don’t feed the trolls...I keep having to remind myself.

noncompete clauses are not enforceable (at least here in Illinois). Cost me a hundred grand in court to figure out that a signature and a promise in a written contract can be nullified by an activist judge.

i’ve got 17 unfilled jobs paying over $17 and a bonus with paid healthcare in my warehouse right now...never saw an applicant who was an Uber driver full time apply for one. Just sayin...

Unemployment rate is one of the most gamed figures government produces.

You can drive for any ride share company. You can pick your hours whenever you want. You can pretty much use anything thats not a heap of crap to do it.

The answer to all of this is (and you and many others are going to hate this) simple (oft used in economics but more broadly applied as well) principle of Laissez-Faire. If these gig-jobs are so horrible, then nobody would do them...but LOTS AND LOTS of people earn in ways that don’t conform to someone’s overly narrow…

stupid millenial engineers/designers 

no, you were right, splinter....the drivers poached the work on the value prop of lower price getting the business. This is the absolutely logical conclusion - once Uber/Lyft have extracted all of the VC grease, and have extracted all of the equity from the driver’s vehicles, and then spent all that money on lavish…

blend, shmend. You be you dude....drive what you like, just make it the cleanest, nicest, best maintained example of whatever it is. Those dudes care about not dying in a private plane. They will respond well to confidence and meticulous pragmatism - they will respond poorly to poor decisions like being a poser.

you should try being a business owner sometime - maybe before talking about things you don’t know much about. In both instances, I’m a business owner - and in both cases my customer establishes price, which I choose or choose not to work the project. Neither is materially different from the other in that respect. And…

it’s just a matter of time, man.

they are a HARD sell, that’s for sure.

these are form over function, man....lol

ditto

the time is worth something, and if you want a beardo-bike rightnow, this is not a bad deal. It would take a LOT of time to recreate this, sourcing all the bits and pieces, teardown, paint, polish, re-tire and reassemble.  Not to mention the space, incidentals and tools required to do a project.

I don’t want it, but if you’re a hipster with more money than skills, this is actually a very fair deal.  Would be hard to build it for $5 grand and could take a year or more to do so. 

I have a masters in economics. I understand why you don't understand. It doesn't really work that way off the graph from Econ 101

What you are missing is that MOST Uber drivers prefer NOT being an employee, rather an entrepreneur. The vocal minority that is pushing the employee status agenda is a well funded sham setting those few up as red herring Patsy's. It's an agenda, man. Can't you see that?

Simple. To avoid matching checkoff taxes, FICA, unemployment, etc. Same reason companies use temps, 10-99's, etc

a touch melodramatic and superlative, but your heart is in the right place, man.