Hello and welcome to the Jordanorama edition of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance

news of the week. I am Kathy O'Neill of Mathbabe.org. I'm filling in for Felix Salmon of Fusion,

who is off in Utah, or something like that. I'm joined as always by Slate's Moneybox columnist Jordan Weissman.

Hello, Kathy.

Hello, Jordan.

And also this week, it's very special.

Another Jordan, special guest, Jordan Ellenberg, a math professor at the University of Wisconsin,

and the author of How Not to Be Wrong, the Power of Mathematical Thinking.

Thanks for joining us, Jordan.

Thanks for having me, Kathy. Today we're going to be talking about the risk involved in becoming an academic

in a world where tenure is rare and difficult thing to find. We're going to be talking about

tenure in general and tenure specifically in Wisconsin, where Jordan Ellenberg is a professor.

We'll also be talking about the lotteries, how to design

lotteries, how to beat lotteries, and at least in one special case, how the lotteries

were beaten. But first, we're going to be talking about Uber, because Uber's in the news

again, and we can't stop ourselves. Jordan Weissman, what happened this week?

Sort of a version of Uber's worst nightmare. So this week, it became public that the California Labor Commission had ruled that one of Uber's drivers, just one of them, counted as an employee. As you may know, Uber does not like to refer to its drivers as employees. It likes to think of them as independent contractors who just happen to use its app to connect with customers, with passengers.

And this saves them all sorts of money on things like, oh, I don't know having to pay minimum

wage, having to pay Social Security taxes, payroll taxes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,

all sorts of regulations. A California commission basically said, nope, you more or less supervise this

person. You have a very

large say over how they do their job, whether or not they're allowed to do their job. You are

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