Today’s links Lies, damned lies, and Uber: Uber wants to pay its Toronto drivers $2.50/hour (eh). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Lies, damned lies, and Uber (permalink) Uber lies about everything, especially money. Oh, and labour. Especially labour. And geometry. Especially geometry! But especially especially money. They constantly lie about money. Uber are virtuosos of mendacity, but in Toronto, the company has attained a heretofore unseen hat-trick: they told a single lie that is dramatically, materially untruthful about money, labour and geometry! It’s an achievement for the ages. Here’s how they did it. For several decades, Toronto has been clobbered by the misrule of a series of far-right, clownish mayors. This was the result of former Ontario Premier Mike Harris’s great gerrymander of 1998, when the city of Toronto was amalgamated with its car-dependent suburbs. This set the tone for the next quarter-century, as these outlying regions – utterly dependent on Toronto for core economic activity and massive subsidies to pay the unsustainable utility and infrastructure bills for sprawling neighborhoods of single-family homes – proceeded to gut the city they relied on. These “conservative” mayors – the philanderer, the crackhead, the sexual predator – turned the city into a corporate playground, swapping public housing and rent controls for out-of-control real-estate speculation and trading out some of the world’s best transit for total car-dependency. As part of that decay, the city rolled…Pluralistic: Lies, damned lies, and Uber (29 Feb 2024)