig workers just treat it like a paycheck and don’t compare revenue to expenses like the independent business it really is.
Edit: poor wording, I don’t believe it’s entirely an independent business but that is how they are paid.
It’s essentially an independent business, but you can rent the car and get insurance and get paid all by the same entity, essentially. At least that’s what I’ve gathered listening to the testimony of some of the drivers.
The funny thing is gig work (proportionally) makes a lot more in plenty of 3rd wold countries because the business owner isn’t taking a massive chunk of the income, and because it started out with everyone paying cash so there’s no shoehorned services fees at every transaction.
Its so lucrative that I’ve seen office workers run it as bonus income on their way to and from work if they travel by car or motorcycle.
I always thought about making a free equivalent platform to stuff like Uber, but I think people would be too scared of the individual liability, despite Uber offering the absolute bare minimum.
I know right? How easy would it be to tie open street maps into a fiverr style so run this errand for me and make it almost free?
But the second someone gets hurt, molested, their house broken into, or carjacked, you’re going to need some huge legal team and have a good chance at getting fucked in the process
Wonder if you could add an arbitration clause or something so they can’t sue you. Like how Disney did when someone died from food allergies at one of their parks but the husband had disney+ so they couldn’t sue or something crazy
They have the luxury of owning a large building full of lawyers. You can make it so that it’s hard for people to win, but it’s impossible to stop them from suing you. Getting your own lawyer just to defend you from the lawsuits gets expensive really quickly.
I’m driving Uber and it’s been a real struggle to hit $20/hr gross (NOT NET) the past few weeks since gas prices skyrocketed.
The best part is Uber just invested like $10 billion in driverless cars. So not only is there no plan to pay better, but we’re directly funding our own replacements.
Both Uber and Lyft have made no secret of their plan to replace all their drivers with a driverless fleet. It’s right on their website.
Gross would include money made before gas spent. But you’re absolutely correct taking a huge pay cut because Trump is beholden to foreign powers is awful
Right, thus I’m netting even less than that.
I just couldn’t stomach paying someone for nearly all the gig work option. The exception was uber. The taxi companies always pissed me off. Using a credit card was harder than it needed to be for a long time, and they just didn’t bother to try new things to improve the experience. And of course there are the ones that controlled the supply so they could drive up prices. But I still only used it when on vacation, like in vegas. But shopping for me, and all that. Just couldn’t do it.
They wanted cash so they could not pay taxes on it. They rode that one all the way into the sunset.
I’ve also had some bad experiences with taxi services. So I totally get that. It’s just too bad that instead of improving their service and fees, that they just got replaced with gig work .
I’ve always heard it said that you can’t really be an ethical consumer in capitalism.
We often don’t have ethical alternatives.
Yeah, very true. Even when I spend money at a small business, I think about how often I have seen owners kids sitting at a table or something. Either doing schoolwork or playing on a tablet. And that reminds me that they often are living on small margins and working tons of hours. We can do better as a society.
What a fckn sh*thole the US is.
The only things I have delivered to me are packages and envelopes through the mail.
Granted, I am GenX, but I can’t recall a single time in the last half a decade where I’ve had anything like food delivered. Or used the services of any kind of gig company.
And I simply can’t think of any benefit of doing so. It’s horrendously expensive, and simply not worth the expense.
You’re GenX and have never had a pizza or Chinese food delivered!? Do you live in the sticks? Town I live in now has never had a delivery restaurant (weird for a tourist town) and nobody runs Uber eats or whatever, but when I was a kid in suburbia delivery food was super common, mostly pizza and Chinese.
No, I have always phoned ahead to order, but I have always picked up the order personally.
The savings having done so have always been more than the fuel spent to retrieve the order.
I found out my family were having fast food delivered by some service, and stomped on that immediately. Walk your lazy ass the two blocks to the pizza shop.
I’m not against delivering services. Just gig jobs.
Lots of people really need these. Like disabled people and the elderly.
But those two groups are least able to afford it.
For me at least, the people at my city’s taxis are sometimes quite rude to me, whereas I’ve never had an issue with getting Uber. I feel a lot safer with them than with the regular taxis.
I honestly don’t see how people do this and in a way that is in the black.
If you’re the kind of person who holds onto your car for 10 years, The accelerated maintenance and fees don’t burn quite as hot. you get your oil change to any way you get your tires changed anyway, they just don’t see it coming out of their pocket the same way the tires wore out because the tires wore out, not because you drove the piss out of it.
They’re making less they just don’t see it happening.
Step one is to not live in or close to a major city or high cost of living area. Step two is to buy an old compact car with good mpg in the $600 range. The insurance will be dead cheap. Then you work, not in a city, but a heavily gentrified suburb. I would average a net (yes, including costs etc.) $30 an hour before I got too ill to do pretty much anything. I have some good days where I can get stuff done, but it takes me way long to do it.
Around me its impossible to get a car that runs for under a grand at this point. I mean its been that way for awhile really.
How quickly we accepted that it’s normal to pay someone to go get our groceries for us. To drive us around when public transportation is available. To run errands for us. To bring us fast food.
Speak for yourself!
I have delivered more food myself than I’ve paid to have delivered to me, and that was a job I had in college (working for a restaurant directly, as it was long before the rise of third-party delivery) that I quit after one shift because it sucked.
And even in the few times when somebody else (e.g. an employer) insisted on getting a grubhub or uber for me at their expense, I wasn’t happy about it! It always just feels incredibly wasteful – and slower/worse – than just doing it myself.
I mean as a country. Not you or me personally.
I even know a few families who are getting into debt because they want to have a lifestyle of having others do everything for them. This is so crazy.
THe worst is that it makes people less likely to want to change our economic system in favor of reducing inequality, because in a system without inequality, it will be impossible to have people doing small things for us like that
Removed by mod
Great idea, we still have some buildings here in germany that were used for such a cleansing purpose before! I am sure they only need a bit of maintenance.
The above is sarcasm!
Killing people, and even more so genocide or mass murder, is NEVER a valid option! Every idea, ideology or system that includes killing people is always rotten to the core!
Those rich fucks would off you without a second thought. They don’t understand anything beyond greed and fear.
So you propose the Final Solution to the Rich Question then? Maybe you should read a history book, and ask yourself if you are the baddy!
Read plenty of then. Find me a history where the ruling class was the oppressed? The marginalized?
Wait. You can’t.
Well, you can’t really call them the ruling class anymore when you start to round them up for the killing squads. They become the oppressed in exactly that moment.
I speak about the genozide part of the history books
In @devolution@lemmy.world’s defense, the gory French Revolution, American Revolutionary War, etc. all led to socioeconomic improvements, as far as I know. They’re not advocating for genocide, but just for the highest ruling class to be clamped down on.
The french revolution had the Jacobins with all his atrocities and so many death of innocent people as a result. It is not called Reign of Terror without a good reason. And in the end it didn’t really changed much for the lower class, because the ruling upper class only was replaced by another.
Killing whole extended families, as proposed by @devolution@lemmy.world, sounds a lot like something Adolph Hitler would do and we all know where this ended! Accepting killing people will created a spiral, with more and more who will be send to death. It happened after the french revolution, it happened during the nazi Regime, it happened in the chinese culture Revolution. When killing is accepted it becomes a normal tool, and that is always bad!
You don’t need to kill anyone, deplete their wealth and they are only people like everyone else. Create a international Court and put them to trial for their crimes against mankind, but don’t kill anyone. There are always better solutions then killing! Is the blanket of civilisation really that thin that we fall back to barbaric solutions so easily? Have we not learned from the many, many mistakes of the past?
I think @DarkMetatron@feddit.de is implying for us to be better than them and not stoop to killing. (I am neither agreeing nor disagreeing and am just inferring this line of thought.)
I want to believe that… But so did Michelle Obama and look where we are at now.
Wait, are you calling for a genocide of all people with inherited, terminal syndromes? Are you serious? What about CRISPR?
If the gene is one that allows psychopathy, inherent greed, and lack of empathy, then yes.
Oh, I thought you were referring to physical disabilities, like all Down-syndrome people, etc.
Well, I’ve never read of a sociopath who had said, “I was raised in a normal family.” I thought this was a really interesting read:
The gene loaded the gun, but the environment pulled the trigger.
This gene-environment interaction helps explain why two siblings with similar genetics can turn out very differently. The child who experiences abuse or neglect while carrying a susceptibility gene faces compounding risk, while the sibling who grows up in a safer environment may never express those traits at all.
- https://scienceinsights.org/is-sociopathy-genetic-nature-nurture-and-the-brain/
God no.
Exceptional people can be exceptional. My daughter is thrice exceptional (asd, ADHD, gifted). I would never advocate the elimination of people born with physical disabilities. They are some of the best and most resilient people if not tainted by the environment.
My issue is the ruling class and psychopathy that has been passed along since well before 5000 BC. The ruling class has never been fully purged in all aspects except very close during the French Revolution and the Bolshevik revolution.
Both of those failed long term because of usurpers like Robespierre (psycho) and Stalin (false revolutionary).
There is no evidence that psychopathy is determined by a gene.
Like most human traits, the environment makes a bigger impact on outcomes.
Until we as a society/species stop rewarding psychopathy , things will keep ending up here.
Genetics are irrelevant.
However I do agree that capitalism cannot work.
It is inevitable destruction.
Also pretty sure capitalism wasn’t the structure during French revolution. Wasn’t it serfdom ?
I mean. That’s almost the same. But yeah.
We need to stay fully objective here and acknowledge that @devolution@lemmy.world is at least partly correct:
“Some genetic heritability studies have noted there may be baseline deviations in emotional processing circuitry (such as in the amygdala or reward centers of the brain) and neurotransmitter profiles (such as serotonin or dopaminergic deficits) in people meeting criteria for psychopathic traits that may eventually lead to callous behaviors and indifference towards social norms (but interestingly not always).” - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-shrink/202203/are-psychopaths-born-or-made
Denser reading:
In the specific genes that may be involved, one gene that has shown particular promise in its correlation with ASPD is the gene that encodes for monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A), an enzyme that breaks down monoamine neurotransmitters such as serotonin and norepinephrine. Various studies examining the gene’s relationship to behavior have suggested that variants of the gene resulting in less MAO-A being produced (such as the 2R and 3R alleles of the promoter region) have associations with aggressive behavior in men.[77][78]
This association is also influenced by negative experiences early in life, with children possessing a low-activity variant (MAOA-L) who have experienced negative circumstances being more likely to develop antisocial behavior than those with the high-activity variant (MAOA-H).[79][80] Even when environmental interactions (e.g., emotional abuse) are taken out of the equation, a small association between MAOA-L and aggressive and antisocial behavior remains.[81]
The gene that encodes for the serotonin transporter (SLC6A4), a gene that is heavily researched for its associations with other mental disorders, is another gene of interest in antisocial behavior and personality traits. Genetic association studies have suggested that the short “S” allele is associated with impulsive antisocial behavior and ASPD in the inmate population.[82] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder
I didn’t know this until now myself (I’ve seen the above article earlier but must have skimmed through it long ago and missed or forgot all that). However, there’s also a lot about the environment further exposing or shutting down sociopathic tendencies, as I noted in another comment here. It could be more difficult to round up these people (who are masters at lying anyway) versus enacting your systemwide proposal to forcefully integrate empathy through all levels of society. The problem is applying it to the highest echelons where it matters most—and, frankly, who @devolution@lemmy.world’s proposed guillotine should apply to the most either way; they’d both be hard to do… maybe together?
Psychopathy is a combination of genetics and environmental factors. Genetics does not cause this condition. You can have the genes associated with higher prevalence but that does not mean you will have it.
This is why eugenics for behavioral or personality factors is irrelevant.Also these are not necessarily hereditary but likely are common mutations that will persist in the gene pool regardless if current people with said gene are sterilized.
Genetic research, not to sound pretentious, is largely misunderstood.
When a study says genetics are 30%. It means genetics account for 30% of the variance.
The variance is not “effect”. Or how much a gene contributed to the trait.
It’s a bit more complicated. But to make a simple example.
Let’s think of height.
Let’s say someone has a gene(s) for being tall.
But the person grew up malnourished. It doesnt matter, the kid won’t be tall. But will the kid be taller than other malnourished kids with out the gene. ? Probably. But it’s hard to say by how much.
Will the kid be taller than other kids that werent malnourished.
Maybe. Maybe not.
If extreme malnourished, the answer is no.Ultimately the environment determines how much effect a gene(s) can determine a trait.
That’s why you can’t measure a general effect % from a gene(s).
Instead we measure how much variation in a group of people with a given trait is predicted by a gene.
“The wiggle room”. A gene is best thought of as the limits of a trait. Each extreme.
When it’s in optimal environment to be expressed and when it’s in the most restricted environment to be expressed.
Even in average environments, genetics still usually doesn’t account for more that 30-40% of the variance for people who score within 1 standard deviation of the mean/average of a trait. And that number declines the farther you get from the mean.
And also most genetics don’t score that high. Very few are as high as 30%.
Interesting, thanks for the enlightenment! I have admittedly not delved into it this much before…
Many people/news outlets present genetic data as “effects” or as percentage of a trait.
Like if someone scored 80% on a trait, people say genes determined 30% of that score.
Which is incorrect. But this interpretation is pushed all the time. I see it a lot with intelligence IQ score. Yes intelligence is genetic but only 30% of variability is predicted by genetics.
And if you think about it. That’s only for people with an IQ of 70 to 130 (1 standard deviation).
For the really smart people and the really dumb people, genetics has a lower ability to predict variance.
The reason genes aren’t as predictive as you would think they would be , is just like my example of height.
If the environment doesn’t allow for potential to be fulfilled, it won’t be.
Human development has what’s called “sensitive periods” . Where if some function isn’t learned by that age, it likely will never be mastered. Because the brain does a lot of pruning at young age. If you aren’t using it, you lose it. This is why learning a second language is hard as an adult and easy as a child.
So taking that into account. You can see how limited genetics are for determining an outcome of a random child.
It certainly has an impact. But it is limited by the environment.
How many amazing geniuses are born every day in 3rd world countries that have the potential to solve big world problems who will never reach that level because the stimulation they need to reach that potential is unavailable to them?
If your argument is nature vs nurture, then all the more reason for a mass culling.
No. The environment has to be changed.
We can stop promoting the wrong people.
We can have harsh penalties for lying. ExploitationIn the Netherlands, any company found to be un ethical business are barred from getting government contracts.
Also companies with better employee benefits, unions, and pay are prioritized for government contracts.
That’s how to combat the problem.
But in the u.s and most of the world. The most ruthless gets the contact. The one that lies the most. Defrauds. Exploits. They get the contacts for decades.
Most of musk’s and palantir money is from u.s tax payers.
The wrong people need to be eliminated. You’re too idealistic. We’re beyond voting them out.
The system creates these bad people.
You have to stop the cause.
It’s not genetics.
Just look at Vivian Musk. Nothing like her father.
I think Hitler also think the same.
Hitler targeted the wrong people.
You don’t permanently eliminate the ruling class by killing the people in it. Elites will continue popping up as long as the system itself allows it. Incentives are just too biased towards people betraying and becoming elite when there is an empty slot.
Who do you think shapes the system to allow it?
