How quickly we accepted that it’s normal to pay someone to go get our groceries for us. To drive us around when public transportation is available. To run errands for us. To bring us fast food.
Covid capitalized on it.
People don’t want to give up that luxury now that they’ve had it. Even if it makes things cost 2x-3x as much.
Even when we all know its exploitive labor.
It’s true delivery and driver services have been around for hundreds of years but now instead of companies with full time employees (with benefits) , the gig employee gets paid less while taking on risk that aren’t compensated by the employer (car accidents, gas, car repairs, injury or attacks).
Gig work is a much worse thing than maybe a lot of people realize. And it’s also making more people servants to others.
It’s moving full time employees with benefits and using company property to no benefits and using their own property that they have to pay for.
The funny thing is gig work (proportionally) makes a lot more in plenty of 3rd wold countries because the business owner isn’t taking a massive chunk of the income, and because it started out with everyone paying cash so there’s no shoehorned services fees at every transaction.
Its so lucrative that I’ve seen office workers run it as bonus income on their way to and from work if they travel by car or motorcycle.
I always thought about making a free equivalent platform to stuff like Uber, but I think people would be too scared of the individual liability, despite Uber offering the absolute bare minimum.
I know right? How easy would it be to tie open street maps into a fiverr style so run this errand for me and make it almost free?
But the second someone gets hurt, molested, their house broken into, or carjacked, you’re going to need some huge legal team and have a good chance at getting fucked in the process
Wonder if you could add an arbitration clause or something so they can’t sue you. Like how Disney did when someone died from food allergies at one of their parks but the husband had disney+ so they couldn’t sue or something crazy
Some people using their cars for gig work are barely making more than the value they are depreciating from their car through wear and tear.
People rent cars to do it, which just blows my mind. I don’t get how they can be making any money at all.
Wouldn’t renting be the ultimate way to know if it was profitable as there’s no hidden costs?
No insurance, no depreciation, no maintenance, no repairs.
You do a shift and whatever you make you make.
Renting doesn’t mean no insurance. If you’re operating a vehicle, you need to be an insured driver. Where you get the insurance is up to you.
Depreciation, maintenance, those are lumped into the cost of the rental. Whomever you are renting from isn’t giving you the car and taking a loss on it.
Insurance comes with the rentals or your credit card in most cases.
And duh. Thats my point. You pay, and that’s it. No more hidden costs.
Any given day is profitable or not, and you immediately know.
edit: we even have a car share service here that includes gas in the rental.
Please don’t duh.
Renting a car for use as a ride share is not covered under any rental agreement, nor under whatever your credit card may provide, which as far as I know covers damage to the vehicle at most. Liability insurance is a whole separate animal and the one that’s most necessary.
If you’re allowed to rent the car for gig work, they’ll almost assuredly offer the insurance for it, and not all gig work is ride share.
Depreciation, maintenance, those are lumped into the cost of the rental.
And the duh was about that, I handled the insurance comment separately.
Not only that, but basic liability usually doesn’t cover gig work either, you need a special and more expensive policy for that.
There are limited exceptions where you can self insure, I think New Hampshire is the only place you can do that in the US. However if you can self insure then you probably aren’t doing gig work.
A lot of gig workers just treat it like a paycheck and don’t compare revenue to expenses like the independent business it really is.
Edit: poor wording, I don’t believe it’s entirely an independent business but that is how they are paid.
It’s essentially an independent business, but you can rent the car and get insurance and get paid all by the same entity, essentially. At least that’s what I’ve gathered listening to the testimony of some of the drivers.
I’m driving Uber and it’s been a real struggle to hit $20/hr gross (NOT NET) the past few weeks since gas prices skyrocketed.
The best part is Uber just invested like $10 billion in driverless cars. So not only is there no plan to pay better, but we’re directly funding our own replacements.
Both Uber and Lyft have made no secret of their plan to replace all their drivers with a driverless fleet. It’s right on their website.
Gross would include money made before gas spent. But you’re absolutely correct taking a huge pay cut because Trump is beholden to foreign powers is awful
What a fckn sh*thole the US is.
The only things I have delivered to me are packages and envelopes through the mail.
Granted, I am GenX, but I can’t recall a single time in the last half a decade where I’ve had anything like food delivered. Or used the services of any kind of gig company.
And I simply can’t think of any benefit of doing so. It’s horrendously expensive, and simply not worth the expense.
I found out my family were having fast food delivered by some service, and stomped on that immediately. Walk your lazy ass the two blocks to the pizza shop.
There are definitely use cases for delivery services, like the whole family having COVID and such.
I’m not against delivering services. Just gig jobs.
Lots of people really need these. Like disabled people and the elderly.
But those two groups are least able to afford it.
For me at least, the people at my city’s taxis are sometimes quite rude to me, whereas I’ve never had an issue with getting Uber. I feel a lot safer with them than with the regular taxis.
Getting food delivered is handy when I’m looking after my kids by myself, but not something I’m in the habit of using, probably use it once per year
I had to use uber once in the last year when the taxi failed to turn up and I needed to get to the airport.
I avoid them for the most part as I can find other ways of doing things cheaper
I mean food delivery is a totally legitimate good thing to have, getting food when you can’t is whats what its for.
The problem is people who absolutely have the means to get their own stuff relying on it almost exclusively just because they are lazy.
Uber bought the biggest taxi company in Denmark and the only one operating in my city. There’s no way around them…
Backstory is that Uber was banned from the market due to their gig model (and lobbying from taxi companies), so they returned half a decade/decade later in the only way they could. Funny how other gig models like food delivery isn’t outlawed the same way.
I just couldn’t stomach paying someone for nearly all the gig work option. The exception was uber. The taxi companies always pissed me off. Using a credit card was harder than it needed to be for a long time, and they just didn’t bother to try new things to improve the experience. And of course there are the ones that controlled the supply so they could drive up prices. But I still only used it when on vacation, like in vegas. But shopping for me, and all that. Just couldn’t do it.
They wanted cash so they could not pay taxes on it. They rode that one all the way into the sunset.
I’ve also had some bad experiences with taxi services. So I totally get that. It’s just too bad that instead of improving their service and fees, that they just got replaced with gig work .
I’ve always heard it said that you can’t really be an ethical consumer in capitalism.
We often don’t have ethical alternatives.
Yeah, very true. Even when I spend money at a small business, I think about how often I have seen owners kids sitting at a table or something. Either doing schoolwork or playing on a tablet. And that reminds me that they often are living on small margins and working tons of hours. We can do better as a society.
Yes, you are completely right, it’s yet another step away from the hard-won labor rights. Capitalism makes these kinds of changes inevitable, and must be abolished.
How does capitalism inevitably lead to fascism?
Basically, the issue with capitalism is that the more wealth you have, the easier it is for you to make more money. And since money can be used to buy goods, services and influence, there is always a way to use money to gain more political and social power. With that political and social power, you can push society and the legal system in the direction you want to go. So you can use your wealth to gain power, and then you can use your power to change laws and society so that you can make even more wealth and power. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Obviously, though, if the billionaires and ruling class are accumulating more and more of our society’s wealth, that inevitably means that there’s less for everyone else to go around - therefore, working class people feel poorer and poorer. Meanwhile, the economy is going absolutely great for rich people, so inflation continues to go up - everything gets more expensive, but wages don’t increase. The wealthy just keep more and more of the wealth for themselves. To accumulate more and more wealth, they change the laws so that they can avoid paying taxes, so public services collapse. Politicians are lobbied to ensure that public funds are diverted away from where it is most needed - housing, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure - and instead into industries where their class interests most benefit from it, such as weapons manufacturing and extractive industries such as fossil fuels and mining.
The working class are bound to notice that their lives are getting shittier and shittier, and if that situation is left unchecked, the working class would realize that the ruling class are fucking them over, rise up, and overthrow their rulers. Obviously, the ruling class need to do something about this, but there’s no solution that the ruling class can offer. They’re causing all of the problems, to fix them they’d have to give up some of their wealth and power - and that’s not something they’re going to do. So they need to find someone else to blame the problems we have in society on. Unfortunately, though, no matter who they blame the problems on, and no matter what they do to “fix” it, the issue will continue to persist, because the material conditions underlying the issues are, very intentionally, never addressed.
So, the conundrum returns: The ruling class said that minority A caused all of the problems, minority A is persecuted and oppressed, but society doesn’t actually get any better. Either the problem wasn’t minority A, or minority A just hasn’t been oppressed enough yet. So the ruling class can either escalate the oppression, or they can shift the focus to another minority group. The division continues to escalate in terms of how vitriolic and extreme it is, and it also continues to divide the working class into smaller and smaller groups.
To get the working class to buy into this hateful message, they need to take advantage of our worst instincts, and one of those instincts is the in-group bias. The majority are manipulated into being suspicious, then intolerant, then hateful, then violent, then genocidal, towards whatever the targeted minority of the day is. Anything that can be used to divide the working class - sexuality, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, age, all of these will be used as wedges to keep the working class split apart and not working together, because they know that if the working class actually unite against them, they are completely and truly fucked.
That’s exactly how fascism manifests. It’s because it’s possible for people to accumulate power through wealth. This is why capitalism must be abolished. If we do not abolish capitalism, fascism will always return. It’s just a matter of time.
But can't capitalism can be reformed?
While, of course, some laws to reform capitalism can be passed, and would definitely alleviate the worst harm caused, over the long term, capitalism cannot be reformed.
Any attempts to reform, democratize or socialize capitalism may yield short term improvements to quality of life of the working class, but if capitalism is not abolished, it will always reassert itself, and capitalism inevitably leads towards fascism.
The New Deal prevented the US from sliding into fascism in the 20th century, so that’s ultimately a good thing, but it did not go far enough, and that’s why we have the resurgence of fascism in the 21st century America.
Gigwork is the piece-work system, 2.0
I honestly don’t see how people do this and in a way that is in the black.
Step one is to not live in or close to a major city or high cost of living area. Step two is to buy an old compact car with good mpg in the $600 range. The insurance will be dead cheap. Then you work, not in a city, but a heavily gentrified suburb. I would average a net (yes, including costs etc.) $30 an hour before I got too ill to do pretty much anything. I have some good days where I can get stuff done, but it takes me way long to do it.
Around me its impossible to get a car that runs for under a grand at this point. I mean its been that way for awhile really.
If you’re the kind of person who holds onto your car for 10 years, The accelerated maintenance and fees don’t burn quite as hot. you get your oil change to any way you get your tires changed anyway, they just don’t see it coming out of their pocket the same way the tires wore out because the tires wore out, not because you drove the piss out of it.
They’re making less they just don’t see it happening.
The only way these platforms hold together is through VC funding and tipping. They’ll all inevitably enshittify more and more, get bought out and eventually absorbed by some megacorp that just wants data to train AI on or some shit. Many such cases.
no I mean the people doing the work. I realize that initiailly thye places ran at such a loss it was kinda doable. especially if it was just supplement. Now though it seems like people do it as a main thing and with the wear and tear on the vehicle it just seems like its a loss long term. Its like the more you do it the less it should return. Once there is a car repair or such.
Yeah I wasn’t sure if you meant for the workers, the platforms or the consumers, haha. But, yeah, tips are the only thing that makes it viable for drivers, I think any delivery without a tip is at best break-even, but they need to accept any delivery they’re offered to keep their ratings up high and so on. Cyclists can probably make more too, at the cost of higher risks of getting hit by a car…
There’s a reason why these jobs are so popular with people who might not be able to find other jobs for various reasons.
Just to tag onto this, you should use the option to add the tip after the delivery. If you don’t then the app will just subsidize themselves with your tip.
For example each delivery is an offer to the delivery driver so a delivery will be 10 dollars. Well if you tipped 8 dollars on that order then the service will pay you 2 dollars and the 8 dollar tip will be the rest. But if you start by tipping zero then the service will pay ten dollars for the delivery and then if you add the tip the gig worker will get 18 dollars for the order.
problem with cycling is now you have what is made goes over a longer period lowering any rate manageable. I think it wins if the density is high enough where you can be as fast or faster than the cars.
People don’t want to give up that luxury now that they’ve had it.
Maybe people should also take some responsibility there?
Yes. But too few will change their habits even when acknowledging the damage it’s doing.
How quickly we accepted that it’s normal to pay someone to go get our groceries for us. To drive us around when public transportation is available. To run errands for us. To bring us fast food.
Speak for yourself!
I have delivered more food myself than I’ve paid to have delivered to me, and that was a job I had in college (working for a restaurant directly, as it was long before the rise of third-party delivery) that I quit after one shift because it sucked.
And even in the few times when somebody else (e.g. an employer) insisted on getting a grubhub or uber for me at their expense, I wasn’t happy about it! It always just feels incredibly wasteful – and slower/worse – than just doing it myself.
I mean as a country. Not you or me personally.
I even know a few families who are getting into debt because they want to have a lifestyle of having others do everything for them. This is so crazy.
THe worst is that it makes people less likely to want to change our economic system in favor of reducing inequality, because in a system without inequality, it will be impossible to have people doing small things for us like that
Capitalism cannot be fixed. The only way to reform it is for the the ruling class to be permanently eliminated. You cannot reform the rich and the sick. You can only remove them permanently. However, you have to also remove anyone who is genetically related to them. Their children. Grandchildren. Siblings. Cousins. In laws. Parents. Aunts. Uncles.
If even one is allowed to live, the risk of them passing on their sick and diseased genes will ensure that a clean break cannot happen.
You can’t fix the sick with thoughts and prayers (conservatives) or logic and rehabilitation (liberals). You can only cull them.
The French understood this.
Great idea, we still have some buildings here in germany that were used for such a cleansing purpose before! I am sure they only need a bit of maintenance.
The above is sarcasm!
Killing people, and even more so genocide or mass murder, is NEVER a valid option! Every idea, ideology or system that includes killing people is always rotten to the core!
Those rich fucks would off you without a second thought. They don’t understand anything beyond greed and fear.
So you propose the Final Solution to the Rich Question then? Maybe you should read a history book, and ask yourself if you are the baddy!
Read plenty of then. Find me a history where the ruling class was the oppressed? The marginalized?
Wait. You can’t.
I think @DarkMetatron@feddit.de is implying for us to be better than them and not stoop to killing. (I am neither agreeing nor disagreeing and am just inferring this line of thought.)
I want to believe that… But so did Michelle Obama and look where we are at now.
Forgive me, but this position is one of absolute impotence.
Your solution is a “mass culling”, but you are without the power to put such a plan into action. Furthermore, you know that this type of solution is unlikely to gain any sort of mainstream approval.
Further, why would in-laws need to be culled if your solution relies on genetically based criteria?
Personally, I don’t think that greed or selfishness are traits of a psychotic mind. They are human flaws, present in nearly every person on this planet. You can’t get rid of these traits - they are inherent survival instincts, found in all of us.
Laura Trump. Erika Kirk. Etc. Takes a certain type of shit stain to marry a monster.
Mackenzie Bezos and Melinda Gates were outliers.
I totally get that they’re outrageously upsetting people, but what would be the governing body to go get them and how would you ensure that they wouldn’t simply money themselves out of it? Like someone else on here said, more would just crop up if you don’t enact a systemwide change to adjust people’s mindsets in the first place.
Everything I pulled up online said psychopathy development definitely involves both nature and nurture (some articles said the influence is even), and we sure as heck haven’t exhausted the latter yet: nowhere near.
I think Hitler also think the same.
Hitler targeted the wrong people.
Wait, are you calling for a genocide of all people with inherited, terminal syndromes? Are you serious? What about CRISPR?
If the gene is one that allows psychopathy, inherent greed, and lack of empathy, then yes.
Oh, I thought you were referring to physical disabilities, like all Down-syndrome people, etc.
Well, I’ve never read of a sociopath who had said, “I was raised in a normal family.” I thought this was a really interesting read:
The gene loaded the gun, but the environment pulled the trigger.
This gene-environment interaction helps explain why two siblings with similar genetics can turn out very differently. The child who experiences abuse or neglect while carrying a susceptibility gene faces compounding risk, while the sibling who grows up in a safer environment may never express those traits at all.
- https://scienceinsights.org/is-sociopathy-genetic-nature-nurture-and-the-brain/
God no.
Exceptional people can be exceptional. My daughter is thrice exceptional (asd, ADHD, gifted). I would never advocate the elimination of people born with physical disabilities. They are some of the best and most resilient people if not tainted by the environment.
My issue is the ruling class and psychopathy that has been passed along since well before 5000 BC. The ruling class has never been fully purged in all aspects except very close during the French Revolution and the Bolshevik revolution.
Both of those failed long term because of usurpers like Robespierre (psycho) and Stalin (false revolutionary).
There is no evidence that psychopathy is determined by a gene.
Like most human traits, the environment makes a bigger impact on outcomes.
Until we as a society/species stop rewarding psychopathy , things will keep ending up here.
Genetics are irrelevant.
However I do agree that capitalism cannot work.
It is inevitable destruction.
Also pretty sure capitalism wasn’t the structure during French revolution. Wasn’t it serfdom ?
I mean. That’s almost the same. But yeah.
We need to stay fully objective here and acknowledge that @devolution@lemmy.world is at least partly correct:
“Some genetic heritability studies have noted there may be baseline deviations in emotional processing circuitry (such as in the amygdala or reward centers of the brain) and neurotransmitter profiles (such as serotonin or dopaminergic deficits) in people meeting criteria for psychopathic traits that may eventually lead to callous behaviors and indifference towards social norms (but interestingly not always).” - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-shrink/202203/are-psychopaths-born-or-made
Denser reading:
In the specific genes that may be involved, one gene that has shown particular promise in its correlation with ASPD is the gene that encodes for monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A), an enzyme that breaks down monoamine neurotransmitters such as serotonin and norepinephrine. Various studies examining the gene’s relationship to behavior have suggested that variants of the gene resulting in less MAO-A being produced (such as the 2R and 3R alleles of the promoter region) have associations with aggressive behavior in men.[77][78]
This association is also influenced by negative experiences early in life, with children possessing a low-activity variant (MAOA-L) who have experienced negative circumstances being more likely to develop antisocial behavior than those with the high-activity variant (MAOA-H).[79][80] Even when environmental interactions (e.g., emotional abuse) are taken out of the equation, a small association between MAOA-L and aggressive and antisocial behavior remains.[81]
The gene that encodes for the serotonin transporter (SLC6A4), a gene that is heavily researched for its associations with other mental disorders, is another gene of interest in antisocial behavior and personality traits. Genetic association studies have suggested that the short “S” allele is associated with impulsive antisocial behavior and ASPD in the inmate population.[82] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder
I didn’t know this until now myself (I’ve seen the above article earlier but must have skimmed through it long ago and missed or forgot all that). However, there’s also a lot about the environment further exposing or shutting down sociopathic tendencies, as I noted in another comment here. It could be more difficult to round up these people (who are masters at lying anyway) versus enacting your systemwide proposal to forcefully integrate empathy through all levels of society. The problem is applying it to the highest echelons where it matters most—and, frankly, who @devolution@lemmy.world’s proposed guillotine should apply to the most either way; they’d both be hard to do… maybe together?
Psychopathy is a combination of genetics and environmental factors. Genetics does not cause this condition. You can have the genes associated with higher prevalence but that does not mean you will have it.
This is why eugenics for behavioral or personality factors is irrelevant.Also these are not necessarily hereditary but likely are common mutations that will persist in the gene pool regardless if current people with said gene are sterilized.
Genetic research, not to sound pretentious, is largely misunderstood.
When a study says genetics are 30%. It means genetics account for 30% of the variance.
The variance is not “effect”. Or how much a gene contributed to the trait.
It’s a bit more complicated. But to make a simple example.
Let’s think of height.
Let’s say someone has a gene(s) for being tall.
But the person grew up malnourished. It doesnt matter, the kid won’t be tall. But will the kid be taller than other malnourished kids with out the gene. ? Probably. But it’s hard to say by how much.
Will the kid be taller than other kids that werent malnourished.
Maybe. Maybe not.
If extreme malnourished, the answer is no.Ultimately the environment determines how much effect a gene(s) can determine a trait.
That’s why you can’t measure a general effect % from a gene(s).
Instead we measure how much variation in a group of people with a given trait is predicted by a gene.
“The wiggle room”. A gene is best thought of as the limits of a trait. Each extreme.
When it’s in optimal environment to be expressed and when it’s in the most restricted environment to be expressed.
Even in average environments, genetics still usually doesn’t account for more that 30-40% of the variance for people who score within 1 standard deviation of the mean/average of a trait. And that number declines the farther you get from the mean.
And also most genetics don’t score that high. Very few are as high as 30%.
If your argument is nature vs nurture, then all the more reason for a mass culling.
No. The environment has to be changed.
We can stop promoting the wrong people.
We can have harsh penalties for lying. ExploitationIn the Netherlands, any company found to be un ethical business are barred from getting government contracts.
Also companies with better employee benefits, unions, and pay are prioritized for government contracts.
That’s how to combat the problem.
But in the u.s and most of the world. The most ruthless gets the contact. The one that lies the most. Defrauds. Exploits. They get the contacts for decades.
Most of musk’s and palantir money is from u.s tax payers.
The wrong people need to be eliminated. You’re too idealistic. We’re beyond voting them out.
The system creates these bad people.
You have to stop the cause.
It’s not genetics.
Just look at Vivian Musk. Nothing like her father.
You don’t permanently eliminate the ruling class by killing the people in it. Elites will continue popping up as long as the system itself allows it. Incentives are just too biased towards people betraying and becoming elite when there is an empty slot.
Who do you think shapes the system to allow it?
I completely understand your frustration, and I am completely on your side that we need to dismantle capitalism.
The thing is, though, if we use mass violence to abolish the ruling class in the way you advocate, will not work at all.
I’m not saying that the movement to abolish capitalism must be completely pacifistic and disavow all violence - on the contrary, we need to be willing and able to defend ourselves against the violence of the ruling class.
Remember, the ruling class has almost all of the advantages, so we need to use the one thing we have: our numerical advantage. That means we need to build an inclusive, people-powered movement of the working class, based on solidarity.
A violent movement will deeply alienate and push away vast swathes of the population. Humans are innately repulsed and disgusted by acts of violence and brutality - especially for acts of killing innocent people, and even children, as you’re advocating here.
The only way that such a movement can hold together for any time is with pure anger, rage, and hatred. That is not the soil that a healthy, non-violent society can grow out of.
I would argue that in many ways the society we have today is because of how violent and brutal our past has been. If we want to get rid of exploitation and violence, we need to make the radical choice to break the cycle, and turn away from violence, except as a very last resort.
I’d be happy to explain my theory of change and share ideas for how we can end capitalism in a non-violent way - and no, I don’t mean just by voting every few years or whatever. Happy to chat. I really hope you’ll hear me out.
Much love, and solidarity forever.
