• What the Sharing Economy Takes - monetizing the desperation of people in the post-crisis economy whi
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[url]http://www.thenation.com/article/196241/what-sharing-economy-takes[/url] [QUOTE]Sharing is a good thing, we learned in kindergarten, but that wisdom was soon called into question by the grown-up world of getting and spending. The most prominent examples of the sharing economy are a taxi-hailing service called Uber and a real-estate-subletting service called Airbnb. As with most enterprises emerging from Silicon Valley, they come with a very ambitious vocabulary. Brian Chesky, the co-founder of Airbnb, uses words like “revolution” and “movement” to describe his company, which is now valued at $13 billion Airbnb, which seems universally loved by both hosts and renters, has since become the most appealing example of this profitably collective ethos. I spoke with hosts (who universally crave anonymity) who pick up anywhere from $15,000 to $75,000 a year by renting out parts of their houses. It’s not quite free money; one host in Los Angeles, whose annual earnings are at the high end of that range, estimates that it takes from one to three hours a day to maintain the space (which would work out to $125 an hour or more). And guests love the service, too—it’s much cheaper than a hotel. [B]But the model isn’t blemish-free: there’s a real, if hard-to-measure, impact on housing availability and affordability in desirable cities. In October, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman issued a report tracing the rapid growth of Airbnb in New York City. It found many of the rentals illegal, which wouldn’t necessarily be something to worry about if they didn’t stretch an already-taut housing market. Schneiderman also found that many of the units are rented out not by individuals, but by large commercial operations that do nothing but let out units via Airbnb, taking them off the regular rental market. Airbnb’s response is that the company has put an end to the commercial operators, and that its footprint is too small in any event—25,000 hosts in a rental market of 2.2 million units—to make much of a difference.[/B] That may sound reasonable, but it’s not fully convincing. Yes, 25,000 hosts is tiny next to a 2.2 million rental inventory—[B]but there were only 68,000 vacancies as of the city’s most recent survey.[/B] And more subtle displacements go on as well: [B]one graduate student I spoke with took a two-bedroom apartment in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood that he otherwise couldn’t afford, knowing that he could rent out the empty room and cover his rent. He feels guilty, but what’s an impecunious grad student to do? He added that he had a friend who rented a four-bedroom apartment, also in a gentrifying neighborhood, and Airbnb’d three of the rooms. Such practices take units off the rental market and grease the wheels of gentrification by making rapidly rising rents “affordable.”[/B] My Los Angeles source said similar things about her neighborhood. And she dismissed Airbnb’s claim about getting commercial operators out of the business; she’s recognized houses previously run by professionals who have simply recast themselves as private individuals. Airbnb would rather we see it as a community, not merely commerce, even as it hastens the breakup of working-class neighborhoods in cities like New York and Los Angeles. Airbnb’s head of community, Douglas Atkin, wrote a book about how brands such as Apple are like a religion to their loyalists. The aim is to turn a business, whose overriding aim is to make a profit, into “radical belonging organizations.” In ride sharing, there’s really only one victor: Uber, a company with a knack for breaking laws, because the march of disruption can’t be bothered with legalities. According to legend, Kalanick founded Uber in 2009 one snowy evening in Paris after a brainstorming session with co-founder Garrett Camp. It launched in San Francisco—a city where it’s notoriously difficult to get a cab because of strict limits on their numbers—in 2010. It was far from Kalanick’s first venture. A youthful coder, he founded Scour.com, a Napsterish file-sharing site, in 1999, while still a student at UCLA; it was quickly sued out of business by the entertainment industry for copyright violations. (Apparently, he has a thing for sharing other people’s stuff.) A second venture, Red Swoosh, moved media files around legally for pay; it was sold in 2007 and made Kalanick a small-time millionaire. He’s a big-time billionaire now. [B]After its San Francisco launch, Uber was immediately slapped with a cease-and-desist order by city authorities for running an unlicensed cab service.[/B] Kalanick found this opposition energizing: the company quickly expanded to other cities, sometimes with official blessings and sometimes without. At first, Uber featured high-end cars for a little taste of luxury, booked via a smartphone app. As Kalanick told an early Uber gathering, the experience was: “[B]I pushed a button, and a car showed up, and now I’m a pimp.[/B]” Uber soon faced competition at the low end from the now-second-banana ride-sharing service Lyft, however, and began recruiting regular people with regular cars as drivers. Its growth has been explosive: it now has hundreds of thousands of drivers in over 200 cities. But there’s a lot of discontent among drivers, both those who work for Uber and those who work for what are derisively called “incumbent” companies. Traditional drivers have staged protests against Uber and its rivals in Los Angeles, Washington and across Europe, although none have gone to the same lengths as Parisian cabbies, who have attacked the cars, smashing windows and slashing tires. And while Kalanick et al. have a point about the restricted taxi availability in major cities, it’s the fleet owners who are profiting, not the drivers facing a low-cost rival. Uber drivers often complain about the low (and declining) pay and miserable conditions. S., a driver in Chicago (who, like everyone I spoke with, wanted to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals), says that full-timers put in sixty hours a week for an hourly rate that comes to $12 or $13 after expenses. He says the company is constantly scheming to cut pay. A., a driver in Los Angeles (and one of the few women in the trade), says she gets [B]$11 to $12 an hour after expenses (daily expenses like gas, not depreciation of the car), which is around the twenty-fifth percentile of the city’s hourly earnings, though about in line with typical taxi-driver pay. [/B]That’s a sharp contrast with the $35-an-hour rate that was dangled in front of her when she signed up. A. describes Uber as “a port in the storm,” a way to pick up some cash while, Angeleno that she is, she works on some movie and web projects. Uber’s a different story in New York, where all drivers have to be certified by the Taxi and Limousine Commission, and the cars are all regular cabs or car-service vehicles. Every Uber-hailed driver I’ve spoken with in New York likes the service, because it delivers more paying riders than they’d otherwise have. [B]Drivers are rated by their passengers, and if your rating isn’t high enough, the company will “deactivate” you—which is how they say “fire,” since you’re just another node in the app to them.[/B] J., another LA driver whose name was passed along to me by an organizer with the California App-Based Drivers Association (a project of the Teamsters Union), says passengers love to wield this power over drivers: one insisted that he run a red light or lose his five-star rating. And J. says there’s no appeal process for a bad rating or deactivation. You need a newish car to drive for Uber; [B]if your car gets too old, that’s grounds for deactivation. But the company is ready to help: it’s entered into a partnership with Santander, a Spanish bank, to offer car loans to drivers, with the payments conveniently deducted from their paycheck.[/B] According to the terms posted on Uberpeople.net, a chat board for drivers, [B]the payments work out to an interest rate of around 21 percent.[/B] They get you coming and going. Earlier this year, Uber hired former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe to handle its PR, strategy and lobbying. Kalanick describes a politico like Plouffe as a perfect fit with Uber, because there are daily “primaries going on with folks in the ride-sharing space.” Well-capitalized revolutions need such high-end strategists. The sales pitch that accompanies this revolution is an update of what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, writing almost twenty years ago, called the “Californian Ideology,” a “new faith [that] emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley…. [T]he Californian Ideology,” they added, “promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies”—a marriage sealed by a common anti-statism. Its promise was that, in time, everyone will be “hip and rich.” Perhaps nothing exemplifies this growing desperation like the smaller, production-oriented side of the sharing economy. [B]Here, the labor of people is shared in an arrangement that looks increasingly feudal.[/B] There’s the venerable TaskRabbit, founded in 2008, which was described by Wired as an “eBay for real-world labor.” It matches “Taskers” with “Clients”—firms or people with errands to run. Financially, TaskRabbit is a pipsqueak next to the giants of the sharing space; according to CrunchBase, it’s received just $38 million in financing. CrunchBase’s bio for TaskRabbit hits all the right notes: “It was a cold night in Boston in February of 2008 when Leah Busque realized she was out of dog food for her 100-lb yellow lab, Kobe. Leah thought to herself, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a place online I could go to connect with my neighbors—maybe one who was already at the store at that very moment—who could help me out?’” Thanks to the magic of this “curated” website, lugging a bag of dog food on a cold winter night gets recast as an act of neighborly generosity, even though money will change hands and the “neighbor” is unlikely to be seen again.[B] Many Taskers are people who had good jobs until the recession hit; as of last year, 70 percent had a bachelor’s degree, and 5 percent a PhD. Now they’re running around town fetching stuff.[/B] Comparable services like [B]Amazon’s Mechanical Turk allow workers to bid for the privilege of doing piecework online—filling out spreadsheets, doing graphic design, checking code for errors—at low rates with no accountability from companies, which can reject their work (and their invoice) if they deem it insufficient for any reason. [/B] [B] The sharing economy looks like a classically neoliberal response to neoliberalism: individualized and market-driven, it sees us all as micro-entrepreneurs fending for ourselves in a hostile world. The sharing economy looks like a classically neoliberal response to neoliberalism: individualized and market-driven, it sees us all as micro-entrepreneurs fending for ourselves in a hostile world. Its publicists seek to transform the instability of the post–Great Recession economy into opportunity. Waiting for your script to sell? Drive an Uber on the weekend. Can’t afford a place to live while attending grad school? Take a two-bedroom apartment and rent one room out. You may lack health insurance, sick days and a pension plan, but you’re in control. As Airbnb’s Chesky said in a McKinsey & Company interview, [B]today’s generation sees ownership as “a burden.” People aren’t proud of their homes or cars; they’re proud of their Instagram feed. As Chesky predicts, “in the future, people will own whatever they want responsibility for. And I think what they’re going to want responsibility for the most is their reputation, their friendships, their relationships, and the experiences they’ve had.”[/B] Affect triumphs over material lack. [B]You may not have a job, Chesky adds, citing Thomas Friedman, but you’ll have an ever more complex “income stream”—which in most cases is more likely to be a trickle than a torrent.[/B] [/QUOTE]
-snip, bad reading-
[QUOTE=Lord_Ragnarok;47043341]Well, that name suggested it was the [I]other[/I] economic model that bothers me. Seriously, why do people with the tendency toward predatory business models always think everyone else is somehow a Marxist? Seriously, [B]they[/B] picked the old term "Sharing Economy," in hopes that it would sound like the antithesis? If nothing else, it made me more likely to read into it. You're damn right my generation sees ownership as a "burden" after the debt-based economy the 2000's created. And it seems like people are working hard to create another one.[/QUOTE] By they you mean the author/newspaper? Because although this is the first time I've read an article from this magazine, It gives me the impression that it sits at the left side of the spectrum. [QUOTE]The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left.[/QUOTE] From wikipedia.
[QUOTE=Lord_Ragnarok;47043341]You're damn right my generation sees ownership as a "burden" after the debt-based economy the 2000's created. And it seems like people are working hard to create another one.[/QUOTE] Speak for yourself. Ownership matters a ton to me. I don't want to rent anything. I HATE renting. I want to be able to call my car [i]mine[/i], my house [i]mine[/i], etc.
[QUOTE=godfatherk;47043432]By they you mean the author/newspaper? Because although this is the first time I've read an article from this magazine, It gives me the impression that it sits at the left side of the spectrum. From wikipedia.[/QUOTE] I had already read about it from another source. I suppose I should have read this one. My apologies. But that's why I generally don't form opinions this fast because I get scattered. Plus I just got done with work, excuses, etc.
[QUOTE=Lord_Ragnarok;47043625]I had already read about it from another source. I suppose I should have read this one. My apologies. But that's why I generally don't form opinions this fast because I get scattered. Plus I just got done with work, excuses, etc.[/QUOTE] No worries. What was the other source though; I'm curious if there's any plagiarism going on here.
I thought this was pretty obvious when you ignore the PR bullshit. "Sharing economy" apps are really about: -Dodging regulations that were put in place for important reasons. -Exploiting desperate people as "contractors" to avoid giving them proper wages and benefits. -Collecting rents off the hard work of others long after your paltry R&D investments have been recouped. If this exploitative robber baron shit is really the future of work in this country, I'd rather put a bullet in my head right now. It is all about pitting people against each other to push wages and benefits further and further down. I don't want a "complex income stream". I want a goddamn job, with dependable wages and benefits so I don't have to wake up every morning wondering whether I'm going to eat that day. Stuff like Taskrabbit scares the living shit out of me. It makes me wonder if ten years from now every work day will start with standing in a crowd of other people and underbidding each other for a day's work, a la Bioshock Infinite.
[QUOTE=TestECull;47043484]Speak for yourself. Ownership matters a ton to me. I don't want to rent anything. I HATE renting. I want to be able to call my car [i]mine[/i], my house [i]mine[/i], etc.[/QUOTE] And most of the times, buying your own property is the most sound financial decision.Although, I wouldn't do it during an inflatory bubble, with a consumer loan, or for a very expensive tight appartment or studio room. I'd buy some cheap small town or village land close to one of those cities with the [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_most_liveable_cities"]highest quality of life[/URL] such as Dusseldorf, Barcelona or Vienna , and erect a cheap prefabricated home on it, american style. Cheap, convenient, private AND much closer to the city center or centers(I'm thinking of the[URL="http://mapfrappe.com/?show=26835"] Rhine-Rhur metropolis[/URL] here) than if you were to live in an american suburb at the edge of a city.
There's another good article on the sharing economy in the 9th February edition of the TIME magazine. That's worth a read as well.
[QUOTE=TestECull;47043484]Speak for yourself. Ownership matters a ton to me. I don't want to rent anything. I HATE renting. I want to be able to call my car [i]mine[/i], my house [i]mine[/i], etc.[/QUOTE] I definitely agree with you for housing/property - if you can buy, you really should. I can understand people preferring to lease a car though, especially a new one, since they nearly always depreciate in value. But other considerations are important as well (like you said, disliking the idea of renting stuff, liking the ability to upgrade/customise the car, etc.).
[QUOTE=Camundongo;47043836]I definitely agree with you for housing/property - if you can buy, you really should. I can understand people preferring to lease a car though, especially a new one, since they nearly always depreciate in value. But other considerations are important as well (like you said, disliking the idea of renting stuff, liking the ability to upgrade/customise the car, etc.).[/QUOTE] In the end, you get shafted by leasing a car. [url]http://www.edmunds.com/car-buying/compare-the-costs-buying-vs-leasing-vs-buying-a-used-car.html[/url] You end up paying only ~20% less when you lease a car (going of this article's example), but at the end of the lease you don't own the car; you have to give it back. A bought (new or used) car can be sold or traded in, allowing you to regain some of the lost money. On top of that, the dealership will fuck you up the ass in fines if there's damage to the car or if you go above the mileage per month/year quota, and some cars have such low quotas that you'd go over just driving to and from work every day. Unless you must absolutely have the [I]newest car every year[/I], there is no reason to lease a car. Buying a new car gets rid the nightmare of fines, and if you buy a used car - even if it's just a year old car with <10,000 miles - you can save thousands of dollars.
[QUOTE=godfatherk;47043742]And most of the times, buying your own property is the most sound financial decision.Although, I wouldn't do it during an inflatory bubble, with a consumer loan, or for a very expensive tight appartment or studio room. I'd buy some cheap small town or village land close to one of those cities with the [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_most_liveable_cities"]highest quality of life[/URL] such as Dusseldorf, Barcelona or Vienna , and erect a cheap prefabricated home on it, american style. Cheap, convenient, private AND much closer to the city center or centers(I'm thinking of the[URL="http://mapfrappe.com/?show=26835"] Rhine-Rhur metropolis[/URL] here) than if you were to live in an american suburb at the edge of a city.[/QUOTE] I much prefer living out in the sticks, no closer than 15 miles to the nearest city limit. Where I live is pretty much the result of a conflict between 'How far from the city can I get' and 'How good is the internet'. [editline]30th January 2015[/editline] [QUOTE=Camundongo;47043836]I definitely agree with you for housing/property - if you can buy, you really should. I can understand people preferring to lease a car though, especially a new one, since they nearly always depreciate in value. But other considerations are important as well (like you said, disliking the idea of renting stuff, liking the ability to upgrade/customise the car, etc.).[/QUOTE] Not only that but leasing a car is a terrible terrible idea fiscally. You get the best value out of your money if you [i]buy[/i] that car and then drive it for 20 or 30 years. It's the most green way to own a car, it's the most fiscally viable way to own a car, and it means you're not constantly throwing several hundred bucks a month out the fuckin' window on new cars you don't actually need. Doubling down on that, never buy NEW cars. Cars lose 5-15 percent of their value the moment the first owner signs the note. Buy used every time, you'll get a great deal and there's nothing wrong with a used car so long as it's been cared for properly. Educate yourself on how cars work and you'll be able to pluck reliable gems out of the sub-$1500 lot 9 times out of 10, nevermind the 'certified pre-owned' lots with cars <5yr old. People may think it odd that I drive a 30 year old Ford pickup. But it's A: Paid off, B: reliable, C: Practical for my needs and D: So laughably easy to maintain that I need nothing more than a basic set of wrenches and jackstands to replace any part on it. I couldn't ask for a more ideal vehicle to own. [editline]30th January 2015[/editline] [QUOTE=Saber15;47043919]In the end, you get shafted by leasing a car. [url]http://www.edmunds.com/car-buying/compare-the-costs-buying-vs-leasing-vs-buying-a-used-car.html[/url] You end up paying only ~20% less when you lease a car (going of this article's example), but at the end of the lease you don't own the car; you have to give it back.[/QUOTE] Not only that but you're restricted on what you can do with it. They often have mandatory mileage limits. You go over that and they shaft you even harder. You can't modify it. You can't service it yourself, or at your favorite garage that's been serving your family for seventy years if that garage isn't 'certified' properly. It's bullshit. Leases are overglorified long-term rentals and I can find absolutely no reason for anyone to ever lease their personal car. Leave leasing to big companies that have fleets.
[QUOTE=Used Car Salesman;47043724]I thought this was pretty obvious when you ignore the PR bullshit. "Sharing economy" apps are really about: -Dodging regulations that were put in place for important reasons. -Exploiting desperate people as "contractors" to avoid giving them proper wages and benefits. -Collecting rents off the hard work of others long after your paltry R&D investments have been recouped. If this exploitative robber baron shit is really the future of work in this country, I'd rather put a bullet in my head right now. It is all about pitting people against each other to push wages and benefits further and further down. I don't want a "complex income stream". I want a goddamn job, with dependable wages and benefits so I don't have to wake up every morning wondering whether I'm going to eat that day. Stuff like Taskrabbit scares the living shit out of me. It makes me wonder if ten years from now every work day will start with standing in a crowd of other people and underbidding each other for a day's work, a la Bioshock Infinite.[/QUOTE] i don't know if that's the future, but sure as hell is what most companies(and those in charge) want. that's the result of believing the lie that the market and capitalism as a whole can self-regulate.
With new disruptive technologies and new applications, it's kind of a given that this sort of thing happens in between their introduction and when it reaches the attention of the authorities and legal systems. I'm hoping a bunch of new laws will be introduced to crack down on these and similar grey areas.
[QUOTE=Wizards Court;47044329]i don't know if that's the future, but sure as hell is what most companies(and those in charge) want. that's the result of believing the lie that the market and capitalism as a whole can self-regulate.[/QUOTE] But the market DOES self-regulate...all the money, into the pockets of a few people.
I feel pretty sad now.
[QUOTE=Used Car Salesman;47044494]But the market DOES self-regulate...all the money, into the pockets of a few people.[/QUOTE] A little legal regulation is never a bad thing.
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