Rhesus Pieces posted:

Here's a window into the mindset of some small-money Trump donors:

My Imaginary GF posted:

That's disgusting.

America doesn't rent hotels by the hour; it goes against everything our zoning laws stand for. When you purchase a room in America, you purchase it for a night.

JT Jag posted:

They are called Love Hotels and while I know your accusation of disgust is on a financial level they actually tend to be very posh.

Rhesus Pieces posted:

Here's a window into the mindset of some small-money Trump donors:

My Imaginary GF posted:

They sound like something which would fall under your city's brothel laws. Why would you want to restore brothels to your city and needlessly piss off the churchgoing vote?

My Imaginary GF posted:

America doesn't rent hotels by the hour; it goes against everything our zoning laws stand for. When you purchase a room in America, you purchase it for a night.

VanSandman posted:

Shut up, MIGF. You know nothing, you contribute nothing, you are a void into which blessedly ignorant posters reply and emit only poo poo in response. Even on ignore, you post too much.

WampaLord posted:

There are plenty of lovely motels in America that rent rooms by the hour, not explicitly for loving, but it's very much implied.

Like, I know you're a gimmick, but you're just wrong here.

JT Jag posted:

No one buys MIGF's shtick anymore, for instance.

Anderron Shi posted:

Confirming there are hourly motels in my [midwestern] city.

My Imaginary GF posted:

And those hourly hotels are often used to facilitate the drug trade and prostitution, vices which Americans do not wish to encourage the spread of.

Muscle Tracer posted:

paranoid randroid posted:

(he doesnt actually live in chicago, lmao)

JT Jag posted:

And yet these hotels still exist. Clearly the free market has decided there's a need for them!
You think I'm taking him seriously just because of the back and fourth? Nah, I just don't use my ignore list. And I have nothing better to do than to right now. It's basically like pulling the cord on one of those dolls with a voicebox for me.

quote:

While the upfront costs were lower for Munchery with a work force of contractors — who receive a 1099 form for their taxes rather than the W-2 reserved for employees — this approach was ultimately bad for business.

There was too much turnover, while high-volume periods, like the Super Bowl or days with miserable weather, were a challenge.

When “lots of people want food delivered,” said Kris Fredrickson, the company’s vice president for operations, “on a 1099 model it’s tougher to compel them to show up.”

Under an employment model, by contrast, the company has a much more reliable and knowledgeable work force, one that can be held to a specific standard of quality and a more consistent schedule. Company executives said the additional 20 to 30 percent in costs have more than paid for themselves.

[...]

While the upfront costs were lower for Munchery with a work force of contractors — who receive a 1099 form for their taxes rather than the W-2 reserved for employees — this approach was ultimately bad for business.

There was too much turnover, while high-volume periods, like the Super Bowl or days with miserable weather, were a challenge.

When “lots of people want food delivered,” said Kris Fredrickson, the company’s vice president for operations, “on a 1099 model it’s tougher to compel them to show up.”

Under an employment model, by contrast, the company has a much more reliable and knowledgeable work force, one that can be held to a specific standard of quality and a more consistent schedule. Company executives said the additional 20 to 30 percent in costs have more than paid for themselves.

And Munchery, it turns out, is only one of many on-demand companies to have made the transition in recent years.

After Instacart, the on-demand grocery delivery service, was started in 2012, it became known as the “Uber for groceries.” A worker would fire up the Instacart app on a smartphone, accept an order, drive to the desired supermarket to buy the goods, then drop them off at the customer’s home.

But turnover was higher than the company preferred, and service quality was lower: There were too many missed items and too much bruised produce. It was also highly inefficient to pay drivers to make the trip from their homes to the store to the customer.

This year, Instacart reimagined its model. Thanks to partnerships with leading supermarkets, teams of designated shoppers now embed in each store and respond quickly to orders. Instacart has made them bona fide employees who receive training and will be judged on how well they do their jobs.

The shoppers then pass the order along to drivers, who remain independent contractors. The only requirement for drivers, who receive no training or instructions, is that they have a license and a clean record, and can navigate their way around town.

While the company is still refining the business model, said Nikhil Shanbhag, an Instacart vice president, “we’ve seen a cadre of workers who are better, have fewer issues than we used to see before in terms of missed items, bad produce. They are getting more and more efficient.”

There are certainly legitimate gray areas in the laws governing the online gig economy. In a comment that has since been widely circulated, a federal judge in California hearing a case brought by Lyft drivers brooded earlier this year that “the jury in this case will be handed a square peg and asked to choose between two round holes.”

In their analysis, Mr. Krueger and Mr. Harris posit a situation in which a single driver has both the Uber and Lyft apps open simultaneously before accepting a passenger. If the drivers were employees — and potentially eligible to be compensated for time spent waiting for passengers, not just driving passengers — they ask, “Who should pay the driver for this waiting time?” (The new report was carried out for the Hamilton Project, a research group, but Mr. Krueger previously co-wrote a study of Uber drivers that was commissioned by the company.)

But even these hard cases often are not necessarily as hard as they initially appear. Benjamin I. Sachs, a Harvard law professor who is a former union official, notes that the drivers may only need to be paid from the point at which they have agreed to pick up a particular rider.

And such cases appear to be relatively rare even in the gig economy, which itself is a tiny fraction of the economy over all, less than 1 percent of employment in the United States, according to an estimate by Mr. Krueger and Mr. Harris.

More fundamentally, Uber and Lyft face the same basic questions that Munchery and Instacart do: Do they want control over their workers or not?

Companies that do — and there are some indications that these ride-hailing platforms are among them, with practices like deactivating drivers who do not maintain certain quality ratings — are frequently considered employers in the eyes of the law.

“What I know about the nature of the control exercised by Uber and Lyft over the way the work is performed, and the fact that the drivers perform a service integral to the business model itself, provide a strong indication of an employment relationship,” said Wilma B. Liebman, a former chairwoman of the National Labor Relations Board.

Both Uber and Lyft maintain the contrary.

Another fear among venture capitalists and tech executives is that these innovative companies are being coerced by the threat of litigation and a crackdown by regulators to upgrade their workers’ status even if they only engage in one or two practices — like training — that are common among employers.

“You have regulatory bodies suing people, lawyers out there suing people,” said Simon Rothman, a venture capitalist at Greylock Partners, who is on the board of an on-demand firm. “Many start-ups can’t withstand a lawsuit even if a company is in the right.”

To fix this, regulators could simply clarify the criteria that suggest employment or independent contractor status — categories that, in theory at least, already give businesses a fair amount of flexibility because no one factor carries the day. “Courts and regulating agencies look at the totality,” said David Rolf, president of a large service employees union in the Northwest. “Training in and of itself is not determinative.”

My Imaginary GF posted:

I'm out of town for work. It's a Presidential election cycle, for pete's sake. I will return, and I will return to a better city, a more harmonious city, a city that is working on becoming one city rather than the current black metropolis and the rest of Chicago, all thanks to the tireless efforts of Mayor Emanuel.

JT Jag posted:

You think I'm taking him seriously just because of the back and fourth? Nah, I just don't use my ignore list. And I have nothing better to do than to right now. It's basically like pulling the cord on one of those dolls with a voicebox for me.

An Angry Bug posted:

So like the irritating kids in a department store who set off the same doll over and over while their parents give up on life?

My Imaginary GF posted:

That's disgusting.

America doesn't rent hotels by the hour; it goes against everything our zoning laws stand for. When you purchase a room in America, you purchase it for a night.

Tender Bender posted:

They're hourly and priced accordingly.

Hulk Krogan posted:

I can't wait for the hourly version of Air BnB.

haveblue posted:

Lol if you don't think AirBnB is already used for this.

haveblue posted:

Lol if you don't think AirBnB is already used for this.

haveblue posted:

Lol if you don't think AirBnB is already used for this.

JT Jag posted:

They are called Love Hotels and while I know your accusation of disgust is on a financial level they actually tend to be very posh. This ain't "swing by a motel for anonymous internet sex" we're talking about.

quote:

The U.S. abortion rate has declined by more than one-third over the past two decades to a record low, federal officials reported Friday.

Abortions fell 35 percent between 1990 and 2010, reaching 17.7 procedures per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, said report lead author Sally Curtin, a statistician for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.

That's the lowest abortion rate since the CDC began tracking the procedure in 1976, Curtin said.

SavageBastard posted:

Is there a reason that nobody is talking about the 25% of Democrats that do not oppose Trump's ban on Muslims in that NBC poll?

SavageBastard posted:

Is there a reason that nobody is talking about the 25% of Democrats that do not oppose Trump's ban on Muslims in that NBC poll?

Luigi Thirty posted:

The woman running for Barbara Boxer's seat on the Democratic ticket gave a speech saying 20% of Muslims are "willing to use terrorism"

quote:

@ryanlizza: Conspiracy theory I've started to see in right-wing comment sections: Paul Ryan's beard may be a sign he's converted to Islam.

SavageBastard posted:

Is there a reason that nobody is talking about the 25% of Democrats that do not oppose Trump's ban on Muslims in that NBC poll?

Joementum posted:

The House just passed, by voice vote, a five day CR, so the government is funded through next Wednesday.

There is no legislative work in the House on Monday so it's hard to see how Paul Ryan will get around the 72 hour rule the House Republicans set up to review all bills. Unless he ignores that. But he'd never do that, would he? This is a new day with Speaker Ryan. None of that business Boehner used to pull.

Rhesus Pieces posted:

I hope he's kidding, but I seriously can't tell anymore.

Rhesus Pieces posted:

I hope he's kidding, but I seriously can't tell anymore.

SavageBastard posted:

Is there a reason that nobody is talking about the 25% of Democrats that do not oppose Trump's ban on Muslims in that NBC poll?