Yea, feudalism is probably the best description, and it applies to cars as well as anything with a computer in it, as well as the more traditional land and food supply. This is not that surprising given that the safeguards that have been systematically dismantled over the last 50 years were by and large created to prevent feudalism, as was most of the apparatus of what we currently call "government"

That's definitely the recent history, and the current propaganda strategy of modern oligarchs, but looking even a little beyond living memory there are many other solutions history can offer us, including labor solidarity, trust-busting, and of course more extreme measures that most would likely prefer to avoid, but which history shows us do happen sometimes

Despite all the hand-wringing most claims to be able to do this seem pretty implausible at this stage. But for the sake of argument, assuming this happens, this is not different from the second scenario I've described. Of course, if there are no workers, one wonders how companies might find "consumers" against whom to price-discriminate, but with companies unilaterally and individually controlling both what people pay and are paid, the whole system of labor and consumption as a market is a fiction anyway. It's crazy that so many people seem to think that transformative technologies will both somehow replace all human labor and keep all present economic relations intact except for the ability of anyone to get a job, given how many economic choices have been made to center labor as the primary means by which people are supported. To reiterate, the options are prevent this nonsense through collective action (either in the form of a government or through other forms of coordination) or move to a more oppressive relationship between a tiny population of oligarchs and everyone else than the "labor market" that is ostensibly the way this economic relationship is currently arranged

> Paying people more to cover undesirable shifts means that people with more flexibility or who choose to make more personal sacrifices will get paid more. I remember something about... pharmacists I think it was? and how these factors lined up with some of the traditional "group X gets paid more than group Y" groupings.

This is key because it’s close to the thing that made me go “ah ha” reading the intro: modern surveillance and algorithmically-managed pricing (so, cheaply modified at arbitrarily-fine resolution based on arbitrarily-many quantifiable factors) open up the possibility of pushing this exact effect from groups of workers to individual workers.

You can avoid (at least to some degree not previously achievable) addressing a pool of workers and instead only clear the rate for a particular worker. No human management input needed per-decision or in any part of the broader offer-decision process and surrounding data gathering and measuring, which is what makes it possible.

No, like, this is fucking different. Read the damn article. Like, get down to pages 42-46. I know it's a lot to read, it's a law review article, it's fine if you don't read it, but like "oh what is it getting at?" is something that you have to read the article to see.

So like, before the gig economy, yes, you might be juggling a job at McDonald's with another at Jo-Ann with a hardware store, and Jo-Ann called up at 7 and said you have to come in Or Else, and then you came in by 7:45 and they said "eh too many people showed up, nevermind" and you're up shit creek, so now you're poking by your McD's which could always use some extra help with the breakfast rush but wants you to clock out between 10:30 and 11:30 so you're having to call up the hardware store to see if you can get paid there.

That is bad, to be sure. You have to be playing all the angles, checking in with everybody, you have to hustle hard to make ends meet.

But according to this, your job at GigBurger is one where they say "hey if you can work for at least 6 hours today, we'll give you a big bonus," with the caveat that you are auto-clocked-out not just at 10:30 but whenever there's nobody in the checkout line or drive-thru, so that "6 hours minimum wage" has to be accumulated over 10 actual hours at work -- which is fine if you can get that bonus. But the shitty algorithmic part is that when you get the GigBurger App to rack up 5 hours of work, suddenly it says "oh shoot we're overbooked for your current GigBurger Restaurant, but you know there's a big surge in customer demand over on the other side of the city, go there and get 2x wages and you'll also make your last 1h for sure" and they are fuckin' lying to you and leading you to other overbooked GigBurgers in the hopes that they can run you back and forth across the city without paying you until they exhaust your desire for that last hour's work that would get you the bonus. And you have to be able to discern between actual surges and algorithmic lying to determine whether to attempt the journey across the city or just stay put and see if the GigBurger next door has someone clock out early.

The article clearly lays out why this is a difference in quality, not just quantity: it says that the default American story of "hard work and hustle will be rewarded", which you absolutely had in the "unpredictable schedules" world that you are talking about, shifts to one where the psychological story is that "GigBurger is a casino, roll the dice and hope to God that you get lucky today." Any individual unpredictable job might have been a casino, but you knew that your employers weren't all in cahoots to deprive you of a promised lucky payoff that was the only thing that made the job sorta worth it.

I think one thing going on is that the form of argument is unfamiliar to a lot of readers. Many seem to have taken away that the paper’s about the concerns the “Blueprint” it mentions sets out to address, or about traditional bonus structures or variable or productivity-based pay, because the intro covers both of those things in some detail—rather, the paper is laying those out as background. The paper is not about those.

This is a common form for papers and arguments in the social sciences, but maybe a lot of HNers aren’t used to it.

[edit] to be clear, the paper lays out plainly that this is the case, and a person unfamiliar with this way of writing could figure it out from the text per se, but if one is not looking out for this kind of structure I can see how one might overlook the parts where it straight-up says “that’s not what this is about: here is what this is about”

Who goes to work for Elon cannot really be so-called abused - already knew what is coming when applied

“Price discrimination” (or in this case “wage discrimination”) as described in microeconomics is exactly this—the same seller/buyer demanding/offering different prices for the same goods depending on their idea of how much the buyer/seller will bear. The term has nothing to do except etymology with what sociologists, lawyers, or politicians mean by the word “discrimination” (not that those three groups mean the same thing by it).

Stay tuned for my new app: Wildcatr

It is installed on gig worker phones and monitors the offered rates. When one worker is offered abusive rates, all other workers have their future offers filtered from view for some period of time unless it exceeds the typical offer by more than the amount the abused worker missed out on.

The issue isn't the "hunt for the bottom line" but the fact that simultaneously multiple parties are offered different price points for an unknown reason (to the workers).

You say it's not discrimination, but you cannot definitively make that claim. That's the issue. Red lining isn't immediately discrimination against a protected class, but silently is it. This is not to say that Uber/Lyft are discriminating against a protected class - it's just that because of the lack of transparency we don't know that they are not.

This is a hard thing for people to accept, but we need to take a deep look at how we implement ML to classify things tied to individuals. It's very easy to de-humanize the humans affected by the systems we build, because "it's just an algorithm."

Setting labor price by exchange-like auction is an abusive practice in any context.

Companies get a pass on job interviews because it's basically impossible to prove. But this doesn't make it ok, it just makes it less damaging than the remedy. (Or at least arguably, a lot of people do argue otherwise, and lots of people are looking for better remedies.)

Thank you! Reading that comment was actually what prompted me to make an account just to reply that, and then when I did it was gone.

showdead is essential for Orange Reddit but it will show downvoted comments in unreadable light grey on light grey. So you probably want a user CSS (e.g., with Stylus) like this (italic and the particular color are to taste, of course):

    .c5a, .c73, .c82, .c88, .c9c, .cae, .cbe, .cce, .cdd { color: #222; font-style: italic; }

I'm not sure if you disagree with me or not from this comment. Tech isn't the only thing that affects the relative strength of individuals vs corporations (regulation, social pressures, etc).

Also I think it's not unreasonable to argue that corporations are more powerful today than they were during any of the time periods you've listed here.

The second sentence of the article reads "For many low-income and subordinated racial minority workforces in the United States, however, on-the-job data collection and algorithmic decisionmaking systems are having a more profound yet overlooked impact"

I'm sorry, but it's clearly pushing an agenda.

What other things?

For decades, restaurants have paid their labor with dynamic “algorithmic” wages: work during peak shifts, get more tips.

Why haven’t people been up in arms about how bar tenders working a Friday night near more than bartenders working a Monday afternoon?

N passengers need rides after a concert, but there Y drivers.

How do you fairly compensate the drivers without dynamic compensation, while keeping the price low for the passengers?

i’m still confused what people are proposing is the solution.

Uber pays a flat hourly rate no matter when the driver works? Drivers working after a football match earned the same pay as drivers working at 4am?

I think this would mean that the drivers that work during peak hours Less than they do now and drivers working during low traffic hours would earn more?

> Technically true, while ignoring all details of how "productivity" is defined.

There's a specialty profession called "cost accounting" whose sole purpose is to accurately define it. Just like insurance companies do risk assessments.

> implies you believe

You're just making things up.

> without any good faith efforts

Give the rudeness a rest.

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