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Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

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Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#331

Post by AndrewKemendo »

WalterBright wrote: post #320
ars wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. I just checked on it, and they used to be subsidized, these days not so much. A lot of them are hybrid models with some capitalism, mixed with the socialism. So I guess it sort of confirms your opinion that these things don't work when pure? But they do seem to have found a successful hybrid model.

If you mix enough gasoline with water, you can get your car to run on water, too! Capitalism can do well despite being taxed to support socialism. The other way around doesn't work. The Soviets starved until they allowed farmers to have their own private plots of farmland. Collective farms => famine.

You’re going really hard on loving capitalism

The problem is that capitalism mathematically ensures inequality which subverts the concept of survival because it creates extreme imbalances in agency.

What results is that capitalism must always use as reference a forever unchanged “state of nature” mythology which never existed.

Capitalists view themselves as a different species than modern anatomical humans, more enlightened etc… but I have seen firsthand that millionaires billionaires and even “middle class” people have less consciousness than those who have very little capital.

Capital enables alienation by letting the capitalist offload “life” to people who do it for them, leaving them nothing but Vice. It always corrupts

Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#332

Post by AdieuToLogic »

WalterBright wrote: post #212
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Any company which has earnings beyond those of operating costs is a concentration of wealth by definition. For context, here is the second sentence related to the above: Whether that wealth is distributed to shareholders, kept as retained earnings, or otherwise transferred to specific entities is irrelevant. I believe this relevant to the below. > Let's say I buy $20 worth of art supplies, and I paint a landscape…

> Either you have not "become wealthy", as you "traded a million dollar painting for a million bucks" or the effectual value of money exceeds the purchase value of the "million dollar painting". Both cannot be true. I became wealthy by creating wealth, not concentrating it. Concentrating it requires it be taken from somewhere else. There is no taking going on, there is creation and exchange.

>> Either you have not "become wealthy", as you "traded a million dollar painting for a million bucks" or the effectual value of money exceeds the purchase value of the "million dollar painting". Both cannot be true.

> I became wealthy by creating wealth, not concentrating it. Concentrating it requires it be taken from somewhere else. There is no taking going on, there is creation and exchange.

The scenario you have described is logically consistent while being representative of a tiny subset of commerce. Revisiting the original use-case:

  Let's say I buy $20 worth of art supplies, and I paint a
  landscape and sign it with my moniker, "bright". Since
  "bright" paintings are very rare and go for a million bucks
  each, I now have created a million bucks of value.
Assuming all of the above, this business model does not account for at least the following:

A - Businesses having more than one employee.

B - Asset deprecation, such as when purchasing a new automobile.

C - Consumable goods, such as food, petrol, etc.

D - Services such as commercial/residential rent and physical security.

E - Taxes.

F - Stock dividends and/or performance bonuses.

A and E involve direct wealth transfer from the business to relevant parties.

B is a second order effect only realized when the buyer attempts to sell the asset to a third party.

C and D are direct wealth transfers as the seller retains the remuneration for as long as they desire (excluding applicable cases identified above) and the buyer eventually does not have a physical equivalent. Note that this often remains a valuable exchange for both parties.

F is where wealth concentration commonly resides.

Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#333

Post by marve087 »

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Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#334

Post by lynx97 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #273
lynx97 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because Americans have an obesity problem doesn't make every food vendor a drug dealer. Come on, get real. Basically everything that is being sold can be abused by the user. Does that mean every vendor of anything is potentially a bad actor? I believe you are exaggregating. BTW, I virtually never thought about Thiel when I ordered a Pizza. Is there a reason why you drag the owners into this? It basically sounds…

When no ceiling is imposed, the natural state of business is to consume all oxygen. It doesn’t matter that you don’t know who Peter Theil is when you buy a pizza. It matters that he somehow makes money from that pizza and if he can, he will extract more value than the pizza guy.

The pizza guy had 30 years to conquer the internet. They could have hired a coder to do their online order website. 12 years later, they could have hired a coder to create an ordering app. Most of them didn't, because they weren't willing to part with the money. Now, Lieferando takes a 10% cut from every order because they created infrastructure the customer actually wants to use. What is so bad about it? You can only cut out the middle man if the vendor is going with the times.

Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#335

Post by RamblingCTO »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #325
RamblingCTO wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he didn't produce any proof of that statement and I figure neither can you. so let's assume this as false, shall we? we see lot's of examples of how monopolies (or similar) tend to do rent extraction. that's why we're talking about enshittification so much. it's because they only care about profit (and on a small time frame as well), not the product, not the customers, nor the planet.

How do you become a monopoly without a superior product?

be the first, buy competitors, lobby for regulatory capture, dominate the resource (see rockefeller/standard oil: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/071515/how-w...)

Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#336

Post by sporkland »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #11

This is essentially the story of tech companies across nearly every industry where they have come to dominate. This is one reason that I see most tech companies as essentially a net negative for society at large, as the goal is nearly always to control a large monopoly (and this is fully admitted by many tech leaders, e.g. Thiel) which the Internet makes possible. Pre-Internet you would see the same dynamics, but usu…

The problem with this line of thought is that everyone just uses it to hate on people they already hated on. You go after rich tech monopolies, progressives generally go after big business, conservatives use it to go after the biggest business of all, the government.

We all just need to focus on monopoly in all its forms, instead of letting the politicians continue to separate us using division without difference.

Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#337

Post by motorest »

nradov wrote: post #295
harimau777 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that simply the ability to perform a task is sufficient for competition. It could still be impossible for a newcomer to compete with established corps' marketing budget and economies of scale.

The point is who cares. Getting a burrito delivered is a pointless luxury service that no one actually needs. Instead of complaining about competition, just stop wasting money on it.

> The point is who cares.

You don't care. That's fine. It's not like there is a retirement to be informed before commenting. Sit this one out and let everyone who do express their concerns.

Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#338

Post by SirMaster »

grafmax wrote: post #330
SirMaster wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it only seems like we are in a quite small scale decline in the otherwise long term upward trajectory of standard of living for the average human being. The overall upward trajectory that I think is mainly driven by technology, abundance, and prosperity.

I’m puzzled by your view but also curious. What’s short term about the climate crisis? And with intensifying authoritarianism what do you think is going to reverse our current trajectory? And what do you think determines whether standard of living rises or not? In our circumstances, which to me seem quite dire, I’m curious what motor you think powers human progress.

When did the discussion turn into climate crisis? I thought this was about quality of life. That's all I am talking about here.

Quality of life is determined by how well off the poor or average people can live. How "easy" their life is and what luxuries they can afford, how long they now can live etc.

I think the advent of technology and mass commercial farming food production and all that allows the general population to live easier lives than what you had to do to survive hundreds and thousands of years ago in like medieval times or ancient Egyptian times etc.

I think any little regression in quality of life in these last few decades is but a small downward blip in the greater and steady rise during all of human history.

Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#339

Post by Spooky23 »

lynx97 wrote: post #334
Spooky23 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When no ceiling is imposed, the natural state of business is to consume all oxygen. It doesn’t matter that you don’t know who Peter Theil is when you buy a pizza. It matters that he somehow makes money from that pizza and if he can, he will extract more value than the pizza guy.

The pizza guy had 30 years to conquer the internet. They could have hired a coder to do their online order website. 12 years later, they could have hired a coder to create an ordering app. Most of them didn't, because they weren't willing to part with the money. Now, Lieferando takes a 10% cut from every order because they created infrastructure the customer actually wants to use. What is so bad about it? You can onl…

Or they can just make pizza. Meanwhile, I could get a $11 pie delivered with a phone call 20 years ago, and now I’m paying $35 for some stupid cloud app to do the same thing.

Re: Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market

#340

Post by dredmorbius »

WalterBright wrote: post #156
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Big business does not concentrate wealth. They absolutely do. If for no other reason than each of their revenue goes to fewer entities. > What you're seeing is the creation of wealth. This created wealth then flows out into the rest of the economy, via paying the workers and buying plant&equipment, etc. This is the flawed reasoning behind "trickle-down economics"[0], which was called "horse and sparrow" in the 19th…

> Any company which has earnings beyond those of operating costs is a concentration of wealth by definition Let's say I buy $20 worth of art supplies, and I paint a landscape and sign it with my moniker, "bright". Since "bright" paintings are very rare and go for a million bucks each, I now have created a million bucks of value. Who did I transfer the wealth from? Nobody. I took nuttin from nobody. Yet I have become…

Your art supplies and time didn't create wealth in the economic sense ("the annual produce and labour of the nation" as Smith defines it, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_II...>), but a financial asset, in the form of a (presumably) uniquely identifiable durable store of financial value.

This is contrasted with economic wealth in which some inputs (capital, labour, raw materials (themselves generally considered as capital) are transformed into some immediately useful consumable product (say, food or fuel), a durable good (clothing, furniture), a service ("immediately extinguished" in the terms of some economists, but still having potential lasting positive value), or capital which can itself be used in future economic activities (machining equipment used in the manufacture of widebody aircraft, or the aircraft themselves).

All else equal ("ceteris paribus"), the result of creating a novel but valued painting would be the same as that of inflating any other durable store of value: the relative prices of competing assets would fall proportionate to the price of the artwork. Ordinarily the drop is small and the bucket large such that this isn't noticed, but it is the net effect.

David Ricardo is amongst the first economists to deal with the economics of collectibles and durable assets of which I'm aware, e.g.,

Ricardo’s value theory applies only to those commodities that ‘can be increased in quantity by the exertion of human industry, and on the production of which competition operates without restraint’; it is thus not applicable to ‘rare statues and pictures, scarce books and coins, wines of a peculiar quality [...]’ (Works, I, 12)

From The Anthem Companion to David Ricardo, Edited by John E. King, p. 169.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/anthem-companion-to...>

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