The problem is the truckers are only allowed to use trucks they lease from the trucking companies

This requirement to lease the truck from a particular source is one thing that distinguishes these two cases very significantly. Uber doesn't even OFFER to lease cars or narrowly limit the vehicles that Uber drivers can use (requirements vary by city, but I recall that the requirements for the basic service are something like the car can't be more than about 15 years old, must have four doors, can't be one of a very few prohibited models, can't be a salvage vehicle, and must pass a very basic mechanical inspection). In most cases, the car is a fine personal use vehicle (I suspect few Uber drivers have a dedicated car specifically for their Uber work) and has a liquid resale market as well.

Critically, the drivers cannot avail themselves of workers comp, overtime or any of the other things an employee would be entitled to.

Sure they can. They can pay themselves whatever they want and offer whatever benefits they want. If one of these truckers wants to take the day off, I don't believe they have to tell a soul (not even their wife if they intend on spending the day with their mistress -- but there may be other ramifications of that). Yes, if they accept a load, they agree to perform THAT single task.

Uber owns these drivers because, like employees, they have to bow down and follow Uber's rules:

When you hire a contractor, even if they are going to do all the work themselves, to remodel your kitchen, I can assure you that there are often many rules in the contract that the contractor must follow.

For example, the contract may say that interior work shall only be performed between 9:30AM and 4:30PM. It may say that the interior work area must be broom clean at the end of every work day. It may say that no dangerous tools (power, sharp etc) shall be left out in the open in the work area at the end of the work day. It may say that the contractor will provide and pay for a porta-potty and no workers on the site shall use the bathrooms in the house. The contract may specify that the plans shall be followed (which includes a lot of things -- including using a particular product or even applying it in a particular way) unless an ECO is approved. None of these factors makes the contractor (or other workers) your "employee" (for which you should be thankful if one of them falls off a ladder).

Monitoring and firing people based on their performance sounds like a boss/employees type of relationship.

Sounds more like a contractor relationship to me. If I'm a realtor and one of the services I arrange for my clients is offering contractors from my "recommended list" and I make it clear to both parties that I get a cut of the job, you can be damned sure that if I begin to receive complaints from my sellers that a particular contractor is rude, doesn't show up on time (or at all), or leaves a mess behind, that contractor will no longer be on my "recommended list" (and may be on my "not recommended" list). My list == Uber.

(Uber, for example, doesn't compensate you the same way if you won't work during their required hours)

How is that different than a painter who charges more for their services during the spring/summer than the winter when they are not in as much demand due to less construction/remodels/home sales? AFAIK, Uber doesn't require you to work any particular hours to remain an Uber driver (but I could be mistaken).

Suppose you contract with a gardener to mow your lawn once a week and, unbeknownst to you, you're his only client after all the other ones terminated their contracts. Do you expect to pay back Payroll Taxes and get dinged for not withholding income taxes years later when the government discovers you were his only customer so you were his employer, not a contracting client?

How many incomes one has is irrelevant to their status as an employee (quite a few employees have multiple employers, does that make them contractors?)

Especially since "Contract" FedEx Drivers are much more tightly controlled by FedEx than Uber Drivers are by Uber.

If so, likely no differently than if the gardening service (a one man operation) I contract with doesn't show up and mow my lawn on Thursday too often and I tell them their services are no longer necessary.

Or, no different than if the gardening service I contract with decides that I'm wasting their time negotiating on the price of removing some shrubs and they tell me that they will no longer provide services to me.

He's definitely a contractor, not an employee of mine.

Indeed. I read one article about this that indicated that drivers were complaining about working more than 40 hours a week (presumably, w/o receiving premium pay for those additional hours). However, with these services, the only reason that they worked more than 40 hours was because they decided to - they are never required to work. If they were employees, they would almost always be banned from working more than 40 hours (or, maybe, 30 hours just to keep them from being "full time employees" for some government regulation) because Uber would usually would choose to pay someone else who hadn't worked 40 hours yet at a "regular" rate rather than an "overtime" rate. Those whiners would probably not like the result.

If a pizza delivery driver doesn't show up at their job as scheduled or decides they won't deliver a particular pizza, they can expect to lose their job.

If a Uber driver decides not to work at any point in time or decides not to take a particular fare I don't think they are at any risk of their relationship with Uber being terminated for those actions.

Quite a difference.

Although, the reality is that Woz gets the last laugh in this case.

Getting a degree in Art History is mostly a hobby for almost all that get one.

If you have just a BA in Art History, it's fairly unlikely that you will ever end up working at a job that requires an Art History degree specifically -- although, given the uselessness of a High School Diploma due to low standards, you may end up working at a near minimum wage job that requires, or at least prefers, a 2 or 4 year degree in something.

In almost all cases, the person would have been better served by getting a degree in something more marketable. It's actually cruel to lure students into wasting precious time that could have been spent better preparing for their future security by offering them a "free" eduction. It's, of course, even crueler to offer them student loans so while wasting their time on education with low ROI, they are also digging themselves into debt that will be very difficult to pay off due to a poor choice of field of study.

Sure, a rich trust fund baby can afford to pursue hobbies and pay for whatever education they wish to learn about those hobbies because they don't really need to work or can be pretty sure they will be set up in the family business. The rest of us can't.

Perhaps we should also offer government subsidized loans or fully subsidized educaiton for four year courses of study in "Monster Truck Racing" or "Skydiving For Fun and Excitement" also?

As well, it's mostly a compute power problem but in production quantities using commodity hardware, the mechanical components will dominate the cost. So, upgrading the electronic bits once (or maybe twice, but mechanical stuff wears out and at some point you will want new sensor feedback from the mechanical bits so there is a limit here) might expand the life at low cost of such robots.

But, tenure is a part of total compensation just as much as a dollar of salary, health insurance, a gym, on-site childcare, or free lunch/dinner are.

Different people will place a different value on tenure. Some (such as those that can't imagine working in the same environment for more than ten years) will attach very little value to tenure and some (such as those that like to settle into an environment and remain there comfortably until they retire) will place a high value on it. As a result, those that don't place much value on it are more likely to jump ship/not go into academia in the first place.

This car had been purchased with the "Find and Acquire Parking Space" (FAPS) option which, upon activation, locates any open parking space nearby and seeks to claim it as quickly as possible. The car simply noticed a space a couple hundred feet away and dove for it.

In other unrelated news, Volvo lawyers are recommending to the marketing department that the FAPS option only be available in conjunction with the Pedestrian Detection option.

You are proposing taxing people who can't afford to buy an electric car or live in a situation (such as an apartment) or work in a situation (any workplace that doesn't provide any, or enough, chargers) which make charging inpractical if they did buy. This in order to subsidize wealthy folks who can afford to buy and maintain a new electric car. Blatantly regressive taxes are often not very politically popular.

Electric cars still generate green house gases unless the power they use is derived from renewable or nuclear sources.

So, let's think a bit more boldly and use tax policy to really change behavior if that's our goal. Better might be to just put a very high tax, increasing each year, on all vehicles -- force people into dense cities and onto mass transit which we can optimize via government expenditures insuring proper maintenance and reducing the waste of each person having their own vehicle. These taxes will be spent to build mass transit. When the tax hits about $20K/year per vehicle, most people will be incented to move into the projects. As well, we can then turn the millions of now abandoned homes into farm land in many areas to produce food locally (the government can buy the land real cheap as the market value of single family homes would plummet and then resell it to agri-business Kelo style).

Although, perhaps the original submitter called them "pumps" rather than "dispenser control heads" because they assumed that was what most /. readers would understand. Generally it's best to communicate in the language your audience understands unless it confuses others -- and you, allegedly knowing how these things work, seem pretty confident that you understood what the submitter meant. Mission accomplished.