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

Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

geohot.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 170 posts

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#151

Post by frm88 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #111
kibwen wrote: post #83

> But for decades, the American market has not been free. The grand, boneheaded naivete to fail to understand that middlemen are an emergent and intrinsic property of free markets in practice.

Antitrust legislation used to be very effective at dealing with this sort of stuff. These laws were designed to put an end to the gilded age (Standard Oil in particular), and accomplished what it set out to do. Though Ronald Reagan dared asked what nobody else thought to ask, "what if monopolies ... good?", so now we're back with a new set of Morgans and Vanderbilts.

On this note: Peter Thiel: Competition is for losers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#152

Post by 9rx »

lapetitejort wrote: post #64
strangattractor wrote: post #54

I think self driving cars are important for a couple of reasons: 1. Demographics - Aging population needs transportation. God knows we certainly don't need really old people driving themselves. We got a taste of the future in West Portal in that regard not long ago. 2. Human Capital - The US has pretty much demonstrated that there is little desire to import low skilled labor. Where do these theoretical Taxi drivers c…

Public transportation solved this before cars were commonplace. Implement ubiquitous and free public transportation in every urban center (where 80% of the American population lives [0]) and you'll save billions from not having to manufacture (and store!) cars. 0: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...

> Implement ubiquitous and free public transportation in every urban center (where 80% of the American population lives [0])

In, or between? Like your link tells, urban is defined by 2,000 houses. At that scale, in-town transport doesn't really make sense. You can already walk just about everywhere in five minutes. A single train station to get you to other towns makes more sense, but...

- We already had exactly that in the past. Perhaps service ended because nobody wanted to use it? ...

- After all, the town already has the town things. The whole point of living in an urban area is so you can walk to all the things you need on a daily basis. If you are leaving the walkable bubble, you're most likely headed to a rural point to access that which cannot be offered in an urban setting. Transport isn't about where people live, but where they are going.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#153

Post by ErroneousBosh »

refurb wrote: post #144
kmeisthax wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the real market failure is just that a market exists at all . Like, in some really fucked up neoliberal hellscape it might make sense to charge money for reservations separately, but that introduces all sorts of extra new inefficiencies that weren't there before. Like, now that reservations can be bought and sold, it's now legal, possibly moral, and most notably, profitable to hoard them. And since reservat…

A free market is individuals and companies can willing enter whatever transaction they want. If someone is willing to pay for a reservation and a restaurant willing to take payment, then it’s a free market. It’s not inefficient at all. You may not like it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not free

But then you don't need to have the restaurant at all, you just need to have the idea of a restaurant that sells the idea of a booking. Someone decides they want to pay £100 for a booking at Restaurant A, which actually only exists on paper, so now they have a restaurant booking. They can then trade that booking to you for some other amount of money, if they want to make a profit on it. How badly do you want to have a booking at Restaurant A?

And now, you want to actually go to Restaurant A and eat a curry, but they look at you like you've grown an extra head. Eat Food? What, here? In Restaurant A?

Congratulations, you've just invented banking, where people look at you similarly if you attempt to actually go and collect the gold that your bank says represents the money that's actually stored as a series of north and south magnetic domains on a thin sheet of rust painted onto a rapidly-spinning aluminium disk.

Meanwhile I ring the guy at the restaurant started by his grandmother when she fled Pakistan at the end of the Second World War, about ten minutes before we show up, and when I get there I've got a pint of Guinness, a menu, and some chapatis and chutney already on the table.

I prefer it that way. The food's better, for a start.

I don't need the menu, the guy's just going to bring me the desi shit from the family meal.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#154

Post by endominus »

refurb wrote: post #144
kmeisthax wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the real market failure is just that a market exists at all . Like, in some really fucked up neoliberal hellscape it might make sense to charge money for reservations separately, but that introduces all sorts of extra new inefficiencies that weren't there before. Like, now that reservations can be bought and sold, it's now legal, possibly moral, and most notably, profitable to hoard them. And since reservat…

A free market is individuals and companies can willing enter whatever transaction they want. If someone is willing to pay for a reservation and a restaurant willing to take payment, then it’s a free market. It’s not inefficient at all. You may not like it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not free

Just because a particular market is free doesn't mean it's useful to society at large.

If it's not useful to society, society has no moral reason to tolerate it. If it indeed benefits a few individuals massively while on net reducing utility to society, an argument can be made that society has a moral imperative to ban it. Hence the limitations on gambling, on alcohol and tobacco marketing/sales, etc.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#155

Post by Akuehne »

This article/post mashes together two different things and gets both wrong.

"The American market has not been free" because companies use call centers and friction to retain customers? That is the free market. No regulator forced Comcast to have bad hold music. They did it because it's profitable and because switching costs are real economic phenomena, not government distortion. Rent-seeking has a specific meaning in economics: capturing value through regulatory manipulation, not through being annoying to cancel. What's described here is just transaction costs. Coase wrote about this in 1937. The complaint is literally "firms optimize against consumers in an unregulated environment," which is the free market working exactly as designed.

AI as "the great equalizer." Equalizing what? AI agents that negotiate on your behalf get countered by AI agents that negotiate against you. The asymmetry doesn't vanish, it escalates. The company still has more compute budget, more training data on customer behavior, and more incentive to invest in adversarial optimization than you do. You get a chatbot. They get an enterprise deployment tuned on millions of interactions. The gap widens.

China "wants AI as a public utility" is doing enormous work with zero evidence. China wants semiconductor independence and geopolitical leverage. Qwen is open-weight because Alibaba wants cloud customers, not because the CCP is running a charity. Commoditizing the model layer serves Chinese hardware and cloud interests exactly the way the post itself explains ("commoditize your complement") then inexplicably frames as altruism.

The punchline the post avoids: every historical example of "friction removal" at scale (Uber, Airbnb, Amazon) concentrated wealth upward, not downward. The middlemen died, the platform owners became billionaires, and consumers got cheaper goods produced by worse labor conditions. No mechanism is proposed here that changes that outcome. "An AI on a box under my desk" doesn't redistribute anything. It just means the rent extraction happens at a layer you can't see yet.

Rooting for the collapse of the US economy as a feature rather than a bug is a take that only lands if you already have enough money to survive one.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#156

Post by pheaded_while9 »

justonceokay wrote: post #141
nine_k wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market actually is not very free, because large companies increasingly use their weight to pull off things that smaller companies or individual customers cannot afford: lobby to obtain preferences, tax exemptions, exclusive deals, other favors that violate or at least skirt the law. But running a call center overseas is not one of these things.

I cannot understand how any of the things you describe are not free. The government kowtowing to corporations is as free as it gets. No one said that just because the market is free that you personally wouldn’t end up holding the shit end of the stick

The violence of the state makes the market not "free." Unless you want to abstract all the way out: the planet is and always has been run through violent coercion by psycopaths, and, as exampled by reality, they are "free" to do so.

But in the sense they mean, the violence of the state precludes a free market. For the record, I do not believe in the validity of money, coercion, usury, violence.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#157

Post by blks »

nine_k wrote: post #122
solarkraft wrote: post #86

> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. And due to things like call centers, this has been very profitable for the businesses. Cable companies and insurance rely on the fact that your time is more valuable than theirs. They ca…

The market actually is not very free, because large companies increasingly use their weight to pull off things that smaller companies or individual customers cannot afford: lobby to obtain preferences, tax exemptions, exclusive deals, other favors that violate or at least skirt the law. But running a call center overseas is not one of these things.

That what companies do in a free market. They all try to become a monopoly.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#158

Post by sph »

blks wrote: post #157
nine_k wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market actually is not very free, because large companies increasingly use their weight to pull off things that smaller companies or individual customers cannot afford: lobby to obtain preferences, tax exemptions, exclusive deals, other favors that violate or at least skirt the law. But running a call center overseas is not one of these things.

That what companies do in a free market. They all try to become a monopoly.

You cannot call it a free market if government lobbying exists and is the primary tool for establishing monopolies.

Nor you cannot call it a free market if the government is allowed to favour or penalise one entity or one sector over the other.

I know words don't mean anything these days, but there is no angle in which you can call modern economy a free one.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#159

Post by cherry_tree »

sph wrote: post #158
blks wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That what companies do in a free market. They all try to become a monopoly.

You cannot call it a free market if government lobbying exists and is the primary tool for establishing monopolies. Nor you cannot call it a free market if the government is allowed to favour or penalise one entity or one sector over the other. I know words don't mean anything these days, but there is no angle in which you can call modern economy a free one.

“a real free market economy just hasn’t been tried” where have I heard that before?

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#160

Post by blks »

sph wrote: post #158
blks wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That what companies do in a free market. They all try to become a monopoly.

You cannot call it a free market if government lobbying exists and is the primary tool for establishing monopolies. Nor you cannot call it a free market if the government is allowed to favour or penalise one entity or one sector over the other. I know words don't mean anything these days, but there is no angle in which you can call modern economy a free one.

That’s just one way of becoming a monopoly.

Is it a free market if there’s antimonopoly agency?

Post reply on HN