First off, Uber's arrogance is breathtaking. Witness this blurb from CNN's "Money":
"'Uber can share smart data with partner cities to help them manage growth, reduce congestion and greenhouse gas emissions and expand public transportation,' the company said in a blog post as CEO Travis Kalanick unveiled its pitch at a major tech industry conference in Germany."For a company hailing from the land of urban sprawl to offer any advice on traffic congestion, greenhouse gases, and public transportation to a continent that groks urban density is just beyond absurd--it's surreal.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here, but I think they're probably ahead of you, Uber.
Pedestrian-only areas in cities. High-speed rail. Chunnels. Mass transit systems carrying tens of thousands of passengers per day decades before San Francisco was patting itself on the back for having a few dozen trolley-cars. Bicycles as a legitimate form of commuter vehicle...even for heads of state. Far too many of those concepts are largely sneered at as socialist tree-hugger pipe-dreams from the political center rightward in North American politics. One has only to look at subsidies and tax breaks to petroleum producers, bailouts to auto manufacturers and contrast with the sorry shoestring state of Amtrak & Via to see where the priorities lie.
But absurdism slides into delusional in Business Insider's version of Uber CEO Kalanick's comments:
"How many unemployed people can come on this platform and find a way to make a living, to be part of an economic opportunity," he said.If you haven't been following the never-ending controversy that is Uber's dystopian twist on the sharing economy, you've missed how the company's always couched its contractor head-counts in terms of Full Time Equivalent jobs. My Gentle Reader needn't be shocked to learn that a contractor would have to work well over 40 hours a week to "make a living," as demonstrated by another Business Insider article. (Original source, plus more lies, d--ned lies, and PR numbers here.)
To quote The Daily Show's Jon Stewart: "Are you lying to yourself, or are you lying to the people out there? Because you're lying."
As much as I'd like to place all the blame squarely on corporations and governments disproportionately populated by sociopaths looking out for Number One, we as a culture share some of the blame.
Namely, we've let those folks degrade the word "job" to the point where it includes people working full time, using their own resources, with zero severance/UI, and still having to be subsidised by family and/or state to make ends meet.
Nuh-uh. If you want to live on ramen as a freelancer while you build up your own business, that's one thing. But it's high time that we demand that anything that can't support the minimum standard of living and has no safety net for layoffs is not allowed to be called a job. Period. Not on the government's job reports. And certainly not out of the mouths of CEOs like Travis Kalanick.
Thus "job" becomes a very precisely defined unit of economic measurement. Not unlike when governments stop debasing coinage, the economy is the better for it, because people can trust the standard again. Check your history books for examples.
But here in the 21st century technocracy, disposable day-labour is not "disrupting" jack-squat. It's dragging the entire economy back to the Gilded Age robber baron hell of the Industrial Age. And if I wanted to see that close-up, I'd invent a time machine.
