Lots of people in the US need to own a car already and the vehicle still depreciates sitting in their driveway. The correct calculation there is the marginal cost (faster depreciation rate, gas) versus the income from a ride-sharing app. But yes buying a vehicle specifically to do delivery or ride-sharing is a bad decision.
Depreciation of the vehicle due to time is only a very small part of the costs. Mileage is way, way more important. (Of course Uber requires a certain age of car so that is a restriction).
Maintenance and fuel are a much larger part of the total costs. It is very easy to math out if you break down by the "recommended service intervals" which are largely based on mileage (fluids do require changing with time intervals but normal driving usually matches up with the mileage).
The myth that a car sitting still is losing money has been sold by the insurance companies. It is only cheaper to buy a new car vs fixing one if you account for the loss if someone runs into you and totals the car. My car which I have maintained and is 14 years old is worth way more to me than the amount that is placed on it by people who have it in their interest to say it is worthless due to age.
Sidenote: I tracked all my miles, costs and income while delivering pizzas many years ago. These costs vary greatly depending on the car. The 89 subaru justy I purchased to deliver was $.25/mile whereas my 93 mazda 626 was closer to $.60 (2004 pricing). My current car is ~$.60/mile also.
Currently, the IRS mileage rates for business is $.70/mile, do any of the gig economies pay this? [1]
You can go online and see what people are actually willing to pay for older, low-mileage cars. It's not much of a premium over similar cars with typical mileage. You can't really blame insurance companies when the valuations are determined by what people are actually paying for used vehicles. Sure, you might do an impeccable job of maintaining your car, but a future buyer has to go off of a mechanic's assessment, plus they won't have a manufacturer warranty to fall back on. There's also the issue that newer models generally have better fuel economy, more safety features, etc. Cars have actually gotten cheaper over time after accounting for new features and reliability improvements, which puts additional downwards pressure on the price of used vehicles.
> Currently, the IRS mileage rates for business is $.70/mile, do any of the gig economies pay this? [1]
I used to get paid that rate at my old job and it was an amazing deal, it was way over my actual costs for the vehicle. With a small fuel-efficient car I was covering my gas, insurance, and depreciation with a few trips each year. It was effectively my work paying for a free car I'd get to use the rest of the time.
That's the issue with using one number as a very rough estimate, it has to account for everything from contractors driving work trucks to someone commuting in a Model 3.
Except when the "meter is broken" or they take the scenic route. My grandmother with dementia routinely got charged double or triple the expected rate for trips to medical appointments, until we figured out what was going on and started booking her rideshares.
Just curious what happens if there is a major event going on in the proximity of one of the doctors appointments?
It could turn out to be 2-3x the "normal" cost due to surge pricing. This often happens to people who go out drinking and think "I'll just grab an Uber later".
Recently heard someone complaining about the $45 cost to go 3 miles.
*Sidenote: people with dementia should probably have someone in the car with them to be sure they get to the appointments. That solves the issue of shady people taking advantage of them for the most part.
To clarify I was referring to her getting upcharged by unscrupulous taxi drivers, not rideshares. Rideshares were an improvement since we could book her a ride with a known up-front cost, and get pick-up/ drop-off notifications.
> *Sidenote: people with dementia should probably have someone in the car with them to be sure they get to the appointments. That solves the issue of shady people taking advantage of them for the most part.
Her dementia was still fairly mild at that point, she could easily manage taking a taxi from A to B, she just wouldn't push back if the guy said it was $30 when it should have been $10. It's tricky to figure out the right supports and boundaries at that stage, especially for elderly people used to being self-sufficient. Convincing her to stop driving was hard enough...
>To clarify I was referring to her getting upcharged by unscrupulous taxi drivers, not rideshares. Rideshares were an improvement since we could book her a ride with a known up-front cost, and get pick-up/ drop-off notifications.
Understood, IMHO...it is easier to find a reputable taxi company than it is to predict surge pricing. Or at least it used to be when you had a choice.
> Before jaywalking was a thing, newspapers blamed drivers for accidents, assuming people had the right to walk anywhere (as they always had) and cars needed to yield.
This is not the full story, even before cars came into common use, society had to figure out how to manage pedestrians coexisting with horses and carriages on public roadways.
Eg. Check out the UK's Highway Act 1835 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Act_1835). It criminalized riding or driving a carriage on the footway (sidewalk) and made both pedestrians and drivers responsible for using due care to avoid collisions in the road.
This was a long-term societal shift to having dedicated infrastructure for both pedestrians and vehicles to avoid collisions, not some sort of sinister auto industry scheme.
A delivery robot has much fewer externalities than your typical delivery person. In a lot of big cities, the person delivering your order will typically be using an illegal e-bike or scooter, flagrantly disobeying traffic laws, and completely uninsured. Oh and good luck enforcing any judgements on them, since they look nothing like the ID used to register for the app.
This is a major reason I actively want human delivery people to be replaced by robots, I expect that in the long run the negative externalities of the sorts of people who in practice do delivery work are greater than the negative externalities of delivery robots.
Humans can't be scaled as fast as robot deployments. A few are okay but there is no limit to it. A person has to live somewhere and even illegal immigration isn't fully frictionless.
I think autonomous cars will also cause problems because currently if nobody is driving it, it has to stay parked. When it becomes autonomous, you can send it on errands or even to just drive around and try to grab a better parking spot etc. It will mean more humanless cars filling up roads, leading to a feeling of an inhuman ghost town.
Most high-car-transit corridors routinely are an inhuman ghost town in that sense. They appear primarily like peeking behind one’s sink into the plumbing. The value they provide is transportation of humans and goods but being human driven or not does not create a sense of humanity.
I recall visiting Dubai in 2006 or so and remarking to my family at that time of this striking inhumanity of that place. Just automobiles everywhere. One might have imagined one was in the world where Transformers was invented and the humans had arrived as aliens to a machine planet.
The only places that really feel human are those which have people walking around. The cars have high utility in transporting people to those places but having human drivers in large numbers of cars has never made a locality feel non-ghost-town like.
If delivery people are causing as many problems as you describe, then it seems trivial to get police to rock up to a food delivery place and just start arresting anyone with illegal vehicles etc.
In reality, the illegal e-motorbikes and scooters cause less issues than cars, but they are visible and it's become popular to demonise them, despite them reducing congestion and being far less dangerous in collisions and producing far less pollution (e.g. tyre wear particulates).
Often attacks like this involve first getting on the VPN (leaked creds, a n-day on a web-accessible endpoint, etc) then running wild on the internal services that everyone assumes are safe.
Sure, you should also keep them up to date, but if they're on the internet you're screwed as soon as someone finds an exploit and runs it against everything on shodan. On a VPN there at least need to be two big problems.
> You’re assuming without evidence that for any given job, that there will be qualified Americans willing to perform that job who aren’t already happily employed.
You can offer them more money, better work/life balance, a more fulfilling job, etc. When the government allows the hiring of foreign workers on visas, it's tilting the playing field in favor of employers. Why offer a better wage when you can just cry to the government and get an indentured servant at a discount?
Exceptional talent is a different argument - most H1bs are average at best. Claiming to be unable to hire for an entry or mid-level software engineer job is absurd.
> You can offer them more money, better work/life balance, a more fulfilling job, etc.
If the qualified workers are already fully employed, how will this result in more of them in the short term?
> Why offer a better wage when you can just cry to the government and get an indentured servant at a discount?
The law requires H1B workers be paid the prevailing wage (20 CFR 655.731), and studies indicate that they're paid pretty close to the average wage (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34793/w347...) -- well within the statistical band. If we keep in mind that half of all citizens holding a particular job are paid below the average wage, too, then perhaps the hue and cry over pay is overblown.
If employers can't pay the market wage, they can't afford a worker. This is what drives productivity gains for the economy. Inefficient business models die off and are replaced by businesses that can use labor more effectively.
Don't you see the clear contradiction between the claim that the employer is paying the market wage, and the fact that they can't hire an American worker at that price? Clearly the claimed "market wage band" is wrong if they can't actually hire a qualified American employee at that price.
Note that there are also plenty of other factors besides wage, eg. 24/7 on-call, working in a remote location, mandatory overtime, etc. Even if an employer actually is paying the market wage for the general job category, there is likely a reason why American candidates are not interested.
> Don't you see the clear contradiction between the claim that the employer is paying the market wage, and the fact that they can't hire an American worker at that price?
No, there's no contradiction. Again, you and others seem to be assuming--without evidence--that for any given job opening, there is an additional qualified local resource available in the prevailing wage band. But that's not necessarily the case. You don't have to take large tech companies' word for it; just ask small business owners around you.
This is literally econ 101. Price is a function of supply and demand. If there is a mismatch between supply and demand, the price shifts until they are in equilibrium. There are 165 million workers in the US, for 99.9% of jobs there are plenty of qualified American candidates who can be hired for the right price. Employers are not entitled to hire an employee at a particular wage.
> This is literally econ 101. Price is a function of supply and demand. If there is a mismatch between supply and demand, the price shifts until they are in equilibrium
I have a degree in Economics. This is a theory, and theories don’t always 100% match reality at the microscopic level.
> for 99.9% of jobs there are plenty of qualified American candidates who can be hired for the right price.
You keep making the mistake of positing facts that are not established. We’re done.
You're the one making the extraordinary claim here - that there are jobs that can't be done at any wage by any of the 165 million working Americans, and yet these jobs don't qualify for an O-1 (extraordinary ability) visa. How about justifying your argument instead of constantly burden shifting? It's very tiresome.
In this entire comment thread, you have not managed to name a single example of one of these mythical impossible-to-fill jobs.
I make no such claims. These are claims made by businesses of all sizes and industries across the nation. Absent compelling data that proves the contrary or proves some sort of far-ranging conspiracy among them to suppress wage growth, I’m inclined to believe them. My father was a small business owner and I saw the challenges of hiring people with even basic woodworking skills first hand. As someone who hires SREs I also see it first hand (though I see this as a global talent challenge and not merely the USA).
Golf courses are a better comparison. Data centers use a fraction of the water that it takes to keep the grass green for a hobby enjoyed by a handful of people.
It depends how it's set up. Often a block will reserve a certain number of rooms for attendees, to ensure people will have somewhere to stay close to the conference site. Usually any unbooked rooms in the block get released closer to the event date.
Effective organizations are busy replacing the low-quality contractors with AI. Seize the opportunity to demonstrate how you can get more done with a $1,000/month token budget than with $10,000/month in contractor salary.
That probably is exactly what is being referred to: the combination of low quality contractors who have access to AI means even more slop to wade through.
If AI is a 10xer the question is what is it 10xing.
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