[HN Gopher] Scale Ruins Everything
___________________________________________________________________
Scale Ruins Everything
Author : drc500free
Score : 66 points
Date : 2024-10-14 17:34 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (coldwaters.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (coldwaters.substack.com)
| endo_bunker wrote:
| Comical to suggest that AirBnB "ruined communities" or "destroyed
| the dream of home ownership" as if decades of federal, state, and
| local government policy had not already guaranteed those
| outcomes.
| api wrote:
| Yeah I'm tired of this too. Real estate hyperinflation is
| almost entirely the fault of chronically under-building real
| estate due to regulatory capture by landlords, legacy
| homeowners, and speculators. The real estate market is more or
| less a cartel in quite a few places.
|
| AirBnB is a small factor. I suppose it drives up prices, but
| only because supply is so absurdly tight.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| 100% of code uses 100% of resources. Let's not downplay the
| role of Airbnb as both a company and a phenomena for causing
| inflation. But more than that, remember that a lot happens at
| the margins in these markets: what's actually liquid or in
| play is a small part of the overall stock. So anything that
| messes with that will have an outsized effect.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| You can define it as under-building, but that's only one side
| of the political effect. E.g. the UK net immigration rate has
| been pretty enormous, and it seems lopsided to call it under-
| building to have not built homes for a giant number of people
| coming from their previous homes elsewhere in the world to
| the UK.
|
| Speaking as the son of an immigrant, married to an immigrant,
| for the people who can only think tribally, and must assume I
| am doing the same.
| arccy wrote:
| most of these are legal immigrants, so the country decided
| to accept them, and yet failed to build enough to keep up
| with demand that they allowed.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Underutilization of land as a result on speculation on the
| growth of land prices is a major reason, even Manhattan has
| massive chunks of real estate that are vacant, a land value
| tax would fix this.
| sgdfhijfgsdfgds wrote:
| Airbnb has _in fact_ ruined communities and destroyed the dream
| of home ownership for an entire class of people: those who
| would already be buying at the limits of their budgets to stay
| where they were brought up.
|
| This happened even in areas where holiday home ownership and
| rental was common as a business.
|
| The failure of government to grapple with the negative effects
| of Airbnb is a separate thing. Airbnb are, in fact, in control
| of their own morality.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| You need to explain why AirBnB did this as opposed to other
| factors. Renting your house out predates AirBnB.
| sgdfhijfgsdfgds wrote:
| I _need_ to?
|
| Thanks for the unnecessary correction, when it's pretty
| clear that my comment you are replying to includes the
| words "even in areas where holiday home ownership and
| rental was common as a business".
|
| I don't know why it did not happen before.
|
| All I know is that the situation in coastal resort towns in
| Cornwall, Devon, and elsewhere in the UK changed _utterly_
| when Airbnb became a thing.
|
| I could guess that barrier to entry was always an issue
| before then; the relative complexity and process involved
| in listing a property with e.g. Hoseasons, who were the
| dominant player in the 80s and 90s, and who inspected
| properties and had greater requirements.
|
| But either way, Airbnb _did_ unambiguously change things.
| Ask people who lived in Cornish towns whether they 're even
| able to rent a room or a flat.
| JackYoustra wrote:
| I mean, usually if thing popular, make more of thing
| until everyone can have it? I guess we could go with your
| solution of deliberately killing demand with bizarre
| mechanisms so only a few people can enjoy a holiday
| instead of pointing the blame where it demands: locals
| fighting tooth and nail to not build more.
|
| Nimbys are basically hukou advocates in disguise. After
| all, it's the only solution if you don't primarily place
| the blame on lack of construction.
| sgdfhijfgsdfgds wrote:
| > make more of thing until everyone can have it?
|
| There are literal physical limits on this in many coastal
| villages and towns -- for example pick almost anywhere on
| the south west coast of the UK. Not only is the area on
| which houses can be built restrictive due to geography
| (and often geology), the transport infrastructure does
| not scale. New property building both has not caught up
| with, and probably cannot catch up with, short term
| demand.
|
| As it happens, a collapse seems likely, because local
| sentiment is turning against them so fast and because of
| general economic weakness; the number of "thriving
| holiday let" properties that are on the market now
| suggests that Airbnb's own accelerating rental costs
| problem is going to cause a bit of a bust.
|
| But that bust will not benefit most of the people in the
| areas affected where the price of a small house is twenty
| to thirty times the average salary of would-be-first-
| time-buyers. Those people are leaving, so there will
| instead be a ghost town. And the sheer number of
| residents who are temporary has destroyed the potential
| for long-term stable infrastructure businesses for
| residents.
|
| > Nimbys are basically hukou advocates in disguise.
|
| It's nothing to do with nimbyism, is it? Nimbys are
| property owners. The problem only affects people who _do
| not have back yards_. They can no longer afford the
| houses at the prices at which they will be built and the
| rates at which they can be.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _It 's nothing to do with nimbyism, is it? Nimbys are
| property owners. The problem only affects people who do
| not have back yards._
|
| NIMBYs are property owners who vote for restrictive
| housing development policy in order to prop up their own
| home values.
|
| Eliminate the NIMBYs and you end up with a lot more
| people who can have their own backyard.
| etothepii wrote:
| As a home owner that was only able to afford to buy a house
| _because_ we were able to rent out the spare rooms on AirBnb
| I find fault in your logic.
|
| I think you'll find that zoning/planning permission is the
| real bad guy here. That and a failure to understand Adam
| Smith and implement the ideas of Henry George.
| sgdfhijfgsdfgds wrote:
| > because we were able to rent out the spare rooms on
| AirBnb
|
| Unless you were the very first person in the entire area to
| think to do so, then the existence of that very market for
| you to rent spare rooms on is actually driving up the
| prices of properties so you have to do so.
|
| It's also driving up the prices of long term rental,
| because landlords make more money in the short-term rental
| market. The prices of long-term rental also affect the
| floor price of permanent ownership.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > As a home owner that was only able to afford to buy a
| house because we were able to rent out the spare rooms on
| AirBnb I find fault in your logic.
|
| Then you're a landlord who has purchased more of a scarce
| resource than they require (a house larger than you need)
| who has then turned around and rented access to the extra
| you have to people who can't afford a home of their own,
| and in so doing have driven the cost of homeowner-ship just
| _slightly_ higher, which was the reason you couldn 't
| afford it in the first place. Repeat that a few thousand
| times and that's a huge contributing factor to why housing
| is in such a dire state here.
|
| You haven't solved anything. You just went from being an
| exploited person to being an exploiter instead, taking
| advantage of people you should have solidarity with and
| inflicting the harm the system was inflicting on you, onto
| them instead. The system will continue feasting on people
| who can't manage the same as you did, and you now posses
| wealth you did not earn.
| kelnos wrote:
| Homes on the market aren't infinitely customizable. It
| seems perfectly likely that GP would have been happy to
| buy a home with exactly the amount of space they needed,
| but such a home was not available at a price they could
| pay. (Maybe they settled for a slightly less-nice
| neighborhood, or a slightly less-nice house, that just
| happened to provide an extra room or two.)
|
| Even if that wasn't the case, I don't see a problem with
| buying slightly larger than is necessary, because (for
| example) perhaps they're planning to have a couple kids
| in the next few years, but will rent out the extra space
| until then. Moving is transactionally expensive, and
| expecting someone to move every few years as their space
| needs change is unreasonable.
|
| Regardless, you seem a bit overly judgmental about this
| entire situation, and about someone you don't know at
| all.
| lacy_tinpot wrote:
| You need to really distinguish between rent seeking
| landowners, and value add landowners.
|
| Landowners that have made improvements to the land and
| seek financial compensation for those improvements, in
| this case in the form of providing a service, is NOT rent
| seeking behavior.
|
| That is NOT exploitation.
|
| This is even basic economics from an extremely leftist
| POV, where those that have added labor value, that is
| improvements to the land, in this case providing a
| service and perhaps building a unit, managing them, etc.
| should be compensated for their labor.
|
| Like this is extremely basic stuff.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > You need to really distinguish between rent seeking
| landowners, and value add landowners.
|
| No, I don't. Rent-seeking is derided behavior by
| basically everyone who isn't rent-seeking.
|
| If you buy property, improve it, and sell it, there's
| your profit for providing that service. No ethical lapse
| whatsoever, unless you used that godawful gray laminate
| that every flipper uses. Then I'm mad at you still but
| that's a different reason.
|
| If you own a thing that people need, and you gate access
| to it behind a paywall while maintaining ownership, and
| extract value from those people so they may use it but
| retain full ownership and control of it, that's rent-
| seeking and it sucks. You're the economic version of wind
| drag.
|
| Yes, that includes the 98 year old lady who rents out a
| room to fill the gaps left by social security to the nice
| young man who's going to college in the area. Still value
| extraction. That young man is losing the value of his
| labor because he has to live somewhere and she has space
| he can live in. That's unethical.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| AirBnB rentals are not making it criminal to build supply,
| local zoning regulations that benefit incumbents at the
| expense of everyone else are what make it criminal to build
| supply.
|
| It's a defect at the intersection of capitalism, property
| ownership, and democracy.
| g-b-r wrote:
| What do you think would happen if you filled a cozy
| touristic town with skyscrapers?
| lacy_tinpot wrote:
| AirBnB destroyed home ownership?
|
| As far as I can remember AirBnB didn't cause the 2008
| financial disaster that really sealed the fate of
| homeownership in America for the next decade for a lot of
| Americans.
|
| AirBnB has provided an avenue to generate income for small
| business owners in rural communities. Urban areas are
| struggling because they aren't building more.
|
| BUILD MORE. How difficult is it to understand that?
| sgdfhijfgsdfgds wrote:
| > AirBnB destroyed home ownership?
|
| What I said was rather more specifically qualified than
| that.
| lacy_tinpot wrote:
| > Airbnb has in fact ruined communities and destroyed the
| dream of home ownership for an entire class of people:
| those who would already be buying at the limits of their
| budgets to stay where they were brought up.
|
| The thing that's "ruined communities and destroyed the
| dream of home ownership" is the incapacity of the
| community, "where they were brought up", to actually
| change and accommodate increasing demands.
|
| In reality these individuals from these communities are
| using Left rhetoric to advocate an extremely conservative
| position. That is for the community to remain as is, in
| the exact way such people were "brought up", such that no
| progress, no change, no additional value is added to the
| communities.
|
| What ends up happening because of this confused policy is
| that the individuals in these communities both lose out
| on their hometown, the community ends up changing, and it
| becomes impossibly expensive for everyone in the
| community. IE the worst of all options.
|
| Instead. Build more. Build vertically. Build better
| infrastructure. Provide for local residents an
| opportunity to "buy-in".
|
| This kind of cloaked conservatism, masquerading itself
| using leftist rhetoric ends up being confused from a
| policy POV.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| > Airbnb has in fact ruined communities and destroyed the
| dream of home ownership for an entire class of people
|
| That is fair, but also misses the point. The issue with
| AirBnB is not that they are evil company and must be
| regulated. It's that they operate in a system where housing
| is an investment vehicle due to artificially constrained
| supply and tax system that is riddled with well intentioned
| and widely abused property ownership cuts. At worst they have
| accelerated the issue rather than caused it.
|
| > Airbnb are, in fact, in control of their own morality.
|
| Not entirely, they are a publicly listed company and will get
| sued if they do anything that will hurt the stock price.
| kelnos wrote:
| Oh please. NIMBYs ruined home ownership. Airbnb certainly
| hasn't had zero contribution to higher home prices, but
| abolishing short-term rentals hasn't fixed affordability
| issues anywhere it's been done.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| Honestly I'm not convinced when an airbnb is cheaper to me
| than renting some other place. It even includes furniture!
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Sure, but if someone started running heavy industrial concrete
| equipment in a residential zoned block 24/7, than the city
| wouldn't be blaming poor people for the issues.
|
| The fact is you can go to travel websites, and the first 70k
| listings in some cities are for commercial hotel/share services
| running out of residential zoned homes.
|
| Low-income people are easier to squeeze, and "with a computer"
| convenience doesn't make it an ethical securitization model. =3
| fire_lake wrote:
| AirBnB has been shown to raise residential house prices.
|
| It's not the only factor, or even the biggest, but still...
| kelnos wrote:
| > _It's not the only factor, or even the biggest, but
| still..._
|
| But that's the key, really. In most places, banning short-
| term rentals will not move the needle on housing
| affordability.
|
| It's like trying to optimize the thing that's causing 3% of
| the slowdown when things that are responsible for 40%, 30%,
| and 25% are right there, staring you in the face.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| When I read stuff like this, I'm left wondering if I'm the only
| person who actually lives in a place that has been infested
| with Airbnb. On paper, my neighborhood is the Hacker News
| dreamland. Nobody has a yard. There is train service. Many
| people don't have cars. There is no mandatory parking
| allowance. There is no zoning restriction against multifamily
| housing. Virtually every unit is at least attached. Multi-use
| is fine. Plenty of buildings contain both housing and
| businesses. There isn't a lot of traffic. It's walkable. The
| only major restriction is you can't build higher than five
| stories. And we've been in a construction boom for nearly a
| decade.
|
| But much of that boom has been tearing _down_ multifamily
| apartment complexes and replacing them with luxury townhouses
| and condos instead. Almost nobody is actually moving into those
| places. They 're 90% being purchased by investors, mostly out
| of state investors, to be used as Airbnbs. There is a
| significant categorical difference between investment property
| today and investment property before Airbnb. Before Airbnb, you
| rented via long-term leases, or you bought hotels and
| apartments in really shitty neighborhoods to use as weekly or
| even daily rentals for homeless people with jobs. Now you can
| buy as little as a single unit and the infrastructure to rent
| it out daily as a hotel room to much wealthier travelers exists
| without you needing to do anything extra.
|
| With predictable results. Even in neighorhoods with little to
| no zoning restrictions, with virtually nonstop construction of
| new housing, almost nobody lives here, the neighborhood is
| completely hollowed out, and all of these new luxury homes are
| mostly party houses used by rich college students and
| bachelorette parties.
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| That should drive your property value down, not up.
| g-b-r wrote:
| Not until there are so many short-term rentals that they
| aren't profitable anymore
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| If anything, there is a housing cartel that we need an Uber-
| like blitz (times a million) to destroy. In the same way that
| Uber ignored local taxi regulations, you would need to ignore
| local zoning regulations. Just "build, baby, build", become
| valuable, and then, with your fait-accompli in hand, bribe the
| various local governments -- just like Uber.
|
| Except -- if it took the combined might of Uber's VCs, and the
| disposable human battering ram that was Travis Kalanick, just
| to disrupt the puny little taxi industry, imagine what it would
| take to change housing. Ain't never gonna happen.
| daxfohl wrote:
| Given that we've been throwing cash at every conceivable idea for
| the last ten plus years, yet when speaking of unicorns we still
| have to refer back to airbnb and uber, seems like we're well past
| "peak unicorn" and well into the "horse with a mild concussion"
| era.
| Terr_ wrote:
| It's also disconcerting how much their success seems to hinge
| on using technology as a lever to break laws or social
| expectations, as opposed to technology as something that
| _itself_ empowers humans to be more productive.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Er no, they totally transformed things through technology as
| well. Their product was fantastic. Hail a cab in the 2000s in
| the UK and tell me Uber had no improvement for its customers.
| daxfohl wrote:
| I understand GP's point, but to yours I'll add they have
| also open sourced and mainstreamed some of their key
| technologies. So it's not all bad.
| adamc wrote:
| Not all bad != good.
| CPLX wrote:
| Right but how much of this improvement came from the
| invention and popularity of smartphones and how much of the
| innovation came from a company called Uber.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Struggling to see the relevance of this question. _How
| much of Uber 's "innovation" was actually Ford/GM/Toyota
| innovation in car manufacturing?_
| labster wrote:
| But those car companies are just riding on the coattails
| of Exxon, Chevron and the like with their improvements in
| oil discovery and hydraulic fracking.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Getting a taxi in my college town in 2005 was agony. Make a
| phone call from a loud bar and shout at some guy who can
| barely tell what you're saying that you want a taxi and then
| maybe if you're lucky they show up in an hour and cost 3
| times as much as you expected (and that's on a good night!)
| vs. "press a button, get a ride" (and have a feedback
| mechanism for horrible drivers or gross cars, etc.).
|
| Uber has issues but honestly it's night and day compared to
| what taxis were like. And they decrease DUI's.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Sure, but there's a difference between " _that_ kind of
| success " and " _any_ success ". To illustrate, imagine an
| alternate timeline with a company called "Rebu", which
| provides all the same phone-apps and servers and whatnot
| for thousands of taxi-services across the world to adopt,
| replacing their shitty old "computerized dispatch" systems.
|
| Do you believe Rebu could that have managed to draw the
| same level of venture-capitalist money and unicorn-ness and
| hype, even sharing the same core technologies, code, and
| product features?
|
| I don't think it would, and I'm asserting that comes from
| business-plans, labor relations, legal challenges,
| government lobbying, investor marketing, etc., which in
| several cases have been, er, ethically-problematic.
| tristor wrote:
| You're right, but you're treating that as a net-negative.
| The reality is that the government regulations structured
| taxi services in most cities in the world into cartels
| that operated in a way that was to the detriment of their
| customers. Uber broke the taxi cartel, and yes, it broke
| the law to do it, but it wouldn't have been possible to
| do this way if they'd tried to work with the existing
| taxi companies, because their anti-customer cancer would
| have infected Uber while it was young and before it could
| even scale. Part of their value proposition is their
| scale, itself.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| Services like Uber and AirBnB have also introduced a
| concept through technology that was previously almost
| unheard of in the private sector: a nationwide blacklist.
|
| Bob Smith annoyed enough Uber drivers in Milwaukee that
| now he can't get a ride in Poughkeepsie. Maybe that's
| valid, maybe it's not. But it is pretty new, and I doubt
| it was in the slide deck when Uber hit up the VCs.
|
| The social aspect of these sorts of things can't help but
| get entangled with the politics of social mores. Maybe
| Bob was giving the Uber drivers wet willies. A lot of
| people would think he caught that ban fairly. Maybe Bob
| was too politically incorrect for the Uber drivers. Not
| quite so sure he deserves to be sentenced to hoof it
| until the Sun burns out. How do we know the bans are of
| the fair former and not the latter? We don't. It's a
| private company, they can be as opaque about this as they
| want.
|
| Good, bad, who knows, but it certainly makes for a
| completely different landscape.
| kelnos wrote:
| I agree that this sort of thing is a problem, but it's
| not a fundamental problem with the existence of these
| services. It's just a problem to be solved, perhaps
| through legislation on how suspensions and bans are
| allowed to work, and how people ought to be able to
| appeal them.
|
| The legacy taxi services had this problem too, though, as
| you note, not on a global level. Pre-Uber, there was one
| taxi service that stopped taking my calls. I have no idea
| why. I had no way to appeal this, or to even get in touch
| with them to find out what was going on.
|
| In the meantime, Bob still probably has public transit or
| local old-school taxi services to fall back on (which
| somehow still exist). Many areas even have local ride-
| hailing apps. Worst-case, Bob will have to rent a car
| when visiting other cities.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think you're missing a key bit: taxi companies weren't
| interested in this sort of thing. In most municipalities,
| taxi service was a protected, government-granted
| monopoly. The reason taxi service was always so bad was
| because there was no competition, and no incentive to
| improve.
|
| So why would they bother to adopt "Rebu"? It's nothing
| but downsides: their taxi drivers have to work harder,
| have to be more polite and drive more safely, have to
| have cleaner cars, and have to be more accountable in
| general. Not to mention of course Rebu is going to take a
| cut of all rides booked on their platform.
|
| There was no way to make regular taxi service better
| without structural and legal reform that the incumbents
| did not want. The only way to fix it was to go outside
| the system and do something sketchy. And it worked! For
| all their issues and controversies, the ride-hailing app
| experience is _amazing_ , especially when compared to
| old-school taxi service. Some legacy taxi services have
| stepped up and improved a bunch since then, and others
| have just faded into obscurity.
| taberiand wrote:
| I think the difference between the hypothetical Rebu and
| Uber is one wants to fix the system, and one wants to be
| the system. The Taxis had to be disrupted, but Uber
| doesn't flinch at being just as bad wherever they can get
| away with it
| arthurjj wrote:
| I'm confused to the argument you're making as some of
| those are clearly ethically-problematic for Uber while
| legal challenges, government lobbying seems core to the
| business.
|
| The taxi market, in the US at least, was a textbook case
| of regulatory capture to stifle competition. Google "taxi
| medallion prices nyc" for an example. Uber was clearly
| the 'good guy' in flouting those laws and later getting
| them repealed. The cartels that controlled the medallions
| had no interest in improving the technology until they
| had competition.
| arccy wrote:
| this is still the experience in less developed places like
| italy
| macro-b wrote:
| It's more about regulations rather than development. It's
| forbidden here, so taxi drivers can still make a good
| living rather than subsidizing a billion dollar company
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| It's a better experience for sure, and that's why they got
| the viral start that gave them the opportunity to eat the
| world, but presenting that as "worth it" seems pretty
| dubious considering:
|
| - Tons and tons of users buying vehicles they can barely
| afford to drive for them
|
| - Tons of restaurants already struggling to get by saddled
| with needing an iPad or two at their counter to intercept
| online orders, and needing to charge more and anger
| customers just to break even on the fees
|
| - Huge amounts of sexual assaults because Uber didn't vet
| drivers
|
| And lest we leave it merely implied: Uber is worth what
| Uber is worth because it's a taxi company that owns no
| Taxis and pays no taxi drivers a proper wage. That's why
| it's a billion dollar unicorn. Same as AirBNB is a hotel
| chain that owns no hotels, UberEats/Doordash are food
| delivery services that don't own restaurants, Instacart is
| a grocery chain that doesn't own grocery stores.
|
| Honestly if you want to really be cynical about it, the
| true path to finding the next tech unicorn is figuring out
| how to be a $business that owns none of what a $business
| normally does, and hires no employees that $business
| usually does, and then wrap that up in an app, and convince
| poor people to do the work for you because they have no
| other options. Boom, unicorn.
|
| The way taxi companies had languished in obsolescence was
| definitely a problem, but I struggle to consider if Uber
| was the best way to solve that on any front.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Lots has been written about how way too much contemporary
| US business is about value _extraction_ not value
| _creation_.
|
| Put differently, a common business model in late 20th
| century and early 21st century US capitalism is to find a
| transaction that is already happening "at scale" and
| figure out how to insert your own company into the
| transaction and extract some percentage of the value.
|
| The primary way of accomplishing this is to create a
| (new) story to tell about the value you claim you are
| adding to the transaction ("it's so easy", "we have an
| app for that", "so much quicker") even though in many
| cases nobody (or very few people) were asking for
| whatever you bring to it.
|
| This does not mean that there is no value added. What
| these companies do _not_ represent are new transactions:
| no new products, no new macro-scale services ( "but you
| get a car with your phone now!" still boils down to
| "someone will drive you where you want to go").
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Pretty hard for me to lament laws being broken when the laws
| boil down to "you're not allowed to compete with this
| monopoly".
| sgdfhijfgsdfgds wrote:
| Do you lament e.g. Uber knowingly breaking laws, and then
| in the knowledge that they are knowingly breaking laws and
| under scrutiny for doing so, also actively building
| functionality into their systems that helps them criminally
| evade scrutiny?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-files-
| leak...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-
| greyball-...
|
| This is a level of deliberate, optional fraud that goes a
| step beyond, is it not? It's organised crime.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| No, I don't care about that at all. Why do you care?
|
| Someone, generations ago, made a law saying people in
| your town could only solicit car rides if they paid a
| special tax, and now you're out here vigorously defending
| that dead model.
|
| State-enforced monopolies are often legalized corruption.
| I care more about that than some corporation using their
| resources to break that corruption.
| sgdfhijfgsdfgds wrote:
| > and now you're out here vigorously defending that dead
| model.
|
| This is a bit of projection. But good for you, being open
| about your support for fraud :-)
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| > Why do you care?
|
| Not OP, but I believe in the rule of law, and in a
| republic governed by elected officials.
|
| It's not OK for powerful actors, especially companies,
| billionaires, and government officials, to willingly and
| knowingly break the law.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Thank you. I do generally agree with you.
|
| In this particular example with Uber, I see "powerful
| actors" many decades ago breaking our social contract by
| using the force of the government to implement a monopoly
| for their own profit and everyone else's expense. Legal,
| yes, in the strictest sense of the word, but certainly
| against what I value about my particular republic (USA).
|
| So Uber here is more "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"
| than a company I actually admire.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Someone, generations ago, made a law saying people in
| your town could only solicit car rides if they paid a
| special tax, and now you're out here vigorously defending
| that dead model.
|
| Congratulations on a text book case of Chesterton's Fence
| [0]. You've mischaracterized the purpose and nature of
| the law.
|
| 1. we have cars, we have people willing to drive them
| around to take people places
|
| 2. we want some regulation of this new business/service,
| to make things safer for the riders
|
| 3. we want some regulation of this new business/service
| because otherwise competition will force the price so low
| that nobody can make a living offering to do this (and we
| consider the service valuable).
|
| So, we introduce a scheme which says you have pay for a
| license in order to provide this service. This creates
| driver identity and "responsibility" which we want for
| riders. We limit the number of licenses so that we do not
| have too many drivers chasing too few riders, and thus
| offering a more reliable income to the drivers, ensuring
| that the service remains available.
|
| [ time passes ]
|
| Uber introduces a scheme in which there is almost no
| floor to what drivers might be paid, but manages to tell
| a story that convinces enough people that they could make
| a living or at least a significant amount of extra cash
| by driving without the required license. Uber also
| assures riders that even though there is no official
| license, their technology can provide the driver
| identity/responsibility that it offered.
|
| Result: better ride hailing for riders, money for Uber,
| and a steady, constant turnover of drivers "just giving
| it a try because I heard you can do really well ..."
|
| As usual, a mixture of pros and cons, which vary
| depending on which perspective you are taking and your
| moral/political philosophy.
| cyberax wrote:
| Eh. If they break laws to bust the monopolies, more power
| to them.
| sgdfhijfgsdfgds wrote:
| I do so love the HN culture that laws are for little
| people.
| kelnos wrote:
| Uber _was_ the little person when they started out,
| busting those monopolies.
|
| They should absolutely be held to a higher standard
| today, now that they are more or less one of those
| monopolies.
| kelnos wrote:
| Sure, that's bad. But that has nothing to do with the
| fact of their existence.
|
| Laws aren't universally good. Some laws are bought and
| paid for by special interests. Some regulations are the
| result of regulatory capture. I am totally fine with
| people or companies skirting our outright breaking those
| laws in order to make things better for people.
|
| But yes, Uber also did some bad things that I don't agree
| with. I still think Uber has been a new positive for my
| life, and I'm happy they exist.
| jgraettinger1 wrote:
| One labeling is "organised crime".
|
| Another is: civil disobedience with a profit motive.
| agumonkey wrote:
| it was social cocaine, a lot of shiny results that made a lot
| of people high on numbers and progress fantasy
|
| old is new, 2.0
| kelnos wrote:
| I'm not sure if this counts as being "empowered to be more
| productive", but both Airbnb and Uber are (to me, at least)
| _still_ miles ahead of what were the only options pre-Airbnb
| and pre-Uber.
|
| The hotel experience of course was (and is) not universally
| bad, but I still prefer an Airbnb in most cases, for most
| trips I take. And when it comes to taxis... no thanks. Unless
| I have foreknowledge that taxis are significantly cheaper
| than Uber/Lyft in a place I'm visiting, I will take that
| Uber/Lyft every single time.
|
| Airbnb is certainly more fraught, given the problems for
| communities that rampant short-term rentals can cause. And I
| won't claim that Uber/Lyft is fair to their drivers. But I
| don't really care if they had to break laws to get where they
| are. Sometimes laws are wrong. Sometimes laws are the result
| of corruption and lobbying that isn't in the interests of the
| actual constituents. "Social expectations" is a bit of a
| weird thing to bring up, since it's so amorphous and hard to
| pin down. I don't think I ever had any "social expectation"
| that people can't rent out their house or apartment for a few
| days or a week. I don't think I ever had any "social
| expectation" that the only way to hire a car was to call a
| number that often doesn't pick up, and then wait 30-60
| minutes for a car that often doesn't ever arrive.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > And I won't claim that Uber/Lyft is fair to their
| drivers. But I don't really care if they had to break laws
| to get where they are.
|
| "Technology and throw-caution-to-the-wind made life better
| for me as a consumer, and I openly don't care (much) about
| the negative impacts on communities and other individuals".
|
| > Sometimes laws are wrong. Sometimes laws are the result
| of corruption and lobbying that isn't in the interests of
| the actual constituents.
|
| Certainly. That's why we have a process to change them,
| rather than simply ignore them.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > we've been throwing cash
|
| I think you find most of the answer you want if you simply
| examine who "we" is in this context.
|
| It certainly wasn't "us."
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| That's a pretty good point.
|
| Are there any, at least somewhat credible, unicorns that have
| appeared over the last 5 years?
| al_borland wrote:
| Does OpenAI count? Founded 8 years ago, but have completely
| blown up in the last couple years.
| CM30 wrote:
| To be honest, you could say this about capitalism in general.
| Everything has to be huge no matter what industry it's in or what
| the product is, just because shareholders demand that impossible
| infinite growth.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's not capitalism. It's government bonds. If you can get a
| guaranteed return from bonds, then any risk must beat the bond
| market. That increases the cost of capital for businesses, so
| they have to produce greater returns.
| vladms wrote:
| Human nature in most big culture seems to be trained to demand
| more (even if not always money). If there was any group of
| people that were "content with what they had", they were
| outpaced in development by the ones that "want more" so there
| will be minor (or inexistent) now.
|
| I do wonder if there is any smart solution to this issue.
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| Any advance, early industrial revolution; late nineteenth century
| industrialization; twentieth century vertical integration;
| globalization; internet disintermediation etc. will cause some
| dislocation. Often unintended, and rarely foreseen. Ultimately it
| all settles down to a new equilibrium, until the next
| perturbation. It's a bit disingenuous blaming VC's, or scale, or
| anything exogenous. The system's capacity for change will always
| outstrip the current institutions' abilities to fully buffer the
| change. If we focused on improving the institutions responsible
| for that function we'd be performing a more useful function than
| trying to limit the change.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| I misread the title as "Scala Ruins Everything" and was very
| confused by the comments.
| jelling wrote:
| So did I and having chosen it once, I still thought "well, I'll
| hear this out..."
| tantalor wrote:
| I'm halfway through reading this and still not discovered what
| the point is.
| rKarpinski wrote:
| Odd piece. It highlights some hyper-scalers but it needs to work
| on justifying 'how they ruin everything'.
|
| "At scale, they would ruin communities, put restaurants out of
| business, destroy the dream of home ownership, and eventually
| undermine democracy itself."
|
| Uh what now?
| jaggederest wrote:
| airbnb, doordash, airbnb, facebook - did those things,
| respectively, with plenty of hard evidence (does anyone still
| remember cambridge analytica)
| adamc wrote:
| One of the questions all this raises for me is: what fraction of
| successful startups actually make society better?
|
| I'm sure to get pushback here, but my suspicion is: most do not.
| Looking at companies like Facebook, Amazon, or Google, I'm kind
| of think they made it worse. Yeah, I know, some people benefited.
| But net-net, I preferred having more and better bookstores to
| Amazon. I don't like what google has become at all. And Facebook
| has never been good.
| dash2 wrote:
| I like Airbnb, because it's made staying abroad much cheaper and
| nicer. I also like being able to rent a taxi on an app in a new
| town.
| sausagefeet wrote:
| For awhile I'd been using AirBnb by reflex, but after a few
| pretty bad experiences I started indexing it against local
| hotels before committing, and my experience has been that if
| you just need a place to be (don't care about kitchen) then
| AirBnB is not nearly as competitive as it used to be. So yes,
| AirBnB has made staying places cheaper, but the industry is
| also catching up. Concrete example is nightly rate for a studio
| in Paris vs the hotel next to it were +/- euros difference when
| I was there last year.
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