taurath

The management of the company does literally everything it can to ensure it doesn’t even have to pay drivers minimum wage and spends hundreds of millions to block minimum wage pay regulations in any municipality bold enough to try to stop them. It gets washed as “just business” but they are ruthlessly extractive.

> I cannot understand just how consumer brained everyone is.

I can - its a collection of hundreds of PHD-level human behavior psychologists across many companies finding ways to "hack" behavior to increase revenue, vs 1 exhausted customer who just needs something basic and doesn't have the time, money or experience to be discerning in what they buy. Ad companies know more about customers and their behavior than the people are aware of themselves. They hoover up your data, run an alg to determine the patterns of your life and the lives of everyone like you, and target both online and in person various inflection points to drive you towards behavior they want.

You have both product, marketing, and sales all contributing to a mass manipulation, and for this they are rewarded with extra resources to start new companies to do more manipulation.

They spend $3b of their $4b in revenue on corporate employees, $500m on restaurant "subsidies" and drivers, and the rest goes to stock buybacks ($8b last year). If they want to find ways to cut expenses, they need to look in their offices not on the street.

Oh these aren't "employees", these are lower caste "gig workers". They could double their pay and still make a profit, according to their latest quarterly filing. Their largest expensive, 5x of what they pay their drivers, is corporate employees, whether executives or software developers or marketers or salespeople.

They could literally double the pay of every single driver and still make a profit, but they won't because the drivers "choice" of who to work for carries no market power whatsoever. Here in Seattle we passed a min wage for drivers, and Doordash promptly increased their fees to customers by 30-50%, making it the most expensive place to get delivery in the country. They didn't need to do so, except as a warning to other municipalities not to. Then they tell everyone that its the fault of the minimum wage workers that the fees are high, and not their decisions

Patrick was basically my dad - the characters he played were absolutely instrumental in developing my own values. What a sad day.

If you said "Hey, I work for an algorithm that will fire me if I don't get this done in a minute but the system didn't have the correct info, and if I don't get this done I won't be able to pay my rent" which is more accurate, then it wouldn't be right for other customers, but it would at least give a bit more insight into why doordashers are rude and look rushed and ragged all the time.

Its definitely a luxury service but often luxuries like this really improve quality of life, especially of people who aren't able bodied like elderly or disabled folks. Its helpful to think of them as the customer base in addition to the "tech person with money to burn who doesn't want to hop in their car" we often default to.

They're taking hundreds of millions in profit and doing share buybacks for the investors, they've got plenty of money, their business is to be a middleman and squeeze everyone external to them: businesses, customers, and laborers

> The refrain I often hear is that those people should then just work harder and get a better job

These are folks who've never had to work a low wage job where bathroom breaks are tightly controlled, except maybe for fun money. I started working at 14, and as a software dev today I've never had to work nearly as hard, or be as utterly exhausted as working these sorts of jobs, which if you are having to do them to pay rent, its difficult or impossible to do extracurriculars like education or networking to move forward.

Imagine your entire workday is on a strict, short term set of timers and if you don't complete a task for any reason an automated rating goes down, and if it happens more than 3 times you are let go. People don't understand the level of stress that carries.

Think really hard - why would doordash laborers be like that? Each thing you state - rudeness, brashness, drug addicts, convicts, etc, are all signs of desperation. People don't want to rush through their life or work as if being whipped. Its a job of indiscriminate last resort because they are paid as little as humanly possible and forced by an algorithm to adhere to timetables. Doordash and Instacart both make hefty profits, and spend at least 2-3x on their corporate employees and executive management as they do those actually performing the work. Your complaints are a direct reflection of the system that they control - if you want more pleasant laborers, ask them to make their labor less demanding.

This is happening in so many companies - executives and cult-like technical leadership are still touting lines of code as being indicative of productivity while their engineering teams lose coherence around their products.

Widespread recording and use in a cross-database is also a dragnet - its not one camera or cameras in a specific space, its cameras everywhere, accessible from anywhere, and its use constitutes a search (all IMO).

If you continue the argument that surveillance used to proactively rather than reactively find evidence is not a search, then with technology as it is today functionally there can be no expectation of privacy in public (somewhat fair) nor in private, given how widely distributed technology is - one could easily argue that technology's wide distribution is in part because of an expectation of privacy.

There must be a line for which people can expect privacy, or else privacy cannot exist. Its a fundamental value of liberty.