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Marty, you’ve never watched Burn Notice, so let me explain why I think this idea works without expecting you to know anything about the original show. Burn Notice ran for seven seasons, from 2007 to 2013. The basic setup was Michael Westen, played by Jeffrey Donovan, was an American intelligence operative who suddenly got “burned.”…
Read MoreWhat happens when a traffic stop, a tow, and a private parking lot all meet in the same place I recently had a conversation with a customer while we were watching somebody get pulled over. The state police officer already had the lights on. The driver then pulled into a CVS parking lot. The customer…
Read MoreThe timing of this one couldn’t have been much better. I’ve spent the last couple of days working on a Raspberry Pi project, designing and 3D-printing a mounting system for a Raspberry Pi that is eventually going inside an old Macintosh Classic II case. Then, while I’m doing that, I come across a video discussing…
Read MoreWhy vehicle living, gig work, and private-property rules eventually collide Yesterday I talked about no-trespass notices: what they mean, how corporations can apply them across properties they own or control, and how somebody can get themselves into trouble by assuming that being banned from one location has nothing to do with another location under the…
Read MoreWhat corporate security, casino bans, and gig work can teach us about trespass notices There are certain things you learn working corporate security that most people never have much reason to think about. One of them is that when a company tells somebody they are no longer welcome on its property, that does not necessarily…
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Sometimes Breakfast Talk has a plan. Sometimes I start talking, look at what is happening in the world, look at what is happening on the road, and we just start streaming. And apparently “streaming” is now going to be a running joke. I blame water. Welcome to The Gig Man’s Life, where I am attempting…
Read More“But the plans were on display…”— The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams Arthur Dent’s problem was not that the plans didn’t exist.The problem was that the people affected by them had no practical way of knowing about them. We would prefer not to run transportation planning like the Vogons. If your rideshare or…
Read MoreThere is a part of rideshare safety that passengers do not hear nearly enough about: The rules apply to you too. Drivers constantly hear about the things that can get us suspended or deactivated. Unsafe driving. Harassment. Discrimination. Drugs or alcohol. Fraud. Improper behavior. What passengers may not realize is that Uber and Lyft also…
Read MoreOne of the things I continually hear when people talk about “the gig life” is the assumption that because an app operates somewhere, there must be enough work there for everyone who signs up. That simply isn’t how markets work. A small town does not suddenly develop the transportation demand of Boston because DoorDash, Uber,…
Read MoreI have been driving rideshare in the UMass Amherst market for about three years now. And for three years, major events around the university have produced variations of the same problem. Move-in. Move-out. Graduation. Football games. Special events. Road closures. Traffic patterns get changed. Roads become one-way. Entrances get blocked. Areas that were accessible yesterday…
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