Readit NewsSuppose we are starting a freelancing company together, the agreement is that you will get 50% of every contract, I will get the other half. What I won't tell you is that I control the contracts we get to sign and I can adjust the contracts as I wish (we never agreed on that, I just do).
This month we closed a deal, we will be incubated in a company for 2 months, 40 hours a week, the contract I signed was for 240$/hour for each one of us, totalling 150,000 $. The contract I show you shows a total of 80,000 $.
How would you feel when you discovered that you should have made 75k on this deal instead of 40k?
Imagine you were selling a house, and your agent came to you with an offer of $1M, of which they would take a 10% commission. You agree to this, but find out later that the buyer actually offered $1.1M. The fact that each party agreed to the transaction with the real estate agent isn't relevant here. What is relevant is that if you charge for services based on a percentage of the price, you can't then set different prices at both ends, this strongly violates the expectations of the contract.
Looking at https://www.uber.com/info/how-much-do-drivers-with-uber-make..., it says "Drivers using the partner app are charged an Uber Fee as a percentage of each trip fare." This is analogous to the real estate agent example, and this is why this is fraud on Uber's behalf. If they told drivers that they were simply buying their services for an arbitrary price, then it would be fine, but they don't say that.
We are not talking about charging different amounts of money depending on the brand of device you are consuming the data on. NN is about not differentiating the cost or quality of bits based on their source. In the US, can you not opt to pay a slightly higher rate for renewable energy? (This happens in Australia).
I'm all for NN, but the analogy Sam used doesn't hold in my opinion.
As an additional thought from someone outside the US: NN doesn't exist in places like Australia, and has actually overall led to better services, especially in the early days of the internet, because overseas data is significantly more costly to provide than local data. The difference is that we have more robust competition and we can more easily switch providers, where is seems in the US (purely based on things I've read on the internet) that the near-duopoly cuts consumer choice, so if NN was not in place, people would have little ability to switch providers, and they would be stuck with it.
Is the lack of competition the real issue here? If people in the US had a choice of many providers and it was easy to switch, then people would likely switch to services that are Net Neutral.
The lack of cited sources in articles like these leads people to bolster or criticize particular studies that they have read or heard about, usually without referencing those. Many of these studies are either flawed or contain assumptions that some people don't agree with, so this ends up going nowhere also.
Are there any really good studies on this topic that we may discuss as a common point of reference? Once that take into account all the facts, and don't start with assumptions like the following:
1. There should be equal numbers of men and women in tech (or there is some other ratio that is preferred or correct). 2. Women and men in tech should - on average - be paid the same.
Some people have these assumptions as part of their personal belief systems, but they entail a whole bunch of other assumptions that are not prima facie true.
One other huge weakness in these kinds of studies is that they measure the things that are easy to measure; things like education and experience. If companies are hiring compensating employees rationally, they would use these only as heuristics, and have some measure of how much an individual employee would contribute to the company as the determining factor.
Measuring job skill, as well as all the other skills that go into being a good employee is really hard, but until a study tries to actually do this, they are coming up with conclusions that aren't at all useful in the real world.
This practice has been known for some time (the recent news is not new at all) and has been used to prevent drivers from being caught up in the regulation battles by taking fake fares. This move makes drivers' experience worse.
It seems inconsistent for Uber to maintain their position when it comes to undermining/circumventing taxi monopoly laws and also make this move.
Is there a broader context or principle that can explain this in a way consistent with Uber's values?
Additionally, it would have been nice to see some mention of patterns that solve this issue more completely, like CQRS, where state is disposable.
Check out the video here http://sightcorp.com/ for an ultra creepy overview. You can even try their live demo: https://face-api.sightcorp.com/demo_basic/.