So what you’re saying is that an Uber driver in Uber’s hometown might not just be making less than the minimum wage (not sure what it is going into 2020, but certainly over $15 an hour), but they will be making less than minimum wage without any state-mandated employee benefits such as unemployment insurance,…

Honestly, if both companies cannot figure out how to pay their employees minimum wage and survive, then I guess it turns out that they were just shitty businesses running an illegal taxi service on VC money. They were doomed to failure anyway and ending their misclassification of their workers just hastened their…

These coal-mining companies are like 100 years old. Literally what thought did these parents put into this? If you don’t like being a 12-year old working in the mines, don’t work in the mines. God, I’m tired of kids within missing limbs complaining about their working conditions.

Even in California, with our restrictive gun laws, it is legal to loan a friend a gun for an extended period.

I’m not sure how that would change things. Religious institutions are already banned from lobbying for specific candidates and they have the same basic restrictions on other types of lobbying as other non-profits.

That would require simply amending the constitution, which it turns out is anything but simple as it requires 2/3rds of each house of congress and 3/4ths of each state legislature to pass. 

How exactly would you tax churches without ending tax exemptions for all non-profits?

The rise of mass shootings is one of those complex social issues that probably does not have a single correct answer. However, there are clearly wrong answers. 

The difference is that Tesla’s technology essentially replaces driver input whereas more cautious manufacturers might take corrective action if you drift out of the lane or beep a warning or something, but they are not designed to steer for you. Autopilot is pretty much 100% taking over normal freeway driving,…

My personal view on this is when these features fail to work as intended, it is usually 50/50 fault between the driver and the technology, although obviously that varies. If autopilot drives someone into a pylon with less than a second to take corrective action, I would say that is almost entirely on the technology.

People are afraid to even walk the streets. . . .

I couldn’t find the interest rate on these loans, but everything I read seems to indicate that they are very low compared to payday loans, which would generally be the alternative for most of these employees.

I asked an evangelical once why his church used the King James Bible, given that while it was probably excellent for its time, much newer and more accurate translations had been released in the many centuries of scholarship since then. He unironically told me that it was because the King James Bible was written in,…

Non-compete laws are an interesting take. In the State that I live in, they are largely unenforceable. Depending on the jurisdiction, a non-compete clause could be difficult or impossible to enforce. In fact, assuming that they were based in the US and not overseas, I suspect just by moving to California they could…

I don’t know, and if they really deleted all the backups, it could be difficult for them to take legal action against people who just set up a new site mirroring the information.

Maybe some members of the far-right nationalists love him, but they’re a small minority.

Have you ever heard the story of the boy who cried wolf? If you call everyone on the right a Nazi, nobody is going to take you seriously when actual neo-Nazis are invading the streets of a small American town, like they did in Charlottesville.

Both sides have a significant population of anti-Semites.

Yeah, except Uber drivers don’t really meet the definition of a contractor. The California Supreme Court more or less said as much. Their entire business model is to misclassify their employees as contractors and try to slow down the law, prevent it from catching up with them for wage theft, until they finally have…

I don’t know, I never had a problem fitting into a taxi cab. It seems like every Uber driver drives some fucking Japanese car that squishes me like a sardine. Also, the drivers have no professional licenses and are responsible for a huge amount of traffic and constantly block traffic lanes instead of picking up rides…