> Long story short: all they are doing is cashing out the wear and tear on their car.

Sounds like you've never done taxes.

Mileage expenses for wear and tear and gas are all business expenses and come right back off their taxes.

>Take your time driving for these companies, multiply it by $50/hour (actually more to get a decent pay), add $0.58/mile (car expenses) driving for those assholes and THAT is what you should be paid as an independent contractor!

$50/hour for unskilled labor? Sure, buddy.

> There are other reasons that Lyft and Uber drivers could reasonable be considered I.C.'s if that's what the companies want, but if those reasons actually held enough weight, then it never would have been decided that they are employees in the first place.

This is incorrect. Uber drivers are clearly independent contractors by every measure:

http://www.practiceofthepracti...

What happened here in California is that our legislature passed AB-5 which reclassified Uber drivers, freelance journalists, and many other people as employees by fiat. Prop 22 is undoing the idiotic law. Unfortunately just for app based drivers, not all of them. Freelance journalism is now dead because of the legislature's brain-dead "helping" of labor.

>is that Uber was able to just plain buy a law. That enough money spent can get the public on your side even when they're not actually.

You can't buy a law. People still have to vote for it. Money can push the needle a little bit, but Californians overwhelmingly supported Prop 22 (by a 17 point margin in a very blue state) because the state legislature really screwed up with the passage of AB5, which improperly and unethically classifies a number of independent contractors as employees. It put the entire freelance journalism industry in our state out of business.

AB-5 is the kind of "helping" that actually harms the people it's trying to help. Californians recognized this, and supported Prop 22 for this reason.

See for yourself the criteria for how 1099 contractors vs. W-2 employees are determined by the IRS:
http://www.practiceofthepracti...

Uber drivers meet every criteria.

>Why was this ballot measure written to only cover app-based drivers, rather than all professions (and means of contact)?

Because it was written by Uber, Lyft, etc.

It would have been much better if it had just overturned AB5 (which is an absolutely horrendous bill) and continued using the nationwide standards for 1099 contractors, but I think that they figured that since they were writing the bill, they could make it extra special just for them. It's really the fault of the Democrats who tried irrationally classifying 1099 contractors as W-2 employees.

Here's a checklist of the difference between W-2 employment and 1099: http://www.practiceofthepracti...

App based drivers are *very clearly* 1099 contractors. They meet every criteria.

My only issue with Prop 22 is that it didn't go far enough. AB5 has already gutted the freelance journalism industry in California - it should have just been repealed outright.

>American company required to follow American laws!!! Who would have imagined it!

With the law, too.

We also knew this exact scenario when the DMCA was passed that allowed copyright holders to spam invalid takedown notices without consequence.

If Slashdot's archive goes back that far, you'll see this discussed back then as well.

Everyone knew this would happen when they were bought by Microsoft, despite obvious platitudes otherwise.

Frankly it's amazing (reading through the Twitter thread) that people are so up in arms over people working two jobs. I'm technically working four jobs right now, though my zero-hour-a-week martial arts class (thanks, Coronavirus) isn't really impacting my ability to do work on the other ones.

Working multiple jobs is a long standing American tradition to get some extra money. There's nothing shady about it as long as he doesn't share secrets across company boundaries.

Yep. I used to have a Samsung TV. It updated its firmware and suddenly started inserting ads into the input select screen, so that you'd go to switch to your Switch or something and the ad would pop up there and you'd click on it by accident. It infuriated me so much (I didn't *buy* a TV with ads) that I returned it, and got another one. This time, I disabled the firmware updates. Samsung very helpfully ignored the fact I'd disabled updating the firmware, updated the firmware, and started showing ads. So I returned it a second time.

I used to use Samsung phones, but Bixby was also a deal breaker for me. So I have dropped Samsung entirely. They simply cannot be trusted.

I hope the 0.001 cents of advertising revenue you got from displaying that ad was worth losing a customer over, Samsung.

"Of the 3,800 students in our classes (from 2000 to 2006), this study included only the 494 who used the C programming language and who also completed all 10 programming exercises."

So they started by discarding the bottom 3,300 students (the bottom 87%) and selected out only programmers who used C and who could complete all 10 assignments.

This right there that shows the "myth" isn't a myth. 87% of their students didn't even make it to the starting line for their study.

Second, they're studying students, not professionals. As anyone can tell you, someone who has been programming competently for a while is massively more productive than someone who has had one semester of college. So there's probably a much narrower range of ability if everyone is just now learning to program.

Third, their own data shows a 10x difference in performance between the top performers (who did it in 30 minutes) versus the bottom performers (who did it in 300).

Fourth, their challenges don't sound realistic. All 10 were just some i/o, some loops, and some if statements? I'm not sure that getting a narrow range of results really means anything, as they're testing just basic skills. Why not give them a day or two to develop both an interpreted language and an interpreter for it, like John Carmack did for Quake? What? You think nobody would be able to do it? Precisely the point. There are programmers who can just casually knock out something like that.

Fifth, their research runs counter to established research on the subject, so given the above flaws, it is really irritating to see the author (who is presumably a smart guy) calling it "The End to the Myth of Individual Programmer Productivity" is just anti-scientific hogwash.

> The power companies are right on this one. Your power bill is not just for electricity. it's (cost of generating electricity) + (cost of maintaining and upgrading the distribution grid). Because electricity used to flow only one way, the utilities just rolled both costs into a single per kWh electricity rate to keep things simple.

This is what the utilities say, but it is not true. If you have solar here in California, you pay a grid maintenance fee of $15/month. This is already a resolved issue, and they're just pushing to squeeze more money out of solar customers by trotting out lies like these.

>The long-term solution is for utilities to break apart the power bill into generation and distribution components.

This is already how it is here. But the utility still says that solar customers don't help maintain the grid.

The quality of CS education varies wildly from institution to institution and from professor to professor and year to year. I think it's pretty hard to generalize. Some schools or professors try to stay up to date, and are teaching C++17 (or at least modern C++) and some are still stuck in the mid 90s. Or worse - UC Santa Cruz has students doing data structures in C. UC Berkeley hasn't updated its textbook in decades and the homework assignments for their intro class are massive amounts of boring busy work. But Berkeley is a highly rated school, so what do I know?

The root problem is that professors aren't tenured based on their teaching abilities at 4-year institutions, but rather on their papers produced and grant money brought in. Most professors avoid teaching large undergraduate classes in preference for small graduate sections related to their research interests. So most 4-years aren't very good at actually, you know, teaching. Or if they are, it's a coincidence. UC San Diego got rid of the best adjunct they had (Keith Muller) but when a Blizzard alumni donated a bunch of money because of the influence Muller had on him, they talked about how great he was and such out of the side of their mouth.

Community colleges instructors are tenured on their ability to teach, but there also quality and subject matter varies wildly. So I don't think there's really any easy answer other than to check various professor rating web sites to see what's really being taught in different classes, and how well, at various institutions in your area.

For all that, I do think that a college CS education is highly valuable. You will learn a lot of things in industry, and you can learn a lot being self taught, but going through a college program will teach you a lot of valuable skills that people don't generally pick up elsewhere. It seems dubious most self-taught programmers will just pick up the Epp book on Discrete Math and work their way through it - it's the kind of thing that it's really nice having a professor for, and discrete math and similar classes are actually really useful for computer science people in industry.

>Just when I think my opinion of tech "entrepreneurs" can't get any lower, a new story comes out and proves me wrong.

I don't see anything wrong with it. All this outrage has it backwards. If a user tips $5 and DoorDash guarantees a minimum $10 on an order, then DoorDash pays $5 extra. I'd rather have a minimum tip than not.

Yeah, a local dentists office has one going 24/7 in front of his office (I guess he doesn't want teens playing in his fountain or something) and it's a severe nuisance, even to people out of their teens.

I have considered filing a noise complaint, honestly.

Yep, that's my attitude as well. When Age of Empires 1 got re-released on the Windows store, I didn't buy it. Now that it's coming out for Steam, I will buy it. I don't think it's that uncommon a phenomenon, either. The sales on the Windows store have been terrible, which is probably why they decided to release on Steam - despite losing more money per sale, they will get far more sales.

It's probably better to use a bitfield. A bitfield will require n/8 bytes of memory, but it has the advantage of not overflowing when N exceeds 65,000 or so. Same O(N) running time, but will probably be much slower in practice (addition is way faster than a memory access+branch). Still, it'll work for any value of N, assuming N is a standard 32 bit int and you have a modern machine with a reasonable amount of memory.