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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I’m not assuming anything. I’m going on the presumption that they will do what they will do and that politicians are going to be similar regardless of country or tax laws, etc.

    It’s also clear that as I said, you have no idea how these companies operate. They will find a way to fuck the workers over as much as possible.

    As I said and you clearly missed. I’m a so called gig worker except I’m making an actual job out of it. I refuse to do the food deliveries because I can’t see how they make any money after the time and mileage invested. I drive uber, empower and I am building my own service. I’ve also been self employed most of my working life and I know how these companies operate.

    If you can prove that Canada is somehow impervious to what they have done everywhere since these companies have existed, I’ll move asap. For example, if I’m not mistaken, California has similar laws on the books and I am fairly certain that uber and lyft include tips in the hourly min. They will probably do similar up your way unless your law makers are some how much smarter and tougher than ours and thought through the possible ways they could work this law.

    The above said. I’m done here. I’m tired of talking chess while you assume we were going to play chutes and ladders.



  • And if you look closer at the verbiage and the way they are known to operate, you are highly likely to be “on the clock” for 50 but only paid for 40. Then deduct standard taxes from that and you end up with way less than if you had been smart about things and they paid fairly per mile, etc.

    Considering how clueless the lawmakers are here in the states about this stuff (despite best of intentions), I wouldn’t expect this arrangement to be any better than being free to cherry pick the best offers, best times to work, etc. The beauty of being IC is being able to say fuck that, not doing that one. What I fear about this is that the gig workers will have to accept bullshit offers to keep their metrics in the right zone so they don’t get “fired”.


  • It’s a start but even if you are guaranteed that amount per hour worked you can still end up making way less after operating expenses unless they are also pushing the companies to reimburse for mileage on top of a min hourly. I drive for a living, uber, etc and I run my own service. When you are self employed in most industries, hourly is actually counter productive to profitability and success.

    I would absolutely NOT work this kind of job for as little as $20/hour even if that included mileage reimbursement. If you track your earnings hourly then most days you will have an hour or two where you make like $10/hour or less and then it goes nuts and you clear $100 or more in an hour or two or less sometimes. One of the benefits of being self employed is the various tax benefits depending on the country you live/work in. I’m in the USA where I can deduct 64.5c/mile iirc but if I was getting reimbursed I may not be able to take that deduction which would mean I earn less after taxes. Not to mention the control these companies have over drivers when they are considered employees versus independent.





  • I’m in Duke energy territory and the past few years they have been really getting their act together. It doesn’t make it better than a coop model but they have been extremely proactive about clearing trees and anything else that would interfere with the lines as well as adding new capacity to the existing lines, adding/upgrading/replacing poles that are holding more weight than they should, etc.

    I meant to mention in another comment that I was utility locate tech for a couple of years so in addition to my standard geek creds, I have a deeper understanding of this and see it from a different angle than the average citizen.

    Personally we are planning on getting some solar panels installed hopefully this year or early next year, that along with a large enough battery and a v2h adapter (when it becomes an option for my car) will make us virtually immune to outages.


  • That isn’t over construction, that’s under production of electricity. My city has a literal fuck ton of manufacturing all over and we have no rolling black outs and very little outages even with most of the lines above ground. We do get our power from a nuclear plant so that definitely helps.

    A lot of these energy issues are hyper local. Texas for example is the worst in the country for maintenance, price, outages, etc and it’s not solely because of the weather.


  • It is extremely expensive and arduous to bury lines that have been aerial for decades. The cost to bury existing lines is exponentially greater than the cost to keep fixing them as needed for decades. New lines are sometimes buried depending on whether it’s an upgrade to existing infrastructure, power going to a new neighborhood, etc.

    Do yourself a favor and look into exactly what it would take just to get approval from the city, county, etc and right of way from the various owners of land where you want to bury them. Not to mention the hell that would cause for traffic when you have to shut down roads to go under them or worst case tear them up and replace them.

    I am not giving the utility companies a pass here but it’s not as easy as some people seem to think it is.