It also may not be the same thing as a market customers understand and feel comfortable participating in. It's true that there's more demand for unblemished produce priced the same as misshapen ones, but I'd be very unlikely to patronize a grocery store that ran an auction for each individual vegetable. So it might be in Uber's interest to not expose a variable-pricing mechanism. (Indeed, customers already seem not thrilled with surge pricing, even though it arguably gets them the service they want more efficiently.)

Unfortunately, you're talking to one of those few people. I'm against government mandating minimum wages or mandatory maternity/paternity leave. If you want those things, you can try to negotiate for it.

> customers already seem not thrilled with surge pricing

This is a true statement, but I wonder about these people. I don't share their view.

Yes, we can expose the reality that most people aren't economically worth enough right now to demand parental leave or living conditions, but what is the benefit of exposing that?

It's not like figuring out the true price of a product is low because it's low quality, so if people stop buying it then the producer will stop making it. The people that aren't worth enough, whether it be because they are lazy, stupid, came across an illness, born into a poor family and never had the opportunity and mentors to teach them, should we just let them rot away?

The benefit would be discouraging people from having kids they can't afford and not forcing employers to pay employees who aren't working.

If you want to get paid for work you're not doing, you should at least have a conversation with your employer about it.

You bring up an interesting point about efficiency, and regarding most other things, I would agree with you, but your employment is one of the most important things in your life, so it's worthwhile to do the work to understand your contract.

Perhaps you haven't noticed, but all the evidence would suggest that that isn't working. You can't just not pay people and they magically stop fucking.

Rather, the framework is broken. When we hyper-individualise everything, we end up with a world people can come to frame thoughts like the one you've expressed.

A world where everyone must own one of everything, and a spare, in order to survive. Where betterment is defined as having more and better things to throw in the garbage heap.

So that future archeologists may dig up our society and find the last of the great cetaceans, beached, with their bellies full of custom gift cards with your face printed on it.

And that is a sad state of affairs.

The more educated people are the fewer children they have. And we continue to price more and more people out of education because they lost the birth lottery.

If you pick up random strangers in "bad" neighborhoods as a private person you are insane. Somehow taxi drivers are bad persons when they don't.

Do these things full time you will sooner or later get in trouble.

Going after drivers is going for the symptoms rather than the cause and quite selfish. If I wouldn't do it myself I don't want anyone else being forced because they have lower income than me.