Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Are we the baddies?

geohot.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 554 posts

Re: Are we the baddies?

#421

Post by const_cast »

robertlagrant wrote: post #363
jordanb wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not my experience using taxi call services in Chicago. Whenever I called them (before Uber) the taxi was prompt and courteous. The apps did three things that the call services did not do: 1) subsidize drivers with vc money for many years making drivers plentiful and fares cheap 2) use unlicensed cabs so they could saturate areas like Manhattan that had previously limited the amount of cabs that could operate 3) Depri…

> 2) use unlicensed cabs so they could saturate areas like Manhattan that had previously limited the amount of cabs that could operate This is mostly a problem with the people you pay taxes to who would invent systems to restrict the driver numbers.

No, restricting the amount of cabs is good, actually. It's very annoying if your city is overrun with cabs. The restriction needs to be reasonable but dense cities like NYC would just trend towards 100% cabs if you let them. And then nobody can drive anywhere.

Re: Are we the baddies?

#422

Post by robertlagrant »

const_cast wrote: post #421
robertlagrant wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2) use unlicensed cabs so they could saturate areas like Manhattan that had previously limited the amount of cabs that could operate This is mostly a problem with the people you pay taxes to who would invent systems to restrict the driver numbers.

No, restricting the amount of cabs is good, actually. It's very annoying if your city is overrun with cabs. The restriction needs to be reasonable but dense cities like NYC would just trend towards 100% cabs if you let them. And then nobody can drive anywhere.

Well no, because that's not what happened with Uber. You get more cab drivers, but there's a population limit on cabs based on various factors, including the fact that people don't always want to take a cab.

Re: Are we the baddies?

#423

Post by const_cast »

latexr wrote: post #173
afiodorov wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing an algorithm can do against disciplined, intentional engagement. If you know which car you want to buy it doesn't matter what the salesman has to say.

> If you know which car you want to buy it doesn't matter what the salesman has to say. Sure it does. The salesman may have information you were not aware of. They could even tell you something which satisfies your needs better and is cheaper. Not all salesman are out to screw you, some really care about a happy customer. I’m reminded of an old Hypercritical episode. If you ever heard John Siracusa, you know he does…

The heuristic is that pretty much anyone who is trying to sell you something is out to screw you. They are probably lying, and they are probably trying to get a quick buck from people who don't know better. And when I say anyone, I mean anyone. Youtubers, anyone on TikTok who links anything, advertisements on the web, billboards.

It's not 100% but if you follow the heuristic you save a lot of money and generally have higher quality goods in your life.

The reason we got into this mess is because advertising on the internet broke all the rules. Now lying is de-facto allowed. So then everyone else followed suit to compete. If your competitors are lying, you cannot afford not to lie.

So now all advertisement and sales are compromised and should not be trusted. Even large, previously trusted corporations are running scams in America. Professionals making six figures are acting as con artists. It's unbelievable how fast the situation has deteriorated.

Re: Are we the baddies?

#424

Post by _9ptr »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #235
ctxc wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangential, but I think most extended warranties I've noticed are beneficial. Even last month I was kicking myself for forgetting to extend a 2 year warranty which costs 1/4th the one time repair cost I had to cough up.

> but I think most extended warranties I've noticed are beneficial. If this were true, it would result in a loss for the issuer of the warranty.

That's not how insurance works

Re: Are we the baddies?

#425

Post by _9ptr »

willturman wrote: post #403
spacemadness wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read anything by Mark Fisher? He spoke about capitalism absorbing all resistance which makes it almost impossible to ever escape from. Which is what you’re saying I think. Resistance becomes the next market and works through the same economic systems it’s attempting to resist.

David Foster Wallace made a similar argument about Television being able to absorb, re-contextualize, and subsequently market any effort opposed to it as a cause of malignant addiction and abdication of societal responsibilities in his essay E. Unibus Pluram. Today you can probably substitute television for YouTube, TikTok, etc, but the argument still holds up, perhaps better than ever.

It's sad he can't witness the death of television

Re: Are we the baddies?

#426

Post by _9ptr »

jagrsw wrote: post #51
alganet wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> disengagement. That disengagement metric is valuable, I'm not gonna give it away for free anymore. I'll engage and disengage randomly, so no one knows what works. > The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people That's a market now. It doesn't mean shit. It's a "lifestyle". > People are feeling the manipulation They don't. Even manipulation awareness is a market now. I'm sure there are YouTub…

> I'll engage and disengage randomly, so no one knows what works. Any predictable pattern, including when you disengage, is just another feature for the pricing model. If the model learns you reliably leave after 3 hours, it will simply front-load the surge pricing into that initial window. Analysis: This user loses disengages during 75% of the time and belongs to a group of 5% who do the same. The expected revenue f…

He said randomly, which means the opposite of predictable or reliable. Sometimes he won't disengage for years and the algorithm would be non the wiser!

Re: Are we the baddies?

#427

Post by const_cast »

ziggure wrote: post #397
lmm wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even at first order, it makes the people at the bottom relatively better off. If we go from Alice having 600, Bob having 0, and Carol having 0, to Alice having 700, Bob having 100, and Carol having 100, then Bob and Carol are still more able to buy things than they were before even if prices now increase by 50%.

Yes, being shortsighted ignores the rubber band effect that then disproportionately hurts those people down the road.

The arguments against UBI are pretty much the same against rising minimum wages. That being, the baseline just moves, so everything gets more expensive, so the situation doesn't improve at all.

It intuitively makes sense, and like most economic reasoning it's horribly simple. But economics is comprised to two parts: theory, and practice.

Practice always trumps theory. If practice defies your theory, it doesn't mean that the market is broken, or that there's over-regulation, or that your theory will eventually come true. It means your theory is just wrong. All economic theory are predicated on thousands or millions of underlying assumptions. If even just a few of those are not true, or aren't true in the way you think they are, then the theory can be wrong while simultaneously being logically perfect.

When it comes to the arguments against minimum wage, the theory is just wrong. Rising minimum wages do help people making minimum wage. If it does raise the COL, it's slowly, and not in the same degree as the minimum wage shift. In addition, a flat minimum wage still results in a rising COL. You can't simply pin the COL like that.

So knowing what we know about minimum wage, I think it's arrogant to claim the UBI would just result in a rising COL to eat up all the UBI.

Re: Are we the baddies?

#429

Post by 9x39 »

pseudocomposer wrote: post #412
lazystar wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as someone who survived on tips for 2 1/2 years while studying comp sci, you're missing one key detail. tips introduce a situation where harder/faster-paced workers get a higher pay per hour than workers with average productivity. a pizza driver that optimizes their routes and memorizes stop light patterns in their delivery zone will get more deliveries per hour than that of a new hire. so even though they work the s…

Why do you associate tipping with “work harder => more pay,” exactly? I don’t see a clear logical route from “socially-forced customer tipping” to that, at all. If anything; tipping leads us to “leverage information to ensure you get a large amount of high-tipping customers => more pay.” Continuing that logical process, we might realize that “make your coworkers have to deal with the bad tippers => more pay.” Which m…

Work harder for more pay is limited to American full service gigs, and a weird employer-driven labor retention push elsewhere.

The tipping process works for servers who have the performative and service skills to work a crowd of tables, modulo peculiarities of the patron population. There can be a very strong connection between a server who works tables hard and their tip take-home versus one who merely gets the food to the table.

Re: Are we the baddies?

#430

Post by 9x39 »

const_cast wrote: post #419
southernplaces7 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just don't tip automatically, toughen up a little on the frowning looks and remind yourself that for one thing, you're not defrauding anyone for not tipping as an automatic thing, and secondly, its the cynical shits in the finacial incentive structure above your waiter who are really at fault.

This sounds good and like a protest but it's not because: 1. You're not hurting the big wigs who exploit workers. They don't care if you don't tip. 2. You ARE hurting the underpaid, exploited worker.

>2. You ARE hurting the underpaid, exploited worker.

This is just hope for the hopeless. If an adult needs the few dollars, they have bigger problems.

If you can solve the coordination problem between diners and the explosion of tipping (largely due to employers trying to fight for unskilled workers by promising some extra tip revenue) the tipping might be extinguished entirely and a correction can occur.

Post reply on HN