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Are we the baddies?

geohot.github.io

331–340 of 554 posts

Re: Are we the baddies?

#331
post #232
post #2

For some people, paying the premium to jump the queue is the point. What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium, and the queue is now with you again. This is mostly Australian frequent flyers, when it was a high barrier to entry it conferred advantages and now Fly in Fly out work has commoditised club status, there is next to no boarding advantage, and no points flight availa…

> My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off. I think non-Americans need to take a stand against this. Refuse all tipping. Its a slippery slope - I know these guys are underpaid but if you start tipping the wages will just drop and we're all worse off.

Here is the core problem laid out:

1.) Owner needs workers and wants to make the position attractive.

2.) Owner is given the option to enable tips, and entice works with "Pay, plus tips!"

3.) Owner doesn't pay tips, patrons do.

4.) Workers blame patrons, not owner, for not tipping.

5.) Patrons feel guilty and tip. Workers make pretty good money from this, and enjoy the job more.

In a way it's kind of like a social mind virus, where the workers and owners benefit, and the patrons feel pain for not going along with it.

The only fix I can come up with is a law that tips can only be solicited after a service has been rendered. And entering something into a computer is not a service.

Re: Are we the baddies?

#332
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot disengage from capitalism. The tricks you describe are perhaps useful to not be the slowest antelope in the herd but that doesn't mean you are fully free from being exploited.

The most exploitative and unfree societies are and always have been the ones that rejected the free market.

Somalia: Land Of The Free

Re: Are we the baddies?

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah I'd never heard of him before

Yeah, he got his fame in the mid-2000s when he found a vulnerability in the Playstation 3 OS and some idiot lawyers at Sony sued him for it. He parlayed that into a cool, anti-corporate hacker persona, and then got hired by the most powerful corporations and people on the planet to try to give their tech companies some cool hacker cred. It's honestly a pretty funny career arc. I don't dislike the guy, he found a way…

Nice try. I worked at Facebook for 9 months and left (before vesting any shares) because I didn't agree with the mission, even back in 2012. I worked at Twitter for 5 weeks and left because I realized nothing was going to change (and the good food went away). I don't regret trying at either, but in revealed preferences, I've spent most of my life writing open source software, even if that's not what attracts most media about me.

I know you think everyone is just trying to "get their bag" and that's the framework you see this in. But I already had more money at 21 than I've spent to date, and not cause I had a lot of money, but cause I don't buy much stuff. I'm sorry you feel played, but don't project that on me.

Re: Are we the baddies?

#334
post #315
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that tips are tax free in the USA, they are unlikely to be going away.

If tips are no longer taxed, does that mean that they no longer count towards medicare, sick pay, pensions and such?

Surely. Nothing kind is done for kindness' sake by these cretins.

Re: Are we the baddies?

#335
post #315
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that tips are tax free in the USA, they are unlikely to be going away.

If tips are no longer taxed, does that mean that they no longer count towards medicare, sick pay, pensions and such?

They abolished all those things so the question is moot.

Re: Are we the baddies?

#336

I generally avoid George’s non-technical posts because they are… let’s say uninspired. But here is one that actually makes sense. Of course the self-reflection with who he otherwise praises and spends his time with will never set in, but at least others may take the time to look inward and do something differently. Something has to change. Even HN seems to have had an increase in sentiment like this in the past few y…

Ah yes geohot. The same guy who used LLMs in advent of code to get on the leaderboard

Re: Are we the baddies?

#337
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium, and the queue is now with you again Wouldn't the market purist argue that this just means the good is mispriced, and tickets should actually be what the price is with the premium added? What you really need is to just raise the prices of the tickets and the price to jump the queue?

For market purism to work people need to have an idea what they are paying for. If this is changing too quickly or there is personalized pricing it becomes a very different kind of game.

Market purism very rarely works, just like any kind of purism, but it's still an interesting thought experiment.

Re: Are we the baddies?

#338
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For some people, paying the premium to jump the queue is the point. What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium, and the queue is now with you again There's a freedom that comes with not caring and just accepting I am last in the line. I don't pay the premium and I can sit and relax in the lobby while the sheep that paid wait in line. Only when the queue is nearly depleted…

>while the sheep that paid wait in line. The supposed "sheep" that want to get on the plane first are people that want to get that precious overhead bin space to avoid checking a carry-on bag at the gate. Boarding last means there's no more bin space and the gate agent will put the bag in the belly of the plane. This adds extra hassles of waiting an extra 30+ minutes at the arrival terminal to wait for the bag on the…

People would still jockey to be first on, even if there wasn't the limited overhead bin space.

Re: Are we the baddies?

#339
post #4

> It’s not okay. Advertising is not okay. Price discrimination is not okay. Using big data, machine learning, and psychology to manipulate others at scale is not okay. Stop participating. Hinge is towards the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you'll do just fine without it.

Collectivists generally start from premises which discount or even dismiss individual agency.

And yet individualists reach to secure those network effects while at the same time decrying they don't exist or will never work, anything to deny the advantage of a network to competing agents.

Re: Are we the baddies?

#340
post #315
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that tips are tax free in the USA, they are unlikely to be going away.

If tips are no longer taxed, does that mean that they no longer count towards medicare, sick pay, pensions and such?

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