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transportaionsoftware · 2 months

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The Economic Impact of Ride-Sharing Software: Job Creation and Opportunities for Drivers

Ride-sharing software has transformed the way people commute, offering convenience, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. Beyond its benefits for riders, ride-sharing software has also had a significant impact on the economy, particularly in terms of job creation and opportunities for drivers. In this article, we'll explore the economic implications of ride-sharing software, with a focus on QRyde's innovative solutions and their role in shaping the transportation landscape.

Ride-Sharing Software and the Gig Economy:

The rise of ride sharing software has contributed to the growth of the gig economy, where individuals work as independent contractors or freelancers on a flexible basis. Ride-sharing platforms like QRyde provide drivers with the opportunity to earn income on their own terms, allowing them to set their own schedules and work as much or as little as they choose. This flexibility has made ride-sharing an attractive option for those seeking supplemental income, part-time work, or a full-time career.

Job Creation in the Transportation Sector:

Ride-sharing software has created a multitude of job opportunities within the transportation sector, ranging from drivers and vehicle operators to support staff and customer service representatives. QRyde's paratransit software, microtransit software, and public transportation software have expanded employment opportunities by facilitating the efficient operation of transportation services, leading to increased demand for drivers and other related roles.

Economic Benefits for Drivers:

For many individuals, driving for a ride-sharing platform like QRyde offers a flexible and lucrative source of income. Drivers have the freedom to choose when and where they work, allowing them to balance their work with other commitments such as family, education, or other employment. Additionally, ride-sharing software often provides drivers with incentives, bonuses, and promotions to encourage peak-time driving and maintain driver satisfaction.

Opportunities for Entrepreneurship:

Ride-sharing software has also created opportunities for entrepreneurship, allowing drivers to operate their own businesses and manage their own fleets of vehicles. With QRyde's innovative paratransit scheduling software and micro-transit software, drivers can leverage technology to optimize their routes, increase efficiency, and maximize their earning potential. This level of autonomy empowers drivers to take control of their careers and build successful businesses within the ride-sharing industry.

Economic Stimulus and Local Businesses:

The growth of ride-sharing software has also led to economic stimulus in local communities, as drivers spend their earnings on goods and services, supporting local businesses and contributing to the overall economy. Additionally, ride-sharing platforms like QRyde often partner with local businesses and organizations to offer discounts, promotions, and incentives to riders, further driving economic activity and fostering community engagement.

Challenges and Considerations:

While ride-sharing software has brought significant economic benefits, it has also faced challenges such as regulatory issues, labor disputes, and concerns about worker classification and benefits. Additionally, the rise of autonomous vehicles and other emerging technologies may impact the future of ride-sharing and the job market for drivers. However, with continued innovation and adaptation, ride-sharing software is poised to remain a key player in the transportation industry and a driving force for economic growth.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, ride-sharing software has had a profound impact on the economy, creating job opportunities, stimulating economic activity, and empowering drivers to earn income on their own terms. QRyde's innovative solutions have played a significant role in shaping the ride-sharing landscape, providing drivers with the tools and resources they need to succeed in a rapidly evolving industry. As ride-sharing continues to evolve, its economic impact will continue to be a topic of interest and discussion, shaping the future of transportation and the gig economy.

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correctsuccess · 3 years

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Federal Stimulus Bill Has Huge Tax Change For Gig Workers NEW YORK, NEW YORK - A Doordash sticker is seen on a window at Mallenche Mexican Grill within the ... Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn on December 04, 2020 (Photograph by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Pictures) Getty Pictures Tucked contained in the American Rescue Act is a tax change that has huge implications for tax income and the gig economic system. Beginni... #Bill #change #correct_success #Federal #gig #huge #news #okcity #stimulus #tax #Taxes #US #workers

#Bill #change #correct_success #Federal #gig #huge #news #okcity #stimulus #tax #Taxes #US #workers

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morecontentpls · 4 years

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Gee, wall street sure looks different these days.

#wallstreet #onepercent #stimulus #gig workers #unemployment #congress

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007blonded · 4 years

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🤷Are you a Beauty Industry “Gig” Worker⁉️ Are you a #beauty industry #gig worker⁉️Join me for Daily Decontamination with Denise the ONLY natural hair braider association that provides protection against retaliation by the #Barber and #Cosmetology Boards.

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politijohn · 3 years

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The Stock Market is not the Economy w/ Dan Price

Airlines spent 96% of free cash flow on stock buybacks for a decade, then cut 90,000 jobs when trouble hit. Then they got a $50 billion bailout

GE promised its CEO a huge bonus if stock hit $19. It didn’t, so GE re-did contract so the bonus kicks in at $10/share The CEO cut 20% of aviation staff to increase profits and raise the stock to $10 His bonus: $47M. If it goes up again, he gets $270M

JCPenney - April: furloughed 85,000 employees, May 10: Gave CEO $4.5M bonus on top of $17M/yr in pay, May 15: went bankrupt, Oct: laid off 15,000 people, Dec: closed 150 stores, Now: CEO left with $4.5M bonus after stock fell 88% in her 2 yrs

Boeing spent almost all of its cash on stock buybacks over the prior decade. In the past year, it cut 27,000 employees. It also fired its CEO over 2 deadly plane crashes and ensuing coverup, and gave him a $81 million exit package

On Jan. 6, when the mob stormed the Capitol, the stock market went up 250 points to a new record, handing the richest 1% an extra $300 billion. Also that day, a new report showed employment dropped for the first time since April and a then-record 3,900 people died of covid

Albertsons, US’ 2nd-largest grocery chain: *Profit is up 256% in pandemic *Stock at record high *Owned by private equity *CEO made $29M last year *Fired all California non-union drivers to replace them with gig workers with no benefits/min wage

The stock market for the 500 biggest companies ended the year up 15%, among the biggest gains ever. Also in that span, those companies lad off a record number of people, and wait times for food banks hit a record high

As part of the first stimulus, the Fed pumped about $3 trillion into the stock market, which helped it soar to record highs. At the same time, a record 30% of small businesses failed and unemployment tripled

Since 2009, stock market is up 233%. Since 2009, the federal min. wage is up 0%

Coca-Cola - This decade, it spent $48B on dividends and over $20B on stock buybacks 2018: CEO got 58% pay increase 2019: CEO got 12% pay increase, to $18.7M 2020: Company makes $8.3B profit…and it just laid off 12% of workers

Among the biggest 50 companies, they spent 79% of profits on stock buybacks and dividends in recent years to enrich executives and mostly-wealthy shareholders. Last year, those companies combined to lay off over 100,000 workers

Disney stock is up 21% in the past year to a new record high. In recent months they laid off 32,000 people. One of our employees lives near Disney World. Recently there was a line of cars outside his house for a drive-thru food bank 7.5 miles away

In the pandemic, total stock value has grown by $16.6 trillion. $8.3 trillion of that went to the richest 1%, and they pay a lower tax rate than those who are unemployed and need help

Salesforce - In the last 5 years, it has bought 27 companies for tens of billions of dollars. It just bought Slack for $27.7B. Its stock is at record high, up 23% in the past year after revenue surged 29%. And it just laid off 1,000 people

In November alone, the average member of the top 10% gained an average of $200,000 from the stock market while 7M people plunged into poverty

On one day in November: *The stock market hit 30,000 for the first time *Elon Musk became first person to gain $100B in a year *A Census report revealed 6M people face imminent eviction

Uber + Lyft spent $200M on November election ads to convince Californians they shouldn’t pay drivers minimum wage or benefits. In the 2 weeks after passage, Uber stock went up 39% and Lyft stock soared 52%. In return, all drivers were denied basic benefits

Average stock gains over 10 years CEOs with above-average pay: stock up 160% CEOs with below-average pay: stock up 280% And yet CEOs are rewarded whether the stock goes up or down

AT&T - 2018-2019: bought Time Warner for $100B, cut 29,000 jobs May: gave departing CEO $64M pension ($274K/mo for life), laid off 4,700 more workers August: laid off 600 more workers, Now: laid off thousands more - news sent stock up 2%

Marriott - 2018-2019: made $3.1B in profits, spent $5B on stock buybacks April: furloughed most employees, paid $160M in dividends to shareholders, gave CEO a 8% raise and 200% bonus Sept: laid off 17% of HQ staff Now: made $100M profit

$3B: what Jeff Bezos cashed out in stock in one day, as Amazon profits tripled in the pandemic. $2.1B: cost to give all Amazon warehouse workers 2 weeks paid sick leave and a year of hero pay (they got none of either now)

84% of stock market value is owned by richest 10% “but what about 401(k)s” Half of Americans don’t have one The average 401(k) balance has *declined* $5,000 in 6 years after inflation, because employers put in less & people can’t afford contributions

MGM - Laid off 18,000 people while giving its CEO $700K in stock. The value of the stock doubled to $1.4M after the stock went up, partly because of increased profitability due to the layoffs

Wells Fargo made $10B in staff cuts, meaning tens of thousands of employees lost their jobs. Wells Fargo also made a $2B profit, did $24B in stock buybacks last year, and paid its CEO $36M

Black and Latino Americans make up about 32% of the population but own only 1.7% of all stock value

1948-1979: Worker productivity: up 108%, Stock market: up 603%, Worker pay: up 93%. Since then, worker productivity: up 70%, Stock market: up 2,200%, Worker pay: up 12%. Corporations and workers used to get richer together. Now companies just keep the money

Deere - Construction sales are down 25%. Yet, it is posting a $2.25B profit as it cuts thousands of jobs. The result: Its stock grew 23% in a year to a record high. In the week after it announced job cuts, its stock grew 9%

Walmart - Stock is at record high, up 23% in a year. The Waltons have gotten over $20B richer in the pandemic. Online sales are up 74% and market share has grown…and it cut hundreds of corporate jobs

Macy’s - Its stock was down 60% in a year and they cut 3,900 jobs. So what did it do? Gave its CEO a $3.7M bonus, and gave about $1M each to 5 other execs

CEOs justify huge pay by saying they’re worth it. But there’s no correlation between profit and CEO pay at 61% of corporations. Since 1990, stock market: up 300%, CEO pay: up 550%

Stock for the parent company of Ann Taylor, Loft and Lane Bryant is down 75% in a year. It closed all 2,800 stores. So what did it do? Gave executives $5.5M in bonuses, including over $2M to the CEO

Where proceeds from stock buybacks + dividends went over the last 15 years: White people: $13 trillion, Black people: $0.18 trillion Hispanic people: $0.21 trillion When we talk about the systemic racial wealth gap, this is a pretty good place to start

Amid the early days of the pandemic, stocks grew 38%, the most ever in a 50-day span. At the same time, thousands of small businesses closed each day while thousands of people died from covid

Google - Stock at all-time high. $6.8B profit last year. Founders Page + Brin added $10B+ to fortunes in a year. Offered jobs to over 2,000 people and axed them w/ no severance before they ever worked a day - after they already left their prior jobs

Companies did $62B/year in stock buybacks in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Now they do $730B/year in stock buybacks. Worker pay increases are far smaller now than they were in the ‘80s and ‘90s

Chevron - Its CEO made $33.1M/year. 5 other execs made a total of $59M. It spent $13B on stock buybacks and dividends in a year then laid off 10-15% of its staff

Big companies don’t just spend profits on manipulating stock. They are a record $10 trillion in debt - mostly for stock buybacks + dividends to enrich themselves. When the bill comes due, layoffs typically ensue

In April, a record 30M people lost their jobs and small businesses lost 55% of their revenue. At the same time, the stock market rose the most since 1987 and billionaires gained $308B

#Eat the rich #capitalism #stock market #economic inequality #the left #working class #long post #us politics

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caainhurst · 3 years

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JUNE 1, 2021

Cities and towns are opening back up after their coronavirus-induced shutdowns. Job vacancies have surged to historic highs. Millions of Americans report that they are looking for work. Yet employers are struggling to fill available positions, leaving them with no option but to shorten their business’s hours of operation and pay overtime. Payroll growth has proved lackluster.

The familiar story about what’s happening goes like this: America is in the midst of a labor shortage. Businesses are unable to find enough workers, in no small part because of the country’s generous unemployment-insurance payments and repeated stimulus checks. This is a nightmare for growing companies, a trend that’s slowing the economic recovery, and a problem that policy must solve. Workers are “dampening what should be a stronger jobs market,” the Chamber of Commerce said, calling the situation a “very real threat” to the recovery. In response, 23 states and counting have slashed unemployment-insurance payments.

But what has rapidly become conventional wisdom is not necessarily wisdom at all. The labor shortage, so far as it exists, seems to have many complicated causes. Even if benefits are among them, policy makers should not rush in to help ensure a flood of low-wage workers for America’s businesses. As the pandemic abates and the economy strengthens, why not focus on creating good ones?

The evidence of a labor shortage comes both from hard numbers and from soft anecdotes. In terms of the hard numbers: Lots of Americans want work. Roughly 10 million Americans are looking for a job, and the unemployment rate is an uncomfortably high 6.1 percent. At the same time, lots of businesses want to hire. Employers report that they have 8.1 million positions open, the largest number in recorded history. Yet the number of Americans taking a job remains subdued: Payrolls grew by just 266,000 in April, when many economists expected a number as high as 2 million.

In terms of the softer stuff: More and more business owners are complaining, loudly, that they cannot find people to work. Restaurants are offering hiring bonuses to try to get potential workers in the door, Uber and Lyft are desperate for drivers, and Costco, McDonald’s, Sheetz, and Chipotle, along with many small businesses, have raised wages to attract employees.

The issue, many business executives and politicians claim, is that the country’s social-insurance and anti-poverty programs are providing more of a hammock than a safety net: Many workers are getting a $300-a-week bonus on top of their regular state UI payments, and are still flush from the rounds of stimulus checks sent out during the pandemic. Workers would rather stay home and collect the dole than go out and take a job, the argument goes. “Continuing these programs only worsens the workforce issues we are currently facing,” Missouri Governor Mike Parson said at a press conference, announcing a cut to the state’s UI payments. “It is time we ended these programs that have incentivized people to stay out of the workforce.”

But surveys of workers—and the simple observation of the strange and still-awful reality we find ourselves in—indicate many reasons why workers are hesitant or unable to take new gigs. The pandemic is abating, but it is not over. Many workers have preexisting medical conditions or a sick family member to worry about, meaning they cannot take a frontline, essential job. Millions of parents are still struggling with the closure of child-care centers and schools. More personal, less easily quantified impulses are at play too: After a year of immense personal and collective trauma, many people just want to take a beat before committing to a new job.

Wages are another pivotal factor. Workers used to making $21 an hour are unlikely to take jobs for $17 an hour—nor would doing so be good for the American economy. Workers used to making $17 an hour are unlikely to take a much more dangerous job for the same amount—nor would doing so be good for the American economy. And workers used to making $15 an hour, who now have a reasonable expectation that more $21-an-hour jobs will be available in a few weeks, are unlikely to take a job for $15 an hour—nor would doing so be good for the American economy.

Yet many employers are dragging their feet in raising wages to make their job offerings worth taking, given the economic climate and the risks of service work. Much of the “wage growth” evident in recent statistics is due to high-wage workers being much less likely to have lost their jobs than low-wage workers; once you account for that fact, wages have not risen much at all. This is part of what accounts for the “labor shortage.” The issue isn’t workers. It’s employers.

The country’s generous UI is likely playing a role too. In a recent survey by ZipRecruiter, job seekers reported feeling far less financial pressure to take the first job they were offered, likely because UI and stimulus checks buoyed family finances. But a large body of research has shown that UI has a more moderate effect on job-acceptance rates than one might think, because it offers only the lowest-paid workers more incentive to say no.

Moreover, UI helping drive wages up by giving workers the option of saying no to a bad job is not a bad thing. Ample UI improves what is sometimes called “job match,” because it gives job seekers the ability to wait for the right position to come along. It also has disproportionate benefits for Black and Latino workers, who have borne a disproportionate burden of both the health crisis and the economic crisis of the past year.

A more philosophical point needs to be made here, too: The job of the government is not to ensure a supply of workers at whatever wage rates businesses set. And workers’ having the power to say no is not a policy problem that the government needs to solve. For decades, though, Washington and America’s statehouses have helped rig the country’s policy infrastructure in employers’ favor.

The federal government has set the country’s wage floor below its poverty line, for instance, and has not increased the minimum wage to account for improvements in productivity and output over time. The current federal minimum is just $7.25 an hour, compared with roughly $10 an hour in Ireland and Canada, $11 in the Netherlands, $12 in France and Germany, and $12.50 in Australia and Luxembourg. Indeed, the United States has the lowest minimum wage compared with typical or average wages of any country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That helps explain why the United States has the highest share of low-wage work among the OECD countries. Fully one-quarter of American workers earn less than two-thirds of the median wage, compared with just 5 percent in Belgium and 12 percent in Japan.

The government has also proved complicit in the collapse of unionization and collective bargaining, making it easy for businesses to beat back organizing efforts and difficult for workers to band together to demand raises, benefits, and safe working conditions. The country has half, one-fifth, one-ninth of the collective-bargaining coverage of many of our peer countries. This has increased inequality in America, holding down wages while bolstering corporate profits.

At the same time, the government has declined to make companies compete against one another—for customers or for workers. Corporate concentration has increased, and any number of industries are dominated by just a handful of giant players. This pushes up profits and decimates wages, particularly in areas with fewer employers.

In recent decades, the government has also decided to allow the unfettered proliferation of Uber-type jobs, sacrificing the needs of low-wage workers in order to satisfy the preferences of wealthy, urban consumers and calling it all “innovation.” The central “innovation” of the gig economy is to call employees “contractors,” to avoid giving them benefits and a stable salary.

Even the American safety net exists not to eliminate poverty so much as to use poverty as a cudgel to force individuals into low-wage work. The earned-income tax credit goes only to people with earned income; food stamps and welfare benefits require a job-search effort. Over time, UI has become in some ways more and more like welfare; many states have made benefits shorter in term and stingier in size.

The government has long encouraged low-wage jobs and forced people into them. This is what we are seeing when governors rush to slash UI at the first sign of a real recovery and when policy makers describe workers’ demands as a “drag” on the economy. Uncle Sam is acting in the interests of low-wage employers, not the economy as a whole.

Perhaps the status quo is changing. The Biden administration has pushed a new New Deal designed to end poverty and provide greater economic security to the 99 percent. It is arguing that bolstered, extended UI should be kept in place for the benefit of American families. It is also promising to be the most pro-union government in decades. Part of this push must be giving workers the power to say no to employers—and putting employers in the uncomfortable position of having to compete for workers.

Maybe a labor shortage is a good thing.

#long post #eat the rich #equality

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thorn-amidst-roses · 3 years

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So in other “shit sucks” news, it looks like the US will soon be requiring you to report all “income” earned over $600 annually via services like Paypal G&S as taxable.

Bad news for people who resell dolls, lolita clothes, etc, unless you have receipts to prove you’re selling at a loss...

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azspot · 3 years

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Beginning in June, gig workers in Texas and 20 other states stand to lose eligibility for extended unemployment benefits. These states are ending pandemic unemployment aid early, even though Congress extended these measures until September. With one in four adults nationally still facing difficulty covering household expenses, cutting benefits is the wrong approach.

Safety Net Needs More Than Stimulus Checks

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

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Ant, Uber, and the true nature of money

The US election news has largely overshadowed a seismic moment in global finance: Ant, a fintech company that spun out of Alibaba/Alipay, was scheduled to have the world's largest IPO, topping even Aramco, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.

Then Chinese regulators canceled it.

As Yves Smith writes in her excellent Naked Capitalism breakdown, the consensus narrative on this is capricious Chinese regulators changed their minds and jerked the rug out from under Ali's billionaire owner Jack Ma.

The reality is a lot chewier.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/11/china-takes-step-against-securitization-consumer-borrowing-with-suspension-of-ant-ipo.html

To understand it, you need to understand the difference between the Chinese and American "money story." In the US, there is widespread, unquestioning faith in the fairytale that money predates the state and is separate from it.

In this story, people come together to trade but are plagued by disparate goods: if I want to pay for your chickens with a cow, how do you make change? They spontaneously decide that something (gold?) is money and price their cows and chicks in it.

Then, governments come along tax our gold away, and then to add insult to injury, governments abandon gold and insist that paper is as good as gold, print too much of it and crash the economy!

This probably sounds familiar to you, but it's just not true.

The actual historical reality, supported by history, archaeology and anthropology, is that governments created money by creating tax. The first "money" was the Babylonian ledgers that recorded how much of their crops farmers owed to the state and their creditors.

Money took a leap forward with imperial conquest: emperors solved the logistical problem of feeding and billeting their occupying soldiers by charging the occupied a tax that had to be paid for in coins stamped with the emperor's head.

They paid the soldiers in these coins, and demanded that their conquered populations somehow get the coins in order to pay their tax, with violent consequences if the tax wasn't paid. So the people sold food and other necessities to soldiers to get the coins.

Money, in other words, is how states provision themselves, and it derives its value from the fact that you have to pay your taxes in it. Governments spend money into existence by buying labor and goods from the public, and then tax it out of existence once a year.

The money the government spends, but does not tax, is the public's money - the money left over for us to transact. All the money in circulation is the sum total of all the money the government spent but didn't tax - that is, the government's deficit is the public's asset.

When governments run "balanced budgets" (or budget surpluses), they remove money from the economy, leaving the public with less to spend. That can be a good thing - a way to fight inflation, which is when too much money chases too few assets.

Low government spending slows growth by taking away the private sector's ability to spend. When the private sector is at full employment, when it is buying all the stuff that's for sale, you need to do something to keep inflation at bay.

During WWII, the USG competed with the private sector for stuff and labor. Uncle Sam spent lots of new money into existence, paying people to build munitions - but then convinced people to buy war bonds, burying that new money for years to come.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/07/taxes-for-revenue-are-obsolete.html

But when governments run so lean that there isn't enough money in the economy for the private sector to buy the stuff it needs, it seeks out other forms of money, like bank loans (which generate interest income for shareholders - one reason the market likes austerity).

In theory, bank lending is tightly regulated. Banks are the government's fiscal agents, creatures of the state, only able to trade because of a government charter. But when there isn't enough money in the system, unregulated banks spring into existence.

Another word for "unregulated bank" is "fintech" (h/t Riley Quinn).

And now we're back to China and the money story. Chinese finance regulators have always treated money as a public utility, to be spent or withdrawn to accomplish public purposes.

During the country's rapid industrialization, regulators loosened the flow of money to allow for rapid capacity-building, directing the country's productive capacity to building factories that would multiply that capacity.

But when they shut off the spigot and told factory owners that their future growth would come from making and selling things, the wealthy rebelled and sought out money from unlicensed banks or banks that were willing to break the rules.

This led to a string of subprime debt crises over the past five years, as regulators crushed these wildcat money-creators as fast as they popped up.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-02-17/china-s-600-billion-subprime-crisis-is-already-here

China's 1% fought back. They emigrated:

https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2012/08/rich-chinese-flee/

They used cryptocurrency (aka fintech) to evade capital controls, inflating the Bitcoin price-bubble and the Vancouver/Sydney/etc real-estate price bubble as they laundered their money and stashed it in safe-deposit boxes in the sky:

https://www.ft.com/content/bad16a88-d6fd-11e6-944b-e7eb37a6aa8e

As China's shadow economy ballooned it also grew in criminality. There was the wave of Chinese debt-kidnappings, which became so widespread that hostage-taking was described as "China's small claims court."

https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/08/chinas-police-think-hostages-arent-their-problem/

No wonder regulators fought back.

China's regulators didn't win a decisive victory, but they retained enormous control over their money-supply, and that REALLY paid off when the pandemic hit and they suspended all debts, rents, and taxes and mothballed the entire productive economy.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/01/cant-pay-wont-pay/#jubilee-now

Contrast with the US where the finance sector is an industry, not a public utility. Finance flexed its political muscle and diverted nearly the whole stimulus to itself, then crushed the productive economy by demanding debt service and rents.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/09/michael-hudson-how-an-act-of-god-pandemic-is-destroying-the-west-the-u-s-is-saving-the-financial-sector-not-the-economy.html

The ability to use finance as a utility is one of China's crucial assets, and it defends that asset ferociously. And THAT'S why the Ant IPO got killed. Ant's major source of income is short-term, high-interest lending, what Chinese regulators call "pawnbrokering."

China's pawnbrokers are a $43B shadow banking sector, and the country's regulators have been cracking down on them for the past year.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-12/china-is-said-to-scrutinize-43-billion-pawn-shop-lending-boom

$43B is a drop in the bucket of China's shadow economy (valued at $9T!), but it has real metastatic potential.

Ant's innovation is to fintechify the pawnbroker industry, by tying it to apps (on the front end) and to a US-style debt-brokerage (on the back end).

IOW: Ant's business model is that desperate people use an app to request and quickly receive high-risk, high-interest loans.

Then Ant sells the loans to "investors" (AKA "securitization"). Converting debts into income streams for third parties is the true basis of the finance industry. It's the means by which socially useless intermediaries extract ever-mounting rents from the productive economy.

And as Smith writes in her breakdown, the fact that Chinese finance regulators weren't going to let Ant explode his mass-scale, app-based payday-lending pawnbrokerage is not a surprise. They've been telling Jack Ma this for MONTHS, publicly and privately.

Ma thought he could simply bull his way past the Chinese regulators - that because he runs Alibaba and its subsidiaries, that they would defer to him. But the whole point of a finance regulator is NOT to let the finance sector write its own rules.

That's because bankers will cheerfully set the whole economy on fire to turn a buck (see, e.g., America).

Ant was on track for the largest IPO in world history due to investors' appetite for converting Chinese money from a public utility to a private enrichment vehicle.

So yeah, you're goddamned right the Chinese regulator wasn't going to let him do it. Their whole JOB is to not let him do it.

If you read this far, you may be asking yourself why, if governments don't need taxes to fund programs, they bother to tax at all?

There are two important reasons. The first is to fight inflation, by removing existing money from circulation so that when the government spends new money into existence to pay for the things it needs, that money isn't bidding against the existing supply.

But the other reason is to deprive the wealthy of the power that money brings, lest they use that power to pervert policy. Jack Ma's billions are what got him to the brink of a disastrous IPO for his unregulated bank.

And the US election demonstrates just how badly public policy fares when concentrated money is brought to bear on it for parochial purposes. Take Prop 22, the California ballot initiative to allow Uber and Lyft to misclassify their employees as independent contractors.

No on Prop 22 is a no-brainer. Vast numbers of gig workers are full-time employees, not contractors, and Lyft and Uber and other gig economy companies have pioneered labor misclassification as a tactic for paying literal starvation wages.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/final_ver2/#prop-22

And yet, Prop 22 passed, thanks to the largest-ever spending on any ballot initiative in California history: $205 million ($628,854/day!), spent pn 19 PR firms (including Big Tobacco's cancer-denial specialists).

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/proposition-22-california-uber-lyft-gig-employee/

The spend included a bribe to the NAACP Chair's consultancy that made sub-minimum wage jobs with no benefits for people of color (the majority of gig workers) seem like a blow for racial justice.

All told, Uber/Lyft's campaign outspent 49 out of 53 CA House races COMBINED.

And it was a bargain. Lyft and Uber have stolen $413m from California's employment insurance fund since 2014 - and that's just one cost they ducked through this victory. Far more important are the savings they'll realize on worker safety and job-related death claims.

The gig economy companies are the epitome of the financial economy destroying the productive economy. None of these companies turn a profit, after all - all they do is destroy actual, profitable businesses.

Currently the entire restaurant sector is being laid to waste by Postmates and Uber Eats (even as both lose vast sums):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-are-beautiful/#man-in-the-middle

And the workers who lost out with Prop 22 are being "chickenized" - having all the risk of operating a business shifted onto their side of the ledger:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poesy-the-monster-slayer/#stay-on-target

(No surprise, one of Prop 22's signature achievements was denying workers the right to unionize).

The desperation of chickenized workers is downright dystopian:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/02/free-steven-donziger/#phone-trees

and chickenization (not automation) is the major cause of falling wages:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/17/on-face-interaction/#zombie-robots

Lyft, Uber, Postmates, and the whole gamut of gig economy companies are all haemorrhaging money. Uber alone lost $4.7B in the first half of 2020. That's how you can tell they aren't tech companies: tech companies profited during the pandemic.

Gig-economy companies aren't part of the productive economy - they're part of the finance economy. They rely on investors, not profits from delighted customers, to stay afloat. They make nothing. They destroy everything: workers' lives, productive businesses.

They will never be profitable. Ever.

Take Uber. The company only exists because the Saudi royals amassed so much money that they could bend reality. The "Saudi Vision 2030" plan calls for the creation of new sources of post-oil wealth.

To that end, the Saudis have poured money into the Softbank VC fund, which then supported global-scale, money-losing, predatory businesses in the hopes of securing a monopoly (or, failing that, unloading the company onto dazzled suckers).

When the company IPOed last year, it had already lost $10b. It loses $0.41 on every dollar you spend on your fare. And yet, the Saudis got away clean, off the backs of investors who assumed that a pile of shit this big must have a pony under it somewhere.

Some believed the company's lies about the imminence of self-driving cars. Uber is not going to make a self-driving car.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/30/death-to-all-monopoly/#pogo-stick-problem

Some believed the company's lies about profitability via growth. It can't grow to profitability. By its own disclosures, profitability depends on every public transit system in the world shutting down and being replaced by Ubers. #Nagahappen.

https://48hills.org/2019/05/ubers-plans-include-attacking-public-transit/

The Saudi strategy - and its punishing, economy-destroying reality-distortions - are exemplary of what happens when government let too much money accumulate in unaccountable, private hands. Prop 22 will kill and starve workers, and the public will pick up the pieces.

The businesses that profit from these deaths and immiseration will fail anyway, but not before their major backers and top execs make hundreds of millions or billions.

Recall: the Ant IPO was set to smash the existing record: Saudi Aramco (AKA the money behind Uber).

Meanwhile, all the blood and treasure squandered on Prop 22 - the $205m spent on the Yes side, the $20 spent by unions on the No side - won't save Uber or other gig economy companies.

Not only are they bleeding money, but as Edward Ongweso Jr explains, "Uber is losing legal challenges in France, Britain, Canada, Italy," turning drivers into employees or allowing "lawsuits reclassifying them as such."

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3annmb/proposition-22-passes-in-california-but-uber-and-lyft-are-only-delaying-the-inevitable

And other US states - NY, MA, NJ - are working to end the misclassification of Uber drivers and other gig workers.

Permitting Uber and other gig economy companies to flout the law did not make the economy better. All it did was transfer more money to the wealthy.

And the money they wealthy amass is converted to political power, usurping money's role as a public utility and converting it to a means to seek private gains at public expense.

#pluralistic

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longwindedbore · 3 years

Text

$600 or $1200 or $2000 is a Great Debate amongst the rich and powerful as to whether the cake crumbs they toss you will or will not have a dab of frosting on them.

CONSIDER if you will: What if rich and powerful had

PROVIDED $1200 per month for the lastnine months for everyone who had to stay home because their job/smallbusiness closed-for-the-duration

PLUS supplemental pay to essential minimum wage workers

PLUS distribution of PPE to the populace (requires pro-active prep by the Federal Administration)

PLUS suspended tax laws that benefit Landlords for empty units after evictions and banks for empty properties after foreclosures

PLUS using mandatory quarantine like George Washington during the Phillidelphia smallpox outbreak [1] or the Governors around New York during the 1916 Smallpox epidemic [2]

What’s that you say? “We” couldn’t afford to give out that amount of money to millions of people.?

COST. The previous $1,200 program amounted to $218B. That was the $0.2 of the $2.2 Trillion provided. [3]

If We the Populace ALL had $1,200 for the last 9 months it would amount to $1.8T.

The Rich and Powerful could have given the populace $1.8T and split the remaining $400B for shut-down funds amongst a few thousand corporations and institutions.

After all, how can you ‘stimulate’ an economy during a shut down?

Instead We the Populace got crumbs, the Rich and Powerful spent a few hundred billion$$ on shut downs and invested the remaining $1.5T in the Stock Market which is part of the reason it’s ‘doing great’ [3] [4]

It is the prerogative of the Rich and Powerful to be cruel with minimum consequences - social, economic or political. The more Rich and more Powerful the fewer the Consequence, the higher their status.

•••••••••••••••Footnotes••••••••••••••••••

[1]. Smallpox 1775.

“Though there was not too much known about viruses and their transitions, English colonists in North America recognized the effectiveness of isolating individuals infected”

==============================

[2] Polio 1916.

“Cities in neighboring counties and states enacted rules barring New Yorkers from entering those cities, with Hoboken, New Jersey going so far as to have police officers intercept travelers arriving from Brooklyn by ferry and escort them back to Brooklyn.”

==============================

[3] The Market is ALL our money:

The 2020 $2.2 Trillion Stimulus on top of the

$4-6 Trillion the Federal Reserve pumped into the Market in 2020 on top of the

$2 Trillion Trump/Ryan/McConnell 2017 tax cuts for the Rich on top of the

8 Trillion the Bush Administration handed to the Too-Big-to-Fail-Banks to prevent their collapse after their Ponzi scheme of “derivatives” collapsed.

That’s $18 Trillion for the Rich Powerful without the US government borrowing, raising taxes, or creating Weimar-type inflation from just printing money.

We’re told and seem to have accepted that the Rich and Powerful were generous to toss 330,000,000 of us 1/10th of 1% of the plunder gotten by about 20,000 individuals.

==============================

[4] The Market Capitalization (as in “Capitalism”) was self-valued at $11T in 2009.

A whopping $0.5T was received by issuing corporations from stocks sold as capital (as in “Capitalism”) investments.

So-o-o-o how can the Stock Market be worth $36T If economy has sucked royally since 2009? If most of the highly self-touted ‘job-growth’ of the Obama and Trump Administrations has been in minimum wage or low paid gig-self-employment? If the big monopolistic corporations have held the line on salaries for the drones?

Where’s all the money coming from?

Consider: $11T plus $0.5T plus $18T = $29.5T. Add in actual business growth plus all our private and State Employee retirement Investments and what do you have?

The World’s largest Ponzi scheme? Idk about you but I lost my safe retirement investments in the collapse of 2008.

Billionaires are billionaires ONLY because they steal - otherwise they would only be Multi-millionaires on what they get from their assets. Most would have been broke after 2008.

Crapitalism.

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emmagoldman42 · 4 years

Text

"For millions of poor and working people, life in this country is going to change – and change very quickly. Already, many companies are starting to lay off workers as the economy slows and things begin to shut down. Low wage workers, many already living just on the edge of eviction and homelessness, now find themselves with even less money coming in and with young children, recently forced out of school, to watch and feed.

In many ways, the coronavirus has accelerated all of the trajectories of modern capitalism that have hurdled us towards our current position: rapidly gentrifying cities, automation and the gig economy displacing workers into precarious forms of employment, the rising cost of living, and lack of access to affordable healthcare, education, and daycare for children. To make matters worse, soon the US will be rocked by a flood of very sick people attempting to access a broken health care system that is unprepared to handle a wide-scale pandemic.

Already there are signs of growing anger. Students in Ohio rioted after police attempted to push them off the streets following a 24-hour eviction notice at their campus in Dayton and students at MIT protested when they were forced to leave as well; some with no idea as to where they would go. Fiat auto workers in Canada walked off the job over coronavirus concerns and fast food workers across the US have picketed and demanded paid sick-leave.

In the face of this growing class anger which threatens to boil over into a potentially insurrectionary wave, elites have already begun to loosen a few chains out of fear. From talks of a stimulus package, to a moratorium on paying interest on student loans, police suspending arrests for minor offenses and scaling back patrols in general, the push to release non-violent offenders, AT&T ending the cap on data, the suspension of evictions in many cities, and Detroit turning water back on to residents who have unpaid bills. In short, poor and working people everywhere should recognize that those in power – are afraid. "

#anarchism #communism #direct action #mutual aid #corona virus #solidarity #police state #abolish ice #water is life #abolish borders

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ill-will-editions · 4 years

Photo

The Pandemic Community

Nil Mata Reyes

01. Welcome to the pandemic community, a form of social belonging structured by the participatory and prophylactic logic of networked machines. The aim of life in the pandemic community is to be intimately “in touch” yet safely out of reach, to be fully networked in hygienic isolation and thus to be fully isolated by hygienic networks.

02. All life that had been organized at the resolution of the institution—the university, the factory, the office, the hospital, the prison—is now organized at the resolution of network addresses. In the pandemic community, social life, work life, school life, and political life all contract into domestic life before exploding into networked life. Everything that had managed to fugitively escape the digital capture of networks regretfully submits and connects.

03. The abundance of newly unstructured time in the pandemic community rapidly overflows with the abundance of notifications, advertisements, updates, alerts, messages, pings, and invites of network time. If prior to the pandemic a life might pass through various institutions over the course of a day, becoming a worker, a consumer, a patient, and a student in turn, now a life can formally assume all of these positions simultaneously as tabs in browsers, as apps on devices, and as software on networks. Subjectivities algorithmically flicker on and off ceaselessly as database entries.

04. In the pandemic community, the risk of contagion is displaced by networks onto racialized and sexualized others who cannot not work. Warehouse stockers, truck drivers, custodial workers, grocery clerks, hospital staff, garbage collectors, and gig contractors are the material foundation for maximally networked and minimally ambulatory domestic life. What cannot be streamed is compensated for by a mobile class that is as precarious as contact is contagious, as essential as it is expendable.

05. The pandemic community reimagines domesticity as the networked synthesis of safety and efficiency, an integrated and interoperable site where the spatial and temporal division between productive and reproductive labor can be overcome. In confined yet connected homes, lives can sleep, eat, parent, work, drink, cook, fuck, teach, and stream in controlled and disciplined environments. Whether performed at home or performed to sustain the homes of others, all labor is now domestic. Those lives whose homes are themselves hostile due to unaffordable rent, domestic abuse, or overcrowded buildings are abandoned as statistically predictable but ultimately discardable casualties, while those who are homeless never even enter the equation.

06. The pandemic community is not a community of bodies, but of data. As more of life comes to be networked, networks know more about life, and as more of life comes to be known by networks, networks hold more power over life. The reciprocal production of knowledge and power upon which disciplinary institutions were founded is fully automated in the pandemic community. All actions performed on networks produce surplus data which—through its accumulation—ultimately returns as a weapon against life. Politics are dispensed with as another technical problem.

07. Before the pandemic, the privileged cultural form was activity that exceeded networks. All that occured “in real life” and “away from keyboards” was fetishized, even if eventually it also came to circulate on networks. In the pandemic community, the network itself assumes the place of privilege. Cultural institutions of every kind lay off staff and lease servers, cancel shows and commission content. Social life is translated into network life in a participatory and impromptu fashion. Following from the convergence of aesthetics and cybernetics, the pandemic community remakes culture according to the following truisms: “All that networks is good, and all that is good networks” and “The good life is the networked life.”

08. In the pandemic community, capitalism cannot sustain itself and so it is simulated. A deluge of stimulus packages, zero interest loans, and payment suspensions reanimate the economy in virtual form, where the massive subtraction of global labor is balanced by the massive multiplication of global debt. The political suspension of the capitalist economy and the technical simulation of capitalist relations are undertaken only in preparation for the eventual arrival of a post-pandemic world where the contradictions of capitalism can be made real again. Until then, the pandemic community lives the virtualized precaritization, dispossession, and privation of capitalism as part of a networked rehearsal, where the simulation of capitalist markets also simulates their violence.

09. The language of the pandemic community is the language of protocols. The synchronized and sequenced exchange of data between network addresses, the coordinated cascade of binary flips, is a technical means of rendering life numerically determinate. Language is captured as machine-readable characters in order to analyze and monetize it as communication, while consciousness is captured as clicks and scrolls in order to measure and manipulate it as attention. Even death can only be meaningfully understood numerically in the pandemic community, captured as statistics and then visualized as a pixelated series of graphs, curves, and maps. Living and dying are rendered formally interchangeable to the extent that they are both captured within the abstraction and mediation of networks.

10. The destructive forces of the pandemic community are simultaneously the condition of possibility for immensely productive pandemic processes, and everything produced to defend life from contagion may come to serve as a model for post-pandemic life generally. By the time treatments emerge, herd immunity develops, and a vaccine arrives, the global economy will have been entirely reorganized and the novel infrastructures, apparatuses, and networks constituted for the pandemic will already have been well instantiated. Among the most consequential outcomes of the pandemic will not only be the many lives lost to the virus, but also the total reinvention of the very forms within which lives are lived.

11. Whatever works in the pandemic community ultimately works against life. The idleness that characterizes the potentiality of life is understood by the pandemic community as a potential that, if not made productive, threatens to ultimately destroy the pandemic community. In other words, the pandemic community sees the productive and destructive potentials of life as two expressions of the same potential. The demand that we continue to study without pause, that we virtually rush back to work, that our lives go on(line) in networked form, are articulated so urgently now only because in a pandemic that has deprived life of its social uses, life appears to threaten society totally. The zero point of life beyond the pandemic community thus becomes life itself, life beyond any particular use.

12. In the pandemic community, our capacity to know ourselves and one another—to know our situation—is wholly mediated and structured by networks. The algorithms and protocols which compose networks are not only structured by the thoughts of programmers, but also structure thought that occurs conjunctively with and on networks. In such conditions, the examined life can only take shape as a networked examination which never fails to validate its own assumptions more concretely: life lived on networks will always only rediscover itself as networked life. If the network form is totalizing in this sense, our task changes from knowing what we are to refusing what we are.

13. As the last of these words are being typed, a new activity has begun to emerge in cities across several continents which suggests the existence and endurance of life that exceeds and escapes the pandemic community. Every evening, people outside of windows, on porches, and from rooftops have begun hollering, banging on pots and pans, and playing music to and for one another, an activity that in its own way has become contagious. This collective gesture is intended to celebrate those who risk their lives to sustain us all, but also is a way of sonorously finding one another in the cacophony of a dispersed but assembled crowd. Beyond the death, depression, and desperation that course so thickly through the heart of the pandemic community, people cry out to one another for what cannot be found on their networks at home, for life that does not just simply live, but is worth living.

-Nil Mata Reyes, 2020

A print version is available on the authors’ website.

#COVID19 #Alienation #articles #community

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