It's not the drivers. It's the taxi companies, often said to be affiliated with organized crime, who own the monopoly (taxi medallions) and make the big money. The drivers get shafted, like all workers who do not control the means of production. There are a few independent cabbies who own their own medallions, but they're exceedingly rare.

Not only does an independent driver need to buy a fabulously expensive medallion (probably from the mob), but he also needs to buy a city-spec taxi. Around here taxis are required to have all kinds of expensively-proprietary looking hardware attached. Uber/Lyft/etc use ordinary cars owned by their drivers. So already their workers own an important part of the means of production. They still don't own the dispatch system, but when there are several competitors they must compete for drivers as well as passengers.

I recently spoke with a taxi driver who was taking me to the airport (in a yellow city cab). He said he also drives for both Uber and Lyft. In his opinion he preferred Lyft, because he made the most money. To him it was all the same work, just different employers and different pay.

One good thing the current taxi medallion regime in SF does provide is a sort of indirect retirement system for the drivers. Don't recall the exact details - heard about it from another cabbie. Apparently after working a long career, a driver is given the opportunity to buy a taxi medallion from the city for rather less than its market price. The driver can then sell it or rent it out. So in effect it is their retirement plan.

NSA already knows the location of my personal tracking device. The city taxis in SF all have a (mandated?) bug eye style night vision camera watching the passenger. I'd be kinda surprise if that data isn't getting run thru facial recognition algos.

FTFY

Where the fuck are these brogrammers?? I've worked in software for over a decade, in Silly Valley, NYC, and Boston.. with over a dozen companies of different sizes and industries.... and never yet met even a single person I would describe as a "brogrammer".

If anyone knows some real, live brogrammers in SF or LA, by all means PLEASE introduce me to them. I want to see one of these creatures first-hand!

Until then, I'm gonna go on assuming the brogrammer stereotype is a 100% fictional creation of the corpmedia.

The "old boys' network" is real. However it has jack shit to do with gender, and everything to do with social class.

The software industry is one of the few left in the US where skill trumps credentials in hiring decisions. Consequently programmers are - in my first-hand observation - rather more likely to come from lower-middle and working-class families than workers in other "white collar" professions. Good luck convincing commoners who grew up under the boot heel of centrist plutocracy that we are the beneficiaries of an old boy's club.

FTFY

Yup, physical switch. Sleeping is for pets not consumer appliances. When my TV & Roku are off, they're OFF.

If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. /sarcasm

This Twitter has been censored for a long time, at least since 2007. I know this first-hand. If you don't believe that, then obviously you've never tried to tweet anything worth censoring.

VC propaganda.

Have you looked at the Go standard library's crypto packages? I have not done any thorough examination of them and could NOT vouch for their quality - but they were written by security conscious folks (including Ken Thompson) at GOOG, and the code is fairly easy to read.

There aren't many OpenBSD hosts relative to other OSes, but there are quite a few of them out on the net. And the people who run them tend to be the kind of folks who would notice if OpenSSL crashed.

Have you considered an exciting and lucrative career working for the mob?

So they're Royalists?

The fathers of Western civilization in ancient Greece would say "hell yes". Personally, I couldn't care less.

The state shouldn't be involved in marriage or any other religious ceremony/status. As for civil unions - well, can you tell me what it would be mean in the context of, let's say probate court, for a person to be married to an abstract idea?

Actually, I've seen several job ads to write digital surveillance software for the bigmedia cartels. There are also a good number of small companies (startup & otherwise) who make it their business to surveil the users of cultural data.