thetransintransgenic:
themindislimitless:
clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead:
pterocopter:
clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead:
Uber and Lyft and this new women only drivers service are all equally bad. I get that people are excited but let me just toss a few concepts out there:
Cab drivers, as employees (when they are employees which is not all the time luckily in pdx we have radio cab) are held to certain standards. If a cab driver harasses you, you can report him.
Cabs have to be ADA compliant.
Cab drivers have to make minimum wage.
There is a REASON cabs are more expensive and that reason, in Oregon at least, is that your cabby is making minimum wage.
This is not true of your uber driver, your Lyft driver, or your fancy new all woman driver but male owned service.
They are abusing the independent contractor system, as strip club owners are! to be falsely competitive in a market place they could never otherwise survive in and they are doing it at the expense of poor, vulnerable people, at the expense of cabbies, and at the expense of every other marginalised and misclassified worker because we are ALL in the same boat.
So no, I’m not excited that some man saw an opportunity to capitalize on the frequency of sexual harassment into making a niche for himself in an already exploitative market.
I’m not excited that he is donating 2% of his profits to charity–this serves the exact same purpose as a pink yoplait top: if you want to do good, do good; don’t disguise your consumerism and liking for a product behind false altruism.
I’m not excited that in a city already drowning in literally tens of thousands of underpaid drivers, there will now be one more.
And if you think women can’t be oppressive, shitty, hate on strippers and sex workers, and otherwise totally unpleasant, you’re dreaming. Especially once these women realise what a ferociously competitive starving market they’ve entered.
You better fucking tip 30%, is all I’m saying. And at that point, you might as well have taken a cab.
Ok wait a second wait a second. I’m seeing Uber hate on my dash.
First of all, the cab industry (at least in my city) is corrupt as hell. There are a limited number of cab “permits”, and they are all owned by super rich people who then rent them out to cabbies for outrageous fees.
Cab drivers don’t always take the most direct route, milking you for more money, because they do not make very much money. The REASON cabs are more expensive is the cab company is taking most of that money and putting it in the pocket of the super rich person, not in the pocket of the driver!
Uber, on the other hand, pays each driver significantly more, so even though you are paying less your uber driver is actually making more. Uber displays your route right on your phone so you can follow along – and you are agreeing to a certain fee to get to a certain location.
You can report your Uber driver easily, and Uber will take action. Also, riders are asked to rate their driver at the end of the trip.
You receive an email receipt at the end of your Uber ride.
You don’t need to carry cash with Uber, you pay through the app.
Oh, and with Uber Taxi, cab drivers can join Uber and make more money doing it!
The cab industry as it is needs to change. Uber has created an elegant 21st century solution. I honestly feel 100% safer riding in an Uber.
I do not speak for the other services - I’ve never used Lyft and only just heard about this service for women. But Uber is the bomb.
I feel like people keep reading this as a defense of cab companies when all it is is an indictment of uber.
Listen, I get that you like Uber.
But I PROMISE YOU:
Your drivers aren’t making enough to live. They aren’t. And they will continue not making enough to live because the people who are brave enough to sue for employee protections get bought off with settlements that don’t help the rest of the drivers.
So let’s put it this way:
None of your drivers, if you are outside Portland Oregon, are making enough to live, no matter what the service you use, unless it’s a surge night and you’re charged $300 and even THEN, the majority of that money is going to the man who developed the ap.
Stop defending it. It works really well for you, that’s great.
It is not working for the drivers. Trust me. I heard from them constantly. They are BEGGARED, and strategies like the introductions of thousands more into cities that are already flooded only cement the proof that the company doesn’t care about the drivers, it cares about profit.
So if it works for you that’s really great, but stop ignoring the fact that the workers across the board are getting screwed for your cheap ride.
Other points, as someone who doesn’t care much for cab companies but will defend cab workers being able to, well, survive:
- Cab drivers generally don’t own their cabs, but rent them (thus leading, in part, to the massive fees they need to pay). Uber/Lyft don’t provide cars, and the ones they do rent– well, what’s the difference between renting from them versus the cabbie companies?
- Cab drivers are largely immigrant and/or working class folk that work as cab drivers full-time and rely on the income. Uber/Lyft drivers don’t work on it full time: they generally have other jobs and are looking to make extra $$$, and in a large city, most of the folk who have cars also have $$$ (hint hint, gentrification).
- Uber drivers practice “client poaching” (driving up to someone and going “Uber?” and said person possibly getting into the car before they realize this is not their ride. Not only shitty, but also extremely dangerous esp for women).
- Not sure if they’ve changed it but up until Jan at least, Uber didn’t have a customer service number, and people accidentally calling (and suing) a design company regarding shitty drivers or poachers or whatever it may be and getting nowhere. So no, “Uber will take action” is false, bye.
- Unless the state/city requires it, Uber (idk abt Lyft) cars are not required to undergo safety inspections, and even when required, it is a frighteningly basic “inspection” that consists of another Uber driver coming out to “inspect” the make/model/take pictures of the car and the licence plate, and getting paid $20 for it, a process that takes 30 minutes. (Hullinger). As opposed to cab drivers that, as stated, have to undergo: car/safety inspections, driving screenings, and their cabs abide by ADA regulations.
- Please trust me when I tell you that you want to make sure your driver can drive well, because taxi driving is one of the most dangerous jobs in the US (and more so than for cops, but that’s a different convo)
- Uber does not regulate their drivers as much as police them– you know, considering they’re trackable, even when not at work, and generate massive data for the company that folks aren’t compensated for? And no, Uber does not pay drivers “significantly more” and there’s a lot of info about Uber drivers not even making minimum wage. Also they dropped their rates even more recently. (Cassano)
- Not sure why people favour Uber/Lyft over cabbies as ~well their money goes to rich people too~. Yeah. But only cab drivers and cab companies are regulated and have fees applied that Uber/Lyft drivers don’t have to abide by. Tax evasions aren’t very progressive tbqh.
-
No really, Uber/Lyft is directly aiding gentrification and it’s hurting people. Here’s an account by a cab driver why you should reconsider ride-share apps and how they aid gentrification.
- Ultimately when it comes down to it, Uber= gentrification and it’s one thing to have to deal with shitty government policies regarding working as a cabbie (which they do, whoa, guess what! many of them are in unions and/or community organizers), but add gentrification, the loss of income, and additional racism and this becomes much worse.
@socialjusticemunchkin this responds to many of your points and a bunch of other ones and also does yes have some philosophical differences.
I … I think for the most part you were agreeing with at least 70% of the above?
Like I think the main jut of the above comments was specifically against the “sharing economy” which denies that the workers it actively controls are. workers. that they exert control (and thus ought to have responsibilities toward) over. Which I think was the main point of your final paragraph?
Like, in order of what you said emphatically, then going back through the above posts for the points that you mentioned off-hand:
Accountability: This is a fundamental difference you have, whether being held legally accountable is more or less powerful than being held market-based accountable. (Given that, what is your opinion on the ADA and stuff? ‘Cause that seemed to work pretty well, no?…) (I also don’t quite understand why you think that because cabs are held legally accountable they won’t be held accountable by the market, too…)
Surge Pricing: I’ve seen arguments for and against it – I’m not convinced either way, and I also don’t think either of the above people are, on a moral level – but for the purpose of this context, that was only mentioned once in the above two posts, in a single fragment of a sentence, as a PS at the end. It was explicitly not a fundamental part of their argument. (Possibly a good way to handle it is with multiple companies, at least one of which has surge pricing, at least one of which doesn’t, all trying to win brand loyalty? Which… seems much more possible and fair with the multi-taxi-company apps like Way2Ride and Arro, than single-app-per-company stuff like Uber, Lyft, and Chariot.)
Employee vs. no: Uber actually specifically has a system (which they brag about) to create drivers without control over their means of production:
- Rode with a Lyft driver who also drives for Uber. His car is lease-to-own, paid via Uber. If he doesn’t make $350/week, his car won’t start. – sha
@shashashasha 6:47 AM - 17 Jan 2016
- http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/04/24/one-uber-drivers-story-how-he-was-trapped-by-auto-loan-program
I don’t know about Lyft, or the new one, but especially for something advertising itself as “Uber but ~Feminist~ in this one specific way”, I seriously don’t have much hope.
I’m pretty sure they would agree with you after only a small discussion about the medallions.
(Frankly, I think I’m a bit frustrated at Uber about this, because wow, you looked at this bleeped-up system and found out how to make a copy of it – without medallions propping it up – so much worse.)
Also, here’s an entire article about how no, Uber drivers are in very few ways their own independent contractors. Comes with a published academic paper and 9 months of collected data. Samples: “Uber’s system enforces blind acceptance of passengers, as drivers are not shown the passenger’s destination or how much they could earn on the fare.” “In order to remain active on the system, drivers must meet an average rating target that hovers around 4.6 out of 5 stars.”
So I think they would agree that there are advantages to not being an “employee” – just that the’re pretty sure Uber deliberately removes most of them.
Unions: Uber, at least, is VERY anti-union. I dunno about Lyft?
Um… okay this post got unfocused and I think I claimed I would keep a consistent argument throughout but I’m not sure I did. I’m ending this now.
Tagged: Uber is EVIL, (And I’m glad we all agree on that fact. And the disagreement is more ‘is their more than a single thing they might have done okay-ly’.).
(Joining the two threads for trackkeepability)
So first of all, Uber is evils georg and I don’t know how bad the situation is with the competitors, other than “less bad” but that’s once again best described as “burying the bar”. I’ve even heard that Uber has an easy time attracting talent because conservative douchebros find the rest of Silicon Valley a bunch of neotenic degenerates who aren’t douchebro-y enough while Uber has a sufficiently respectable and elitist “screw the poor” attitude for them. “Ridesharing” as an idea is excellent and if Uber etc. bust the cartels and then get replaced by better and less abusive alternatives it would probably be the ideal outcome. I don’t oppose fairly maligning things that need to be maligned as long as it’s not used to defend other things that need to be maligned just as well.
And speaking of maligning, that cab driver’s account in huffpost was…pretty much what one’d expect from a working-class cartelmember. Sympathetic, but terrible.
For cabbies to earn a decent living there has to be proper regulation of the industry. Too few cabs and the public isn’t served and too many and drivers can’t make decent money.
If there are “too many” cabs and drivers don’t make decent money, where do the drivers come from? Where do they go if they can’t be cab drivers? Whatever it is, it’s likely to be even worse than being a cab driver who can’t make decent money. (Unless there’s fraud or coercion, which Uber’s financing schemes seem to, unsurprisingly, be very good at. In fact, the financing is exactly as predatory as the medallion cabs’ in Toronto. That thing needs to be stopped with overwhelming force if necessary.)
The article basically says, “we’re poor, and should be allowed to have [disguised welfare]” and I don’t like [disguised welfare]. This would be solved by UBI (I’m starting to keep track of how many times I repeat my standard talking points of “UBI” and “liberalized zoning and better urban planning” (abbr. LZ) because I suspect they are going to come up a lot) so that everyone would make ends meet anyway.
Good jobs are scarce in this city for the working-class and driving a cab is one of those good jobs.
Good jobs are scarce, let’s maintain that scarcity, never mind those who can’t become cab drivers because they can’t get the medallions. Most of the customers are poor so they are effectively subsidized by the few who aren’t. UBI + LZ would help with the one-two of better income and lower housing costs. And unlike a cartel, it would also help those who aren’t cab drivers.
Then we get a broadside of binary politics and applause lights about how there are pros and cons and cons are bad and pros are good and pros must support regulation. As a lel I feel erased and marginalized and oppressed by this discourse, and this pro really needs to check his binary-political privilege. My eyes glazed over because there was no substance.
And then exciting words like gentrification! If 10 000 hipsters really want to move in to where 10 000 poor people live, they really can’t be stopped in any reasonable way. Hipsters are effectively a force of nature, an inevitable calamity, so it’s better that the neighborhood is rebuilt to accommodate 20 000 people so the original residents don’t need to move away just because hipsters move in. LZ, turn rent control into bostadsrett, etc. instead, and try to achieve a mix of classes and races which is the Objectively Correct Way to do cities because it leads to higher social mobility, better services for the poor and black people because they live where the rich and white people live and thus get rich white people services, and because the rich white people have more money they inject it into the local economy (the complaints about staffing bars with non-locals only are perfectly valid though, and I support voluntary initiatives to increase the diversity of workers in hipster bars and would participate if I ran a hipster bar and would pressure bars to participate if such a thing existed and I was a patron of an eligible hipster bar) which is better than poor black people being segregated in separate areas and economies with poor black people only. (If any city suffering from such issues wants to hire me as urban planning czar to experiment with cracking the question of how to replace regular gentrification with this kind of “hybrid gentrification” which could benefit the poor as well, I’m available.)
And then something about unions, and asfdgasfgd the current system is so broken. Right-to-work is bullshit, state-enforced collective bargaining is bullshit, everything in the current labor laws of apparently everywhere is bullshit. Let’s just introduce the UBI and erase most of the labor laws, let workers unionize and negotiate freely, let employers not employ if they disagree, and let someone else outcompete the troglodytes by offering something of actual value to then-inherently-consensual labor because people can just tell the employers to do something anatomically impossible if they don’t make a fair offer. And then something about local politics and “hail regulatory capture!” (total: 3 UBI and 2 LZ)
Okay, back to the rest of it. So Uber is terrible, treats workers like shit, news at eleven. So does the government. Everyone treats poor people like shit, except sometimes other poor people who know what they are dealing with, and I wouldn’t trust regulations a priori as not effectively treating poor people like shit exactly the same. The questions about safety etc. are not exactly lgbtq rights where the state just follows popular opinion and probably is a net negative, and I’m a fan of some things like ADA (or at least parts of it, not familiar with everything) because accessibility is awesome and at least California seemed to have made substantially more progress on that front than Finland, but those things can also be overdone. I don’t know the specifics of ADA requirements so I deliberately avoided commenting on that part.
Sexual assault is where the government obviously should be protecting people, but has proven to be relatively reluctant in practice, which is kind of what I’m referring to with the claim that the markets (broadly interpreted) are what actually deliver the outcomes. Unlike curb cuts and wheelchair ramps, sexual assault is one of those things that are disgustingly open to interpretation, so just banning it doesn’t help much if the actual de facto will to enforce it isn’t there. Cops are often not very cooperative, etc. so the standard tendency is to just sweep stuff under the rug everywhere. If there are actual credible methods for dealing with abuses, and not just a nominal complaint system, then great. But Uber still has the advantage of being inherently more capable of addressing them (because it tracks more data, while hailing a cab from the street is a hail mary in comparison); the same deal with driver safety, as they don’t carry money and riders are less anonymous.
Other regulations obviously sound superficially appealing to many, but my prior is to be skeptical, because often such things seem to devolve into mere barriers to entry with little actual content. At least around here a lot of certifications are basically paying some crony’s company to deliver a specified amount of lessons (which far exceeds the time an effective course would need, and still doesn’t really teach the material half as well) because it managed to lobby such a criterion. And then there’s the fact that there’s no way to avoid all tragedies; I do know that my utopia would have a steady stream of unfortunate fates because the harm from stopping people from having them is too great, and that’s terrible but I don’t pretend I can fix everything YGM. It’s easy to sweep the unfortunate fates under the rug with regulation, and thus we get things like the FDA which prevent spectacular bad things from happening, at the cost of creating far more bad things in a less spectacular form (I wouldn’t necessarily abolish it completely but I’d tone down the strictness a lot and accept that every now and then we’ll get a thalidomide or vioxx as the price of getting important things to the market faster; of course that’s probably impossible in a democracy because the voters would just vote back the regulations as big unspectacular tragedies are more politically viable than smaller spectacular ones, just ask anyone who’s gotten sick from the coal we burn to avoid scary ~nukular powaa~).
And I don’t consider taxpaying necessarily virtuous either; anyone who’s done the GWWC pledge has IMO a carte blanche ethically to do all the tax evasion they want because EA is so much better than the state. Bednets don’t shoot black people. There seems to be a “standard progressive fallacy” that if the tax is nominally paid by the employer it reduces the employer’s profit instead of the workers’ wages, which just isn’t expected in an elastic market; if you slap a tax of $20 on a thing costing $100 which initially is divided 50/50 with the worker and employer, I’d guess the prior for the actual outcome would be more like 40/40 once the market has adjusted, regardless of where it’s hidden. And once again there’s this “a real progressive is a socdem” thing which is really turning me off from progressivism even if I probably agree with many of the values regarding whether poor people should stay poor or not.
The situation with employee vs. contractor vs. fake contractor I agree with, and would definitely prefer to see an actual market instead of this bullshit, but I really think that there should be a better distinction; Uber isn’t evil because it has contractors instead of employees, it’s evil because it lies and calls its employees “contractors”, and this should be addressed properly so that a honest platform for independent workers wouldn’t be saddled with the fallout of re-designating Uber as an employer, because I’m kind of afraid that something along those lines might be a risk.
And surge pricing is very important, and it was called “fucking surge pricing”, so I kind of assumed that the writer of that part disagrees with me. I like flexible prices, I even buy my electricity by the hour (because I can’t buy it by the minute YGM) from Nord Pool Spot. Of course, the actual impact of optimizing my electricity consumption this way isn’t technically “worth it” but my kink is the great chain instead of the party whip (sorry, I simply had to say it) so it’s kind of a hobby and a cheap signaling effort to shift my consumption around the prices because I’m contributing! to! the! market!
Whether Uber is actually worse or just slightly less terrible than traditional cabs when accounting for the totality, not just the drivers (because being in a cartel can definitely be comparatively nice and distorts the data if the people who can’t get a job because of it aren’t accounted for) is not a question I can answer here right now because it would require scrutinizing a lot of data I don’t have. What I can say is that I could totally do better.
To the question in the tags: I do think Uber is doing relatively well (for a certain value of “well”) in many things; the things they claim to be doing sound good on paper and I think the actual problem is the inherent exploitability of a desperate workforce on a shitty market. As long as it exists unscrupulous companies will keep trying to find loopholes for exploiting, and patching the loopholes without addressing the core issues just creates a regulatory hell that leaks constantly and makes legislators and unions play a silly whack-a-mole that ends up whacking a lot of innocent people too. And this is what’s letting Uber get away with being evilness georg and not delivering what it promises, not the lack of enough regulations everywhere.
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2 months ago · tagged #i'm only angry at the left because i care about the poor #this is a social democracy hateblog #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 1,618 notes · source: clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead · .permalink
leighalanna:
clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead:
Uber and Lyft and this new women only drivers service are all equally bad. I get that people are excited but let me just toss a few concepts out there:
Cab drivers, as employees (when they are employees which is not all the time luckily in pdx we have radio cab) are held to certain standards. If a cab driver harasses you, you can report him.
Cabs have to be ADA compliant.
Cab drivers have to make minimum wage.
There is a REASON cabs are more expensive and that reason, in Oregon at least, is that your cabby is making minimum wage.
This is not true of your uber driver, your Lyft driver, or your fancy new all woman driver but male owned service.
They are abusing the independent contractor system, as strip club owners are! to be falsely competitive in a market place they could never otherwise survive in and they are doing it at the expense of poor, vulnerable people, at the expense of cabbies, and at the expense of every other marginalised and misclassified worker because we are ALL in the same boat.
So no, I’m not excited that some man saw an opportunity to capitalize on the frequency of sexual harassment into making a niche for himself in an already exploitative market.
I’m not excited that he is donating 2% of his profits to charity–this serves the exact same purpose as a pink yoplait top: if you want to do good, do good; don’t disguise your consumerism and liking for a product behind false altruism.
I’m not excited that in a city already drowning in literally tens of thousands of underpaid drivers, there will now be one more.
And if you think women can’t be oppressive, shitty, hate on strippers and sex workers, and otherwise totally unpleasant, you’re dreaming. Especially once these women realise what a ferociously competitive starving market they’ve entered.
You better fucking tip 30%, is all I’m saying. And at that point, you might as well have taken a cab.
And there ARE alternatives, in more and more places – if you need to hail via your phone or pay with your card you can still support drivers that have to have accessible cars and have unions and are further down the road of creating reasonable working conditions and compensation for their drivers, you can use Way2Ride and Arro and quite a few others at this point, depending on where you are. And they don’t have fucking surge pricing.
Rideshare drivers could be held to the same standards if the rideshare companies wanted (aka. were forced by pressure from the public) to implement proper accountability. Cab companies can ignore reports that don’t have enough proof/social clout to get them in trouble with cops/social media, and at least Uber can reliably check who drove whom from its databases so abuses are inherently more investigable (and that’s why not taking sufficient action when they happen is even more damning).
Surge pricing is the best. I’m totally a fan of surge pricing, speaking as a person who has once hit a 3.1 multiplier. Supply and demand. I find it slightly ironic that a post simultaneously supports higher compensation for drivers and rejects it when it happens in its most natural form. Surge pricing gives the drivers extra compensation, to reward them for their work when their contribution is the most important. In fact, I get a slight joy from paying surge prices because it means that not only is the system working and probably making the waiting times a lot shorter, but also that I am paying the worker the fair price (some terms and conditions apply; “less unfair” is closer to reality) of the moment, not an unfair fixed rate that deprives them of the full value of their work. I ship free markets and economic fairness so hard.
Also, why has nobody mentioned the downsides of being an employee? Control over one’s means of production for example. Driving a cab is materially not that capital-intensive, so of course the System (I’m antropomorphizing it because this is one of the things that makes me angry enough to warrant it even if there probably isn’t such intentional malice involved) creates alternative barriers to entry to establish an owning class that can get free money from others’ work without needing to create any value (or comparable value) themselves. An assembly line worker can’t just save up a bit of cash and start their own factory, so they will remain bound to wage slavery and dependent on the local capitalist, but anyone with a car can start carrying people around unless something is done to stop it.
Enter regulation, to legislatively deprive people of the means of production even when they materially could control them pretty easily.
When one needs a medallion to drive a taxi, and the medallions are artificially scarce and thus expensive as fuck and thus probably owned by companies or rich people instead of the workers, the capitalists don’t need to fear competition. They just send the cops (their cops, it’s always the interests of the powerful that are protected and served first and foremost) to chase down anyone who doesn’t submit to vehicular serfdom in which the non-value-creating rentier class exploits the workers and slaps a little bit of socdem PR like minimum wages on top like a pink yoplait, and if challenged, fills the media with propaganda about how evil it is to only take 20% instead of $100 a day (yes, the taxi capitalists, propped up by the state apparatus of violence and nothing more, make the workers toil the equivalent of one and a half days of minimum wage before they get to keep a single cent to themselves; compared to that pure rent and exploitation, ridesharers’ 20% for something that actually creates value (as a customer, I’m willing to pay slightly more for the convenience etc.) seems downright saintly). When a permit to work costs a million dollars, the industry is inherently controlled by millionaires.
(Incidentally, this is also why I get immensely angry at anyone on the left who ever says the words “licensed brothels” because the rule #1 of communism is you never enclose the commons and licensed legalization is a fucking forcible enclosure act; decriminalization and deregulation is how one does not piss in the cereal of sex workers. Free sex workers are inherently in control of their own means of production, and only violence can take it away so why the fuck do so many leftists want to turn them from independent workers to brothel proletariat ausetdiuesideutoiuuhunao (that’s dvorak for “asdf…”))
As far as unions are concerned, my emotional reaction to them is quite… all over the place. Free unions make my brain go all solidarity! liberty! workers of the world unite! while the instant the state gets involved and enforces collective bargaining my brain does a 180 and starts screaming about leeches! and moochers! and redwashed rentiers! (”right to work” laws are just as terrible; I’m definitely not taking a knee-jerk “pro-business” stance); so I’m not exactly the most impartial observer to comment on them. But I’m not surprised that tomato pickers in Florida (left outside normal labor laws because redwashed rentiers always need a precariat beneath them to exploit) extracted concessions from even Walmart by voluntary organizing, using tactics that would be illegal for corporatist state-sanctioned unions; while stevedores in Finland get super-comfy wages and benefits because they can nuke the economy any time they want and labor regulations prevent them from being replaced with less extortionate and rentseeky laborers (and they still threw a hissy fit and nuked the economy a few years ago because they wanted their employers to pay them an entire years’ wages for zero work if they got laid off, despite being already entitled to 500 days [sic!] of state-mandated income-dependent unemployment insurance only the middle class gets because fuck the poor and precarious).
And obvious disclaimer: Uber is evil anyway. But it’s not evil because it competes with taxi capitalists, it’s evil despite competing with them. The obvious ideal solution is to cut out the middleman and create an independent, worker-owned-and-controlled system for tracking reputation, ensuring safety, processing payments and matching riders to passengers (and having surge pricing! surge pricing is important!), but even ridesharing corporations are actually doing a lot of things right and should be only fairly maligned, instead of unfairly.
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2 months ago · tagged #free markets x fairness is my otp #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #i'm only angry at the left because i care about the poor #this is a social democracy hateblog #bitching about the country of birth · 1,618 notes · source: clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead · .permalink
theunitofcaring:
trickytalks:
theunitofcaring:
I’m against criticising fanfic for being problematic because I’ve so rarely seen it done well, and so often seen it be destructive to young writers and to communities and to healthy conversation, that it’s probably better to just say “don’t like it, don’t read it”.
But I’m amazed that no one who is enthusiastic about criticising problematic fanfic says anything about what is objectively the most problematic fanfic, which is “character A is a sex worker and character B saves him and then he quits sex work and they fall in love” fics. Like, that’s perpetuating an actually really harmful message to an audience that actually mostly doesn’t know better, the people writing it often pretty much believe in the message as presented and basically never problematize it (also, none of them use the phrase ‘sex worker’), the characters are mostly morose caricatures who lament how they “fell so far” as to be “selling their body”, and there are disappointingly few subversions in which the sex worker is not, in fact, miserable and abused or brainwashed or enslaved (or in which they want to stay in sex work after Falling in Love.)
and seriously:
police departments will often do mass arrests of sex workers specifically for the good PR. It’s good PR because people believe that the sex workers are helpless and in need of rescuing, but these rescues basically never make their lives better and often involve horrific violations of human rights. Treating sex work like a dangerous addiction you can save people from results in abuses of the people involved. Sex workers don’t think or speak in terms of ‘selling their body’, which is bullshit anyway; like everyone else, sex workers sell their time and labor. And you shouldn’t date a sex worker in the hope that, once they fall in love with you, they’ll “see they’re worth more than that” and switch careers.
ending state violence against people involved in sex work (by legalizing it) is really important. stopping the hot fanfic in which the narratives that serve that state violence are used to fuel plot is less so. but I still find it unpleasant to run across, and it’d be cool if writers would throw in a scene that reflects the actual biggest source of violence and risk in the industry: the police.
From what I understand, legalizing the selling and the purchasing of sex work has not reduced abuses and human trafficking in Amsterdam. However, legalizing the selling of sex work but criminalizing its purchase has reduced abuses in Sweden.
(This observation is corroborated both by the linked article and by Professor Bridgette Carr, who runs the human trafficking clinic at the University of Michigan).
And while both she and the article would agree with you that legalizing the selling of sex work is important (and would certainly agree that that fanfic trope is Bad), imo it’s important to make the distinction.
Nah, I support full legalization. First of all, “trafficking” laws are written so broadly that “I helped my sex worker roommate make rent” or “I drove my sex worker partner to a hotel for their work” can make you a sex trafficker; “rate of sex trafficking” is not a useful or meaningful statistic if you’re interested in the safety and rights of the people involved. People think “trafficking” means “being forced into sex work against your will”, but a vanishingly small share of trafficking arrests have anything to do with that.
Sweden’s model doesn’t make sex workers safer. It still means that there’s no way to screen clients or spread the word about dangerous or manipulative ones, it still means that sex workers can be subject to police raids, and sex workers mostly oppose it. Also, as @2centjubilee observed, it hasn’t lowered rates of violence or abuse against sex workers, and your link itself doesn’t say it does.
Likewise the study you linked doesn’t say anything about abuses or the rate of “human trafficking” (which, remember, doesn’t mean forced sex as often as it means ‘assisting sex workers in finding clients’ ) in Amsterdam.
Also, saying that “the rate of sex work has gone down” is the metric by which the success of an intervention is measured is bullshit. Why should sex work go down? Sex work is fine. I don’t oppose state violence against sex workers because I think then it’ll be easier to rescue them from their tragic and/or sinful careers. I don’t want to “end demand”. I just want people to be able to have consensual sex with others for money without any state violence on either end.
Related sources
And more
Also, in Finland it’s even “trafficking” for two sex workers to work together. The laws are trying to ostracize sex workers out of the legal economy, isolate them from any support and security, and basically do everything to destroy them that isn’t outright banning them. Full decriminalization and deregulation, as regulation itself segregates the work into the law-abiding and legitimate, and the marginalized.
2 months ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #steel feminism · 169 notes · source: theunitofcaring · .permalink
ilzolende:
In “ridiculous overregulation”:
SF requires a license for fortune-telling, removing curses, and so on. (See Article 17.1 of the San Francisco Police Code.
It shall be unlawful for any person to advertise or offer or engage in the activity, enterprise, profession, trade, or undertaking of fortunetelling with the object of gain, benefit or advantage, whether direct or indirect, without a valid permit issued by the San Francisco Police Department. Gain, benefit or advantage includes but is not limited to economic remuneration of any kind, including authorization to use credit issued to another, use of another’s property or assets, loans, or the provision of tangible items.
Opponents of corporate personhood may appreciate that “Persons as used in Sections 1300 to 1321 shall mean an individual. Corporations and other legal entities shall not be entitled to a fortunetelling permit.”
Unfortunately, all would-be for-profit fortune-tellers must disclose their “full true name” to get a license, which may be a problem for all you mages out there.
If you’re wondering what fortune-telling is:
(a) Fortunetelling shall mean the telling of fortunes, forecasting of futures, or reading the past, by means of any occult, psychic power, faculty, force, clairvoyance, cartomancy, psychometry, phrenology, spirits, tea leaves, tarot cards, scrying, coins, sticks, dice, sand, coffee grounds, crystal gazing or other such reading, or through mediumship, seership, prophecy, augury, astrology, palmistry, necromancy, mindreading, telepathy or other craft, art, science, talisman, charm, potion, magnetism, magnetized article or substance, or by any such similar thing or act. It shall also include effecting spells, charms, or incantations, or placing, or removing curses or advising the taking or administering of what are commonly called love powders or potions in order, for example, to get or recover property, stop bad luck, give good luck, put bad luck on a person or animal, stop or injure the business or health of a person or shorten a person’s life, obtain success in business, enterprise, speculation and games of chance, win the affection of a person, make one person marry or divorce another, induce a person to make or alter a will, tell where money or other property is hidden, make a person to dispose of property in favor of another, or other such similar activity.
(b) Fortunetelling shall also include pretending to perform these actions.
(h/t Lowering the Bar)
original post
That’s probably related to mystic-religious scams where the con artist identifies a sufficiently vulnerable person and fucks with their mind and offers to remove the curse of “having any money or mental health at all”. Which is pretty clearly blatant fraud and thus my libertarian instincts aren’t as excessively offended by this as they would be if something without such a track record of massively harmful anti-consumer activities was regulated in the same way.
It’s still obscenely ridiculous but I can’t immediately think of an obviously better alternative for achieving the intended goal of making “that asshole who stole $200,000 and ran” identifiable, and “promethea can’t instantly invent a better way of doing it” a pretty damn high bar for any actually existing regulation.
The purpose of this legislation is to regulate fortunetellers, psychics, and other similar businesses so that the City and County of San Francisco can efficiently and thoroughly investigate fraud and deception, protect the public by preventing people who have been charged with deceptive practices from having easy access to persons who may be vulnerable to fraud or confidence games, to ensure that consumers are provided with information regarding services, rates, and complaint procedures
Of course, it’s also a barrier to entry which artificially hurts poor people, but fortune-telling isn’t the same kind of a legitimate business as hair-braiding, drug-dealing or sex work, and the criteria are basically “we want to know who you are in case you start scamming people because a lot of you guys are going to start scamming people” instead of “pay an imperial fuckton of money to favored special interests for lessons completely unrelated to your job” so, as far as goverment regulations go, this is fucking excellent and comparatively non-burdensome. And there’s a case to be made that fortune-telling basically in itself involves misrepresenting the nature of the service sold, or at least belongs in the general category of things that should be in Banned Product Stores. When If I were to become the dictator, this wouldn’t be the first regulation I abolish. Not saying I’d keep it, just saying that it wouldn’t be the first one on the chopping block.
For example, there is Article 32A which defines poker, 11 for miniature golf alone, 9 regulates what water may legally be used for (how about just making people pay for the water they use), 24 regulates street artists and I can’t even tell which parts of it are repealed or not, 40 mandates employers to be like “drugs are bad mmmkay” to their workers, there’s some weird ad hoc patch of rent control from the 70′s, and every other article seems to include something in the vein of:
- Sex work is banned.
- Not calling it sex work is not enough to make in un-banned.
- Sneaky ways of trying to do sex work are still banned.
- That clever hack you just thought of? It’s called sex work, we know of it, and it’s banned.
- Seriously, why is it so hard for you guys to accept that consenting adults won’t be allowed to make a honest living this way? It’s fucking banned.
- This may be San Francisco but our government is still a bunch of prudes who will only allow exchange of sexual favors for material favors to occur within marriage.
- Showing tits between 2:00 and 6:00 is regulated unless the person showing them is a “he”. Not showing tits counts as showing tits if we can’t tell the difference easily enough.
- We have no idea people other than “he” or “she” exist.
And of course sleeping in cars is prohibited because in a city where rents are as high as the mean citizen, even with cannabis georg not counted because he’s an outlier, the last thing it needs is poor people having affordable places to sleep in that are not the streets. Also, MINORS ARE SUBJECTED TO A CURFEW AND MAY NOT BUY OR POSSESS THICK SHARPIES WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS POLICE STATE BULLSHIT
3 months ago · tagged #vulgar libertarianism #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #drugs cw #regulation cw #ageism cw · 57 notes · source: ilzolende · .permalink
rusalkii:
socialjusticemunchkin:
I seem to have accidentally caused quite a shitstorm overnight, so I want to make it extremely clear that SUPERVILLAIN STUFF IS NOT TO BE TAKEN AT FACE VALUE. IT IS A COMEDIC EXAGGERATION OF MY ACTUAL BELIEFS FOR THE SAKE OF A FICTIONAL PERSONA AIMED TO SIMULTANEOUSLY IMFORM AND AMUSE THOSE PEOPLE WHO AREN’T DISTRESSED BY SUCH THINGS. I apologize for the confusion.
So what are my actual beliefs on the matter? I do think that various interesting ways of deviating from the norm are less common presently than I’d like to see. I do not endorse exposing people to hormonal medications against their informed consent. If given the choice between two possible people, I would prioritize the one which is more different from other people unless there is substantial incompatibility in terminal values etc.
I consider this a natural consequence of a computationalist model of identity. If one runs a bit-perfect copy of me, the world gains no extra value at all. If one runs an otherwise perfect copy of me with just a few small changes, the world gains very little extra value because there is no magical limit where persons turn discrete. Thus given a fixed amount of instances of persons, value is maximized by having them be spread across as wide an area of mutually-compatible-person-space as possible. Furthermore, adding a new source of diversity not only introduces such people to the universe, but also introduces other people to such people as well, making their experiences more different from experiences previously had. Also, if diversity has value, enough diversity outweighs some quality of life, and other such concerns, further matching my moral intuitions that creating an autistic person who posts about strange things on tumblr is as okay as creating a neurotypical person, but creating a person suffering from extreme depression is less desirable than creating a less suffering person.
The expression “magical gender creatures” was a reference to a comment on Yud’s facebook post on the suspected “20% rate of women”, on the observed massive gender diversity in the region. No implications about trans people being inherently magical or whatever intended. The part about clones was intended in a more literal fashion: it would be a dramatic loss of value if people converged on the most normative pattern even if it did increase hedons. I can see how the context wasn’t optimally expressed and could be taken as judgement of the readers’ life choices and I’m sorry for not being more careful to make it clear enough in the first place so such things could’ve been avoided.
If given the choice between two possible people, I would prioritize the one which is more different from other people unless there is substantial incompatibility in terminal values etc.
If you don’t mind me poking at this a bit, a few questions:
I assume that, given the chance to save, from whatever contrived thought-experiment fate you like, either a pair of identical twins or one of the twins and a third, unrelated person, you would pick the second option. How far does this preference extend? Would your answer be any different if the twins had radically different life experiences? If the third person was different from the twins in a way you found personally unappealing, but not morally wrong? If the third person could be considered to have a lower quality of life?
That’s the region where things become complicated. On difference alone the unrelated person would be tie-breaker, assuming they also have an equally close person who would suffer from their death as much as the living twin. On the other hand identical twins are rare and thus would get priority even if they resemble each other a bit more. And it’s not very strong on this level because people are individually different from each other; the aggregate of thousands to millions of experiences is where I start considering such things relevant.
Personally unappealing shouldn’t matter as long as they don’t impose their unappealingness upon others because I prefer people to be operating on a meta-rule that we don’t discriminate on that. But if they do materially impose their values on others I get uncomfortable because on one hand the meta-rule of no discrimination on political beliefs, on the other hand the world needs more people who stick to their own business and less people who coercively restrict bodily autonomy etc.
Getting to less vague territory this suggests I should value a neo-nazi who doesn’t vote, do political advocacy, or have kids, over a moderate who similarly abstains from them, and it feels really weird but is also a bullet I’m perfectly willing to bite.
I don’t want to be the judge of people’s quality of life and whether theirs is worth living (I know mine would fairly be considered lower than that of many, but it also feels eudaimonic in a way that kind of resembles Dark Souls; I may not be in bliss as much as many others but I feel much more alive than I think I would in a more conventionally happy and easy life), so I’d go on the priors of what I know about their preferences and err on the side of equality.
This kind of ethics is really hard and very least-convenient-worldy. In practice my value for diversity mostly manifests in very enthusiastically defending people’s independence from normativities, morphological freedom, consensualism, and advocating for the awesomeness of abnormal existence, and the sort of libertarianism which is basically “don’t hurt others, and we really should make sure everyone has the basic things they need and there are no obscene hierarchies where I throw more money on what’s basically a toy than millions can afford to spend in an entire year, and we need to figure out the problem with kids, but other than that feel free to be as disgusting as you want as long as I can opt out from being subjected to it (yes, I tentatively support LGBTQ- or immigrant- or judaism- or islam-free small communities as long as they don’t begin to dominate society and the problem with innocent children born into them is sorted out)”. I don’t get distressed over the existence of people with such kinks as long as they only do it with other consenting adults and don’t form conspiracies that begin monopolizing opportunities. All I ask for return is that I get to do the same; I can even agree to credible mechanisms for ensuring my freaky transhumanism genuinely doesn’t threaten their continued existence. Diversity isn’t a one-way street and having some consensually traditional conformist people is good as long as we can mutually honor each other’s desire to not be assimilated.
3 months ago · tagged #vulgar libertarianism #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #death cw #nazis cw · 12 notes · source: socialjusticemunchkin · .permalink
shlevy:
genderfluid-ranma:
shlevy:
I often worry about what Drew Summit calls the “bourgeoisification” of socially liberal activism, wherein some policy or social shift is justified by emphasizing how normal and uncontroversial it is, often while explicitly throwing more “extreme” acts/people/situations under the bus. Gay people want to settle down, be monogamous, have 2.5 kids and a dog and a white picket fence just like you! Marijuana is really safe, safer than alcohol, and has some medicinal benefits too, it’s not like it’s *heroin* or anything!
On the one hand, the things this kind of activism focuses on are true. And they do address some of the concerns of people who would otherwise be opposed. And there’s a plausible case that over time this kind of strategy can lay the groundwork for the more weird cases to be accepted too (though I’d love to see concrete historical analysis here), and that even if they remain outside of the realm of the socially acceptable/legal they are at least not really much worse off for the change that’s being pushed.
On the other… These issues are totally besides the point. Marijuana should be legal even if it destroys your brain and kills you in 10 years. Gay people should be able to make arrangements about child care, shared finances, medical decisionmaking, etc. even if they’re living lives of constant drug-fueled sex parties in broken-down tenement homes. And not everyone can pass for normal, and not everyone wants to, and their legal rights shouldn’t depend on that.
I don’t have a solution here. I don’t know that this worry is justified; it may be that this kind of incremental change is exactly the right way to go. It feels like betraying my principles and letting values I don’t hold set the terms of the discussion, but feelings aren’t conclusions.
Marijuana absolutely should not be legal if it destroys your brain and kills you in 10 years. One of the key reasons for a government’s existence is to protect people from irrational choices.
Re: gay marriage: prima facie the objection people have is “gay people are hypersexual fetishistic degenerates and thus tolerance for gay people is tolerance for moral decay”. Factually, “being gay” and “being a hypersexual fetishist” are orthogonal for the most part, which is what’s important here, because “actually hypersexual fetishistic degeneracy is great unlike your puritan morals which are based filthy lies that must be destroyed” is a discussion for a different day and a terrible objection to raise if you’re trying to make gay marriage legal.
It’s kind of like communism.
Did you know that people are pretty receptive to workers’ rights as long as you don’t mention Marx? “For each according to his ability, to each according to his need” sounds almost like a politically neutral phrase. People’s opposition to communism is mostly about, like, gulags and revolutions. Which is why internet marxists say “well, the bourgeoise must be of course slaughtered when we come to power. Join us now, and maybe we won’t kill you later.”
Respectability politics is the only reason anything ever gets done.
First, on the object level issues: I think that, possibly modulo some uncertain concerns about age and mental capacity, you have the right to do whatever you want to your own body. I also think you have the right to delegate financial, medical, childcare (modulo uncertain concerns about child abuse etc.), etc. concerns however you wish, regardless of the specific nature of your relationship with the person/people you delegate to. If you disagree with those things, fine, but this is not the post for you then.
Second, I think there’s a difference between incremental progress/aiming for low-hanging fruit and what I’m talking about here. You could look at the situation in, say, 2008 and say “hey, we’re pretty close with gay marriage, let’s focus our efforts on this” without specifically emphasizing “they’re normal, they fit into our existing social and economic system just fine, don’t worry this isn’t a gateway to polyamory or anything” etc. You could say “gay people are just as entitled to make decisions about their lives as anyone else, the legal institution of marriage is currently how our society mediates certain decisions people make about their lives, so as long as that’s the case gay people should be extended the right” and not simultaneously distance them from more extreme cases.
Finally, I acknowledged in the OP that it may in fact be the case that this is the best way to do things (though I am still interested in detailed analysis here). I acknowledged that this is just a feeling, and is not something that should guide decisionmaking. There is no reason to shove the last two paragraphs in my face like they are somehow news to me. But, if I were a communist and I believed the bourgeoise would need to be slaughtered when we came to power, it would at the very least be fundamentally disappointing that my so-called allies recoiled at that idea and it wouldn’t be completely illegitimate for the working class to consider me a traitor. OK,that analogy is so far from my actual views as to be unhelpful, so let me go to an actual stance: It is fundamentally disappointing that my so-called allies in the fight for drug legalization don’t actually care about bodily autonomy, they just don’t think pot is worth the government forcing us about, and to the extent I emphasize those reasons instead of the autonomy ones I could very well be considered an enemy of those whose drug use falls outside that range. Again, to reemphasize, it may be that this is the best we can do, and once the pot battle is behind us we can move on to the next step, but it feels off.
That argument about hypothetical super-harmful marijuana is way too broad. Any kind of an unpopular and stigmatized choice can be constructed as an “irrationality” that people must be protected from if the powers that be so desire. Gays? Oh no, they’ll be bullied and catch AIDS, we must therapize them straight. Trans people? Oh no, they’ll kill themselves, we must do everything we can to prevent children from expressing gender non-comformity. Suffragettes? Oh no, don’t they know politics will ruin a woman’s uterus, won’t somebody think of the children because these mothers-to-be certainly don’t. Transhumanists? Don’t they know death is a blessing in disguise, we must throw a million bioethicists at them to force them to die against their will.
Autonomy is the only option that can’t be co-opted by oppressors so easily (even then there’s childrens’ vs. parents’ autonomy etc. but at least it breaks less often than paternalism). Anything that can be used to actually prevent people from doing ‘scientifically irrational thing X’ can, and all too often will be used to destroy you and people you care about (pigovian taxes notwithstanding; they still impose a burden but at least it’s not completely insurmountable and/or violent in the same way legal prohibitions are, so if you want to reduce irrational thing X don’t ban it, just tax it (but not so much that you create profitable black markets that are hard to eradicate non-violently)). For example, trans people have spent something like half a century fighting against gatekeeping imposed on us because the establishment wanted to protect us from irrational choices and was, and mostly still is, unable to recognize the harm from doing so. Transhumanists are right now subjected to ridiculous biopolicing to protect the sanctity of repugnance or whatever it is cishumanists fetishize.
It’s obscene that often a doctor can’t do the thing I specifically ask and pay for, to my own body with my own informed consent, because “primum non nocere”; but governments are completely unbound by such rules and violent men with guns will definitely force all sorts of reckless things upon a non-consenting populace because some people think they know better than others and can cook up studies supporting them.
Bans are serious fucking business, they should be reserved for things actually worth using the state apparatus of violence on. Eradicating measles? Possibly worth it if the alternatives don’t work. Preventing people from frying their own brains in ten years? Fuck no.
3 months ago · tagged #primum non nocere: the first principle of responsible government #death cw #suicide cw #homophobia cw #transphobia cw #deathism cw #vulgar libertarianism #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 71 notes · source: shlevy · .permalink