I don’t think it’s a supply and demand problem in San Francisco. Cab service here has been notoriously and actively shitty for decades. They tell you the cab is on its way, they tell you the cab has arrived (it hasn’t,) you call back and they say driver said he didn’t see you. Yeah, I’ve been sitting on my stoop waiting for the better part of an hour, so I’m pretty sure he didn’t see me because he never fucking showed up. If you do manage to get in a cab, god forbid you’re going out to the Avenues, because guess what, this guy doesn’t feel like driving all the way out to the Avenues and there’s nothing you can do about it. If you do manage to get where you’re going, sorry, credit card machine is broken (even though it’s illegal to be in service with a broken meter/CC machine) so you’ll have to cruise all over the neighborhood looking for an ATM. On your dime of course.
/me inhales
The whole reason anyone even came up with Uber in the first place is because SF cab service sucked so truculently. It’s been getting a lot better lately, but it took “rideshare” companies eating their lunch to smack the smug complacency out of them.
(On unilaterally raising their commission from 25 to 30% for UberX drivers’ first 20 rides per week:)
Novogratz said this answer prompted him to ask a “cheeky question.”
“‘You’ve got happy employees, you’ve got happy customers, you’ve got happy shareholders. The holy triumvirate are all really excited about your company. Why are you going to risk that and push the employees salary down 5%?’”
It seems like you shouldn’t NEED to be rich to afford a liver transplant - we should all have access to good health care when we need it, because we are all human. Marx wasn’t anti-industrial, he was very much for the expansion of the industrialized economy, he just wanted more to evenly distribute the wealth to the people who were actually creating it (workers). Remember that class, in a Marxist perspective isn’t about how much $$$ you have, really, but about culture, power, and how you labor. In a more egalitarian world, basic needs would be met, and everything else would be gravy.
Hmm. Perhaps you’re correct (it’s been a while since I watched it)? Basically the federation and Klingon empire coming to terms in that film, right? And I guess that Deep Space Nine (especially in season 4, with the new tensions with the Klingons) is some of the new tensions.
So I was trying to come up with a strained analogy last night conflating income with WoW aggro floors and caps. I couldn’t make it work, but is reminiscent of why I disagree with Marx.
The bottom, let’s say 15% aren’t always workers. Yes wealth should be more evenly distributed to labor, but labor as a class excludes people (rather a lit really). The top 15% may also be in labor (surgeons, coders) but have their needs met.
So I guess what I am saying is:
capitalism is cool
basic income for all, 18+
make the tax code more progressive
(basic health care, but that won’t really help when my heart goes out)
Edit
How did I go from taxi medallions to basic income and organ transplants? I can feel the hot breath of @falcor on the back of my neck.
Aren’t the unemployed, underemployed, deeply marginalized people the lumpen-proletariat? The people who make up the underclass?
I think we need to look at how capitalism has actually operated in history before we decide if it’s cool or not.
And again, it’s not just about how much money you have. If you work for a living, it could be argued that you are working class. Aren’t the schlubbs who head out to silicon valley and work for 100 hours a week for a (probably very high salary) also selling their labor, which was Marx’s core identifier of that class? If you sell your labor, if that’s the only thing you have to sell, you are a prole. A very well off one, but none the less, I think the definition fits.
Also, in the Mindy-socialist-utopia, FREE HEARTS AND LIVERS FOR ALL!!!
I think this is on topic, since the topic is people’s labor and how corporations are attempting to make that all the more precarious. It totally fits!
[ETA] Here is the wikipedia for lumpenproletariat:
Ah, but that is a study of historical implementation failures. I believe capitalism with a very strong safety net is utopia. So yes, labor can still be abused. But there is a floor to how hard labor can be abused.
Same with high earners. Exploit your skills but there is a point of diminishing returns after you hit a ceiling.
So there is still a stratification of wealth, but it is narrower. And everyone has a basic level of dignity, so when they get fired for screwing up a DNS update they aren’t broke.
By that notion, you can say the same thing about Marxist communist utopia… “if only Trotsky had won the power struggle after Lenin died instead of Stalin…” But he didn’t. And what happened is all we have to work with, really. So, what has the implementation of capitalism historically looked like (keeping in mind that capitalism never had a strong set of theories behind it in the same way communism did) and what has it actually done. This thread is a case in point - what impact is Uber having on what many considered a deeply exploitative system and what does that mean? If we take seriously Marx’s notions - the people who own the medallions are the capitalist and they have exploited the people who work for them as well as the people who use taxis. But there is exploitation with the system that uber uses as well.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t think of alternatives, just we do need to understand where we are in all this, what has the systems meant to accumulate wealth within a small class really gained us, good and bad. Are the many and numerous examples of exploitation through out the history of capitalism a feature or a bug? Can we all be capitalist anyway, given the nature of the system? If we can’t work through these questions, we’re not going to be able to imagine anything different, I don’t think.
Man, reading Piketty with you guys is going to be a blast!!!
To be fair, you could say that about many Marxists… maybe not Zizek. He’s all kinds of fun.
Although I did recently attend a conferrence on capitalism, and saw two old marxists get into it regarding class struggle during the revolutionary war/early republic… that was fun.
I find Zizek completely unreadable. I mean, I got myself an MA in philosophy and have read a lot of dry shit by white dudes but Zizek is both incomprehensible at times and a sleep inducer.
True story: friend of mine is outside a bar called “The Comet” in Seattle, known for being a hangout for lefty political folks (real political folks) about 20 or so years ago. Two guys are beating the crap out of each other while a woman is watching. My friend, who just walked up, turns to the woman and asks if the dudes are in a fight about her. She says, “No. Trotsky.”
