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It's not a crime if we do it with an app

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Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#61

Post by Cheer2171 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #44
Cheer2171 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, they broke the law How about I go into your house and break the laws around theft? I promise to do good things for society with your property. The ends justify the means, according to your argument.

Some laws are just. Some aren't.

Oh so it seems you are unaware that in modern societies, there is a thing where if laws are unjust, we have a whole system for changing them. It's called government. If your definition of 'unjust' is different than the political system's definition, you have to push for social change to change the political system. You don't get to short-circuit this just because you're an 'innovator'.

How do you feel about protesters who carry out acts of civil disobedience, violating laws to draw attention to the issue? Just curious.

Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#62

Post by miohtama »

maiar wrote: post #42
ryandrake wrote: post #17

More like "It's not a crime if a corporation does it." The US treats corporations with kid gloves. They get away with so much, and in those rare cases where a regulatory body does anything , it's often just a strongly worded letter, a warning, a threat to one day send a strongly worded letter, or, in really rare, extreme cases, a company official gets called in to say a few words in front of Congress. Nobody goes to…

This. The entire point of corporations is to shield individuals from penalties, but they don’t work. Business failure in good faith, where the shielding makes sense, is not really protected because bank loans require personal liability and because it’s impossible these days to recover from a damaged reputation unless you come from a family rich enough to hire its own PR firm. On the other hand, when it comes to letti…

Corporations are owned by people. Profit is distributed back to the society thru dividends. The largest shareholder category is pension funds, not billionaires. So effectively boomers are robbing younger generations.

Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#63

Post by aleph_minus_one »

Eextra953 wrote: post #23

Does anybody know whats stopping ethical and slightly less greedy companies from outcompeting these conglomerates? Its a question I keep coming back to because if the market were efficient then competitors should be able to use that same data to undercut big potato (or big whatever). This never seems to happen.

> Does anybody know whats stopping ethical and slightly less greedy companies from outcompeting these conglomerates?

The customers who buy the product with the lowest price.

A very low price is much easier to achieve if you can make use of economics of scale.

Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#64

Post by MaxikCZ »

Eextra953 wrote: post #23

Does anybody know whats stopping ethical and slightly less greedy companies from outcompeting these conglomerates? Its a question I keep coming back to because if the market were efficient then competitors should be able to use that same data to undercut big potato (or big whatever). This never seems to happen.

Discoverability. Theres no money in promoting free stuff, so compact free solutions never make it to your suggestions.

Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#65

Post by ipdashc »

fny wrote: post #18

Don’t react to the Airbnb and Uber: read the article to the end. The core argument is tech empowers oligopolies which in turn drives inflation. There are other damning facts too: > private equity companies have rolled up all the fire truck companies, hiking the price of trucks, creating backlogs and bottlenecks for parts and service, and starving the nation's municipalities (including Los Angeles) Capitalism is dead.…

> Don’t react to the Airbnb and Uber: read the article to the end.

Agreed, but it is IMO a flaw in the author's work that they chose to lead with Airbnb and Uber. You see this very often with criticisms of the tech industry, and while it is understandable (they're the 2nd and 3rd most visible examples of what the author is describing; I'd put crypto 1st, though), I think it just hurts the point and certainly the appeal of such articles. Frankly, if we ignore the real issues they cause, how many people in the real world actually care about Airbnb and Uber dodging regulations? The public-opinion tide miiight have turned against Airbnb by now, but I'd wager that for most people, Uber/Lyft are still fine, and an overwhelming improvement compared to the taxis we had before. (I don't even use them more than a handful of times a year, but that's way more than taxis.) Even for Airbnbs, I suspect most people think nothing of them; a small chunk see, like, those funky, slightly-cheaper, hipstery accommodations they might have stayed in once or twice; and a vanishingly small percentage actually care about property shortages or regulatory issues.

I realize I've detracted from the main point, and I apologize, but it is something people will have to deal with if they want to make this point (tech industry regulation) to the wider public. Using Airbnb and Uber as the headline examples of "tech dodging regulations" is an awful idea when most people are ambivalent, if not outright happy, that the regulations were dodged in those cases. We will need something a bit more salient.

Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#66

Post by ohlookcake »

golemotron wrote: post #15
mrs6969 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they should not exist at the first place. So I cant use my car to carry out people, without a permission. However, if I do it with uber, I suddenly can! More than this, I wonder if I can create a company to do taxi bussiness. I will buy 5 car, then rent out 5 more, do taxi bussiness… what makes uber so special, I wonder

Uber is not a great case for your argument. They made the world safer and enabled transportation for people who would otherwise not have it. No one, literally no one, who has spent any time in taxis wants to go back to them. I can't tell you the number of times I've had to call several companies to get a taxi to the airport have none arrive. Uber broke the ice and showed what was possible. There was literally no othe…

> They are a net positive by a large margin Maybe initially. The 'large' margin is getting smaller every day. Pricing is opaque and ever increasing. A subscription is slowly becoming a requirement rather than a ln add on. Most of the price increases are not passed on to the driver. Drivers in most markets are 'independent contractors', which they're realising is a bad deal. They've only recently moved from market-capture mode to tighten-the-screw mode. Expect the enshittification to accelerate

Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#67

Post by stickfigure »

llamaimperative wrote: post #53
method_capital wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is: nothing. The whole argument is predicated on a political conviction, not an economic reality.

You don’t think massive conglomerates have additional advantages they can deploy against competitors in order to retain their cartels?

Do you have some specific examples?

Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#68

Post by ajmurmann »

Symbiote wrote: post #4
andrewfromx wrote: post #2

but would Airbnb or Uber exist if they tried to get permission first? Netflix streaming was illegal at first. Youtube for sure. Napster. Tesla (no dealerships it was direct sales to consumers.) Even craigslist or ebay or the very first Ford Model T. They break rules because that's the only way to test the waters and see if the public wants the rule broken?

I don't think most of your examples are correct, but in any case, not everything has to be started in the USA. Private companies running a taxi service (arranged by phone) were widespread in the UK long before Uber, and surely also other places. Why couldn't Uber start there, if the USA was too restrictive?

One Uber founder is American and the other Canadian and AFAIK both lived in the Bay area, so they probably prefer staying where they were. How much harder would it be to get VC funding for a business in the UK? They already had VC connections in the US from prior ventures. Same issue probably true for engineers they could bring on board. The UK is a much smaller market.

Further, I don't think Uber started out breaking regulations. Initially you could only hail black limos and which were licensed. They only started offering rides from unlicensed drivers in response to competition from Lyft. Lyft in turn started as a long-distance ride sharing company which is also legal. So the hurdle for either company to move to the UK was even higher. Moving an established company to a less important market seems far fetched

Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#69

Post by crawfordcomeaux »

hermannj314 wrote: post #32

This is the way our world works. If you steal a potato, you will be arrested immediately and the case will be resolved in a few weeks or months. If you illegally fix the price of potatoes and steal billions from the market, you will be allowed to operate for years in the open while a lengthy civil procedure eventually may ask you to give 1 or 2% of what you stole back in fines. Don't blame the potato theives or potat…

Don't blame anymore because blame is an act of supremacy.

Responsibility says it's shared to varying degrees through various classes of equivalence among all.

The thieves are trying to eat or feed people in the context of oppression that capitalism is. Capitalism is a system of oppression that requires poverty to work, so is an economic system of oppression. "Crimes" committed in the context of oppression are required when "noncrimes" are insufficient for meeting needs.

Cartels operate without regard for human life and support the context of oppression. Totally different level of responsibility.

Politicians create the system based on choices made due to support from the cartels. They're in some classes of equivalence with the politicians because they're interacting in a way that promotes the context of oppression.

They're all operating within the context of oppression that is individualism.

Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#70

Post by cluckindan »

crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #49
cluckindan wrote: post #33

What proportion of the ultimate financial beneficiaries of these apps are old money white supremacists? Airbnb leaves more people homeless while enabling the rich more convenience. Uber (as in ”übermensch”) makes the most desperate people compete for pittances, use their income at the gas station and the auto parts store while enabling the rich more convenience. Doordash does the same. Robinhood et al take from the p…

Rioting has its place, but I think we're at a point where that's become somewhat performative & police are now militarized with Trump holding a good bit of the slack on their leash. Find the underground railroads. Build communities of care. We need to get better at caring for each other & collaboration. The other side has apps for that. Where are the developers making apps for the revolution?

Where indeed:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5m18v0/sam_maloney...

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