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

pluralistic.net

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

#611

Post by cudgy »

dd36 wrote: post #585
cudgy wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, there’s still a chance the current administration can do something about it. But there’s a zero chance the previous administration did anything about it.

Lina Khan did a ton of anti-trust but corporations seem to have realized Trump is transactional/pay to play. One can hope the strong antitrust continues but there’s little reason for optimism.

Unfortunately, pay to play is better than no pay to play. Recently, Trump had the audacity to ask for half of TikTok for the government to approve the deal. That sounds like a lot more than Lina Khan or Biden would’ve demanded.

By the way, I’m not condoning government ownership of corporations as the ideal solution, but I absolutely do not approve of huge corporate subsidies with no value in return for tax payers and handwaving small fine penalties for obvious monopoly behavior.

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

#612

Post by RHSeeger »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #515
RHSeeger wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Option 3 - You hire enough people to cover general demand, have surge prices to lower demand when there's not enough drivers, and charge prices for normal/lower demand that allows you to make sure everyone you have on duty makes at least minimum wage. And if you _can't_ find a solution that allows you to pay everyone minimum wage, then you don't get to do business. I can think of plenty of businesses I could set up t…

> Option 3 - You hire enough people to cover general demand, have surge prices to lower demand when there's not enough drivers, and charge prices for normal/lower demand that allows you to make sure everyone you have on duty makes at least minimum wage. This is just a rehash of Option 1. The point of surge pricing is to get more drivers to drive during peak times. If you're instead using that money to pay other peopl…

> Minimum wage laws in general have never protected anyone. If there is another job available to you that pays more than minimum wage and is otherwise on equally favorable terms, you would have taken that one regardless of whether a lower paying job is available.

That "if" there is doing a lot of work. I think you underestimate how many people out there are in a situation where it's the job they have or the street. Not everyone has the option to just go pick another job, and the people that don't is heavily skewed towards the people with the worst jobs.

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

#613

Post by RHSeeger »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #531
viraptor wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one person gets 40 hours and one person gets 10 instead of each person getting 25 hours If these are the upfront conditions, why is that an issue? But the main issue you're getting closer and closer to is: uber's model doesn't seem to be profitable if they have to pay and employ with reasonable conditions. They don't have to be profitable though. We really can let them fail. The reasonable cities can then provide s…

> If these are the upfront conditions, why is that an issue? Because they might have both preferred 25 hours with flexibility to a forced choice between 40 inflexible hours or 10 flexible ones. > uber's model doesn't seem to be profitable if they have to pay and employ with reasonable conditions. Uber is an app. Their primary cost is paying drivers. They're not going to fail because you imposed this inflexibility on…

> But "have fewer drivers" is those people losing their jobs, which isn't really helping them out.

Laws that regulate how people can be treated by employers have always been a balance between _some_ people having it worse (ex, their jobs not being available) so that the _vast_ majority of people have it better.

The same things is true of things like safety regulations. It costs more to be safe, and you have to charge more or hire less if you're going to have them. But overall, society is better for them (even though some people no longer have jobs).

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

#614

Post by RHSeeger »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #551
viraptor wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> both preferred 25 hours with flexibility That's not an option though. The option uber gives is "maybe 25, maybe not, you'll find out on the day". That's still "how do we keep uber in business". There are alternatives like good quality overprovisioned public transport which can take most of those customers. It can also deal with peak situations like events. It's a sunk cost fallacy to think of uber as some kind of l…

> That's not an option though. The option uber gives is "maybe 25, maybe not, you'll find out on the day". It's 25 when it's 25. Which you can still have a preference for when the alternative is 10, or the alternative is "40 hours but your hours are 9PM to 1AM and then 5AM to 9AM". > That's still "how do we keep uber in business". Uber is still in business when they require you to work split shifts in the wee hours.…

> Uber is better than taxi medallion cartels

Uber is _different_ than the taxi system. Not all taxi systems are "taxi medallion cartels", even in cities with taxi medallions. And, when it started, Uber was worse than the taxis in a lot of cities in many ways. It's gotten better since then, but pretty much exclusively to try to prevent the cities from throwing them out on their asses.

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

#615

Post by bschne »

dd36 wrote: post #588
bschne wrote: post #138

> These companies have been hiking prices for years, but really started to turn the screws during the post-covid inflationary period The only one I found a time series for quickly is Lamb Weston: Their margins steadily went down after 2019, then surged quite substantially, and by the end of 2024 were more or less back at their 21/22 low points [1] Additionally there's apparently a class action suit against the compan…

Margins aren’t an objective measurement. Margins are easy to manipulate through shell companies and other costs. Just look at PBMs. They all supposedly have small margins. However, once you peel back the layers, you see rebates and kickbacks and all kinds of illegal schemes to hide the real income.

What is your hypothesis in this case? Something like "margins went down because of accounting shenanigans they only figured out a few years ago, surged so much because of price fixing that the accounting shenanigans were not good enough to cover it anymore, and then they figured out new accounting shenanigans to manipulate margins down to the previous low. And all of that in a way that overstated COGS or understated value of goods produced, because gross margins basically show the same pattern? I'm not in the potato business or an accountant, but curious to learn if you know more about this.

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

#616

Post by olalonde »

dd36 wrote: post #582
olalonde wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standard Oil: Its monopoly was already crumbling before antitrust action. By 1911, market share had plunged from 90% to 64% as competitors like Gulf/Texaco emerged and new oil fields broke its grip. Carnegie Steel: Government intervention. The federal government imposed steep tariffs on imported steel, shielding domestic producers like Carnegie from foreign competition. Without those tariffs, cheaper British/German s…

Google. Microsoft. Facebook. If it weren’t for antitrust, there’d be a lot fewer cell phone companies or airlines. I mean, it’s harder to name an industry where there hasn’t been consolidation. The only thing stopping it is the law. Consolidation was basically illegal until the 1980s. If you wanted to grow, you had to compete.

Wrong. Also, none of the companies you listed are monopolies.

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

#617

Post by olalonde »

emn13 wrote: post #609
olalonde wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to keep a free market from collapsing into one of the natural end states What is that natural end state? Natural monopolies are exceedingly rare, almost all monopolies are the result of government intervention .

I'm curious what you base that on. For instance, we've never really allowed literally cutthoat competition, nor things like fraud and we've generally not allowed misrepresentation. Governments intervene heavily and always have to set those kind of boundary conditions - but there are really lots of them. Economies of scale seem to be very, very common ever since the industrial revolution; and even more so in today's i…

The observation that the least regulated markets are typically the most competitive ones and that large companies rarely tend to maintain their lead over long periods of time. And at least one Nobel Prize-winning economist agrees with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdLBzfFGFQU

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

#619

Post by elicksaur »

constantcrying wrote: post #103

What a terrible article. The title and the first paragraph talk about how new business models are circumventing existing laws, which seems fair enough and actually quite an interesting subject. Then, there is a switch to the most traditional of businesses with the most traditional business models. Who, the author argues, are engaging in price gauging. In the second paragraph he claims that apps cause this inflation (…

The fact that this is seemingly the top comment shows how entrenched HN’s typical user is in making money off the predatory practices articulated thoroughly in the article.

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

#620

Post by cudgy »

greyface- wrote: post #587
cudgy wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to the settings of the graph and set the graph to logarithmic. Growth is linear.

An upward line on a log graph represents exponential, not linear, growth.

The rate of growth is linear. In fact, looking at the graph in logarithmic scale shows that the rate of growth of M2 is slowing.
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