Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 09/12 - Uber: We're NOT in the Ride Hailing Business!

Episode Date: September 12, 2019

Uber says the California contractor law doesn’t apply to it because it is… checks notes… not technically in the ride hailing business, will France block Libra in the EU, dark mode comes to Slack, crowd-sourced answers come to Alexa, and, some news on the Fermi Paradox front. Sponsors: Tinycapital.com Datatribe.com/challenge Links: Uber argues its drivers aren’t core to its business, won’t reclassify them as employees (The Verge) FACEBOOK’S LIBRA CRYPTOCURRENCY WILL BE BLOCKED IN EUROPE, FRANCE SAYS (The Independent) Slack's desktop apps get dark mode options (Engadget) The FBI is investigating a venture capital fund started by Peter Thiel for financial misconduct (ReCode) Exclusive: Amazon will let anyone answer your Alexa questions now (Fast Company) Healthy.io raises $60 million to help patients complete urine tests on their phone (Venture Beat) An Exoplanet Like No Other Yet Found (The Atlantic) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Thursday. September 12th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough.

Today, Uber says the California contractor law doesn't apply to it because it is checking notes, not technically in the ride-hailing business. Will France block Libra in the EU? Dark mode comes to Slack. Crowdsourced answers come to Alexa and some news on the Fermi paradox front. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Remember when I said yesterday, that the big ride-hailing companies were not prepared to take that new California law that

requires them to recognize drivers as full employees lying down? Yeah, well, it seems that Uber is not even willing to acknowledge the law applies to them. Uber says its drivers will remain contractors under the law, known as AB5. As Uber claims, drivers are not core to its overall business, which in reality, Uber says, is merely a platform for several types of digital marketplaces. Quote, contrary to some of the rhetoric we've heard, AB5 does not automatically reclassify any rideshare drivers from independent contractors to employees. Tony West, Chief Legal Counsel at Uber, said in a press call with reporters,

AB5 does not provide drivers with benefits. AB5 does not give drivers the right to organize. In fact, the bill currently says nothing about ride share drivers, end quote. Quoting now from the verge, West is correct in saying the bill doesn't automatically turn every Uber driver into an employee. Much of that work will take place behind the scenes in California's regulatory agencies where unemployment insurance claims, workers' compensation claims, and other individual tests are brought.

But the argument that its drivers operate outside the usual course of Uber's business is sure to raise a few eyebrows. West said Uber intends to follow AB5, should it be put into law next year, but that it will continue to try to prove that it doesn't fall under its legal framework, end quote. So what they're talking about there is the argument that contractors operate outside the usual course of business, that's a clever legal argument. There's something called an ABC test for determining if workers are independent contractors or, you know, regular employees. The ABC test, codified, actually, by recent state Supreme Court rulings, says something along these lines.

Part A of the test requires that the worker in question is free from the control. and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of the work, both under the contract for the performance of the work and in fact. And part B of the test requires that the worker perform work that is outside of the usual course of the hiring entity's business. And part three of the test, part C, I guess, requires that the worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as the work performed. Oh, and the contractor must actually be in business for themselves. Quoting from

the verge again, West said Uber could pass the ABC test because drivers aren't core to its business. Under that three-part test, arguably the highest bar is that a company must prove that contractors are doing work outside the usual course of its business, West said. Several previous rulings have found that drivers' work is outside the usual course of Uber's business, which is serving as a technology platform for several different types of digital marketplaces, end quote. So, I'm just going to leave this here, a tweet from Jameson Foser, quote, This is a good point by Uber. Just last week, as my wife and I were leaving a bar, I turned to her and asked,

are you getting a technology platform for several different types of digital marketplaces, or should I? Our business is not providing rides. GTFO, your business's name is synonymous. with getting a ride. It's like Kleenex saying, our business is not wiping snot off noses, end quote. So I guess we kind of have to make this whole Libra health watch official. The French economy and finance minister has said that the nation of France might block the development of Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency in the EU because, according to France, it poses a threat to national monetary

sovereignty. At the opening of an OECD conference on cryptocurrencies, French economy and finance minister Bruno Le Maire said, quote, I want to be absolutely clear. In these conditions, we cannot authorize the development of Libra on European soil, end quote, quoting the block. While France likely cannot completely block the development of Libra as the Libra Association is headquartered in Switzerland, it could block apps supporting Libra. The French government could also prevent merchants from accepting the proposed stable coin in France, thereby making it impractical to use, end quote. Yeah, and if somehow France could put its foot down and block Libra deployment in the EU, that would be a big enough market that it would make the whole Libra project basically a non-starter, right?

Not at all sure what to make of this, but sources are telling Recode that Mithril Capital, the VC firm co-founded by Peter Thiel is being probed by federal investigators. Quoting Recode's Teddy Schleifer, U.S. officials, including the FBI, have in recent months questioned some people close to Mithril regarding concerns of possible financial misconduct at the firm, according to people familiar with the matter who insisted on anonymity given its sensitivity. Mithril confirmed in a statement that its lawyers are in touch with government authorities. Meathril's leader, A.J. Royan has worked with Teal for almost two decades and has used that relationship to raise over $1 billion. But in recent years, Royan has frustrated some of his

investors by sitting on some of their money rather than investing it in startups, while almost certainly raking in millions of dollars in fees for himself. This federal probe is just the latest but most significant problem for the firm, which has increasingly struggled with internal tensions declining morale and employee departures. Not all federal investigations, of course, and with an indictment and Mithril could eventually be cleared of wrongdoing. When asked if Mithril and Royan were cooperating with the government probe, a Mithril spokesperson said, quote, this is a foiled plot by a self-serving ex-employee. There are no allegations from any government agency or any investor. Nevertheless, our attorneys are in contact with government

authorities in order to protect investors, employees, and portfolio companies against any extortionate behavior, end quote. Maybe you've already tried it out earlier today. Slack has launched a dark mode version of its software for macOS, Windows and Linux, with dark mode variants of all existing sidebar themes, and a new nocturn dark mode theme that is available for both desktop and mobile, quoting and gadget. George Zamfier, Slack's Accessibility Project Management, says the dark mode is, quote, helpful for working at night or in low light,

and it's important for enabling accessibility for people with visual impairments, migraines, and other visual disorders, end quote. To enable dark mode in the Slack desktop client, go to preferences, then to themes. Here you can preview different sidebar options or toggle between light and dark modes. In the future, Slack says, it will enable an option for its client to sync with your desktop OS's dark mode preferences as well, end quote. Now you can ask Alexa a question, and basically anyone can answer you. Amazon has launched Alexa Answers, a crowd-sourced platform that lets any user answer any questions asked by any other user.

At the moment, it's only available in the U.S., quoting Fast Company. The program launched in a private invite-only beta for thousands of customers last year after a period of internal testing. Even with that limited group, Amazon says it's already logged hundreds of thousands of responses which Alexa has served millions of times. Those numbers will likely shoot upwards now that anyone in the U.S. can participate. Those who participate in Alexa answers don't submit responses directly through Alexa itself. Instead, Amazon provides a website where they can view pending queries and enter responses in 300 characters or less. During the invite-only period, Amazon largely focused on making the answer process more engaging. It added a search function and more tags for users to filter different kinds of questions,

and it launched a for-you section that's personalized for each contributor. Amazon has also tried to gamify the process of answering questions, adding profiles where users can see the impact of their responses, a leaderboard, and the ability to earn badges, end quote. Amazon is keen to stress that it has put systems in place to prevent abuse of the system. But when even Wikipedia has trouble managing the quality of authority on its site and all of the back and forth about the arguing over right and wrong, politics, blah, blah, blah, it remains a very big question as to how well this will work for Alexa, because it only takes one garbage or trollish answer, and I can imagine a lot of people would never give this a try a second time. Recently on Thursdays, I've tried to find interesting raises to tell you about to help us keep our eye on up-and-coming startups. Earlier in the year, we identified health tech as a sector that might have an interesting few years ahead of it, especially on the consumer-facing side. Well, Healthy.io is a startup that helps patients analyze urine samples via a testing kit and a smartphone app, and they've raised $60 million in a Series C led by Corner Ventures.

Venture B suggests that Health IOs business must be going gangbusters, noting that they raised an $18 million series B just this past February. Quote, quote, healthy IOs tests were designed with ease of use in mind. Patients wait for the colors on the included dipstick to develop and snap a picture against a card with the comparison app, after which the image is anonymized, tokenized, and beamed to the cloud for diagnostic tests. The medical grade CE and ISO 13485 certified for sale kit performs urinalysis for a range of illnesses, infections, and pregnancy-related complications. Specifically, it tests for ketones, leukocytes, nitrates, glucose, protein, blood, specific gravity, bilirubin, Eurobilogen, and pH levels, markers that span pathologies from urinary tract infections to ketosis, kidney disease, pregnancy, health, and bladder cancer. For patients, the benefits are obvious. Taking pictures of urine samples is

much less inconvenient than driving to a nearby hospital. As for clinicians, such at-home tests, thin out waiting rooms and help hospital staff prioritize urgent cases. Quote, if you look at the exponential growth around the smartphone camera, it makes sense to leverage this growth to use it for diagnostic purposes. Healthy.io CTO Tonatan Adiri. told Ventra Beat in an earlier interview, quote, patients don't have to go to the lab anymore. Healthy.io is effective, Adiri adds, both at encouraging patients to test themselves regularly

and at revealing signs of kidney dysfunction. In a triple-blind study with 500 subjects, 99% of people were able to complete a test. In an assessment of patients with hypertension conducted by Gesinger Health in conjunction with the U.S. National Kidney Foundation, adherence rates were 71% end quote. Finally today, this is not tech, but science.

And I think some of you know this is a personal obsession of mine, but then it's my show. Yes, the Fermi paradox. Google it if you don't know about it. It's not that I'm obsessed with finding aliens. It's that I'm obsessed with the question as to why we haven't found tons of alien civilizations by this point. But then again, we're still nubes. in this universal exploration stuff, a mere 25 years ago. We had never found proof that there were other planets around other stars.

We knew they should be there, but we had no proof. Now we've literally found thousands of exoplanets. And the big news today is, for the very first time, we found an exoplanet that we think has water on it. Not just water vapor, but potentially water in liquid form. Possibly even water raining down from alien skies, quoting the air. Atlantic. Of the 4,44 confirmed exoplanets found orbiting faraway stars, some are rocky like Earth, and others are gaseous like Jupiter, some have thick atmospheres, others have none at all, some planets hurdle around their stars in a matter of hours, while others can take decades

to complete one orbit. And then there's K2-18B. It is about twice the size of Earth, but nearly nine times more massive. It orbits within its stars' habitable zone, and scientists just detected a hint of water in its atmosphere. Astronomers have found water vapor in exoplanets before, but this distant world is the first known exoplanet that both shows signs of water and orbits in a region where temperatures are right for water, if there's enough of it to flow in liquid form. According to new research published today, astronomers have stretched the famous Hubble Space Telescope's limits and detected the molecular signature of water vapor from more than 100 light years away. K-218B, orbits close enough to its star that it receives about the same warmth as the Earth does from the sun,

according to an international team led by Bjorn Beneke, an astronomer at the University of Montreal. Their models, based on the potential temperature conditions on this planet, suggests that the water vapor in the planet's atmosphere could condense into liquid water. In other words, it might rain. The temperature is just right, or potentially right, for liquid water to exist, Benakey says, end quote. So this does not mean that the water for sure exists or how much of it does exist, but this is the first time we found a planet where we know it could. And since K218B has a hydrogen atmosphere, that apparently means it's unlikely to have a rocky surface.

It's probably more like Neptune. But again, from what we know of exoplanets so far, this is good. Planets like this, somewhere between Earth and Neptune in composition, seem to be the most common exoplanets. We've found so far, and the sort of star that this planet orbits, known as a red dwarf, is the most common star type in the galaxy. So again, with the Fermi paradox or even the Drake equation, it's all a numbers game. And anytime we can get any new data like this, it moves the numbers favorably. The real Grand Slam home run, of course, that scientists are looking for, it's not just signs of water. it would be signs of significant oxygen in the atmosphere of an exoplanet because based on what we

understand about biology, if you find a bunch of oxygen in a planet's atmosphere, chances are very good that the only way it got there was from life. Speaking of stuff vaguely related to the Fermi paradox and things like AI, simulation theory, the singularity, for the first time, Nick Bostrom, was on Joe Rogan's podcast last night. If you don't know, Nick Bostrom, he's the philosopher that basically has written the seminal books and papers on things like simulation hypothesis, existential risk, and superintelligence. I'm only about 20 minutes into the episode, and so far Joe's a tiny bit out of his depth, just kind of asking superficial questions,

but maybe I've read too much on this stuff, or maybe Nick will go deeper as the show goes on. But seriously, podcast episode recommendation, Nick Bostrom on Joe Rogan, if you've never heard of Nick. Talk to you tomorrow.