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Imagine creating an app called "Clean Streets" - basically people can put bounties on streets, other people can collect the bounty by picking up the litter. Sou

by umvi 6y ago

Imagine creating an app called "Clean Streets" - basically people can put bounties on streets, other people can collect the bounty by picking up the litter. Sounds like a great little idea right? The app takes a 1% fee for server upkeep. Win/win, bored teenagers make some extra money and your neighborhood gets cleaned up... right? Wrong. Turns out, people aren't willing to pay that much for people to clean up their streets - only $1-5 on average per job. Yet it takes an hour to clean the street sometimes. That is an abysmal hourly wage, how can you expect desperate impoverished single mothers trying to work 3 jobs to live off of this?? Clean Streets ought to give a living wage and full health benefits to anyone who signs up. Oh, except... just one problem... the 1% transaction fee isn't enough to fund that, and jacking up pricing just means people stop using the app altogether. So yes, in theory this app is great - if you can restrict its use to only non-desperate people. But desperate people would nevertheless try to make a living on it, and you would get lambasted by human rights activists for exploiting the poor. Sigh, I wish there were a way for things like this to exist.

riffic 6y ago
I've been kicking around the idea of a New Urbanist business model generator, which would spit out ideas from keyword lists like "gamification blockchain micropayments 311 litter reporting cleanup" et cetera. I'm sure there are a whole bunch of businesses out there that can be created based on applying civic principles to disruptive capitalist exploitation models edit: please don't ever ask me the related dystopian business model generator.
shizcakes 6y ago
In this particular, specific case - there are. They are called taxes, and in most urban areas, they fund regular street sweeping.
- OCASM 6y ago
  Or fines for people who litter. An improvement that actually punishes the people who caused the problem and not those who did nothing wrong.
mike00632 6y ago
Ummmmm, Uber and Lyft take a lot more than 1% from drivers. And Uber drivers are typically the polar opposite of bored teenagers. They are dedicated adults trying to make driving their profession.
- umvi 6y ago
  > And Uber drivers are typically the polar opposite of bored teenagers. They are dedicated adults trying to make driving their profession Right, but were they the original target demographic? Just because a platform gets commandeered by desperate people doesn't mean the platform was originally designed to support them.
  - mike00632 6y ago
    Is the intent most important here or is it who the workers actually are? The fact is that Uber and Lyft employ people in the way you typically think of (and in the way that the law thinks of). These aren't children driving around for spare cash. Uber even has financing options to help drivers buy cars specifically for this job. What type of person buys an entire car to accomplish side hustle or to dally around? The fact that Uber accomodates such a large investment into being a driver speaks towards what their "target demographic" is.
po8crg 6y ago
I think this makes a much deeper point. You can't create an app that will pay people badly because it will pay people badly. We (society) have traditionally massively underpaid people who are time rich and cash poor, but who have basic life necessities provided outside of their income - teenagers, most obviously, but historically the same applied to middle-class married women (look up "working for pin money"). But that involved discrimination - either only offering these jobs to people who were not relying on them for basic life necessities, or paying people who were actually trying to make a living much more (at least minimum wage, and in some cases far more). That discrimination has usually been illegal, but paying a local teenager a few dollars to mow your lawn (when you would pay a much more substantial fee to a proper lawn-care firm) is the sort of informal small-scale law-breaking that no enforcement body would ever bother with. But you can't, intrinsically, aggregate this sort of thing. That takes the human being out of the loop, which means there is no one to discriminate. It makes the law-breaking large-scale and formal, rather than small-scale and informal. This happens to all sorts of things - there are plenty of informal payments made to people in exchange for small amounts of their time (lots of us have paid a bit more than the fuel costs for a friend to give us a lift to the airport), but when this starts to scale up (ie Uber), you have to turn it into formal business and employment arrangements, and that changes the nature of the relationship. You can't scale it up without changing it in kind. I know that a lot of people on HN don't like the idea that there are some things that can only be done one-to-one, personally, and informally, and therefore cannot be automated, done many-to-many, impersonally, and formally. But there are. For the specific case, surely the solution is to assess how long the job will take, check the minimum wage or living wage, and then aggregate multiple bounties until there's enough to pay for the job to be done. As for health benefits, the likely approach is something like how SAG health benefits work - you pay a percentage of your income into the plan; if you earn more than $X per year, then you get health benefits. Someone should organise this across all "gig" jobs and employers can then require people working gig jobs to sign up for this (and deduct the percentage at source). That someone would be a labor union, of course.
- notthemessiah 6y ago
  It misses a bigger point: Uber/Lyft drivers don't set their own prices, and can't be considered independent contractors. Nothing stops me from putting up an ad on Craiglist and putting up a price for a gig, and taking more time to complete the gig than I would have gotten for waged labor. It would be absurd to consider me an employee of Craigslist, and rightly so. But if Craiglist forced me to accept a certain price and took their cut, I'm effectively performing waged labor.

by umvi 6y ago

riffic 6y ago

I've been kicking around the idea of a New Urbanist business model generator, which would spit out ideas from keyword lists like "gamification blockchain micropayments 311 litter reporting cleanup" et cetera. I'm sure there are a whole bunch of businesses out there that can be created based on applying civic principles to disruptive capitalist exploitation models edit: please don't ever ask me the related dystopian business model generator.

shizcakes 6y ago

In this particular, specific case - there are. They are called taxes, and in most urban areas, they fund regular street sweeping.

OCASM 6y ago
Or fines for people who litter. An improvement that actually punishes the people who caused the problem and not those who did nothing wrong.

mike00632 6y ago

Ummmmm, Uber and Lyft take a lot more than 1% from drivers. And Uber drivers are typically the polar opposite of bored teenagers. They are dedicated adults trying to make driving their profession.

umvi 6y ago
> And Uber drivers are typically the polar opposite of bored teenagers. They are dedicated adults trying to make driving their profession Right, but were they the original target demographic? Just because a platform gets commandeered by desperate people doesn't mean the platform was originally designed to support them.
- mike00632 6y ago
  Is the intent most important here or is it who the workers actually are? The fact is that Uber and Lyft employ people in the way you typically think of (and in the way that the law thinks of). These aren't children driving around for spare cash. Uber even has financing options to help drivers buy cars specifically for this job. What type of person buys an entire car to accomplish side hustle or to dally around? The fact that Uber accomodates such a large investment into being a driver speaks towards what their "target demographic" is.

po8crg 6y ago

I think this makes a much deeper point. You can't create an app that will pay people badly because it will pay people badly. We (society) have traditionally massively underpaid people who are time rich and cash poor, but who have basic life necessities provided outside of their income - teenagers, most obviously, but historically the same applied to middle-class married women (look up "working for pin money"). But that involved discrimination - either only offering these jobs to people who were not relying on them for basic life necessities, or paying people who were actually trying to make a living much more (at least minimum wage, and in some cases far more). That discrimination has usually been illegal, but paying a local teenager a few dollars to mow your lawn (when you would pay a much more substantial fee to a proper lawn-care firm) is the sort of informal small-scale law-breaking that no enforcement body would ever bother with. But you can't, intrinsically, aggregate this sort of thing. That takes the human being out of the loop, which means there is no one to discriminate. It makes the law-breaking large-scale and formal, rather than small-scale and informal. This happens to all sorts of things - there are plenty of informal payments made to people in exchange for small amounts of their time (lots of us have paid a bit more than the fuel costs for a friend to give us a lift to the airport), but when this starts to scale up (ie Uber), you have to turn it into formal business and employment arrangements, and that changes the nature of the relationship. You can't scale it up without changing it in kind. I know that a lot of people on HN don't like the idea that there are some things that can only be done one-to-one, personally, and informally, and therefore cannot be automated, done many-to-many, impersonally, and formally. But there are. For the specific case, surely the solution is to assess how long the job will take, check the minimum wage or living wage, and then aggregate multiple bounties until there's enough to pay for the job to be done. As for health benefits, the likely approach is something like how SAG health benefits work - you pay a percentage of your income into the plan; if you earn more than $X per year, then you get health benefits. Someone should organise this across all "gig" jobs and employers can then require people working gig jobs to sign up for this (and deduct the percentage at source). That someone would be a labor union, of course.

notthemessiah 6y ago
It misses a bigger point: Uber/Lyft drivers don't set their own prices, and can't be considered independent contractors. Nothing stops me from putting up an ad on Craiglist and putting up a price for a gig, and taking more time to complete the gig than I would have gotten for waged labor. It would be absurd to consider me an employee of Craigslist, and rightly so. But if Craiglist forced me to accept a certain price and took their cut, I'm effectively performing waged labor.