Mystery shoppers were often paid in cheaper groceries, one time payments, etc (at least in the early 2000s). Mystery shoppers wasn’t a full time hourly job.

I am pretty sure that DoorDash employs quite a few of people for their tasks at hand.

If the politicians are bought out by evil DoorDash's lobbying, why don't the voters just vote the politicians out? Do you have any evidence of a politician voting against their constituents' interests for personal gain?

To be fair, it’s not really their fault that there are people who want to treat work that normally would be considered a way to pick up a few bucks during free time as a full time career.

Sure, go ahead and make fast food delivery a highly regulated line of work that pays $30/hour with benefits. Just don’t be surprised when it no longer becomes economically viable for DoorDash to continue operating.

The question is what happens if these sorts of micro-contract work arrangements are outlawed... is the expectation that these businesses will instead hire these people full time, thus increasing full time employment?

Maybe, although it seems unlikely. These sorts of tasks aren't going to be worth most companies hiring someone to do it full time. Instead, the work simply won't be done and the business will just be a little less efficient and responsive.

The other alternative is that someone would start a specialized service providing each of these types of tasks, and hire full time workers to do the work, and then contract out the services directly.

Is that better for the workers? Maybe for some, they will have full time employment. But will they make more money? Maybe, but now there is a new company extracting profit, with overhead and all the related costs.

Is that a better world for the average person? I don't know. I just don't think the answer is as simple as saying DoorDash obviously makes it worse.

A lot of that is about medical insurance. Employers generally have to offer subsidized health plans to full-time employees. If we could break that policy linkage between employment and health plan coverage then it would reduce the importance of classifying workers as employees versus independent contractors.

Not how Uber works now. Uber drivers love the flexibility and the ability to choose their hours. That’s the main draw of tue platform.

It's right there in the article. An innovative idea in the field of distributed labor, enabled by technology is being launched in the 99% of the US that allows ideas to be tried freely. I'm happy to see it!

Those states have more worker labor protections that apply to gig workers.

* Child labour - Return the right to work to everyone

* Slavery - End the unjust and anti-competitive prison system monopoly

* Restore the rights of oppresed White Nationalists - The right to hire whom you please

* End the unjust prohibition of "rape" in marriage - Be free to do what you want with your property

The best part is that if my phone dies, I have no way to hail an unlicensed taxi and I'm well and truly stranded.

> closing Waymo doors

They can't reverse and brake?

It's understanding impact before taking action, especially on issues at scale (like labor displacement/replacement technologies). It's being vocal about shaping society in ways that reduce harms that naturally occur from inventions and technological revolutions instead of pawning it off to "other experts" or the workers themselves. It's engaging stakeholders beyond your comfort zone and social circles to build consensus, shape movements, and mitigate damage done while amplifying the good that would come from such a profound change. It's slowing or stopping work if society refuses to adapt, or targeting your output to harm those blocking the transformations needed to protect the commoners and guarantee prosperity is shared equally instead of hoarded. It's ostracizing those who choose to pursue such selfish ends while remaining willfully ignorant of (or worse, deliberately working towards) the harms they'll cause to others, applying negative pressure to influence positive reforms or warning others of the harm they'll incur by engaging in such socially-hostile behaviors.

At its core, it's about understanding (the metaphorical) you are not a single person but a cog in a much larger machine, and that your actions reverberate throughout that machine in ways that are largely predictable, at least for a reasonable number of next-order impacts. Putting aside emotional intelligence like empathy and compassion for a bit, the practical intelligence needed to solve these tasks at a scale where robots or machines can displace labor implies a similar capacity to understand the harms and impacts of said solutions on a populace. To focus solely on solving the problem before you rather than acknowledging the impact it will have beyond you is to willfully reject accountability in favor of achievement, and we have enough vainglorious chuds in technology as-is.