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

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

#181

Post by ectopod »

Crazyontap wrote: post #68
Jabbles wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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're absolutely right. I don't know what OP is going on about but no there were 0 taxis with apps at least in Birmingham. I just checked with my friends too and not one person remembers using an app to call a cab before uber. It is possible that some company possibly offered it but it certainly wasn't a popular option before Uber and it was just awful using the taxis here.

Star Cars in Birmingham had an app before Uber.

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

#182

Post by toss1 »

>>you can make a business viable by pumping a lot of cash into it, you can actually crowd-out a lot of good businesses with bad, albeit well-funded ones.

Yup

And in most of the gig economy, it appears that that the only winning move is to not play. The exceptions are only certain circumstances such as where one can do arbitrage between economies, e.g., computing nomad living in a very low-cost economy but selling services in the US or EU. Otherwise, every account I've read of Uber/Lyft drivers is which way they are losing the most money after being lured in by promises of good income...

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

#183

Post by lifeisstillgood »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #78
heurisko wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that writing software is comparable to literacy. I think it's more similar to any other profession, with a skillset you can learn if you're interested, or learn to get paid. Not everyone is interested in writing software, and that's fine. It has also never been easier to tinker with things, as root VMs are cheaply available, in comparison to 20 years ago, when you really were just given a cpanel interface,…

>I think it's more similar to any other profession Could not disagree more. I run a small business selling used video games online, and come from a SWE/EEE background. The fact that we've got processes in place that are built from the ground up to be scalable and automatable, as well as the simple Python scripts to perform this automation has basically tripled or quadrupled our productivity. I could see much the same…

>>> accountants who can't write their own report generators.

what a great way to put it

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

#184

Post by lifeisstillgood »

lordnacho wrote: post #98
heurisko wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that writing software is comparable to literacy. I think it's more similar to any other profession, with a skillset you can learn if you're interested, or learn to get paid. Not everyone is interested in writing software, and that's fine. It has also never been easier to tinker with things, as root VMs are cheaply available, in comparison to 20 years ago, when you really were just given a cpanel interface,…

Literacy is known at the top for things like the Iliad or the works of Shakespeare, but the major benefits are actually much more mundane, like allowing doctors to write prescriptions or being able to have instructions in a manual. Similarly, you may never write an OS or a AAA game, but being able to just automate a teeny tiny bit of your Excel spreadsheet, that's where software literacy will benefit the most people.

Exactly :-)

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

#185

Post by [deleted] »

coffeeblack wrote: post #129
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…

The current president had been holding a position of power in Washington for 50 years. Same is true for many other top politicians. As long as you vote in the same people over and over again, nothing will change.

[deleted]

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

#186

Post by lifeisstillgood »

jb1991 wrote: post #127
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #4

My take on the productivity paradox is software is a form of literacy . We have put a pen and paper onto every desktop and every pocket but almost no-one can read or write. Edit: And those that can find that only a tiny fraction of the fold is written down (accessible through the virtual cyber world). Amazon's secret to success was forcing every service to live behind a "public" API.

People have lots of things in their homes that they’re not experts at or even knowledgeable of. Most people have a hammer and nail sitting around, that doesn’t mean they can build a piece of furniture or build a house. I’ve got all the tools to make bread, but I wouldn’t even know how to get started without some practice. And the list goes on. I also have a real pen and real paper, but that doesn’t mean I can write a…

It does literally mean you can write a novel. from an early age you have been trained to write and construct narratives. You can write that novel. it yeah no one has trained you at Primary School to build furniture:-)

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

#188

Post by BoorishBears »

650 wrote: post #179

I’ve been using delivery apps on and off for the past few months. Between the promos I’ve received, I’ve gotten groceries delivered for less than the items cost let alone the gas and time to deliver them. I’ve had multiple food items delivered at a lower cost than me walking there and buying in store as well. Talking to a few drivers for the companies - its tough, but they make a decent amount in the city (4-7k a mon…

I was you once, amazed at how badly the VCs had let me pull one over on them, and sure I'd stop if it became a bad deal.

That was probably tens of thousands in spend on overpriced delivery meals making them huge profits off the initial "investment" they made in this customer

Of course the promos dried up and the pricing became awful not too long into the process.

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

#189

Post by BoorishBears »

talkingtab wrote: post #180

We do not have an economy built on disruption, we have an economy built on the myth of disruption. No better example than Theranos. And we have an economy built on lock-in. No better example that Apple, or perhaps Google and Amazon. These are both ways to extract value from the economic system, not ways to improve it. The Apple Tax, Google Adsense.

That's an awful example being such an exceptional case, so maybe you should elaborate.

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

#190

Post by Ankaios »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #120
solatic wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another option to address the same basic issue is to fix estate taxes, which might be an easier fix. (Among other things, change the cost basis for the estate taxes to be the price when the asset was originally acquired, not the price when it was transferred to the inheritor.) Either way, I agree that it's critical to close the routes to avoiding taxes.
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