We can go around all day with analogies, the core question is does offering a ride via Uber constitute a contract of employment. There are a lot of good arguments on both sides. We need better definitions to match the new relationships that the gig economy has created.

I am not sure I understand how the direction the money travels is important. You are going to have to provide all the same general information if you win the lottery too. Many organizations use your SSN for background checks. The DMV asks for this to verify who I am, and if I am eligible to drive.

Right or wrong, companies have been using SSN for identification purposes for a long time.

My bank asks all those same questions when I get a car loan and I don't have an employer-employee relationship with them.

I think Uber is arguing that they are more like Ebay, they provide an app that links drivers to riders. A great many people have used this to earn a few extra bucks, and a few can even earn a living. I am not sure that makes you an employee though.

Not to mention, this truck need to be loaded. I am guessing that the front-end loaders moving and pouring gravel into the bed are not electric, or otherwise capable of running on the excess power generated. I am glad this mine found a good use for the technology, but I doubt it is anything more than a rounding error in the net carbon generated in producing concrete.

Except at 10k sq. ft. you are not much more than triple the size of the toy section of a Target or Walmart. And the new Toys R Us wants to have play areas and more interactive displays. If you are selling on consignment you will likely not have a consistent inventory. They are going to be a niche market at best, with little ability to move the high volume of merchandise required to be a major player in this business.

I am not sure that federal control is really a great option in most cases. Do you really want the decision of the zoning board of a city, or town to get wrapped up in national politics, and red tape? I suppose it is a matter of which demon do you want to deal with? You trade corrupt local officials, or national ones. I can see where it might work in a place like Japan, although Tokyo and Osaka are listed as some of the most expensive places in the world to live. Japan is not geographically large, and among the the most densely populated nations. I suspect they treat the entire island as one large metropolitan area. I am not sure how well federal control would scale in Germany, where there is still a lot of rural areas. Imagine someone living in a small hamlet having to file paper work to rezone a portion of land that was used for farming, to something for commercial use, like a small store. It gets worse when you scale it up to a place as big as the US. Even if you held the control at the state level, the needs and interested of a state like Pennsylvania can vary greatly, and it's only 300 miles wide. A few angry voters can swing a local election rather easily and affect change. That gets harder the higher up the government ladder you go.

If you can create a long haul tractor trailer, that can drive with little/no human intervention, major shipping companies would likely shovel cash in your direction. A quick Google search suggests that the average semi is driven about 45,000 miles per year. If the driver is earning $0.40 per mile, that's a savings of $18,000 per year per truck. FedEx has 20,000 semi trucks in its fleet, Walmart has 6,000. As an aside, I read that the US had a shortage of 50,000 drivers in 2017.

The market might be smaller than passenger vehicles, but the impacts on labor costs are significant. The savings to your average home/consumer are the loss of time while driving, this really doesn't hit your wallet. It's not like you are loosing money by driving the car yourself. For shipping companies the driver is an added expense that needs managers to schedule drivers, and people in HR to manage benefits.

All other things being equal, the plane's computer can realize and react to problems more quickly than a human. We have made planes safer by automating much of the cockpit, and the statistics seem to bare that out. I am not sure putting a human in control more frequently is the answer. You will be adding the very risk that you are trying mitigate. Additionally, will piloting a 2-hour flight once a week really sharpen their skills? I would think the better solution would be to have more time in the simulator focusing on these edge cases, but that probably has diminishing returns, since you cannot hope learn to adapt to every possible condition.

I think we are at a point where we need to accept that flying is as safe as it can ever be. That is not to say that we can't learn from incidents like this, and make improvements, but those improvements will be small, moving the needle very little. The reason I say this is that every time you change the system, you likely add some new unknown risk. You are a fool if you ever think you can achieve perfection.

I genuinely hope that we will get a detailed account of what happened. Something this big was likely more than an intern checking in a bad config file. While embarrassing for those involved, there is likely a good lesson to be learned. It would go a long way in improving my opinion of the company if they shared those lessons.

Your question is interesting. Even if you were not making money on the deal, can I sell shares of my account, and create some time share mechanism to share 4 streaming seats with 50 people? Clearly Netflix doesn't seem to care (yet) that you let your kids use your account, or you left it logged in at your friend's house. This is similar to sharing your internet connection, sure you pay for the subscription, and a few extra people doing it doesn't really hurt, but then people are shocked when the company gets upset because the practice has gotten out of hand, and you are putting undue pressure on the local infrastructure. Big corporations shouldn't be dicks, and prosecute someone for a minor infraction of the rules. Give them a warning and tell them to please stop. But this door swings both ways , consumers also need to own up and admit that what is happening isn't right, and pay the asking price, or stop using the service.

This make a lot of sense. With a drone I can get a direct flight to any hospital in the country. No need to book or charter the flight, and no need to use an airport.

I am not sure it is that simple. In your example, the company was employing two people to answer calls to respond to their typical daily volume of calls. You can't just make the blanket statement that staggering shifts will solve the problem. It gets worse as you scale up. If a large company has 100 people answering calls from 9-5, you can't just reduce that to 80 people in the first two and last two hours and not expect that to impact the amount of time customers spend waiting in the queue.

Most service industry businesses require some number of employees to be on staff at a specific time to handle their customer volume. Yes, restaurants keep cooks and waiters on call to handle sickness and holidays. But, if you reduce their hours from 8 to 6 per shift the restaurant still needs to employ someone during business hours. So that cook who was making $100 per shift is now making $70 with that $30 being paid to someone else. You can't make a cook more productive. It takes some number of minutes to cook the food, put it on a plate, and make it ready to go out to the table. Perhaps you can gain efficiency through automation, but even there the returns are diminishing. There will come a point where there is one person running the show, and removing them halts your operation.

This was a question that struck me too. Surly Verizon can configure the account to never be throttled. You would think that the Fire Service wouldn't want to have to call someone during a crisis to increase their data plan. So while it does look like Verizon screwed up by failing to remove the cap upon request, the Fire Service shares some blame by allowing the cap to be there in the first place. Lessons learned all around.