Trying way, way too hard. On demand food businesses are just catering companies. Catering companies have always existed. Bolt on pizza delivery magic, paired w

Trying way, way too hard. On demand food businesses are just catering companies. Catering companies have always existed. Bolt on pizza delivery magic, paired with remote-button access from your little black mirror that constantly tracks your coordinates/altitude and now it's a daily faustian dilemma weighing too heavy? Do you want another app to help you with that too? From the article the author's main point is this: Sprig-type operations drain agency and expertise out of the world. They centralize, aiming to build huge hubs with small spokes; their innermost mechanisms are hidden. They depend on humans behaving as interchangeable units of labor. He just doesn't like that a store exists to cater to his demand. How gauche to have to interact with a store that's not a store! He then wax romantically about some weird hippie future where it's much more fun to have your neighbors cooking for each other like one big timeless block party. That's called a marketplace. An unregulated, cottage protected, open marketplace! That must be better better than a store but as lovely as that sounds to mingle with a range of people to get a bowl of pho or some sandwich one has to face the fact that every marketplace ends up centralized. Every one. An open marketplace is a winners take all video game. Look at eBay and its class of power-sellers that dropship or flip their Alibaba account. Look at Fiverr and its class of power-users that end up dominating the search results. You just end up dealing with the most polished store for the sake of what being a store brings to the table. The consistency, quality, and ease. So wait, really what's the point here? What are we really trying to discover and realize about ourselves today? That treating people as interchangeable economic units is bad but this hippie fuzzy feeling way is less bad? As opposed to just cooking yourself or going to a restaurant? Maybe this is just a promoted native post. Who knows. But it notches up another line about how frustrating annoying Berkeley and its residents are. For extra credit contrast this piece to another post today by New York Times on the culture of GoFundMe community and a response by nostrademons Per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526447 On the whole, I think this is a good trend - it makes the economy more efficient, it encourages people to celebrate diversity instead of shunning it, and it's how the upper classes have operated for a long time, which is the source of a major power imbalance where corporations & rich people feel entitled to ask for anything and then working-class people feel ashamed to refuse. I hope you take that, stuff it in your pipe and smoke it, guy.