14 ms·

Exponential growth devours and corrupts

180 points by AngeloAnolin 10y ago

xchaotic 10y ago
The problem is that I can't use the 'nice' app in every city I visit that has Uber. It's the aggressive growth and VC that allows it to be everywhere. And at least where I travel, the existing taxi corporations are far worse than Uber. So yes, in an ideal world, I'd rather use open-source app to hail my sustainable eco taxi, but such an app does not have the funding to upend the existing taxi rackets.
- msoad 10y ago
  Travelers are not a big chunk of ride-sharing company user base.
3pt14159 10y ago
During the dying days of calling myself a libertarian (I think the last permutation was "realistic geo-libertarian") I read a blog post kinda like this, but less concrete. It was by a guy who made up a word, something like "Mazolith", and he was trying to describe how letting these forces unchecked was this hyper system that we were failing to recognize. One of the lines was I got to about there ^ in the comment before I remembered more of the quote. The article I trying to find was this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ It is extremely good and it plays well after DHH's intro. I know some of the arguments there against libertarianism are strawman arguments, but overall it's a great article and about a day after reading it and thinking about it I started just calling myself a Liberal (it's more complicated than that, but it's the closest fit). DHH touches on exponential growth specifically, but more generally what is needed is to recognize the world as a system of forces and feedback functions, and to take actions to limit the consequences of those systems. For example, democracy is a system to establish which people run our country. If media is allowed to be funded by foreign forces unchecked then it can subvert our democracy. We must now make a choice, do we do something or allow it? For a time we allowed it because our propaganda works better than theirs (mostly because ours is the truth and we live in free societies) but with the advent of social media we may need to make a different choice or change our systems to adapt. It is this type of thinking. It's a superset of what the Canadians and others call "good government". It's a way of managing systems to enact our ends: a more peaceful, prosperous, sustainable existence. Capitalism and growth have a place, but that place needs to be carefully considered and guarded. It's that or we perish in a nuclear holocaust or melted, polluted planet.
- selimthegrim 10y ago
  er, Moloch is not a made up word.
  - svachalek 10y ago
    "Moloch is exactly what the history books say he is. He is the god of child sacrifice, the fiery furnace into which you can toss your babies in exchange for victory in war. He always and everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most into the flames, and I can grant you power."
- svachalek 10y ago
  "In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse." Insightful and depressing.
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    Another way to look at that statement is "All values that do not lead to continued existence are competed away", which is basically exactly what the theory of evolution says. We know that this statement is false, BTW, because of the existence of organs like the appendix, which AFAWCT are completely vestigial. Also, it ignores the part of the dynamic where new values are created because they allow you to throw some other values under the bus. Cooperation, empathy, creativity, intelligence, and pretty much everything that makes us human are all examples: our non-primate ancestors didn't have these, but the evolution of them allowed us to fight more fiercely than a lion, move more quickly than a cheetah, live in colder places than a penguin, and go without foraging longer than a bear.
    - 3pt14159 10y ago
jonmc12 10y ago
Where do benefit corporations and b corps (https://www.bcorporation.net/what-are-b-corps https://www.bcorporation.net/what-are-b-corps) miss the mark? Benefit corps have the specific purpose to increase prosperity for all stakeholders - not just shareholders. They are indeed a proposal for a "new operating system" for companies, and it is adopted by many companies (some very well-known) already. The basic idea is to put a statement of public benefit in corporate bylaws, then sign up for an assessment that audits that your company actions are indeed aligned with public benefit. This effort, nominally, would seem to address many of the problems laid out in the post, but benefit corps are not mentioned once. I'm not saying its _the_ answer, but seems like a more collaborative, concrete starting point for a solution than "some mass infusion of the 1960s spirit."
- Nomentatus 10y ago
  Private companies without investors also elude the problems in the post, of course. (Though in both cases you may have to deal with an Uber-type competitor willing to subsidize its operations for long periods - something of dubious legality, but it still happens.) Note that if you begin as a public benefit corporation, raising funds will be obstacle number one, since you must compete not just in your market with current-model companies, but also compete with them for funds. So no wonder it's more common for successful private companies to pay back their investors and then transform themselves into public benefit companies. This is still useful as an option, but hardly more than a start at a solution. Unless laws are changed, of course. If the law allowed public companies to change to a public benefit corporation without warning regardless of investor's opinion that would be a huge change - but might thoroughly discourage investment, of course.
eevilspock 10y ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair Selling advertising space rather than selling one's purported product is the epitome of the dark forces and banal moral failure that DHH talks about. But most YC and SV startups owe their existance to advertising, and they are psychologically resistant to admit such moral failure, no matter how obvious the costs to society. More detailed arguments against the ad-supported "business model": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773 Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510227
- untilHellbanned 10y ago
  Just like the moral failure Sinclair refers to, HNers are pyschologically resistant to the mention of YC in a negative light. Expect an automatic 4 downvotes, just FYI.
- Gibbon1 10y ago
  I think the idea is to use advertising and finance to capture all the profits from brick and mortar corporations. Similar to a comment I saw from someone that worked at a stodgy old fabric manufacturer. They paid Oracle more in the last ten years for licensing than profits in the last 100.
bambax 10y ago
This is weak and inconsistent. You can't blame growth at all costs -- costs including postponing profits indefinitely, and milking customers via in-app purchases, in the same sentence. It's one or the other. If you dislike the former you should kind of like, or at least respect, the latter. Or you're just rambling.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  Not really. Milking customers is exactly "growth at all costs", only they're working on growing income or profits rather than growing number of customers or some other metric.
bpolverini 10y ago
First thing I thought of when I read this was the article by Sam Altman where he calls businesses valued at $100M "really good airplanes." https://blog.ycombinator.com/navigating-mid-success/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/navigating-mid-success/ Something is awry in our understanding of moral capitalism at large for statements like that to be met with anything other than derision, and DHH is getting at the heart of why: We've all become obsessed with growth. When the way to get rich in the world is capital gains, as opposed to value creation, the abnormalities in behavior and ethics, which are glorified elements of Silicon Valley culture, fall out as a natural consequence. Having real, powerful values that help evaluate whether something legal is actually ethical means saying "no" to certain kinds of work. God forbid you do that though, lest your investors punish you. Where your treasure is, your heart will be also. It comes as no surprise to anyone tarrying long over the facts that SV's treasure is gold.
- mikekij 10y ago
  ^This. The idea that I'm a failure if my company "only" sells for $100M is a recipe for perpetual depression and disappointment.
  - Retric 10y ago
    Yes, even if you only get 0.3-3% of that 100M exit it's going to completely change the equation if you ever try again. Or just do something else with the rest of your life. Further, if you have another exit of that size again your likely to end up with a much larger chunk of the second company. To the point where it's possible to be better off with 2 x 100M exits than 1 billion dollar exit.
    - devoply 10y ago
      Most startup fail. So though yes that's true, the chances of it happening twice are quite small. Even the first chance is quite small, so maybe... dunno have not seen numbers to back up hypothesizing.
      - 10y ago
gkop 10y ago
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell" - Edward Abbey
yanilkr 10y ago
This reminds me of a scene from the popular TV show Silicon valley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo Smartphones, youtube, facebook and many other success stories had exponential growth. Once a product/idea goes big, there will always be people who do not like something about it. Thats the cost of making a product that everyone can use. A better example is the idea of money itself. Its an invention used by almost everyone in the world, We still have people who absolutely hate money with passion based on their own principles that are right for them. Overall it did more good to humanity. We have created an economic world, where good ideas travel faster and share the rewards with everyone. Its a good thing. The alternative would be a hierarchical society where some other parts of the society will always be left behind.
AstralStorm 10y ago
Exponential growth is a joke, you hit the first limiting factor and you end up at best on a sigmoid. Or probably nowhere. Running Twitter on Wikipedia budget is trivial, we have IRC networks that handle similar volume of traffic on volunteer budget. Distributed open equivalents of Facebook and Google also exist. The problem they face is always marketing. On a shoestring budget you cannot afford that.
- omgwtfpmr 10y ago
  What's the best open competitor to Google?
darod 10y ago
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” -Abbey
ktRolster 10y ago
Silicon Valley is awful, of course, but my company is different. It actually provides value.
zeteo 10y ago
>And this new world order is being driven by a tiny cabal of monopolies. So commercial dissent is near impossible. Do you want to be the weirdo without a Facebook account? The obvious solution is antitrust law. Why is Microsoft no longer the competitive boogeyman of the 90s? Because it was prosecuted under section 2 of the Sherman Act in 1998 [1]. Everyone would be using Bing, Zune and Internet Explorer otherwise. But the last two administrations haven't prosecuted anyone under section 2. Just imagine spinning off Gmail, Google Maps, Chrome etc. and letting them survive on their own merits. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.#Settlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...
- bantunes 10y ago
  Yes, let's have the super functional Congress fix this! :D
- lcw 10y ago
  How would you go about applying antitrust laws to companies like facebook, google, uber, and airbnb? I think this would be a difficult fight because they all can claim serious competition. For instance, probably your best case could be against Google and their search engine advertising, but they could easily say that they are competing against all advertising mediums in the world. Airbnb could say they are competing against hotel chains. Uber says they are competing against taxi's. Facebook is competing against 100's of social networks. While I agree something should be done to help business compete in these new mediums they are not defined enough to draw a line in the sand. To your point though you look at a situation where a single company, Google, could shutter a businesses website on a whim... that seems like a valid antitrust case. I'm just not sure how you would make the case though.
  - zeteo 10y ago
    >How would you go about applying antitrust laws to companies like facebook, google, uber, and airbnb? I think this would be a difficult fight because they all can claim serious competition. It depends how you define the market, right? If we allow substitutes then Standard Oil was not a monopolist because it was competing against the electric utilities for illumination etc. If we define it by "similar business model" it's hard to see how Google doesn't dominate search engine advertising, Facebook social network advertising, Uber the space of apps used to call transportation etc. Doctrines such as product tying [1] and essential facilities [2] seem ready-made for Google and Facebook respectively. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)#Tying_of_Microsoft_products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)#Tying_of_Micr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_facilities_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_facilities_doctrine
mwcampbell 10y ago
When he brought up Uber, I naturally wondered if I should stop using it (and not start using Lyft or anything similar). But perhaps that's a bit like wondering if we should stop using Google, or Facebook. On further reflection, I think we passengers might be able to make things less bad for the Uber drivers. DHH mentioned putting on headphones and not interacting with the driver at all when he uses Uber. I've never done that. More often than not, I chat with the driver at least a little during the ride. Once or twice, I used the ability of the Uber app to put my choice of music from Spotify on the car stereo. But then I felt uncomfortable doing that, because I was imposing my choice of music on the driver. So now, I'm happy to let the driver play whatever music he or she wants, or none at all. And I've never rated a driver anything other than five stars, since I know their ability to continue getting work depends on ratings. So we need to remember that our Uber drivers, AIrbnb hosts, etc. are humans, not machines.
- bantunes 10y ago
  That still doesn't help as much as not using Uber at all.
  - mwcampbell 10y ago
    But would an individual's choice to not use Uber actually help anyone? Or is it just a knee-jerk over-reaction? If my choice to not use Uber wouldn't actually help anyone, and it would limit me quite a bit (I'm visually impaired and can't drive), then the correct moral choice (at least according to utilitarianism) would be for me to keep using Uber but go out of my way to be nice to the drivers.
josho 10y ago
I'm not sure if the tax rate is the root cause, but they certainly came close to hitting the nail on the head saying "What sucker wants to earn $10 million/year at a 52.5% tax rate when you can get away with hundreds of millions in one take at just 15%?" For decades we've valued the growth of capital over salaries, we are living the results of this policy, and need to see a reverse to a position where the result of salaries grow faster than capital.
youdontknowtho 10y ago
I dont know how you build a startup that "leaves money on the table". Maybe as a coop? The infinite growth trap is what leads to Marx's critique of capitalism. Since that is on the list of verboten ideas we need to come up with a new language that says the same thing so that people can hear it without freaking out.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
Really a nice article and I especially liked the finish when he mentions Douglas Rushkoff's latest book 'Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus' that is largely a prescription for building new types of companies and organizations with more stability and robustness - similar to advice offered up in Nassim Taleb's book 'Antifragile' Edit: a short video where Rushkoff summarizes the big ideas in his new book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAOyOULWKUo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAOyOULWKUo - recommended!

180 points by AngeloAnolin 10y ago

The problem is that I can't use the 'nice' app in every city I visit that has Uber. It's the aggressive growth and VC that allows it to be everywhere. And at least where I travel, the existing taxi corporations are far worse than Uber. So yes, in an ideal world, I'd rather use open-source app to hail my sustainable eco taxi, but such an app does not have the funding to upend the existing taxi rackets.

msoad 10y ago
Travelers are not a big chunk of ride-sharing company user base.

3pt14159 10y ago

During the dying days of calling myself a libertarian (I think the last permutation was "realistic geo-libertarian") I read a blog post kinda like this, but less concrete. It was by a guy who made up a word, something like "Mazolith", and he was trying to describe how letting these forces unchecked was this hyper system that we were failing to recognize. One of the lines was I got to about there ^ in the comment before I remembered more of the quote. The article I trying to find was this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ It is extremely good and it plays well after DHH's intro. I know some of the arguments there against libertarianism are strawman arguments, but overall it's a great article and about a day after reading it and thinking about it I started just calling myself a Liberal (it's more complicated than that, but it's the closest fit). DHH touches on exponential growth specifically, but more generally what is needed is to recognize the world as a system of forces and feedback functions, and to take actions to limit the consequences of those systems. For example, democracy is a system to establish which people run our country. If media is allowed to be funded by foreign forces unchecked then it can subvert our democracy. We must now make a choice, do we do something or allow it? For a time we allowed it because our propaganda works better than theirs (mostly because ours is the truth and we live in free societies) but with the advent of social media we may need to make a different choice or change our systems to adapt. It is this type of thinking. It's a superset of what the Canadians and others call "good government". It's a way of managing systems to enact our ends: a more peaceful, prosperous, sustainable existence. Capitalism and growth have a place, but that place needs to be carefully considered and guarded. It's that or we perish in a nuclear holocaust or melted, polluted planet.

selimthegrim 10y ago
er, Moloch is not a made up word.
- svachalek 10y ago
  "Moloch is exactly what the history books say he is. He is the god of child sacrifice, the fiery furnace into which you can toss your babies in exchange for victory in war. He always and everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most into the flames, and I can grant you power."
svachalek 10y ago
"In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse." Insightful and depressing.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  Another way to look at that statement is "All values that do not lead to continued existence are competed away", which is basically exactly what the theory of evolution says. We know that this statement is false, BTW, because of the existence of organs like the appendix, which AFAWCT are completely vestigial. Also, it ignores the part of the dynamic where new values are created because they allow you to throw some other values under the bus. Cooperation, empathy, creativity, intelligence, and pretty much everything that makes us human are all examples: our non-primate ancestors didn't have these, but the evolution of them allowed us to fight more fiercely than a lion, move more quickly than a cheetah, live in colder places than a penguin, and go without foraging longer than a bear.
  - 3pt14159 10y ago

jonmc12 10y ago

Where do benefit corporations and b corps (https://www.bcorporation.net/what-are-b-corps https://www.bcorporation.net/what-are-b-corps) miss the mark? Benefit corps have the specific purpose to increase prosperity for all stakeholders - not just shareholders. They are indeed a proposal for a "new operating system" for companies, and it is adopted by many companies (some very well-known) already. The basic idea is to put a statement of public benefit in corporate bylaws, then sign up for an assessment that audits that your company actions are indeed aligned with public benefit. This effort, nominally, would seem to address many of the problems laid out in the post, but benefit corps are not mentioned once. I'm not saying its _the_ answer, but seems like a more collaborative, concrete starting point for a solution than "some mass infusion of the 1960s spirit."

Nomentatus 10y ago
Private companies without investors also elude the problems in the post, of course. (Though in both cases you may have to deal with an Uber-type competitor willing to subsidize its operations for long periods - something of dubious legality, but it still happens.) Note that if you begin as a public benefit corporation, raising funds will be obstacle number one, since you must compete not just in your market with current-model companies, but also compete with them for funds. So no wonder it's more common for successful private companies to pay back their investors and then transform themselves into public benefit companies. This is still useful as an option, but hardly more than a start at a solution. Unless laws are changed, of course. If the law allowed public companies to change to a public benefit corporation without warning regardless of investor's opinion that would be a huge change - but might thoroughly discourage investment, of course.

eevilspock 10y ago

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair Selling advertising space rather than selling one's purported product is the epitome of the dark forces and banal moral failure that DHH talks about. But most YC and SV startups owe their existance to advertising, and they are psychologically resistant to admit such moral failure, no matter how obvious the costs to society. More detailed arguments against the ad-supported "business model": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773 Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510227

untilHellbanned 10y ago
Just like the moral failure Sinclair refers to, HNers are pyschologically resistant to the mention of YC in a negative light. Expect an automatic 4 downvotes, just FYI.
Gibbon1 10y ago
I think the idea is to use advertising and finance to capture all the profits from brick and mortar corporations. Similar to a comment I saw from someone that worked at a stodgy old fabric manufacturer. They paid Oracle more in the last ten years for licensing than profits in the last 100.

bambax 10y ago

This is weak and inconsistent. You can't blame growth at all costs -- costs including postponing profits indefinitely, and milking customers via in-app purchases, in the same sentence. It's one or the other. If you dislike the former you should kind of like, or at least respect, the latter. Or you're just rambling.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
Not really. Milking customers is exactly "growth at all costs", only they're working on growing income or profits rather than growing number of customers or some other metric.

bpolverini 10y ago

First thing I thought of when I read this was the article by Sam Altman where he calls businesses valued at $100M "really good airplanes." https://blog.ycombinator.com/navigating-mid-success/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/navigating-mid-success/ Something is awry in our understanding of moral capitalism at large for statements like that to be met with anything other than derision, and DHH is getting at the heart of why: We've all become obsessed with growth. When the way to get rich in the world is capital gains, as opposed to value creation, the abnormalities in behavior and ethics, which are glorified elements of Silicon Valley culture, fall out as a natural consequence. Having real, powerful values that help evaluate whether something legal is actually ethical means saying "no" to certain kinds of work. God forbid you do that though, lest your investors punish you. Where your treasure is, your heart will be also. It comes as no surprise to anyone tarrying long over the facts that SV's treasure is gold.

mikekij 10y ago
^This. The idea that I'm a failure if my company "only" sells for $100M is a recipe for perpetual depression and disappointment.
- Retric 10y ago
  Yes, even if you only get 0.3-3% of that 100M exit it's going to completely change the equation if you ever try again. Or just do something else with the rest of your life. Further, if you have another exit of that size again your likely to end up with a much larger chunk of the second company. To the point where it's possible to be better off with 2 x 100M exits than 1 billion dollar exit.
  - devoply 10y ago
    Most startup fail. So though yes that's true, the chances of it happening twice are quite small. Even the first chance is quite small, so maybe... dunno have not seen numbers to back up hypothesizing.
    - 10y ago

gkop 10y ago

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell" - Edward Abbey

yanilkr 10y ago

This reminds me of a scene from the popular TV show Silicon valley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo Smartphones, youtube, facebook and many other success stories had exponential growth. Once a product/idea goes big, there will always be people who do not like something about it. Thats the cost of making a product that everyone can use. A better example is the idea of money itself. Its an invention used by almost everyone in the world, We still have people who absolutely hate money with passion based on their own principles that are right for them. Overall it did more good to humanity. We have created an economic world, where good ideas travel faster and share the rewards with everyone. Its a good thing. The alternative would be a hierarchical society where some other parts of the society will always be left behind.

AstralStorm 10y ago

Exponential growth is a joke, you hit the first limiting factor and you end up at best on a sigmoid. Or probably nowhere. Running Twitter on Wikipedia budget is trivial, we have IRC networks that handle similar volume of traffic on volunteer budget. Distributed open equivalents of Facebook and Google also exist. The problem they face is always marketing. On a shoestring budget you cannot afford that.

omgwtfpmr 10y ago
What's the best open competitor to Google?

darod 10y ago

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” -Abbey

ktRolster 10y ago

Silicon Valley is awful, of course, but my company is different. It actually provides value.

zeteo 10y ago

>And this new world order is being driven by a tiny cabal of monopolies. So commercial dissent is near impossible. Do you want to be the weirdo without a Facebook account? The obvious solution is antitrust law. Why is Microsoft no longer the competitive boogeyman of the 90s? Because it was prosecuted under section 2 of the Sherman Act in 1998 [1]. Everyone would be using Bing, Zune and Internet Explorer otherwise. But the last two administrations haven't prosecuted anyone under section 2. Just imagine spinning off Gmail, Google Maps, Chrome etc. and letting them survive on their own merits. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.#Settlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...

bantunes 10y ago
Yes, let's have the super functional Congress fix this! :D
lcw 10y ago
How would you go about applying antitrust laws to companies like facebook, google, uber, and airbnb? I think this would be a difficult fight because they all can claim serious competition. For instance, probably your best case could be against Google and their search engine advertising, but they could easily say that they are competing against all advertising mediums in the world. Airbnb could say they are competing against hotel chains. Uber says they are competing against taxi's. Facebook is competing against 100's of social networks. While I agree something should be done to help business compete in these new mediums they are not defined enough to draw a line in the sand. To your point though you look at a situation where a single company, Google, could shutter a businesses website on a whim... that seems like a valid antitrust case. I'm just not sure how you would make the case though.
- zeteo 10y ago
  >How would you go about applying antitrust laws to companies like facebook, google, uber, and airbnb? I think this would be a difficult fight because they all can claim serious competition. It depends how you define the market, right? If we allow substitutes then Standard Oil was not a monopolist because it was competing against the electric utilities for illumination etc. If we define it by "similar business model" it's hard to see how Google doesn't dominate search engine advertising, Facebook social network advertising, Uber the space of apps used to call transportation etc. Doctrines such as product tying [1] and essential facilities [2] seem ready-made for Google and Facebook respectively. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)#Tying_of_Microsoft_products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)#Tying_of_Micr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_facilities_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_facilities_doctrine

mwcampbell 10y ago

When he brought up Uber, I naturally wondered if I should stop using it (and not start using Lyft or anything similar). But perhaps that's a bit like wondering if we should stop using Google, or Facebook. On further reflection, I think we passengers might be able to make things less bad for the Uber drivers. DHH mentioned putting on headphones and not interacting with the driver at all when he uses Uber. I've never done that. More often than not, I chat with the driver at least a little during the ride. Once or twice, I used the ability of the Uber app to put my choice of music from Spotify on the car stereo. But then I felt uncomfortable doing that, because I was imposing my choice of music on the driver. So now, I'm happy to let the driver play whatever music he or she wants, or none at all. And I've never rated a driver anything other than five stars, since I know their ability to continue getting work depends on ratings. So we need to remember that our Uber drivers, AIrbnb hosts, etc. are humans, not machines.

bantunes 10y ago
That still doesn't help as much as not using Uber at all.
- mwcampbell 10y ago
  But would an individual's choice to not use Uber actually help anyone? Or is it just a knee-jerk over-reaction? If my choice to not use Uber wouldn't actually help anyone, and it would limit me quite a bit (I'm visually impaired and can't drive), then the correct moral choice (at least according to utilitarianism) would be for me to keep using Uber but go out of my way to be nice to the drivers.

josho 10y ago

I'm not sure if the tax rate is the root cause, but they certainly came close to hitting the nail on the head saying "What sucker wants to earn $10 million/year at a 52.5% tax rate when you can get away with hundreds of millions in one take at just 15%?" For decades we've valued the growth of capital over salaries, we are living the results of this policy, and need to see a reverse to a position where the result of salaries grow faster than capital.

youdontknowtho 10y ago

I dont know how you build a startup that "leaves money on the table". Maybe as a coop? The infinite growth trap is what leads to Marx's critique of capitalism. Since that is on the list of verboten ideas we need to come up with a new language that says the same thing so that people can hear it without freaking out.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

Really a nice article and I especially liked the finish when he mentions Douglas Rushkoff's latest book 'Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus' that is largely a prescription for building new types of companies and organizations with more stability and robustness - similar to advice offered up in Nassim Taleb's book 'Antifragile' Edit: a short video where Rushkoff summarizes the big ideas in his new book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAOyOULWKUo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAOyOULWKUo - recommended!