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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

#321

Post by rectang »

gruez wrote: post #250
CogitoCogito wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess if our goal were to stop this sort of corporate behavior, we would remove the requirement of a crime being intentional for corporations.

Isn't that already the case? For instance Wells Fargo was fined $185M for fraudulently opening accounts customers didn't want[1]. Wells fargo (ie. management) weren't scheming to fraudulently open accounts. They only set aggressive sales goals, and that caused some employees to go rogue and commit fraud themselves. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_cross-selling_scan...

I'm skeptical that the intentions of the Wells Fargo executives were pure and white as the driven snow.

The incentives align to encourage executives to commit crimes in service of short-term gains — even in the extreme case of Wells Fargo, Carrie Tolstedt and John Stumpf have both avoided prison time and ended up money ahead to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, even after clawbacks and fines.

Not only shouldn't intent matter, we should assume the worst. Whether assuming the worst is a workable enforcement regime, I don't know — but it most accurately models a reality where the most rational behavior for executives is indifference to the law.

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

#322

Post by insane_dreamer »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #308
insane_dreamer wrote: post #283

More like "not a crime if a cartel of corporations does it" - not so sure it has much to do with an "app". Useful analysis of consolidation and resulting price increases due to "inflation", even if the title could use re-wording. Interesting that -- especially in an election cycle -- the government is blamed for "inflation", whereas a large contributing factor -- and the main one in this case -- are companies which c…

To an extent costs did rise. All sorts of materials are costlier. Rent is higher. Labor is paid more. Pre pandemic was what 6-7 years ago at this point, thats a long time for prices to stay flat. If companies like trek were making appreciable more profit margin today than 7 years ago, it should be apparent in their quarterly reports no?

Not expecting prices to be flat.

But the cost of raw materials did not rise 50% to 100%, neither did wages. Residential rents jumped, but commercial rents -- which is what would affect cost of business -- did not.

So there's not really any way to explain this other than companies along the chain realizing that the prices are sticking (meaning customers are still buying) so there's no reason to go back. But the reason that the customers are still buying is because in many cases, as the article brings out, there is serious consolidation of the market which means that there's not enough competition to push prices back down.

> If companies like trek were making appreciable more profit margin today than 7 years ago, it should be apparent in their quarterly reports no?

Trek is private so we can't know. But in the original article the author cites examples of companies with a monopolistic position increasing profits. Also, it may not be the consumer-facing company -- Trek -- that is taking the bulk of those profits, but a supplier with a hold on the market (i.e., Shimano-SRAM duopoly) that is.

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

#323

Post by gruez »

steveBK123 wrote: post #284
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…

Exactly - theres a lot of stuff that if an individual/small business owner did, they'd be personally onerously fined or jailed.. but corporations get a pass. Corporations also have a lot of money to pay good lobbyists & lawyers such that laws are pretty forgiving, loopholes are found & exploited, and finally they are vigorously defended if the government ever does try to crack down. Ubers behavior during its growth p…

>To avoid having to pay any difference to make up the hourly wage to drivers, Uber runs an algorithm which kicks drivers out of the app randomly if demand gets too low, without warning or indication of when they can get back in. It can be minutes or hours. So the drivers remain on the road, driving/idling, waiting to get back into the app. The "work" is still getting done, but it doesn't count against Uber.

I get legislators want uber drivers to earn a living wage, but expecting uber to continue allowing unlimited amount of drivers to be "online", when they have to pay for them is absurd.

>Imagine a small restaurant doing similar, deciding at random slow times instead of sending staff home for the day, they assign them no tables and mark them as off-the-clock. When demand picks up again, they get assigned some tables and resume making money.

You're trying to imply small businesses don't do this but this happens all the time. It's not even limited to minimum wage laws. After the ACA was passed, everyone started avoiding hiring people for more than 32 hours if they could, to skirt the "you have to provide healthcare to all full time employees" requirement.

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

#324

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

wat10000 wrote: post #237
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I routinely see coverage of workers not being paid what they’re owed. People do sometimes go to jail for not paying workers what they’re owed ( https://kfoxtv.com/amp/news/local/el-paso-contractor-jailed-... ), but this article illustrates pretty clearly why you don’t hear more about it. Advocacy orgs aren’t going to brag about some random contractor or McDonalds supervisor going to jail, and the corporate fat cats t…

We need to redefine what it means to commit this sort of crime. The modern corporation is an expert in dodging responsibility. Upper management will make it very clear that everyone is expected to follow the law at all times. Then they’ll set up incentives, requirements, and quotas that more or less require breaking the law to meet. When the inevitable occurs, they’ll wring their hand and say, we don’t condone that b…

Wage theft, like any other kind of theft, is a self-incentivizing crime. I agree people shouldn't be allowed to turn a blind eye to systematic lawbreaking, but no system of incentives can erase the fundamental accounting identity that a business unit will have more money if they pay workers less than promised.

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

#325

Post by derektank »

AutistiCoder wrote: post #299
derektank wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Crimes are only “easy” or “difficult” to prosecute because of the laws as they’re written. Yes and no. Yes in the sense that you can make crimes very easy to prosecute, no in the sense that doing so usually makes unobjectionable or even good behavior illegal in the process. Take insider trading for example. It would be very easy to simply make selling the stock of a company you work for, or are in any other way part…

You could just say employees get a blackout period each year where they can’t buy or sell company stock.

Sure, there are always compromises that can be made and my point wasn't about insider trading specifically, it was that there are tradeoffs to consider. But let's take your example, how long is the blackout period and how long is the open period? I would contend that there is almost no open period short enough that a motivated insider couldn't trade on their non-public knowledge if they were "lucky" enough to have it during the open period, so you're kind of back at square one where you still need the SEC and DoJ to investigate and borderline cases will slip through the cracks. And for everyone else, they've lost some liquidity in case of personal emergency, etc. Again, this isn't to argue against blackout periods specifically, they might be good policy, just pointing out that law and law enforcement is not always easy.

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

#326

Post by andrewfromx »

Cheer2171 wrote: post #20
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?

This is revisionist history: Netflix was legal. Craigslist was legal. eBay was legal, Youtube was legal (yes people uploaded copyrighted content, but they complied with DMCA takedowns as required to under the law)

putting DVDs in the mail was legal but when Netflix first started streaming they broke some laws.

Craigslist and ebay were "unregulated marketplaces".

You're absolutely correct that YouTube complied with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by implementing a takedown system for copyrighted content. However, YouTube's early operations still faced significant legal challenges and criticism because its platform enabled widespread copyright infringement on a massive scale. secondary liability. Viacom claimed that YouTube was aware of the widespread infringement and benefited from it, which they argued disqualified YouTube from DMCA safe harbor protections.

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

#327

Post by wnevets »

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 is only gonna get worse, we just had the CEOs of massive corporations actively campaigning for the current president.

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

#328

Post by gmueckl »

wyager wrote: post #282
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.…

> The government needs to step in actively to keep a free market from collapsing into one of the natural end states. Which is what, exactly? The US is per capita richer than almost all EU countries by a huge margin (with a few small exceptions mostly enabled by regulatory arbitrage targeting US money), so forgive me if I don't take your seething commentary about the US economic apparatus very seriously.

Any free, unregulated market will eliminate competitors until they create an oligopoly or even a single monopoly. It's an immediate consequence of the rules of the market.

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

#329

Post by kjkjadksj »

llamaimperative wrote: post #56
miohtama wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only argument I can think of is economics of scale. You need to have sufficient mass to enter the markets. However even in this case customers, or Big Potato buyers, can simply ally and create a new supplier where they are shareholders.

Correct, which is why they agglomerated in the first place . Sectors where you see lots of agglomeration are ones where there are significant advantages to agglomeration. And yeah, it’s hard to do once, but obviously it’s dramatically harder to do after someone has already done it.

Its interesting how the benefits seem to be dependent on market context. Go to the ralphs, its big potato no doubt. Go to the farmers market and people are there arguably to avoid big potato and big anything else for that matter.

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

#330

Post by steveBK123 »

gruez wrote: post #323
steveBK123 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly - theres a lot of stuff that if an individual/small business owner did, they'd be personally onerously fined or jailed.. but corporations get a pass. Corporations also have a lot of money to pay good lobbyists & lawyers such that laws are pretty forgiving, loopholes are found & exploited, and finally they are vigorously defended if the government ever does try to crack down. Ubers behavior during its growth p…

>To avoid having to pay any difference to make up the hourly wage to drivers, Uber runs an algorithm which kicks drivers out of the app randomly if demand gets too low, without warning or indication of when they can get back in. It can be minutes or hours. So the drivers remain on the road, driving/idling, waiting to get back into the app. The "work" is still getting done, but it doesn't count against Uber. I get leg…

If Uber has let so many drivers on the app such that they cannot earn a minimum wage, they should stop aggressively enrolling new drivers. They could have also kicked people out for full days, rest of shift, or given an indicator of when they may try again. Something that leaves it more clear they are off and don't linger around to try and get back in.

Restaurants/retail will reduce staffing due to demand, but they don't leave people hanging by an on-call thread the way this automated Uber model did. Tends to be more like cutting shifts off early or calling people not to come in. It is not this automated app-driven robo labor optimization. People aren't being told to go outside and maybe they'll get called back in 5 minutes, 1 hour, or 1 day.

Agreed a lot of businesses moved people to 32 hour weeks to avoid ACA, which is a different issue.. how's all the on-demand faux contractor workforces healthcare though?

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