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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

#191

Post by bdndndndbve »

I think the key insight that the article misses is that when consumers interact with an app they have an excess of trust in "the app".

I run an ecommerce site. It's hard as a small retail operation to keep inventory in sync and model the complex network of supplier relationships for special-orders: we can get some products in a day, some things in a week, some in 6 months. Nonetheless customers assume that the computer is the word of God, and that if the website lets them order a product that product must be available immediately.

When you make an app to do something that is illegal, people for some reason assume it is legal (or at least less bad) to do in the app. The presence of a computer intermediary somehow cleanses the action of moral ambiguity. I think this is because most people don't understand how computers work, and they assume that "the computer is always right".

This goes as far back as Babbage:

On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question

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

#192

Post by 9283409232 »

stickfigure wrote: post #162
9283409232 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the FDA and USDA regulations and inspections.

...which even my local CSA seems to manage. Not saying there isn't a burden, but it's nothing like laying fiber or laws which specifically ban direct sales of automobiles. If there was big money to be made undercutting Big Potato, someone would do it. Even my CSA grows potatoes.

The OP asked for examples of things that prevent ethical companies from outcompeting unethical ones and I provided a few. Hyper-focusing on potatoes doesn't invalidate that.

Your local CSA is also unlikely to be audited by the FDA unless they tried to go larger than your community.

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

#193

Post by VirusNewbie »

lesuorac wrote: post #169
greyface- wrote: post #125

> Inflation is one of the most politically salient factors of this decade > Inflation has lots of causes, it's true. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL Algorithmic price fixing is certainly a not-insignificant part of the issue. But it's strange to see zero acknowledgement of the massive increase in money supply over the same time period. When doing causal analysis, we need to examine both the private sector and…

> But it's strange to see zero acknowledgement of the massive increase in money supply over the same time period. Because when you look at inflation in the period of say ~2000 to ~2025 [1] it's really not very obvious that there's an increase in M2 from '08 onward. Talking about M2 as a source of inflation is like shouting Red at a roulette wheel. Sure, sometimes the ball will land on Red but your shouting is a non-s…

Because true inflation isn’t CPI!

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

#194

Post by Aurornis »

gmueckl wrote: post #76

This is all a result of a lack of active market regulation. The government needs to step in actively to keep a free market from collapsing into one of the natural end states. But the US has consistently been far too passive and accepts greedy companies far too readily. If a single company can sell almost 100% of an essential good, they need to atomatically lose the power to set their prices and margins independently.…

> If a single company can sell almost 100% of an essential good, they need to atomatically lose the power to set their prices and margins independently.

The fallacy is assuming that the government will make everything cheap for consumers.

In practice, government regulation of prices just changes the game. Look at any market with rent control: There are numerous meta-games around building or not building new supply, landlords are incentivized to not fix units because they know tenants don’t want to give up their rent control and move, and a new market emerges where people illegally sublet their rent controlled apartments because it becomes attractive to take advantage of the market demand that landlords aren’t allowed to capitalize on.

The other fallacy in all of this is thinking that companies control both supply and demand. For nearly all commodities, there is a price where consumers won’t pay for it. If rents get too high, people move to a different city. If gas gets too expensive they start carpooling and looking for WFH jobs. If eggs are too expensive they eat something else. These choices make people angry as hell, but there’s no denying that these choices exist. Companies can’t push past these limits and force people to buy at any price. They still have to discover that point on the supply and demand curve.

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

#196

Post by noisy_boy »

gruez wrote: post #157
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…

>Contrast that to how individuals get the hammer put down on them by the justice system if they so much as fart in the wrong room. The lesson from the last 50 years should be: If you want to commit a crime and get away with it, do it as a corporation. That's because most crimes "individuals" do are straightforwardly illegal and easy to prosecute, whereas the "crime if a corporation does it" are not. It's not any diff…

Sure - then don't let them get big enough that they start to affect public at large. Name and shame the company, not the individuals. Let the public and market decide if such a company lives or dies. Right now, we are letting them get big enough that they are turning back and are eating us.

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

#197

Post by pwg »

regularization wrote: post #176
gruez wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Contrast that to how individuals get the hammer put down on them by the justice system if they so much as fart in the wrong room. The lesson from the last 50 years should be: If you want to commit a crime and get away with it, do it as a corporation. That's because most crimes "individuals" do are straightforwardly illegal and easy to prosecute, whereas the "crime if a corporation does it" are not. It's not any diff…

> That's because most crimes "individuals" do are straightforwardly illegal and easy to prosecute, whereas the "crime if a corporation does it" are not. I Yes, but why are individual crimes easy to prosecute and corporate crimes not. These are not things that just popped into being like a thunderstorm. They are a part of an economic and social system that makes things in such way.

The GP did not mean "individual crimes". The meaning was: "most crimes that an individual will commit turn out to be easy to prosecute".

I.e., shoplifter steals candy bar, surveillance camera has clear view of the shoplifters face, and of the theft, and security camera in parking lot gets license plate of car they drive away in. Easy conviction for prosecutor, as there little question of who committed nor of what crime was committed.

Contrast that with the GP's example "business type" crime. To prove the "business" committed a crime, they have to find a way to prove the business, when buying the truckload of candy bars, at the time of the purchase, intentionally never intended to pay back the loan taken out to buy the truckload. Proving intent (i.e., effectively "mind-reading") is way more difficult than proving a crime happened in the "shoplifter" example above. There's no security camera footage recording the "intent" of the business when it purchased the truckload of candy bars.

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

#198

Post by crawfordcomeaux »

crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #69
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 require…

Wearing these down downvotes as a badge of honor. Appistocracy gotta keep the truth down

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

#199

Post by barbazoo »

They’re describing capitalism. The end state of capitalism is a single entity co trolling everything. We might not let the end state happen, we might stop at duopolies as described in the article but it’s not much better. It’s not a system benefitting regular people only the wealthy capital owning class.

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

#200

Post by ajmurmann »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #156
ajmurmann wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But the US has consistently been far too passive and accepts greedy companies far too readily." All companies are greedy. That's the reason for existence. Your point that monopolies and oligopolies need to be crushed is very valid though. I wish more mergers were rejected in the first place. Regulating prices is a recipe for disaster though.

Regulating prices is a recipe for disaster though That's an assertion, not a statement of fact. Pricing in natural monopolies is a mature subject, and public utilities have been a thing for over 100 years. Also, pricing for medical procedures is regulated in Europe, and it works extremely well.

Yes, it's preferably over allowing a monopoly to set prices. However, wherever possible you should break up the monopoly or prevent it on the first place. Of course there are conditions where that's very hard and you mention some of them.

Setting prices where you could just have a functioning market has historically been well proven to lead to disaster. Look at any communist country. The GDR ended up allowing luxury stores that were not price bound and they were a huge hit for a reason.

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