No, that's actually a terrific analogy. Uber is lottery economics, but in a different way from things like writing apps for iPhone (where you will fail and lose time and money hoping to be one of the three trendy apps that makes somebody millions).

In the Uber model, you are the lottery ticket, and Uber is the gambler. Their purpose is to keep squeezing the situation and conditions of employment until they are holding a large number of winning lottery tickets. That is defined as 'person who is dumb enough to substantially lose money and resources competing with rivals for that Uber job'.

Everybody haughtily suggests that THEY would insist upon good terms, put away money for retirement (rather than dump it back into the vehicle and into fancier bottles of water: hey look, an Uber driver with a complimentary wet bar for passengers! Top that, taxis! Stuff like that)

As such, they are saying that THEY are not Uber's winning tickets, because they would demand too much or call Uber's bluff and leave. Every time they do, Uber gets another chance to try and find somebody more desperate. It's a race-to-the-bottom condition, not necessarily even for passengers depending on the terms Uber sets, but for anybody trying to conduct business in that market segment. It's dumping to try and lock in total control of the market.

We don't know Uber would take the Wal-Mart approach of cutting back customer quality and draining money that way. They could also take the Google approach of doubling down to try and get into a unassailable position in order to control future transportation completely (when the self-driving cars take over).

For the time being, if you are an Uber driver you are the lottery ticket Uber purchases. If you exercise rational self-interest you are a losing lottery ticket. Uber requires that you not do that. The business is based on taking maximum advantage of people prepared to be cheated in order to undercut the next guy, and this is not a model where you can bring rational choices and expect to survive for long.

To be a winning ticket for Uber, you need to act as if you are sacrificing heavily in the short term so you can build a better position competing for work in the future as a day laborer. Because if you won't, the guy next to you might: and then you lose everything, Uber doesn't want you. The self-sacrificing guy made a better (to them) offer.

This is the problem with setting up a class of employment based on rational self-interest where employers benefit most by people abandoning that rational self-interest. It's a lottery, and you know you can't trust most people to stay rational enough of the time.

Oh, you mean 'Seattle'?

Half of half of $500,000 is still a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars more than my deadbeat neighbors, and the government is giving them that money just so they can turn around and give it right back to ME.

By all means go all galt and refuse to come to work if this upsets you so.

I'll be running my business, and I'll happily take that $125,000 and whatever happy, insured employees I've got. And maybe I can turn around and take all your customers when you quit. That's business

I think you may be a little mixed up about the goose that laid the golden egg. You may be thinking guys like Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk are the goose, and the hordes of welfare rabble are seeking to kill that goose.

The hordes of underclass people consuming (whether with crappy jobs or on welfare or a basic income) are the goose.

Trump and the others are the egg.

Kill wisely.

Everybody wants 'a bit more money', no matter how much they already have.

Let me address this from the point of view of a small business guy (and not a rich tech employee vesting their options)

Let's say what you can do to better yourself is make a lemonade stand, 'cos you got lemons.

Your neighbors are lazy bastards and won't squeeze lemons, so you win: you are demonstrably more motivated than them, and they are bad. With me so far?

In the current system, you do your lemonade stand, and you have to compete with Minute Maid, aka the Coca-Cola company. They don't have to buy lemons as they can buy citric acid and corn syrup by the ton, in bulk, for a substantial discount. You squeeze your lemons and try to sell your lemonade anyhow, but your neighbors can't buy any because they are broke. Even if you convince them your stuff is better than corn syrup and citric acid, they are deadbeats and can't afford to buy anything but Coca-Cola products.

In the commie pinko star trek system (also seen in Universal Basic Income theory), the Coca-Cola company is doubtless still huge but is hit up aggressively for money as that's where the money is: same with Donald Trump and all the biggest winners of the system. They don't notice all that much as one's lifestyle is much the same if you're 30 or if you're 300 times richer than the average Joe: those guys used to BE 30 times richer and it seemed fine to them at the time, there were still Ferraris and Rolexes to be had. The money taken from these money-outliers, these network-effect winners, is then given to all your lazy bastard neighbors who sit around doing nothing but drinking lemonade all day.

They can now afford to buy your lemonade if you still want to sell it to them, and they're less stressed out and have more time to pay attention to what you're telling them.

Some of you guys see civilization-destroying looters where I see customers. Just sayin'. We already know that if you dump money into the underclasses of society it goes into immediate economic activity rather than abstractions like investment. It can BE an investment pool for anybody willing to actually work and make something other people might want.

This is not communism, it's still capitalism: all the more in fact since it recirculates resources into small business and local economies completely without regulation. Go ahead and throw out all labor laws and just give every citizen a grand or two a month automatically, from bum to Trump, and then tax everybody a quarter or a third of what they earn with absolutely no loopholes (and money-shuffling capital gains also counts as 'earns'). Much much simpler and the number of customers (as well as students) skyrockets, and no central authority has to decide what shall succeed or fail.

But you gotta remove the requirement to work and make it 'go to work to get MORE than just survival in some podunk town somewhere, in a cruddy apartment'. Right now it's lottery economics: everybody starves to make the payoff for the Silicon Valley tech nerd more impressive. The Trek future can't work that way. Even if you got very enthusiastic about total genocide of all poor losers, your customer base collapses more and more. The customer base MUST have money in capitalism or the whole thing fails.

Depends on whether you consider cloud backups a thing, or indeed public-facing cloud backups as Google Photos appears to be.

Or, public-facing cloud backups tagged by slowly improving AI on the cusp of deciding whether you are man or ape? http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...

I can see it is embarrassing to Google that its AI is deciding black people are gorillas. Tells you something about who's coding the low levels of this AI as it gathers itself together. It's growing from the bones of things like Google Photos, fed by the wittingly or unwittingly given visual data of the world, and you do have to have imagination to conclude something like Google Photos is a way to steal all your data, whether or not you delete 'the app' that set it transferring all your images to an apparently public-facing server. Hope your selfies aren't too naughty! Who do you think is going to steal them, other humans?

I'm pretty sure they aren't proposing to sell the fruits of this to humans.

Because to Google, "Le Singularity, c'est moi". The intelligence that directs all the self-driving cars, that takes over from all human foibles, is to be THEIRS and so the important thing is simply to get the data and to build the neural networks—so, they are "also working on longer-term fixes around both linguistics - words to be careful about in photos of people - and image recognition itself - eg better recognition of dark-skinned faces" quite literally. That's the purpose of Google Photos and why they'll spend money on cloud servers for the world, asking nothing. Le Singularity, c'est moi.

Whilst it is nice that Skynet will not begin herding black people to special zoos thanks to the timely intervention of the BBC, it is unsettling to get this glimpse of the Singularity forming through actions like these. Black people are gorillas, large dogs are horses, and the personality is being trained through collective input but initially formed by people who will set up an AI to consider some Homo Sapiens as people and others as presentient animals, and think nothing of it until caught at it.

Meet the new boss, I guess.

I polish Red Wolves and pinch Grey ones, but prefer not to do anything to my father's side.

Man, the five-digit Slashdot ID users are loonies... I'm not sure this one isn't serious.

Extended use of Slashdot.org is evil!

In the event that Google moved out of the US and moved to a country where they are twenty times the size, manpower and influence of the country's government, is that the point that some people see 'em as an independent entity on scale with a government and with their own purposes which are indistinguishable from such a government?

Folks keep going on about the NSA but I'm not really sure which is bigger or more capable, Google or the NSA. Google has nicer campuses. As far as we know...

Or at least Phys Ed :)

Who're you calling a youngster? XD

Hm. Creative Commons-Attribution is very similar to endorsement. What do you think of French moral rights, such as right of association?

Currently in the field of music we're getting some rumblings on this front, such as David Byrne suing Charlie Crist for using his song 'Road to Nowhere' in politics- it goes back further with Rush vs. Rand Paul, and Jackson Browne and Van Halen vs. John McCain.

Earlier, both parties tried to co-opt Bruce Springsteen's "Born In The USA", which has lyrics hinting obliquely at the futility of the Vietnam war.

I use CC myself- the same one Trent Reznor went for, which is not straight-up CC-Attribution. Let's assume you know an artist (not me! I'm a nerd! :D ) capable of writing music that seizes the emotions and powerfully moves people, with lyrical themes which are simple and general (as good lyrics often are). This means the work in question, while powerful, isn't real specific. It can be personal, in other words, the meaning is spelled out by context.

To what extent do you feel popular culture should get to override moral rights such as right of association? If someone does a powerful but ambiguous song, and their arch-enemies (in terms of belief systems) seek to use their work to back and support themselves, to what extent does the artist get to prohibit that particular use? Under ordinary copyright the artist can do this, and under CC-Attribution it is quite the opposite: the arch-enemy not only gets to use the work, but is required to also attribute, associating the artist's name with their worst enemy.

I think one counterargument is that attribution lets people look up the original artist and learn more about their differing beliefs and values- but you're going to run into a problem with asymmetry of information, where most people will not look and will assume the artist is sympathetic if the musical theme seems like it might be sympathetic to the cause.

No, that would be mean :D