"After the incident... she abandoned a career as a flight attendant... She moved home... She fears the dark, she said, because it takes her back to the seat of the car in the dark parking lot..."

"... where the rape occurred. She sleeps with the lights on, sometimes in her parents’ bed, she said. Uber’s lawyers said the driver had no criminal history, had received top ratings from passengers, had completed training and had acknowledged that he was aware of Uber’s rule that bans sex between drivers and passengers. They said the company was the industry leader in safety, developing a machine-learning tool to assess the risk of potential rides as well as other safety features and releasing public reports documenting assaults and other safety incidents on the platform. Sachin Kansal, Uber’s chief product officer, pushed back against claims that the company 'dragged its feet' on safety features like dashcams. However, 'I’ll be the first one to say we have not done enough,' he said. 'There’s a lot more that we have to do.'"

From "Uber Found Liable in Rape by Driver, Setting Stage for Thousands of Cases/In a federal bellwether case, the jury ordered the ride-hailing giant to pay $8.5 million to Jaylynn Dean, who said one of its drivers assaulted her in 2023" (NYT).

"Uber paid high-profile academics in Europe and the US hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce reports that could be used as part of the company’s lobbying campaign."

"The Uber files, a cache of thousands of confidential documents leaked to the Guardian, reveal lucrative deals with several leading academics who were paid to publish research on the benefits of its economic model.... Using techniques common in party political campaigns, Uber targeted academics and thinktanks to help it construct a positive narrative, namely that it created well-paid jobs that drivers liked, delivered cheap transport to consumers and boosted productivity.... Scholars were excited about Uber’s data because it gave them rare real-time evidence about the effect of prices on markets – one of the key issues among liberal economists arguing for free markets."

From "Uber paid academics six-figure sums for research to feed to the media/High-profile professors in Europe and the US were engaged as part of lobbying campaign, leak shows" (The Guardian).

"We’re becoming more persona-dominated. We all put on an act about how people want to see and hear us. We do it all the time on social media."

"Human beings evolved in small hunter-gatherer groups where everyone knew one another. We aren’t necessarily adapted to be interacting with strangers all the time. People find it incredibly tiring. At least in a taxi, you have an opportunity to sit and be quiet."

Said the clinical psychologist Paul Gilbert, quoted in "Hit the mute button: why everyone is trying to silence the outside world/Uber is trialling a feature that allows customers to stop their drivers from talking. But there’s growing evidence that cutting ourselves off like this isn’t healthy" (The Guardian).

One Uber driver quoted in the article says that even without that Uber shush feature, he can tell who wants chitchat. There are outward signs: "Most people have their earphones on anyway. I usually have my Bluetooth earphone in too." And he wants to listen to "audiobooks, lectures, radio, podcasts, educational stuff."

The author of the article, Richard Godwin, observes that headphones — "retreat into our own discrete sound worlds" — are essentially a mute button. He looks around in his office and sees half of his colleagues isolating their heads under headphones. There's a term for this, "the privatization of auditory space." A lecturer in sonic anthropology observes that we have eyelids but not earlids, and "We don’t have any control over what drips into our ears and collects in them. Earphones are the closest we have to that."

A neuroscientist explains another sight-versus-hearing distinction: "When you look at an object, it appears to be out there in the world. But sounds, for most of us, feel like they’re emanating from within our heads. It makes them more intimate and more intrusive." But sound from headphones is even more intimate and feels even more like it's coming from within your head.

There's so much isolation from your surroundings, so many chance encounters averted, so much commitment to the belief that what's in your personal presence is negative or at least dull and unworthy of attention. You've got to replace it with substance from elsewhere.

This subject made me think of Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man":

Well, you walk into the room
Like a camel and then you frown
You put your eyes in your pocket
And your nose on the ground
There ought to be a law
Against you comin’ around
You should be made
To wear earphones

Dylan had the idea of forcing  the thin man ("Mr. Jones") to go under the earphones, but today all the Mr. Joneses put their earphones in voluntarily. The Guardian article characterizes them as muting the world around them, but from the Dylan perspective, they are muting themselves and ridding him of their unwanted existence. Who's muting whom?

"A Florida tourist has died after being punched in the face by an SUV driver in New York who he likely mistook for an Uber worker."

"Sandor Szabo, 35, was knocked unconscious around 1.15am on Sunday in Queens while trying to make his way home from his stepsister's wedding" (Daily Mail).

It is thought that he had called for an Uber and began knocking on car windows to find out which ride was his. When he knocked on the window of a white SUV the driver climbed out, hit him in the face, and then drove away leaving him bleeding on the sidewalk.

AND: Another example of possibly justifiable self-defense: "Woman shoots masturbating bicyclist trying to break into her SE Houston home, police say."

A fruit-seller in China became a ride-sharing driver in the hope of finding his daughter, who had gone missing 2 decades earlier, at the age of 3,

Wang Mingqing and his wife had been searching for Qifeng all those years — searching the city of Chengdu, putting ads in newspapers and on line. He thought becoming a driver for Didi Chuxing might give his search new reach, and he had signs in his car and gave out cards about the missing Qifeng.

Mr Wang did not have a picture of Qifeng as a toddler so he used a picture of his other daughter in his leaflets, as they looked similar.... "One day, my daughter may just be the person sitting in my car!" he was quoted as saying.

No, the woman did not get into his car one day. His method of searching caught the attention of the media, and that led to a police sketch artist working with Wang to produce a drawing of the adult Qifeng, where it was seen by a woman who lived in a distant city. The woman, called Kang Ying, thought it looked like her, and like Qifeng, she had a small scar on her forehead and she got nauseated when she cried. A DNA test proved that Kang Ying was Qifeng.

The father is quoted — "I can't tell you how much hope, disappointment and despair we have gone through these past 24 years. Now we can finally meet again" — but we're not told how Qifeng disappeared or what she's been doing all these years. I'd like to hear more about what happened, but perhaps the real story for us is that tells us something about China to know that this is what has (supposedly) captured the hearts of the people or this is what the media in China are serving up for the entertainment and delight of the people.

The day the rise of the robots ended?

1. "A woman in Tempe, Ariz., has died after being hit by a self-driving car operated by Uber.... The Uber vehicle was in autonomous mode with a human safety driver at the wheel when it struck the woman, who was crossing the street outside of a crosswalk.... Uber said it had suspended testing of its self-driving cars in Tempe, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto" (NYT).

2. "Facebook FB shares were suffering their worst day in more than five years as the social network came under fire for improperly managing user information when it revealed that a company with ties to the 2016 Trump campaign improperly kept data on an estimated 51.3 million Facebook users for years when it had been required to destroy the data. Facebook claims to have more than 2 billion active users" (MarketWatch).

3. ???

Uber and sexual assault — 2 stories raise the question: How vigilant and self-defensive is a woman supposed to be?

1. You may have heard about the Dallas County District Attorney Jody Warner who got fired after an Uber driver posted a recording of her berating him after he stopped his car and demanded that she get out. The driver, Shaun Platt, explained afterward:

“We get to a stretch in the road where the navigation says continue for several blocks. She says 'no, make a right here.' I said 'I’m required by Uber to follow the GPS.' She said 'no, make a right here' and she became kinda belligerent.... She kept calling me stupid. She said this was the only job I can get because I’m so stupid. And that I was a retard. She hit me on my shoulder. That was the final straw. I’m used to dealing with drunk passengers on different levels of intoxication. I pulled over immediately. I said, 'ma’am you need to exit my vehicle.' She said 'you’re supposed to take me home.' I said 'I understand that but you just crossed the line."

The recording makes Warner look horrible, but she's inviting us to see her subjective perspective in "a situation that made me feel very uncomfortable and I became defensive and eventually angry." She says:

"I'm not trying to make any accusations against that driver, I don't know what's in his heart... Whether it's because of my experience as a prosecutor, maybe [I'm] hyper-vigilant, but whether I was justifiably uncomfortable, I can't tell you that... all I can tell you is what's in my heart."

His heart, her heart, what is she trying to say?

She says she felt uncomfortable with the route the driver was taking and went into "fight or flight" mode, saying her years of prosecuting sexual assault cases may have put her on edge or more sensitive than most.

So, she's a woman, alone in a car with a man, and she's vulnerable, because she's intoxicated and needs to trust him to get her home, and he takes what she now claims looks like the wrong route — though it was apparently just the GPS route Uber requires him to take — and she goes all authoritarian on him, yelling at him, ordering him to do things and attaching shocking epithets and accusations.

2. Meanwhile, "2 women sue Uber, alleging sexual assault by drivers" (NY Post). This is a class action in federal court, accusing Uber of failing to do adequate background checks and monitoring.

The lawsuit... alleges that Uber markets to young women traveling alone and puts profits over their safety.... It asks the court for unspecified damages to compensate the women, and also seeks court-ordered safety measures including fingerprint background checks for drivers and a panic button on the Uber app that would alert the company and authorities to safety problems....

There is a perception that a woman needs to be vigilant about the potential for a sexual attack from an Uber driver, and the lawsuit is an effort to make Uber provide the vigilance. But Uber oversees billions of rides. The incidence of attacks is probably already quite low. Maybe Uber should do more. Should the app have a panic button? The rider has a phone and could call 911, but there are situations when you're just wary — perhaps like Jody Warner — and you think the driver is deviating from the norm and maybe he's not.

You know, we're talking a lot these days about how much a woman should react on the spot when something starts going wrong. The Jody Warner case may explain why sometimes these women report that they felt "paralyzed" or unable to speak up. Look at the horrible consequences for Warner of opting for fight mode.

Is this NYT video an advertisement for iPhone?

It doesn't say it is, and when I played it, I had to first watch what was plainly an ad and that was for another brand of "smart phone"*:



I enjoyed the video. iPhones — with some help from other smart phones? — have "destroyed" a lot of things and it gets funny as the list gets longer. Obvious things on the list: cameras, calendars, address books, maps, clocks (counted twice as alarm clocks and watches). Less obvious things: postcards, photo albums, compasses, levels. Less clearly destroyed things: taxis (but not hotels**). And the less tangible things that relate to human nature are kept upbeat: "small talk" and "shame and humility" (but not dinner conversation, civility, situational awareness, and attention span). In the psychological category, the closest they get to conceding a negative — as the music continues its peppy, happy beat — is "work/life balance" and "anonymity."

So... I enjoyed the video, though I'd probably prefer simply reading the list of things (as I've put it in the previous paragraph), but I was offended by what feels like a hybridization of advertising and journalism, I loathe the music's nudging to find the "destruction" terribly fun, and I hate the triumphant shallowness (unless I do my own work to see it as sarcasm and critique).

_______________________

* I put "smart phone" in quotes because it sounds as cutesy and dumb as "snail mail" to me, perhaps because I've always — as long as there have been iPhones — had an iPhone. And I rewatched the video, and the ad seems to be not for another brand of smart phone but for something like "the smart behind every smartphone." The name on this product is Qualcomm, and I still don't know why I should care about that and not just whatever the new iPhone is going to be.

** Because hotels are big advertisers in the NYT but taxis are not?

"Until now, Uber’s aggressive culture was celebrated and emulated across Silicon Valley, while its excesses were largely dismissed as the cost of 'disrupting' the hyper-competitive transportation industry."

"The term disruption itself, emblematic of a Silicon Valley firm that uses digital chops and a fast-moving, rule-breaking approach to challenge entrenched industries has become synonymous with Uber."

From "Uber founder Travis Kalanick resigns as CEO amid a shareholder revolt." (WaPo)

Was that Uber board member's sexist remark just an attempt to make a subtle dig at fellow board member Arianna Huffington?

I'm trying to understand this story in the NYT:

David Bonderman, an Uber board member and partner at private equity firm TPG, resigned from the board of the ride-hailing company after he made a disparaging remark about women at an Uber meeting on Tuesday.

Earlier in the day at an Uber staff meeting to discuss the company’s culture, Arianna Huffington, another board member, talked about how one woman on a board often leads to more women joining a board.

“Actually, what it shows is that it’s much more likely to be more talking,” Mr. Bonderman responded.

So Arianna Huffington talked about the value of women, maybe — I'm thinking about her specifically — she held forth annoyingly. And the guy makes a wisecrack that's funny because what it really says is that Arianna Huffington has been talking too much.

It's still a sexist remark. He dragged in other women to take a shot at one woman, and the humor depends on stereotyping if the meaning is: If you're any indication of what women on the board are going to be like, there's going to be too much talking. Ha ha. Women! They talk too much. That's the standard stereotype about women that I remember growing up with, back in the 1960s.

How old is Bonderman? 74. I'm reading his Wikipedia page. The guy went to Harvard Law School. He's a billionaire. He likes to celebrate his birthdays:

In 2002, for his 60th birthday, Bonderman had The Rolling Stones and John Mellencamp play at his birthday party at The Joint at Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. John Mellencamp played for an hour, The Rolling Stones played for an hour and a half, and comedian Robin Williams entertained guests between acts. The party cost $7 million....

In 2012, for his 70th birthday party, Bonderman held a private concert by former Beatle Paul McCartney at Wynn Las Vegas for 1020 guests. Robin Williams also performed a comedy routine.

Sorry. No pity for this guy. I tried a sympathetic reading of his remark. No. He's simply awful, even assuming Arianna Huffington is mind-blowingly irritating at a board meeting. And by the way, the meeting was about dealing with the sexist culture at Uber. The company got Eric Holder to produce a 13-page report on the subject, and they're supposed to do something about it, not go back to their old ways.

Bonderman's got his 3-quarters-of-a-century birthday coming up. What if — as with Donald Trump and the presidential inauguration parties — the big stars won't show up now?

"Just How Creepy Are Uber’s Driver-Nudges?"

Asks New York Magazine's Jesse Singal, who's reading a NYT article that nudges you to think that Uber's nudges are creepy.

The company is trying to solve basic problems baked into its business model: From Uber’s point of view, it’s great to have tons of drivers on the road, because that means customers don’t have to wait as long to get picked up. But from drivers’ points of view, having fewer fellow drivers on the road is best, because it means less time idling and earning no money (since drivers get paid only per ride, not on an hourly basis).

So Uber has introduced all sorts of nudge-y tricks to try to keep drivers driving. Some involve gamification — drivers can earn certain (meaningless) badges if they meet certain performance benchmarks — while others involve subtler forms of engineering, like building menus and interfaces in a way where certain options are easier to click. Drivers, Scheiber’s reporting reveals, often feel they’re being nudged into working more than they want to for less than they feel they should be earning.

Singal wonders whether what Uber is doing is anything different from the usual maximizing of profit within the current "American framework in which workers are increasingly alone, batted around by epochal forces, simply trying to get by." So I guess the question is comparative creepiness. Or... if something is common enough, is it just not creepy anymore?

I see I have a tag for creepiness. What is creepiness and why should we care about creepiness as opposed to simply whether something is good or bad? I found 2 useful things:

1. "The Age of Creepiness" (The New Yorker, July 9, 2015):

Half a century ago, there were squares and libertines, stalwarts and histrionics, private lives and public personalities. Today, in our self-scrutinizing, liberated time, these categories have got scrambled, and distinguishing between a charmingly revealing Instagram post and a bomb of oversharing requires daunting feats of judgment. Looming behind many missteps is the threat of creepiness: a fear that, out of all the free paths open to the modern social actor, you have picked the one that is invasive, obviously needy, and perverse.

2. "On the Science of Creepiness/A look at what’s really going on when we get the creeps" (The Smithsonian, October 29, 2015):

Being creeped out is different from fear or revulsion, [says a psychology professor]; in both of those emotional states, the person experiencing them usually feels no confusion about how to respond. But when you’re creeped out, your brain and your body are telling you that something is not quite right and you’d better pay attention because it might hurt you....

[T]here’s an evolutionary advantage to feeling creeped out, one that’s in line with the evolutionary psychology theory of “agency detection”. The idea is that humans are inclined to construe willful agency behind circumstances, seek out patterns in events and visual stimuli, a phenomenon called pareidolia. This is why we see faces in toast, hear words in static or believe that things “happen for a reason.”...

"The most important question surrounding Uber is not whether it is a platform or a transportation company, or whether its drivers are employees."

"It’s whether it can only recoup its investors’ billions by building a monopoly (or at least duopoly with Lyft) on the ruins of public transportation – and it may not take much to tear it all down."

"A California Uber driver helped rescue a 16-year-old girl from sex trafficking after giving her a ride to a hotel along with two alleged female pimps..."

"... police say. Elk Grove cops arrested three people on Monday after the vigilant cabbie dialed 911 after dropping the group off at a Holiday Inn. Keith Avila, a married father of one in Sacramento, had just logged in to Uber and was picking up his first passengers for the night: the teenager, whom authorities would later reveal was a runaway, and two older women."

Here he is, still in his car, explaining what happened into his camera, as the police activity unfolds behind him:



ADDED: I don't think Avila was trying to make a viral video. I assume the police asked him to wait while they handled things and they would come back to take his testimony. He was very upset and he also needed to collect his thoughts and remember the details. He's an important witness and getting out the phone and making this video is an excellent idea from a legal standpoint (don't you think?). Emotionally, for him, it was also good. He was alone and this seems to have given him a way to comfort himself and to reach out to other people. He was also sincerely and justifiably proud of himself and wanted to memorialize the occasion. The virality of the video is a bonus, and it's especially nice virality, because it lets us experience his heroism and internalize the example he's set. It will, I hope, inspire others to notice their surroundings and to understand that calling the police is the proper response.

And the police come quick. They don't play around.

The downside of Uber.

1. "A 23-year-old Uber driver has been charged after he allegedly stabbed a passenger multiple times because he felt the man showed disrespect for his vehicle." The passenger had merely tapped on the window before getting into the car, we're told. That's at USA Today, where the top-rated comment is: "What a fine, upstanding member of society. From the looks of him, he's probably got a couple swastika tattoos & a tRump bumper sticker. Uber-wacko."

2. Uber drivers pushing drugs. "Dozens of people have reported the dodgy dealings, with many taking to social media to recount the drug offers." "Dodgy"... yeah, it's the UK. Maybe it's not happening here. And anyway, the tweets could be lies.

3. Uber, the corporation, has apparently lost over $3 billion this year. "Uber, a closely held company based in San Francisco, has stayed mum about its financial performance even as its valuation has soared to $69 billion, making it more valuable on paper than General Motors Co. and Twitter Inc. combined." Long term, though, it should work, right? (Like Amazon?)

4. [ADDED, related to #1.] "You guys know how to not let pax slam your doors when they exit from your car? give me your advice please."/"Stay home and only travel with your family and friends."/"Door and trunk slammers are an automatic one star. With Lyft you will never see those people again. You can stop most of it by getting out and opening those doors and the trunk yourself."/"Shoot them in the head before they exit your vehicle. I keep a pair of gloves, couple of blankets and cleaner sprayer just for those cases in the trunk."

"And here is where Uber and Lyft made their first mistake" that turned Austin against them.

"We are obsessed with our city’s identity and sense of community, and we are particularly wary of outsiders who come in promising to change us.... A collision of communitarian social activism with Ayn Rand-style technology disruption was probably inevitable. 'Wrong fight. Wrong time. Wrong town,' said Ron Marks, an alum of the old punk rock scene who had a role in 'Slacker.' To be clear: The city never told Uber and Lyft to leave. But it did insist that they play by our rules and have drivers be fingerprinted, just like cabbies — particularly after the police investigated at least seven alleged sexual assaults by ride-share drivers in 2015. Instead, the companies responded by helping to put Proposition 1 on the ballot: They would be absolutely exempt from fingerprinting by the city. Period. That was the second mistake. They arrogantly confused a convenience for a few as a necessity for the many.... Uber and Lyft have claimed they will reduce the nation’s traffic, but in Austin they just added to the aggravation...."

From "How Austin Beat Uber" by Richard Parker, who I thought was the tiger in "The Life of Pi," but who is actually the author of "Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America."

Well, not only is "The Life of Pi" one of my all-time favorite books, but "Slacker" is one of my all-time favorite movies. So my first question is, which one was Ron Marks? He played the role of the Bush Basher, who's just a guy we see in one little scene, ranting about Bush:



Anyway, obviously, Austin thinks it's special. It is special! And one thing about it is the traffic is horrible — not just way overcrowded, but aggressive as hell. The other drivers want you the hell out of there. I am not surprised these people voted against Uber drivers crowding them in their fiercely guarded car space. I know all about the highway version of the "sense of community" they have down there.

"This economic opportunity has excluded women — not purposefully, but women have self-selected out of it."

"And the number one reason they do that is the perception of safety or lack thereof."

Said Nick Allen, referring to the job opportunity that is Uber, quoted in a WaPo article titled "A ‘female-only Uber’ called ‘Chariot’ is coming to Boston next week. But is it legal?"

The founder of Chariot, Michael Pelletz, said: "I saw that something in this movie... I was made to take care of women, to love them respect them.... I was meant to do this.”

The movie that inspired him — for reasons left completely unexplored in the article! — is "Pretty Woman." (Julia Roberts plays a prostitute hired by a rich man played by Richard Gere. It's a rom-com.)

Notice the 2 levels of "taking care of women." Women are the drivers and women are the riders. The women-as-drivers are taken care of by only having women as passengers, and the women-as-passengers are taken care of by only having women as drivers.

Is this an option that the market should be permitted to provide? We have bathrooms for women only with only women as bathroom attendants. Gyms for women. Women are not required to limit their riding to women-driven cars, and women seeking driver jobs are not required to go to work for a women-only driving service.

"Uber hits back at claims of thousands of rape and sexual assault complaints."

"Company says customer-service tickets including 'rape' often involve misspellings of 'rate' and customers claiming 'you raped my wallet.'"

ADDED: In somewhat related news: "NYC’s ‘sex spa’ is grossing people out."

The Spa Castle in Queens is billed as a sprawling, 22-pool Disneyland of soaks and steams.... The wading pool is where much of the action occurs. It’s heated and equipped with underwater jets and a swim-up bar....

"It is an axiom of modern American life: Offer a new service that is wildly popular with the public, and sooner or later you will find yourself labeled an enemy of the people."

The first line of A Wall Street Journal column by William McGurn titled ""Uber Crashes the Democratic Party/The ride-share app is bringing out the inner Elizabeth Warren." (No subscription? Google some text.)

[NYC mayor Bill] de Blasio said he aims to freeze Uber’s expansion until his regulators can figure out how best to block any attempts to “skirt vital protections and oversight.”...

[Hillary Clinton] fretted that while the “gig economy” may be “exciting” and “unleashing innovation,” “it is also raising hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in the future.”...

McGurn takes a swipe that might impress you but doesn't work on me:

[I]nnovation by its nature challenges the inner-Elizabeth Warren in so much of today’s Democratic Party. However open Democrats may be to revolutionary new definitions of marriage, the thought that there might be some nonsexual for-profit contracts between consenting adults keeps progressives up at night....

To end the exclusion of gay couples from marriage — while marriage remained an option for heterosexual couples — was a matter of getting to equality, making the same options open to different kinds of human individuals. If the state of being married doesn't offer the benefits and protections a given couple wants, they don't have to marry. They can remain single. There's no finite number of married and single slots that people compete for. I know there's an argument that gay marriage diminishes the value of marriage for heterosexual people, and if you believe that argument — the "defense of marriage" argument — you can enjoy McGurn's comparison. But I think it's a very bad argument.

There is a much more realistic concern that traditional jobs — with desirable benefits and protections — will dry up as "gig economy" work structures grow. It won't be a matter of individual choice like staying single versus getting married.

But, it's certainly true that even those who love to pose under the banner "CHANGE" only like some changes, just as those who cry "TRADITION!" have plenty of tradition they'd be happy to dump.

What if Hillary gave a speech and nobody cared?

Judging from Memeorandum, that's what happened. The trending stories are about about Scott Walker's announcing his candidacy, President Obama commuting 46 drug sentences, a bit of the Donald-and-Bernie hijinks, Ted Cruz versus the NYT best-seller list, 50 Cent filing for bankrupcy, El Chapo's escape, and the prospects for a "mini ice age" in 15 years and an earthquake that "will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest" who knows when.

I do see one Reuters piece, "Clinton bashes Wall Street, pledges U.S. income equality." What? I thought she said, in that CNN interview I wasted my time on last week, that she was going to be laying out her economic policies in her speech today.

Clinton will unveil more specifics of her economic policy in a series of speeches in coming weeks... Putting some meat on the bones of her economic policy could divert focus from issues dragging on Clinton's popularity....

The substance is always coming later. And there's this in Politico, which seems to think the story of Hillary is insufficient by itself. "Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush renew sparring match over worker hours, pay." Had to put Jeb in there.

Not relying on Memeorandum, I found this in Business Insider:

Hillary Clinton just brought the most important economic issue of the next decade into the mainstream: the gig economy.... "This on-demand or so-called gig economy is creating exciting opportunities and unleashing innovation, but it's also raising hard questions about workplace protection and what a good job will look like in the future," she said at the New School in Manhattan on Monday.

So, the gig economy is an interesting new subcategory in within the issue of jobs, but it doesn't seem that she said anything she'd do about it.

And — also in Business Insider — I see she had a heckler — a heckler who tried to pin her down on an issue she was talking around: "Senator Clinton, will you restore Glass-Steagall?" If only the press would ask questions like that. Not that she'd answer it. She didn't answer the heckler.

I turned this up too. It's not about the speech that was supposed to be important. It's Richard Cohen at The Washington Post — not my ex-husband Richard Cohen — saying:

[T]he incessant attacks on her, the parsing of every sentence, the jumping on her characteristic but harmless overstatements like “dead broke,” brings out the Sir Lancelot (or is it Galahad?) in me. She might not be a damsel in distress, but her enemies are making her into one.

Oh, get that, Hillary opponents? Better not attack her or Richard Cohen, et al., will be moved to — gasp! — defend her. What bilge! You know, if we have to hold back attacking a woman lest men feel the need to defend her simply because she's a woman, then we shouldn't have a woman President.

"This is just fun for me. This is not a job. I don’t do it for the money, I do it because I love driving and because I’m a sociable person."

Says the man officially recognized as the best Uber driver in Canada.

"I only Uber when I’m upbeat, positive, feeling good, when the car’s clean, I want to go be sociable and get to know my own city a little bit more," he said. "The key is that if this ever feels like a job, I’m done. I’m out... Driving has always come very naturally to me. It’s a passion,” he said. He was raised in rural Saskatchewan, where “your driver’s licence is your ticket to freedom. This allows me to enjoy it even more, be social, meet new people, tour my own city and have some fun,” he said.

He was awarded Uber's Sixth Star medal, which he'll display in the car but not call attention to because "That would be un-Canadian."

He has 5 tips for Uber drivers: "1. A clean car... 2. Smooth driving... 3. Amenities... cold water, Perrier, mints, gum and cellphone chargers...  free Wi-Fi... 4. Music... 'chill house music'... 5. Clean personal appearance... shirt with a collar, blue jeans, driving shoes...."

Note: This man also has a regular job.