We can afford to pay people, but the problem here is that it's not just me paying you a bit of money to cover your gas, insurance, mechanics, and time; it's also me paying for tens of thousands of employees and cloud datacenters and all the rest to connect me to you. That's a lot of overhead, and it's duplicated by virtue of multiple companies being in the mix doing the same thing.
Also, it was never really supposed to be a career - it was supposed to be something you could do on your way to work to help subsidize your own commute. Making a career out of a side job is certainly one's own choice, and I don't want to get in the way of that, but... are people getting benefits and guaranteed hours for busking, or being a living statue? Are people guaranteed a certain minimum pay for their lemonade stand?
Having a high overhead and not charging customers enough to recoup it sounds like a flawed business model to me.
>Also, it was never really supposed to be a career - it was supposed to be something you could do on your way to work to help subsidize your own commute. Making a career out of a side job is certainly one's own choice, and I don't want to get in the way of that, but... are people getting benefits and guaranteed hours for busking, or being a living statue? Are people guaranteed a certain minimum pay for their lemonade stand?
No, but they're also not told that they can make a living, get benefits, etc. for busking, being a living statue or running a lemonade stand. They understand from the outset that none of that will be happening. The difference here is that Uber/Lyft imply - if not state explicitly - to their drivers that it can be their sole source of income.
If it's supposed to be a method of subsidizing your own commute, shouldn't Uber/Lyft be restricting who drivers can pick up to only those customers who are heading in the same direction/on the same route that the driver has told the app they're going?
If it's supposed to be a method of subsidizing your own commute, why do Uber/Lyft assist car-less folk with obtaining rentals?
And this in one of the most prosperous economies in the world.
Do you not understand that this is what you're arguing for?
Do you also not understand that if you don't already have a huge pile of fuck-you money as a buffer, your privileged steady middle class job will be next to be "disrupted" - likely by the end of the decade?
Because why would your employer's customers pay more than they feel like paying when they can the same service from an automation-aided gig economy developer who has been beaten down to the point where they're two weeks of savings away from being homeless?