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Airbnb and Uber have showed us that laws matter only to the extent that the political will to enforce them exists. Throw enough lawyers and lobbying money at th

• DebtDeflation 2y ago
  The reason there was no political will to punish Airbnb and Uber for violating the law was that initially they were subsidized with VC money and so were able to undercut traditional hotels and taxis on price. In the world of tradable goods, pricing below cost with the intent of putting competition out of business so you can raise prices later is known as "dumping" and is itself illegal.
  • buran77 2y ago
    The reason is that everyone who was supposed to do something about it was "subsidized with VC money".
    • grepfru_it 2y ago
      Or in Ubers case, used to actively hinder those doing the investigation
  • mapt 2y ago
    Is it? Really? Or is it just "illegal" for an overseas competitor to a domestic industry, in trade disputes? What is the fine? How many days in jail does the company spend? What portion is its stock diluted by? We remember the tale of Jeff Bezouis the Wise, who tragically lost his company when he decided he didn't want to buy diapers.com at the offered price, and instead wanted to dump 200 million dollars into selling diapers well below cost until their site folded.
    • hammock 2y ago
      You're right. Dumping refers to international trade. I believe parent commenter was thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing
  • hylaride 2y ago
    The traditional taxi industry was rife with corruption, bad experiences, and poor service in many jurisdictions before uber/lyft. As terrible of a human being that I think Travis Kalanick is, it was only going to take lawbreaking to overcome such a tainted system. Medallion systems often prevented any competition, sometimes to absurd effect. The number of licenced taxis often didn't keep pace with population growth, sometimes even staying flat. Many drivers didn't own their own medallians then had to rent from owners, often making little money. In my city (Toronto) cabs were often dirty, broken, refused short distance fares (illegal) and smelled of cigarette smoke that was obviously from the driver. Examples (paywalls, but you get the idea): https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/26/nyregion/amid-a-heritage-of-graft-a-taxi-bribery-scandal-seems-shocking-to-few.html https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/26/nyregion/amid-a-heritage-... https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/adventure/red-line/how-uber-is-ending-the-dirty-dealings-behind-torontos-cab-business/article25515301/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/adventure/red-li...
    • slices 2y ago
      I've never been a huge user of either, but my worst Uber ride was much better than my best taxi ride.
      • ses1984 2y ago
        The last time I dragged my family into a taxi because of my anti Uber ideology, the driver stank to hell of body odor, asked me to input directions on his phone covered with dried snot from him sneezing with his mouth open, he drove dangerously under the speed limit on the freeway, and it took twice as long to get home as normal. But at least I didn’t give Uber any money…
        • jamespo 2y ago
          Strange, my last Uber driver had BO. Normally they are fine however.
        • derektank 2y ago
          I'm immediately reminded of the Slavoj Zizek quote, "I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology"
  • _heimdall 2y ago
    Speed had a lot to do with this as well. VC funding allowed them to move quickly enough that they got to a scale where they could afford legal and lobbying protection when challenges eventually happened.
  • johnebgd 2y ago
    I rooted for Uber to smash the Taxi cartels. Let us not forget that Taxi Cartels were also insidious beasts. Taxi drivers abused their walled garden with their price gouging by taking longer routes, refusal to take a credit card, and extremely poorly maintained fleets of vehicles. I have had mostly good experiences with Uber, whereas I had experiences that mostly bordered on general condescension toward me whenever I took a ride in a Taxi. I am glad the political will to block Uber never materialized.
    • walrus01 2y ago
      What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis. And the experience is equally mediocre. The pendulum has swung back the other way. The only thing they have going for them now is the app based convenience, which is eroding as more "yellow cab" type traditional taxis band together and get set up with their own sort of city-specific app.
      • oremolten 2y ago
        It does always seem like a race to the bottom.
      • gardnr 2y ago
        I remember calling a taxi 3 hours before my flight to get to SFO. After an hour and four different phone calls to the taxi company, I took BART and barely made it before the counter closed. The feedback system incentivizes drivers and riders to behave.
        • GuB-42 2y ago
          This is getting off-topic, but I am curious, why didn't you go with BART in the first place? If you had an hour to call the taxi company and still arrive in time, presumably, you had more than enough time. I know there are reasons for not going with public transport, but preferring to take a taxi/uber when a train line can get you there in time maybe has more to say about public transport than about taxis. Well functioning rail is typically one of the most effective and reliable way of getting to an airport, and often much cheaper than taxis.
  • harrison_clarke 2y ago
    shouldn't there be a lot of political will from the traditional hotels and taxis, and their lawyers? i can see that the answer is "no", but i don't know why especially with hotels, i would have expected there to be small enough oligopoly to overcome the freerider problem (taxis are more regional, so i don't expect them to be able to fight an (inter)national company very easily) plus the president owning a hotel chain
    • lupusreal 2y ago
      There are a lot more people who own a few properties as investments than there are hotel owners. Even if these people don't plan to rent through Airbnb, the way Airbnb distorts the housing market is still beneficial for their investments. Also, by the time Trump became president Airbnb was already entrenched for years.
    • rangestransform 2y ago
      > shouldn't there be a lot of political will from the traditional hotels and taxis, and their lawyers? Yes there is, I am reminded of this every time I take an uber by the yellow cab medallion buyout fee that I’m charged because of the lobbying power of the TLC lobby in NYC
  • School-Cotton 2y ago
    Taxis and hotels suck compared to Airbnb and uber even at the same price, so I find it hard to be upset.
  • lupusreal 2y ago
    Part of the reason Airbnb got a pass must be how profitable it was to people who own many properties, despite the harm it does to the communities of people who only own one property.
  • AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > The reason there was no political will to punish Airbnb and Uber for violating the law was that initially they were subsidized with VC money and so were able to undercut traditional hotels and taxis on price. That's just a trope. They were initially losing money because they had high fixed costs (developing a platform, spending enough on advertising to get a critical mass of people using it), which are long-term investments. If you only spread the cost of the long-term investment over the short-term sales, they were "losing money" in the early years, but that's how all long-term investments work. Dumping is when you sell below the unit cost, e.g. paying drivers more than you charge customers, which isn't what they were doing in general. And as long as they weren't doing that, the incumbents could have responded by lowering their own prices (and therefore margins) without themselves losing money on each sale, which is competition working as intended. Unless the competition is too hidebound to accept a reduction in profits in order to stay competitive or otherwise insists on using a less efficient method of operating, in which case they go under.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • AlexCoventry 2y ago
    Uber is still undercutting taxis in Boston, FWIW. I looked up a ride on Curb (a taxi app) and Uber today, and the prices were $17 and $12, respectively.
  • elzbardico 2y ago
    Every time we talk about VC money in the last 20 years, we’re really talking about a wealth transfer from workers and the middle class to the rich via the Cantillon Effect. Cheap money enters the system through banks, funds, and corporations, not through wages. The people who get access to it first (asset holders, investors, VCs) deploy it into equities, real estate, and startups before inflation devalues the currency for everyone else. Post-2008, ZIRP and QE pumped trillions into financial markets, making capital nearly free for those who could borrow at scale. That money didn’t go into raising wages; it went into inflating asset prices. If you owned stocks or real estate, you got richer. If you earned a paycheck, you watched housing and living costs go up while your wages stagnated. VC was one of the biggest beneficiaries. With bonds yielding nothing, institutional investors had to chase returns, flooding venture funds with capital. That’s how we got an era of insane startup valuations, SoftBank-style mega-funds, and entire sectors built on free money. Growth-at-all-costs became the norm because the cost of capital was effectively zero. Then COVID hit, and the Fed doubled down—more QE, more stimulus, even lower rates. Another massive wealth transfer. Money printer go brrr, asset prices moon, and suddenly we have SPACs, meme stocks, and a startup funding frenzy. Meanwhile, workers got a couple of stimulus checks, and by the time the dust settled, everything from rent to food to cars was way more expensive. Now AI companies are running the same playbook that cloud megascalers ran before them—monetizing open-source work while locking out the people who actually built it. Cloud providers took open-source databases, infrastructure, and developer tools, turned them into managed services, and extracted billions in profit without meaningfully compensating the people who did the work. AI companies are now doing the same thing—scraping open-source repositories, academic papers, and public datasets, building models upon it then slapping on proprietary fine-tuning and charging for API access all the while blatantly raising capital by promising to make the same workers they stole from obsolte. All of it built on the backs of researchers, engineers, and artists who never see a dime, but also on the backs of everyone else via the cantillon effect. Now rates go up, the bubble deflates, and who gets left holding the bag? Not the VCs who cashed out early. Not the bankers who took their fees. It’s the workers, the middle class, the open-source devs, and the late-stage startup employees who thought they had something real. The cycle repeats.
• cpursley 2y ago
  The hotel and taxi industry were legit terrible before those two disrupted them. Laws are ment to be broken. Especially in cronist systems where incumbents write the laws.
  • dboreham 2y ago
    Not terrible everywhere.
  • 999900000999 2y ago
    Hotels were just fine. Taxis were discriminatory and "uncool" to the point were Uber has saved thousands by preventing drunk driving. Now if you go out with the boys and get drunk, it's a 30 second casual call to get an Uber and get home. Live in a neighborhood Taxis are afraid to service，you can either make some extra income working for Uber or use it yourself. When Ubers used as its intended purpose, to basically make a quick buck, it's a lifeline to many low income people . Say your rents it's going to be late, you can pick up 20 or 30 hours of Uber this month to make it happen. It's not really a career though...
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • 4ggr0 2y ago
      > Say your rents it's going to be late, you can pick up 20 or 30 hours of Uber this month to make it happen that sounds so incredibly dystopian, not sure if that was the intention :(
      • 999900000999 2y ago
        I forgot to mention, Jitney cabs( unlicensed cabs primarily serving minority neighborhoods)came long before Ubers. They're more of less gone now though. What's better. Taking out a 300% APR payday loan, getting evicted or working an extra 20, 30 hours of Uber.
      • BrandonM 2y ago
• classified 2y ago
  That's what makes a banana republic, and for all intents and purposes the U.S. are exhibit A.
  • infamouscow 2y ago
    The purpose of having an executive branch of government is explicitly to apply the law based on subjective opinions. There's no purpose of having an executive branch of government separate from the other two branches if not to cushion the inflexible and glacial nature of the other branches of government.
    • mrguyorama 2y ago
      >The purpose of having an executive branch of government is explicitly to apply the law based on subjective opinions. What? No, the purpose of having a separate executive is separation of powers and checks and balances.
      • infamouscow 2y ago
        You haven't explained why there is an executive branch in the first place. Why does the executive branch exist at all if it's simply to enforce written law? Why do we elect the executive at all if they are merely to enforce written law? Why do executives have the power to pardon someone when a court of law finds a person guilty of breaking law?
        • Dylan16807 2y ago
          > Why does the executive branch exist at all if it's simply to enforce written law? Someone has to be in charge of enforcing things. > Why do we elect the executive at all if they are merely to enforce written law? Do you have a suggestion of another way to do it that doesn't put congress in charge? Also the president has some other very important roles. > Why do executives have the power to pardon someone when a court of law finds a person guilty of breaking law? That one is definitely subjective by its nature, but also the average number of pardons is around two thousand, a very small fraction of cases.
• deegles 2y ago
  I've also heard the term "regulatory arbitrage" to describe this.
  • turtlesdown11 2y ago
    its a term used to describe "corporate criminal acts" yes
• pdntspa 2y ago
  This has always been the case. Laws are only as good as their enforcement. This is why the business class is so aggressive about tearing down regulation until they can wield it as a weapon. Do as I say, not as I do, etc etc If you as an individual can prevent the enforcement of a law, or be sure that it will not be enforced against you, then it does not apply to you.
• CamperBob2 2y ago
  Airbnb and Uber have showed us that laws matter only to the extent that the political will to enforce them exists. Laws matter to the extent that they don't interfere with actual progress. Laws that would have prevented the LLMs we have today from being developed should be ignored, as should laws requiring us to pay tribute to taxi and hotel cartels. Respect for the law is going to be an increasingly-hard sell going forward, and that's mostly the lawmakers' own fault. When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law.