Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

greg-satell.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 318 posts

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#111

Post by Ekaros »

cultureulterior wrote: post #102
a-dub wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as a counterpoint, there were places like nyc where the cabs and black cars were very reliable, fast and cheap and there were both drivers and family owned black car bases that were keeping the overheads rather than see them sent elsewhere. many drivers were first generation immigrants.. owned homes in queens, were putting kids through college, looking at their name come up on the medallion wait-list in a few years a…

The fact that medallions were so expensive that you could retire off owning one was the problem . There weren't enough taxis.

The insanity was that medallions had monetary value in first place. Just imagine that you couldn't start software company unless you bought medallion from someone already operating one. Or any other business for that matter... As for each type of business there is very good reasons to limit amount of those...

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#112

Post by Ekaros »

lordnacho wrote: post #101
simonbarker87 wrote: post #15

Fully agree with this. It seems like so many of the apps that come to dominate just make up for shortcomings unique to the US that then, with money, take over the rest of the west for no good reason other than scale to get 25 people at the top of those companies rich. I’ve never seen the need for Uber. Taxis have never been an issue in the UK and the most successful firms in the city I lived when Uber was starting ou…

I would say a taxi app is a good though obvious idea, worth pursuing. What was a bit surprising was the sheer scale of it. That crowding out point in the essay is very relevant, we are basically allowing the bully with the big stack to raise everybody out of the poker game, no matter how good his cards actually are. If we want a functioning market, let a bunch of little guys show what they can do, don't let one huge…

Dumping of service should outside very limited promotional offers lead to massive penalties. That is multiple times the generated revenue. Possibly distributed to proven operators on the market.

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#113

Post by Beltalowda »

Jabbles wrote: post #22
simonbarker87 wrote: post #15

Fully agree with this. It seems like so many of the apps that come to dominate just make up for shortcomings unique to the US that then, with money, take over the rest of the west for no good reason other than scale to get 25 people at the top of those companies rich. I’ve never seen the need for Uber. Taxis have never been an issue in the UK and the most successful firms in the city I lived when Uber was starting ou…

Absolutely disagree - taxis in the UK used to be awful, none of them had apps before Uber. Black cabs in London were generally good due to the high entry requirements but you could only get them by flagging them down somewhere fairly central. Uber introduced competition which has massively improved all other taxi services. These days there's nothing special about Uber except its ubiquity so I don't care if it fails n…

You could just phone a cab, no? That's what I did anyway; it's less convenient than an app, but back in the day you didn't have mobile phones either so not much option really. I don't really see how an "app" is fundamentally all that different, and it's kind of an obvious thing to add once smartphones become popular.

I agree that Uber injected some fresh energy in a somewhat complacent market, but the real "innovation" with Uber is with its business model ("employees but not employees") and willingness to just ignore local laws. This I think is the real point of the article; for all the pompous bloviating about being "disruption" and "changing the world", the actual real change is actually not all that large, with many of the changes being of doubtful or even negative worth.

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#114

Post by pclmulqdq »

amelius wrote: post #105
ALittleLight wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's Uber's problem though. Essentially their billionaire investors subsidized car rides for lots of people. Maybe it'll work out for Uber in the long run. Maybe not.

It will work out for them when/if they have destroyed the competition, that's the point. And in any case the founders are still billionaires.

This game is over. There is no way uber is getting a monopoly on taxi service. The popularity of uber has had the wrong effect: taxi companies are getting apps now, and other ridesharing companies are trying to get a piece of the action. There will not be a monopoly except in the places that are truly unprofitable to service.

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#115

Post by solatic »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #104

The loss of innovation has zip to do with the Uber Economy. Try the fact that the middle class has been gutted by an unfair tax structure that shreds responsibility away from the wealthy and corporations and has created peripheral damage in high college cost and low public school expectations. Bring back the tax rate where people making over 540k (the 1980 equivalent of the top tax rate $225,000) pay 50% on anything…

Excepting star-power labor (professional athletes, entertainers), most of the income in the upper tax brackets goes to the owners of capital. When stocks pay dividends, the dividends are taxed as income. If you raise taxes on upper-tax-bracket income, you just promote stock-based compensation instead: compensation in stock options (which are taxed as capital gains when realized, not income), stock buy-backs instead of issuing dividends (again, capital gains rather than income), etc.

The long-term capital gains tax rate, for those in high tax brackets, is 20%.

Go ahead, set the income tax rate for high tax brackets to seventy percent. It won't actually make a difference.

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#116

Post by herunan »

Can we get an open source gig economy app where 75% of the profits go to gig workers? Then 7.5% would go towards employee rights and benefits of gig workers, 7.5% towards contributors improving the software, and 10% towards customer support and legal third parties.

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#117

Post by Beltalowda »

whitepaint wrote: post #74
waynecochran wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Uber is horribly in the red financially. They disrupted a poorly ran industry, but didn’t produce anything that truly raised the economy… that’s the point.

> but didn’t produce anything that truly raised the economy… that’s the point. Utterly false. They produced people taking way more rides. More rides = more people going out to different places.

It's not like people would be stuck in the house otherwise. It's just that people would have taken public transport, their own car, or went by foot or bicycle before. I'm very skeptical of this claim that Uber increased mobility.

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#118

Post by Beltalowda »

ozim wrote: post #110

So as I read the article main argument is, as rephrased: Commercial airlines are building on top what Wright brothers did and just grab easy money instead of figuring out how to fly people to the Moon.

I think that is an unfair summarisation since all the Wright brothers did was fly a very non-practical plane for about ten seconds as a kind of "MVP". There was no market. Commercial airliners took that core technology, refined it, and used it to actually create an entire new service and market.

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#119

Post by timkam »

herunan wrote: post #116

Can we get an open source gig economy app where 75% of the profits go to gig workers? Then 7.5% would go towards employee rights and benefits of gig workers, 7.5% towards contributors improving the software, and 10% towards customer support and legal third parties.

IMHO, such apps should be considered infrastructure and be regulated accordingly (or be managed by foundations).

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#120

Post by ChicagoDave »

solatic wrote: post #115
ChicagoDave wrote: post #104

The loss of innovation has zip to do with the Uber Economy. Try the fact that the middle class has been gutted by an unfair tax structure that shreds responsibility away from the wealthy and corporations and has created peripheral damage in high college cost and low public school expectations. Bring back the tax rate where people making over 540k (the 1980 equivalent of the top tax rate $225,000) pay 50% on anything…

Excepting star-power labor (professional athletes, entertainers), most of the income in the upper tax brackets goes to the owners of capital. When stocks pay dividends, the dividends are taxed as income. If you raise taxes on upper-tax-bracket income, you just promote stock-based compensation instead: compensation in stock options (which are taxed as capital gains when realized, not income), stock buy-backs instead o…

Then you have to tax stock-based income. Any employee acquiring stocks must report it one time as income and get taxed on it. No capitalism back doors. However we figure it out, the wealthy need to pay more into annual tax revenues.

A functioning society requires a large and happy middle class, affordable liberal arts college, strong K-12 teaching, and time off.

Post reply on HN