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points by sailfast 5 days ago | 0 comments

I dunno it sure seems to have worked for Uber and AirBnB…

I would amend your “breaking the law” comment to “willfully ignoring all regulation, taxes, and labor provisions” perhaps but, same sentiment.

[–] burningChrome 5 days ago

This is the old, "Easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission"

A lot of these companies have taken this approach. Break laws until someone finally notices AND does something about it. The runway to a slap on the wrist is often times more financially beneficial to companies - there is no incentive to stop if you run a billion dollar company and breaking the law gets you a $50M dollar fine you make back in a single month.

I thought SOX (Sarbanes–Oxley Act) was supposed to prevent a lot of this, but I guess companies just continue to find loopholes to exploit.

[–] Loughla 5 days ago

It's literally just move fast and break things.

[–] whimsicalism 5 days ago

I think sometimes people need a visceral demonstration of what bad laws are actually preventing. Uber was a pareto improvement in my view: we are in a better world both for consumers & for low-income wages having ridesharing as a backstop.

On the other hand, I've come around to the view that sports betting is a net unqualified bad -- and I didn't necessarily feel that way before the Kalshi/PM explosion.

[–] cowlevel 4 days ago

> Uber was a pareto improvement in my view: we are in a better world both for consumers & for low-income wages having ridesharing as a backstop.

Which has led to the interesting phenomenon that a sequence of Pareto improvements (each of which makes everyone better off) has seemed to leave everyone worse off.

[–] whimsicalism 4 days ago

Causal evidence indicates that uber entrance raises wages and reduces unemployment among the poorest, even who are not working for uber. Riders also get value.

How the hell is that leaving everyone worse off?

[–] lenerdenator 5 days ago

Uber and AirBnB were things we should have taken far more seriously.

That being said, they weren't effectively offering unregulated gambling on any difference of opinion. Gambling is a vice. We've made it a regulated vice, but it's very much still a vice. If you get rid of the "regulated" part, people, including those with the ability to present a case in front of a grand jury, are going to see you as a 1980s cosa nostra capo and act accordingly.

[–] BeetleB 4 days ago

Eh. Uber and Lyft exploit people bad at math. Just as gambling operations do.

[–] tt24 5 days ago

So your two examples of this supposed bad thing are two completely unambiguous goods for the world?

[–] hvb2 5 days ago

Uber and Airbnb are unambiguous good for the world?

You might want to look up Barcelona and the issues airbnb causes there. Basically it follows out the cities as you can make way more money doing Airbnb than renting to people living/working there.

As to Uber, I'm not sure if the driver experience is unambiguous good. For some, sure. For the ones that depend on it, I'm sure they'll disagree

[–] tt24 5 days ago

Airbnb is a convenient scapegoat in Barcelona. The service it provides is an unambiguous good.

Uber drivers are welcome to no longer drive for uber if they don’t enjoy the experience.

[–] lenerdenator 4 days ago

> Uber drivers are welcome to no longer drive for uber if they don’t enjoy the experience.

Are they?

The drivers have a certain set of capital and skills, and Uber (and to a lesser extent, Lyft) have created a near-monopoly on the market to buy services produced using that capital and skills. Since the ability to execute a transaction in that market is severely compromised if you don't work by Uber's rules, you are effectively outside of the marketplace if you no longer drive for Uber. You make no money. You go broke. You don't have the capital necessary to effectively compete in the market for giving rides in exchange for money. They own your skills and capital in all but the legal sense.

If there were either real, multi-company competition for Uber's market share, or a larger amount of regulation upon their monopoly, it'd be a different story.

Of course, there are people who think that monopolies are good, but that seems to be counterintuitive to anyone with a basic grasp of human nature and history.

[–] cowlevel 4 days ago

Why don't we make another Uber, a third and fourth and fifth Uber until prices converge to the market optimum?

This isn't a rhetorical question. As far as I know there are only two globally - Uber and Lyft. If most of what you need is a web server and a lawyer, shouldn't there be ten of these in every city?

[–] Dylan16807 4 days ago

"Car" and "follow GPS" are a set of capital and skills shared by most adults. Uber doesn't own most adults. You're supposed to have marketable skills on top of that.

The skill of knowing all the roads stopped being important a decade or two before Uber even started.

[–] tfrancisl 5 days ago

> Uber drivers are welcome to no longer drive for uber if they don’t enjoy the experience.

This is obviously a fallacy under our current economic system; workers are not "free to choose whatever job/occupation" they'd like. Their circumstances (material conditions) dictate what they can and cannot do for work, and in some places, driving for Uber is about it, at least for a part time gig that can fit around a primary job (since many Americans at least must work in excess of 50 hours a week to afford food and rent).

So, instead of punching down and saying "man, just get a better job" we could recognize the realities of the world and hope we can make the conditions of drivers better. Uber, or a system like it, at least if we are forced to have car-centric infrastructure, should be a net good. At the moment it is not.

[–] Dylan16807 4 days ago

I dunno. This is a job that didn't exist until recently. Society isn't structured around it and I don't think it's punching down to say people can skip that specific job.

It should have more protections too, I'm not arguing against those. I just think "it's the only job some people can get" is often a bad argument. And it's often used to perpetuate bad systems.

[–] cowlevel 4 days ago

Things existing generally can't be ignored as their mere existence can have higher-order effects. For example your landlord can now raise your rent higher and say "why don't you just drive Uber to pay this", and even if he doesn't actually say that, people's extra Uber income still raises the average amount that people can pay for rent, which raises the amount that landlords can charge for rent and still fill their apartments.

[–] logdahl 5 days ago

That is not at all how it works in practice though. Where I live, Uber has basically fixed the rate of all taxi companies. Effectively, if you order an Uber, you will 80% of the time get a normal taxi, except they earn less.

[–] whimsicalism 5 days ago

That is because you live somewhere that is poorly governed and defaults to protecting incumbents, probably Europe.

[–] tt24 5 days ago

This is due to regulation

[–] Dylan16807 5 days ago

While it's often a scapegoat for lack of construction, it does contribute to a lack of housing. It's not an unambiguous good, especially when you look at the hosts that have more than 1-2 houses.

[–] tt24 4 days ago

This is like saying that my LED lightbulb contributes to climate change. Technically true, but completely meaningless.

[–] Dylan16807 4 days ago

Barcelona's at something like 1.2% empty housing and a similar amount of Airbnb locations if these Google results can be trusted. Let's say we want 10% more housing. If shutting down Airbnb would put just 1/4 of those locations on the market, that would be 0.3% of the market or 3% of the goal. That's not a meaningless amount. It's not your flashlight's roughly 0.00000000000001% of 100PWh per full charge.

[–] cowlevel 4 days ago

Also, prices are set on the margins. Everyone who lives there has to pay a competitive rate to AirBNB because otherwise their landlord would just evict them and make it an AirBNB instead.

(Competitive doesn't mean the same price per night - there's also factors of cleaning and occupancy rate)

[–] nsoam 5 days ago

Barcelona has a big problem with a lack of development and mass migration. Has little to do with Airbnb although it’s a good scapegoat.

[–] t-writescode 5 days ago

Are they?

Uber is a major driver of the gig economy and all the lack of worker protections that that includes.

They’re also arguably a major driver/originator of DoorDash and Uber Eats, a company that famously takes an enormous percentage of every restaurant’s order fee, compounding either the increase in costs of restaurant food, or causing restaurants to struggle further or both.

They’ve done good - they’ve made it easier to get a job when you otherwise can’t, and they’ve reduced car reliance for some people; but “unambiguous good” is too far a bridge.

[–] tt24 5 days ago

The gig economy is good.

If a restaurant doesn’t like the cut taken by DoorDash they’re welcome to not participate in DoorDash. As far as I know, neither company has ever forced a restaurant into participation.

[–] cowlevel 4 days ago

You're assuming that a sum of a finite number of voluntary transactions adds up to a voluntary system, but this doesn't actually work. The whole is not equal to the sum of its parts.

[–] JDups 4 days ago

DoorDash has absolutely added restaurants without consent, the other food delivery apps as well, they call them non partnered listing. California, Colorado, and maybe other states have passed laws against it.

DoorDash got sued by In-N-Out for doing this. https://www.eater.com/2015/11/11/9714840/in-n-out-doordash-d...

[–] tt24 4 days ago

Sorry, did you read the context of the thread?

The parent comment was complaining about the fee that DoorDash charges the restaurant.

Is that link going tell me that DoorDash was charging restaurants non consensually? That would be very tough for me to believe

[–] jmuguy 5 days ago

What behavior from Airbnb do you think compares in criminality to running an online bookie?

[–] sailfast 4 days ago

How many billions of dollars in taxes went unpaid? How many overnight accommodation laws were broken? How much consumer harm has occurred due to lack of rights where they might otherwise have redress? Just a few that come to mind.

[–] jmuguy 4 days ago

So Airbnb is responsible for the individual hosts who decide to do something illegal? People have been doing short term rentals for a long time, including online, before Airbnb - what specifically did the company do that was so bad that its the same level as the gambling enabled by Kalshi etc?

[–] sailfast 4 days ago

This might be a controversial take, but if you take a small cottage industry and make it a consolidated global platform that is growing the practice on purpose by thousands of percentage points, then the platform IS actually responsible.

As for the gambling bits I guess if I had to answer it would be property investors that bought thinking they could rent on AirBnB - speculation but also driving up prices in popular areas to price out locals.