Tatsujin posted:

is heb like woodmans in wisconsin where its the size of a superwalmart but they only have groceries and have like a dozen different brands of every food item and a liquor section that is literally a regular sized liquor store put inside the store with its own entrance doors?

Shifty Pony posted:

uber recently released some post crowing about how their SF operation is now pulling in 3x the revenue of the traditional taxi fleet.

which sounds like they are pulling off the impossible until you realize that they are conveniently leaving off the factoid that traditional taxis have seen in excess of a 70% drop in revenue since uber and whatnot started operations. I would expect black car services took a similar thwacking

duTrieux. posted:

if artificial intelligence is ever good enough to replace basic blue-collar workers (e.g. drivers, factory, basic service, dock-hands, etc.) there will either be a universal income or bloody class war with the rich deploying automated police buzzsaws

PleasingFungus posted:

not every member of the staff, just an arbitrarily chosen subset

please don't ask me why they chose the people they did, I have no idea

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

Sagebrush posted:

jesus christ, i'm the lead-balls-on-strings-on-a-flywheel method of crowd pacification

As a Millennial I posted:

lyft is dropping their giant engine-choking plush mustaches in favor of Teh Glowstache

While still pink, the small, plastic mustaches are designed to float on drivers' dashboards using magnets and at night will emit a soft pink glow.

not surprising considering i haven't seen the old stache in at least a year

duTrieux. posted:

if artificial intelligence is ever good enough to replace basic blue-collar workers (e.g. drivers, factory, basic service, dock-hands, etc.) there will either be a universal income or bloody class war with the rich deploying automated police buzzsaws

Tatsujin posted:

is heb like woodmans in wisconsin where its the size of a superwalmart but they only have groceries and have like a dozen different brands of every food item and a liquor section that is literally a regular sized liquor store put inside the store with its own entrance doors?

qirex posted:

for some reason the "smartest" economists we have seem to think that "the economy isn't zero sum" also means "anything can be worth infinity dollars"

Necc0 posted:

i was more thinking pump & dump but that works as well

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

bored marketing person social media director probably thought OUR FRONT WINDOW IS THE MOST SOCIAL OF MEDIA

Sagebrush posted:

these investors do all realize the whole "needs to take over the entire north american taxi market, and then some, to match their valuation" thing right?

do they think that'll actually happen?

quote:

EBay said today that it would cut about seven percent of its workforce globally in the first quarter as it looks to reduce costs ahead of its planned spinoff of PayPal. The company also said it would explore a sale or IPO for its eBay Enterprise unit, which provides online and brick and mortar retailers with software tools and warehousing and logistics services.

The job cuts are expected to affect 2,400 positions across all divisions of the company, including PayPal, the company said. eBay’s stock was trading up nearly 4 percent in after-hours trading.

quote:

EBay also announced a deal with shareholder Carl Icahn to name Icahn crony Jonathan Christodoro to eBay’s board. The so-called “standstill agreement” was reached to keep Icahn from agitating for a bigger stake or a hostile takeover of the company. Upon eBay’s split with PayPal — which Icahn had pushed for and which is expected to happen later this year — Icahn can determine whether Christodoro will remain on eBay’s board or take a seat on PayPal’s instead. If it wasn’t already clear, Icahn won this fight.

computer parts posted:

heb and texas bbq

oh and the abundance of mexican food (but that's easier to get these days)

Forums Terrorist posted:

agreed, eat the billionaires

qirex posted:

also

e: cremnob favorite carl icahn still loving with them too

born on a buy you posted:

most mexican food in az and california is poo poo. texas has it figured out

qirex posted:

well yeah the people inside uber are just like yeah sure we're worth 100 billion dollars no sweat here's some of our company

it's the people investing now after they already took a billion in vc who are stupid

facebook did a similar thing but they didn't make a big deal out of it there were just a bunch of super wealthy people who were like "get me some of that facebook" and since these were private banking investors I imagine this uber deal is the same

born on a buy you posted:

most mexican food in az and california is poo poo. texas has it figured out

qirex posted:

e: cremnob favorite carl icahn still loving with them too

Necc0 posted:

facebook is starting to generate some serious $$$ now though and all signs are pointing to them continuing to grow but yeah there's no way any of them could have known that back then

uber doesn't even have a network effect let alone anything else to protect their business model either. lmao

DolphinCop posted:

good news: creating/maintaining AI and robots to do menial jobs costs more than paying poo poo salaries to blue collar workers. wage slavery will never go out of style

we're currently on track for a Gattaca style dystopia imo

hobbesmaster posted:

new mexican cuisine superiority

Sagebrush posted:

these investors do all realize the whole "needs to take over the entire north american taxi market, and then some, to match their valuation" thing right?

do they think that'll actually happen?

duTrieux. posted:

if artificial intelligence is ever good enough to replace basic blue-collar workers (e.g. drivers, factory, basic service, dock-hands, etc.) there will either be a universal income or bloody class war with the rich deploying automated police buzzsaws

prefect posted:

you know how bitcoin people say that ponzi schemes are a-okay, because they're smart enough to get out before it explodes? same thing

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

containerized shipping basically erased the dockhand
less than 1% of the staff is needed, and docks/wharves have virtually disappeared from our cities. (when everything is containerized, you can move goods through centralized ports, there's no need for docks to be near housing or services)

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

• factories are extensively automated
  today we have triple the (inflation-adjusted) output with just 3/4ths the staff of 60 years ago

computer parts posted:

ships too, you can ship ten times as much cargo with a tenth of the people compared with 40 years ago

Citizen Tayne posted:

It's even worse in steel. we make more steel in this region than ever before but the factories are incredibly automated now and operate with orders of magnitude less staff.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Thomson_Steel_Works

that mill has been in continuous operation since 1872 and used to be operated by over 10,000 men a shift. it's less than 500 now.

(also I'm the picture taken in the 1990s with a black and white filter applied)

quote:

Uber drivers in many of the company's major markets are making about $6 an hour more than their traditional — and professional — taxi-driver counterparts, according to a rare analysis of internal data the company released Thursday along with Princeton economist Alan Krueger. In Washington, the difference is about $4.60, in San Francisco it's about $10 and in New York it's closer to $15.

These gross earnings don't account for the considerable costs drivers pay to deploy their own cars as modern-day taxis. But Uber argues that these numbers paint a picture of decent work in a shifting economy where tens of thousands of people — nearly half of them with college degrees — have recently found supplemental income and more flexibility doing a job that has long been the domain of immigrants and middle-aged men.

...

There has been a shortage of hard data to answer these questions — Are these good jobs? Would they even exist in a better economy? — as platforms such as Uber have proliferated over the past five years. Krueger argues that the numbers Uber is releasing now point to the first picture — Uber as the promising future of work — and not the second.

"When I looked through the survey, I was struck by how many of the drivers already had jobs when they started," says Krueger, who says he had full discretion over his research. "They joined Uber not out of desperation, but because it offered new opportunity that could help them smooth their income, smooth fluctuations from other jobs, and add a supplement to their household income. The more I looked into it, the more I thought this rapid growth is really not a result of a weak job market, but the result of a new opportunity."

quote:

Previously, Professor Krueger served as Chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and a Member of his Cabinet from November 2011 to August 2013. He also served as Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of the Treasury in 2009-10, and as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor in 1994-95.

quote:

Jessica, a Portland dancer who has heard seven years of dressing room gossip about Casa Diablo, says, "It is well known that Casa Diablo has a really unique auditioning process compared to [other clubs]—you have to give full two-way contact lap dances to... Johnny, which is really unusual in this industry."

Matilda Bickers, one of the dancers suing the club, likewise said new dancers have to audition by giving Zukle a full-friction lap dance. During the dance, Bickers said, "[Zukle] would grab your nipples and be like, 'They can't touch you here, or on your crotch,' and then he'd pat your crotch." (Apparently touching these areas is now allowed during lap dances at Casa Diablo, but wasn't three years ago when Bickers first auditioned.) Bickers added that bouncers regularly touched, groped, and untied dancers' outfits, even after the dancers complained. If dancers touched the bouncers, they could be fined $100.

"There seems to be this disconnect where people are really invested now in organic, free-range, and fair-trade stuff—except when it comes to their sex workers," Bickers tells me. "You can consume a service and still care about it. I can give you a really great lap dance and rub on your dick, and you can still care that I'm being treated fairly. [Customers] can come in and get their lap dances, but they should also be like, 'Hey, you should treat your workers better.' It wouldn't take much if the club thought this was a priority—if they cared half as much for the women working for them as they did about animals."

Dancers I spoke with complained of unreasonably long hours, scheduling insanity, and a pattern of dehumanizing behavior by management that ranged from throwing away a dancer's non-vegan food to non-consensual groping and spanking. Most recalled some form of sexual harassment and Zukle making fun of emotionally vulnerable dancers. Several mentioned the large self-portrait Zukle painted of himself as the devil that hung in the club, and one shared a heartbreaking story of Zukle ridiculing a young woman for having an abortion.