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Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

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Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#151

Post by PartiallyTyped »

DarkContinent wrote: post #28

Re LinkedIn as an example of an economic termite: It's certainly true that LinkedIn is the go to for white collar professionals seeking to make their resumes visible passively to recruiters. But isn't life still easier with LinkedIn than in the before times, when recruiters would dig deep to get folks' phone numbers and then have to call each of those people individually? (I think the modern equivalent would be email…

LinkedIn is eating both sides of the pie; 50 eur for premium, it's ridiculous and we are here because we really have no choice.

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#152

Post by lotsofpulp »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #106
silverquiet wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with much of this and I'll add one of my biggest stressors - opaque pricing. One of the biggest "innovations" in the US in the last decade or so seems to be to add as many hidden fees as possible to every service imaginable. Obviously it's hardly a new idea; I'm sure that human nature being what it is, they had to deal with it in Mesopotamia. But it makes budgeting very difficult; I suppose it's like living i…

This seems to be rooted in a generalized problem which I'll hastily call the conscious abuse of polite understanding, or abuse of economic consensus. Another possible rubric for this, a bit more sensationalized, would be "destructive precision". A simple example would be the hollowing-out of conventional terms everyone believes they hold the same settled definition of, such as "a flight." Instead of transacting accor…

On the other hand, I recall paying roughly $100 per hour of one way flight time in the 2000s, and I still pay near $100, maybe $150 to $200 in peak season (including seat assignment and carry on luggage).

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#153

Post by losthalo »

johnwatson11218 wrote: post #81

This is the time for AI assisted efforts to merge with open source to deliver alternatives to all these Big Company type proprietary software solutions. I have been thinking of what it would cost to create enterprise workflow and document management but based on nodejs. Perhaps targeting the business markets of a smaller country such as Pakistan could be a way to get real world feedback before larger markets are targ…

The problem is the cost to shift to a new product, not cost of the product.

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#154

Post by ghaff »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #152
ChainOfFools wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be rooted in a generalized problem which I'll hastily call the conscious abuse of polite understanding, or abuse of economic consensus. Another possible rubric for this, a bit more sensationalized, would be "destructive precision". A simple example would be the hollowing-out of conventional terms everyone believes they hold the same settled definition of, such as "a flight." Instead of transacting accor…

On the other hand, I recall paying roughly $100 per hour of one way flight time in the 2000s, and I still pay near $100, maybe $150 to $200 in peak season (including seat assignment and carry on luggage).

I don't love taking flights in general--and my goal moving forward is to reduce the number of flights relative to the amount of travel overall. But I'm also well aware I could make my travel more comfortable but at an hourly cost that I'd probably much rather spend on other travel things. (Not that I cheap out beyond some floor.)

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#155

Post by Forgeties79 »

pixl97 wrote: post #116
estebank wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you need to look at perception and fix the reasoning behind it. Many times that perception is shaped by the media we consume, which has no obligation to have any connection to the reality on the ground. At that point whatever is done to improve the reality doesn't have to have any impact on people's perception.

I don't really watch any broadcast/cable news these days. Was at a restaurant that had it going on their TV and my goodness all it was saying is "FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR". Absolute mind rotting garbage.

I was at an airport the other day and I was struck by how I saw four different new stations all covering one tornado in a town half way across the country from me. This was top line national news for like 20min with reporters standing by downed trees and going on and on about the “utter devastation.” It seemed pretty small potatoes tbh but maybe I was missing context?

You would think there is some sort of tornado epidemic nationwide based on the way they were acting. Tornadoes happen all of the time, and they are very tragic for those involved, but y’all aren’t hearing about every house that burns down in my city lol

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#156

Post by losthalo »

dindobre wrote: post #105

I feel like the gist of this could have been "rent seekers bad", something I'd strongly agree with. A non-trivial part of society is checked out of real work and milking others dry because of existing conditions or acquired leverage.

Has anyone done a real study on what value the financial industly adds?

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#157

Post by smsm42 »

I am wondering about the Autodesk example. If they suck so much and the users hate them so much, why no competition have arisen? Are there some government induced barriers? We saw Microsoft has been an unassailable incumbent on browser market, OS market, personal computing market, etc. And yet, their perceived monopoly has been successfully attacked. It took big companies like Google and Apple and IBM, but it turned out not to be impossible. I'm sure some big companies wouldn't mind a chunk of CAD market - why it's not happening then?

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#159

Post by AnimalMuppet »

gruez wrote: post #144
spicyusername wrote: post #6

I very much agree with the premise that economists unduly focus on a few metrics of dubious quality - labor force participation, personal consumption expenditures, market capitalization, wage growth, etc - and overfit them to construct a coherent narrative about the "strength" of the economy and what the experience of living in that economy must be like. There's a story right now being peddled by all the talking head…

>I think this goes the other way around. Our method for understanding the economy is flawed and is not properly capturing what all consumers know intuitively, things kind of suck, even when you have a job and even when you're still buying things. It seems kind of lazy to observe that anecdotes contradict statistics, and then conclude that it's the statistics are wrong without providing any empirical evidence to the c…

Anecdote would be saying that some individual over on 4th Street feels that things aren't that great. "Consumer sentiment" (or whatever name) is actually a statistic.

So now you're at two statistics, one that measures economic activity in jobs and output, and the other that measures peoples' intuitive feel of the economy. I think the gap between them might be that peoples' confidence was shaken by inflation reigniting after 15 years.

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#160

Post by netbioserror »

apsec112 wrote: post #101
Spooky23 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two Americas, the one that HN folks inhabit and the underclass. The former is doing great. The latter has grown and shifted. I grew up in a rural community that was in the process of unraveling from a prosperous farming and light industrial area to a rural slum. There are zero operational farms in that area today. The one I worked for as a teen was in continuous operation since the Dutch colonial period. Th…

Since 2016, real (inflation-adjusted) wages have risen quickly for people in the bottom quartile, while for upper-income workers they've been stagnant. Obviously, most people on HN are still better off than manual laborers, but the gap has narrowed substantially (a big reversal from 1995-2015) and that's a good thing. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...

Way to completely miss the anecdotal point about rural cultural decay. You can point to a chart showing rising wage growth all day, but if it's happening at the expense of long-lived communities being hollowed out, you're effectively celebrating peoples' destitution.

It is incredible how Internet armchair technocrats will attempt to reduce human existence to a few equations and wonder why broader populations despise the Ivory Tower.

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