Dear Bernie Sanders please do not spread bullshit about Hugo Chavez and Venezuela. What convinced me to support your campaign was the fact that you were the first to boycott Netanyahu ' s speech to Congress. Netanyahu came to Washington to dishonestly and in league with.outright racists undermine the first United States President who isn't a white man and to campaign for a United States war on Iran.
Your stance then took courage and was on the side of peace.
Americans are too easily film flammed into supporting aggressive wars against " dictators " of weaker countries. By claiming that Chavez was a dictator you are spreading confusion and indirectly threatening the people of Venezuela, who voted for Chavez time after time in clean elections that would be envied in Florida and Ohio.
There may be a lot to criticize about Hugo Chavez, whose kind heart led him to send heating fuel to poor Vermonters.
Hugo Chavez never was a dictator. Venezuela never has constituted a threat to the American people.
Most Summers it's a bit harder driving a taxi. Affluent Manhattanites are out of town. The kids at NYU and Columbia are gone. If the dollar is strong, like it's been awhile then foreign tourists are not filling the gap . It's tough for the liveries too so lots of them turn to poaching street hails whether they're affiliates of Uber or ABC.
New taxi drivers and taxi drivers who like to see the end of the world always seem to be found by Daily News reporters doing their taxi human interest piece for August. A perfect storm for complaints about Uber. Daily News reporters Nolan Hicks and Dan Rivoli got the story this year.
There's no doubt that yellow cab receipts are down but so is the number of yellow taxis on the prowl. First some drivers went to Green cabs. Second some went to Uber and third, some took off to visit their native lands. It happens every summer. So yellow taxi receipts are down, but spread among fewer taxi drivers. Fewer cabbies chasing fares mean fewer fares.
Lawrence Meyers pointed out some rusty spots on Uber' s shiny suit of PR armor, namely that Uber appears to be tapped out. Out of of the highly touted number of 20,0000 Ubers on the road in New York City only around 3000 are actually working at any given time. Of course Uber/ Goldman Sachs is a threat to all transportation workers on earth today. I wouldn't be happy if I were not fighting Uber.
STOMPING OUT UBER MEANS STARVING GOOBERS
Goobers live on surge prices. The straight up Uber fare just doesn't support a Goober and a car. One way to starve a Goober is to be where Uber is demanding surge prices.Uber customers often will cancel a priceyGoober if there's an empty cheaper taxi who reaches them first.
Sherpa Share has an app that shows where the demand for Uber is greater than the supply of GOOBERS. These heat zones are the best place to be for finding a fare. This is no guarantee, but where the map is red, Uber passengers will pay extra, sometimes a whole lot extra. As a bonus you could be taking a fare away from Uber and helping starve a Goober.
I don't know if I should call him "Goober" or "The Goober." He's one of the taxi drivers who quit the bullshit at the garage and signed a sub prime car lease so he could go work for Uber, be his own boss, work when he wants to, spend more time with his family, yadda yadda yadda. He came by the garage the other morning looking for a half shift of work in a yellow taxi. Now since so many drivers went either to drive green taxis or Uber, the management of the garage was glad enough when he drove onto the lot in the little black prius that he pays $400 a week rent for. I couldn't help but ask Goober why he's looking for a half shift in a yellow taxi. Isn't he driving for Uber after all ?
Well, he tells me, he's making it with Uber just fine, but he has to pay the car lease and that cuts into the money he's making. Also Uber takes a dollar from each fare plus 25%. Aside from that stuff, he's making it. It's just that his wife had made hotel reservations for the holiday weekend without consulting him, so he's a bit short. He said he has to teach his wife not to make plans for him without his okay. I said "uh huh" and went back to reading Guardian on line, and eating my morning meal al fresco at one of the picnic tables they have in the yard because Goober was talking Uber cult gibberish. I mean why rent out a yellow taxi for half shifts while you're paying a weekly $400 for a little black Prius whether or not you're working and no matter what you are making or not making.
It must be great being one's own boss, just like Goober.
Speaking of Goobers, one Uber driver who is nobody's Goober makes videos and gets commissions from Uber/Goldman Sachs for roping Goobers in. He calls himself +UberMan on Google+ plus and You Tube. I have to hand it to this guy. He could probably sell.any lie or exaggeration to thousands of Goobers who are just dying to get played, splayed, flayed and flambed by Uber, or for that matter by anyone who exudes self confidence, or charisma. So +UberMan has enough of a conscience (or he knows his Goobers all too well) to tell them flat out that Uber lures its Goobers to come out to drive by making false representations that the fares the Goobers will collect is higher than what they're going to receive in reality.
I am a student of the human condition and I have realized that there are millions of people who really want to get Ubered: played, flayed, splayed and flambed by whosoever. That's the true secret of Uber.
I downloaded an app that's used by Uber drivers for some business related tasks. The function I was looking for was the heat map. It tells the drivers where there are concentrations of passengers that outnumber Uber cars available to them. Drivers get bonuses and passengers within the warm zones pay premiums called surge prices. UberX can sometimes be cheaper than a yellow taxi but not generally so when surge pricing is in effect.
Above is a screenshot showing where the surge heat was at 2:27 this morning. None in Manhattan, a lot in parts of Brooklyn that were called ghettos not so many years ago. In those Brooklyn heat zones a taxi medallion provided an advantage over green taxis and Ubers evaluated by me at $00.00. IMO where people are looking for Uber's at a premium price there are people who'd cancel an Uber car and grab the taxi if it reached them before the Uber. Tonight I did that twice. Yellow taxi drivers should start doing battle with the goobers in their own comfort zones.
Starve a goober, smash the surge and make money.
Aiming an Arro at Uber's heart.
Hailo was a taxi hailing app that was destined to fail miserably and that it did. The Taxi and Limousine Commission had blocked the industry from developing its own E hail system, obviously mimicking the referees of professional wrestling matches. Now there's ARRO rolling out this month. I hope to be using it soon along with thousands of other cabbies. I'll be seeking the heat too with the heatmap app by SherpaShare. Don't go to a knife fight wearing a blindfold.
Politics make strange bedfellows. Here's a notice of an anti Uber demonstration to be led by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance and Bhairavi Dessai. The notice was posted by fleet managers in the taxi driver waiting room at "my" garage. Dessai is the one who worked with Michael Bloomberg to bring in the green taxis and with Bloomberg and Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to destroy taxi fleet leader Yevgeny (Gene) Friedman after he messed with Bloomberg and Uber. I doubt any fleet owner wants to fill his shoes, so the default "industry leader" will be Bhairavi "no skeleton in my closet" Dessai.
I am writing this as an American who's spent time in Venezuela amongst regular people who were and are engaged in their life struggles. I care about these my friends who treated me with kindness and hospitality, and whose country, Venezuela, I have a special fondness for.
Well I don't know if pictures in the mass corporate Zionist media are staged. Were it to turn out so I wouldn't be amazed. Looking at the pictures I couldn't help but be reminded of the Hollywood tale of a false flag operation, a CIA-Hollywood production.
Do you remember the Kuwaiti baby incubator hoax? Almost the same except that a million or so people ended up dead.
Reading of the global concern for around a thousand deported Colombians and supposedly five thousand more who are said to have self-deported had been among five million or so residing in Venezuela I couldn't help but ask why and how five million Colombians are living in Venezuela in peace as legal residents and even as citizens.
Poor Colombians have no human rights in Colombia! Farmers and ranchers pay paramilitaries to chase them off their land. Union activists turn up dead.
Why and how could insurgent groups function for fifty years if things were even reasonably fair in Colombia? Where's the love for poor Colombians living in Colombia?
I don't know if there have been legal violations of process in the deportations of not. Two things though I do know:
Smuggling and other activities harmful to Venezuelans and Colombians residing in peace in Venezuela had been going on with increasing harm being done.
Also, paramilitarism, an unwelcome import to Venezuela, the same that makes a mockery of human rights in Colombia itself threatens all law-abiding people in Venezuela, be they citizens, legal residents, tourists, business travelers, foreign students or even people who are not legally in the country but otherwise law abiding.
It has not been the practice of the Venezuelan government to round up and deport undocumented immigrants en masse nor to threaten to do so.
It's reported that the lines at stores and pharmacies and the shortages of food, medicine and personal hygiene products are abating. This would suggest that the border closure and deportations had a good effect. I would suppose, as Venezuelan Army Colonel Raga said, there's much corruption in Venezuela. I think just about everyone who lives in Venezuela or who follows the situation there knows that. So, perhaps, in some way the shutting down of the border puts the ball in those individual's court. The President, after all now has the issue of smuggling and paramilitaries front and center. By the way, Colonel Raga names several names. I have no way of forming an opinion about them and if I did, I'd keep it to myself. That's stuff that Venezuelans will sort out.
Venezuela has undertaken a feat that has never happened before: Becoming a socialist country not born in violent revolution or war.
Looking around the world many people see that capitalism is kaput as far as being able to meet the needs of a growing number of billions of human beings on this earth yet the global capitalist class, yearning for a world without people (except for themselves) is weaponized in horrible ways that couldn't be imagined less than a hundred years ago. If Venezuela could cut the Gordian knot it would bring hope to millions around the world.
Venezuela is in an emergency situation and it called for emergency measures.
Venezuela is a nation of around 27,000,000 people that is dependent on oil exports for most of its government revenue and foreign currency needed for importing almost everything that's consumed in the country.
Since the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998 the government has made efforts to assure all Venezuelans have their necessities met. In spite of serious problems with corruption and inefficiencies and instability caused by the determination by the United States to overturn the government utilizing various means including the funding of opposition groups the living standards of the poor and near-poor were improving overall until the recent months since the collapse of oil prices. Venezuela has a complex monetary system that was intended to stop capital flight and facilitate the import and sale of low cost staples, medicine and personal hygiene products. It worked more or less well until the recent oil price collapse.
Neighboring Colombia has suffered through decades of insurgency and repression and its economic policies are neo-liberal. These factors have resulted in a large and growing Colombian population of around five million people living in Venezuela, where they've been afforded resident and citizen status.
Given the availability of cheap food, personal hygiene products and nearly free gasoline, as well as a wrinkle in the monetary system that's not hard to game Colombians as well as others have been involved in smuggling of contraband. Millions of people inside Colombia survive by informal work in the transportation and sale of items meant to go to people in Venezuela.
Venezuelans have been suffering long lines at stores where they don't always get the cheap items that they are looking for. Inflation is also eating away at the socialist type programs and living standard gains.
Last week three Venezuelan soldiers were shot while engaging in an anti-contraband operation at the border. That incident apparently was the straw that broke the camel's back. President Nicolas Maduro ordered the closure of the border and deportation of Colombians believed to be involved in contraband activities.
Some commentators have likened these steps (around 1,000 deportations out of a population of around 5,000,000) to the Nazi persecutions of the Jews. President Maduro is widely being compared to racist US demagogue Donald Trump. Trump brands all Mexicans as criminal and calls for revocation of citizenship of hundreds of thousands of people who are born in the United States and who are US citizens according to the constitution. Clearly the comparison to Nazism is outrageous and false as is the comparison of President Maduro to Donald Trump.
Because the Colombian government doesn't care about its own people many are in dire straits with the loss of contraband trade.
There is a humanitarian crisis in Colombia and those who claim to care ought to be organizing relief and pressing for international aid for the Colombian people.
I like to go to pick up passengers at Cornell Medical Center, which is located at the end of East 68th Street for a whole number of reasons. For one thing it's set up.in a way that lets me wait on an orderly line rather than me racing up and down the streets competing with people who are younger than me. Their reflexes and vision are sharper than mine are. So waiting on a line and getting the luck of the draw, the good fares or the not so good ones, makes sense for me. Also the management of Cornell is thoughtful enough that they allow us taxi drivers to use the good clean restroom facilities of the E.R. while we don't have to worry about getting a parking ticket.
Also I like the idea of serving patients, visitors and the doctors, nurses and workers. Each deserves to be treated with respect, possibly more so than any.random passengers.
So it really bothered me that this character pulled in front of me while I was stopped, waiting for the taxi that had just picked up passengers at the front of the line to pull out, and for the taxis ahead of me to move up a spot. I didn't like it but I'd never thought of making a big deal about it. BUT when two people got into his taxi and a couple of moments later emerged and started walking towards my taxi I got angry. Very angry. This dirtbag was refusing to take them where they wanted to go. Just what they needed as they left the hospital - a rude insult.
Also it was the second insult this slimeball delivered to me directly. Here he's telling me : "I cut you off so that I'd get a fare before you, but these people are not going to be a profitable transaction. So here, chump, they're yours."
Well, I am not any cabbie's back up driver.
I walked over to him. I told him I'm going to report him to the TLC. He flipped the bird, and told me to go fuck myself.
