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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

#631

Post by creer »

ricardobeat wrote: post #417
dghlsakjg wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What it costs to produce is irrelevant in an equilibrium price for supply and demand. I'm not sure you do understand. Many people are buying the cereal for $8. Its that simple. There is enough demand for it at $8 that the company is happy with the market clearing their supply at that price point. If people were not buying the cereal at that price, they would lower it, or have gone out of business by now. If someone c…

> If someone could produce a substitute for far cheaper, and undercut, they would Not when a cartel controls 97% of the market, distribution, placement, and is very keen on maintaining the status quo, as posited by the article.

At least in high population places like much of California, nobody controls distribution and placement to this degree. If you are not happy with Safeway - and there is no reason to be - you can buy some product categories at the other chains, at walmart or Costco, unpackaged at specialized grocery stores, at several kinds of ethnic grocery stores, even at eastern european grocery stores. And that's before getting to online, long distance, grocery delivery which is not even always out of the question on price. ALL of these are functional. We do have a lot of choice currently.

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

#632

Post by creer »

afro88 wrote: post #469
dghlsakjg wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What it costs to produce is irrelevant in an equilibrium price for supply and demand. I'm not sure you do understand. Many people are buying the cereal for $8. Its that simple. There is enough demand for it at $8 that the company is happy with the market clearing their supply at that price point. If people were not buying the cereal at that price, they would lower it, or have gone out of business by now. If someone c…

But why is all that cereal $8? Where's the competition driving prices back down?

This is a misunderstanding. There is no reason for SOME cereal to not be $8. Competition will not make ALL substitutable products go to the lowest price. The question is whether all cereal is there, or at least all plausibly substitutable cereal is there. And it's not. Someone else did the research, even if you want brand name Cheerios, there is still a lot of range in prices. Unfortunately many people are not THAT price driven, clearly.

Now, all these grocery store do have something in common. They are all in California (if we pick that state), so they all share the high cost of real estate, the high cost of custom formula gas, the high taxes, etc, etc, etc.

And the fire truck example, it correct, is much more of a problem. It's not hard to manufacture breakfast cereals (and clearly not THAT hard to distribute them) or to bring potatoes to restaurants! It's much harder to build reliable fire trucks.

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

#633

Post by creer »

cudgy wrote: post #566
latency-guy2 wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> costs a dollar or so to deliver landed to a store costs me $8 to buy. Delivery optimization, logistics, and last mile operations are an unfathomably difficult problem(s) to solve, so much so that the entire world participates and there are still enormous gaps in efficiency, many that likely will never be solved due to physics. I know you're plain wrong about it costing "a dollar" to deliver. Even if it did, you do…

People have been delivering goods to stores for hundreds of years. How much expertise and convenience is required?

For a while, that was the entire strength of Walmart (efficient distribution) and they did amazingly well with just that. For many years now, even they have not been able to achieve that. It's not so easy.

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

#634

Post by latency-guy2 »

cudgy wrote: post #566
latency-guy2 wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> costs a dollar or so to deliver landed to a store costs me $8 to buy. Delivery optimization, logistics, and last mile operations are an unfathomably difficult problem(s) to solve, so much so that the entire world participates and there are still enormous gaps in efficiency, many that likely will never be solved due to physics. I know you're plain wrong about it costing "a dollar" to deliver. Even if it did, you do…

People have been delivering goods to stores for hundreds of years. How much expertise and convenience is required?

I don't really have the patience for ignorance being masqueraded as expertise.

If you have something to prove, then you're welcome to show the world how its done. Doubt me all you want, but you can't doubt the rest of the world.

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

#635

Post by brookst »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #384
brookst wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the ripple effects are much larger. Lay off a few thousand people in most cities and you’re sinking all sorts of businesses that had nothing to do with the crime.

Putting down a corporation doesn't necessarily mean ending a productive operation. Employee or government takeover are options too.

So it’s good for employees when the company does something criminal? That seems like misaligned incentives. If you and I can engineer a crime, we can seize all of the stock from shareholders?

I don’t think these solutions are well thought through.

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

#636

Post by immibis »

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…

> 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.

Uber gets to choose how many drivers to schedule at a given time. Expecting it to be unable to correctly-ish choose this number, when it's 50% of the work every other company has to do, is what's absurd.

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

#637

Post by immibis »

ajmurmann wrote: post #86
MaxikCZ wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discoverability. Theres no money in promoting free stuff, so compact free solutions never make it to your suggestions.

What do you mean "free stuff". This isn't about giving potatoes away for free but about reducing margins and competing on price. "Your margin is my opportunity" seems to work well in many cases

I think Mastodon vs Bluesky is an example. Mastodon, being OSS developed in someone's spare time (I think he makes a meager salary off grants and donations now) is barely marketed. Bluesky, being a multi-billionaire's pet project, had plenty of marketing. As a result, everyone who complained about the lack of free speech on X still ignored Mastodon, the actually-free-speech-host-your-own-server-how-you-want-it platform, for an entire year, instead preferring to wait for Bluesky, the billionaire-owned-and-operated exact-copy-of-early-Twitter where a different billionaire still controls your speech, to come out instead.

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

#638

Post by immibis »

istultus wrote: post #40

It really does suck that US companies have belatedly figured out that demand is elastic and jacked up the prices. Where I live that happened long ago. The thing is that he doesn't present any alternative. I know he's some variant of a communist, so does he suggest government control for everything? As if that solved anything? I guess what you find on empty market shelves is cheaper. Truly a question - what's your sol…

You shouldn't have to propose a solution to complain about a problem.

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

#639

Post by bdndndndbve »

ogleopoly wrote: post #497
bdndndndbve wrote: post #191

I think the key insight that the article misses is that when consumers interact with an app they have an excess of trust in "the app". I run an ecommerce site. It's hard as a small retail operation to keep inventory in sync and model the complex network of supplier relationships for special-orders: we can get some products in a day, some things in a week, some in 6 months. Nonetheless customers assume that the comput…

The article isn't about consumer apps, though, it's about websites that all four companies in an industry use for "optimal pricing", which just launders collusion through a Python backend. I would considering giving the piece a reread.

I don't really see how doing collusion through a Python backend is separate from my point? They're doing an obviously illegal and immoral thing but wrapping it in a layer of technology which obfuscates and apparently legitimizes it. The consumer view is one aspect but the companies and regulators have the same perspective.

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

#640

Post by emn13 »

olalonde wrote: post #617
emn13 wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

While a humorous response by Milton and an interesting debating point, the argument he makes is pretty weak because it almost inevitably reduces to complete lawlessness, doesn't really define which government "granted" monopolies he's willing to give up, and ultimately relies on a fairly arbitrary definition of what government even is - and one that if you really let it go to the extreme not only obviously just doesn't work well for most people, it also does not avoid monopolies as is witnessed every day around the globe.

After all, the natural inclination of a powerful elite is to protect their interest. It's business 101 to want a moat, and tearing down one set of artifical legal protections that allows for a moat allows on the other hand for the far more extreme quite physically violent moat in the form of a putin-esque kleptocracy.

The argument merely sounds convincing because it's very selectively implying that certain monopolies are created by state power and might be weakened by free market principles without considering what a free market even is (generally a regulated one), nor addressing the fact that other monopolies will arise precisely because because the lack of regulation allows winner-take-all brute force strategies to work.

That doesn't mean Milton's ideas are without merit - but that there is a breaking point; dogmatically hoping for anarchy to avoid harmful centralization of power is problematic because of the dogma; not because it's never a valid approach.

But sure, if you're going to embrace Milton's (intentionally) vague proposition in the way it was likely intended - to provoke thought - then sure; there are state regulations that are in part to blame for some of today's near monopolies - the interaction between intellectual property, incorporation, and state-enforced contract law. As a matter of debate, sure, it'd be interesting to weaken all three and in particular their interactions. I just highly doubt that's very practical, nor would it be very easy to predict the outcome, especially once international power-plays start circumventing even the best of intentions.

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