I hate Uber and wish it every misfortune but it’s also hard to support the protesting French cab drivers. If these were cab drivers in any other place in the world, I’d be in their side. But I’ve heard so many horror stories about the cruel and nasty cabbies in France that I can’t get over it. Which doesn’t mean Uber doesn’t suck dick, of course.
In the meanwhile, here is a link from a neoliberal economist who believes that Uber ratings
These people are such clowns.
Off-topic, but my eyes glaze over every time I hear the term ‘sharing economy’. Sharing is when you give something to another person for free. Like, you know, when you were a kid and shared your toys with your little sister.
Getting paid for letting someone sleep in your spare bedroom is called renting. This is a renting economy, not a sharing economy.
Words have meaning, shitlords!!!
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I agree. We are all supposed to feel warm and fuzzy because this abomination has been labeled “sharing.” In reality, I’m being bilked yet again to give profit to these companies. They are displacing the costs of hiring labor onto me, you, every other taxpayer. And that’s their entire business model. Jerks.
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One of the best piece of news to come out lately. Wish it extends to other states and to other companies.
“Uber’s business model—skim profits off drivers, while avoiding the expenses that come with hiring drivers as employees—just suffered a major blow: the California labor commission has just ruled that Uber’s drivers are, in fact, employees, not contractors. Uber, which has seen its valuation soar to over $50 billion, can no longer claim that it is just a nifty little app that happens to pair up micro-entrepreneurial drivers and consumers, thereby avoiding the expenses and laws that other transportation and logistics companies have to bear.”
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That is great news. I wish more people saw how all these Uberized models of employment hurt us all.
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\ I agree. We are all supposed to feel warm and fuzzy because this abomination has been labeled “sharing.”
The word “sharing” makes me feel the opposite of fuzzy since:
1) I don’t want to “share” anything with unknown people, but rather pay and be paid in the market. Do most people really love to share to feel all fuzzy at the word? That was a serious question.
2) “Sharing” also implies to me something that happens betwen a few people privately, and I would be afraid to be robbed / raped / attacked / ripped off by somebody unknown.
Btw, aren’t women taught since childhood to be careful about entering unknown cars / flats / etc. for fear of rape? How is it OK now?
When I buy services of a company, it’s supposed to send normal people to me to do tasks XYZ. When I just sit in a private car or enter a private flat, ensuring safety is on me only and if something happens, there is nobody to sue too.
3) “Sharing” makes me think of communism, naive anarchists and extreme neoliberals at once.
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el: I agree with your entire comment but with most people, the word “sharing” brings them back to the early childhood mantras “Good boys and girls always share their toys with their friends!” Never are we exhorted to share as often as we are in early childhood. So people get this vague feeling of comfort, of being good boys and girls when they believe they are “sharing.”
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Sharing economy = Kindergarten bullies grew up and use smartphones and apps to take people’s lunch money.
Uber=gypsy cabs with middlemen. (This defeats the point of gypsy cabs. And of cabs.)
AirBnb=hostels/timeshares/couchsurfing with apps.
I thought for half a second I should create a hitchiking app and then I realized someone had already done it.
I think Ayn Rand would puke over the fuzzy veneer of this sharing economy along with the idea of calling businesses like families. If a workplace describes itself as being like a family I always assume it’s dysfunctional. If I like someone I work with or for it’s a happy side effect completely unrelated to any declarations of sharing or family by some corporate weirdos.
My revulsion at “sharing” and “like a family” being used to describe piecemeal contractor work marks me as old and cranky and weird to everyone else I suppose.
You are just like N. 🙂 He knew he didn’t want to work in academia when he heard several departments described “just like family.” So he knew it was not for him.
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For all intends and purposes, Uber is a a taxi company. And one that thinks it does not need to adhere to laws. The french cabbies as right to protest, even though they are horrible people.
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How interesting that you heard bad things about French cabbies! I have a related anecdote: the short version is that a French taxi driver tried to take advantage of my gentle and elderly father, then yelled at him and shoved him in the chest when he didn’t get his way. (For the record, my father was not at all in the wrong, and was trying to get to hospital to visit my mother.)
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You know that economists suck when their advice to people is to turn their homes into boarding houses, drive wildcat cabs and get used to eating beans instead of meat (and not expect any services from government in exchange for taxes).
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Economists suck because they are perpetrators of the worst kind of white man’s ju ju.
http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2013/01/gilbert-rist-and-why-development-did.html
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Great post. Economics is such a pseudo-discipline. I took a single course in economics but everything I heard there was such garbage that I couldn’t continue.
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\ You know that economists suck when their advice to people is
He doesn’t advise it as a professional, but as somebody ruled by certain ideology.
For instance, you can’t say “communist economists in FSU sucked, therefore, all economists suck.”
\ could make such services useful for upward mobility, and it might make their credentials competitive with those of some lower-tier colleges and universities.
Somehow, professional taxi drivers aren’t eager to work in Uber. Doesn’t it tell him something about being “competitive with colleges”?
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There is this bizarre obsession amongst neoliberals which is that they want all colleges to disappear and all kinds of bizarre things to substitute college diplomas. The likelihood of that happening is nil, yet they keep dreaming.
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“neoliberals … want all colleges to disappear”
Yet they invariably have degrees themselves and many might even work at universities. I think their constant thinking up ineffective and unworkable plans to replace brick and mortar institutions are designed to keep out the rubes.
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“Yet they invariably have degrees themselves and many might even work at universities. I think their constant thinking up ineffective and unworkable plans to replace brick and mortar institutions are designed to keep out the rubes.”
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Hi, thanks for visiting and liking my blog! Just to add on to the Uber debate… It’s not just in France. I’ve heard so many horror stories in LA and I REFUSE to take an Uber. It may be cheap but I just don’t trust it.
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Hi Clarissa,
Very good article, you really write very well. I am great fan of your blog, keep writing.
Thanks for sharing.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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