• The Shiny New “Sharing Economy” Is Sure Starting to Seem Awfully Old-Fashioned


    Brian Fung writes today about Amazon’s new package delivery scheme:

    Flex, Amazon’s new on-demand delivery service, promises to get your packages to you even sooner by hiring independent drivers to bring them to your house. As a lot of reports have pointed out, Flex is basically Uber for Amazon packages.

    But, speaking of Uber, how will Amazon’s leap into on-demand logistics affect the rest of the sharing economy?

    ….Amazon Flex says it will pay its delivery drivers $18 to $25 per hour. They can elect to drive for two-, four-, or eight-hour shifts. In exchange, they need to supply your own car, a driver’s license and an Android phone so that they can install Amazon’s driver app….Compare that to ridesharing services whose drivers get to maximize their flexibility but whose income is more variable. For some, this trade-off may be worth it.

    ….Amazon Flex is betting that as the economy improves, there will still be people who are willing to work in the sharing economy rather than returning to full-time jobs….Research from PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts the sharing economy will become a $335 billion business by 2025 — up from $15 billion a year today.

    Let’s slow down here. What exactly is the “sharing economy”? Originally it was sort of like renting. Time rhapsodized about it in 2011: “The true innovative spirit of collaborative consumption can be found in start-ups like Brooklyn-based SnapGoods, which helps people rent goods via the Internet. Or Airbnb, which allows people to rent their homes to travelers.”

    Then it morphed into “Uber for ____” companies. Uber, of course, doesn’t really allow you to share your car with other people. It’s your car and you’re the only one who drives it. Rather, Uber provides infrastructure and scale that allows you to become an on-demand taxicab whenever your schedule allows it.

    Now it’s apparently morphed even further. In some sense, Uber allows you to “share” your car with your passengers. That’s a stretch, but Flex doesn’t even provide that. The only thing you’re doing is “sharing” your car with the packages you’re delivering. By that standard, all of us are part of the sharing economy, since we “share” our bodies and brains with employers in order to accomplish tasks that our employer gives us.

    In this case, Amazon is doing nothing more than hiring drivers as independent contractors so that it doesn’t have to pay benefits and doesn’t have to pay them if there aren’t any packages to deliver. (You can pick your own shift, but only if a shift is available.) The only real innovation here is that Flex might1 allow you to work odd hours here and there, which is convenient if you have other commitments that prevent you from working a normal schedule. Mostly, though, it’s just Amazon taking the 21st century mania for scheduling workers on a day-to-day basis and instead scheduling them hour-to-hour.

    In any case, it now seems as though the “sharing economy” is any job that’s somehow related to a scheduling app and provides workers only with odd bits and pieces of work at the employer’s whim. In other words, sort of like manual laborers in the Victorian era, but with smartphones and better pay. No wonder PricewaterhouseCoopers thinks it will grow to $335 billion over the next decade. By that standard, I’d be surprised if it didn’t break $1 trillion.

    1I say “might” because it all depends. Maybe jobs really are first-come-first-serve. Or maybe Amazon will start to favor workers who regularly take as long a shift as Amazon wants them to take. Or perhaps Amazon will start to push offers out to workers, and downrate those who don’t accept them frequently enough. Who knows?

  • Putin Is Wasting Blood and Treasure in Syria. Let Him.


    Tom Friedman gets it right on Syria:

    Today’s reigning cliché is that the wily fox, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, has once again outmaneuvered the flat-footed Americans, by deploying some troops, planes and tanks to Syria to buttress the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and to fight the Islamic State forces threatening him. If only we had a president who was so daring, so tough, so smart.

    Yep. Charles Krauthammer, for example, is nonplussed. “What’s also unprecedented is the utter passivity of the United States,” he said yesterday. “The real story this week is what happened at the U.N., where Putin essentially stepped in and took over Syria. He’s now the leader.” And here’s another Republican on the same theme:

    Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) says Russian President Vladimir Putin is escalating his support for the Assad regime in Syria because he thinks the Obama administration won’t stop him. “He sees no pushback, no price to pay,” said Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, at the Washington Ideas Forum on Wednesday. “What he’s doing is raising popularity in his country.”

    ….The Foreign Relations chairman also criticized the Obama administration for missing opportunities in Syria, citing the decision to pull back from its redline after the regime used chemical weapons.

    “We have missed opportunities,” he said….”That could have really changed the momentum at a time when we really did have a moderate opposition. “By us not taking that action, it took the wind out of their sails,” he said. “That was the biggest moment of opportunity … and that was mishandled.”

    This has become almost pathological. Every time Putin does something, Republicans start wailing about how he’s taking charge, showing what a real leader does while Obama meekly sits back and does nothing. They assume that military action always shows strength, while avoiding military action always shows weakness. That’s just crazy. Let’s take a quick survey of the real situation here:

    Syria is the last ally Russia has left in the Middle East. Putin didn’t suddenly increase his military support of Assad as a show of brilliant grand strategy. He did it because he was in danger of losing his very last client state in the Middle East. This is a desperate gamble to hold on to at least a few shreds of influence there.

    Fred Kaplan: “In the past decade, Russia has lost erstwhile footholds in Libya and Iraq, failed in its attempt to regain Egypt as an ally….and would have lost Syria as well except for its supply of arms and advisers to Assad….Syria is just one of two countries outside the former Soviet Union where Russia has a military base….His annexation of Crimea has proved a financial drain. His incursion into eastern Ukraine (where many ethnic Russians would welcome re-absorption into the Motherland) has stalled after a thin slice was taken at the cost of 3,000 soldiers. His plan for a Eurasian Economic Union, to counter the influence of the west’s European Union, has failed to materialize. His energy deal with China, designed to counter the west’s sanctions against Russian companies, has collapsed.

    Intervention is unpopular with Russians. Corker is dead wrong about Putin doing this to curry favor with the public. On the contrary, they don’t care about Syria and are reluctant to lose any lives helping Assad. Putin is assisting Assad despite the domestic difficulties it will create for him, not because he expects the Russian masses to rally to the flag.

    Amanda Taub: “A recent poll by Moscow’s Levada Center shows that only a small minority of Russians support giving Bashar al-Assad direct military support. Only 39 percent of respondents said they supported Russia’s policy toward the Assad regime. When asked what Russia should do for Assad, 69 percent opposed direct military intervention. A tiny 14 percent of respondents said that Russia should send troops or other direct military support to Syria.”

    Putin is targeting anti-Assad rebels, not ISIS. For public consumption, Putin claims that he’s helping the US in its counterterrorism operations against ISIS. This is obvious baloney, since Russian jets aren’t operating in areas where ISIS is strong. They’re operating in areas where anti-Assad rebels are strong.

    Andrew Rettman: “Philip Breedlove, Nato’s top military commander, believes the Latakia build-up has nothing to do with counter-terrorism….’As we see the very capable air defence [systems] beginning to show up in Syria, we’re a little worried about another A2/AD bubble being created in the eastern Mediterranean,’ he said.

    ‘These very sophisticated air defence capabilities are not about [IS], they’re about something else … high on Mr. Putin’s list in Syria is preserving the regime against those that are putting pressure on the regime.'”

    The benefits of getting further entangled in Syria are….what? Russia may be concerned about Syria becoming a breeding ground for terrorists who then make their way up to Russia. But that’s about it. Putin isn’t going to win Syria’s civil war, and Assad will become a bottomless pit of demands for more military support. Aside from winning the admiration of American conservatives, it’s hard to see Putin getting anything of real worth out of this.

    The same is true of the United States. There has never been a cohesive “moderate opposition” that would have ousted Assad if only we had supported them earlier. Republicans keep repeating this myth, but when they had a chance to support strikes on Syria in 2013, they didn’t do it. That shows about how much they really believe this. Nor has there ever been a chance that the United States could topple Assad short of committing tens of thousands of ground troops, something that nobody support. “Arming the opposition” is the last refuge of hawkish dead-enders: something that sounds tough but rarely has much effect. You mostly hear it from people who don’t have the courage to recommend ground troops but are desperate to sound like they’re backing serious action.

    The United States doesn’t have the power to fix the Middle East. We can nudge here and there, but that’s about all. As Friedman says, Obama may have caused some of his own problems by talking a bigger game than he’s willing to play, but he’s still right not to play. If Vladimir Putin is so afraid of losing his last foothold in the Middle East that he’s willing to make a reckless and expensive gamble in the Syrian quagmire, let him. It’s an act of peevishness and fear, not of brilliant geopolitical gamesmanship. For ourselves, the better part of wisdom is to stay out. Modest action would be useless, and our national interest simply isn’t strong enough to justify a major intervention. Like it or not, war is not always the answer.

  • Watch and Be Amazed as the Internet Becomes a Parody of Itself


    It’s about time we had a rigorous, quantitative way of telling our friends what we really think of them. Meet Peeple, coming soon to a smartphone near you:

    When the app does launch, probably in late November, you will be able to assign reviews and one- to five-star ratings to everyone you know: your exes, your co-workers, the old guy who lives next door. You can’t opt out — once someone puts your name in the Peeple system, it’s there unless you violate the site’s terms of service. And you can’t delete bad, inaccurate or biased reviews — that would defeat the whole purpose.

    Sounds like a libel suit waiting to happen, doesn’t it? Exciting! In any case, here’s the deal: When Peeple launches, I want every one of you to download the app and rate me with one star. Zero stars if possible. For a brief moment, I want to be the worst person in the world. This will be my 15 minutes of fame.

    Unfortunately, I know my readers. You probably think this sounds like a hoot, but you’re too lazy to actually do it, aren’t you? I guess I don’t blame you. I am too.

    Oh well. But one more thing before I end this post. According to Caitlin Dewey, “You can already rate restaurants, hotels, movies, college classes, government agencies and bowel movements online.” Bowel movements? Well fine. I would give today’s four stars. No, wait. Five stars. It was pretty excellent.

    POSTSCRIPT: There’s already an app-enabled camera for your front door called Peeple, a poorly-reviewed Tyler Perry movie called Peeples, a kids’ toy called Creeple Peeple, and a “urine-induced art” package called Peeple (you put the peeple in urinals, and they slowly lose their clothes as you pee on them). These guys couldn’t think of a more unique name for their ridiculous app?

    ANOTHER POSTSCRIPT: I sure hope we’re allowed to change our ratings in this app. When some little rat bastard of a “friend” refuses to let me borrow his lawnmower, I want an easy way to punish him.

  • Welcome to the 1990s Version 2.0


    Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the pride of Bakersfield and most likely our next Speaker of the House, was on Sean Hannity’s show last night. He assured Hannity that he would be a conservative speaker with a strategy to fight and win:

    “And let me give you one example. Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee. A select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known that any of that had happened had we not fought to make that happen.”

    That appears to be a reference to Clinton’s private server email woes.

    Ya think? Benghazi is the modern version of Whitewater. I think everyone knows perfectly well that there’s nothing there and never has been, but it gives Republicans an institutional base to issue subpoenas and basically poke into anything that might hurt Hillary. Just as Whitewater led to Filegate led to the blue dress, Benghazi has led to emailgate, and from there, who knows? But obviously Republicans are hoping that if they just keep the investigation going, eventually they’ll get their blue dress.

    It’s worth remembering just how much of the Whitewater investigation was aimed at Hillary back in the day. There were times when she took more hits than Bill. The press played along then, and they’re playing along now. In both cases, there was genuine news that justified a certain amount of coverage. But also in both cases, the amount of coverage was insanely out of sync with the actual evidence of serious wrongdoing. Welcome to the 1990s version 2.0.

  • Elizabeth Warren Is Not a White Knight for Democrats


    As Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers drop, Matt Yglesias talks up Elizabeth Warren’s chances today:

    The basic bargain of the Clinton campaign is breaking down: Democrats increasingly feel they need other options in case Clinton turns out to be much less electable than they thought. So far, that search has manifested in an odd yearning for a third Joe Biden presidential campaign.

    But it’s always been Warren—not Biden—who seemed like the person who could actually beat Clinton in a primary, who is a more charismatic campaigner than Clinton, who is better than Clinton at garnering positive media coverage, and whose record is more in touch with the populist mood of the electorate. And it’s Warren—not Sanders—whom the left wing of the party wanted to recruit as its champion.

    I don’t see it. Warren’s obvious problem is that it’s too late: She just doesn’t have time to set up a serious campaign with serious fundraising anymore. It’s probably too late for Biden too, but at least he has decades of political experience and a big base of supporters that he could call on if he decides to run.

    But Warren has an even bigger problem: Her background is just too narrow. This is a problem for Sanders too, but at least he has a well-established record on a wide range of domestic issues and is campaigning on a broad platform of tackling income inequality. Warren, by contrast, is focused like a laser on one thing: Wall Street. I’m sure she has fairly conventional Democratic views on everything else, but she rarely talks about them because she wants to stay focused on financial abuse. This is probably smart on her part, but it makes her a poor choice as a presidential candidate.

    A few years down the road this may change. But right now she looks attractive mostly because no one has gone after her yet. She’d look a whole lot less shiny if she threw her hat into the ring this year, and I think she knows it. That’s why she’s not running. She understands this stuff a lot better than many of her supporters do.

  • Is Donald Trump the Victim of a Fickle Media?


    Donald Trump’s poll numbers are falling, and political scientist John Sides says it’s because the media is covering him less. The chart on the right tells his tale. When the media started covering Trump heavily, he surged in the polls. When they tapered off, he began to drop.

    I don’t doubt that there’s some truth in this, but really, how can you tell? When there’s an earthquake somewhere, news coverage spikes, but no one thinks news coverage caused the earthquake. News coverage spiked because something happened. Likewise, news coverage of Trump increased because something happened: He officially entered the Republican race and started racking up a lot of support.

    I’m not quite sure how you disentangle the two. Sides acknowledges that this is probably a “self-reinforcing cycle,” but how much is coverage driving polling versus polling driving coverage? There’s no way to tell.

    But there is a further bit of evidence that would be helpful: What does this chart look like for other candidates? In particular, people like Fiorina, Carson, and Sanders, who have surged, as well as folks like Walker and Bush, who have declined. Do those candidates follow a curve that matches the coverage they got? The data is all there, so it should be easy to take a look.

    For what it’s worth, I think that Trump is just following the usual path of pop culture stardom: a fast rise when he does something to gain attention, followed by decline as people get bored with him and turn to something new. This cycle normally takes months or even years, but in the hothouse environment of a political campaign it’s more like weeks. Unlike, say, Hillary Clinton, Trump doesn’t have a solid base of support built up over years. He’s purely a fad, so his rise and fall are especially fast and spectacular. The media surely plays its role in this, but so does real life.

  • Rumor of the Day: Gay Marriage Martyr Kim Davis Met With the Pope Last Week


    Here’s your spine-tingling rumor of the day, straight from Robert Moynihan of Inside the Vatican. He claims that gay marriage martyr Kim Davis met with Pope Francis last Thursday at the Vatican embassy in Washington DC, just before he left for New York City:

    “The Pope spoke in English,” she told me. “There was no interpreter. ‘Thank you for your courage,’ Pope Francis said to me. I said, ‘Thank you, Holy Father.’ I had asked a monsignor earlier what was the proper way to greet the Pope, and whether it would be appropriate for me to embrace him, and I had been told it would be okay to hug him. So I hugged him, and he hugged me back. It was an extraordinary moment. ‘Stay strong,’ he said to me. Then he gave me a rosary as a gift, and he gave one also to my husband, Joe. I broke into tears. I was deeply moved.”

    ….Vatican sources have confirmed to me that this meeting did occur; the occurrence of this meeting is not in doubt.

    Davis’s lawyers also say the meeting took place, and told WDRB News that although they don’t have photos of the meeting yet, they’ll release them as soon as they get them. Davis herself, though, is silent about all this—which seems a little odd since she hasn’t been shy about talking to the media before. So far there’s neither confirmation nor denial from the Vatican.

    Did this actually happen, or is it a truly bizarre hoax? I cannot tell you. But I figured you’d want to know.

    WEDNESDAY MORNING UPDATE: It actually happened. From the New York Times: “On Wednesday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, confirmed the meeting, but he declined to elaborate. ‘I do not deny that the meeting took place, but I have no other comments to add,’ he said.”

  • Chart of the Day: Intriguing New Data on Getting Kids to Eat Their Vegetables


    Over at Wonkblog, Roberto Ferdman passes along some fascinating new research on the frustrating problem of getting kids to eat their vegetables in school lunches:

    It turns out there might be an ingenious solution hiding beneath everyone’s nose.

    Researchers at Texas A&M University [found] there’s at least one variable that tends to affect whether kids eat their broccoli, spinach or green beans more than anything: what else is on the plate. Kids, in short, are much more likely to eat their vegetable portion when it’s paired with a food that isn’t so delicious it gets all the attention. When chicken nuggets and burgers, the most popular items among schoolchildren, are on the menu, for instance, vegetable waste tends to rise significantly. When other less-beloved foods, like deli sliders or baked potatoes, are served, the opposite seems to happen.

    So let me get this straight. The way to get kids to eat vegetables is to serve them crappy-tasting food that makes the vegetables seem good by comparison? That’s the ingenious solution?

    Yes indeed. So if we just starve the little buggers and then give them a choice of steamed broccoli or vegemite on wheat, they might go ahead and force down the broccoli. And since you are all sophisticated consumers of the latest research, I’m sure you want to see this in chart form. So here it is for veggie dippers (notably, a “vegetable” already disguised with mounds of ranch dressing). As you can see, when paired with yummy Chef Boyardee ravioli, the kids turn up their noses at the dippers. But when the entree is a yucky sunbutter sandwich, kids cave in and sullenly eat more than half of the little devils.

    This all comes from “Investigating the Relationship between Food Pairings and Plate Waste from Elementary School Lunches.” However, if you click the link and read the report, you will almost certainly find yourself tormented with yet more questions. I’m here to help:

    Q: What the hell is a sunbutter sandwich?

    A: According to an exhaustive search of the entire internet, it’s a peanut-free peanut butter sandwich made out of sunflower seed spread.

    Q: What vegetable do kids hate the most?

    A: Sweet potato fries, which barely edge out green peas. Oddly, sweet potato fries are far more loathed than raw sweet potato sticks. I suppose it’s because the raw sticks are served with some kind of horrific dipping sauce.

    Q: What’s the most popular vegetable?

    A: Tater tots.

    Q: Knock it off. What’s the most popular real vegetable?

    A: It’s a little hard to say, but the garden salad with ranch dressing seems to do relatively well.

    Q: Is a cheese-stuffed bread stick really considered a proper entree?

    A: Apparently so. And as loathsome as it sounds, I suppose it’s not really all that different from a slice of cheese pizza.

    Q: Is a whole dill pickle really a “vegetable”?

    A: In west Texas, where this study was done, it is.

    Q: How about mashed potatoes?

    A: Yep.

    Q: French fries?

    A: Yes indeed.

    Q: Seriously?

    A: It appears so.

    Q: Is one of the authors really from the Alliance for Potato Research and Education?

    A: That’s what it says. In fact, they’re the ones who financed this study. I can’t tell if they got their money’s worth or not.

  • Whose Tax Plan Is Best For Millionaires?


    So here’s where we stand. Marco Rubio has a tax plan with a top rate of 35 percent that promises to boost our economic growth rate to 3.5 percent per year. Jeb Bush then came out with his plan, which has a top rate of 28 percent and a growth rate of 4 percent per year. Then Donald Trump announced his plan, which has a top rate of 25 percent and a growth rate of 6 percent per year.

    Who’s next? Carly? I advise her to announce a plan that has a top rate of 20 percent and promises growth of 8 percent per year. Ridiculous? Sure, but who’s going to call her on it? I mean, what’s Bush going to do? Get into an argument about whose supply-side growth assumptions are the most out of touch with reality?

    Besides, she has to compete with Ben Carson, who doesn’t have an official tax plan but has vaguely said he likes the idea of a flat 10 percent tax based on the Biblical practice of tithing—though he’s been a little wobbly on whether his tax rate would really be exactly 10 percent. I guess even God can be improved on.

    In case you’re curious, here are the top tax rates on the rich from each of the leading candidates. The most dynamic defenders of free enterprise are at the top, while the losers are at the bottom:

    • Carson: 10-15 percent
    • Paul: 14.5 percent
    • Huckabee: ~17 percent (23 percent FairTax that eliminates the payroll tax)
    • Trump: 25 percent
    • Bush: 28 percent
    • Christie: 28 percent
    • Rubio: 35 percent
    • Fiorina: ?
    • Cruz: ?

  • Lying With Charts, Anti-Abortion Edition


    During this morning’s Planned Parenthood hearings, Rep. Jason Chaffetz displayed a chart that seemingly showed a huge increase in the number of abortions they’ve performed. Actually, though, the number has increased only about 2 percent per year since 2006. How did this happen? Well, it turns out that Americans United for Life, which made the chart, decided to ignore the y-axis. But I’m sure it was an honest mistake, probably due to poor math skills from a lifetime spent in the liberal public education system. So as a public service, I’ve replotted the data using conventional “numbers” and “slopes.” You’re welcome.

    POSTSCRIPT: And why has the line for cancer screenings gone down? According to Cecile Richards, it’s because “some of the services, like pap smears, dropped in frequency because of changing medical standards about who should be screened and how often.”

    UPDATE: Tim Lee helpfully points out that Planned Parenthood also provides STD testing and contraceptive services. If you add everything up, you get the rather boring chart below. I guess that doesn’t make very good TV, does it?