Comment by largest_lad
1 year ago
It is not complicated why this is happening. Even very low wage jobs in wealthy countries pay 10x what people can make in poor countries. The gig economy advances a race to the bottom for wages, in particular because there is zero identity verification or language skills needed for most of these guys.
Of course the number of deliveries that must be completed in an hour increases. Of course the pay per delivery decreases. Of course the delivery bikers are constantly running red lights and getting killed. Of course the shoddy ebikes are burning down the tenements. That is the logic of the market: more, cheaper, all the time.
The one lesson companies refuse to learn from Apple and Nvidia is that a race to the bottom isn't the optimal strategy in the short, medium, or long term. It only hold both in the super long term in which you assume that innovation is dead or that innovation can be done at no extra cost.
If people had a slightly different perspective on this we would already have drones delivering food, but because of this mistaken belief drones won't be economically viable for the foreseeable future.
> because of this mistaken belief drones won't be economically viable for the foreseeable future.
i dont think it's mistaken.
A crashed drone is a capital loss for the delivery app company. A crashed driver is not.
It wasn't a matter of lack of vision but cold constraints of reality resulting in the person fueled plan B. If I recall correctly they (the industry) already tried flying drones and wanted to have trucks as mobile hubs. Regulation said no to it. Because of the risks of delivery drones or their packages falling from the sky. Ground drones aren’t quite there yet just like self-driving cars (plus issues with where they would be allowed to travel).
I don't consider myself a xenophobe but it feels somewhat strange the first thing I ask when interacting with the new servant class is "do you speak Dutch". It's already considered normal that the delivery guy or Uber driver is an immigrant.
Very few locals want to do these jobs and maybe there is something wrong with that I don't know.
Unfortunately, multi-tiered societies ("those people do THAT work") have been a thing ever since people got the idea to settle down. Maybe for a brief period of time, these tiers could be in entirely separate hemispheres, but things tend to diffuse over time.