5 ms·

Perhaps I can address your point about “generic screeching” against the tech world, by noting that the criticism here is often specific and direct. Not generic.

by CPLX 4y ago

Perhaps I can address your point about “generic screeching” against the tech world, by noting that the criticism here is often specific and direct. Not generic. The usual suspects have been trying to frame it in terms of the regular old startup workers that will be affected. But what about these entrepreneurs, the taxi drivers who were completely fucked by the onslaught of Uber and Lyft using financial engineering to lose money on each ride and undercut their livelihood: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/23/nyregion/nyc-taxi-suicides.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/23/nyregion/nyc-taxi-suicide... Or these ones, who saw VC funded delivery services stealing their tips: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/why-instacart-doordash-workers-don-t-always-receive-tips-you-n965926 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/why-instacart... And so on. We would also like to see social media held accountable for the harms done to children and communities and for our existing laws against anti-competitive behavior and collusion to be enforced against search and software platforms. The chutzpah of the Silicon Valley influencer crowd over this weekend has become seriously fucking unbearable. My feeds are full of sociopathic libertarians calling for government to make sure they never suffer any consequences for their failure to adequately manage risk? Many of the people expressing this frustration are in favor of having the government heavily involved in preventing this kind of thing and helping if it ends up happening. But if we’re going to regulate let’s fucking regulate. To the tech people unhappy with screeching my reply is that there is nothing special about your humanity here. Your lives aren’t more important than the lives of the children of employees at the Carrier plant in Indianapolis, or the workers at the Amazon faculty on Staten Island. If your values system only applies to you and your friends it’s not much of a values system.

thinkmassive 4y ago
> My feeds are full of sociopathic libertarians calling for government to make sure they never suffer any consequences for their failure to adequately manage risk? Not sure to whom you’re referring, but they’re not libertarians.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- CPLX 4y ago
  I mean literally nobody is a libertarian by the dictionary definition, there aren't any on the planet. It's just a word people use to describe a value system where governments only help people like them and everyone else gets fucked. They sure talked a good game though.
  - tome 4y ago
    No true libertarian.
    - CPLX 4y ago
      Show me one.
      - tome 4y ago
        When you show me a true Scotsman. (I was attempting to make a wry joke.)
        CPLX 4y ago
        Indeed. The difference is that there are actually people living in Scotland.
  - gwright 4y ago
    > I mean literally nobody is a libertarian by the dictionary definition And is anyone a "democrat" or "republican" or "socialist" (note small "d", "r", and "s") by the dictionary definition? All I'm saying is that failing to behave strictly according to dictionary definitions is common to all humans not just "libertarians".
mark_l_watson 4y ago
I agree with you, except for the comment about Libertarians. Let me assure you, as a member of the Libertarian Party, that we don’t in general like or support government bailout of special interests. I 100% agree with you about the chutzpah level being really annoying! I also like your comments about the groups of workers adversely affected in the past.
manuelabeledo 4y ago
I find it ironic that you mentioned taxi drivers, since many were initially collateral damage, and then moved onto drive for Uber or Lyft. I would say that medallion holders, those with enough capital to pay the almost million dollars a license was running for around 2010, were the ones getting screwed. And if you ask me, I would compare them to whomever invested in SVB. Those will not get their money back.
- CPLX 4y ago
  Just click the link, that's exactly who the article is about. In those specific cases they aren't moving on to Uber and Lyft because they're dead. They didn't have enough capital for the medallions in hand of course, these were mostly immigrant strivers who worked and toiled and deeply tapped their entire network of friends and family for down payments and were heavily leveraged for the rest. Then Silicon Valley VC's purposefully made it impossible for them to compete using a massive wash of cheap capital. What's that you say? The free market is tough, and they should have been able to adequately understand the risks? What can you do if they put their money into something and it didn't pan out right? The game has rules right? No take backs. Oh.
  - manuelabeledo 4y ago
    I think you got it wrong. Regardless of what these articles may say, the vast majority of medallions are owned by private companies, not independent contractors. Drivers need to be licensed, but medallions are associated to cars, not necessarily people. And this is not a new phenomenon at all [0] Effectively, Uber and Lyft did more damage to companies than individuals. Companies that also speculated with the medallion prices by the way, as most were bought and sold privately, not by governments. How do you think they got to cost a million bucks in NYC back in 2013? [0] https://slate.com/business/2012/06/taxi-medallions-how-new-yorks-terrible-taxi-system-makes-fares-higher-and-drivers-poorer.html https://slate.com/business/2012/06/taxi-medallions-how-new-y...
    - CPLX 4y ago
      What’s the substantive difference between the people in this industry who got fucked and the startups and their employees who might get fucked next week that makes you (or the SV online community at least) care about one and not the other.
nhod 4y ago
Regarding the VC-fueled "onslaught" on the regular old taxi drivers, perhaps you are too young to remember what life was like before Uber and Lyft? Before those companies gave literally millions of people around the world the ability to just up and have a job, with very little hassle? Which obviously has its own issues. But then wait. Zoom out. The former system did too. The new companies disrupted the absurd, customer-hostile, worker-hostile, cartel-like monopolies those legacy industries had evolved into. Did you ever try getting a taxi in any US city besides Manhattan — not even the rest of NYC — before Uber? It was expensive, frustrating, and completely lacking in integrity. I remember calling taxis to go the airport in SF before Uber existed and nearly missing my flight on multiple occasions because the government-granted taxi monopoly I ordered from the day before just never showed up at 5am, and oh by the way the company is closed at 5am, so wouldn't answer the phone, but would still try to charge you and tell you you missed your taxi when it showed up and hour late while you were cussing them out the entire drive to the airport in your own car so you could pay the airport parking monopoly absurd rates so you didn't miss your flight. Yep, I want that system back. Taxis were absolutely terrible before Uber, and they only benefitted taxi companies, the banks that financed them, and then maybe in some cases taxi drivers. Frankly, fuck those old taxi companies. Good riddens. This is the nature of disruption. Entrepreneurs have a negative experience with an entrenched industry, have a lightbulb moment, raise some money (or not — that path actually exists, though it isn't often discussed here), disrupt the often terrible old industry and create a new market, dominate the new market, and then often stop innovating and focus on keeping out competitors and protecting their rents. Then the cycle repeats. The disruption cycle existed before Silicon Valley VCs got involved. It is happening right now to Silicon Valley-fueled (and -fueler) Google and (Silicon Valley-fueled) AI LLM chatbots. Google once seemed unstoppable, and suddenly people, including apparently Google, think it's vulnerable. It happened with the iPhone and Nokia and Blackberry! Yet no one will stand up for the poor candy bar phone designers, or soon the poor AdWords salespeople, because something much newer and ostensibly better has come along. It's literally a tale as old as time, though like any historic cycle it is on increasingly shorter timelines. Protectionist, rent-seeking, and in some cases full-on colluding legacy industries merely try to keep their grip on the market through their own forms of financial and political engineering rather than seeking to innovate on their own. So the quaint pastoral notion of the innocent taxi companies being obliterated before terrible Uber came along is just flat out wrong. They knew that they were rent-seeking, they knew they could innovate, and they just didn't fix it. Even after Uber came out, for many years they sought — are still seeking? — to defend themselves rather than create a better customer and worker experience. As for, "if we’re going to regulate let's fucking regulate," that is actually what gets us the entrenched industries described above. Which "we" might collectively agree we want in some cases. We just need to be aware of what the second-order and beyond consequences of that regulation are likely to be. If we regulate in response to this, it is might result in the mega banks taking over smaller ones, continuing the consolidation and obliterating more local banks like SVB. Or perhaps what you are saying is let's establish regulations where we place the depositors' rights above the rights of the banks? Where we separate investment banking from "consumer" banking again? I agree. And also, good luck with that! It also has second-order and beyond consequences which also could suck. Careful hat you wish for.

by CPLX 4y ago

thinkmassive 4y ago

> My feeds are full of sociopathic libertarians calling for government to make sure they never suffer any consequences for their failure to adequately manage risk? Not sure to whom you’re referring, but they’re not libertarians.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
CPLX 4y ago
I mean literally nobody is a libertarian by the dictionary definition, there aren't any on the planet. It's just a word people use to describe a value system where governments only help people like them and everyone else gets fucked. They sure talked a good game though.
- tome 4y ago
  No true libertarian.
  - CPLX 4y ago
    Show me one.
    - tome 4y ago
      When you show me a true Scotsman. (I was attempting to make a wry joke.)
      - CPLX 4y ago
        Indeed. The difference is that there are actually people living in Scotland.
- gwright 4y ago
  > I mean literally nobody is a libertarian by the dictionary definition And is anyone a "democrat" or "republican" or "socialist" (note small "d", "r", and "s") by the dictionary definition? All I'm saying is that failing to behave strictly according to dictionary definitions is common to all humans not just "libertarians".

mark_l_watson 4y ago

I agree with you, except for the comment about Libertarians. Let me assure you, as a member of the Libertarian Party, that we don’t in general like or support government bailout of special interests. I 100% agree with you about the chutzpah level being really annoying! I also like your comments about the groups of workers adversely affected in the past.

manuelabeledo 4y ago

I find it ironic that you mentioned taxi drivers, since many were initially collateral damage, and then moved onto drive for Uber or Lyft. I would say that medallion holders, those with enough capital to pay the almost million dollars a license was running for around 2010, were the ones getting screwed. And if you ask me, I would compare them to whomever invested in SVB. Those will not get their money back.

CPLX 4y ago
Just click the link, that's exactly who the article is about. In those specific cases they aren't moving on to Uber and Lyft because they're dead. They didn't have enough capital for the medallions in hand of course, these were mostly immigrant strivers who worked and toiled and deeply tapped their entire network of friends and family for down payments and were heavily leveraged for the rest. Then Silicon Valley VC's purposefully made it impossible for them to compete using a massive wash of cheap capital. What's that you say? The free market is tough, and they should have been able to adequately understand the risks? What can you do if they put their money into something and it didn't pan out right? The game has rules right? No take backs. Oh.
- manuelabeledo 4y ago
  I think you got it wrong. Regardless of what these articles may say, the vast majority of medallions are owned by private companies, not independent contractors. Drivers need to be licensed, but medallions are associated to cars, not necessarily people. And this is not a new phenomenon at all [0] Effectively, Uber and Lyft did more damage to companies than individuals. Companies that also speculated with the medallion prices by the way, as most were bought and sold privately, not by governments. How do you think they got to cost a million bucks in NYC back in 2013? [0] https://slate.com/business/2012/06/taxi-medallions-how-new-yorks-terrible-taxi-system-makes-fares-higher-and-drivers-poorer.html https://slate.com/business/2012/06/taxi-medallions-how-new-y...
  - CPLX 4y ago
    What’s the substantive difference between the people in this industry who got fucked and the startups and their employees who might get fucked next week that makes you (or the SV online community at least) care about one and not the other.

nhod 4y ago

Regarding the VC-fueled "onslaught" on the regular old taxi drivers, perhaps you are too young to remember what life was like before Uber and Lyft? Before those companies gave literally millions of people around the world the ability to just up and have a job, with very little hassle? Which obviously has its own issues. But then wait. Zoom out. The former system did too. The new companies disrupted the absurd, customer-hostile, worker-hostile, cartel-like monopolies those legacy industries had evolved into. Did you ever try getting a taxi in any US city besides Manhattan — not even the rest of NYC — before Uber? It was expensive, frustrating, and completely lacking in integrity. I remember calling taxis to go the airport in SF before Uber existed and nearly missing my flight on multiple occasions because the government-granted taxi monopoly I ordered from the day before just never showed up at 5am, and oh by the way the company is closed at 5am, so wouldn't answer the phone, but would still try to charge you and tell you you missed your taxi when it showed up and hour late while you were cussing them out the entire drive to the airport in your own car so you could pay the airport parking monopoly absurd rates so you didn't miss your flight. Yep, I want that system back. Taxis were absolutely terrible before Uber, and they only benefitted taxi companies, the banks that financed them, and then maybe in some cases taxi drivers. Frankly, fuck those old taxi companies. Good riddens. This is the nature of disruption. Entrepreneurs have a negative experience with an entrenched industry, have a lightbulb moment, raise some money (or not — that path actually exists, though it isn't often discussed here), disrupt the often terrible old industry and create a new market, dominate the new market, and then often stop innovating and focus on keeping out competitors and protecting their rents. Then the cycle repeats. The disruption cycle existed before Silicon Valley VCs got involved. It is happening right now to Silicon Valley-fueled (and -fueler) Google and (Silicon Valley-fueled) AI LLM chatbots. Google once seemed unstoppable, and suddenly people, including apparently Google, think it's vulnerable. It happened with the iPhone and Nokia and Blackberry! Yet no one will stand up for the poor candy bar phone designers, or soon the poor AdWords salespeople, because something much newer and ostensibly better has come along. It's literally a tale as old as time, though like any historic cycle it is on increasingly shorter timelines. Protectionist, rent-seeking, and in some cases full-on colluding legacy industries merely try to keep their grip on the market through their own forms of financial and political engineering rather than seeking to innovate on their own. So the quaint pastoral notion of the innocent taxi companies being obliterated before terrible Uber came along is just flat out wrong. They knew that they were rent-seeking, they knew they could innovate, and they just didn't fix it. Even after Uber came out, for many years they sought — are still seeking? — to defend themselves rather than create a better customer and worker experience. As for, "if we’re going to regulate let's fucking regulate," that is actually what gets us the entrenched industries described above. Which "we" might collectively agree we want in some cases. We just need to be aware of what the second-order and beyond consequences of that regulation are likely to be. If we regulate in response to this, it is might result in the mega banks taking over smaller ones, continuing the consolidation and obliterating more local banks like SVB. Or perhaps what you are saying is let's establish regulations where we place the depositors' rights above the rights of the banks? Where we separate investment banking from "consumer" banking again? I agree. And also, good luck with that! It also has second-order and beyond consequences which also could suck. Careful hat you wish for.