So Lyft is now punishing drivers. I've been getting over a head cold so I haven't been riding in. The guy who picked me up night before last mentioned that if you don't take all the rides you're supposed to Lyft steals all rides that take you out of your local area. The only hails you get are short-run, sub-$10 rides. You can go all day and make $80. The driver next day told me that lately Lyft has been giving her the longest of three options in her directions - she has to deliberately pick the one that takes less time to get anywhere she's going. She's new and doesn't understand it. The dark design here is so thick it's appalling. Same guy who has figured out how not to get boned by Lyft drives 12 hours a day. He knows all about the restaurants that are open at 3am because he doesn't stop to eat. He drinks nothing but water. He's effectively a prisoner in his car (but master of his domain) for 84 hours a week because he's saving up to get his livery permit so he can get the fuck out of driving for Lyft. He drives 2,000 miles a week. He retired his escalade with 350,000 miles on it. He'd had it three years. I paid $17. He got $9 of that because I tipped him. I was with him for 45 minutes. Lyft is losing $7m a day to create this Dickensian dystopia. Uber? fifty eight million dollars a day. "We have a history of losses and, especially if we continue to grow at an accelerated rate, we may be unable to achieve profitability at a company level for the foreseeable future.” Meanwhile an unelected charlatan is ramrodding England into a no-deal Brexit and my president wants to open the Tongass to logging. Even the hedge fund managers are starting to chant "burn it the fuck down" on Twitter. Google is evil yet I'm fucking around in Google Cloud Platform because it's the only way I can get speech-to-text for my wife for less than $280 a month. All signs point to recession. And we employ five millennials that our business has to protect against recession because there are mortgages, there are student loans and when you're a sole proprietor things are fucking scary but when you have headcount the stakes are so much bigger than you that it's terrifying. We've been trying to set money aside to upgrade our own house. We should probably set money aside so we can help our employees not lose theirs. I'd drink but I'm sick.
Get outta here with that shit. New tech is an unmitigated good.
I'm at work and can't respond to this, but I want to. Please give me a day or so.