The problem of credit cards is that when you make a payment, you have to give away your private key. No amount of securitisation will take away this fundamental flaw.
This is one of Bitcoin's evolutionary advantages in this space. To send money with Bitcoin, there is no need to expose one's private key. A massive corporation could take millions of annual payments and their paying customers needn't be concerned about their money being at risk. If the entity has poor security, the only people they endanger are themselves.
Uber offers a certain deal to potential drivers, they either like it enough to accept it or they think they can get a better match for their skills and circumstances and they keep looking. Uber has no responsibility to try and offer a deal which matches your sense of fairness. No one is being coerced and no one is being exploited.
You're neglecting to consider that other employment opportunities for someone in a given set of circumstances may offer a similarly raw deal, which results in effective exploitation, even if Uber is not solely responsible.
Worse than that, Uber externalizes the cost of commercial vehicle insurance onto the driver. A part-time driver is likely to not carry commercial insurance, due to the expense and to hyperbolic discounting: I'd rather have $X more in my pocket now than protection from a possible lawsuit later. This results in cheap fares at increased personal risk to the driver, who often doesn't fully understand that risk.
Also, these drivers have no ability to negotiate as a group, so they are at a disadvantage against a well-funded corporation that is quickly gaining market power and sets all of these terms.
So what, some people have urgent needs, different parties in economic transactions have access to different information. Welcome to the free market. They're still choosing to work for Uber. No one is forcing them. Uber isn't forcing them. Uber is just offering an opportunity that they are deciding to accept.
The entire economic system is built around people trying to get the best deal possible for themselves. You can try and paint that as inhumane and abusive if you're commited to emotionalising economic dynamics, but it really doesn't make any sense. At the end of the day as long as the transactions are consensual, there's no need for this rhetoric of abuse. Uber drivers know the deal and they can take it or leave it. No one's holding a gun to their heads. Likewise, it's not Uber or anyone else's job or responsibility to guarantee anyone or anybody a certain standard of living.
You might as well vilify people for choosing the potatoes which are 10c/kg cheaper at the supermarket, isn't that a case of those wealthy enough to buy potatoes victimising helpless potato farmers?
> At the end of the day as long as the transactions are consensual, there's no need for this rhetoric of abuse.
That's one of the biggest singular pieces of bullshit I see regurgitated in the discussions about market economy.
For most of the people on this planet, a lot of Uber drivers included, there's little choice. They either have a job, or go hungry and homeless. The power asymmetry between an employer and employee is so big that you may as well enforce that "consent" at gunpoint. There's little practical difference.
What we need is an equitable distribution of wealth starting with equal access to land. These guys can't make a living for themselves because they don't have any land.
That was why they called the USA the land of opportunity. In the expansionary phase people could get land near others and generate wealth from it. Now people must exist in the service economy waiting for trickle-down that isn't going to come, spending most of their wages on rent.
You're missing the point. You're absolutely right that "consent" is only _technically_ present when the alternative is something terrible, but the flaw is in blaming the less-bad alternative.
To use your example, if I force you out of your house at gunpoint and you're forced to live under a freeway, the problem isn't "this overpass isn't a very nice place to live", the problem is _the guy holding you at gunpoint_. (That example is trivially modifiable to describe homelessness: the real problem is the lack of adequate housing provided to those who can't afford it).
In the case of Uber, the problem is not that Uber is provided an alternative means of employment that's suboptimal, it's that people are forced into taking what they can get because our social safety net is such garbage.
What's the idealized world you're comparing this to?
An agrarian economy? Guess what, you either farm and build a shelter, or you go hungry and homeless.
Sure, maybe an agrarian economy is too market-based for you.
Try living on a commune and being the guy who specializes in "doing fuckall". I'm not sure how long you'll be welcome.
I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make, but life isn't free or fair, and it never has been and never will be.
That's not a reason to not even try to make things better, but the tone of the "regurgitated bullshit" comment implies that it's being used to fight against some other, better system.
I'm not comparing it to any idealized world; my point is that the "voluntary trade" card is being played as justification for all types of abuse in the economy. Because it's not abuse if both participants consented, right? It's also used to support the viewpoint that if only we could further deregulate things, "remove the barriers to voluntary trade", things would be better.
Except that the ideal voluntary trade seldom exists in practice, especially when you're lower or middle class. There is so much power and information imbalance that the employee or customer rarely has any choice but to participate in the trade. Companies like Uber know this and exploit it on purpose.
> The entire economic system is built around people trying to get the best deal possible for themselves ...
Getting the best deal possible is one factor, but it's not the only one, it's not dogma, and it doesn't justify bad behavior.
I think your post is a simplified approach to a complex world. For example, it assumes that the marketplace is free and fair, which it clearly is not. The powerful often use their power to prevent competition, or even to write the rules (via influence in government) of the 'free' competition. Also, profiting from others' suffering is wrong.
Finally, our economic system, while good relative to most in human history, could be greatly improved. Let's not allow a dogmatic idea that it is ideal stop us from getting better. For one thing, it could be made more free and more fair.
> it's not Uber or anyone else's job or responsibility to guarantee anyone or anybody a certain standard of living.
I strongly disagree. We all have responsibilities to our communities and society; if people didn't meet those responsibilities, the communities and society would fall apart. Those who don't do their part are parasites on those who do, in my humble opinion.
Great, so you're concerned about some people being more competitive than others in the free market. So what's your response? A monopolistic ostenisbly communally-controlled central power to oversee and address alleged abuses? Excellent, you just created a superbly manipulable tool of power for society's most capable individuals to wield. You just made problems of fundamental unfairness much worse, not better.
Uber has enough market power that it's often a monopsony, and thus has the power to depress wages more than would happen in a market that didn't have the winner take all dynamics of most app-based businesses.
You can paint it as "natural" for a monopsony buyer to squeeze every possible penny for themselves, but most humans have an emotional reaction to interactions which are perceived as unfair. This isn't irrational or dumb. It's natural and it's part of being a human.
Because we decided as a society that it is. That's why say, the concept of minimum wage exists, and plenty other labor laws. The remaining question, legally, is whether Uber is offering drivers a "job", as opposed to a software platform that they can use to be self-employed as drivers (which is Uber's argument).
If Uber is offering jobs to drivers, then certain standards must be met to avoid illegal employment practices. Then the next question is whether or not Uber actually violates those standards. The answer might be that it doesn't, life can be pretty thought for people in many professions that we have actually deemed 'fair enough' work. But if the answer is that it does, then Uber needs to change.
If 'the sharing economy' is not actually creating employer-employee relations, then it might still need to be regulated (perhaps under different regulations than labor laws), depending what society thinks of the mechanism as a whole. For example, if drivers are self-employed contractors rather than employees, then what gives Uber the rights to fix their wages? Is there such a thing as minimum wage for independent contractors? Who is responsible for things like health insurance for Uber drivers? We have plenty of answers for these questions for the kind of independent contractor that makes $50 an hour, not for the kind that makes $17 a ride. But again, it might well be that the deal as it is can be actually considered fair, compared with for example being a street market vendor or a temp worker at a convenience store. I certainly have met plenty of part-time/retired drivers in the South Bay that consider the deal a fair enough source of extra cash. The point is that we haven't figured out whether or not it is exploitative and that is the sort of question modern developed societies can afford to ask themselves and weight against the benefit of 'it creates some value for some people and pays the bills for some others'.
Edit: I'll add that I use ride-sharing services often, want them to continue to exist in some useful form and am firm believer of 'default allow' as it comes to new business models. But that doesn't mean nobody is allowed to look into whether some new business practices are exploitative or not or that there can be no harm in allowing any voluntary economic transaction.
The entire economic system is built around people trying to get the best deal possible for themselves. You can try and paint that as inhumane and abusive...
Wow -- you're so damn close to the moment of insight, and yet so far.
And the irony is that people like yourself, chasing phantoms of unfairness in the free market, support the extension and entrenchment of coercive governments, an institution which is and always will be eminently corruptible, an institution whose history is a litany of abuse and overreach.
You sound like someone who's never actually gotten involved in politics.
Try getting in at the local level--volunteer for a state representative's campaign, or a local city/county commissioner. Get to know people, talk to them, see what it's really like.
What you're characterizing as "eminently corruptible" and full of "abuse and overreach" actually makes a lot more sense when you step out from behind the keyboard (and its steady supply of anti-government, libertarian websites) and get involved.
Alternative advice from someone with an anarchistic bent: ignore the law and join the resistance against government. The more people who do it, the less power they have to stop it. People convincing themselves that they need to stay out of trouble and play by the government's rules is what Nietzsche would call internalising the slave mentality, and Foucault "self-policing."
Hello, I'm a Bitcoin community member, I can help clear this one up for you:
1) Bitcoin is claimed as a legitimate alternative to cash money insofar as: Bitcoin proponents believe that, if the world valued Bitcoin, it would function superbly as a money. So "legitimacy" here means "workable" or "beneficial" - it has nothing to do with legitimation by governments.
2) Many Bitcoin proponents are of the opinion that governments destroy wealth and hamper economic progress by trying to restrict and control the actions of people, in so doing preventing more organic and consensus-based mechanisms of social organisation emerging. Thus the argument that Bitcoin should not be subjected to existing cash laws is a) an attempt to prevent Bitcoin from early smothering by suspicious governmental authorities and b) an early-game strategy, the end game of which would be the significant or total disempowerment and/or disestablishment of government.
It's almost as if the government as a social institution continuously and inexorably acts to expand and reinforce its power over society, regardless of any constitutional or rational or utilitarian grounds for its expansion... as if the people in government seek to reinforce and expand the job security and fiscal prospects of being an agent of government, regardless of whether their actions are welcomed by or beneficial to the people they are ostensibly meant to serve, or actually just ever more patronising and controlling overreach...
Why would you say that? There are attempts to regulate them, but those attempts so far are mostly just succeeding in ensuring that the regulating districts become uncompetitive and virtual currency businesses leave for somewhere with better promise.
How are you supposed to regulate these services when anyone can open a Bitcoin bank and serve anyone anywhere in the world with an internet with an internet connection? If they couldn't stop movie piracy, how are they supposed to stop free global financial services? They have even less of a legal case to make for intervention than piracy!
>If they couldn't stop movie piracy, how are they supposed to stop free global financial services?
They could hit it really hard. They haven't stopped illegal images from being spread, but they have made it really rare except for the darkest corners of the web.
If by illegal images you mean child pornography, there's a few key differences between CP and Bitcoin. Namely: very very few people are into CP, while practically everyone who isn't an enthusiast is violently opposed to it. Therefore, law enforcement has a practical free reign to track down and destroy the lives of CP-sharers, and are actively supported and even acclaimed by the wider public for their actions.
The excuses for the prohibition of free financial services on the other hand are all basically covert attempts to protect the sovereignty of state military/police institutions, and do not actually align at all with the interests of regular folk. Plus absolutely everybody needs and enjoys high quality, unrestricted financial services.
So I see the chances of government attempts to suppress Bitcoin succeeding as more or less 0. What would be the grounds for it? Where would they gather the support that would allow them to openly violently suppress great swathes of people to try and keep it from happening?
It's even less likely to succeed than efforts to suppress copyright-breaking, because with Bitcoin there are no legitimate victims, it is only the state who will lose out.
In the past it was legal to produce and distribute it. Most people didn't care enough to stop it. In a relatively short time certain groups turned it from a 'meh, not my problem' to 'kill it with fire, nukes, lasers, and anything else we can throw at it'. They could potentially do the same to bitcoins. (You can even find there was a period where most all child abuse wasn't considered a problem, with one of the key cases of the era being a case where the lawyers for one abused child argued that the child should be legally considered an animal because at that time animals had greater protection). And the numbers of individuals into it are larger that most people realize (consider that 1 in 5 children are sexually abused by the time they reach 18 to know just how large the problem is).
Now, maybe certain factors like the potential demand growing for bitcoins would be enough to keep it from being banned. Also, even if you could get the public worked up about the topic, it is much harder to shock and awe them. What would a pro-ban advocacy group do, show numbers of wallets? And the ability for the government to scare people has taken a hit thanks to the backlash from the war on drugs.
The USD is a pretty lousy global currency. You can't exactly use it anywhere in any sort of transaction. I've only ever heard of a handful of places outside of the States where the local currency is terrible enough that local people prefer to hold and transact in USD over long periods of time. A true global currency would be one that you could use to buy practically anything, anywhere, whether it was a very large or very small transaction.
Regardless, Bitcoin has several advantages. For one thing, you're not dependent upon continually obtaining a flow of paper notes from a foreign country that may lie halfway around the world. For another, you can divide Bitcoin to extremely small and precise quantities - the dollar on the other hand doesn't scale as well to economies where a penny may start to approach a significant individual unit of money.
There are of course many other advantages of Bitcoin that make it attractive for people in many different countries to adopt. The fact that you can transmit and receive it to and from anywhere in the world, with the same certainty of transaction confirmation as cash in hand, without the need to either physically ship cash or rely on a network of physical cash shipment, is a pretty good one, especially as the world grows ever smaller.
A final advantage would be that you are never hostage to the political dangers of a nation-state controlled currency (i.e. a small group of rich white men can at any point decide to devalue your savings, to the point of destruction, by printing an unlimited amount of the currency.)
