And yet people work for walmart, are they all being taken advantage of?

There is a claim that some positions of power make people unqualified to make choices. Think student/teacher or adult/minor sexual relations or maybe some of the ideas around accredited investors -- non-accredited investors are not allowed to invest in certain types of assets to protect them from predatory practices.

I'm not commenting on morality here, but the state of current law.

> Think student/teacher or adult/minor sexual relations

You are literally comparing working for Walmart to being raped? That's a bit condescending not only to people working for Walmart but also to rape victims.

Sometimes we have laws that protect people from their own decisions, absolutely true. But protecting people right into unemployment seems like a funny kind of help.

but then, is that the "disruption" we really want?

On one hand, no, of course not. It's a voluntary transaction between adults. There's no taking advantage of someone who comes willingly. I used to think this.

But on the other hand, if some people are getting really really rich off the labor of some really poor people than it's gotta make you wonder a bit. And the risk distribution has really got to make you wonder.

Uber, being big and diversified could easily take on that risk and insure against it (or really just self insure with their scale). A single driver on the other hand could be completely wiped out by bad luck. Uber isn't doing this though. Why is that?

It's certainly worth thinking about more deeply than simply shrugging and saying that you can't take advantage of someone in a voluntary transaction.

I don't understand. Why do you have to wonder? No offense but there is a lot of hand waving going on in your post, like this:

> Uber, being big and diversified could easily take on that risk and insure against it (or really just self insure with their scale)

Uber is a marketing channel. Why would they want to take on this risk? Why is it "right" for them to take on this risk? Exactly how easy for them would it be? How much would it cut into their profits?

> It's certainly worth thinking about more deeply than simply shrugging and saying that you can't take advantage of someone in a voluntary transaction.

I don't agree with this. It's a free choice, as free as you can get. Yes, some people have better choices than others in life. But just because I can't spend my life making exactly the choices I want doesn't mean someone is taking advantage of me.

Why do some people have better choices than others in life? In particular for people that only have bad choices do we, as a society, bare some of the responsibility for that? Is it a sign that we've done something wrong?

To be clear, I don't have all the answers to these questions, but they are the questions that I ask myself when issues like this come up.

You're making it this big societal argument. I agree that what you are talking about makes sense. It's why we don't allow child labor, for instance.

I'm questioning whether Uber is one of those situations. I don't think you're making it clear that it is, so much as that those situations exist. Which I don't contest.

To what degree do Uber's business practices create (or at least perpetuate) those situations? To what degree are they part of a giant societal machine that creates or perpetuates those situations?

> some people are getting really really rich off the labor of some really poor people

The answer to this is more competition between companies. Uber is enjoying temporary market dominance.

Well yeah because they've been subsidizing wages. Just recently Uber's tried to lower the amount paid out to drivers (saying the previous rate was "promotional") and there was a huge amount of discontent

http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-new-york-city-office-pro... <-- some protest at New York office, same sorts of protests elsewhere

Yeah I think they are, but people also value being able to control how long they work for and the exact hours they work. Plus it can be just an additional stream of income.