Category: Places
Methinks Uber doth protest too much
A London Employment Tribunal has ruled that Uber is in the transportation business, not the software business; and that Uber is an employer, not a service that connects independent contractors to customers.
If you like reading legal documents, this decision is worth reading: the Tribunal is both witty and brutally critical of Uber. Here’s one quote from the decision, Case nos. 2202550/2015, paragraph 87 (the entire decision is online here:
“In the first place, we have been struck by the remarkable lengths to which Uber has gone in order to compel agreement with its (perhaps we should say its lawyers’) description of itself and with its analysis of the legal relationships between the two companies [i.e., between Uber B.V., and its subsidiary Uber London Ltd.], the drivers and the passengers. Any organisation (a) running an enterprise at the heart of which is the function of carrying people in motor cars from where they are to where they want to be and (b) operating in part through a company discharging the regulated responsibilities of a PHV [Private Hire Vehicle] operator, but (c) requiring drivers and passengers to agree, as a matter of contract, that it does not provide transportation services (through UBV or ULL), and (d) resorting in its documentation to fictions,36 twisted language37 and even brand new terminology,38 merits, we think, a degree of scepticism. Reflecting on the Respondents’ general case, and on the grimly loyal evidence of Ms Bertram [lawyer for Uber] in particular, we cannot help being reminded of Queen Gertrude’s most celebrated line: ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’ 39
“36 Eg the passenger’s ‘invoice’ which is not an invoice and is not sent to the passenger
“37 Eg calling the driver (“an independent company in the business of providing Transportation Services”) ‘Customer’ (in the New Terms [of service]). This choice of terminology has the embarrassing consequence of forcing Uber to argue that, if it is a party to any contract for the provision by the driver of driving services, it is one under which it is a lient or customer of “Customer’.
“38 Eg ‘onboarding’ for recruitment and/or induction and ‘deactivation’ for dismissal
“39 Hamlet, Act III, sc 2″
The Tribunal doesn’t come right out and say that Uber is lying. But the Tribunal does state, for example (para. 89), that “Uber is in business as a supplier of transportation services,” not as a technology company. The Tribunal quotes with approval the following paragraph from a North California District Court judgment: “Uber does not simply sell software; it sells rides. Uber is no more a ‘technology company’ than Yellow Cab is a ‘technology company’ because it uses CB radios to dispatch taxi cabs.”
And the Tribunal later states (para. 93) that Uber “is precluded from relying upon its carefully crafted documentation because, we find, it bears no relation to reality.”
And further, the Tribunal calls Uber’s legal arguments (para. 96) illustrative the phenomenon of “‘armies of lawyers’ contriving documents in their clients’ interests which simply misrepresents the true rights and obligations on both sides.” So while the Tribunal does not say that Uber is lying, the Tribunal makes it very clear that Uber is not telling the truth.
As you’d expect, Frances O’Grady, General Secretary of the British Trades Union Congress, speaks more harshly of Uber. Calling Uber and its ilk purveyors of “sham self-employment,” O’Grady said, “For many workers the gig economy is a rigged economy, where bosses can get out of paying the minimum wage and providing basics like paid holidays and rest breaks.”
This is pretty much what the Tribunal said in its decision, except more politely.
All this reveals a dark side of Silicon Valley: a significant part of the Valley’s vaunted “innovation” actually relies on armies of unscrupulous lawyers contriving documents to avoid legal requirements designed to protect workers and consumers. So thank goodness for the scrupulous lawyers who help expose the facts when Silicon Valley does not tell the truth.
BBC News offers more on this story here.
Sketchbook
Tracking pit
In the middle school Ecojustice class this morning, one of the things we did was to make a tracking pit. Lorraine brought some mud that got dug up from her yard (if you want to be technical, it’s a clay-like soil composed of Quaternary alluvial deposits). Some of us worked on moistening the mud till it got to the right consistency, then spreading it out on a flat spot under some bushes:
We put a bait cup in the middle of the mud, then crumbled a granola bar into the bait cup. By this evening, the bait was gone, and there were plenty of squirrel tracks in the mud:
The tracks were not as distinct as I would have liked. The mud was a little too wet, and the suqirrels slipped and slid just enough to blur the finer details of their tracks. Nevertheless, these are some pretty good tracks!
Sketchbook
Watching a video by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, at SFMOMA.
South Palo Alto faith communities
For our “Neighboring Faith Communities” class for middle schoolers, I continue to think about ways to communicate the incredible religious diversity in our area. My latest effort: a map that shows faith communities in South Palo Alto, an area roughly bounded by U.S. 101 on the northeast, Oregon Expressway on the northwest, El Camino Real on the southwest, and San Antonio Rd. on the southeast. (I did go a little past these arbitrary boundaries to include some additional faith communities.)
The map below shows the approximate boundaries of the area I researched, a rectangle about 2 miles by 2-1/2 miles. Our faith community, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto (UUCPA), is circled in red. All the faith communities shown are within about a half hour’s walk of our congregation. You can click on this map to go to an interactive map on Mapquest (I’ve also embedded the Mapquest map at the very end of this post).
Below is the list of the 35 faith communities I found in this area. I suspect I missed some; if you can identify other faith communities in this area, please let me know about it in a comment. (Updated 10/20/16 based on Erp’s comment.) Continue reading “South Palo Alto faith communities”
Cafe, San Francisco
Places of worship in south Palo Alto
A few days ago, I started at my office in the Unitarian Universalist Church, and took a walk around the neighborhood. In less than an hour, I walked past or near 7 different faith communities.
I walked to the corner of Charleston and Middlefield; down the street and just out of sight on my left was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints at 3865 Middlefield Rd., which is locally famous for the annual Christmas Creche exhibit that is erected in its front yard in December.
Continuing down Charleston, I crossed Fabian Way; to my left, a few blocks down at 3900 Fabian Way is Kehillah Jewish High School, where the Keddem Congregation, a Reconstructionist Jewish faith community, holds its larger events and services.
At the corner of Charleston and San Antonio Road, I walked next to the Jewish Community Center, where, every Sunday, the C3 Silicon Valley Church rents their auditorium for a worship service. The C3 Church is a worldwide movement based in Pentecostal Christianity.
Turning left on San Antonio, I came to Anjuman-e-Jamali, a new Dahwoodi Bohra mosque, an impressive stone-clad building; the minaret is over 60 feet tall, though supposedly it isn’t functional.
I crossed back over Charleston Rd., and went a block or two into the city of Mountain View, where I saw the Abundant Life Christian Fellowship, in a large building that looks like a corporate headquarters or maybe a big-box store. The Web site lists no denominational connection, but recent pastors have had connections to Pentecostalism.
Back over the city line in Palo Alto, along San Antonio Rd., I walked by the small Central Chinese Christian Church. Unfortunately, the Web site is in Chinese, so I don’t know which branch of Christianity this church comes from.
I walked back down Charleston Rd., and returned to the Unitarian Universalist Church.
The final tally for a one-hour, 2-12 mile walk:
1 Jewish congregation: Reconstructionist Jewish congregation, rented space
1 Muslim congregation: Dahwoodi Bohra (a sect of Shia Islam)
4 Christian congregations:
— Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormon), Restorationist Christian
— C3 Church, Pentecostal Christian
— Abundant Life Christian Fellowship, nondenominational Christian
— Central Chinese Christian Church, unknown Christian
1 post-Christian congregation, Unitarian Universalist
Winnemucca, Nev., to San Mateo, Calif.
On a whim, we decided to stop at the Thunder Mountain Monument near Imlay, Nevada. Frank Van Zant, who determined that he was partly descended from Creek Indians, decided to build a monument to the American Indian. The monument consists of buildings, fences, figures sculpted in concrete, junk sculptures. The monument tells a non-linear story about the destruction of Native American peoples by peoples from Europe. Van Zant changed his name to Chief Rolling Thunder.
But there’s a back story. Before he started work on the monument, Rolling Thunder’s wife died, and one of his children committed suicide, according to a 2010 article on Smithsonian.com; and the first figure that Rolling Thunder made was a sculpture of the son who had died. In this monument, personal grief is mingled with grief arising from genocide and racism.
Rolling Thunder’s grief proved overwhelming, and luck was not with him. His followers began to drift away. An arsonist set a fire that destroyed many of the buildings that were once part of the monument. His new wife left him, taking their children. He committed suicide in 1989.
The monument is slowly decaying: vandals and the weather are both taking their toll. It has been declared a state historical site, and looks like there is now someone living on the site to watch over the monument. It would be possible to descend further into grief, and declare it a tragedy that the masterpiece of an outsider artist is not being maintained. I prefer to view it from another vantage point: this is a work of art that exists in four dimensions, where the fourth dimension is time. Some things are fading away, but some of the sculptures seem to me to be improving with time: they are becoming more pointed in their message, more urgent, more real.
Grief happens over time. If you try to freeze it so that it cannot change and evolve, that can get you into trouble. You need to move forward with it, towards the light.
We stopped at the Donner Pass trailhead for the Pacific Crest Tail, parked the car in some shade, and started out on a hike through the Sierra Nevadas. It was a perfect day for hiking: cool mountain air, a pleasant breeze, a clear blue sky overhead. We hiked for an hour and a half, talking idly about this and that, then turned around and hiked back. I stopped to look at a Williamson’s Sapsucker; Carol stopped to photograph glacial erratics.
After three hours of hiking, we got back to the car refreshed and happy. We sat under the trees at the edge of the parking lot and ate our picnic dinner. And we arrived back at home at about 10:30, tired, content, and different from when we set out.
Evanston, Wyo., to Winnemucca, Nev.
I had a slight but sharp headache when I got up, and it took me a few minutes to remember why: Evanston is about 6,750 feet above sea level, and I am not used to air that thin. Then I remembered that we were back in the Far West, where the air is much drier than the air in the eastern half of the continent, so I was probably dehydrated too. Coffee helped the headache go away.
Within an hour from the time we left Evanston, we were in the outskirts of Salt Lake City. We hadn’t driven through a city since we had to get through Chicago, and we did not like the thought of having to drive through Salt Lake. So we decided to go around it, up Interstate 84 to the north of Great Salt Lake, then down state highways to rejoin Interstate 80 in Utah.
As we left Interstate 84, a sign on Utah Highway 30 read: “Next Services 102 miles.” We drove past the occasional agricultural field, growing what appeared to be hay or alfalfa, and through open range (though we didn’t see any cattle). A sign declared that we were passing through the town of Park Valley, though we didn’t see much beyond a small cluster of houses and a Mormon church. A little later, we wound through another cluster of houses that a sign said was Rosette. People who live in these two communities have to drive forty miles or more to buy gasoline.
About halfway between Rosette and Grouse Creek Road, we pulled off the two-lane highway to look out over the basin of the Great Salt Lake Desert. We watched dark areas of rain fall from clouds fifty or a hundred miles away. We could see the glint of sunlight shining on the salt flats far to the south of us.
I stood in the middle of the highway to take a photograph of the highway and the plain sloping up to the mountains. There were so few vehicles I was able to stand in the middle of the road for several minutes and frame exactly the photograph I wanted.
Yet it didn’t feel lonely at all; it was just beautiful. But we had to keep driving west, so we got back in the car. We stopped briefly in Montello, Nevada, for something cold to drink; Montello boasted a couple of bars and a sort of general store that also sold gas. And in another half hour, we were back on the interstate.
We made one more stop, at the Western Folklife Center in Elko, Nevada. They have one of the most interesting selection of books on the Far West, ranging from cowboy poetry to academic studies to just plain weird books. (In fact, one of my favorite books that I’ve bought at the Western Folklife Center is titled Living the in Country, Growing Weird, about life in a tiny town in north central Nevada.)
I got to talking with the man who was watching over the shop, and he told me that if I liked the books they sold, I should come in January to the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. It’s more than cowboy poetry, he said, there are workshops on hatmaking, and Basque cooking, and it’s lots of fun. And, he added, you can come by train, so you don’t have to drive through the snowy passes in January.
I’ve always wanted to come, I said, but it’s hard to get away from work in January. And that reminded me that I will be back at work on Monday, just two days from now. I love my job, but I’m not sure I’m ready to go back to work, not quite yet.
