For some people, paying the premium to jump the queue is the point. What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium, and the queue is now with you again. This is mostly Australian frequent flyers, when it was a high barrier to entry it conferred advantages and now Fly in Fly out work has commoditised club status, there is next to no boarding advantage, and no points flight availability.
So yes. Status seeking, and differential price seeking probably is a-social as a pattern when it's weaponised against the consumer.
That said, I hated Uber, they actually offered to underwrite people breaking the law to get foot in the door (how that didn't get them excluded as a corporate scofflaw is beyond me) and they continue to export all the profits offshore, but taxi services had become shit and now we have got used to Uber and I just don't worry about surge pricing. I got boiled slowly.
My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off.
The European push to mandate included luggage in flight is seeing a fair bit of trolling. So there are still true believers who think needing clean underwear is weak.
> My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off.
I think non-Americans need to take a stand against this. Refuse all tipping. Its a slippery slope - I know these guys are underpaid but if you start tipping the wages will just drop and we're all worse off.
1.) Owner needs workers and wants to make the position attractive.
2.) Owner is given the option to enable tips, and entice works with "Pay, plus tips!"
3.) Owner doesn't pay tips, patrons do.
4.) Workers blame patrons, not owner, for not tipping.
5.) Patrons feel guilty and tip. Workers make pretty good money from this, and enjoy the job more.
In a way it's kind of like a social mind virus, where the workers and owners benefit, and the patrons feel pain for not going along with it.
The only fix I can come up with is a law that tips can only be solicited after a service has been rendered. And entering something into a computer is not a service.
as someone who survived on tips for 2 1/2 years while studying comp sci, you're missing one key detail.
tips introduce a situation where harder/faster-paced workers get a higher pay per hour than workers with average productivity. a pizza driver that optimizes their routes and memorizes stop light patterns in their delivery zone will get more deliveries per hour than that of a new hire. so even though they work the same number of hours, the higher skilled driver earns more because they get more tips.
this "work harder => more pay" incentive is pretty unique in the industry; in manual labor jobs where each day has a set limit on the amount of work that can be completed, like grocery merchandising, workers that work harder get paid less than average workers. stock incentives are the closest comparison, but it's too far removed from the individual worker's output when the company's size grows above 100 employees.
the point is, part of the problem is the lack of other incentives that reward the hardest/best skilled workers.
Why do you associate tipping with “work harder => more pay,” exactly? I don’t see a clear logical route from “socially-forced customer tipping” to that, at all.
If anything; tipping leads us to “leverage information to ensure you get a large amount of high-tipping customers => more pay.”
Continuing that logical process, we might realize that “make your coworkers have to deal with the bad tippers => more pay.” Which might lead us to “socially manipulate management to get optimal shifts and locations => more pay.”
If you really want “work harder => more pay,” then just pay a high/fair/livable hourly rate, and add a bonus for number of orders fulfilled in the shift (or total sales volume during the shift). Certainly, some perverse incentives remain with this approach. But nothing nearly so bad as tipping. And like with tipping, the higher the hourly rate compared to the bonus, the more those problems are reduced.
But yeah… tipping has very little to do with “work harder => more pay.” You need to examine your logic more. Or just, like… have a few beers with a single person who’s ever worked in a restaurant as an adult.
> But yeah… tipping has very little to do with “work harder => more pay.” You need to examine your logic more. Or just, like… have a few beers with a single person who’s ever worked in a restaurant as an adult.
I have had more than a few conversations with tipped service workers. Some are even friends of mine. While a lot of what you say is true (the manipulation of shifts and spotting/monopolizing desirable customers) it really fails to capture what most folks tell me about these jobs.
They like tips. The ones that hustle and build up a bank of "regulars" do quite well. It takes a lot of work, and if you hustle on your shifts you usually get more tables assigned to you or drinks poured per hour, etc. This means even more pay.
A slow unskilled bartender is making far less money than a highly skilled efficient experienced bartender with a stable of regulars taking up half the bar stool seats every slow night. It is a night and day difference in total pay rates - all to do with skill. This can be two bartenders behind the same bar on the same nights. The unskilled bartender is not going to be known in these closely knit industry circles as good talent, and will likely never get the opportunity for a position at the top-tier establishments known for good tippers. Those positions are highly competitive.
While we can pontificate about how businesses "should" reward the top tier employees, it isn't happening. In this area of work these are often the only types of jobs available that offer significantly more hourly pay by working harder or being better at your job than your peers. Tilting at windmills only goes so far - sometimes you take the only options available to you to immediately improve your lot in life.
And yes, some of that is "manipulation" of your work environment - just like how we call it "managing upwards" in our white collar world. Same thing.
They like money. Service workers tend to like tips (which provide variable income) over stable higher wages mostly I think because the latter is one they just haven't experienced. Instead they get a choice between low wages and tips or low wages without tips. Hardly a choice.
Also, tips do not always go to the harder working employees. With tip request spreading far and wide, I often see them in places where there is little work even involved. If I buy a bottle of water from a take-out fast food place I'm expected to tip, but the same bottle of water from a convenience store I'm not expected to tip? Who was working harder here exactly?
I think the case of tips "regulars" does definitely make more sense then in a lot of other situations as the customers can make a good evaluation of their service. But even then a simple per-drink bonus or commission would serve this purpose without shifting the decision and responsibility to customers. The faster and more skilled bartender would naturally receive more orders because they are serving faster and because the patons prefer their drinks.
In part it's buying yourself a place without waiting.
I know a bartender who runs the entire bar area (the actual bar plus maybe eight four-top tables) at a nearby restaurant during lunch. I can text him at 10:30 and say I'd like a table for 2-4 people at lunch at 11:45, and there will be one waiting for me. He just brings one menu to the table, with our drinks (I'll have water, my wife will have Diet Coke, he already knows this) and we usually spend about ten seconds looking at the menu before we order.
We're both busy professionals, so getting us in and out in thirty minutes matters. And he does.
I'm directly paying the guy who provides service to me for a much higher level of service. I'm sure his manager would like a cut of that, but it's the price they have to pay to retain high-skill servers.
Sure. That might work, but the worker has zero control of implementing such a policy. They do have control over doing things that increase their tips. You work in the frameworks available to you, not some idealized version of the world.
We are arguing exactly against those frameworks, while your argument, while true, is only repeating that one can do well within that framework. I'm european and I find annoying the fake smiles, the fake chitchat and the deep cleavage I will get from a tips-motivated worker. Basically this softcore prostitution is the only way letting them get some bread on the table, within that framework you refuse to change. The manager definitely sees the unskilled bartender and could raise the pay of the skilled one any time, and if they don't notice the difference I believe the bar has bigger problems anyway. So no, it's not the only framework available, and the way it's slowly reaching nowadays europe because that "capitalism means individualism" is just garbage to me. We've always lived in tribes, only today's social media is spreading those lies for pure political power.
Work harder for more pay is limited to American full service gigs, and a weird employer-driven labor retention push elsewhere.
The tipping process works for servers who have the performative and service skills to work a crowd of tables, modulo peculiarities of the patron population. There can be a very strong connection between a server who works tables hard and their tip take-home versus one who merely gets the food to the table.
sure, it is a different approach than the old model - but i think it's only a guess when you visit a place for the first time. personally, i tip high on my first visit to a new place, any tips i give on my followup visits are based on my previous experiences with that restauraunt. workers remember good tippers, and when they go the extra mile on my followup visits, i keep tipping well.
followup - got downvoted hard on this, so i reflected a bit on my opinion here. i think its cognitive dissonance on my part, and its definitely a flaw in the new tipping model.
1. Tips are not a reliable source of income (I am an American who also survived on tips).
2. Only people working front get tips. If you have a lazy busboy working front for the most talented chef in the world, the chef pockets $0.00/hr in tips.
3. If any computer science job ever contemplated adding tipping to my compensation package, I'd go get my pink slip within the hour.
> 2. Only people working front get tips. If you have a lazy busboy working front for the most talented chef in the world, the chef pockets $0.00/hr in tips.
im not saying that the current tipping system is a good design - your example is one of the most glaring flaws. to put it another way, my point is that the current system will stay in existence due to the lack of other incentives that reward harder working individuals. in order to get rid of tipping culture, you can't simply appeal to morality/shame tippers; you have to replace it with a new system that also incentivizes harder work.
What do you think of the donations to open source project maintainers or photographers or musicians? What about gifts sent to tiktok hosts?
I'm from a country where there're no tips, and I'm not defending tips at all. But I do think the tiktok gifts are basically tips right? Is it a good idea to live off the gifts like the tips?
Donations aren't tips. I'm an Open Source maintainer as well, and I don't ever expect to be paid for my work. It's a hobby, whereas the code I write at work is what people pay me to do. Growing up, I knew a fairly popular musician from the internet-era, and I'll just say she made less money than I did working the cash register. She worked more hours, too.
Tipping, as an American culture, exists to reward "above and beyond" behavior from service workers. Tiktok performers, bedroom musicians and FOSS developers aren't service workers, and most of the time they aren't salaried either. Expecting to live off those wages is an unfortunate mistake.
Except all the jobs where the job is repetitive and salary is tied to performance inevitably start out as comfortable ways of earning easy money, and turn into nightmarish hellscapes as the owners do the frog boiling routine.
Food delivery is the perfect example. Right before covid, and during lockdowns, in my country, it was a lucrative job with easy work that earned a decent chunk of change, while being so cheap for consumers, that I've once or twice skipped out on going around the apartment block to the pizza place and just ordered it to my door.
Nowadays, prices are sky high and the wages are so low, and the system so punishing, is the only delivery drivers you see are illegal immigrants hanging on for dear life.
I was watching a YouTube video in the background while reading the comments, and I think it pretty much explained the issue, for the consumer: I feel pressured to pay a two dollar tip, on a seven dollar coffee, that was only worth one dollar to begin with.
..and then you start visiting other coffee shops with higher quality/lower cost, right? you, the consumer, are not alone in this behavior - so this causes a pattern where skilled baristas have a higher rate of exodus from that coffee shop where no one tips, which leads to even lower qiality, and eventually that shop has to lower its prices in order to get new customers. its capitalism all the way down.
At some point “more pizzas per hour” will be achieved at the cost of quality.
I’d love to seem them incentivize actually not putting a whole pizza’s worth of toppings on just 3 slices.
And also putting enough of a topping where it becomes visible. When I add “onion” to “pizza”, I don’t intend for them to add a single tiny spec to a single slice — finding it should be easier than Where’s Waldo.
there's been attempts to do just that, but it doesnt work because tipping is engrained in the surrounding culture, which exists outside of the pizza place's control. a single store cannot fix the tipping problem on their own; it has to be a cultural shift towards a better system that similarly rewards harder working individuals.
There is nothing I would like more than seeing tipping implemented in retail. And then the more you think about it the more you realise everything should have a tipping option.
personally id love to see something like tipping implemented in frontline support. kpi's that focus on monthly case resolve goals and TTR are incentives that reduce quality, and 5 star kpi's are easily gamed. if customers could tip frontline support engineers based on their experience with a support case, we'd see quality go way up.
why would you tip a pizza delivery driver or a bartender, when youre already paying their employer for a pizza/drink?
over time, your experiences with any company will vary, due to the cycle of new workers joining the company and experienced workers leaving. tipping after a good experience incentivizes the skilled worker to stay longer in their position, thus increasing the odds that your future interactions will also be handled by a skilled worker.
> A robust performance evaluation process does this just fine
this assumes that an org is able to perform a robust performance evaluation. i posit that the lack of a quality-based incentive, like tipping, decreases the accuracy of an org's performance review process.
organizations that are unable to retain skilled workers, will also experience a drop in the rate of skilled workers that transition to management positions. over time, management positions are then filled with individuals that do not have experience with the company's product. this lowers the accuracy of performance reviews, which causes a downward spiral: frontline engineers learn which KPI's are important in performance reviews, and focus on achieving those KPI's, rather than focusing on the customer experience. skilled workers are the workers most likely to spot the problem, and either adapt to lower the quality of the experience they provide to the customer, or they begin to seek greener pastures. this is textbook organizational collapse.
I’m going to start tipping 10% now, if I get yelled at by waitstaff I’ll mention the tax break and explain they’re receiving the same tip as they would’ve received prior to the tax break. I’m sick of being shaken down everywhere I go for tip money. I suspect I’m not the only one who will be modifying my tipping behavior.
Do waitstaff where you live actually have a tendency of yelling at people who "only" tip 10%? Honestly curious. That's one sick tendency if so.
if I had anyone at all nag me over tipping them more than that as if it were something you're supposed to automatically do, id flat out tell them to fuck off without a shred of guilt. Luckily it's not so ingrained where I live.
Yeah... 10% is my usual tip and nobody's ever yelled at me, confronted me, or responsed in any way. I'm sure it's happened once to someone somewhere at some point in time but this expectation that you're going to get confronted is silly. Humans are non-confrontational by default.
I personally thought tax-free tips is a fine idea.
Who are we kidding ourselves? Where do all those cash tips go? Not on the tax return, that's for sure.
This is how capitalism is supposed to work. It's supposed to seep into every crevice of society and pull money out of the poorest, weakest people and into the hands of the richest and strongest. This isn't a coincidence, it is in fact the most important aspect of the system.
Tipping went from some generous gesture to recognize exceptional service and it's turned into a mandatory, arm-twisting shakedown by businesses that simply do not want to pay their employees. Not just avoid paying a living wage (those days are long gone) but not even a _minimum_ wage. Many people involved in or invested in the restaurant businesses wouldn't have thought about getting in if they had to pay employees for an honest day's work.
Many restaurants these days aren't just local mom and pop family run businesses but large corporations who own many franchises and operate in the billions of dollars yet people like you and I are expected to pay most of the wages of the servers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darden_Restaurants
Sure, you can never eat out or only eat at locally owned small businesses. But that's just one small slice of society. The only realistic solution for many of us is to try to run the rat race faster.
As an American who agrees with you that this is a perennial failure mode for our culture and that this is by far the worst I've seen it in decades (I was a kid for "...government is the problem"), I still always remind everyone that it doesn't have to be this way, it wasn't this way 20 years ago, it was trending bad but not like this ten years ago, and that old proverb (Chinese I think and I'm probably butchering it) is spot on: "every step into a dark forest is a step you'll have to take to see the sun, but you have counted your steps".
Markets are great when they are well administered by competent and uncorrupted authority. And this is not an oxymoron! Brooksley Born should win the Nobel Peace Prize or something, she saw the road ahead and gave everything in a bitter battle against Clinton's goons and if we hadn't kneecapped her we wouldn't be here today.
More recently Lina Khan was a one-woman nightmare calamity for scammers, thieves, and other assorted bottom dwellers, and if Trump's goons hadn't had their way she'be ramming data privacy laws so far up FAANG's ass that Lt Colonel Boz would think he actually had been through legit basic.
The system can work, we get excellent people in charge of the important stuff with some frequency, but we have got to drop this red/blue crap and get behind leaders like the ones I mentioned or this goes one fucking way.
And there's a pretty optimistic message not in what George wrote, but that people like George are starting to ask if they're the baddies. He's always been brilliant but I was starting to wonder if he had gone TESCREAL on us, and I think we can see he (metaphorically) sobered up off the kool aid. If he can, idk, maybe Lex can, maybe pmarca can. If those guys took a cold shower? The world changes that day.
Just don't tip automatically, toughen up a little on the frowning looks and remind yourself that for one thing, you're not defrauding anyone for not tipping as an automatic thing, and secondly, its the cynical shits in the finacial incentive structure above your waiter who are really at fault.
> You ARE hurting the underpaid, exploited worker.
What? No, you're not hurting anyone. You're going out to eat and expecting to pay for what you ordered, not the life subsidy of someone whose employer can't be bothered to pay them well enough. Either way, it's not and shouldn't be your obligation even if it does screw with the waiter's finances. I too might have financial squeezes that make it difficult for me to fork over an extra 14 to 20% every damn time I've already paid for all that I bought.
Your claim just keeps reinforcing the foolish notion that it's a consumer's fault/responsibility if wait staff aren't paid enough by their employers.
>You're not hurting the big wigs who exploit workers. They don't care if you don't tip.
And I shouldn't have to care if they don't care. At bottom, like I said in my point above, it's not my job to subsidize their wages either way. I didn't make my argument as a description of protest, instead i'm saying it as a practical thing anyone should and has a right to do.
Does this worker have more, or less, money than before? It's not a matter of opinion. The answer is less, and we know that's the answer because that's specifically what you're seeking out.
What you're arguing is if this harm is justified. Maybe, maybe not. In your opinion, it is. My opinion is that the marginal effects of me not tipping will have zero impact on the culture, so, for now, I play by the rules. The rules are stupid, I agree, but I still play by them.
No, you're bloody well not. You as an average external consumer did not create the exploitative culture of low wages for hospitality staff or make any one of them join that culture by seeking employment there. There's nothing objective about what you argue except that it's objectively mistaken in its blame.
Playing by stupid "rules" (which these aren't in any case, they're social tendencies that can be slowly changed) is the passively damaging thing, a logic of, "yeah, this aspect of the world is shit but i'll chide you for not participating in it because I myself am too inert to not do so".
>Does this worker have more, or less, money than before? It's not a matter of opinion. The answer is less, and we know that's the answer because that's specifically what you're seeking out.
Do you own a restaurant in which you underpay employees? I'd almost guess you do to come up with such topsy-turvy nonsense. The worker having less money has nothing to do with any fault of your own. You're paying for what you ordered, and stealing nothing from anyone; you're simply seeking not to be squeezed further for no good reason. The owner of the place is however literally underpaying because they're hoping to guilt you into subsidizing part of wages, and convincing their employees that this is the correct thing.
A person having less money because you refuse to participate in a subtle bit of exploitation doesn't make you guilty of the exploitation or "seeking it out"
It's not topsy-turvy at all, it's very simple and straightforward logic.
Again: does the worker have less, or more, money than before if you don't tip? It's not a trick question, it's not a rhetorical question, it's a very simple question.
Okay... they have less. So, the worker is worse off when you don't tip. Again, what you're arguing is that's okay and justified. Which is fine, and lots of people will agree.
> The worker having less money has nothing to do with any fault of your own.
This is blatantly not true.
When you don't tip 5 dollars, the waiter does not have 5 dollars. Who did not give them that 5 dollars? You.
You're arguing that isn't your responsibility. That's a different argument. But who didn't give it to them? You.
> The owner of the place is however literally underpaying because they're hoping to guilt you into subsidizing part of wages, and convincing their employees that this is the correct thing.
Correct, this is exactly right. And, I agree with you: this is absolutely what is happening. I want this to end 100%.
But, in my opinion, I do not believe, personally, for me, in my life, that I will be enacting any change or furthering this cause in any way by not tipping. So, for me, I tip.
If you do not want to tip, I think that's fine. Go for it. What you cannot claim is that this doesn't hurt your particular waiter. Obviously it does, you made his night a little bit worse. If you still don't believe me, just ask next time, the waiter will tell you.
And, notice my wording here, it’s very careful. That particular waiter is worse off. It’s possible to help waiters, as a group, as a collective, while simultaneously harming that particular waiter. You believe you’re deconstructing or undermining tipping as a system, ergo helping waiters as a whole. But in the process, you’re hurting that particular waiter.
Yes, it is, that's exactly what it is and it's not up for debate.
Like I said, the rules are stupid but, for now, I play by them.
You might as "why are you hurting yourself?". Because I can afford to hurt myself, the waiter probably can't. 5 bucks is a drop in the bucket for me, but, presumably, not for them.
And, on the topic of self-harm, we all make decisions every day that harm us. We sometimes get something in return, but often we don’t. We do it purely for the benefit of other people, often people we don’t know and will never see again.
Consider holding a door open. For me, I get in the building 10 seconds later. That’s worse than getting in the door 10 seconds earlier. What did I gain? Nothing. Some stranger got 100% of the benefit, with nothing for me.
You're correct, you are more hurt than if I gave you 100 dollars. Duh, this is obvious.
Consider the negation: you’re not hurt if I give you 100 dollars. Or, rephrased, you're better off if I give you 100 dollars. Is this true? Yes. If I queried all 7.5 billion people on Earth, they’d all say yes.
Again, the tricky part is I don't care. That's a different thing.
>2. You ARE hurting the underpaid, exploited worker.
This is just hope for the hopeless. If an adult needs the few dollars, they have bigger problems.
If you can solve the coordination problem between diners and the explosion of tipping (largely due to employers trying to fight for unskilled workers by promising some extra tip revenue) the tipping might be extinguished entirely and a correction can occur.
Tipping is just a tax on losers. My friends were all about how they always tip and that’s why they get Ubers faster but then it turns out I never tip and I get them in the same time.
I’m a regular at this bakery / coffee store and I buy a doughnut there every day and I never tip.
Uber and Lyft are expensive but anyone who says they are worse than what they replaced doesn’t remember well the heydays of taxis. Sure, people in big towns like NYC could always get one fairly easily, but everyone else was stuck dealing with whatever potentially shady operation they could dig out of a phonebook, and even then getting a car wasn’t guaranteed.
Now, anyone anywhere can get a ride, often quickly. I’m not trying to excuse any predatory commercial practices directed at drivers or passengers, which are serious problems deserving of more strict regulation, but I absolutely do not want to go back to the old way.
I'm really not sure old school taxis are actually that bad.
I had two incidents in the UK recently where my app of choice failed me and I was quickly bailed out cheaper by googling "taxi $TOWN" and having a one minute conversation with an operator.
Yeah some operators use similar proper digitised internal systems now as well.
The main amazing thing about Uber is that you can go most places in the world, not know what you're doing with obscure public transport/payments/etc and just get an Uber to your hotel, no problems. It's so, so much better than what came before.
And you don't consider than just maybe that local taxi service which bailed you out so politely now, in the age of Uber everywhere, is delivering a better experience because it finally needs to compete like it didn't back in the day?
They are better than they used to be because of the competition. I remember a time not that long ago where getting a minicab was nigh on impossible, and one miraculously did show up, it would be primary so the driver could try to scam you.
> Not my experience using taxi call services in Chicago. Whenever I called them (before Uber) the taxi was prompt and courteous.
Not remotely my experience in Chicago, and I lived in a relatively primary service area (Wicker Park). Calling them was basically pointless, you needed to walk to a cab stand and hope there was a cab standing by if you needed to go to the airport at a weird off-peak time.
And my friends all had similar experiences to mine as well. It was a trope that you'd call dispatch and schedule a ride, and then maybe it would show up within 90 minutes of the actual time assigned. You could even listen to the dispatch radio and realize how much of a shitshow it was with cabbies assigned to a pickup ditching it for a street fare randomly. And how little dispatch cared about it all.
Uber was a night and day overnight change for the better.
The only "good" cab experiences were flag pulls from the street within short city trips. Usually the loop to back home during peak after-work or bar traffic times. Anything else was frustrating to outright unusable.
Cabs in Chicago prior to Uber were unbelievably bad unless you were picking them up in the Loop and taking them to a destination within the city limits (reference period: 1995-2010). It could take 45 minutes to get a cab to show up in Lakeview, and it was a crap shoot whether they actually would.
When I lived in Uptown I could typically get one just by standing on Broadway for a little while. When I lived in Logan Square I'd call and they'd be there in 20 minutes. This is well before either Uptown or Logan Square were particularly gentrified.
I can believe if you were going to/from the suburbs it may have been harder. The cabbies could know your destination and could just ignore the dispatcher if they didn't want to run the trip.
I lived in Lakeview (several spots) and just south of Uptown (on Montrose and Broadway, near the Jewel). I had never had a good cab experience. In particular, as I said, I'd often have to call, wait, and then call again when the cab didn't show up. The idea of getting a cab by waiting on Broadway --- I mean, maybe there was some time of day you could do that at? But at 8:30PM? Forget it.
No, restricting the amount of cabs is good, actually. It's very annoying if your city is overrun with cabs. The restriction needs to be reasonable but dense cities like NYC would just trend towards 100% cabs if you let them. And then nobody can drive anywhere.
Well no, because that's not what happened with Uber. You get more cab drivers, but there's a population limit on cabs based on various factors, including the fact that people don't always want to take a cab.
> I’m not trying to excuse any predatory commercial practices directed at drivers or passengers, which are serious problems deserving of more strict regulation, but I absolutely do not want to go back to the old way.
So which of the laws that uber broke to get big are what prevented these new issues, and which are what made the old way bad?
I remember the time before Uber arrived here, where ”here” obviously is not USA.
I don’t mind the old ways.
Taxis had apps before Uber arrived here, they had geolocation with ETA, contactless payment, up-front pricing, and never refused service (because they were required by law to offer service to anyone anywhere).
The problem probably never was incumbent taxis, it was how they were regulated (or not).
> Taxis had apps before Uber arrived here, they had geolocation with ETA, contactless payment, up-front pricing, and never refused service (because they were required by law to offer service to anyone anywhere).
I lived in NYC and other metropolitan US cities for the few years before the Uber and I don’t remember a single car service that had any of that and wasn’t a lottery of if they’ll pick up the phone in time to get me somewhere
Sometimes it seems USA truly is the home of cutting-edge tech, yet sometimes not so much…
Checking the iOS App Store reviews on the local taxi app I am currently using they go back to 2011, and that's not the oldest one. It has also been available on Android since March 2012. All prior to the dates Uber started operating here.
Taxis in the US are one of the most regulated services around, and they were still utterly atrocious.
Sure, they’re mandated to not refuse service, but you try getting picked up in Manhattan with a suitcase mid afternoon (when it’s obvious you’ll be taking the fixed fare to JFK in heavy traffic). To this day, the meter being “broken” is a tactic used in taxi strongholds like Las Vegas, even with this regulation.
The sweet spot for taxis was London, but I will go out of my way to avoid taking one lest I get forced to listen to the drivers views on Brexit for the entire ride.
> Taxis in the US are one of the most regulated services around, and they were still utterly atrocious.
Maybe the fact that they were the most regulated services around was exactly why they were atrocious. Regulation often erects barriers to competition. It's impossible for a regulatory body to spell out every way in which a company can be exploitive and disallow it. The only thing that prevents bad behavior is meaningful competition.
It was this regulatory body that limited the number of cabs that could be on the road at any given time and set "fair" meter pricing. What resulted was that if you lived in a poor isolated neighborhood, there would be no cabs willing to take you there or driving around to pick you up. Uber solved this pretty much overnight.
> Taxis in the US are one of the most regulated services around, and they were still utterly atrocious.
This assumes that “most regulated” correlates with less atrocious. Or that the intentions behind regulations are always good. Regulations can indeed makes things less atrocious, but other regulations can just as easily make things more atrocious. I’d argue that many taxi regulations were more the latter than the former. (I.e arbitrary limit on total number of taxi vehicles, while allowing an unlimited number of non-taxi vehicles)
Especially on the discounters here in EU (especially Ryanair / Easyjet), i'm the only one in the non-priority queue, everyone else is in the priority queue. This used to of course not be the case; you paid extra and was in first. Now i'm usually in before 2/3th of the prio queue. Which is just weird.
> about surge pricing. I got boiled slowly.
Not sure how it is in the US (I used uber there on vacation in the past, but on vacation, I don't worry about prices too much), but here prices jump heavily during surge; often from 40->50->38 euros in a few minutes; I'll just keep an eye on the app for a few minutes and pick it at a good point. Taxis are almost always twice or sometimes (airport) 3x the price. I never take them as they are also often rude and I cannot rate them (these two are related). The last one I took was 3 weeks ago; I was 10 minute drive to the airport from some horrible 'business hotel' and I had an early flight, so I checked out, ordered an uber at 5am and waited; in front of me stopped a 'real' taxi (both are now legal and need licenses, but Taxi have Taxi on top); the driver got out to welcome his client which was not me but obviously he thought I was. We talked for a bit waiting for his real client and then he asked how much uber was; E15 I showed him. He said; cancel it and give me E15. Ok, so I got in front, the other client in the back. We arrived, and while waiting to park up, he shoved a terminal in my face with E15 on it, so I paid. We got out, he got the luggage from the other guy who asked 'how much is it'; E72,-. Cheers bro; made almost E90 for a 10 minute trip.
Point being; hating uber (and I used to refuse to use them) is making your life very hard for very little benefit. The taxis needed a kick up the arse and they still didn't learn anything. Still need to order far upfront, their app sucks and far more expensive. Not sure how they can exist (of course I do, they don't know uber exists, how to use it or they refuse to use it). I find if you are with 2+ people, they are often cheaper than the trains which is quite mental really in a country where 'people should take the train if they can'.
> I never take them as they are also often rude and I cannot rate them
You should check if there are taxi apps where you live. In Europe a lot of these apps consolidated under bigger brands (e.g. FreeNow) so it's a good bet that you'll find one and then you have the same experience as Uber. Just check which gives you a better price.
When the service providers feel cheated by the app they have to use to reach any audience (Booking, Uber, etc.), they'll find ways to make more money. Hotel owners gave me hefty discounts just to cancel a Booking reservation and pay directly, Uber drivers did the same. And with taxis it's getting ever so slightly harder to cheat when people have a recording device in their pockets at all times. I know cases where friends used Strava to record a trip and could show it's impossible for the trip to cost that much at advertised prices. Driver complied.
Startup idea: Strava for taxi rides, disrupt the market of shady taxi drivers with an app dedicated to tracking the trip to calculate/estimate costs.
Yup. The price jump isn't just a "surge." It's the algorithm calculating the highest price you'll tolerate without abandoning the app long-term, no matter availability of cars (which can be related, but from CFOs perspective that's not the metric to optimize)
This personalized price discrimination is precisely the kind of manipulation geohot is describing.
It's the same principle as (an old story) booking.com charging Mac/Safari/iphone users more.
Booking is the worst of them. You can open two tabs of one account next to each other and since one is from Google Maps pricing gonna be. 20% different.
Also all kind of cashback or discount offers just bake even higher premium than Cashback they offer.
So yeah booking hotels is more and more like a whack-a-mole game if you don't want to pay 30% more.
It used to be that you could use Booking and get a cheaper reservation than using the hotels own website. Today, it seems to be the opposite, the prices for hotels are almost always cheaper on their website than Booking...
This is a common online trope, but has almost never been true for me when I’ve checked. (US domestic ~4 star hotels) Direct is more or at least equal to the aggregator prices.
and you reinforce it every time you accept the price.
So you have to vote with your wallet. If you can't, or won't, then it just proves that their pricing algorithm has found "your" price, and so you don't get to keep your surplus value as it gets transfered to uber.
This is why i, even if i can afford it, go for lowest price, most economically valuable buys. Always, without exception. Cannot allow them to win.
And this generally fails because Uber has more market power, given that there are only a few alternative options and many people will defect in order to get where they’re going. If customers could organize somehow and apply this principle collectively they could achieve some parity with Uber and it would affect that organization’s behavior more. But we’ve decided that regulation is bad, and the tech world hasn’t figured out how to build an Uber-bargaining collective app (which wouldn’t instantly itself defect and take a payoff from Uber.)
> Taxis are almost always twice or sometimes (airport) 3x the price.
Not where I live. Here, Uber is 50-100% more* than the price of a local taxi, at all times of day. Uber is also at least 30% more expensive than hailing a black cab.
So even though I have the app, after optimistically checking the Uber price, I invariably choose to book a taxi instead.
The shorter arrival times shown in the Uber app are sometimes tempting, but after waiting nearly 30 minutes for a car that Uber continuously said was 4 minutes or less away, with their location moving around (so not stuck in traffic) and driver repeatedly changing, I don't take the time seriously any more.
I just wanted to correct the impression that's often put out that Uber is cheaper (or faster) for the customer. It's evidently true in some places. But where i live, other than when they ran a 50% discount for the first few months after arriving in town, I've never seen Uber be anything other than the most expensive option.
It's not due to lack of drivers: I've been told most drivers at the biggest local firm switched to Uber as soon as they arrived in town, and that's backed up by seeing Uber-marked cars everywhere.
I never understand why people make comments like this and leave it to the reader to guess where they live. Your profile has your email and linkedin, so it's not like you're trying to stay anonymous.
And to your point, local taxis being less expensive is unusual in my travels from 50+ countries. Uber/Grab/Bolt/Gojeck/Maxim are almost always significantly cheaper and more reliable in my experience, especially for foreigners who aren't familiar with typical fares.
Uber is more expensive than a cab in almost all Asian countries, often by a lot. Grab is a bit better, the margin tends to be pretty slim. The main benefit of Uber to me in Asia is that you don't get a taxi driver who tries to skip the meter and extort you, which is a surprisingly common phenomenon.
Last time I took an Uber from Eindhoven out 30km to a neighbouring village, the driver showed up and gave me shit for not calling the taxi company. See, he was a taxi driver as well and used the same car for both services. He said that Uber didn't pay enough and that it was unfair I was _only_ paying €50 for the trip. I told him that I was just paying for a service I ordered and wished him luck. If the driver wants to make more money, he should stop accepting Uber offers because he's certainly not winning over hearts and minds by complaining to the clientele he is supposedly trying to convince to pay 50% more for the exact same ride.
> I never understand why people make comments like this
It's intentional, because the location has nothing to do with the actual point. Stating it invites people to focus on the location too much instead of the actual point, or to say things like "oh that's just your country / town, we can assume that's anomalous".
Which would be missing the point entirely.
If you're interested in the location you can find out. It's no secret, though I would advise against trusting people's locations on LinkedIn, they are often not where the person currently works or lives.
But I'm not interested in stating it. For the point I was making, the specific location, or even the country, detracts from that.
You've traveled in 50+ countries. Just from that, you're an extreme economic and social outlier. You are almost certainly taking journeys that are systematically different from those taken by the majority of people, and the price brackets and journey routes you're comparing between services are different than those used by other people. It may well be that the comparison works out differently as a result.
Not to disregard your experience. You've plenty. But you are very unusual, and it's impossible to travel that much without taking journeys that other people never or very rarely take.
I would not be surprised if the "obvious foreigner" premium is there for taxis, even if you're experienced. I'd find it unlikely that you became so intimately familiar with all 50+ countries as to get the true "favour for a friend" fare in all 50+ including those where that's more common, and that you took the same journeys as locals do in all of them.
On the other side (and on the original topic), Uber has reason to optimise for traveller cohorts. If Uber wanted to seem cheaper than local taxis to people in your cohort, to a greater extent than for other people, they could probably do that, and it would make economic sense if their algorithm statistically optimises for that. Profit-maximising algorithms with "personalised" pricing default-optimise for trade with wealthier customers who use their services more often, for journeys associated with other spending, such as to/from travel hubs and hotels, and for separating out cohorts in subtle ways that maximise the inability of cohort members to detect the separation.
Regarding Uber, I agree that their price transparency is very much appreciated.
However it's not rare to find bad drivers on Uber. On Christmas this year I took an uber from the airport, the driver had supposely arrived but he was nowhere to be seen. We called each other and I could hardly hear anything. After wasting about 30 minutes (and battery almost depleted) we finally found each other. It turns out he didn't know how to speak English or the local language. He had two phones, one he used to call a colleage who could (barely) translate english for him, the other phone he used to talk to clients, and both phones were placed mic-to-speaker to bridge the calls. What about the extra time that the driver wasted? I was billed for it and I had no way to dispute it. I could only report this behavior in a review to a driver that didn't seem to be him (was the main driver subletting his account?).
I had very bad drivers on Uber, but I do give them low ratings, complain to Uber, ask for refunds or refuse to go depending on the level of bad. I had a driver a few months ago on saturday morning: 'don't get in on the left, someone vomited out of the window last night'. Yeah that's shit and can happen but it's the next day, you went out without cleaning. Didn't get in and complained. Come on people.
Generally I still had much nicer uber drivers than taxi drivers. What do I do if a normal cabby is a shit? With uber I get to vote 1 star AND I will get my money back the same day. That's not happening here with the normal taxis: you can complain, fill forms, and maybe, after you expire of old age, your family will enjoy that 10 euros refund.
I agree with you, uber is a good 1st option. In my previous comment I wanted to remark that it's not flawless, but I think we are on the same page about this as well. It pays off to keep alternatives in mind when things seem to go sideways (request another driver, use a taxi, be more vocal ...). Also travelling makes me tired and then I just let issues slide
> Especially on the discounters here in EU (especially Ryanair / Easyjet), i'm the only one in the non-priority queue, everyone else is in the priority queue. This used to of course not be the case; you paid extra and was in first. Now i'm usually in before 2/3th of the prio queue. Which is just weird.
That’s because the ”priority” queue for those carriers is really a ”paid for a proper carry on”-queue. But the airlines realised that they could brand it as a priority queue to make the upcharge to bring a bag more palatable. You’re not spending €40 just to bring a bag that used to be included in the ticket, you also get to feel more important. At least the first time until you realise 2/3rds of the plane is also important.
The workaround for this, ironically, is more tech.
"Sorry, I've got like 20 lith-ions in there. I can pull them out if you'd like to see them." cue shiteating grin and grumping from the airline staff.
On the one hand I feel good about it because your dumb rules are dumb and fuck that shit. On the other hand, it's not the air steward's fault Frank Lorenzo was a lizard person puke pustule.
I really want to dislike Uber because I'm generally much in favor of locally-operated public services rather than a big foreign corporation, but man, taxis really make it hard.
In my country (Spain) there can't be more than 1 Uber (or similar) per 30 taxis by law (obviously pushed by the taxi lobby). That's actually enforced, at least in my region (I think in some regions, like Madrid, it's not). Additionally, in my region Ubers are further nerfed by requiring booking 15 minutes or more in advance and not allowing trips inside of a city, but they just disregard that law and at the moment it doesn't seem to be actually enforced, although taxis are protesting a lot about it so it might be in the future.
Normally I would be indignant at a foreign big corp disregarding laws, but it's hard not to support Uber when taxis are clearly not enough to meet demand (sometimes you need to wait half an hour for one, in a small city where if you are fit you get to most places walking in that time anyway. If I want a taxi it's because I'm in a hurry and walking or taking a bus won't cut it, if I have to wait 30 minutes for a taxi it becomes useless) and they constantly push not only to limit the number of Ubers, but also the number of taxis themselves. They prefer to be guaranteed to always have customers waiting and see the taximeter numbers go up constantly, and screw the people who have to put up with a terrible quality of service because they don't meet demand. In the past I used to take a taxi to the train station if I'd rather work some more instead of stopping 30 minutes earlier to take the bus, now I don't even bother because you might need the same time to go by taxi than by bus due to scarcity of taxis.
Add to that that many taxi drivers are rude, and many drive Dacias which are the cheapest low-end car here... come on, I'm not saying they should be luxury cars, but you are serving customers in a car that is your whole means of production, your image and your calling card, and that will be amortized very fast, and you go for the absolute cheapest that you can find in the market? What does that say about your care for the customer?
I take Ubers whenever I can (which is also seldom, because obviously with the 1 to 30 rule they are even further than taxis from meeting demand) because taxis really go the extra mile to make me hate them.
> What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium, and the queue is now with you again
Wouldn't the market purist argue that this just means the good is mispriced, and tickets should actually be what the price is with the premium added? What you really need is to just raise the prices of the tickets and the price to jump the queue?
The market purist might argue for a second-price auction for boarding order, where people board in the order of highest sealed bid for boarding order to lowest, but pay the amount bid by the person behind them in the sequence; or for "Paris Metro Pricing" where everyone being in the "priority" line results in a large fraction of them opting not to pay the premium for the next flight they take. Or they might think up something I haven't thought of.
Thanks for the link! This is a good example of the use of the medium of video (animation) to present information more clearly than alternative media could.
He's concerned not about allocating the suffering optimally (to the people least willing to pay to reduce it, for example because they are in excellent health or couldn't afford the flight otherwise) but about reducing the total amount of suffering, which is far more important.
In other contexts, the main benefit of market mechanisms is precisely that they vastly reduce suffering, for example by stimulating the production of socially valuable goods. Is there a way market mechanisms for boarding order could have such a benefit? For example, by rewarding people who board in an order that minimizes overall boarding delay? I'm skeptical.
For market purism to work people need to have an idea what they are paying for. If this is changing too quickly or there is personalized pricing it becomes a very different kind of game.
People don't make buying decisions from a purely rational headspace, though. Charge too much for the upfront ticket and people will go to someone advertising it for lower (but with additional back-end services that are must-have)
My guess is the hidden fees end up making businesses more money
especially the australian airline example and perhaps with much broader applicability, I know that companies are completely happy with managable competition (Australian domestic airlines are functionally 2 players, and similarly across many large industries here that's true) where over time once they can establish profitable gimmicks neither party really wants to rock the boat and they're able to lock in that margin forever more. It doesn't suit established players to compete on that, they both open up losing situations in the game theory compared to silent non-competition.
In high capital businesses like airlines and supermarkets it seems to play out all over the place these days.
> For some people, paying the premium to jump the queue is the point. What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium, and the queue is now with you again
There's a freedom that comes with not caring and just accepting I am last in the line. I don't pay the premium and I can sit and relax in the lobby while the sheep that paid wait in line. Only when the queue is nearly depleted it is my turn.
The supposed "sheep" that want to get on the plane first are people that want to get that precious overhead bin space to avoid checking a carry-on bag at the gate. Boarding last means there's no more bin space and the gate agent will put the bag in the belly of the plane. This adds extra hassles of waiting an extra 30+ minutes at the arrival terminal to wait for the bag on the conveyor belt and/or the bag getting lost.
Yes, it can look "irrational" to hurry up and get in line because as some like to say, "No point in fighting to get on the plane first since we're all leaving on the same plane at the same time!" ... The issue isn't the departure time -- it's the limited bin space.
EDIT add reply to : >bag put in the belly lf the place, and my bag was never lost.
There are more complications because at some airports with widely separated terminals, going outside of the security zone to pick up a bag at the conveyor belt also means using slower buses instead of the tram to go to another terminal to get a car. E.g. at Dallas airport, the faster railway trams are only available inside the secured area. So not getting that bag in the overhead bin has domino effect of waiting for buses (another +30 minutes) which can add up to 1 extra hour of waiting at the arrival destination. Getting in line early for boarding is a small price to pay to avoid all of that.
> The supposed "sheep" that want to get on the plane first are people that want to get that precious overhead bin space to avoid checking a carry-on bag at the gate.
They are still sheep. Fighting for better spot on the butcher's table.
So let me get this straight. Rather than fighting airlines for better flying conditions, they fight each other for earlier boarding time.
Not sure who said it, but consumerism truly is slavery perfected.
Maybe it's different in the US, but I fly constantly and have ever since I was a kid, and overhead storage space has never been an issue in my experience. At worst you'll have to put your bag a few seats away from your seat, but even then I usually travel with a pretty big duffle bag and have never had issues
It's different in the US. The gate agents, depending on the flight, for the last 10-30% of boarding passengers will say "we're out of room, we're checking your bags". So now you have to deal with that hassle. The lived experience is you have gate agents explicitly priming the anxiety.
OP missed the point though, also in the US, you can bring what's called a "personal carry on" and put it under the seat in front of you. Now overhead space is a non-issue. Just pack light.
> now Fly in Fly out work has commoditised club status, there is next to no boarding advantage
Why would you want to be on the plane earlier than necessary? Only thing I can think of is better access to the overhead lockers, which fill up fast these days.
Airport food & coffee is expensive and often not very good. At least with lounge access, I get that subpar food & coffee for free plus somewhere to sit. With a family, that can save a significant chunk of money off the cost of a holiday.
> With a family, that can save a significant chunk of money off the cost of a holiday.
How long are y'all sitting around in lounges?
If a small meal / snack saves a significant chunk of money off the cost of a holiday then one of us is not doing it right.
Flights and accommodation are the lions share of costs as far as my limited experience goes.
(P.S. I was meant to be leaving for Japan this morning, but family medical emergency has ruled it out. Flights were $5,500. I'd hope that airport food costs wouldn't raise a blip on a radar set to that scale).
Asocial people are great because they lack exactly this kind of status seeking and don't feel the need to engage in zero-sum social games. They just do what they like, which often is something actually productive or fun.
This behavior is anti-social. It actively harms everyone else except the person (or group) doing it.
Australian FF points programs ceased being about flights long ago, now they are a complex web of data harvesting and cross promotion. Why are our airlines offering homeloans, health insurance and retirement investment funds?
If you wanted to be generous you could say it the other way around, moving some features to premium allows people who value time and money differently to still get the bulk of the value they want out of the proposition. I don't for one minute think that's the actual conversation had in HQ but it's still valid I guess.
> What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium
That's simply discovering the true price of a product. We're living in a mega-inflationary period, but most people won't accept that a dollar or a euro is actually worth no more than 30 cents. So sellers are putting things which used to be included at a premium price. If people pay, then that is the price.
It's highly annoying as a customer, but the general public won't accept that product and services they pay for cost double than they used to. At the same time the general public demands that their real estate and stock investments should be valued at triple or quadruple than what they used to.
"how that didn't get them excluded as a corporate scofflaw is beyond me)"
The essence to breaking crony capitalism. No prosecution. No change. Fines do not work. For a start, it's the shareholder that pays. Prosecute the executives with more than just a wag of the finger, and it changes behaviour.
I thought the name of Uber was all you needed to know, what kind of company names themselves after "Deutschland über alles", or Übermensch? The smug superiority was all the clue I needed.
>My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off.
Eh I wouldnt speak for all of us. I like having the ability to reward contractors with some extra cash for a job well done. The issue is structurally relying on it.
Shit, when I was 14 or so I worked as a baggage handler. And I will never forget the time we took on an overflow job from an american cruise liner at circular quay. Not only was I getting 20 bucks an hour (decent pay at the time), but I took home an extra 1100 or so completely tax free. Nothing as australian as cash in hand.
>That said, I hated Uber, they actually offered to underwrite people breaking the law to get foot in the door
Its always moral to break unjust laws. The taxi monopolies needed to be broken. Having those laws challenged thanks to the donation of US VC money was just a bonus.
Actually theres still work to be done. Sydney CBD is still extremely hostile to rideshare.
The fact that they may make you check it anyways is annoying.
I avoid checking a bag but because it’s price sensitive; its because so much of the airline experience is just idle dead time and I’d like to avoid spending an extra 45 minutes waiting around at baggage claim.
Having everyone check bags is just trading waiting at one area for waiting in another area
You just wear your dirty clothes in the shower. No worry about shrinking or stretching either. They will even air dry while you're wearing them if carrying a second set of clothes is not an option.
The big problem with traveling without any bags at all is that you get flagged by security for extra attention. Turns out terrorists are too cheap to buy a set of luggage and a return ticket if they're just going to blow themselves up.
We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement.
This isn't theoretical, it's happening right now. The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people, the shift from public feeds to private DMs, and the "Do Not Disturb" generation are all symptoms of the same thing. People are feeling the manipulation and are choosing to opt out, one notification at a time.
> If you know which car you want to buy it doesn't matter what the salesman has to say.
Sure it does. The salesman may have information you were not aware of. They could even tell you something which satisfies your needs better and is cheaper. Not all salesman are out to screw you, some really care about a happy customer.
I’m reminded of an old Hypercritical episode. If you ever heard John Siracusa, you know he does his research and knows what he wants. Yet when it came time buy a TV, which he had intensively researched, the salesman mentioned plasma and how the tech had improved and it threw a wrench in Siracusa’s whole decision.
The heuristic is that pretty much anyone who is trying to sell you something is out to screw you. They are probably lying, and they are probably trying to get a quick buck from people who don't know better. And when I say anyone, I mean anyone. Youtubers, anyone on TikTok who links anything, advertisements on the web, billboards.
It's not 100% but if you follow the heuristic you save a lot of money and generally have higher quality goods in your life.
The reason we got into this mess is because advertising on the internet broke all the rules. Now lying is de-facto allowed. So then everyone else followed suit to compete. If your competitors are lying, you cannot afford not to lie.
So now all advertisement and sales are compromised and should not be trusted. Even large, previously trusted corporations are running scams in America. Professionals making six figures are acting as con artists. It's unbelievable how fast the situation has deteriorated.
Exactly. People say "Oh, I'm not affected by advertising, and I ignore sales pitches. I am very smart and do my own research!" But what are they researching? Marketing literature! They think they are informing themselves, but in reality, they are just seeking out marketing disguised as impartial facts.
I laugh when people say "I use site:reddit.com to scope my Google searches for product information because I'm getting impartial information from real people."
The salesman can cut the car you want from your buying options, or stick conditions on it that will make up for the difference with the other models.
That's what we're seeing with Youtube for instance: your choice is to pay Youtube's price for Premium (litteraly paying to not get bullied), sit through all the ads in the world, or get three strikes after playing the ad-blocking cat and mouse game for long enough.
Of course you're still free to go somewhere else, in a world where even public guides and presentations will often be pushed on youtube only, to alleviate for the bandwidth costs on standard web services.
> The salesman can cut the car you want from your buying options, or stick conditions on it that will make up for the difference with the other models.
My favourite approach to this is to write an email to all dealerships within the radius I’m willing to go, explaining what I want, then “publicly” make them bid for my business in a thread with their peers. I’ve had it work several times now.
Depending on when you look at it, it might be worked around or fully enforced again, it comes and go, but at least Youtube doesn't seem willing to give up that stance entirely.
To note, what u-block is doing to workaround this is far from the trival "just block the ad" behavior, and I expect it to break again (perhaps within weeks ?)
Then the waltz will go on as usual, until the ads are straight baked into the video-feed with the server refusing to serve the rest of the content on a per-client base.
What car you want to buy is just one tiny part of the transaction. The salesman can and will manipulate you on everything else from price to warranty, from payment schedule to cross-sale rebates, from maintenance subscription to registration fees, from additional options to spare tires.
You're right, they can try to manipulate you on a thousand tiny things. My counter-argument is that at a certain point, it's not worth the mental energy to fight over what amounts to pennies on the dollar.
Anecdotally, when I bought my car recently, they forgot to even offer me the extended warranty they'd planned to push. I find it funny to think it was so minor, even they forgot to care.
Tangential, but I think most extended warranties I've noticed are beneficial. Even last month I was kicking myself for forgetting to extend a 2 year warranty which costs 1/4th the one time repair cost I had to cough up.
Are you sure the extended warranty would have covered it?
I paid for an extended warranty on the first car I ever bought. Turned out it didn't cover any of the things the salesperson cited as good reasons to pay for it, and to maintain the warranty, I'd have to pay the dealer for all maintenance - even oil changes.
That car never needed any repairs, but seeing the list of exclusions convinced me to never pay for an extended warranty again.
I guess I should have specified financial benefit.
You wouldn't pay someone else to insure a common vegetable, because it is so low cost that if it turned out to be bad, you would just buy another one (or have bought extra as your insurance).
When you buy from Walmart/Target/Amazon/Best Buy, they will try to sell you insurance for a $30 toaster or other cheap appliance. Again, most people will not buy this because they will believe the appliance will work sufficiently long or that the warranty process will be too time consuming, or otherwise decide that just quickly replacing the cheap appliance with another is the preferred way to insure it.
The insurance seller is a business and has to earn more than what they pay out for claims (or at least to make payroll if it is a mutual insurance company). Otherwise, they are going to lose money over time and go out of business. If you financially benefit from it, then you are either lucky, or had an information edge over the insurance underwriter.
Of course, if you get peace of mind from buying insurance, and count that as a benefit, then most insurance is beneficial in that case.
That is really not how the insurance seller's business model works.
Think about it this way: on a given year, they are collecting "Sales" amount of money from their pool of customers. For the insurer to make a profit, the amount reimbursed to legit claims simply has to be less than Sales-Expenses that year, which basically translates to having Z customers claims on any given year where Z << NbOfCustomers.
So it's a bit like a Ponzi scheme, whereby you can benefit as a customer if you pay year 1 and get a claim during year 1 or 2 for example, and the insurer can benefit too if many customers pay "a year in advance" (money that can be invested) before having their claims fall on years 2 or 3 (or never).
The customers can earn investment returns just like the insurance seller, so you have to reduce foregone returns from the insurance buyer’s benefit so it ends up canceling out.
>For the insurer to make a profit, the amount reimbursed to legit claims simply has to be less than Sales-Expenses that year, which basically translates to having Z customers claims on any given year where Z << NbOfCustomers.
That inequality does not “basically translate”. Insurance sellers have to exist for multiple years, not just 1 year.
If every single year, “customer claims” are less than the net benefit of customers, which is what I think you wrote although it is hard to interpret, then your “net benefit of customers” includes a non cash component (such as feeling secure)”.
There is never a free lunch, and the insurance business is not at all like a Ponzi scheme (that’s the whole point of actuaries performing calculations…to ensure sustainability without an ever growing income stream).
Insurance seller has to earn at least enough for payroll, so at least some of the premiums go towards that instead of any money received from claims.
Investment earnings cancel out because both the insurance buyer and insurance seller have access to same returns via broad market index funds. I.e. you can self insure and get the same returns on your savings that the insurance seller is going to get if you gave them a premium.
Not to me. I don't want to manipulate the manipulators. I just want to not be manipulated. I want to be able to go through my day without having to fight off manipulation in order to do and be what I want to do and be.
The goal is my freedom, not to "stick it to the man" in some way that won't actually matter to them.
> The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people
>> That's a market now. It doesn't mean shit. It's a "lifestyle".
The fact that there's such a market now, means something on it's own I believe. Regardless if it's a "lifestyle", it's a lifestyle people are choosing now. I know more and more people who either don't own a smartphone or have it on DnD at all times.
It's the same for "manipulation awareness" or whatever. You can't will a market into existence, the market has to already exist because people are drawn to it.
I am not saying that it will matter in the end, but I can say for a fact that there are people consciously disengaging from social media.
The algorithm still can't make me buy or read rage-bait.
Of course the machine will never stop trying. But with results decreasing gradually with time, the human will get discouraged and will turn it off. It happens at places, btw.
I think pretty far. I expect the future involves nonsense layer full of AI slop being read and written by AI's. Mapping it onto the actual humans will be difficult unless you have a preexisting trust relationship with those humans such that they can decrypt the slop into your actual communications.
If I were an algorithm-profiling company I would try to anchor my profilings in the real world (what kinds of people I talk to, about what, what kinds of places I visit, what are the opinions of others on me, etc). LLM garbage would be just to draw voluntary participation in potential surveys.
It takes a particularly paranoid and stubborn individual to make the necessary efforts to consider what kinds of profiling could be done with such anchored data, and even more effort to probe it enough to acquire some knowledge on how it works.
I agree that it's currently paranoid to hide your activities so that the algorithm profiling companies see you as several different people, or see the activities of millions as if they're just one... Automated misdirection on the part of the users is, so far, minimal.
But the point of such a company is to sell data on individuals, and a problematic use case for such data is to kill the ones who say things that you don't like. As that becomes cheaper and easier to do I think we'll find that it's not so paranoid to hide.
Maybe the endgame is honesty. Not pretending you're several people, or other convoluted ways of misdirection and disguise.
Just honestly acknowledge that profiling exists, and explicitly work against it.
That should be enough to make any algorithm company that notices something is wrong to trip on its own wires, thinking some more elaborate form of hackery/covertion is being employed.
The likelyhood of some company noticing a single user is quite low though, but if you are able to hook even a single person inside that company using nothing but honesty and no tricks, that is the best trick of all.
My proposal wasn't that individuals should juggle accounts and cookies in a machine-vs-human game of cat and mouse, but rather that we should rewrite the protocols we use to play that game for us. I don't think there's anything dishonest about that--it's just that making computers lie to each other is the honest work of protecting well-meaning humans from malicious humans.
Do you have a different sort of explicitly working against profiling that you had in mind?
I'll criticize things that could benefit me if I think they're manipulative.
I won't do alt accounts even if everyone does it.
I think most surveillance and advertisement relies on social dynamics. I attempt to play the algorithms but not the people. Sometimes it will get misunderstood, and that's fine.
Ah, well I hope that sharing your honest opinion about it turns out to be an effective strategy. But I'm afraid we'll regret not interfering more directly than that.
I think surveillance is very, very advanced. But the active meddling thing is old tricks.
One should consider this combination. You can't lie to some systems, the better strategy is to be honest. You can lie to some systems, but these won't be load bearing, so why do it?
I will also observe back. The active meddling thing, when observed in action, is a source of information. It could be lying to me too, predicting that observability is inevitable and camouflaging it. Of course, I could be predicting that as well (and so on).
Notice how many interesting scenarios exist even if honesty is considered as a viable strategy in a total surveillance hypothetical situation?
> The active meddling thing, when observed in action, is a source of information.
Not if it's done right. If one person views a page the old-fashioned way, caches the DOM, and circulates it peer-to-peer, then whoever is weaponizing that content only has one browser fingerprint to work with, despite there being potentially thousands of users that they wish they could profile.
That's far less information to work with than the thousands of individual requests they would otherwise have to scrutinize.
The honest/dishonest distinction only comes down to whether you're going to try to protect the volunteer who grabbed the page to begin with, or whether you're going to expose them to retribution.
As for the systems you can't lie to, those you can replace with more trustworthy alternatives. This is a lot of work but it's better than suggesting that your peers be honest in ways that will harm them.
So to answer your question, no. None of the scenarios where you let your adversary know that you're working against them, and also let them know how to find and harm you, are interesting strategies for combatting surveillance.
Surveillance exists in support of targeted coercion. We should not make a target of the more honest among us. We need to protect those people most of all.
You need to imagine a surveillance system that you cannot lie to, and cannot avoid or replace. It will be there, no way of escaping it. Sattelites, network monitoring, doesn't matter. Assume it exists.
Anyone in control of such hypothetical systems can act upon the surveillance information to manipulate a target (not only observe it). This could be done in several ways. LLM bots encouraging you to volunteer information, gaslighting, etc.
The load bearing component of such surveillance systems are _not_ these actors (LLMs, bots, etc). It's _the need for surveillance_.
What encourages a society to produce surveillance in the first place? Catching bad guys, protecting people, etc. I'm not saying that I agree with it, it is just that this is the way it works.
Anyone doing shady things is a reason for surveillance to exist. Lying is one of those things, making LLM bots is one of those things. Therefore, to target the load bearing aspect of surveillance, I need to walk in a straight line (I won't deploy LLM bots, create alt accounts, etc). There should be no reason to surveil me, unless whoever is in control is some kind of dictator or developed some kind of fixation on me (then, it's their problem not mine).
I can do simple things, like watching videos I don't particularly like, or post nonsense creative stories in a blog, or just simple things designed to hide nothing (they're playful, no intent). Why does someone cares about what I post in a blog that no one visits? Why does someone care about the videos I watch? If someone starts to act on those things, it is because I'm being surveiled. They're honeypots for surveillance, there's nothig behind them.
With those, I can more easily see whoever is trying to act upon my public information by marking it. They will believe they're targeting my worldviews or preferences or personality, but they're actually "marked with high-visibility paint". In fact, I leave explicit notes about it, like "do not interact with this stuff". Only automated surveillance systems (unable to reason) or fanatic stalkers (unable to reason) would ignore those clear warnings.
This strategy is, like I mentioned, mostly based on honesty. It targets the load bearing aspects of surveilance (the need for it), by making it useless and unecessary (why are you surveiling me? I see how you are acting upon it).
It's not about making honest people targets, it's about making surveillance useless.
I suppose we are. I generally assume that someone, somewhere, has something to hide: something that benefits me if they're allowed to keep it hidden. History is full of these characters, they keep the establishment in check, prevent it from treating the rest of us too badly.
If the powers that be could know with certainty that all of us planned to behave and would never move against them (or could neutralize those who had been honest about their intent to do so), then I think things would be much worse for the common folk than they are now. It's hard not to see your strategy as a path to that outcome.
Have you read anything by Mark Fisher? He spoke about capitalism absorbing all resistance which makes it almost impossible to ever escape from. Which is what you’re saying I think. Resistance becomes the next market and works through the same economic systems it’s attempting to resist.
David Foster Wallace made a similar argument about Television being able to absorb, re-contextualize, and subsequently market any effort opposed to it as a cause of malignant addiction and abdication of societal responsibilities in his essay E. Unibus Pluram.
Today you can probably substitute television for YouTube, TikTok, etc, but the argument still holds up, perhaps better than ever.
> I'll engage and disengage randomly, so no one knows what works.
Any predictable pattern, including when you disengage, is just another feature for the pricing model. If the model learns you reliably leave after 3 hours, it will simply front-load the surge pricing into that initial window.
Analysis: This user loses disengages during 75% of the
time and belongs to a group of 5% who do the same. The
expected revenue for this group over a longer period
and with multiple users is 24% lower than for the
average user.
Action: Since 80% of theirs engagements last for at
least 12 hours, ads should be shown and prices
increased only within the first three hours.
He said randomly, which means the opposite of predictable or reliable. Sometimes he won't disengage for years and the algorithm would be non the wiser!
You cannot disengage from capitalism. The tricks you describe are perhaps useful to not be the slowest antelope in the herd but that doesn't mean you are fully free from being exploited.
Let's be clear: it's entirely possible to leave the "herd". People can and do go completely off-grid and thus disengage from capitalism. The crucial point is that the vast majority of us choose not to. That choice is what makes your "slowest antelope" analogy so much more complex.
An antelope's greatest desire is to be in the herd, because while it may contain a lion, the world outside contains a thousand wolves.
We've built a herd—society—that is incredibly effective at holding those wolves at bay: famine, plague, and chaos. We willingly participate because it provides "shields" our ancestors could only dream of. The problem isn't the herd itself; it's the lion that we allow to stalk within it.
What I am suggesting isn't to abandon this safety and comfort brought by modern capitalism. It's to improve the herd—to enjoy its protections while finding ways to tame, cage, or evade the lion of exploitation. What we're discussing here aren't futile attempts to escape, but vital tactics for building a better, safer herd for everyone.
Sure, a choice to opt out technically exists. But that common argument ignores two things:
First, the massive asymmetry of power involved in making people choose opting in (again and again, to greater and greater degrees).
Second, the fact that unrelated penalties—severe ones—are attached to choosing to opt out, by people and systems who want to discourage this behavior. It’s not like saying “choosing to not eat means you might be hungry”. That’s an intrinsic consequence; it has to happen. It’s not even like “choosing not to eat again and again means you might stunt your growth.” That’s intrinsic too, whether or not it’s intuitive.
No, the penalties we’ve attached to opting out are more like “choosing not to eat means you might go hungry, and also the people with hammers that specifically go after people that don’t eat will break your fingers.”
> We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement.
It's worth adding that "disengagement" does not mean "not giving a f*ck", and I worry that it isn't a good human response either.
So what's the difference between "not giving a f*ck" and "disengagement"? I think where the former works on the individual level, the latter is supposed to work on the collective level. I'm no scholar on any social sciences, mind you, but I worry that disengagement can only lead to positive change in conjunction with the Broken windows theory[0]. Here's the bummer: A lot of us are already in said stage of disengagement.
We somehow are in an atmosphere that makes it unpleasant for everyone and let the environment decay together, but the provoked collective change is just not happening. The dumbphone and digital detoxes are outliers. What happens instead is that the threshold for what's acceptable is systematically being lowered, and my biggest gripe is that it's done in the name of equality and inclusion while the imbalance between demographics is just growing. Tell me why?
There was a movement after Occupy Wall street and the Arabic Spring where it got fashionable to Not Giving a F*ck[1]. It contrasted a movement of self-optimization, growth-hacking, and some data-driven lifestyle usually reserved for corporate marketing. Morphemes such as hyper/super/über got resurrected from a nostalgic sentiment of the economic boom in the 80/90s, the neoliberal free-market Accelerationism and Bitcoin certainly fit in there. While "not giving a f*ck" was a critique of the established attention-grabbing system to promote the individuality of citizens, it also got misinterpreted by political representatives and corporate operators that started to put more focus on their own career than the responsibility of their current role. They all "didn't give a f*ck" anymore in a world that got more and more connected, year after year.
> If you open a government S&P 500 account for everyone with $1,000 at birth that’ll pay their social security cause it like…goes up…wait who’s creating this value again?
This is a good point. Some VCs were major proponents of this (and tons of other business people I'm sure), but this is of course just a guaranteed inflow into the largest companies and the companies that think they will be large some day. Yet another way to reallocate public cash to private companies.
Another similar example is UBI -- its proof of an economy that is not dynamic. It's a tacit approval and recognition of the fact that "no, you probably won't be able to find a job with dignity that can support you and your family, so the government will pay to make you comfortable while you exist".
During the depression this was done with a job guarantee. Instead of paying people to sit on their ass they paid people to build stuff like the Lincoln tunnel, which was preferable for them (and even for us, we still use that stuff).
UBI is more like the grain dole which Roman Emperors used to temper mass unrest and "prove" their benevolence.
It seems to be in vogue among tech moguls who cant distinguish between abject dependence on the Chinese industrial system/systematic underinvestment in infrastructure and all jobs being automated thanks to their glorious genius.
In 1934 people were trained on the job. This was as true in the WPA as it was outside.
What changed is not the newfound impossibility of doing that, just the reluctance of employers to pay for it and the willingness of the government to indulge their insatiable demand for cheap, pretrained labor.
there are many reasons to be against a job guarantee but the presumption that every potential job nowadays requires a 7 year degree is a particularly bad one.
If everyone gets an equal raise (whatever the UBI is), wouldn’t the entire market simply adjust to price that in, leaving everyone in the same relative position?
Yes, IMO that's exactly what will happen, except companies that can best compete for their share of this $1000 will get a government funded revenue stream (think Amazon, Netflix, rent seeking enterprises, etc).
I have not heard a convincing argument the other way, would really appreciate a link to one if you find one.
A class of people would have a larger spending power.
Naturally, implementing UBI would require the entire financial sector to adjust. We would likely need to significantly raise interest rates (Which, IMHO would be great) and have a period to manage inflation.
But beside the initial recalibration phase, I have not seen any convincing arguments for why prices on non-positional goods would increase. Even with the increase interest rates, we would likely see that prices on positional goods / assets would stabilize as dead-cheap capital is not available.
> A class of people would have a larger spending power.
Spending power with no real alternatives (i.e. in monopoly/oligopoly conditions) isn't actually very useful IMO. It's mostly just more guaranteed money for the current monopoly/oligopoly -- you're just guaranteeing revenue streams.
In a pre-UBI world, you can at least assume that companies can't completely shaft employees because then no one can buy anything. If the government steps in to make sure people can still buy stuff, that has almost the opposite effect.
I think walmart & it's treatment of employees (with employees reportedly needing to ALSO depend on food stamps) as a perfect example of the system kind of working against itself. The fix for that problem is within our reach right now, but it's just unpopular for the usual reasons with the people with the ability to make the fix.
> Naturally, implementing UBI would require the entire financial sector to adjust. We would likely need to significantly raise interest rates (Which, IMHO would be great) and have a period to manage inflation.
>
> But beside the initial recalibration phase, I have not seen any convincing arguments for why prices on non-positional goods would increase. Even with the increase interest rates, we would likely see that prices on positional goods / assets would stabilize as dead-cheap capital is not available.
OK, so then how about we do this without the UBI bit and just raise interest rates? I'm not seeing where UBI actually has a material benefit here, and there are other real problems with raising interest rates, because losing access to cheap credit also hurts those at the bottom of the economy (arguably even more) -- the solution there is political, likely (i.e. lower income borrowers could somehow be advantaged, but then we have shades of 2008 all over again if excessive greed/moral hazard sets in).
> In a pre-UBI world, you can at least assume that companies can't completely shaft employees because then no one can buy anything. If the government steps in to make sure people can still buy stuff, that has almost the opposite effect.
In my first comment I referred the Scandinavian countries. Read up on the flexicurity model of Denmark.
> OK, so then how about we do this without the UBI bit and just raise interest rates?
You cannot within the confines of the responsibility of the monetary systems (Eg. The FED). What you are seeing now is that the FED "prints" money that accumulate at the top because the fiscal powers (Eg. the government) are p*sies who do not dare to redistribute - this is called the velocity of money. And there is a higher velocity of money when they are in the hands of the people than in the pockets of the rich.
Regardless, proposing UBI on American forums is generally like setting fire to a wasp nest. Americans have been conditioned to support the oligarchy in quite some decades now.
> In my first comment I referred the Scandinavian countries. Read up on the flexicurity model of Denmark.
Denmark does not have UBI. They "just" have a good welfare system, good income redistribution policies, and strong labor policy.
They do not make the case for UBI, they make the opposite case -- that the problems of present can be solved without UBI.
> You cannot within the confines of the responsibility of the monetary systems (Eg. The FED). What you are seeing now is that the FED "prints" money that accumulate at the top because the fiscal powers (Eg. the government) are psies who do not dare to redistribute - this is called the velocity of money. And there is a higher velocity of money when they are in the hands of the people than in the pockets of the rich.
You can, and they have. In fact, much of the US wants the FED to lower rates right now, but they have not.
I agree with you that people lack the wherewithal to redistribute more effectively, or at least as a stated goal.
Trying to make sure I'm hitting the points you're noting here but the FED is not "printing" tons of money right now, they have tightened monetary policy, especially relative to the last ~6 years.
It's unclear if the use of "velocity of money" is right here -- I think you're referring to propensity to spend, which would increase velocity of money. Yes, poor people spend more of their income than rich people, and that is stimulative to the economy, and so arguably policies should be crafted that encourage productive work for pay rather than rent seeking or pure accumulation of capital. I'm not sure if that's your point, but that's what I take away from it.
> Regardless, proposing UBI on American forums is generally like setting fire to a wasp nest. Americans have been conditioned to support the oligarchy in quite some decades now.
Welp, that's kind of an unproductive way to end, but sure. Conditioned or not (I'm American), I'm still looking for a good argument for UBI and haven't found one.
Good arguments for better redistribution are easy to make, good argument for higher taxes are good to make, good arguments for better social safety nets are easy to make -- but still can't really find one for UBI specifically above the other options.
No, because the money isn't being printed, it is being reallocated from whatever it would have been spent on either by the people we tax to get it, or by the government who would have spent it on other things. Proponents contend that the economy is better off when people have a baseline income so that they can invest their time in productive things which may be beneficial, like going to school, having more time to raise their children, or starting a business, or volunteering, whatever, without worrying about how they are going to feed themselves. This would be opposed to whatever tax breaks we would be giving that would end up in a trust, foundation, or a VC fund, or whatever the government would have spent it on.
Note, I have no position on whether or not it would work in this way, but that is my understanding of the position of the those in favor of it.
Even at first order, it makes the people at the bottom relatively better off. If we go from Alice having 600, Bob having 0, and Carol having 0, to Alice having 700, Bob having 100, and Carol having 100, then Bob and Carol are still more able to buy things than they were before even if prices now increase by 50%.
The arguments against UBI are pretty much the same against rising minimum wages. That being, the baseline just moves, so everything gets more expensive, so the situation doesn't improve at all.
It intuitively makes sense, and like most economic reasoning it's horribly simple. But economics is comprised to two parts: theory, and practice.
Practice always trumps theory. If practice defies your theory, it doesn't mean that the market is broken, or that there's over-regulation, or that your theory will eventually come true. It means your theory is just wrong. All economic theory are predicated on thousands or millions of underlying assumptions. If even just a few of those are not true, or aren't true in the way you think they are, then the theory can be wrong while simultaneously being logically perfect.
When it comes to the arguments against minimum wage, the theory is just wrong. Rising minimum wages do help people making minimum wage. If it does raise the COL, it's slowly, and not in the same degree as the minimum wage shift. In addition, a flat minimum wage still results in a rising COL. You can't simply pin the COL like that.
So knowing what we know about minimum wage, I think it's arrogant to claim the UBI would just result in a rising COL to eat up all the UBI.
Price/income increases don't happen in a vacuum, it takes a while for it to become normal. If you got a £50 bonus and decide to get yourself to a McDonalds, only to find they've raised the price of their burgers to £50, would you still buy the burger? Your situation would be the same as before so logically you would, but of course you wouldn't. That price increase has overall lost Mcdonalds money, since now you're not buying anything (assuming everything else they sell also went up a proportional amount).
Obviously there are essentials that can effectively be at any price and you have to pay them if you can afford them, but everything else is fair game.
My intuition is that it wouldn't change the ranking of people's wealths, but it would make a big difference in the ratio between a top 10 percentile income and a bottom 10 percentile income
Edit- although even that is an oversimplification because I think in some cases it might encourage people to make more money. I know a handful of people who intentionally limit their income because of gaps in means testing. eg there's a window where you start making too much to take advantage of some govt social services, but not enough to pay for those services yourself (healthcare is a big one)
I don't know about the long term economic effects, but there are people who currently earn less than the subsistence amount who will be better off with UBI than without it.
People that admit "yes" to this (or similar ones: subsidization causing increasing rent to match, etc) are acknowledging that prices aren't really set by supply and demand, nor were they ever, nor will they ever be.
Prices are as high as companies can get away with charging, and they can collude to get these prices higher if need be, or lie about a product, or spend decades as an industry convincing you that you need something you don't.
If the market worked as economists always scold us that it does when they want less socialism, it wouldn't matter a lick what someone's salary is. That doesn't affect supply and demand, after all.
> I don't think there are many proponents of that type of ubi.
Another good sign of a difficult policy to implement successfully/an idea that isn't ready for primetime. If everyone has different ideas of what the thing is, it's very hard to make good decisions, and easy for the "wrong" UBI to sneak in.
Other commenters have already made this point, but there are other ways to guarantee "subsistence". I think the hard to answer question is why are the targeted methods currently available not good enough? If we want to ensure people have food, then food subsidies/support make sense.
Also, if unemployment is the problem, fix that. If unemployment isn't the problem and people who are working aren't getting subsistence wages, fix that.
I think part of the problem is that no one wants to stick up and define what we think every human deserves and what we want society to provide. Does every human deserve housing? Access to green space? etc. Trying to clearly define this will lead to really interesting discussions that lay bare the disagreements core to society.
I think my early point still stands, UBI is not needed (we're making do without it now), and if it ever is needed, it's a sign of a lack of dynamism in the economy/ineffective wealth distribution mechanisms (basically, taxation).
> Another good sign of a difficult policy to implement successfully/an idea that isn't ready for primetime.
It will never be ready for primetime because the system under which we live requires an underclass of people that are coerced into working jobs that no one really wants to do for abysmally low wages. Because the only other option left for them is homelessness and starvation.
It is an inherently cruel system, but this cruelty is what keep things afloat. Any system that guarantees the basic subsistence of all would not do.
> I think my early point still stands, UBI is not needed (we're making do without it now)
It's important to qualify that "we" as "we that make six figures working in white collar jobs". Yes, "we" are making do without UBI just fine. This "we" does not include the vast majority of people.
Hopefully plummeting birth rates will throw a wrench to this system by making labor a lot more expensive.
> It will never be ready for primetime because the system under which we live requires an underclass of people that are coerced into working jobs that no one really wants to do for abysmally low wages. Because the only other option left for them is homelessness and starvation.
>
> It is an inherently cruel system, but this cruelty is what keep things afloat. Any system that guarantees the basic subsistence of all would not do.
We're talking about how it might be about to not require the this underclass, and how we might need a UBI to fix that right? Can it be both of these things at once?
Also as a side note, I think that it's kind of arrogant to think we can create a society where no one does work they don't like, for wages that are always perfect. Nature is not that way, and creating those condition is basically asking for utopia. There is probably always a percentage of undesirable outcomes that every society must endure (and undesirable outcomes are a moving target).
I get your stance on the cruelty of the current system, but I want to note that in the span of human time we've had MUCH crueler systems in place. For example in the US despite the perceived high cruelty of the system, soup kitchens exist, governmental help exists -- there are a lot of things that exist that wouldn't exist in a maximally cruel society/one you describe. There are places on the planet we live on now where these safety nets don't exist.
The problem is the relative position of those with the most resources in society to those with the least. That, is fixable.
> It's important to qualify that "we" as "we that make six figures working in white collar jobs". Yes, "we" are making do without UBI just fine. This "we" does not include the vast majority of people.
I mean that we in the sense that no known society has collapsed because of a lack of UBI (would love to be corrected here). UBI is clearly, objectively not a need.
There are other ways to create a society that works for those with and without, what is probably most needed is clarity on those steps/what we want to guarantee people who live in the given society.
I would disagree that the "majority" of people in (for example) the US are against the current situation. The poverty rate (likely a reasonable proxy for an economic system that really isn't working) is not above 50%. People may
It's hard to quantify -- one of the things about sentiment polling is that people often just don't have a good grasp on how well or how badly they're doing. See earlier this year, when sentiment polling basically was incredibly negative, yet the "economy" as a whole is still mostly chugging along and unemployment has not spiked dramatically across all industries. Tech is in dire straits but "regular" jobs like HVAC, Plumbing, etc are doing fantastic AFAIK.
> Hopefully plummeting birth rates will throw a wrench to this system by making labor a lot more expensive.
Yes, except that is happening at the same time that we've turned what could be a huge corner on automation of both white collar and maybe eventually blue collar work.
I think the price of labor needs to go up, but this is only part of the equation. The more direct answer is simpler -- we need higher taxes on businesses or automation or both.
If you want to profit from US citizens (US company or not!), enjoy infrastructure and stability provided by the US, then the price for that can rise. Charge businesses for the jobs they don't create.
The classic refrain to the increased tax is that businesses will leave. I think that's absolute bullshit -- the US is where people want to be for many reasons, and it is incredibly unlikely that companies will unseat themselves to go run their headquarters out of malta or whatever. Also, incredibly unlikely that all the people who work at those companies will go redomicile. Also, INCREDIBLY unlikely that those companies will give up on the incredibly profitable American consumer they're targeting. What we lack is politicians who can/want to reign in corporate power.
> Also as a side note, I think that it's kind of arrogant to think we can create a society where no one does work they don't like, for wages that are always perfect.
I would agree if there were no billionaires in a country where people also cannot afford things such as housing, food, healthcare and basic education. With economic inequality this high, I don't think we are trying hard enough to create a more egalitarian society.
> I get your stance on the cruelty of the current system, but I want to note that in the span of human time we've had MUCH crueler systems in place.
That scaphism is more cruel than stoning as means of execution, it does not make stoning more humane.
I think you get my analogy.
> I mean that we in the sense that no known society has collapsed because of a lack of UBI (would love to be corrected here). UBI is clearly, objectively not a need
No society collapsed directly because of use of slave labor. Many actually thrived in such a system.
That should not be an argument in favor of slavery.
Just because the lack of UBI does not cause society to collapse ot does not mean that a society as inequal as ours cannot be improved.
> Yes, except that is happening at the same time that we've turned what could be a huge corner on automation of both white collar and maybe eventually blue collar work.
I don't think we turned this corner. But if we did, then perhaps it's fine we head towards extinction. With no humans there will be no inequality eh?
> we need higher taxes on businesses or automation or both.
Agreed.
> The classic refrain to the increased tax is that businesses will leave. I think that's absolute bullshit
I always say the same. If businesses leave, but the demand for goods and services in that society still exists, other businesses will occupy that space. Either existing businesses will seize that opportunity or new businesses will spawn.
> What we lack is politicians who can/want to reign in corporate power.
In no small part because our current system favors capital above all else, and excessive capital concentration allows its owners to distort institutions to their will. Excessive economic inequality is a bitch.
Note that I said excessive. I am not against some economic inequality. I think it's alright for a surgeon to have a nicer house and a better car than, say, a store clerk.
I don't think it's alright for one to have a mutiple yachts and mansions on ski resorts, while the other fights starvation.
Not that I think surgeons have multiple yachts or mansions on ski resorts. But I think you get my point.
> I would agree if there were no billionaires in a country where people also cannot afford things such as housing, food, healthcare and basic education. With economic inequality this high, I don't think we are trying hard enough to create a more egalitarian society.
Agreed -- the ratio is a problem. The problem is not that billionaires exist, because that is a slippery slope IMO (you could say the same thing about millionaires, or people who make money WITHOUT working at all -- i.e. wealth). The problem is the ratio. We need to decide what disparity is acceptable for our society, and then enforce that.
Not full on regime change to whatever new government might be better than the current. Just a clear stating of what our values are as a nation, and some numbers.
> That scaphism is more cruel than stoning as means of execution, it does not make stoning more humane.
>
> I think you get my analogy.
True, but if I had to pick a way to be executed, I don't think it's a hard choice. The analogy has to imply that you have to pick a poison -- there's no utopia.
> No society collapsed directly because of use of slave labor. Many actually thrived in such a system.
>
> That should not be an argument in favor of slavery.
>
> Just because the lack of UBI does not cause society to collapse ot does not mean that a society as inequal as ours cannot be improved.
UBI was proposed as a "need". It is not a need -- it is a want, or seen as a moral imperative.
Of course society can be improved, it's a question of how, and UBI is not a convincing how, that's my problem.
I'm not really sure the comparison to slavery here is relevant. I did not imply that the lack of UBI is desirable, just that UBI is not present and not a necessity for any government that exists.
> I don't think we turned this corner. But if we did, then perhaps it's fine we head towards extinction. With no humans there will be no inequality eh?
I think we did -- even if AI stopped where it is right now we already have created a pretty insane new tool. Even if it's only use was surfacing knowledge 5x/10x/100x??? faster than current search engines can, in a way that is more natural to humans. The knock-on effects are profound and likely going to be immeasurable.
Almost completely separate from that, robotics is really progressing. We have self-driving cars, just casually running around right now. We've turned some pretty big corners.
And IMO it's not an ideal outcome to head towards extinction, but it's a possible one. It's arrogant to think that humanity will live on forever, no matter how much we want that to be true.
Very against people who explicitly want extinction though -- pretty anti-human thing to say, and I can't think of something more worthy of suspicion. We worked pretty hard to survive this far.
> I always say the same. If businesses leave, but the demand for goods and services in that society still exists, other businesses will occupy that space. Either existing businesses will seize that opportunity or new businesses will spawn.
Yup, that's an even more compelling argument. Imagine all those companies vacating the space. The absolute explosion of entrepreneurship and new innovation would be transformative, if the interim can be managed through and the right incentives put in place.
> In no small part because our current system favors capital above all else, and excessive capital concentration allows its owners to distort institutions to their will. Excessive economic inequality is a bitch.
I'd agree, except I'd replace "capital" with "power". No political/social system seems to be immune to excessive power accumulation, but IMO current representative and direct democracies are the closest we've ever gotten.
Real politik is a bitch.
> Note that I said excessive. I am not against some economic inequality. I think it's alright for a surgeon to have a nicer house and a better car than, say, a store clerk.
>
> I don't think it's alright for one to have a mutiple yachts and mansions on ski resorts, while the other fights starvation.
Yup, while I like leaving it up to a market to decide that, I do think markets need to be controlled/have guard rails.
Agree though, the ratio is the problem.
I often think there's a really simple solution that sounds amazing -- just cap the discrepancy between total comp of the lowest employee at a company and the highest one (including the board). Super simple solution that broadcasts values, and is relatively easy to understand.
People might argue that the "most productive" people would lose motivation, but IMO it wouldn't do a thing -- they'd keep their same motivation because the drive (put overly simply, greed) will always be there.
> Another good sign of a difficult policy to implement successfully/an idea that isn't ready for primetime. If everyone has different ideas of what the thing is, it's very hard to make good decisions, and easy for the "wrong" UBI to sneak in.
This is not a reasonable bar for a policy being "ready for primetime". Some version of this is true for practically all policy proposals. The details will always matter, it will always be possible to get details wrong in critical ways, and people will (likely) always disagree on what those are.
It's very funny that you snub UBI in favor of "wealth distribution mechanisms". What do you think UBI is?
It is an allocation to the biggest companies at any time.
ETFs need to rebalance, increase, decrease shares of a given stock and even evict them. Buying shares on SPY exposes you to the current companies but also any companies that will join.
If a company gets evicted, then there is massive drop in their stock pricing as most movement is mechanistic and done by ETFs.
Well massive is relative. For example last week we saw quite the drop in pltr after it was removed from russel2000.
FYI this is not true and has been debunked in newer studies; the reason why it seems true is because companies that enter the SP500 tend to enter it because they're doing well which makes its stock go up. If you control for that factor, presence in the SP500 does not significantly affect the stock price. https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff...
It’s not about SPY per-se, but about ETFs in general. Addition to spy is likely an addition to many other big volume ETFs. Top stocks also join QQQ which is another highly liquid ETF.
Most market volume according to citi is done by ETFs, approximately 80%.
When said ETFs rebalance at start and end of any particular day, we end up with big movements, much wider than the sideways chop we observe during the day when movement is mostly performed MMs that deal with hedging or dropping options value.
So I don’t think it’s the presence to S&P per se, but presence in big ETFs.
Also that paper is from 2012. Market’s a lot different these days.
To be clear, I am not saying that getting in there implies stock go brr. I am saying that in the context of the whole comment chain, buying spy exposes one to all companies that will enter or be evicted from the ETF, which then theoretically funds the companies which then produce value, which returns back as dividends or growth of stock.
If we look deeper though, buying into ETFs likely means the shares that are exchanged are bought and sold by and to MMs, so a whole lot of value is lost to them.
That theory would only be true in a market without shorts and derivatives. In the real world, hedge funds and market makers will sell into those pension funds, as the underlying asset value has not actually changed, counterbalancing the effect.
Generally, I'd be wary of doing theoretical stock analyses like that. They can be true, but if they're this simple they're almost never true in practice, and if they are then someone is already working on making it not true.
Hedge Funds call ETFs, pension funds, etc. "dumb money". I suspect they also feed the finance media narrative stating how on average they are not good at trading.
There’s money to be made alright, but I don’t think most retail traders are in the position to do that.
Technical analysis might as well be astrology. It treats tickers as isolated when in reality ETFs and growth of any individual stock in an ETF affects the flow in and out of other ETFs. When ETFs purchase stock due to an increase in value, they seek most liquid constituents first, and eventually rebalance. All these create feedback loops. The flow across the ETFs drives 80% of volume.
People would have higher performance if they learned about any particular sector, its movement and long term trends.
Retail has a lot of flexibility but people focus on trading over days instead of understanding trends and events of tomorrow, next year and the next decade.
Retail options “traders” barely understand the mechanics of at all, let alone the disadvantage they are in. They buy overpriced options with absurd premium that tanks during the chop induced by MMs. They don’t understand how MMs move/manipulate(not in the illegal sense)/shape the market to avoid losing money — they wouldn’t be in this position if they lost money. They just copy trades from traders on discord and hope to make some money.
ETFs are a great way to make money in terms of risk exactly of their rebalancing mechanics.
Everyone doesn’t have to beat the market, just beating inflation and leaving it in the bank is an improvement for the average person. Yes it won’t make people rich tomorrow, but they will be in a better situation next year or the one after than today.
No, but it makes the stock price appreciate which is even better than a cash inflow for an inside investor since your wealth increases without a taxable event.
I generally avoid George’s non-technical posts because they are… let’s say uninspired.
But here is one that actually makes sense. Of course the self-reflection with who he otherwise praises and spends his time with will never set in, but at least others may take the time to look inward and do something differently.
Something has to change. Even HN seems to have had an increase in sentiment like this in the past few years. Maybe I’m just noticing it more myself. Maybe it’s not just the existence of the Grape, but rather where it came from.
I was hopeful that by titling his post “Are we the baddies?” that he would spend at least a little time reflecting on his role in all this. But he didn’t.
I have to wonder if some people are just trying to follow the hype. This reads like the "put a cell phone camera on your dashboard to make a car self-driving" approach to reflection.
I think there is genuine burnout. Also it makes sense that the more grizzled on HN have lived long enough to see the fruits of the labor, perhaps just tangentially, and what it has wrought. Coupled with the industry treating its workers pretty poorly right now and shattering all illusions, it makes sense this sentiment is rising.
Five years ago I got flagged on HN and heard back channel that I was getting passed over for stuff via some little whisper in the right ear because I've been calling this shit out since my come to Jesus moment around it nearly a decade ago.
Today? I don't feel like criticizing Thiel-adjacent authoritarian goons changes my net prospects all that much. It hurts me with 65 and helps with 45 (or something), instead of 95/5 like a few years ago.
I think the burnout is real: the consequences are too obvious and most people are reasonable deep down even if we all get carried away sometimes.
If you change the domain to xcancel.com, you can see twitter stuff without being on twitter.
The tweet claims a startup built an ai cheating tool, another ripped them off, then a YC backed start up ripped the second group off. The YC backed guy claims he isn't worried about legal because he got the license from gpt.
(Wouldn't that be killer evidence in a lawsuit that the defendant didn't even attempt due diligence?)
I worked on the original browsers and modern internet infrastructure. I worked on building the hyperscale cloud infra that enables the modern internet. I’ve had my fingers on so much of what is happening. And I felt genuinely like I was helping build some thing better. Then the role of product manager was invented and I regret everything I’ve done.
Context: built a viable business which I ran for many years. Eventually got seduced and went to work for big(ish) tech as a product manager. It was so divested from what I understood about building great products - however I was fantastic at doing things my way and getting shit done; largely based on what I learned from doing "all the things" at a small business. I had lots of success while also suffering with burnout and anxiety almost constantly.
Worked on incredibly popular cloud and OSS software. Hated most of it - especially what product management and the product-management-industrial-complex was distorting that role to be (divorced from much of reality but also expected to fix bullshit founder/c-suite/old-guard behavior). Oy the Miro boards and endless GDocs comment threads.
I left product (and some wild comp) to go back to building things.
So, I'm not disagreeing, I am just hoping you could expand a bit more on your own personal experience with rise of the product manager role.
Nevertheless, I also don't think PMs and PM-centric culture, are to solely to blame. I've not yet met a leadership team who's behavior and decisions I respect and/or can live with (and yes, it's highly possible I'm the problem).
The answer is yes. The answer about how bad is really bad. We humans have never before understood how essential our innate collaboration is nor. Nor have we ever understood how fragile it is. Here are some thought experiments for you.
Take a colony of ants and destroy their ability to use a pheromone trail. What happens?
Take a colony of ants and use the pheromone trail to generate "profit" for some of the ants at the cost of others.
Ants probably have little self consciousness. But add that awareness to them - essentially tell them they are being manipulated - and then perform the above two experiments again.
A good way to understand complex adaptive systems, like the ones we humans use, is to try to build some. See John Holland's "Hidden Order" for some hints on how to go about this.
I find these posts primarily interesting as a sort of demographic heatmap. Like now it has gotten to the point where instead of only chasing their interest of choice (geohot hacking, in this case), this person has become aware of the issue, and been sufficiently motivated to write a post about it.
geohot is pretty deep into the center of the map afaict.
> Someday, people will have to realize we live in a society. What will it take?
From all the podcasts (Trevor Noah, social media in general), etc, one good aspect that I find is now society in a distributed manner can point a finger to social problems. e.g. we desperately need community in our society, by that I mean, we need a modern version of village. Not being individualistic and self-centered in all decisions. Adjusting to each others requirements and needs. Sometimes not asserting yourself on your parents even if you know they are wrong. It is hightime we nurture such an interdependent society, not unbundle ourselves totally and becoming transactional.
I think this is what struck me as well. Hearing what I can only describe as radical anti-capitalism coming from George Hotz was not what I expected when I opened that link.
That said I have felt the same feelings expressed by Hotz in this post. I commend him for saying it.
A few posts before he shared a story of a black woman Amazon delivery driver caught on camera complaining about delivering to a rich person's large house.
He attributed this to basic monkey psychology and said it led to revolutions where all the rich people get killed and society gets poorer overall.
I read it as mocking poor people, but maybe he was trying to warn the people who get killed in those kinds of revolutions.
it definitely can, but the question is for how long and to what extent; historically, players with power and money will always want more and so things tilt in that direction....
I don't think it's anti-capitalist. It's anti-mass-manipulation and anti-price-discrimination, but capitalism only works to the extent that the pricing system works to provide information, both about consumer utility and about production costs.
His post is the standard small C conservative critique. It's only radical in that capitalism has seeped into far more facets of life since the last time such a position had appreciable expression within politics.
I don't think the kind of foundational change that is needed to solve these issues has ever been done in other ways. If it can be done, it's much harder than just letting it all burn down. The people at the top of any system are not willing to change it without a fight.
If you think "the people at the top" suffer the most during a world war you're deluded. If you're willing to do that because you don't like ads or because girls aren't replying to you on dating apps, no words.
They don't suffer the most, but the point isn't to make them suffer. The point is to change the system. If the current system feels unfair or wrong in some way, people will want to change it. If the only way to change it is war, and if enough people want change, then war is what will happen. The war might make things a lot worse, but at least people are worse off together and are forced to take care of each other in a way that we haven't in a long time. The selfishness will be reduced, communities will come back, and a better system might be the result.
If somebody as driven, successful, and talented as him is starting from square one in the realm of dating/having trouble finding a partner, I feel even more bad for those less fortunate/interesting.
>But eventually the market will fix this, right? People will feel sick of being manipulated and move elsewhere?
You can literally go outside and talk to people. There's no moat around dating apps. Human beings continue to exist in meatspace. I am yet to see a dating app contract that prevents you from being casually approached by strangers. Heck matchmakers still exist.
> You can literally go outside and talk to people.
You can't . If you talk to modern city people the way you casually said 'hi' to strangers in the 90s , at best you 'll end up in a tiktok branded as a creepy person
> You can't . If you talk to modern city people the way you casually said 'hi' to strangers in the 90s
It is true, in some places, that talking to strangers are generally frowned upon without having a good reason to do so.
The trick is to either only open up the conversation when you have something relevant to say (or funny, seems to work sometimes too), or move to city/country where it's socially accepted.
As someone who used to live in a country where talking with strangers is basically implicitly forbidden and straight up weird, but then moved to a country where it's completely normal, the amount of interesting conversations easily skyrocketed as soon as I landed in my new home country.
I've done this a few times over the last few days alone (in Seattle no less, a city infamous for being antisocial - though I'm willing to accept some were tourists for the 4th).
IME, people are actually starved for human interaction.
If you want to hit on the people yes you should be in social ccontext where causual sexual relations are appropriate. And yes, most people in most situations are not looking for that.
That was actually unwelcome in the 90ties too in most settings.
It makes no sense to have a high risk of getting blasted all over local Facebook groups/Instagram/Tiktok for daring to approach while being ugly when they can use dating apps for zero risk. And if dating apps feel expensive to use, then there is Photofeeler also to validate your attractiveness.
Honestly if you are ugly the only chance you have of getting a partner is in real life. Dating apps only serve the top 10% of men, and this isn’t even red pill incel conspiracy, this is fact corroborated by studies done by companies such as okcupid.
Second, if you talk to a stranger in line at the coffee shop nobody is going to put you on the local creeper list, maybe just don’t comment on how smooth their skin is.
I recommend being very honest with yourself here, whether or not you want to share it in a reply.
Is the low chance of bad consequences the only factor keeping you from talking to strangers? There’s a low chance of bad consequences when you cross a busy street, too.
Is fear of rejection by an individual or group a factor, too? There’s a much higher chance of that happening, but it’s far from life ruining.
Are you worried that you have social behaviors that make it more likely you are considered creepy in social interactions? If so, are there ways you can reduce those behaviors?
Are there other areas where acute awareness of severe potential negative consequences makes you avoid activities that lots of other people in your cohort might enjoy?
Source: it me. If you’re in a similar situation, know that it can get a lot better. Just takes time and work, like everything.
The risks and consequences of crossing a busy street are nowhere near as unknown or potentially severe. Wait until all the traffic has stopped, look to your left and your right and behind your back (typical situational awareness during bounding overwatch), cross the road. Even if something very rare and extreme happens, nobody sane will blast you on social media for failing to dodge a meteor or a suddenly exploding car.
When it comes to social context, you might miss some kind of sign and the worst cases there are pretty terrifying, might even get arrested in UK, which will lead to losing a job, failing any background checks, might even become homeless — and nobody sane will have any empathy for your mistake.
So I really do not get why people are against dating apps, when those are the best thing ever to avoid catastrophic consequences for initial approach.
I agree with the adjacent commenter: therapy would help with this.
As someone who has similar anxieties, I was pleasantly surprised in two ways when getting professional help:
Surprise one: the advice for confronting anxiety--specifically social anxiety around forming connections--was actionable and specific rather than woo-woo and "just be present/mindful/listen to your thoughts and they go away"-flavored.
Surprise two: therapists identified specific areas where I had broken or atrophied social skills and helped to build them. Just like crossing a street, most unprompted social interactions:
a) Have an expected script which, if followed, reduces the risk of severe negative consequences to near zero. If you didn't know the script you mentioned ("Wait until all traffic has stopped..."), then crossing a street would be dangerous indeed.
b) Have a higher likelihood of minor, non-lasting negative consequences: getting honked at by oblivious drivers, playing do-I-go-left-or-right chicken with oncoming pedestrians, bumping into people, and so on.
c) Have a lot of rules that are contextual (local traffic laws :: mores about what is acceptable in a park vs. in a pub). Some of those rules can be researched, but a lot of them are unspoken/gained through practice--and practice with others is most effective.
d) Are not practiced perfectly by most people. Those apprehensions you have? Those awkwardnesses and anxieties and hyper-awareness of the consequences of failure? Those are shared by tons of people! Even women in the dating scene--hell, especially women in the dating scene--are screwing up, recovering, bailing out, gathering themselves, and trying again constantly.
If you are worried about "missing some kind of sign and ... losing a job", that sounds a lot like either anxiety (therapy surprise one helps) or some missing/mis-functioning specific skills (therapy surprise two, and I cannot underline this enough, really helps here).
(Caveat: be aware that psych help, just like friends, car mechanics, or clothing stores, is variable in quality and highly preference-based; multiple selection passes may be needed before you find someone that you vibe well with).
I also really recommend Devon Price's writing on the subject. He has a few focuses that may be less relevant here (experiencing autism, being queer/trans), but also writes extensively on social/romantic interaction as a practiced, scripted phenomenon; I have found those essays to really help contextualize some of this stuff: https://devonprice.medium.com/
> I really do not get why people are against dating apps, when those are the best thing ever to avoid catastrophic consequences for initial approach.
I'm not against dating apps; I'm responding to the "unprompted social outreach is risky/a bad cost-benefit" claim.
In fact, you can get a lot more out of dating apps if you have practiced the skills required to be comfortable with ("comfortable with" is not the same as "good at") apropos in-person connection forming!
Also:
> nobody sane will blast you on social media
I agree. Raging about someone's social gaffe on social media is not sane/healthy behavior. Since jackasses raging online is nearly never as life-ruining as you might fear, framing it as "not sane and therefore not worth losing sleep over" is a good approach!
...and people on social media routinely rage about pedestrians, cyclists, slow drivers, etc. With pictures, license plates, death threats--the works. With dating, just like with crossing the street, it is not worth worrying about: be kind/do no harm, learn (potentially with help) the skills needed to progress, be willing to fail a lot while learning, and it will turn out well. I promise.
EDIT: Also, one last thing:
Avoid parts of the internet that use language like "daring to approach while ugly" and "on initial approach" when talking about dating. I've been there. I get how good it can feel to be validated by people with similar experiences, who explain that it isn't your fault/that thinking about dating as adversarial game theory is healthy. But those communities are toxic, self-hatred-reinforcing hostility factories. Seriously, go for a walk/watch TV/read a book instead.
If those are terms you came to use organically, consider avoiding them to avoid being associated with those places.
They are, but they're correct that attitudes have changed.
People largely do not want to be approached in public and actively take steps to make sure it doesn't happen. Simple things like not making eye contact, or wearing headphones everywhere.
The reason men don't approach women in public anymore isn't some crazy conspiracy or anything - it's because women have told them to stop. Both implicitly through behavior and body language, and explicitly by saying "do not approach us in public".
It's complicated, because a lot of men do not know how to be normal or respectful. So who can blame women for being wary? But, the result now is that if you do choose that approach, you're coming in with an implicit bias against that behavior. You sort of have to work harder to overcome that bias, and for a lot of situations you just won't. Which is fine, just try again later, but that's what's going on.
>it's because women have told them to stop. Both implicitly through behavior and body language, and explicitly by saying "do not approach us in public".
Its really situational. And definitely difficult to always identify. But there are avenues. I always found bars and clubs to be the worst way to approach women.
>actively take steps to make sure it doesn't happen
I used to do door to door sales, very briefly. And I was amazed at the fact that, risking fines, my coworkers would approach houses on the government no knock register, and reliably make sales. Not advocating for breach of consent. But there are multiple ways to "meet" someone that don't require a cold open at a bar when they have their headphones in. I always tell other men to go volunteer for a local club or charity. Or take a pottery class or something.
> The reason men don't approach women in public anymore isn't some crazy conspiracy or anything
Respectfully: no, this is just an excuse.
I don't know where y'all lost the plot but when I was growing up it was widely considered that how you talked to other people was a skill. Skills require practice.
There's a billion people out there. Not everyone you meet is going to be against you talking them up. Do the work, lol
I agree. That doesn’t mean it’s a conspiracy, that means society has changed. Not am I saying people shouldn’t approach others. I’m saying it’s harder, which it is and I think you agree with.
I agree with the premise that it is really difficult and sucks to "just go out and talk to people". Depends on where you live I guess though. I think thinking you'll end up on a TikTok because you talk to a person in a queue is just a far off excuse.
This exchange highlights the huge difference in experience people have w.r.t. dating. Some people get approached all the time and others never get approached and it's always been like that. I blame humanity for this unfair system rather than some stupid app.
I remember trying to date a woman in college, she would drop what appeared to me as incredible hints, but if I acted on them she would just ignore me.
We once had a 2 hour conversation about how she just could not find a mexican restaurant in town and would do /anything/ to eat at one. So I found one (willed it into existence) and then she simply wasn't interested.
Thing was, I dont really care about the rejection so much as, it was super easy for me to have relatively deep and interesting conversation with a total stranger. This wasn't even the first one, previous conversations about "Why are cities taking up valuable agricultural land" and "The best gifts to buy a woman are power tools" went down much the same way.
If people are convinced that the conversation to be rejected in cant even take place then I guess I understand concerns about the birthrate a little more.
I usually see this as an anti immigration dogwhistle.
I live in an actual hellhole by these standards.
For 40 years, every refugee or immigrant population was forced to live in my region. Every time the government wanted to do A/B testing on welfare, my region.
When I first wanted to move here I considered that I would need amazing security and reviewed crime stats. OH NO, its a CRIME HOTSPOT. How could I subject myself to that, I would have to live in fear.
Then I turned off "Drug Crimes" in the police statistics, and that completely normalised the results against much richer, whiter suburbs.
If anything we have a greater density of churches, because everyone wants to hear the bible read in their tongue. Theres an islander community just over the main drag from me where twice a year I see like 200 big islander kids dressed in choir costumes being loaded into busses for a big church thing.
My wife literally takes my toddler out for walks unassisted in the middle of the night.
I have no issues talking to people, or being approached by people.
Before you pay for boosts on a dating app, pay for good pictures.
Here is what a man seeking woman profile needs:
1. Good Pictures. Honest. Good lighting. Appropriate grooming and attire (whatever than means in your social context). Smile in a carefree way in most of the pictures.
2. Attractive man in the pictures.
3. No icks.
Yes the pictures are more important than being attractive.
As a matter of storytelling, the theme is "aspirational", but the particular aspiration is up to you.
Or just stop playing the game. Like a parasite, dating apps only survive while their host is alive.
You can pay for pictures, spend hours a day scrolling, pretend to be someone you’re not, blunt every aspect of your personality that may be an “ick.”Maybe you’ll eventually win if you keep pulling the lever. But then you’ve just contributed to the problem.
It’s just not worth it in my view. I gave up. Being a singleton is going to become the new normal in the next 25 years, many Western countries are going the way of Japan and South Korea.
The good news for George is he’s a high profile, decent looking, wealthy dude. He’ll be fine.
Playing devil's advocate: embellishing one's own features is a common tactic for attracting a mate in the real world as well. Courtship is a game, not just for humans. During this phase you rarely get to know the other person. You meet their best facade first, and then slowly get to know the person behind it. If you refuse to play this game, then you're just lowering your chances of attracting a partner. Which is fine, but it's good to be aware of this.
What GP is suggesting is simply making an effort to showcase your features. The most attractive person on Earth could be rejected if their pictures are of poor quality. That's just common sense. Being genuinely attractive by modern societal standards is important, but the first step is making an effort.
Dating apps can be a good way of finding a partner. After all, they're just the modern equivalent of making the initial connection. Their problem is the same as with any SaaS: companies are incentivized to keep users on the platform for as long as possible, which they do by engaging in shady tactics like artificially controlling the visibility of user profiles, while squeezing out as much profit out of users as they can. This is bad news for men, who are overwhelmingly the ones using these services and are willing to accept the downright predatory tactics of these companies.
But in theory, there's nothing wrong with the concept of dating apps. They're just corrupted by the usual user hostile incentives. A dating service with the right incentives could appear tomorrow to disrupt this rotten industry.
> pretend to be someone you’re not, blunt every aspect of your personality that may be an “ick.”
You don't have to "pretend" to do anything, or try to get rid of what others consider "icky", but generally I think most people aim to at least be neutral (if not pleasant) in the eyes of others, either by social pressure or because life just gets easier and less frustrating then.
I'd probably wager that the whole pretending thing you think is required, actually backfires as people eventually learn who you are, so better to just be yourself upfront.
I'm in my 20s and the way a significant portion of relationships start in this generation is via dating apps. If you aren't using dating apps, and don't have social circles, there's just no social fabric to build from. Believe me, I've tried activities, they don't really work. It's extremely difficult to build enough rapport with someone in the space of 1-2 hours that they'll care enough to ever meet up again.
From what I read in comment threads like this, dating apps don't really work for the majority of 20-something men, either. So your choice is between paying for an app that doesn't work and going out and doing IRL things that don't work. Why would you pay for the app, when you can get the same result for free?
If you're in your 20s you should change your life so that you live a lifestyle with easy social connections and ways to find partners. Being alone too much in your age will give you permanent mental damage.
So change careers, change city, change country, change whatever is needed so that you can have a decent life.
I actually go out a lot, and moved across the world to Tokyo four months ago. The problem is not meeting people. I can make surface level connections every day of the week. The problem is finding people who want to stick around.
If it's only been four months, then you don't have to worry. To make deeper than surface level connections, find a group activity and show up repeatedly (this can be work or school as well). But perhaps the Japanese aren't too interested in making friends with foreigners? The part about moving I mentioned is also about moving to a place where people are more sociable, I don't know if Tokyo is it.
Permanent mental damage is rather from years spent in loneliness, or lovelessness, or poverty, or any other kind of unsustainable personal situation.
> blunt every aspect of your personality that may be an “ick.”
That’s not what was meant and you know it.
Ten years into a relationship, I sometimes leave my dinner dishes in the sink and wash them in the morning. Had I done that early on in my relationship—or had those dishes in a photo on a dating site—I’d sabotage my chances with a lot of people.
The same is true for interests. Maybe you really like guns: marksmanship, customizing them, restoring them, and so on. If you have guns front and center in your dating app pics you are going to alienate a lot of people. Plenty of those same people would enjoy being introduced to that hobby once you are in a relationship! But guns being a photographed part of your dating-site-identity is not going to help your chances. The people who swipe left are avoiding gun nuts, misogynists, etc. Putting guns in your picture only sabotages yourself.
That’s not “I have to totally be someone I’m not and remove every single thing someone might find objectionable”. That’s basic social awareness and understanding that there’s a time and a place for presenting different parts of yourself.
The zoomer interpretation of "ick" is just an extension of patriarchal attitudes. It means "anything that does not perform masculinity to an adequate degree". Fruity drinks, splitting bills, wearing strange colors or patterns, even having well-groomed nails.
It's childish, it's petty, and it's self-defeating. Most women I know are in a vicious cycle of misogyny because they actively optimize for misogynistic men without knowing it. They then come to the conclusion that men must suck, so they tighten their "standards", which inadvertently results in even more misogynistic men going for them.
We often hear about gen-z men becoming more conservative but anyone who is paying attention knows that gen-z women are also becoming more conservative. And, a lot of the conservatism in men is in response to growing conservative attitudes in women, and vice-versa. We have trad wives and bio-essentialist ideology because conservative men exist. And they exist because they meet our arbitrary patriarchal standards, even the small ones, like paying for the bill.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I'm not talking about only dating apps. Wherever there's an algo, there's someone manipulating you. I just deleted and disabled my Youtube history. It's incredibly liberating!
I’ve come to realize that dating apps are just outright hostile to honest newcomers who don’t know the implicit rules.
It starts with picking the “right” pictures, then saying the “right” things then choosing the “right” place and then confirming at the “right” time. Eventually you are just going down a checklist rather than being your authentic self. If you find yourself minmaxing in this way, take a break.
To be fair, society and social interactions are full of implicit rules. Put a bunch of people in a room(/train/company/island/club/cult) and they will make up some rules along the way.
Someone catch your eye at a party? You'll probably take a moment to choose what you want to say to them there too
No that’s fair - I don’t think I articulated the difference between normal social rules and dating apps.
What I’ve found is that the first couple of interactions (up until the second date) can be completely formulaic - and what can look like outward success is just a treadmill.
If you get too good at optimizing the dating apps funnel you can find yourself on a regular rotation of dates without actually connecting with anyone.
Dating apps prey on the weakest of us all, selling hopes and shattering egos. Not everyone can get good pictures, not everyone is a 10/10 attractive man, and "no icks" is such a vomit inducing term. They are perfectly happy that you don't have a good picture and you don't get matches, because then they can sell you boosts and superlikes and whatever bullshit they've made up today.
Tinder, Hinge and others are directly responsible for tens of thousands of cases of depression and in building up a perfect breeding ground for misogyny and misandry. Everyone involved in their self-worth-destroying app has blood on their hands.
Yea, that group of people is insufferable and wrong about almost everything. Dating apps are the one place where they kind of have a point; which really raises the question "Are we (app developers) the baddies?" Dating apps are not a nature preserve, they are a created environment.
Also, there's all kinds of maxing stuff, and there's basic advise, like wash your face and get a haircut before you get your picture taken.
More importantly than this, George Hotz is very influential (has a self-driving startup and made the news for a Twitter internship) and presumably quite rich as well, there’s probably easier ways than swiping through Hinge like everyone else.
There is also an alternative strategy. Cut out the bullshit and doomed-to-fail relationships by putting your 'icks' front and center. That is a fishing for the niche situation though.
Huh, I thought this was going to be some sort of self-reflection about fascism and such but no - it's about how a site is too manipulative in its UX. Gosh.
In a way the real baddies was the trivial stuff we fixated on along the way.
Online dating websites are a waste of time unless you are in the top % of men. Sad reality of online dating is that a small % of men gets attention of most women, while the remaining % of men get little to no attention at all. The whole boosting system makes it even worse.
At one point I was fixated on conversion rates, cost per click, pricing tiers etc for my small software business. Then I realized I'm doing ok, and I don't have to squeeze every last penny out of it. Now I choose what to do based at least as much on how interesting it will be for me, as how much money I think it might earn. It has been quite liberating.
The $*99 prices in shops should have hinted you that we already live in a self-hating society. AI will make it x100 worse. But don't get it wrong - the problem is not with AI itself.
You’re defining that in the simplest possible way, ie if the stars aligned a man could, in theory, impregnate thousands of women. In reality, the factors that limit a man’s potential mates are equally real. The population’s sex ratio is no less a biological reality than the structure of a reproductive system. So a woman’s reproductive value fluctuates depending on circumstances, but remains similar to a man’s under most circumstances in a modern country.
Genetical evidence shows that twice as many women as men successfully reproduced during the history of our species. And if it wasn't for a period of massive population increase combined with monogamy, that ratio would probably be maybe five to one or more.
The sex ratio of children is hard coded genetically at 50/50 for pretty much all mammals, since any deviance would be corrected back to 50/50 within a couple of generations.
In modern society, an average woman can have as many sexual partners as she chooses to, and very distinguished men can have that. Birth control means that there isn't any actual children resulting from these encounters, but our biological imperatives are still the same. A woman's reproductive value is infinitely higher than a man's in modern society, where the man's reproductive value is approaching zero.
It gets even more disturbing when the algorithm (or a disgruntled former date reporting you to a tired and underpaid customer support agent overseas) decides to ban you from the dating apps and suddenly your chances of meeting someone go down dramatically (60% plus of all couples meet online in the US), with the apps having become the middlemen for most of dating connections: https://www.vice.com/en/article/banned-from-dating-apps/
Good luck ever getting back onto the apps, especially if you've ever used facial verification to validate that you're you. Every future attempt to sign up again will be immediately blocked. No way to appeal. Dystopian.
The business model of Match Group, by the way, for those unaware, is to buy every dating app (yes, they own all of them; Bumble was once the lone hold-out but not any more) and then do everything they can to make you pay money for premium. They do not care if you get a date.
It’s genius really. They’ve inserted themselves into the social fabric, hijacked it, and then used cartel tactics to take control of competition. And nobody cares enough to start an antitrust suit.
Ah, ye-olde Poindexter's Revenge. If only an intelligentsia-class had the gall, the sheer epistemic knowledge required, to disrupt this courtship business once and for-all.
Today I visited the shit website known as Fandom, and within a second of scrolling the page, the entire page was ads. Not joking: https://imgur.com/a/8QzBZGM — and it’s not a contrived example, this is the first thing that happened after reaching the page via a search for some character in a show. This is the default new user experience for Fandom, at least some portion of the time. How is this acceptable to the employees and executives of that company?
The CTO, Adil Ajmal, says “we help people worldwide go deeper on their favorite games, entertainment, and culture.” How can I possibly do that with the absurd number of ads on the page?
The money incentive in software right now is to make it extremely shitty. We need ways to incentivize people, and especially executives, to make friendly decisions for their users.
Right now across the industry, many people are getting promoted and hired for decisions that are extremely hostile to their customers and visitors. Whether it be for replacing support with an unhelpful, dumb AI bot, or marginally growing revenue by shoveling ads down your unwilling throat, we are not incentivizing products that are good and friendly to humans.
Seriously, fuck all the investors who are incentivizing this BS.
Of course, we need drastic changes to the economic system (the counterproductive incentives exist everywhere), but you have a choice in the matter. It’s possible to build a good product and make good money and make some revenue growth without being absolutely insane about it. Companies are betting that customers won’t catch on. Facebook might be a good example. It’s turned into such a shithole that no one in a certain age range wants to deal with it anymore, outside of very specific niches. The primary feed & product has failed.
ads are the most benign form of extraction. They attack your attention but that's just about it. The manipulative algorithms, the walled garden, the subscriptions , the extractive surcharges, the anticompetitive rules , those came after ads and they are far worse and far more profitable. Wish we could go back to a free, ad-supported internet, but the whole internet is now a front for stockholder ponzi schemes.
Ads don't just take your attention lol. The point of getting your attention is to manipulate you into taking actions or making decisions that align with the interests of the advertiser (usually profit) over your own.
Oh, same thing is happening with the regular TV and almost any media that needs attention. Every single channel is shit. News channels are just curated selection of horror stories from all around the globe. Ads are competing be weirder and weirder. Every single channel wants to grab your attention by dishing out concentrated weirdest stuff. I'm terrified to switch on TV.
I’m not a big user of Uber but I need to say that the experiences there are mostly better than your grandad’s taxi (pay up for Uber X if you want a better experience). Mostly cabs were/are badly maintained and some seem downright dangerous with shocks dead, idiot lights on, smoking tailpipes and just general crappy interiors. I once got in a NYC cab where there blood all over the back of the drivers seat, got right back out. Cabbies are quarrelsome and grumpy. One guy picked me up at my house obviously drunk. I mentioned Uber to one guy who became very aggressive. Got out at the next light. Ah the good ole days.
Now for Uber. If you pay to upgrade to Uber X it’s a great experience. One time I got in the wrong Uber (not X). They said silver Nissan at station 4 at the airport in Atlanta. Got in the car and he was obviously going somewhere else than where I requested. When he realized I was the wrong passenger the driver became extremely agitated and aggressive. My bad for not checking his plate, his bad for not checking the passenger out. He was the driver so it’s really his responsibility since I may not know these things. Also I could not leave a bad review as I did not know who this driver was. Always always check you are in the right car.
The layers are part of the evolution. We may like to credit ourselves with great inventions which built these layers, but it is like trees claiming to create the wind, rivers claiming to create water flow etc. Humans are just facilitators or vehicles that carry the wind of change. We don't cause the change. The change has selected the agents who showed least resistance to the change. Then the agents gloriously claimed that they caused the change.
Everyone hates The Algorithm but we're all caught in network effects. Networks can collapse though.
AI is propping up the Web but I'm not convinced it can do that indefinitely.
The dream of Internet enabled disintermediation is not dead. We'll eventually switch protocols, change the incentive structures and build a social internet for ourselves - at least those of us who've not had our souls eaten by Moloch already. It's not inevitable but it is possible and it is what a lot of us actually want.
>If you open a government S&P 500 account for everyone with $1,000 at birth that’ll pay their social security cause it like…goes up…wait who’s creating this value again
It changes with production, if production shrinks it shrinks. This is exactly what you need with a retirement account, otherwise you end up with a situation like the UK where the pension system is crushing the workers.
> Will mass starvation fix this? Or will the attitude of thinking it’s okay to manipulate others at scale persist even past that?
As long as everyone is OK with the losers losing big so the winners can win big, it will persist. As long as the “I've got mine, screw you” attitude keeps being culturally ingrained, it will persist.
Tips through apps, much like charity at the grocery store checkout, is a really strong signal that the provider can raise their prices. Basically asking how wealthy do you feel after the transaction.
In my opinion this is one of many simptoms of a decadent society on the brink of collapse. And I also think that cheap money and huge fiscal debts have been feeling this decadence.
I'm so sick of algorithms dictating choices for me. I just don't want to partake anymore. It's no fun anymore, my dopamine reservoirs get drained quicker now and I just want to drop out of this society that has been colonized by companies that hate us. The government hates us, the policies of the too rich are destructive and they hate us.
Oh, so you're sick of it but unwilling to do anything? How about do something about it? I am glad to see the consequences of convenience that you all crave. It's just going to get worse. There is always a choice, whether you believe it or not. Opt-in and realize they own you or opt-out and don't be a slave
What meta structure allows us to get rid of rent seeking behavior?
I don’t have an answer - is there scientific research on this?
Taxation? Loopholes will be found.
Lawfare against it? Lobbying will win.
I am amazed by capitalism, but at the same time it is a ruthless machine - and in democratic countries it is highly unlikely that a single political party can force the machine into a new direction. Perhaps that is a very nice feature, at the cost of also having to tolerate rent seeking, but it sure as hell sucks to see these downsides.
Social cohesion. People are happy to rip off an outsider, a stranger, a schmuck. But people within a high-trust social group generally don't rip each other off - you still need to be on the look out for fraudsters, but you won't be doing it systematically and virtually openly.
It's not a coincidence that all this has happened as the US' national identity has gotten weaker and weaker. They're shifting from a cohesive nation to one of those "it's a single block on the map but it's actually 200 tribes who all hate each other" countries, and people's values and behaviour are shifting to match.
What can we do to make rent-seeking hurt society less? Imo we should start by decoupling money from power. Right now, people are forced to participate in the rent-seekers game because his wealth implies power over them.
I’m increasingly convinced advertising is a huge mistake and just not normal.
We don’t need advertising, which fundamentally is little different from lying and manipulation, at all, and society would be a lot better if we denormalized advertising.
If a company paying an influencer to talk about them, or placing an ad on a sports game, would be denormalized to the extent that it would lead to people deliberately not buying the product.
Instead one could subscribe to trusted reviewers who make their money off subscription revenues and therefore their interests are aligned with the customer rather than the ad supplier.
That's not price discrimination, like hardcover vs paperback if you have two versions of something and people can choose which they want. That's totally fine and actually something that makes capitalism great. The rich usually end up covering more of the costs here cause they are less price sensitive, like business vs economy on airplanes.
Price discrimination is when two people visit a site to buy a book, the algorithm computes an estimate of what they are barely willing to pay, and then shows the two of them different prices for the exact same book based on who they are.
Yours is an overly narrow version of price discrimination in which the discrimination is extended to the customer level. If that's what OP meant he should use a less ambiguous description.
Hardcovers last longer, resource use is real. Cheap things is a regressive tax on the lower incomes who have to replace cheap stuff faster. They can’t save for better stuff.
When it comes to media like movies… really? Still? The resource use of Top Gun and Star Wars is bonkers. Can’t we just have local theater and you know socialize?
Do we need the movie to come together and socialize over?
I so thought we were done with that stuff around Spider-Man 3. MCU and Star Wars sequels made no sense to me.
Is our attention always going to be coupled to Saturday mornings in 1990s?
Boomers did all the drugs and made music and corny fun shows like SNL and somehow convinced us to stare at computers iterating on word problems like it’s fucking middle school while staring at these over the top delusions of grandeur to borrow from Han Solo.
Paperbacks are _not_ a regressive tax. The book is equally readable in both forms, and often more portable in paperback. Hardcover books are (mild) luxury items that can command a higher profit margin and thus are easier for publishers to justify. Very few individuals are buying hardcover books in order to maximize utility over many decades
> Someday, people will have to realize we live in a society. What will it take?
Anarchism, socialism and communism can work perfect in a small village where everyone knows and trusts each other. But if you scale it up it does not work well because people can be corrupt. If you want to scale up to a Geo Global level that is trust-less the best way we know is to use Capitalism, but Capitalism ends up becoming more and more centralized.
Because Capitalism is inherently competitive there will always be winners and losers and these are not just businesses it's everyone in the system because capital is required to partake in the system. This competitiveness is also what leads to the lack of "morality".
What will it take?
I think you cannot have the benefits of capitalism without these side-effects.
I think we now have the technology to make decision-making and resource allocation systems that do not need to centralize power. If we can do that, then it wouldn't matter that people can be corrupt, because there would be no positions of power that people can abuse.
I also believe that technology is the solution. But all the key technology is centralized Chips, AI, Batteries, Cryptography, Email, Internet access, Radio Waves
Most people aren't looking to eliminate capitalism. They just want constraints to be put on it. Higher taxes on wealth, stricter antitrust enforcement, investing in social infrastructure, or passing laws that protect consumers don't prevent capitalism from working.
Australia has social healthcare and massive mining companies. They coexist just fine. There really is a lot of wiggle room between fully embracing socialism and going full anarcho-capitalist, and maybe the tradeoffs of shifting towards the socialism side of things are worth considering.
Although, George seems to just want to flip the table out of the belief that real reform that would impact most people positively will never get passed in a democracy. It would require too much change.
> Most people aren't looking to eliminate capitalism. They want sensible constraints to be put on it. Things like higher taxes on wealth, stricter antitrust enforcement, or investing in social infrastructure don't prevent capitalism from working.
In capitalism the capitalists end up being the government. They can choose who gets elected, the laws, they even start political parties.
That's an oversimplification. Yes, wealthy individuals inevitably have more influence. But there are numerous countries whose governments regularly act against corporate interests. For example, as much as I dislike GDPR, it is a strong example of governments implementing a policy that is explicitly against corporate interests. Another example is the OECD global minimum corporate tax.
So, there are governments that oversee capitalist countries that are willing to implement policies that hurt corporate interests with the goal of helping consumers. I'd say the problem is that often these policies made with good intentions, like GDPR, end up being poorly implemented and therefore harming consumers as well as hurting corporations... but that's an entirely different problem.
It can scale economies and can run on the global level, it also brings about rapid advances in Science and Technology. It also provides more options for individuals than in Socialism, in this regard Capitalism is more decentralized than Socialism.
Sorry for being clueless but - what is Hinge? A quick search says it's a dating application. But I don't quite understand from the first paragraph that this is the Hinge he's talking about.
You want to opt out of this all you say? Good luck running a competitive business! Every metric is now a target. You better maximize engagement or you will lose engagement this is a red queen’s race we can’t afford to lose!
I'm from GenX. It can be done. We used to do it. Just stop playing their game. The only winning move is not to play.
What the open web did for discoverability of businesses, we need to invent again for actual engagement with the businesses.
Uber, Booking.com, AirBnB, ClassPass, Steam, DoorDash - these winner take all middle-men rent seeking tech behemoths are bad for society and are hostile to consumers and the businesses that rely on them.
Everything except for steam, one of the few to do it right. Of course they arent perfect as nobody is, but in general they treat developers right, they treat customers right. Theres no personalized surge prices or other AI BS, and they dont ban randomly like google. If you buy a game on steam, you own it for real.
If Steam itself goes bankrupt, Gabe himself said you'll still retain access to your games.1 Yes its a non-legally binding promise, but Steam has earned that trust.
Also Steam isn't going away, so for these reasons that is "how so".
If Steam itself goes bankrupt, that decision is not up to Steam, it's up to its creditors and the bankruptcy court. It's not a credible promise for any US corporation to make, regardless of its trustworthiness.
Ah cool, so an alleged promise made to one user makes it all OK and we should stop worrying and just buy more.
Even if Gaben "money drives the community" Newell did make that promise and was sincere, he's going to be gone in a couple of decades at most and likely not in control of Valve before that.
Steam doesn't do it right, they are just slightly friendlier than the competition. And that can change at a moments notice and you will be locked in because your friend Gaben has been working on making it hard to leave all along.
No, Steam is still in its (unusually long) first phase of enshittification, where it delivers surplus value to consumers.
Probably as long as gaben is alive, it will be so. But don't expect it to last. There's nothing special about Steam the platform.
You definitely don't own Steam games for real, and they don't ban randomly but for example, if you're caught cheating in a game, or talking about illegal things with your friends, you will find out how much you don't own those games.
It's not the centralization that's the main problem. Centralization of those services can make sense. It's how and why those centralized services are run. They're run like dictatorships, for the purpose of making the dictator and his friends richer. They should be run democratically, for the purpose of making the lives of the users better. Breaking up monopolies is just a temporary solution, because the systems of capitalism will always create them again. The underlying system, the how and why, needs to change.
> Democracy, haha, you think the algorithms will let you vote to kill them? Your vote is as decoupled from action as the amount Uber pays the driver is decoupled from the fare that you pay.
Relevant here, all the way from 1975:
"...In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate MUST depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society MUST be highly organized and decisions HAVE TO be made that affect very large numbers of people. When a decision affects, say, a million people, then each of the affected individuals has, on the average, only a one-millionth share in making the decision. What usually happens in practice is that decisions are made by public officials or corporation executives, or by technical specialists, but even when the public votes on a decision the number of voters ordinarily is too large for the vote of any one individual to be significant. Thus most individuals are unable to influence measurably the major decisions that affect their lives. There is no conceivable way to remedy this in a technologically advanced society. The system tries to “solve” this problem by using propaganda to make people WANT the decisions that have been made for them, but even if this “solution” were completely successful in making people feel better, it would be demeaning."
- Industrial Society And Its Future, Ted Kaczynski (1975)
Perhaps this person lived in a fantastic futuristic city before. But for a lot people, getting a cab was not a good experience. Uber singlehanded changed that.
And dating apps are not middlemen for dating. They're middlemen for dating outside your social circle, which is always a mess. Whatever subscription you pay to the app per month is probably cheaper than a single drink at a bar anyway.
> Perhaps this person lived in a fantastic futuristic city before. But for a lot people, getting a cab was not a good experience. Uber singlehanded changed that.
I've been in taxi just about three times in my life and zero in Uber. Usually just take bus/tram/train, walk or bike. Car for utility in the country. I think I do not live in fantastic futuristic city (it is in eastern Europe) but at least it is not dystopia.
Right. It's the consistent lack of healthy social circles that is the problem for most people. Either it is staying afloat that sucks all your energy or focusing on "tech will solve problems" but it doesn't.
George Hotz has spent his career[1] being a "useful idiot" for a series of hypercapitalist techbros, including Zuckerberg in the 2010s and Musk as recently as 2022, so it's somewhat notable that the scales may be falling from his eyes.
Yeah, he got his fame in the mid-2000s when he found a vulnerability in the Playstation 3 OS and some idiot lawyers at Sony sued him for it. He parlayed that into a cool, anti-corporate hacker persona, and then got hired by the most powerful corporations and people on the planet to try to give their tech companies some cool hacker cred. It's honestly a pretty funny career arc. I don't dislike the guy, he found a way to get his bag, good for him. But he definitely got played by the pros.
Nice try. I worked at Facebook for 9 months and left (before vesting any shares) because I didn't agree with the mission, even back in 2012. I worked at Twitter for 5 weeks and left because I realized nothing was going to change (and the good food went away). I don't regret trying at either, but in revealed preferences, I've spent most of my life writing open source software, even if that's not what attracts most media about me.
I know you think everyone is just trying to "get their bag" and that's the framework you see this in. But I already had more money at 21 than I've spent to date, and not cause I had a lot of money, but cause I don't buy much stuff. I'm sorry you feel played, but don't project that on me.
Haha, no worries, you're good. But come on, you have to admit it's at least a little funny that the famous Sony/iOS/Android hacker geohotz ended up... working for Facebook and then Elon Musk's X, lol.
This post, and presumably its author, is reaching escape velocity, or at least max-Q.
A second-order difficulty is that the tools with which we could go about dissecting, reimagining and reconstructing new society are also tainted by the powers that have delivered such malignant incentives and effects. This is not new and the fervour and insistence will continue to mount as the cracks in the dam grow in number and size.
There are, however, positive routes forward but in my experience they are somewhat alienating because the majority of people around you will think you are mad, weird or simply delusional. To be clear, I am probably all of those things (definitely the first two), but I prefer that to being a commodity powering a machine that is disinterested in anything that doesn't make it bigger. Two illustrations:
First, cognitivism. A sneaky, anthropocentric idea that simulataneously promotes and soothes a sense of dissonance. We don't, imo, create meaning primarily by modelling simulations of the world in our heads and forming goals based on them. Sure, this happens, but to give it primacy will lead to all sorts of unexpected and unpleasant effects. Alternative: constructivism.
Second, systems of perpetual (exponential) growth. Every day we buy into this by transacting within a system that has this implicit assumption built into it. We do not (an cannot) comprehend the scale and influence of this, because society is unpredictable and the effects are often emergent. Example: tragedy of the commons. This system didn't just show up by itself, nor was it the creation of a shadowy cabal - it perpetuates because we all use it, all the time. Alternative: imagine harder, build systems that mimic nature in its sigmoidal beauty, not only their growth phase.
An important milestone is, imo, proper systems thinking. This is no-ones fault and we are all complicit, but we all possess the ability for radical adaptation and, where it has been cultivated, the ability to rebuild all that which is broken.
I regularly think/read about, work towards and promote such angles, including ethical algorithm design, open-model behavioural analysis and value-aware technology. If anyone would like to join my micro-revolution, you are most welcome. I should warn you though, it doesn't pay well.
In short. Yes. Sorry- but you can and are able to contemplate the externalities of your creations before you create them... imo most people prefer a little delusion as a treat.
Obviously it is not black and white like this. In turn- we all have the free choice to not engage. I don't engage with 99% of contemporary market economy tech, for these reasons. Heck I still carry cash just so I can leave cash tips, or make small cash payments at stores, bribe an official, etc.
I went to Walmart twice last week, Tuesday and Friday. Passed by the chips aisle twice and the price on Friday was over a dollar higher per-bag. They've got those fancy e-ink screen price-tags now and I guess they're doing surge pricing. I'm tired of this shit.
There’s no gain from outrage. Just opt out and move on.
I sold my TV. Don’t wanna get creeped on thanks. A TV with a microphone might be convenient for some but for us that’s a hard pass.
I drive a 12 year old car, its fuel efficiency is horrendous and its entertainment system barely works. But it’s off the grid! When I turn it off it TURNS OFF. It doesn’t creep on me, it doesn’t sell my driving habits or report my location or upload microphone recordings at the dealer when it’s plugged in for a service.
I’m biding my time until enough others think like me that a company takes notice. One day someone will make a car that loudly says it doesn’t creep on you, one day someone will make a TV that doesn’t creep on you. One day companies will care again about the customer. One day people will be wise enough to recognize enshittification and will call companies on their shit, and the market will speak.
I sometimes think of the internet as an alternative dimension: as mind space; it was Terra Nova and speculators rode in to grab the available real estate. But as the experience also showed us, there are maybe infinite mind spaces, and the job of anyone dissatisfied with the status quo is to open those new spaces where networks can be built around principles other than enshittification.
No. It's just that the teachings of totalitarian sects are especially effective against narrow-minded, disillusioned people. The solutions they propose are not supposed to be effective or even realistic.
Yeah, so how does communism solve the situation when attention of women is limited and needs to be competed for? Does every man get an equal 3-second slice of attention from each girl on communist dating apps?
Attractive women are not such a rare resource. There is no particular problem in collecting it and distributing it fairly. One attractive woman can satisfy tens of thousands of men during the period of her attractiveness.
> It’s not okay. Advertising is not okay. Price discrimination is not okay. Using big data, machine learning, and psychology to manipulate others at scale is not okay.
Stop participating. Hinge is towards the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you'll do just fine without it.
And yet individualists reach to secure those network effects while at the same time decrying they don't exist or will never work, anything to deny the advantage of a network to competing agents.
For some people, paying the premium to jump the queue is the point. What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium, and the queue is now with you again. This is mostly Australian frequent flyers, when it was a high barrier to entry it conferred advantages and now Fly in Fly out work has commoditised club status, there is next to no boarding advantage, and no points flight availability.
So yes. Status seeking, and differential price seeking probably is a-social as a pattern when it's weaponised against the consumer.
That said, I hated Uber, they actually offered to underwrite people breaking the law to get foot in the door (how that didn't get them excluded as a corporate scofflaw is beyond me) and they continue to export all the profits offshore, but taxi services had become shit and now we have got used to Uber and I just don't worry about surge pricing. I got boiled slowly.
My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off.
The European push to mandate included luggage in flight is seeing a fair bit of trolling. So there are still true believers who think needing clean underwear is weak.
> My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off.
I think non-Americans need to take a stand against this. Refuse all tipping. Its a slippery slope - I know these guys are underpaid but if you start tipping the wages will just drop and we're all worse off.
Here is the core problem laid out:
1.) Owner needs workers and wants to make the position attractive.
2.) Owner is given the option to enable tips, and entice works with "Pay, plus tips!"
3.) Owner doesn't pay tips, patrons do.
4.) Workers blame patrons, not owner, for not tipping.
5.) Patrons feel guilty and tip. Workers make pretty good money from this, and enjoy the job more.
In a way it's kind of like a social mind virus, where the workers and owners benefit, and the patrons feel pain for not going along with it.
The only fix I can come up with is a law that tips can only be solicited after a service has been rendered. And entering something into a computer is not a service.
as someone who survived on tips for 2 1/2 years while studying comp sci, you're missing one key detail.
tips introduce a situation where harder/faster-paced workers get a higher pay per hour than workers with average productivity. a pizza driver that optimizes their routes and memorizes stop light patterns in their delivery zone will get more deliveries per hour than that of a new hire. so even though they work the same number of hours, the higher skilled driver earns more because they get more tips.
this "work harder => more pay" incentive is pretty unique in the industry; in manual labor jobs where each day has a set limit on the amount of work that can be completed, like grocery merchandising, workers that work harder get paid less than average workers. stock incentives are the closest comparison, but it's too far removed from the individual worker's output when the company's size grows above 100 employees.
the point is, part of the problem is the lack of other incentives that reward the hardest/best skilled workers.
Why do you associate tipping with “work harder => more pay,” exactly? I don’t see a clear logical route from “socially-forced customer tipping” to that, at all.
If anything; tipping leads us to “leverage information to ensure you get a large amount of high-tipping customers => more pay.”
Continuing that logical process, we might realize that “make your coworkers have to deal with the bad tippers => more pay.” Which might lead us to “socially manipulate management to get optimal shifts and locations => more pay.”
If you really want “work harder => more pay,” then just pay a high/fair/livable hourly rate, and add a bonus for number of orders fulfilled in the shift (or total sales volume during the shift). Certainly, some perverse incentives remain with this approach. But nothing nearly so bad as tipping. And like with tipping, the higher the hourly rate compared to the bonus, the more those problems are reduced.
But yeah… tipping has very little to do with “work harder => more pay.” You need to examine your logic more. Or just, like… have a few beers with a single person who’s ever worked in a restaurant as an adult.
> But yeah… tipping has very little to do with “work harder => more pay.” You need to examine your logic more. Or just, like… have a few beers with a single person who’s ever worked in a restaurant as an adult.
I have had more than a few conversations with tipped service workers. Some are even friends of mine. While a lot of what you say is true (the manipulation of shifts and spotting/monopolizing desirable customers) it really fails to capture what most folks tell me about these jobs.
They like tips. The ones that hustle and build up a bank of "regulars" do quite well. It takes a lot of work, and if you hustle on your shifts you usually get more tables assigned to you or drinks poured per hour, etc. This means even more pay.
A slow unskilled bartender is making far less money than a highly skilled efficient experienced bartender with a stable of regulars taking up half the bar stool seats every slow night. It is a night and day difference in total pay rates - all to do with skill. This can be two bartenders behind the same bar on the same nights. The unskilled bartender is not going to be known in these closely knit industry circles as good talent, and will likely never get the opportunity for a position at the top-tier establishments known for good tippers. Those positions are highly competitive.
While we can pontificate about how businesses "should" reward the top tier employees, it isn't happening. In this area of work these are often the only types of jobs available that offer significantly more hourly pay by working harder or being better at your job than your peers. Tilting at windmills only goes so far - sometimes you take the only options available to you to immediately improve your lot in life.
And yes, some of that is "manipulation" of your work environment - just like how we call it "managing upwards" in our white collar world. Same thing.
> They like tips.
They like money. Service workers tend to like tips (which provide variable income) over stable higher wages mostly I think because the latter is one they just haven't experienced. Instead they get a choice between low wages and tips or low wages without tips. Hardly a choice.
Also, tips do not always go to the harder working employees. With tip request spreading far and wide, I often see them in places where there is little work even involved. If I buy a bottle of water from a take-out fast food place I'm expected to tip, but the same bottle of water from a convenience store I'm not expected to tip? Who was working harder here exactly?
I think the case of tips "regulars" does definitely make more sense then in a lot of other situations as the customers can make a good evaluation of their service. But even then a simple per-drink bonus or commission would serve this purpose without shifting the decision and responsibility to customers. The faster and more skilled bartender would naturally receive more orders because they are serving faster and because the patons prefer their drinks.
It's not just that.
In part it's buying yourself a place without waiting.
I know a bartender who runs the entire bar area (the actual bar plus maybe eight four-top tables) at a nearby restaurant during lunch. I can text him at 10:30 and say I'd like a table for 2-4 people at lunch at 11:45, and there will be one waiting for me. He just brings one menu to the table, with our drinks (I'll have water, my wife will have Diet Coke, he already knows this) and we usually spend about ten seconds looking at the menu before we order.
We're both busy professionals, so getting us in and out in thirty minutes matters. And he does.
I'm directly paying the guy who provides service to me for a much higher level of service. I'm sure his manager would like a cut of that, but it's the price they have to pay to retain high-skill servers.
Sure. That might work, but the worker has zero control of implementing such a policy. They do have control over doing things that increase their tips. You work in the frameworks available to you, not some idealized version of the world.
Tilting at windmills doesn't pay the bills.
We are arguing exactly against those frameworks, while your argument, while true, is only repeating that one can do well within that framework. I'm european and I find annoying the fake smiles, the fake chitchat and the deep cleavage I will get from a tips-motivated worker. Basically this softcore prostitution is the only way letting them get some bread on the table, within that framework you refuse to change. The manager definitely sees the unskilled bartender and could raise the pay of the skilled one any time, and if they don't notice the difference I believe the bar has bigger problems anyway. So no, it's not the only framework available, and the way it's slowly reaching nowadays europe because that "capitalism means individualism" is just garbage to me. We've always lived in tribes, only today's social media is spreading those lies for pure political power.
Work harder for more pay is limited to American full service gigs, and a weird employer-driven labor retention push elsewhere.
The tipping process works for servers who have the performative and service skills to work a crowd of tables, modulo peculiarities of the patron population. There can be a very strong connection between a server who works tables hard and their tip take-home versus one who merely gets the food to the table.
The key detail you are missing is that this new wave of tipping is all tipping that is done before the service is given.
Waiters/drivers/bartenders/barbers, all are classic tipped jobs and you tip them after they serve you.
Smoothie Shop instead asks for a tip before they do anything. And they are paid a full wage anyway.
sure, it is a different approach than the old model - but i think it's only a guess when you visit a place for the first time. personally, i tip high on my first visit to a new place, any tips i give on my followup visits are based on my previous experiences with that restauraunt. workers remember good tippers, and when they go the extra mile on my followup visits, i keep tipping well.
followup - got downvoted hard on this, so i reflected a bit on my opinion here. i think its cognitive dissonance on my part, and its definitely a flaw in the new tipping model.
1. Tips are not a reliable source of income (I am an American who also survived on tips).
2. Only people working front get tips. If you have a lazy busboy working front for the most talented chef in the world, the chef pockets $0.00/hr in tips.
3. If any computer science job ever contemplated adding tipping to my compensation package, I'd go get my pink slip within the hour.
> 2. Only people working front get tips. If you have a lazy busboy working front for the most talented chef in the world, the chef pockets $0.00/hr in tips.
im not saying that the current tipping system is a good design - your example is one of the most glaring flaws. to put it another way, my point is that the current system will stay in existence due to the lack of other incentives that reward harder working individuals. in order to get rid of tipping culture, you can't simply appeal to morality/shame tippers; you have to replace it with a new system that also incentivizes harder work.
What do you think of the donations to open source project maintainers or photographers or musicians? What about gifts sent to tiktok hosts?
I'm from a country where there're no tips, and I'm not defending tips at all. But I do think the tiktok gifts are basically tips right? Is it a good idea to live off the gifts like the tips?
Donations aren't tips. I'm an Open Source maintainer as well, and I don't ever expect to be paid for my work. It's a hobby, whereas the code I write at work is what people pay me to do. Growing up, I knew a fairly popular musician from the internet-era, and I'll just say she made less money than I did working the cash register. She worked more hours, too.
Tipping, as an American culture, exists to reward "above and beyond" behavior from service workers. Tiktok performers, bedroom musicians and FOSS developers aren't service workers, and most of the time they aren't salaried either. Expecting to live off those wages is an unfortunate mistake.
Except all the jobs where the job is repetitive and salary is tied to performance inevitably start out as comfortable ways of earning easy money, and turn into nightmarish hellscapes as the owners do the frog boiling routine.
Food delivery is the perfect example. Right before covid, and during lockdowns, in my country, it was a lucrative job with easy work that earned a decent chunk of change, while being so cheap for consumers, that I've once or twice skipped out on going around the apartment block to the pizza place and just ordered it to my door.
Nowadays, prices are sky high and the wages are so low, and the system so punishing, is the only delivery drivers you see are illegal immigrants hanging on for dear life.
I was watching a YouTube video in the background while reading the comments, and I think it pretty much explained the issue, for the consumer: I feel pressured to pay a two dollar tip, on a seven dollar coffee, that was only worth one dollar to begin with.
..and then you start visiting other coffee shops with higher quality/lower cost, right? you, the consumer, are not alone in this behavior - so this causes a pattern where skilled baristas have a higher rate of exodus from that coffee shop where no one tips, which leads to even lower qiality, and eventually that shop has to lower its prices in order to get new customers. its capitalism all the way down.
There are plenty of non tipping ways to reward hard workers. Managers can track performance and reward it through bonuses and/or wage increases.
If more pizzas per hour is important then who ever is running the pizza place should be the one incentivizing that, not customers.
At some point “more pizzas per hour” will be achieved at the cost of quality.
I’d love to seem them incentivize actually not putting a whole pizza’s worth of toppings on just 3 slices.
And also putting enough of a topping where it becomes visible. When I add “onion” to “pizza”, I don’t intend for them to add a single tiny spec to a single slice — finding it should be easier than Where’s Waldo.
there's been attempts to do just that, but it doesnt work because tipping is engrained in the surrounding culture, which exists outside of the pizza place's control. a single store cannot fix the tipping problem on their own; it has to be a cultural shift towards a better system that similarly rewards harder working individuals.
There is nothing I would like more than seeing tipping implemented in retail. And then the more you think about it the more you realise everything should have a tipping option.
personally id love to see something like tipping implemented in frontline support. kpi's that focus on monthly case resolve goals and TTR are incentives that reduce quality, and 5 star kpi's are easily gamed. if customers could tip frontline support engineers based on their experience with a support case, we'd see quality go way up.
Why would I pay a company’s support rep extra to deliver the service that I’m already paying their employer for?
why would you tip a pizza delivery driver or a bartender, when youre already paying their employer for a pizza/drink?
over time, your experiences with any company will vary, due to the cycle of new workers joining the company and experienced workers leaving. tipping after a good experience incentivizes the skilled worker to stay longer in their position, thus increasing the odds that your future interactions will also be handled by a skilled worker.
A robust performance evaluation process does this just fine. If they do well they get a bonus, if they do poorly they get fired.
There is also no massive and obvious corruption risk in me paying either of those people to do a job as there is with a support engineer.
Maybe I should tip customs officers too, for processing my passport quickly and not looking too closely at my luggage?
Or perhaps if I take a speeding ticket to court, maybe I should tip the judge based on the outcome?
> A robust performance evaluation process does this just fine
this assumes that an org is able to perform a robust performance evaluation. i posit that the lack of a quality-based incentive, like tipping, decreases the accuracy of an org's performance review process.
organizations that are unable to retain skilled workers, will also experience a drop in the rate of skilled workers that transition to management positions. over time, management positions are then filled with individuals that do not have experience with the company's product. this lowers the accuracy of performance reviews, which causes a downward spiral: frontline engineers learn which KPI's are important in performance reviews, and focus on achieving those KPI's, rather than focusing on the customer experience. skilled workers are the workers most likely to spot the problem, and either adapt to lower the quality of the experience they provide to the customer, or they begin to seek greener pastures. this is textbook organizational collapse.
Tons of B2B stuff works that way. You'll get an account rep who's got some part of their pay based on commission.
I think non-Americans need to take a stand against this. Refuse all tipping.
The custom of tipping came to America from Europe after the First World War, and tipping was seen as deeply un-American until the 1950's.
It is sometimes mentioned in films and radio dramas of the period. See the Bettie Davis movie Petrified Forest for one example.
Now that tips are tax free in the USA, they are unlikely to be going away.
If tips are no longer taxed, does that mean that they no longer count towards medicare, sick pay, pensions and such?
It's structured as a federal income tax deduction, capped at $25k, and does not reduce reportable payroll or gross income.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1/te...
Surely. Nothing kind is done for kindness' sake by these cretins.
They abolished all those things so the question is moot.
Sadly, like Steve Buscemi, I'm going to have to look like an asshole to stand up for my principles. Mostly it means I'm not going to eat out.
Sometimes you do have to have the courage to look like an asshole. But eating out is maybe not worth it.
I’m going to start tipping 10% now, if I get yelled at by waitstaff I’ll mention the tax break and explain they’re receiving the same tip as they would’ve received prior to the tax break. I’m sick of being shaken down everywhere I go for tip money. I suspect I’m not the only one who will be modifying my tipping behavior.
Do waitstaff where you live actually have a tendency of yelling at people who "only" tip 10%? Honestly curious. That's one sick tendency if so.
if I had anyone at all nag me over tipping them more than that as if it were something you're supposed to automatically do, id flat out tell them to fuck off without a shred of guilt. Luckily it's not so ingrained where I live.
Yeah... 10% is my usual tip and nobody's ever yelled at me, confronted me, or responsed in any way. I'm sure it's happened once to someone somewhere at some point in time but this expectation that you're going to get confronted is silly. Humans are non-confrontational by default.
I personally thought tax-free tips is a fine idea. Who are we kidding ourselves? Where do all those cash tips go? Not on the tax return, that's for sure.
I'm American.
This is how capitalism is supposed to work. It's supposed to seep into every crevice of society and pull money out of the poorest, weakest people and into the hands of the richest and strongest. This isn't a coincidence, it is in fact the most important aspect of the system.
Tipping went from some generous gesture to recognize exceptional service and it's turned into a mandatory, arm-twisting shakedown by businesses that simply do not want to pay their employees. Not just avoid paying a living wage (those days are long gone) but not even a _minimum_ wage. Many people involved in or invested in the restaurant businesses wouldn't have thought about getting in if they had to pay employees for an honest day's work.
Many restaurants these days aren't just local mom and pop family run businesses but large corporations who own many franchises and operate in the billions of dollars yet people like you and I are expected to pay most of the wages of the servers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darden_Restaurants
Sure, you can never eat out or only eat at locally owned small businesses. But that's just one small slice of society. The only realistic solution for many of us is to try to run the rat race faster.
As an American who agrees with you that this is a perennial failure mode for our culture and that this is by far the worst I've seen it in decades (I was a kid for "...government is the problem"), I still always remind everyone that it doesn't have to be this way, it wasn't this way 20 years ago, it was trending bad but not like this ten years ago, and that old proverb (Chinese I think and I'm probably butchering it) is spot on: "every step into a dark forest is a step you'll have to take to see the sun, but you have counted your steps".
Markets are great when they are well administered by competent and uncorrupted authority. And this is not an oxymoron! Brooksley Born should win the Nobel Peace Prize or something, she saw the road ahead and gave everything in a bitter battle against Clinton's goons and if we hadn't kneecapped her we wouldn't be here today.
More recently Lina Khan was a one-woman nightmare calamity for scammers, thieves, and other assorted bottom dwellers, and if Trump's goons hadn't had their way she'be ramming data privacy laws so far up FAANG's ass that Lt Colonel Boz would think he actually had been through legit basic.
The system can work, we get excellent people in charge of the important stuff with some frequency, but we have got to drop this red/blue crap and get behind leaders like the ones I mentioned or this goes one fucking way.
And there's a pretty optimistic message not in what George wrote, but that people like George are starting to ask if they're the baddies. He's always been brilliant but I was starting to wonder if he had gone TESCREAL on us, and I think we can see he (metaphorically) sobered up off the kool aid. If he can, idk, maybe Lex can, maybe pmarca can. If those guys took a cold shower? The world changes that day.
You cheapskate!!!
I’m paraphrasing an old girlfriend of mine because you gave her a substandard tip.
Just don't tip automatically, toughen up a little on the frowning looks and remind yourself that for one thing, you're not defrauding anyone for not tipping as an automatic thing, and secondly, its the cynical shits in the finacial incentive structure above your waiter who are really at fault.
This sounds good and like a protest but it's not because:
1. You're not hurting the big wigs who exploit workers. They don't care if you don't tip.
2. You ARE hurting the underpaid, exploited worker.
> You ARE hurting the underpaid, exploited worker.
What? No, you're not hurting anyone. You're going out to eat and expecting to pay for what you ordered, not the life subsidy of someone whose employer can't be bothered to pay them well enough. Either way, it's not and shouldn't be your obligation even if it does screw with the waiter's finances. I too might have financial squeezes that make it difficult for me to fork over an extra 14 to 20% every damn time I've already paid for all that I bought.
Your claim just keeps reinforcing the foolish notion that it's a consumer's fault/responsibility if wait staff aren't paid enough by their employers.
>You're not hurting the big wigs who exploit workers. They don't care if you don't tip.
And I shouldn't have to care if they don't care. At bottom, like I said in my point above, it's not my job to subsidize their wages either way. I didn't make my argument as a description of protest, instead i'm saying it as a practical thing anyone should and has a right to do.
> What? No, you're not hurting anyone.
You are, and it's objective.
Does this worker have more, or less, money than before? It's not a matter of opinion. The answer is less, and we know that's the answer because that's specifically what you're seeking out.
What you're arguing is if this harm is justified. Maybe, maybe not. In your opinion, it is. My opinion is that the marginal effects of me not tipping will have zero impact on the culture, so, for now, I play by the rules. The rules are stupid, I agree, but I still play by them.
No, you're bloody well not. You as an average external consumer did not create the exploitative culture of low wages for hospitality staff or make any one of them join that culture by seeking employment there. There's nothing objective about what you argue except that it's objectively mistaken in its blame.
Playing by stupid "rules" (which these aren't in any case, they're social tendencies that can be slowly changed) is the passively damaging thing, a logic of, "yeah, this aspect of the world is shit but i'll chide you for not participating in it because I myself am too inert to not do so".
>Does this worker have more, or less, money than before? It's not a matter of opinion. The answer is less, and we know that's the answer because that's specifically what you're seeking out.
Do you own a restaurant in which you underpay employees? I'd almost guess you do to come up with such topsy-turvy nonsense. The worker having less money has nothing to do with any fault of your own. You're paying for what you ordered, and stealing nothing from anyone; you're simply seeking not to be squeezed further for no good reason. The owner of the place is however literally underpaying because they're hoping to guilt you into subsidizing part of wages, and convincing their employees that this is the correct thing.
A person having less money because you refuse to participate in a subtle bit of exploitation doesn't make you guilty of the exploitation or "seeking it out"
It's not topsy-turvy at all, it's very simple and straightforward logic.
Again: does the worker have less, or more, money than before if you don't tip? It's not a trick question, it's not a rhetorical question, it's a very simple question.
Okay... they have less. So, the worker is worse off when you don't tip. Again, what you're arguing is that's okay and justified. Which is fine, and lots of people will agree.
> The worker having less money has nothing to do with any fault of your own.
This is blatantly not true.
When you don't tip 5 dollars, the waiter does not have 5 dollars. Who did not give them that 5 dollars? You.
You're arguing that isn't your responsibility. That's a different argument. But who didn't give it to them? You.
> The owner of the place is however literally underpaying because they're hoping to guilt you into subsidizing part of wages, and convincing their employees that this is the correct thing.
Correct, this is exactly right. And, I agree with you: this is absolutely what is happening. I want this to end 100%.
But, in my opinion, I do not believe, personally, for me, in my life, that I will be enacting any change or furthering this cause in any way by not tipping. So, for me, I tip.
If you do not want to tip, I think that's fine. Go for it. What you cannot claim is that this doesn't hurt your particular waiter. Obviously it does, you made his night a little bit worse. If you still don't believe me, just ask next time, the waiter will tell you.
And, notice my wording here, it’s very careful. That particular waiter is worse off. It’s possible to help waiters, as a group, as a collective, while simultaneously harming that particular waiter. You believe you’re deconstructing or undermining tipping as a system, ergo helping waiters as a whole. But in the process, you’re hurting that particular waiter.
You're hurting yourself when you tip.
You have, objectively, less money than before. Ergo, tipping is self-harm.
Yes, it is, that's exactly what it is and it's not up for debate.
Like I said, the rules are stupid but, for now, I play by them.
You might as "why are you hurting yourself?". Because I can afford to hurt myself, the waiter probably can't. 5 bucks is a drop in the bucket for me, but, presumably, not for them.
And, on the topic of self-harm, we all make decisions every day that harm us. We sometimes get something in return, but often we don’t. We do it purely for the benefit of other people, often people we don’t know and will never see again.
Consider holding a door open. For me, I get in the building 10 seconds later. That’s worse than getting in the door 10 seconds earlier. What did I gain? Nothing. Some stranger got 100% of the benefit, with nothing for me.
You're hurting me right now by not tipping me for this comment. I expect at least $100 in order to not feel hurt.
You're correct, you are more hurt than if I gave you 100 dollars. Duh, this is obvious.
Consider the negation: you’re not hurt if I give you 100 dollars. Or, rephrased, you're better off if I give you 100 dollars. Is this true? Yes. If I queried all 7.5 billion people on Earth, they’d all say yes.
Again, the tricky part is I don't care. That's a different thing.
>2. You ARE hurting the underpaid, exploited worker.
This is just hope for the hopeless. If an adult needs the few dollars, they have bigger problems.
If you can solve the coordination problem between diners and the explosion of tipping (largely due to employers trying to fight for unskilled workers by promising some extra tip revenue) the tipping might be extinguished entirely and a correction can occur.
Tipping is just a tax on losers. My friends were all about how they always tip and that’s why they get Ubers faster but then it turns out I never tip and I get them in the same time.
I’m a regular at this bakery / coffee store and I buy a doughnut there every day and I never tip.
You can just do things.
Do you really view people who tip as “losers”? Do your friends know you think of them that way?
What a depressing way to live…
My friends are secure happy people. They laugh off banter easily. It’s part of why we’re all friends and all doing well in life.
Gotcha, I guess I missed the playful wink ;)
I know we've got plenty of problems on our plate, but Americans need to keep trying to push this crap out domestically too.
Uber and Lyft are expensive but anyone who says they are worse than what they replaced doesn’t remember well the heydays of taxis. Sure, people in big towns like NYC could always get one fairly easily, but everyone else was stuck dealing with whatever potentially shady operation they could dig out of a phonebook, and even then getting a car wasn’t guaranteed.
Now, anyone anywhere can get a ride, often quickly. I’m not trying to excuse any predatory commercial practices directed at drivers or passengers, which are serious problems deserving of more strict regulation, but I absolutely do not want to go back to the old way.
I'm really not sure old school taxis are actually that bad.
I had two incidents in the UK recently where my app of choice failed me and I was quickly bailed out cheaper by googling "taxi $TOWN" and having a one minute conversation with an operator.
Yeah some operators use similar proper digitised internal systems now as well.
The main amazing thing about Uber is that you can go most places in the world, not know what you're doing with obscure public transport/payments/etc and just get an Uber to your hotel, no problems. It's so, so much better than what came before.
And you don't consider than just maybe that local taxi service which bailed you out so politely now, in the age of Uber everywhere, is delivering a better experience because it finally needs to compete like it didn't back in the day?
They are better than they used to be because of the competition. I remember a time not that long ago where getting a minicab was nigh on impossible, and one miraculously did show up, it would be primary so the driver could try to scam you.
Not my experience using taxi call services in Chicago. Whenever I called them (before Uber) the taxi was prompt and courteous.
The apps did three things that the call services did not do:
1) subsidize drivers with vc money for many years making drivers plentiful and fares cheap
2) use unlicensed cabs so they could saturate areas like Manhattan that had previously limited the amount of cabs that could operate
3) Deprive drivers of info they might use to reject fares they don't want (like destination).
> Not my experience using taxi call services in Chicago. Whenever I called them (before Uber) the taxi was prompt and courteous.
Not remotely my experience in Chicago, and I lived in a relatively primary service area (Wicker Park). Calling them was basically pointless, you needed to walk to a cab stand and hope there was a cab standing by if you needed to go to the airport at a weird off-peak time.
And my friends all had similar experiences to mine as well. It was a trope that you'd call dispatch and schedule a ride, and then maybe it would show up within 90 minutes of the actual time assigned. You could even listen to the dispatch radio and realize how much of a shitshow it was with cabbies assigned to a pickup ditching it for a street fare randomly. And how little dispatch cared about it all.
Uber was a night and day overnight change for the better.
The only "good" cab experiences were flag pulls from the street within short city trips. Usually the loop to back home during peak after-work or bar traffic times. Anything else was frustrating to outright unusable.
Cabs in Chicago prior to Uber were unbelievably bad unless you were picking them up in the Loop and taking them to a destination within the city limits (reference period: 1995-2010). It could take 45 minutes to get a cab to show up in Lakeview, and it was a crap shoot whether they actually would.
When I lived in Uptown I could typically get one just by standing on Broadway for a little while. When I lived in Logan Square I'd call and they'd be there in 20 minutes. This is well before either Uptown or Logan Square were particularly gentrified.
I can believe if you were going to/from the suburbs it may have been harder. The cabbies could know your destination and could just ignore the dispatcher if they didn't want to run the trip.
I lived in Lakeview (several spots) and just south of Uptown (on Montrose and Broadway, near the Jewel). I had never had a good cab experience. In particular, as I said, I'd often have to call, wait, and then call again when the cab didn't show up. The idea of getting a cab by waiting on Broadway --- I mean, maybe there was some time of day you could do that at? But at 8:30PM? Forget it.
You could not get one in Hyde Park full stop.
> 2) use unlicensed cabs so they could saturate areas like Manhattan that had previously limited the amount of cabs that could operate
This is mostly a problem with the people you pay taxes to who would invent systems to restrict the driver numbers.
No, restricting the amount of cabs is good, actually. It's very annoying if your city is overrun with cabs. The restriction needs to be reasonable but dense cities like NYC would just trend towards 100% cabs if you let them. And then nobody can drive anywhere.
Well no, because that's not what happened with Uber. You get more cab drivers, but there's a population limit on cabs based on various factors, including the fact that people don't always want to take a cab.
> I’m not trying to excuse any predatory commercial practices directed at drivers or passengers, which are serious problems deserving of more strict regulation, but I absolutely do not want to go back to the old way.
So which of the laws that uber broke to get big are what prevented these new issues, and which are what made the old way bad?
In several European countries they weren't doing the criminal record checks that taxi companies are required to do.
I think that's what got them banned in London at some point.
I remember the time before Uber arrived here, where ”here” obviously is not USA.
I don’t mind the old ways.
Taxis had apps before Uber arrived here, they had geolocation with ETA, contactless payment, up-front pricing, and never refused service (because they were required by law to offer service to anyone anywhere).
The problem probably never was incumbent taxis, it was how they were regulated (or not).
> Taxis had apps before Uber arrived here, they had geolocation with ETA, contactless payment, up-front pricing, and never refused service (because they were required by law to offer service to anyone anywhere).
I lived in NYC and other metropolitan US cities for the few years before the Uber and I don’t remember a single car service that had any of that and wasn’t a lottery of if they’ll pick up the phone in time to get me somewhere
Sometimes it seems USA truly is the home of cutting-edge tech, yet sometimes not so much…
Checking the iOS App Store reviews on the local taxi app I am currently using they go back to 2011, and that's not the oldest one. It has also been available on Android since March 2012. All prior to the dates Uber started operating here.
Taxis in the US are one of the most regulated services around, and they were still utterly atrocious.
Sure, they’re mandated to not refuse service, but you try getting picked up in Manhattan with a suitcase mid afternoon (when it’s obvious you’ll be taking the fixed fare to JFK in heavy traffic). To this day, the meter being “broken” is a tactic used in taxi strongholds like Las Vegas, even with this regulation.
The sweet spot for taxis was London, but I will go out of my way to avoid taking one lest I get forced to listen to the drivers views on Brexit for the entire ride.
> Taxis in the US are one of the most regulated services around, and they were still utterly atrocious.
Maybe the fact that they were the most regulated services around was exactly why they were atrocious. Regulation often erects barriers to competition. It's impossible for a regulatory body to spell out every way in which a company can be exploitive and disallow it. The only thing that prevents bad behavior is meaningful competition.
It was this regulatory body that limited the number of cabs that could be on the road at any given time and set "fair" meter pricing. What resulted was that if you lived in a poor isolated neighborhood, there would be no cabs willing to take you there or driving around to pick you up. Uber solved this pretty much overnight.
I did not speculate on the cause and effect - only the status quo circa ~2013-2014 pre-Uber.
Today though, Uber has definitely developed anti-competitive and frankly disgusting traits - they're just different ones to the taxi industry.
> Taxis in the US are one of the most regulated services around, and they were still utterly atrocious.
This assumes that “most regulated” correlates with less atrocious. Or that the intentions behind regulations are always good. Regulations can indeed makes things less atrocious, but other regulations can just as easily make things more atrocious. I’d argue that many taxi regulations were more the latter than the former. (I.e arbitrary limit on total number of taxi vehicles, while allowing an unlimited number of non-taxi vehicles)
> most regulated
As in most rules on the books, not in actually enforced rules I presume?
Enforced when corrupt politicos wanted to squeeze medallion owners.
> there is next to no boarding advantage
Especially on the discounters here in EU (especially Ryanair / Easyjet), i'm the only one in the non-priority queue, everyone else is in the priority queue. This used to of course not be the case; you paid extra and was in first. Now i'm usually in before 2/3th of the prio queue. Which is just weird.
> about surge pricing. I got boiled slowly.
Not sure how it is in the US (I used uber there on vacation in the past, but on vacation, I don't worry about prices too much), but here prices jump heavily during surge; often from 40->50->38 euros in a few minutes; I'll just keep an eye on the app for a few minutes and pick it at a good point. Taxis are almost always twice or sometimes (airport) 3x the price. I never take them as they are also often rude and I cannot rate them (these two are related). The last one I took was 3 weeks ago; I was 10 minute drive to the airport from some horrible 'business hotel' and I had an early flight, so I checked out, ordered an uber at 5am and waited; in front of me stopped a 'real' taxi (both are now legal and need licenses, but Taxi have Taxi on top); the driver got out to welcome his client which was not me but obviously he thought I was. We talked for a bit waiting for his real client and then he asked how much uber was; E15 I showed him. He said; cancel it and give me E15. Ok, so I got in front, the other client in the back. We arrived, and while waiting to park up, he shoved a terminal in my face with E15 on it, so I paid. We got out, he got the luggage from the other guy who asked 'how much is it'; E72,-. Cheers bro; made almost E90 for a 10 minute trip.
Point being; hating uber (and I used to refuse to use them) is making your life very hard for very little benefit. The taxis needed a kick up the arse and they still didn't learn anything. Still need to order far upfront, their app sucks and far more expensive. Not sure how they can exist (of course I do, they don't know uber exists, how to use it or they refuse to use it). I find if you are with 2+ people, they are often cheaper than the trains which is quite mental really in a country where 'people should take the train if they can'.
> I never take them as they are also often rude and I cannot rate them
You should check if there are taxi apps where you live. In Europe a lot of these apps consolidated under bigger brands (e.g. FreeNow) so it's a good bet that you'll find one and then you have the same experience as Uber. Just check which gives you a better price.
When the service providers feel cheated by the app they have to use to reach any audience (Booking, Uber, etc.), they'll find ways to make more money. Hotel owners gave me hefty discounts just to cancel a Booking reservation and pay directly, Uber drivers did the same. And with taxis it's getting ever so slightly harder to cheat when people have a recording device in their pockets at all times. I know cases where friends used Strava to record a trip and could show it's impossible for the trip to cost that much at advertised prices. Driver complied.
Startup idea: Strava for taxi rides, disrupt the market of shady taxi drivers with an app dedicated to tracking the trip to calculate/estimate costs.
> but here prices jump heavily during surge
Yup. The price jump isn't just a "surge." It's the algorithm calculating the highest price you'll tolerate without abandoning the app long-term, no matter availability of cars (which can be related, but from CFOs perspective that's not the metric to optimize)
This personalized price discrimination is precisely the kind of manipulation geohot is describing.
It's the same principle as (an old story) booking.com charging Mac/Safari/iphone users more.
Booking is the worst of them. You can open two tabs of one account next to each other and since one is from Google Maps pricing gonna be. 20% different.
Also all kind of cashback or discount offers just bake even higher premium than Cashback they offer.
So yeah booking hotels is more and more like a whack-a-mole game if you don't want to pay 30% more.
It used to be that you could use Booking and get a cheaper reservation than using the hotels own website. Today, it seems to be the opposite, the prices for hotels are almost always cheaper on their website than Booking...
This is a common online trope, but has almost never been true for me when I’ve checked. (US domestic ~4 star hotels) Direct is more or at least equal to the aggregator prices.
Ah, never traveled to the US, my experience is from Europe, South America and Asia, could explain the difference :)
and you reinforce it every time you accept the price.
So you have to vote with your wallet. If you can't, or won't, then it just proves that their pricing algorithm has found "your" price, and so you don't get to keep your surplus value as it gets transfered to uber.
This is why i, even if i can afford it, go for lowest price, most economically valuable buys. Always, without exception. Cannot allow them to win.
And this generally fails because Uber has more market power, given that there are only a few alternative options and many people will defect in order to get where they’re going. If customers could organize somehow and apply this principle collectively they could achieve some parity with Uber and it would affect that organization’s behavior more. But we’ve decided that regulation is bad, and the tech world hasn’t figured out how to build an Uber-bargaining collective app (which wouldn’t instantly itself defect and take a payoff from Uber.)
> Taxis are almost always twice or sometimes (airport) 3x the price.
Not where I live. Here, Uber is 50-100% more* than the price of a local taxi, at all times of day. Uber is also at least 30% more expensive than hailing a black cab.
So even though I have the app, after optimistically checking the Uber price, I invariably choose to book a taxi instead.
The shorter arrival times shown in the Uber app are sometimes tempting, but after waiting nearly 30 minutes for a car that Uber continuously said was 4 minutes or less away, with their location moving around (so not stuck in traffic) and driver repeatedly changing, I don't take the time seriously any more.
I just wanted to correct the impression that's often put out that Uber is cheaper (or faster) for the customer. It's evidently true in some places. But where i live, other than when they ran a 50% discount for the first few months after arriving in town, I've never seen Uber be anything other than the most expensive option.
It's not due to lack of drivers: I've been told most drivers at the biggest local firm switched to Uber as soon as they arrived in town, and that's backed up by seeing Uber-marked cars everywhere.
> Not where I live
I never understand why people make comments like this and leave it to the reader to guess where they live. Your profile has your email and linkedin, so it's not like you're trying to stay anonymous.
And to your point, local taxis being less expensive is unusual in my travels from 50+ countries. Uber/Grab/Bolt/Gojeck/Maxim are almost always significantly cheaper and more reliable in my experience, especially for foreigners who aren't familiar with typical fares.
Uber is more expensive than a cab in almost all Asian countries, often by a lot. Grab is a bit better, the margin tends to be pretty slim. The main benefit of Uber to me in Asia is that you don't get a taxi driver who tries to skip the meter and extort you, which is a surprisingly common phenomenon.
Uber doesn't even operate in most Asian countries. They made deals with Grab 7-8 years ago to not compete in the same markets.
In which country is Uber more expensive?
Taiwan and Hong Kong
Not GP but I didn't mention either; Netherlands.
Last time I took an Uber from Eindhoven out 30km to a neighbouring village, the driver showed up and gave me shit for not calling the taxi company. See, he was a taxi driver as well and used the same car for both services. He said that Uber didn't pay enough and that it was unfair I was _only_ paying €50 for the trip. I told him that I was just paying for a service I ordered and wished him luck. If the driver wants to make more money, he should stop accepting Uber offers because he's certainly not winning over hearts and minds by complaining to the clientele he is supposedly trying to convince to pay 50% more for the exact same ride.
Uber seems to be more expensive in Dubai too.
> I never understand why people make comments like this
It's intentional, because the location has nothing to do with the actual point. Stating it invites people to focus on the location too much instead of the actual point, or to say things like "oh that's just your country / town, we can assume that's anomalous".
Which would be missing the point entirely.
If you're interested in the location you can find out. It's no secret, though I would advise against trusting people's locations on LinkedIn, they are often not where the person currently works or lives.
But I'm not interested in stating it. For the point I was making, the specific location, or even the country, detracts from that.
You've traveled in 50+ countries. Just from that, you're an extreme economic and social outlier. You are almost certainly taking journeys that are systematically different from those taken by the majority of people, and the price brackets and journey routes you're comparing between services are different than those used by other people. It may well be that the comparison works out differently as a result.
Not to disregard your experience. You've plenty. But you are very unusual, and it's impossible to travel that much without taking journeys that other people never or very rarely take.
I would not be surprised if the "obvious foreigner" premium is there for taxis, even if you're experienced. I'd find it unlikely that you became so intimately familiar with all 50+ countries as to get the true "favour for a friend" fare in all 50+ including those where that's more common, and that you took the same journeys as locals do in all of them.
On the other side (and on the original topic), Uber has reason to optimise for traveller cohorts. If Uber wanted to seem cheaper than local taxis to people in your cohort, to a greater extent than for other people, they could probably do that, and it would make economic sense if their algorithm statistically optimises for that. Profit-maximising algorithms with "personalised" pricing default-optimise for trade with wealthier customers who use their services more often, for journeys associated with other spending, such as to/from travel hubs and hotels, and for separating out cohorts in subtle ways that maximise the inability of cohort members to detect the separation.
Regarding Uber, I agree that their price transparency is very much appreciated.
However it's not rare to find bad drivers on Uber. On Christmas this year I took an uber from the airport, the driver had supposely arrived but he was nowhere to be seen. We called each other and I could hardly hear anything. After wasting about 30 minutes (and battery almost depleted) we finally found each other. It turns out he didn't know how to speak English or the local language. He had two phones, one he used to call a colleage who could (barely) translate english for him, the other phone he used to talk to clients, and both phones were placed mic-to-speaker to bridge the calls. What about the extra time that the driver wasted? I was billed for it and I had no way to dispute it. I could only report this behavior in a review to a driver that didn't seem to be him (was the main driver subletting his account?).
I had very bad drivers on Uber, but I do give them low ratings, complain to Uber, ask for refunds or refuse to go depending on the level of bad. I had a driver a few months ago on saturday morning: 'don't get in on the left, someone vomited out of the window last night'. Yeah that's shit and can happen but it's the next day, you went out without cleaning. Didn't get in and complained. Come on people.
Generally I still had much nicer uber drivers than taxi drivers. What do I do if a normal cabby is a shit? With uber I get to vote 1 star AND I will get my money back the same day. That's not happening here with the normal taxis: you can complain, fill forms, and maybe, after you expire of old age, your family will enjoy that 10 euros refund.
I agree with you, uber is a good 1st option. In my previous comment I wanted to remark that it's not flawless, but I think we are on the same page about this as well. It pays off to keep alternatives in mind when things seem to go sideways (request another driver, use a taxi, be more vocal ...). Also travelling makes me tired and then I just let issues slide
> Especially on the discounters here in EU (especially Ryanair / Easyjet), i'm the only one in the non-priority queue, everyone else is in the priority queue. This used to of course not be the case; you paid extra and was in first. Now i'm usually in before 2/3th of the prio queue. Which is just weird.
That’s because the ”priority” queue for those carriers is really a ”paid for a proper carry on”-queue. But the airlines realised that they could brand it as a priority queue to make the upcharge to bring a bag more palatable. You’re not spending €40 just to bring a bag that used to be included in the ticket, you also get to feel more important. At least the first time until you realise 2/3rds of the plane is also important.
The workaround for this, ironically, is more tech.
"Sorry, I've got like 20 lith-ions in there. I can pull them out if you'd like to see them." cue shiteating grin and grumping from the airline staff.
On the one hand I feel good about it because your dumb rules are dumb and fuck that shit. On the other hand, it's not the air steward's fault Frank Lorenzo was a lizard person puke pustule.
edit: Appropriate use of 'cue'
I really want to dislike Uber because I'm generally much in favor of locally-operated public services rather than a big foreign corporation, but man, taxis really make it hard.
In my country (Spain) there can't be more than 1 Uber (or similar) per 30 taxis by law (obviously pushed by the taxi lobby). That's actually enforced, at least in my region (I think in some regions, like Madrid, it's not). Additionally, in my region Ubers are further nerfed by requiring booking 15 minutes or more in advance and not allowing trips inside of a city, but they just disregard that law and at the moment it doesn't seem to be actually enforced, although taxis are protesting a lot about it so it might be in the future.
Normally I would be indignant at a foreign big corp disregarding laws, but it's hard not to support Uber when taxis are clearly not enough to meet demand (sometimes you need to wait half an hour for one, in a small city where if you are fit you get to most places walking in that time anyway. If I want a taxi it's because I'm in a hurry and walking or taking a bus won't cut it, if I have to wait 30 minutes for a taxi it becomes useless) and they constantly push not only to limit the number of Ubers, but also the number of taxis themselves. They prefer to be guaranteed to always have customers waiting and see the taximeter numbers go up constantly, and screw the people who have to put up with a terrible quality of service because they don't meet demand. In the past I used to take a taxi to the train station if I'd rather work some more instead of stopping 30 minutes earlier to take the bus, now I don't even bother because you might need the same time to go by taxi than by bus due to scarcity of taxis.
Add to that that many taxi drivers are rude, and many drive Dacias which are the cheapest low-end car here... come on, I'm not saying they should be luxury cars, but you are serving customers in a car that is your whole means of production, your image and your calling card, and that will be amortized very fast, and you go for the absolute cheapest that you can find in the market? What does that say about your care for the customer?
I take Ubers whenever I can (which is also seldom, because obviously with the 1 to 30 rule they are even further than taxis from meeting demand) because taxis really go the extra mile to make me hate them.
> What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium, and the queue is now with you again
Wouldn't the market purist argue that this just means the good is mispriced, and tickets should actually be what the price is with the premium added? What you really need is to just raise the prices of the tickets and the price to jump the queue?
The market purist might argue for a second-price auction for boarding order, where people board in the order of highest sealed bid for boarding order to lowest, but pay the amount bid by the person behind them in the sequence; or for "Paris Metro Pricing" where everyone being in the "priority" line results in a large fraction of them opting not to pay the premium for the next flight they take. Or they might think up something I haven't thought of.
CGP Grey on "The better boarding method airlines won't use" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAHbLRjF0vo
Thanks for the link! This is a good example of the use of the medium of video (animation) to present information more clearly than alternative media could.
He's concerned not about allocating the suffering optimally (to the people least willing to pay to reduce it, for example because they are in excellent health or couldn't afford the flight otherwise) but about reducing the total amount of suffering, which is far more important.
In other contexts, the main benefit of market mechanisms is precisely that they vastly reduce suffering, for example by stimulating the production of socially valuable goods. Is there a way market mechanisms for boarding order could have such a benefit? For example, by rewarding people who board in an order that minimizes overall boarding delay? I'm skeptical.
For market purism to work people need to have an idea what they are paying for. If this is changing too quickly or there is personalized pricing it becomes a very different kind of game.
Market purism very rarely works, just like any kind of purism, but it's still an interesting thought experiment.
People don't make buying decisions from a purely rational headspace, though. Charge too much for the upfront ticket and people will go to someone advertising it for lower (but with additional back-end services that are must-have)
My guess is the hidden fees end up making businesses more money
especially the australian airline example and perhaps with much broader applicability, I know that companies are completely happy with managable competition (Australian domestic airlines are functionally 2 players, and similarly across many large industries here that's true) where over time once they can establish profitable gimmicks neither party really wants to rock the boat and they're able to lock in that margin forever more. It doesn't suit established players to compete on that, they both open up losing situations in the game theory compared to silent non-competition.
In high capital businesses like airlines and supermarkets it seems to play out all over the place these days.
The most profitable thing you can do is charge for a service and then not deliver it.
They do that too.
> For some people, paying the premium to jump the queue is the point. What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium, and the queue is now with you again
There's a freedom that comes with not caring and just accepting I am last in the line. I don't pay the premium and I can sit and relax in the lobby while the sheep that paid wait in line. Only when the queue is nearly depleted it is my turn.
>while the sheep that paid wait in line.
The supposed "sheep" that want to get on the plane first are people that want to get that precious overhead bin space to avoid checking a carry-on bag at the gate. Boarding last means there's no more bin space and the gate agent will put the bag in the belly of the plane. This adds extra hassles of waiting an extra 30+ minutes at the arrival terminal to wait for the bag on the conveyor belt and/or the bag getting lost.
Yes, it can look "irrational" to hurry up and get in line because as some like to say, "No point in fighting to get on the plane first since we're all leaving on the same plane at the same time!" ... The issue isn't the departure time -- it's the limited bin space.
EDIT add reply to : >bag put in the belly lf the place, and my bag was never lost.
There are more complications because at some airports with widely separated terminals, going outside of the security zone to pick up a bag at the conveyor belt also means using slower buses instead of the tram to go to another terminal to get a car. E.g. at Dallas airport, the faster railway trams are only available inside the secured area. So not getting that bag in the overhead bin has domino effect of waiting for buses (another +30 minutes) which can add up to 1 extra hour of waiting at the arrival destination. Getting in line early for boarding is a small price to pay to avoid all of that.
Yes, there is freedom in that. I seldom have my overhead bag put in the belly lf the place, and my bag was never lost. Perhaps I am lucky.
I get that time back by being able to go to the gate when they are about to close :)
> The supposed "sheep" that want to get on the plane first are people that want to get that precious overhead bin space to avoid checking a carry-on bag at the gate.
They are still sheep. Fighting for better spot on the butcher's table.
So let me get this straight. Rather than fighting airlines for better flying conditions, they fight each other for earlier boarding time.
Not sure who said it, but consumerism truly is slavery perfected.
Maybe it's different in the US, but I fly constantly and have ever since I was a kid, and overhead storage space has never been an issue in my experience. At worst you'll have to put your bag a few seats away from your seat, but even then I usually travel with a pretty big duffle bag and have never had issues
It's different in the US. The gate agents, depending on the flight, for the last 10-30% of boarding passengers will say "we're out of room, we're checking your bags". So now you have to deal with that hassle. The lived experience is you have gate agents explicitly priming the anxiety.
OP missed the point though, also in the US, you can bring what's called a "personal carry on" and put it under the seat in front of you. Now overhead space is a non-issue. Just pack light.
People would still jockey to be first on, even if there wasn't the limited overhead bin space.
Though, that too only works if it is not adopted by the majority :)
The actual strategy is not that you are last, but that you choose to be part of the smallest group.
That's true. It's almost like the prisoners dillema.
I think that in a world with no priority queueing, I would still not care about the only queue and show up at the gate at the last possible time.
Problems would arise if everyone behaved like me. You would have everyone showing last minute and chaos would be the result.
I wonder how the system would adapt to that.
The thing is, not everyone is like you. So it would work better than the pathological case, at least.
> now Fly in Fly out work has commoditised club status, there is next to no boarding advantage
Why would you want to be on the plane earlier than necessary? Only thing I can think of is better access to the overhead lockers, which fill up fast these days.
Less so the early boarding, but the priority baggage is nice, especially after long international flights.
Getting on the flight 15 minutes early also beats dawdling in a slow moving like for 20.
Lounge access is worth it alone! Especially on international connections!!
> Lounge access is worth it alone
Airport food & coffee is expensive and often not very good. At least with lounge access, I get that subpar food & coffee for free plus somewhere to sit. With a family, that can save a significant chunk of money off the cost of a holiday.
> With a family, that can save a significant chunk of money off the cost of a holiday.
How long are y'all sitting around in lounges?
If a small meal / snack saves a significant chunk of money off the cost of a holiday then one of us is not doing it right.
Flights and accommodation are the lions share of costs as far as my limited experience goes.
(P.S. I was meant to be leaving for Japan this morning, but family medical emergency has ruled it out. Flights were $5,500. I'd hope that airport food costs wouldn't raise a blip on a radar set to that scale).
I wonder why you called it asocial.
Asocial people are great because they lack exactly this kind of status seeking and don't feel the need to engage in zero-sum social games. They just do what they like, which often is something actually productive or fun.
This behavior is anti-social. It actively harms everyone else except the person (or group) doing it.
Australian FF points programs ceased being about flights long ago, now they are a complex web of data harvesting and cross promotion. Why are our airlines offering homeloans, health insurance and retirement investment funds?
If you wanted to be generous you could say it the other way around, moving some features to premium allows people who value time and money differently to still get the bulk of the value they want out of the proposition. I don't for one minute think that's the actual conversation had in HQ but it's still valid I guess.
> What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium
That's simply discovering the true price of a product. We're living in a mega-inflationary period, but most people won't accept that a dollar or a euro is actually worth no more than 30 cents. So sellers are putting things which used to be included at a premium price. If people pay, then that is the price.
It's highly annoying as a customer, but the general public won't accept that product and services they pay for cost double than they used to. At the same time the general public demands that their real estate and stock investments should be valued at triple or quadruple than what they used to.
> when everyone has wound up paying the premium
just scale premiums in cost and number...
"how that didn't get them excluded as a corporate scofflaw is beyond me)" The essence to breaking crony capitalism. No prosecution. No change. Fines do not work. For a start, it's the shareholder that pays. Prosecute the executives with more than just a wag of the finger, and it changes behaviour.
I thought the name of Uber was all you needed to know, what kind of company names themselves after "Deutschland über alles", or Übermensch? The smug superiority was all the clue I needed.
[dead]
>My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off.
Eh I wouldnt speak for all of us. I like having the ability to reward contractors with some extra cash for a job well done. The issue is structurally relying on it.
Shit, when I was 14 or so I worked as a baggage handler. And I will never forget the time we took on an overflow job from an american cruise liner at circular quay. Not only was I getting 20 bucks an hour (decent pay at the time), but I took home an extra 1100 or so completely tax free. Nothing as australian as cash in hand.
>That said, I hated Uber, they actually offered to underwrite people breaking the law to get foot in the door
Its always moral to break unjust laws. The taxi monopolies needed to be broken. Having those laws challenged thanks to the donation of US VC money was just a bonus.
Actually theres still work to be done. Sydney CBD is still extremely hostile to rideshare.
Yeah but it's one thing to tip for a job well done and a whole other thing to have to tip even for a job done middlingly.
Noted. Some people here like tips as a discretionary option. I think folding it into the paywave terminal is .. naff.
Hard to do any kind of tip these days without adding it to the terminal.
> who think needing clean underwear is weak.
Washing clothes was discovered several thousands years ago.
And boarding plane is much faster. I really do not want to pay for your luggage!
Boarding the plane would be much faster if everyone didn’t have the maximum sized carry-on because they’re trying to avoid paying for a checked bag.
The fact that they may make you check it anyways is annoying.
I avoid checking a bag but because it’s price sensitive; its because so much of the airline experience is just idle dead time and I’d like to avoid spending an extra 45 minutes waiting around at baggage claim.
Having everyone check bags is just trading waiting at one area for waiting in another area
Since they tend to do that at the check in gate and slow boarding, I think it’s more adding waiting at one area and also at another area.
> Washing clothes was discovered several thousands years ago.
So you carry high quality detergent, and clean washing machine with delicate setting, and then air dry your clothes? Nice.
Yes, I carry a few grams of detergent powder in a zip lock bag. I wash in clean dry bag to avoid dirty sinks. And I air dry my clothes over night!
It is simpler and faster than dealing with hotel laundry, laundromat or carrying extra 10kg of clothes around!
> Yes, I carry a few grams of detergent powder in a zip lock bag.
This guy International Travels.
You just wear your dirty clothes in the shower. No worry about shrinking or stretching either. They will even air dry while you're wearing them if carrying a second set of clothes is not an option.
The big problem with traveling without any bags at all is that you get flagged by security for extra attention. Turns out terrorists are too cheap to buy a set of luggage and a return ticket if they're just going to blow themselves up.
We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement.
This isn't theoretical, it's happening right now. The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people, the shift from public feeds to private DMs, and the "Do Not Disturb" generation are all symptoms of the same thing. People are feeling the manipulation and are choosing to opt out, one notification at a time.
> disengagement.
That disengagement metric is valuable, I'm not gonna give it away for free anymore. I'll engage and disengage randomly, so no one knows what works.
> The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people
That's a market now. It doesn't mean shit. It's a "lifestyle".
> People are feeling the manipulation
They don't. Even manipulation awareness is a market now. I'm sure there are YouTubers who thrive on it.
---
How far can you game a profiling algorithm? Can you make it think something about you that you're not? How much can one break it?
Those are the interesting questions.
There's nothing an algorithm can do against disciplined, intentional engagement.
If you know which car you want to buy it doesn't matter what the salesman has to say.
> If you know which car you want to buy it doesn't matter what the salesman has to say.
Sure it does. The salesman may have information you were not aware of. They could even tell you something which satisfies your needs better and is cheaper. Not all salesman are out to screw you, some really care about a happy customer.
I’m reminded of an old Hypercritical episode. If you ever heard John Siracusa, you know he does his research and knows what he wants. Yet when it came time buy a TV, which he had intensively researched, the salesman mentioned plasma and how the tech had improved and it threw a wrench in Siracusa’s whole decision.
https://overcast.fm/+AA3EXrnIDrA/1:23:08
The heuristic is that pretty much anyone who is trying to sell you something is out to screw you. They are probably lying, and they are probably trying to get a quick buck from people who don't know better. And when I say anyone, I mean anyone. Youtubers, anyone on TikTok who links anything, advertisements on the web, billboards.
It's not 100% but if you follow the heuristic you save a lot of money and generally have higher quality goods in your life.
The reason we got into this mess is because advertising on the internet broke all the rules. Now lying is de-facto allowed. So then everyone else followed suit to compete. If your competitors are lying, you cannot afford not to lie.
So now all advertisement and sales are compromised and should not be trusted. Even large, previously trusted corporations are running scams in America. Professionals making six figures are acting as con artists. It's unbelievable how fast the situation has deteriorated.
Exactly. People say "Oh, I'm not affected by advertising, and I ignore sales pitches. I am very smart and do my own research!" But what are they researching? Marketing literature! They think they are informing themselves, but in reality, they are just seeking out marketing disguised as impartial facts.
I laugh when people say "I use site:reddit.com to scope my Google searches for product information because I'm getting impartial information from real people."
How intensively can you possibly have researched if a salesman mentioning an entire category of display technology is a curve ball for you.
> How intensively can you possibly have researched
Listen to it. Start way before the given timestamp.
The salesman can cut the car you want from your buying options, or stick conditions on it that will make up for the difference with the other models.
That's what we're seeing with Youtube for instance: your choice is to pay Youtube's price for Premium (litteraly paying to not get bullied), sit through all the ads in the world, or get three strikes after playing the ad-blocking cat and mouse game for long enough.
Of course you're still free to go somewhere else, in a world where even public guides and presentations will often be pushed on youtube only, to alleviate for the bandwidth costs on standard web services.
> The salesman can cut the car you want from your buying options, or stick conditions on it that will make up for the difference with the other models.
My favourite approach to this is to write an email to all dealerships within the radius I’m willing to go, explaining what I want, then “publicly” make them bid for my business in a thread with their peers. I’ve had it work several times now.
> get three strikes after playing the ad-blocking cat and mouse game for long enough
I've never encountered this. What is it?
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14129599?hl=en
Depending on when you look at it, it might be worked around or fully enforced again, it comes and go, but at least Youtube doesn't seem willing to give up that stance entirely.
People using subpar ad blockers mostly, or more than one.
To note, what u-block is doing to workaround this is far from the trival "just block the ad" behavior, and I expect it to break again (perhaps within weeks ?)
Then the waltz will go on as usual, until the ads are straight baked into the video-feed with the server refusing to serve the rest of the content on a per-client base.
What car you want to buy is just one tiny part of the transaction. The salesman can and will manipulate you on everything else from price to warranty, from payment schedule to cross-sale rebates, from maintenance subscription to registration fees, from additional options to spare tires.
You're right, they can try to manipulate you on a thousand tiny things. My counter-argument is that at a certain point, it's not worth the mental energy to fight over what amounts to pennies on the dollar.
Anecdotally, when I bought my car recently, they forgot to even offer me the extended warranty they'd planned to push. I find it funny to think it was so minor, even they forgot to care.
Tangential, but I think most extended warranties I've noticed are beneficial. Even last month I was kicking myself for forgetting to extend a 2 year warranty which costs 1/4th the one time repair cost I had to cough up.
Are you sure the extended warranty would have covered it?
I paid for an extended warranty on the first car I ever bought. Turned out it didn't cover any of the things the salesperson cited as good reasons to pay for it, and to maintain the warranty, I'd have to pay the dealer for all maintenance - even oil changes.
That car never needed any repairs, but seeing the list of exclusions convinced me to never pay for an extended warranty again.
> but I think most extended warranties I've noticed are beneficial.
If this were true, it would result in a loss for the issuer of the warranty.
Interesting. Can you expand a bit on what your reasoning is so we can understand where you come from?
I guess I should have specified financial benefit.
You wouldn't pay someone else to insure a common vegetable, because it is so low cost that if it turned out to be bad, you would just buy another one (or have bought extra as your insurance).
When you buy from Walmart/Target/Amazon/Best Buy, they will try to sell you insurance for a $30 toaster or other cheap appliance. Again, most people will not buy this because they will believe the appliance will work sufficiently long or that the warranty process will be too time consuming, or otherwise decide that just quickly replacing the cheap appliance with another is the preferred way to insure it.
The insurance seller is a business and has to earn more than what they pay out for claims (or at least to make payroll if it is a mutual insurance company). Otherwise, they are going to lose money over time and go out of business. If you financially benefit from it, then you are either lucky, or had an information edge over the insurance underwriter.
Of course, if you get peace of mind from buying insurance, and count that as a benefit, then most insurance is beneficial in that case.
That is really not how the insurance seller's business model works.
Think about it this way: on a given year, they are collecting "Sales" amount of money from their pool of customers. For the insurer to make a profit, the amount reimbursed to legit claims simply has to be less than Sales-Expenses that year, which basically translates to having Z customers claims on any given year where Z << NbOfCustomers.
So it's a bit like a Ponzi scheme, whereby you can benefit as a customer if you pay year 1 and get a claim during year 1 or 2 for example, and the insurer can benefit too if many customers pay "a year in advance" (money that can be invested) before having their claims fall on years 2 or 3 (or never).
The customers can earn investment returns just like the insurance seller, so you have to reduce foregone returns from the insurance buyer’s benefit so it ends up canceling out.
>For the insurer to make a profit, the amount reimbursed to legit claims simply has to be less than Sales-Expenses that year, which basically translates to having Z customers claims on any given year where Z << NbOfCustomers.
That inequality does not “basically translate”. Insurance sellers have to exist for multiple years, not just 1 year.
If every single year, “customer claims” are less than the net benefit of customers, which is what I think you wrote although it is hard to interpret, then your “net benefit of customers” includes a non cash component (such as feeling secure)”.
There is never a free lunch, and the insurance business is not at all like a Ponzi scheme (that’s the whole point of actuaries performing calculations…to ensure sustainability without an ever growing income stream).
That's not how insurance works
I meant financially benefit. See
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44490667
Insurance seller has to earn at least enough for payroll, so at least some of the premiums go towards that instead of any money received from claims.
Investment earnings cancel out because both the insurance buyer and insurance seller have access to same returns via broad market index funds. I.e. you can self insure and get the same returns on your savings that the insurance seller is going to get if you gave them a premium.
> it's not worth the mental energy to fight over what amounts to pennies
Maybe it's not about the money. Maybe I see it challenging profiling algorithms as entertainment.
I wonder if there are other kinds of profiling algorithms not related to sales.
Depends on your definition of sale, but influencing elections comes to mind.
> Those are the interesting questions.
Not to me. I don't want to manipulate the manipulators. I just want to not be manipulated. I want to be able to go through my day without having to fight off manipulation in order to do and be what I want to do and be.
The goal is my freedom, not to "stick it to the man" in some way that won't actually matter to them.
> The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people
>> That's a market now. It doesn't mean shit. It's a "lifestyle".
The fact that there's such a market now, means something on it's own I believe. Regardless if it's a "lifestyle", it's a lifestyle people are choosing now. I know more and more people who either don't own a smartphone or have it on DnD at all times.
It's the same for "manipulation awareness" or whatever. You can't will a market into existence, the market has to already exist because people are drawn to it.
I am not saying that it will matter in the end, but I can say for a fact that there are people consciously disengaging from social media.
> there are people consciously disengaging from social media
There are people _voluntarily_ disengaging. It is different.
We're talking about manipulation, you have to consider the possibility of unconscious decisions.
The Algorithm doesn't care if you're illegible. How ever much you mess with it, you're still its plaything.
The algorithm still can't make me buy or read rage-bait.
Of course the machine will never stop trying. But with results decreasing gradually with time, the human will get discouraged and will turn it off. It happens at places, btw.
I'm not trying to shake it off.
ineligible or illegible?
illegible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State#Summary
> How far can you game a profiling algorithm?
I think pretty far. I expect the future involves nonsense layer full of AI slop being read and written by AI's. Mapping it onto the actual humans will be difficult unless you have a preexisting trust relationship with those humans such that they can decrypt the slop into your actual communications.
I think it's more difficult than it seems.
If I were an algorithm-profiling company I would try to anchor my profilings in the real world (what kinds of people I talk to, about what, what kinds of places I visit, what are the opinions of others on me, etc). LLM garbage would be just to draw voluntary participation in potential surveys.
It takes a particularly paranoid and stubborn individual to make the necessary efforts to consider what kinds of profiling could be done with such anchored data, and even more effort to probe it enough to acquire some knowledge on how it works.
I agree that it's currently paranoid to hide your activities so that the algorithm profiling companies see you as several different people, or see the activities of millions as if they're just one... Automated misdirection on the part of the users is, so far, minimal.
But the point of such a company is to sell data on individuals, and a problematic use case for such data is to kill the ones who say things that you don't like. As that becomes cheaper and easier to do I think we'll find that it's not so paranoid to hide.
Maybe the endgame is honesty. Not pretending you're several people, or other convoluted ways of misdirection and disguise.
Just honestly acknowledge that profiling exists, and explicitly work against it.
That should be enough to make any algorithm company that notices something is wrong to trip on its own wires, thinking some more elaborate form of hackery/covertion is being employed.
The likelyhood of some company noticing a single user is quite low though, but if you are able to hook even a single person inside that company using nothing but honesty and no tricks, that is the best trick of all.
My proposal wasn't that individuals should juggle accounts and cookies in a machine-vs-human game of cat and mouse, but rather that we should rewrite the protocols we use to play that game for us. I don't think there's anything dishonest about that--it's just that making computers lie to each other is the honest work of protecting well-meaning humans from malicious humans.
Do you have a different sort of explicitly working against profiling that you had in mind?
Just being honest, mostly.
I'll say things I know will get me downvoted.
I'll criticize things that could benefit me if I think they're manipulative.
I won't do alt accounts even if everyone does it.
I think most surveillance and advertisement relies on social dynamics. I attempt to play the algorithms but not the people. Sometimes it will get misunderstood, and that's fine.
Ah, well I hope that sharing your honest opinion about it turns out to be an effective strategy. But I'm afraid we'll regret not interfering more directly than that.
I think surveillance is very, very advanced. But the active meddling thing is old tricks.
One should consider this combination. You can't lie to some systems, the better strategy is to be honest. You can lie to some systems, but these won't be load bearing, so why do it?
I will also observe back. The active meddling thing, when observed in action, is a source of information. It could be lying to me too, predicting that observability is inevitable and camouflaging it. Of course, I could be predicting that as well (and so on).
Notice how many interesting scenarios exist even if honesty is considered as a viable strategy in a total surveillance hypothetical situation?
> The active meddling thing, when observed in action, is a source of information.
Not if it's done right. If one person views a page the old-fashioned way, caches the DOM, and circulates it peer-to-peer, then whoever is weaponizing that content only has one browser fingerprint to work with, despite there being potentially thousands of users that they wish they could profile.
That's far less information to work with than the thousands of individual requests they would otherwise have to scrutinize.
The honest/dishonest distinction only comes down to whether you're going to try to protect the volunteer who grabbed the page to begin with, or whether you're going to expose them to retribution.
As for the systems you can't lie to, those you can replace with more trustworthy alternatives. This is a lot of work but it's better than suggesting that your peers be honest in ways that will harm them.
So to answer your question, no. None of the scenarios where you let your adversary know that you're working against them, and also let them know how to find and harm you, are interesting strategies for combatting surveillance.
Surveillance exists in support of targeted coercion. We should not make a target of the more honest among us. We need to protect those people most of all.
We're talking about different things.
You need to imagine a surveillance system that you cannot lie to, and cannot avoid or replace. It will be there, no way of escaping it. Sattelites, network monitoring, doesn't matter. Assume it exists.
Anyone in control of such hypothetical systems can act upon the surveillance information to manipulate a target (not only observe it). This could be done in several ways. LLM bots encouraging you to volunteer information, gaslighting, etc.
The load bearing component of such surveillance systems are _not_ these actors (LLMs, bots, etc). It's _the need for surveillance_.
What encourages a society to produce surveillance in the first place? Catching bad guys, protecting people, etc. I'm not saying that I agree with it, it is just that this is the way it works.
Anyone doing shady things is a reason for surveillance to exist. Lying is one of those things, making LLM bots is one of those things. Therefore, to target the load bearing aspect of surveillance, I need to walk in a straight line (I won't deploy LLM bots, create alt accounts, etc). There should be no reason to surveil me, unless whoever is in control is some kind of dictator or developed some kind of fixation on me (then, it's their problem not mine).
I can do simple things, like watching videos I don't particularly like, or post nonsense creative stories in a blog, or just simple things designed to hide nothing (they're playful, no intent). Why does someone cares about what I post in a blog that no one visits? Why does someone care about the videos I watch? If someone starts to act on those things, it is because I'm being surveiled. They're honeypots for surveillance, there's nothig behind them.
With those, I can more easily see whoever is trying to act upon my public information by marking it. They will believe they're targeting my worldviews or preferences or personality, but they're actually "marked with high-visibility paint". In fact, I leave explicit notes about it, like "do not interact with this stuff". Only automated surveillance systems (unable to reason) or fanatic stalkers (unable to reason) would ignore those clear warnings.
This strategy is, like I mentioned, mostly based on honesty. It targets the load bearing aspects of surveilance (the need for it), by making it useless and unecessary (why are you surveiling me? I see how you are acting upon it).
It's not about making honest people targets, it's about making surveillance useless.
I suppose we are. I generally assume that someone, somewhere, has something to hide: something that benefits me if they're allowed to keep it hidden. History is full of these characters, they keep the establishment in check, prevent it from treating the rest of us too badly.
If the powers that be could know with certainty that all of us planned to behave and would never move against them (or could neutralize those who had been honest about their intent to do so), then I think things would be much worse for the common folk than they are now. It's hard not to see your strategy as a path to that outcome.
> keep the establishment in check
The ultimate subversion of the estabilishment is raw honesty. Honesty produces an environment that disables unjust distribution of power.
> never move against them
That's inaction, not honesty.
> It's hard not to see your strategy as a path to that outcome.
That's ok, my strategy does not require you to understand it. I don't need to create informative material or convince people.
> Honesty produces an environment that disables unjust distribution of power
How does this work?
In theory, I shouldn't need to explain this.
Have you read anything by Mark Fisher? He spoke about capitalism absorbing all resistance which makes it almost impossible to ever escape from. Which is what you’re saying I think. Resistance becomes the next market and works through the same economic systems it’s attempting to resist.
David Foster Wallace made a similar argument about Television being able to absorb, re-contextualize, and subsequently market any effort opposed to it as a cause of malignant addiction and abdication of societal responsibilities in his essay E. Unibus Pluram.
Today you can probably substitute television for YouTube, TikTok, etc, but the argument still holds up, perhaps better than ever.
It's sad he can't witness the death of television
> I'll engage and disengage randomly, so no one knows what works.
Any predictable pattern, including when you disengage, is just another feature for the pricing model. If the model learns you reliably leave after 3 hours, it will simply front-load the surge pricing into that initial window.
Hope this helps :)At which point the user disengages from the platform permanently. Great work.
He said randomly, which means the opposite of predictable or reliable. Sometimes he won't disengage for years and the algorithm would be non the wiser!
You cannot disengage from capitalism. The tricks you describe are perhaps useful to not be the slowest antelope in the herd but that doesn't mean you are fully free from being exploited.
Let's be clear: it's entirely possible to leave the "herd". People can and do go completely off-grid and thus disengage from capitalism. The crucial point is that the vast majority of us choose not to. That choice is what makes your "slowest antelope" analogy so much more complex.
An antelope's greatest desire is to be in the herd, because while it may contain a lion, the world outside contains a thousand wolves.
We've built a herd—society—that is incredibly effective at holding those wolves at bay: famine, plague, and chaos. We willingly participate because it provides "shields" our ancestors could only dream of. The problem isn't the herd itself; it's the lion that we allow to stalk within it.
What I am suggesting isn't to abandon this safety and comfort brought by modern capitalism. It's to improve the herd—to enjoy its protections while finding ways to tame, cage, or evade the lion of exploitation. What we're discussing here aren't futile attempts to escape, but vital tactics for building a better, safer herd for everyone.
Sure, a choice to opt out technically exists. But that common argument ignores two things:
First, the massive asymmetry of power involved in making people choose opting in (again and again, to greater and greater degrees).
Second, the fact that unrelated penalties—severe ones—are attached to choosing to opt out, by people and systems who want to discourage this behavior. It’s not like saying “choosing to not eat means you might be hungry”. That’s an intrinsic consequence; it has to happen. It’s not even like “choosing not to eat again and again means you might stunt your growth.” That’s intrinsic too, whether or not it’s intuitive.
No, the penalties we’ve attached to opting out are more like “choosing not to eat means you might go hungry, and also the people with hammers that specifically go after people that don’t eat will break your fingers.”
In essence, the lion is the monopolies and the ultra rich (who are consequences of monopolies … and inheritance).
Sure capitalism offered us the herd. But too big companies/people are just a net negative.
I hope someone today will have the courage to dismantle those big actors. Except, at least in the US, they now are protected by fascism.
Of course you can disengage, and very effectively: spend less, work less. Touch grass. It's called Asceticism and is as old as Philosophy.
The most exploitative and unfree societies are and always have been the ones that rejected the free market.
Somalia: Land Of The Free
Pierce Hawthorne compared it to Shangri-La
they'll just go after the elusive "disengagement dollar"
watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY linkhead removed for language and content, but you know what to do (and probably who it is)
I've long since checked out (2012) from social media and apps that commodify and monetize every little aspect of life.
> We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement.
It's worth adding that "disengagement" does not mean "not giving a f*ck", and I worry that it isn't a good human response either.
So what's the difference between "not giving a f*ck" and "disengagement"? I think where the former works on the individual level, the latter is supposed to work on the collective level. I'm no scholar on any social sciences, mind you, but I worry that disengagement can only lead to positive change in conjunction with the Broken windows theory[0]. Here's the bummer: A lot of us are already in said stage of disengagement.
We somehow are in an atmosphere that makes it unpleasant for everyone and let the environment decay together, but the provoked collective change is just not happening. The dumbphone and digital detoxes are outliers. What happens instead is that the threshold for what's acceptable is systematically being lowered, and my biggest gripe is that it's done in the name of equality and inclusion while the imbalance between demographics is just growing. Tell me why?
There was a movement after Occupy Wall street and the Arabic Spring where it got fashionable to Not Giving a F*ck[1]. It contrasted a movement of self-optimization, growth-hacking, and some data-driven lifestyle usually reserved for corporate marketing. Morphemes such as hyper/super/über got resurrected from a nostalgic sentiment of the economic boom in the 80/90s, the neoliberal free-market Accelerationism and Bitcoin certainly fit in there. While "not giving a f*ck" was a critique of the established attention-grabbing system to promote the individuality of citizens, it also got misinterpreted by political representatives and corporate operators that started to put more focus on their own career than the responsibility of their current role. They all "didn't give a f*ck" anymore in a world that got more and more connected, year after year.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Subtle_Art_of_Not_Giving_a...
You can spell out "fuck" here, we’re all adults. And the president does it on live TV too!
> If you open a government S&P 500 account for everyone with $1,000 at birth that’ll pay their social security cause it like…goes up…wait who’s creating this value again?
This is a good point. Some VCs were major proponents of this (and tons of other business people I'm sure), but this is of course just a guaranteed inflow into the largest companies and the companies that think they will be large some day. Yet another way to reallocate public cash to private companies.
Another similar example is UBI -- its proof of an economy that is not dynamic. It's a tacit approval and recognition of the fact that "no, you probably won't be able to find a job with dignity that can support you and your family, so the government will pay to make you comfortable while you exist".
> make you comfortable while you exist
I don't think there are many proponents of that type of ubi.
The way, at least I, see ubi is absolute subsistence - with a right to earn above that without affecting your subsistence.
IMHO something along UBI is needed for a democratized market economy - and I think the Scandinavian countries are the support for this claim.
During the depression this was done with a job guarantee. Instead of paying people to sit on their ass they paid people to build stuff like the Lincoln tunnel, which was preferable for them (and even for us, we still use that stuff).
UBI is more like the grain dole which Roman Emperors used to temper mass unrest and "prove" their benevolence.
It seems to be in vogue among tech moguls who cant distinguish between abject dependence on the Chinese industrial system/systematic underinvestment in infrastructure and all jobs being automated thanks to their glorious genius.
This would sound like a good solution.
The main difference from then, however, is that it is difficult to give each man a showel to dig and each woman a kid to care for this time.
People need qualifications to operate heavy machinery, know regulations, etc. - we are not in 1934 anymore.
As such we also don't need 30% og the population in the farming sector.
In 1934 people were trained on the job. This was as true in the WPA as it was outside.
What changed is not the newfound impossibility of doing that, just the reluctance of employers to pay for it and the willingness of the government to indulge their insatiable demand for cheap, pretrained labor.
I find it difficult to believe that the price of training has not gone up.
I am not as convinced as you. When training is 7 year degree to achieve some specialization it simply is not for everyone.
Also, ubi is not anti work - it is merely the acknowledgement that not everyone have salary worthy things to do.
The alternative it havy financialization as in you receive a tip when you bring down you neighbors garbage.
there are many reasons to be against a job guarantee but the presumption that every potential job nowadays requires a 7 year degree is a particularly bad one.
That is not the presumption - I trust that you are enough of a non-LLM to properly understand the message behind the words.
This is what you wrote:
>When training is 7 year degree to achieve some specialization
>properly understand the message behind the words
You should probably say what you mean if you want people to hear what you mean. I dont have the patience to listen to metaphors.
If everyone gets an equal raise (whatever the UBI is), wouldn’t the entire market simply adjust to price that in, leaving everyone in the same relative position?
Yes, IMO that's exactly what will happen, except companies that can best compete for their share of this $1000 will get a government funded revenue stream (think Amazon, Netflix, rent seeking enterprises, etc).
I have not heard a convincing argument the other way, would really appreciate a link to one if you find one.
A class of people would have a larger spending power.
Naturally, implementing UBI would require the entire financial sector to adjust. We would likely need to significantly raise interest rates (Which, IMHO would be great) and have a period to manage inflation.
But beside the initial recalibration phase, I have not seen any convincing arguments for why prices on non-positional goods would increase. Even with the increase interest rates, we would likely see that prices on positional goods / assets would stabilize as dead-cheap capital is not available.
> A class of people would have a larger spending power.
Spending power with no real alternatives (i.e. in monopoly/oligopoly conditions) isn't actually very useful IMO. It's mostly just more guaranteed money for the current monopoly/oligopoly -- you're just guaranteeing revenue streams.
In a pre-UBI world, you can at least assume that companies can't completely shaft employees because then no one can buy anything. If the government steps in to make sure people can still buy stuff, that has almost the opposite effect.
I think walmart & it's treatment of employees (with employees reportedly needing to ALSO depend on food stamps) as a perfect example of the system kind of working against itself. The fix for that problem is within our reach right now, but it's just unpopular for the usual reasons with the people with the ability to make the fix.
> Naturally, implementing UBI would require the entire financial sector to adjust. We would likely need to significantly raise interest rates (Which, IMHO would be great) and have a period to manage inflation. > > But beside the initial recalibration phase, I have not seen any convincing arguments for why prices on non-positional goods would increase. Even with the increase interest rates, we would likely see that prices on positional goods / assets would stabilize as dead-cheap capital is not available.
OK, so then how about we do this without the UBI bit and just raise interest rates? I'm not seeing where UBI actually has a material benefit here, and there are other real problems with raising interest rates, because losing access to cheap credit also hurts those at the bottom of the economy (arguably even more) -- the solution there is political, likely (i.e. lower income borrowers could somehow be advantaged, but then we have shades of 2008 all over again if excessive greed/moral hazard sets in).
> In a pre-UBI world, you can at least assume that companies can't completely shaft employees because then no one can buy anything. If the government steps in to make sure people can still buy stuff, that has almost the opposite effect.
In my first comment I referred the Scandinavian countries. Read up on the flexicurity model of Denmark.
> OK, so then how about we do this without the UBI bit and just raise interest rates?
You cannot within the confines of the responsibility of the monetary systems (Eg. The FED). What you are seeing now is that the FED "prints" money that accumulate at the top because the fiscal powers (Eg. the government) are p*sies who do not dare to redistribute - this is called the velocity of money. And there is a higher velocity of money when they are in the hands of the people than in the pockets of the rich.
Regardless, proposing UBI on American forums is generally like setting fire to a wasp nest. Americans have been conditioned to support the oligarchy in quite some decades now.
> In my first comment I referred the Scandinavian countries. Read up on the flexicurity model of Denmark.
Denmark does not have UBI. They "just" have a good welfare system, good income redistribution policies, and strong labor policy.
They do not make the case for UBI, they make the opposite case -- that the problems of present can be solved without UBI.
> You cannot within the confines of the responsibility of the monetary systems (Eg. The FED). What you are seeing now is that the FED "prints" money that accumulate at the top because the fiscal powers (Eg. the government) are psies who do not dare to redistribute - this is called the velocity of money. And there is a higher velocity of money when they are in the hands of the people than in the pockets of the rich.
You can, and they have. In fact, much of the US wants the FED to lower rates right now, but they have not.
I agree with you that people lack the wherewithal to redistribute more effectively, or at least as a stated goal.
Trying to make sure I'm hitting the points you're noting here but the FED is not "printing" tons of money right now, they have tightened monetary policy, especially relative to the last ~6 years.
It's unclear if the use of "velocity of money" is right here -- I think you're referring to propensity to spend, which would increase velocity of money. Yes, poor people spend more of their income than rich people, and that is stimulative to the economy, and so arguably policies should be crafted that encourage productive work for pay rather than rent seeking or pure accumulation of capital. I'm not sure if that's your point, but that's what I take away from it.
> Regardless, proposing UBI on American forums is generally like setting fire to a wasp nest. Americans have been conditioned to support the oligarchy in quite some decades now.
Welp, that's kind of an unproductive way to end, but sure. Conditioned or not (I'm American), I'm still looking for a good argument for UBI and haven't found one.
Good arguments for better redistribution are easy to make, good argument for higher taxes are good to make, good arguments for better social safety nets are easy to make -- but still can't really find one for UBI specifically above the other options.
> but still can't really find one for UBI specifically above the other options.
There are a lot of good arguments: stability of monetary systems, democratized marketeconomy, equality, etc.
Just like with other things there is an infinite number of solutions for a given problem.
I stick to Occams razor.
No, because the money isn't being printed, it is being reallocated from whatever it would have been spent on either by the people we tax to get it, or by the government who would have spent it on other things. Proponents contend that the economy is better off when people have a baseline income so that they can invest their time in productive things which may be beneficial, like going to school, having more time to raise their children, or starting a business, or volunteering, whatever, without worrying about how they are going to feed themselves. This would be opposed to whatever tax breaks we would be giving that would end up in a trust, foundation, or a VC fund, or whatever the government would have spent it on.
Note, I have no position on whether or not it would work in this way, but that is my understanding of the position of the those in favor of it.
Even at first order, it makes the people at the bottom relatively better off. If we go from Alice having 600, Bob having 0, and Carol having 0, to Alice having 700, Bob having 100, and Carol having 100, then Bob and Carol are still more able to buy things than they were before even if prices now increase by 50%.
Yes, being shortsighted ignores the rubber band effect that then disproportionately hurts those people down the road.
The arguments against UBI are pretty much the same against rising minimum wages. That being, the baseline just moves, so everything gets more expensive, so the situation doesn't improve at all.
It intuitively makes sense, and like most economic reasoning it's horribly simple. But economics is comprised to two parts: theory, and practice.
Practice always trumps theory. If practice defies your theory, it doesn't mean that the market is broken, or that there's over-regulation, or that your theory will eventually come true. It means your theory is just wrong. All economic theory are predicated on thousands or millions of underlying assumptions. If even just a few of those are not true, or aren't true in the way you think they are, then the theory can be wrong while simultaneously being logically perfect.
When it comes to the arguments against minimum wage, the theory is just wrong. Rising minimum wages do help people making minimum wage. If it does raise the COL, it's slowly, and not in the same degree as the minimum wage shift. In addition, a flat minimum wage still results in a rising COL. You can't simply pin the COL like that.
So knowing what we know about minimum wage, I think it's arrogant to claim the UBI would just result in a rising COL to eat up all the UBI.
A descriminator between minimum wage and ubi is location.
UBI (if people trust that it will continue) will encourage people moving out of the cities as they don't need to be close to jobs.
I would hypotheses that this would 1) create new more local economies (where people can earn money) and 2) reduce pressure on the hyper metropols.
I would even hypothesize that because of this, it would have an adverse effect on the cost of living.
Butnthese a theories.
Price/income increases don't happen in a vacuum, it takes a while for it to become normal. If you got a £50 bonus and decide to get yourself to a McDonalds, only to find they've raised the price of their burgers to £50, would you still buy the burger? Your situation would be the same as before so logically you would, but of course you wouldn't. That price increase has overall lost Mcdonalds money, since now you're not buying anything (assuming everything else they sell also went up a proportional amount).
Obviously there are essentials that can effectively be at any price and you have to pay them if you can afford them, but everything else is fair game.
My intuition is that it wouldn't change the ranking of people's wealths, but it would make a big difference in the ratio between a top 10 percentile income and a bottom 10 percentile income
Edit- although even that is an oversimplification because I think in some cases it might encourage people to make more money. I know a handful of people who intentionally limit their income because of gaps in means testing. eg there's a window where you start making too much to take advantage of some govt social services, but not enough to pay for those services yourself (healthcare is a big one)
Only of positional goods. Ie. Houses in attractive quarters etc.
On the contrary, we would likely see non positional goods become cheaper as the market is alive and companies can continue to produce at scale.
I don't know about the long term economic effects, but there are people who currently earn less than the subsistence amount who will be better off with UBI than without it.
I don't hope that this is a latent argument pro corporate slavery?
Are you seriously proposing that we need people who are paid below subsistence?
Or was this more an argument for ubi?
People that admit "yes" to this (or similar ones: subsidization causing increasing rent to match, etc) are acknowledging that prices aren't really set by supply and demand, nor were they ever, nor will they ever be.
Prices are as high as companies can get away with charging, and they can collude to get these prices higher if need be, or lie about a product, or spend decades as an industry convincing you that you need something you don't.
If the market worked as economists always scold us that it does when they want less socialism, it wouldn't matter a lick what someone's salary is. That doesn't affect supply and demand, after all.
> I don't think there are many proponents of that type of ubi.
Another good sign of a difficult policy to implement successfully/an idea that isn't ready for primetime. If everyone has different ideas of what the thing is, it's very hard to make good decisions, and easy for the "wrong" UBI to sneak in.
Other commenters have already made this point, but there are other ways to guarantee "subsistence". I think the hard to answer question is why are the targeted methods currently available not good enough? If we want to ensure people have food, then food subsidies/support make sense.
Also, if unemployment is the problem, fix that. If unemployment isn't the problem and people who are working aren't getting subsistence wages, fix that.
I think part of the problem is that no one wants to stick up and define what we think every human deserves and what we want society to provide. Does every human deserve housing? Access to green space? etc. Trying to clearly define this will lead to really interesting discussions that lay bare the disagreements core to society.
I think my early point still stands, UBI is not needed (we're making do without it now), and if it ever is needed, it's a sign of a lack of dynamism in the economy/ineffective wealth distribution mechanisms (basically, taxation).
> Another good sign of a difficult policy to implement successfully/an idea that isn't ready for primetime.
It will never be ready for primetime because the system under which we live requires an underclass of people that are coerced into working jobs that no one really wants to do for abysmally low wages. Because the only other option left for them is homelessness and starvation.
It is an inherently cruel system, but this cruelty is what keep things afloat. Any system that guarantees the basic subsistence of all would not do.
> I think my early point still stands, UBI is not needed (we're making do without it now)
It's important to qualify that "we" as "we that make six figures working in white collar jobs". Yes, "we" are making do without UBI just fine. This "we" does not include the vast majority of people.
Hopefully plummeting birth rates will throw a wrench to this system by making labor a lot more expensive.
> It will never be ready for primetime because the system under which we live requires an underclass of people that are coerced into working jobs that no one really wants to do for abysmally low wages. Because the only other option left for them is homelessness and starvation. > > It is an inherently cruel system, but this cruelty is what keep things afloat. Any system that guarantees the basic subsistence of all would not do.
We're talking about how it might be about to not require the this underclass, and how we might need a UBI to fix that right? Can it be both of these things at once?
Also as a side note, I think that it's kind of arrogant to think we can create a society where no one does work they don't like, for wages that are always perfect. Nature is not that way, and creating those condition is basically asking for utopia. There is probably always a percentage of undesirable outcomes that every society must endure (and undesirable outcomes are a moving target).
I get your stance on the cruelty of the current system, but I want to note that in the span of human time we've had MUCH crueler systems in place. For example in the US despite the perceived high cruelty of the system, soup kitchens exist, governmental help exists -- there are a lot of things that exist that wouldn't exist in a maximally cruel society/one you describe. There are places on the planet we live on now where these safety nets don't exist.
The problem is the relative position of those with the most resources in society to those with the least. That, is fixable.
> It's important to qualify that "we" as "we that make six figures working in white collar jobs". Yes, "we" are making do without UBI just fine. This "we" does not include the vast majority of people.
I mean that we in the sense that no known society has collapsed because of a lack of UBI (would love to be corrected here). UBI is clearly, objectively not a need.
There are other ways to create a society that works for those with and without, what is probably most needed is clarity on those steps/what we want to guarantee people who live in the given society.
I would disagree that the "majority" of people in (for example) the US are against the current situation. The poverty rate (likely a reasonable proxy for an economic system that really isn't working) is not above 50%. People may
It's hard to quantify -- one of the things about sentiment polling is that people often just don't have a good grasp on how well or how badly they're doing. See earlier this year, when sentiment polling basically was incredibly negative, yet the "economy" as a whole is still mostly chugging along and unemployment has not spiked dramatically across all industries. Tech is in dire straits but "regular" jobs like HVAC, Plumbing, etc are doing fantastic AFAIK.
> Hopefully plummeting birth rates will throw a wrench to this system by making labor a lot more expensive.
Yes, except that is happening at the same time that we've turned what could be a huge corner on automation of both white collar and maybe eventually blue collar work.
I think the price of labor needs to go up, but this is only part of the equation. The more direct answer is simpler -- we need higher taxes on businesses or automation or both.
If you want to profit from US citizens (US company or not!), enjoy infrastructure and stability provided by the US, then the price for that can rise. Charge businesses for the jobs they don't create.
The classic refrain to the increased tax is that businesses will leave. I think that's absolute bullshit -- the US is where people want to be for many reasons, and it is incredibly unlikely that companies will unseat themselves to go run their headquarters out of malta or whatever. Also, incredibly unlikely that all the people who work at those companies will go redomicile. Also, INCREDIBLY unlikely that those companies will give up on the incredibly profitable American consumer they're targeting. What we lack is politicians who can/want to reign in corporate power.
> Also as a side note, I think that it's kind of arrogant to think we can create a society where no one does work they don't like, for wages that are always perfect.
I would agree if there were no billionaires in a country where people also cannot afford things such as housing, food, healthcare and basic education. With economic inequality this high, I don't think we are trying hard enough to create a more egalitarian society.
> I get your stance on the cruelty of the current system, but I want to note that in the span of human time we've had MUCH crueler systems in place.
That scaphism is more cruel than stoning as means of execution, it does not make stoning more humane.
I think you get my analogy.
> I mean that we in the sense that no known society has collapsed because of a lack of UBI (would love to be corrected here). UBI is clearly, objectively not a need
No society collapsed directly because of use of slave labor. Many actually thrived in such a system.
That should not be an argument in favor of slavery.
Just because the lack of UBI does not cause society to collapse ot does not mean that a society as inequal as ours cannot be improved.
> Yes, except that is happening at the same time that we've turned what could be a huge corner on automation of both white collar and maybe eventually blue collar work.
I don't think we turned this corner. But if we did, then perhaps it's fine we head towards extinction. With no humans there will be no inequality eh?
> we need higher taxes on businesses or automation or both.
Agreed.
> The classic refrain to the increased tax is that businesses will leave. I think that's absolute bullshit
I always say the same. If businesses leave, but the demand for goods and services in that society still exists, other businesses will occupy that space. Either existing businesses will seize that opportunity or new businesses will spawn.
> What we lack is politicians who can/want to reign in corporate power.
In no small part because our current system favors capital above all else, and excessive capital concentration allows its owners to distort institutions to their will. Excessive economic inequality is a bitch.
Note that I said excessive. I am not against some economic inequality. I think it's alright for a surgeon to have a nicer house and a better car than, say, a store clerk.
I don't think it's alright for one to have a mutiple yachts and mansions on ski resorts, while the other fights starvation.
Not that I think surgeons have multiple yachts or mansions on ski resorts. But I think you get my point.
> I would agree if there were no billionaires in a country where people also cannot afford things such as housing, food, healthcare and basic education. With economic inequality this high, I don't think we are trying hard enough to create a more egalitarian society.
Agreed -- the ratio is a problem. The problem is not that billionaires exist, because that is a slippery slope IMO (you could say the same thing about millionaires, or people who make money WITHOUT working at all -- i.e. wealth). The problem is the ratio. We need to decide what disparity is acceptable for our society, and then enforce that.
Not full on regime change to whatever new government might be better than the current. Just a clear stating of what our values are as a nation, and some numbers.
> That scaphism is more cruel than stoning as means of execution, it does not make stoning more humane. > > I think you get my analogy.
True, but if I had to pick a way to be executed, I don't think it's a hard choice. The analogy has to imply that you have to pick a poison -- there's no utopia.
> No society collapsed directly because of use of slave labor. Many actually thrived in such a system. > > That should not be an argument in favor of slavery. > > Just because the lack of UBI does not cause society to collapse ot does not mean that a society as inequal as ours cannot be improved.
UBI was proposed as a "need". It is not a need -- it is a want, or seen as a moral imperative.
Of course society can be improved, it's a question of how, and UBI is not a convincing how, that's my problem.
I'm not really sure the comparison to slavery here is relevant. I did not imply that the lack of UBI is desirable, just that UBI is not present and not a necessity for any government that exists.
> I don't think we turned this corner. But if we did, then perhaps it's fine we head towards extinction. With no humans there will be no inequality eh?
I think we did -- even if AI stopped where it is right now we already have created a pretty insane new tool. Even if it's only use was surfacing knowledge 5x/10x/100x??? faster than current search engines can, in a way that is more natural to humans. The knock-on effects are profound and likely going to be immeasurable.
Almost completely separate from that, robotics is really progressing. We have self-driving cars, just casually running around right now. We've turned some pretty big corners.
And IMO it's not an ideal outcome to head towards extinction, but it's a possible one. It's arrogant to think that humanity will live on forever, no matter how much we want that to be true.
Very against people who explicitly want extinction though -- pretty anti-human thing to say, and I can't think of something more worthy of suspicion. We worked pretty hard to survive this far.
> I always say the same. If businesses leave, but the demand for goods and services in that society still exists, other businesses will occupy that space. Either existing businesses will seize that opportunity or new businesses will spawn.
Yup, that's an even more compelling argument. Imagine all those companies vacating the space. The absolute explosion of entrepreneurship and new innovation would be transformative, if the interim can be managed through and the right incentives put in place.
> In no small part because our current system favors capital above all else, and excessive capital concentration allows its owners to distort institutions to their will. Excessive economic inequality is a bitch.
I'd agree, except I'd replace "capital" with "power". No political/social system seems to be immune to excessive power accumulation, but IMO current representative and direct democracies are the closest we've ever gotten.
Real politik is a bitch.
> Note that I said excessive. I am not against some economic inequality. I think it's alright for a surgeon to have a nicer house and a better car than, say, a store clerk. > > I don't think it's alright for one to have a mutiple yachts and mansions on ski resorts, while the other fights starvation.
Yup, while I like leaving it up to a market to decide that, I do think markets need to be controlled/have guard rails.
Agree though, the ratio is the problem.
I often think there's a really simple solution that sounds amazing -- just cap the discrepancy between total comp of the lowest employee at a company and the highest one (including the board). Super simple solution that broadcasts values, and is relatively easy to understand.
People might argue that the "most productive" people would lose motivation, but IMO it wouldn't do a thing -- they'd keep their same motivation because the drive (put overly simply, greed) will always be there.
> Another good sign of a difficult policy to implement successfully/an idea that isn't ready for primetime. If everyone has different ideas of what the thing is, it's very hard to make good decisions, and easy for the "wrong" UBI to sneak in.
This is not a reasonable bar for a policy being "ready for primetime". Some version of this is true for practically all policy proposals. The details will always matter, it will always be possible to get details wrong in critical ways, and people will (likely) always disagree on what those are.
It's very funny that you snub UBI in favor of "wealth distribution mechanisms". What do you think UBI is?
It is an allocation to the biggest companies at any time.
ETFs need to rebalance, increase, decrease shares of a given stock and even evict them. Buying shares on SPY exposes you to the current companies but also any companies that will join.
If a company gets evicted, then there is massive drop in their stock pricing as most movement is mechanistic and done by ETFs.
Well massive is relative. For example last week we saw quite the drop in pltr after it was removed from russel2000.
FYI this is not true and has been debunked in newer studies; the reason why it seems true is because companies that enter the SP500 tend to enter it because they're doing well which makes its stock go up. If you control for that factor, presence in the SP500 does not significantly affect the stock price. https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff...
It’s not about SPY per-se, but about ETFs in general. Addition to spy is likely an addition to many other big volume ETFs. Top stocks also join QQQ which is another highly liquid ETF.
Most market volume according to citi is done by ETFs, approximately 80%.
When said ETFs rebalance at start and end of any particular day, we end up with big movements, much wider than the sideways chop we observe during the day when movement is mostly performed MMs that deal with hedging or dropping options value.
So I don’t think it’s the presence to S&P per se, but presence in big ETFs.
Also that paper is from 2012. Market’s a lot different these days.
To be clear, I am not saying that getting in there implies stock go brr. I am saying that in the context of the whole comment chain, buying spy exposes one to all companies that will enter or be evicted from the ETF, which then theoretically funds the companies which then produce value, which returns back as dividends or growth of stock.
If we look deeper though, buying into ETFs likely means the shares that are exchanged are bought and sold by and to MMs, so a whole lot of value is lost to them.
That theory would only be true in a market without shorts and derivatives. In the real world, hedge funds and market makers will sell into those pension funds, as the underlying asset value has not actually changed, counterbalancing the effect.
Generally, I'd be wary of doing theoretical stock analyses like that. They can be true, but if they're this simple they're almost never true in practice, and if they are then someone is already working on making it not true.
Hedge Funds call ETFs, pension funds, etc. "dumb money". I suspect they also feed the finance media narrative stating how on average they are not good at trading.
There’s money to be made alright, but I don’t think most retail traders are in the position to do that.
Technical analysis might as well be astrology. It treats tickers as isolated when in reality ETFs and growth of any individual stock in an ETF affects the flow in and out of other ETFs. When ETFs purchase stock due to an increase in value, they seek most liquid constituents first, and eventually rebalance. All these create feedback loops. The flow across the ETFs drives 80% of volume.
People would have higher performance if they learned about any particular sector, its movement and long term trends.
Retail has a lot of flexibility but people focus on trading over days instead of understanding trends and events of tomorrow, next year and the next decade.
Retail options “traders” barely understand the mechanics of at all, let alone the disadvantage they are in. They buy overpriced options with absurd premium that tanks during the chop induced by MMs. They don’t understand how MMs move/manipulate(not in the illegal sense)/shape the market to avoid losing money — they wouldn’t be in this position if they lost money. They just copy trades from traders on discord and hope to make some money.
ETFs are a great way to make money in terms of risk exactly of their rebalancing mechanics.
Everyone doesn’t have to beat the market, just beating inflation and leaving it in the bank is an improvement for the average person. Yes it won’t make people rich tomorrow, but they will be in a better situation next year or the one after than today.
Proof that the USA is the largest exporter of inflation. UBI can not compete with strategic inflation on a global scale.
S&P 500 companies don't get any inflow of cash when their stock is purchased
No, but it makes the stock price appreciate which is even better than a cash inflow for an inside investor since your wealth increases without a taxable event.
They can recapitalize? Ofcause a company has huge benits of having expensive stocks.
I generally avoid George’s non-technical posts because they are… let’s say uninspired.
But here is one that actually makes sense. Of course the self-reflection with who he otherwise praises and spends his time with will never set in, but at least others may take the time to look inward and do something differently.
Something has to change. Even HN seems to have had an increase in sentiment like this in the past few years. Maybe I’m just noticing it more myself. Maybe it’s not just the existence of the Grape, but rather where it came from.
I was hopeful that by titling his post “Are we the baddies?” that he would spend at least a little time reflecting on his role in all this. But he didn’t.
>he would spend at least a little time reflecting
It's Hotz. Why would you waste time expecting that.
I have to wonder if some people are just trying to follow the hype. This reads like the "put a cell phone camera on your dashboard to make a car self-driving" approach to reflection.
I think there is genuine burnout. Also it makes sense that the more grizzled on HN have lived long enough to see the fruits of the labor, perhaps just tangentially, and what it has wrought. Coupled with the industry treating its workers pretty poorly right now and shattering all illusions, it makes sense this sentiment is rising.
Five years ago I got flagged on HN and heard back channel that I was getting passed over for stuff via some little whisper in the right ear because I've been calling this shit out since my come to Jesus moment around it nearly a decade ago.
Today? I don't feel like criticizing Thiel-adjacent authoritarian goons changes my net prospects all that much. It hurts me with 65 and helps with 45 (or something), instead of 95/5 like a few years ago.
I think the burnout is real: the consequences are too obvious and most people are reasonable deep down even if we all get carried away sometimes.
Ah yes geohot. The same guy who used LLMs in advent of code to get on the leaderboard
Whenever I send like a diff summary or something that the bot did I title it: ChatGPT That XYZ Dawg (busy building!)
Hmmm. I'll just leave this here https://x.com/ns123abc/status/1940980667455836578
I don’t use Twitter. I believe it plays a big part in the degradation of society that geohot hot refers to in this article.
Can you share that that post is about and the significance of it in relation to this link?
If you change the domain to xcancel.com, you can see twitter stuff without being on twitter.
The tweet claims a startup built an ai cheating tool, another ripped them off, then a YC backed start up ripped the second group off. The YC backed guy claims he isn't worried about legal because he got the license from gpt.
(Wouldn't that be killer evidence in a lawsuit that the defendant didn't even attempt due diligence?)
https://xcancel.com/ns123abc/status/1940980667455836578
Thank you for the summary; I appreciate it. I’m not really sure how it applies here though.
No problem. I'm basically in the same boat on relevance.
I guess the YC backed guy shows the sort of carelessness that often leads to enshitification?
The author should start with his own product, which stops working if it doesn't connect to the internet at least every 14 days.
https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/a8ec08e5bbc2be0a32...
Or the fact that he volunteered to work for Twitter, which is the ultimate propaganda recommendation algorithm since Musk took over.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/20/23519922/george-hotz-geo...
>Or the fact that he volunteered to work for Twitter
Worse! He volunteered, then went "Hey anyone want an internship? Fix twitter search, Make the code MIT, and then maybe I'll give you an internship."
...had 0 authority to give anyone an internship btw. Dudebro just wanted free fix.
Yeah cause this niche product is the structural source of the problems he cites.
I worked on the original browsers and modern internet infrastructure. I worked on building the hyperscale cloud infra that enables the modern internet. I’ve had my fingers on so much of what is happening. And I felt genuinely like I was helping build some thing better. Then the role of product manager was invented and I regret everything I’ve done.
Would you be willing to expand on that?
Context: built a viable business which I ran for many years. Eventually got seduced and went to work for big(ish) tech as a product manager. It was so divested from what I understood about building great products - however I was fantastic at doing things my way and getting shit done; largely based on what I learned from doing "all the things" at a small business. I had lots of success while also suffering with burnout and anxiety almost constantly.
Worked on incredibly popular cloud and OSS software. Hated most of it - especially what product management and the product-management-industrial-complex was distorting that role to be (divorced from much of reality but also expected to fix bullshit founder/c-suite/old-guard behavior). Oy the Miro boards and endless GDocs comment threads.
I left product (and some wild comp) to go back to building things.
So, I'm not disagreeing, I am just hoping you could expand a bit more on your own personal experience with rise of the product manager role.
Nevertheless, I also don't think PMs and PM-centric culture, are to solely to blame. I've not yet met a leadership team who's behavior and decisions I respect and/or can live with (and yes, it's highly possible I'm the problem).
The title is a reference to a sketch from a UK show, That Mitchell and Webb Look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h242eDB84zY
Anyone who hasn’t seen this show - it is brilliant. Such clever satire.
Dr Death is also a very apt take on modern technology
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Skl71urqKu0
See also 'Bronze orientation':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyu4u3VZYaQ
Thank you. That was marvellous
Classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE.
This one is quite sad. But also hilarious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRbj1Q4tXNo
i m officially old now
There no office for this, go and live youthfully however long you want.
The answer is yes. The answer about how bad is really bad. We humans have never before understood how essential our innate collaboration is nor. Nor have we ever understood how fragile it is. Here are some thought experiments for you.
Take a colony of ants and destroy their ability to use a pheromone trail. What happens?
Take a colony of ants and use the pheromone trail to generate "profit" for some of the ants at the cost of others.
Ants probably have little self consciousness. But add that awareness to them - essentially tell them they are being manipulated - and then perform the above two experiments again.
A good way to understand complex adaptive systems, like the ones we humans use, is to try to build some. See John Holland's "Hidden Order" for some hints on how to go about this.
I find these posts primarily interesting as a sort of demographic heatmap. Like now it has gotten to the point where instead of only chasing their interest of choice (geohot hacking, in this case), this person has become aware of the issue, and been sufficiently motivated to write a post about it.
geohot is pretty deep into the center of the map afaict.
> Someday, people will have to realize we live in a society. What will it take?
From all the podcasts (Trevor Noah, social media in general), etc, one good aspect that I find is now society in a distributed manner can point a finger to social problems. e.g. we desperately need community in our society, by that I mean, we need a modern version of village. Not being individualistic and self-centered in all decisions. Adjusting to each others requirements and needs. Sometimes not asserting yourself on your parents even if you know they are wrong. It is hightime we nurture such an interdependent society, not unbundle ourselves totally and becoming transactional.
As long as we don’t turn needing community into some sinister excuse to force people into X religion or be ostracized, I’m all for it.
I think this is what struck me as well. Hearing what I can only describe as radical anti-capitalism coming from George Hotz was not what I expected when I opened that link.
That said I have felt the same feelings expressed by Hotz in this post. I commend him for saying it.
It’s not particularly radical is it? Maybe I’m in a bit of a bubble.
Exactly, it’s very mild first steps anti-capitalism. Nothing about class, for example.
A few posts before he shared a story of a black woman Amazon delivery driver caught on camera complaining about delivering to a rich person's large house.
He attributed this to basic monkey psychology and said it led to revolutions where all the rich people get killed and society gets poorer overall.
I read it as mocking poor people, but maybe he was trying to warn the people who get killed in those kinds of revolutions.
Cf: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/03/16/resen...
It's not. Communists are way more cutthroat and willing to step over corpses.
Uh what?
Call me crazy, but I think capitalism can exist without mass manipulation.
it definitely can, but the question is for how long and to what extent; historically, players with power and money will always want more and so things tilt in that direction....
Can it, if the technology is there todo exactly that? Capitalism (for me) means doing the maximum allowed in a legal framework to maximize profit.
but then what if line not go up???
I don't think it's anti-capitalist. It's anti-mass-manipulation and anti-price-discrimination, but capitalism only works to the extent that the pricing system works to provide information, both about consumer utility and about production costs.
His post is the standard small C conservative critique. It's only radical in that capitalism has seeped into far more facets of life since the last time such a position had appreciable expression within politics.
Shame they come together with casual references to burning it all down, ww3 to the rescue just because he couldn't get a hinge date fast enough.
I don't think the kind of foundational change that is needed to solve these issues has ever been done in other ways. If it can be done, it's much harder than just letting it all burn down. The people at the top of any system are not willing to change it without a fight.
If you think "the people at the top" suffer the most during a world war you're deluded. If you're willing to do that because you don't like ads or because girls aren't replying to you on dating apps, no words.
They don't suffer the most, but the point isn't to make them suffer. The point is to change the system. If the current system feels unfair or wrong in some way, people will want to change it. If the only way to change it is war, and if enough people want change, then war is what will happen. The war might make things a lot worse, but at least people are worse off together and are forced to take care of each other in a way that we haven't in a long time. The selfishness will be reduced, communities will come back, and a better system might be the result.
This makes me like George more. I also liked that he wants to reduce the NVidia monopoly by working on AMD. Simply because it's a monopoly.
I thought he gave up on that when he couldn’t get AMD chips to run for long enough without bugs.
AMD just signed a 2 million dollar contract with them to get the new hardware on mlperf, so it looks like the AMD chapter continues. https://x.com/__tinygrad__/status/1935732517933613216
If somebody as driven, successful, and talented as him is starting from square one in the realm of dating/having trouble finding a partner, I feel even more bad for those less fortunate/interesting.
>But eventually the market will fix this, right? People will feel sick of being manipulated and move elsewhere?
You can literally go outside and talk to people. There's no moat around dating apps. Human beings continue to exist in meatspace. I am yet to see a dating app contract that prevents you from being casually approached by strangers. Heck matchmakers still exist.
> You can literally go outside and talk to people.
You can't . If you talk to modern city people the way you casually said 'hi' to strangers in the 90s , at best you 'll end up in a tiktok branded as a creepy person
> You can't . If you talk to modern city people the way you casually said 'hi' to strangers in the 90s
It is true, in some places, that talking to strangers are generally frowned upon without having a good reason to do so.
The trick is to either only open up the conversation when you have something relevant to say (or funny, seems to work sometimes too), or move to city/country where it's socially accepted.
As someone who used to live in a country where talking with strangers is basically implicitly forbidden and straight up weird, but then moved to a country where it's completely normal, the amount of interesting conversations easily skyrocketed as soon as I landed in my new home country.
No? Just... don't be creepy.
I've done this a few times over the last few days alone (in Seattle no less, a city infamous for being antisocial - though I'm willing to accept some were tourists for the 4th).
IME, people are actually starved for human interaction.
I sometimes browse my city Spotted pages.
It's an common thing to see someone complaining about a "creep" (quotes as in, I'm quoting them) because someone tried to hit up on them and so on.
In today world, what you're speaking is at best dangerous.
If you want to hit on the people yes you should be in social ccontext where causual sexual relations are appropriate. And yes, most people in most situations are not looking for that.
That was actually unwelcome in the 90ties too in most settings.
That used to be every social context, and it still is if you go about it in a decent manner.
> In today world, what you're speaking is at best dangerous.
It's not dangerous if you do the work to learn how to socially interact.
It makes no sense to have a high risk of getting blasted all over local Facebook groups/Instagram/Tiktok for daring to approach while being ugly when they can use dating apps for zero risk. And if dating apps feel expensive to use, then there is Photofeeler also to validate your attractiveness.
I sincerely recommend therapy. Not trolling.
If you see someone filming you, simply don't approach that person.
Honestly if you are ugly the only chance you have of getting a partner is in real life. Dating apps only serve the top 10% of men, and this isn’t even red pill incel conspiracy, this is fact corroborated by studies done by companies such as okcupid.
Second, if you talk to a stranger in line at the coffee shop nobody is going to put you on the local creeper list, maybe just don’t comment on how smooth their skin is.
You are seriously overthinking this shit.
Carefully considering actions that might have life-ruining consequences is not overthinking.
I recommend being very honest with yourself here, whether or not you want to share it in a reply.
Is the low chance of bad consequences the only factor keeping you from talking to strangers? There’s a low chance of bad consequences when you cross a busy street, too.
Is fear of rejection by an individual or group a factor, too? There’s a much higher chance of that happening, but it’s far from life ruining.
Are you worried that you have social behaviors that make it more likely you are considered creepy in social interactions? If so, are there ways you can reduce those behaviors?
Are there other areas where acute awareness of severe potential negative consequences makes you avoid activities that lots of other people in your cohort might enjoy?
Source: it me. If you’re in a similar situation, know that it can get a lot better. Just takes time and work, like everything.
The risks and consequences of crossing a busy street are nowhere near as unknown or potentially severe. Wait until all the traffic has stopped, look to your left and your right and behind your back (typical situational awareness during bounding overwatch), cross the road. Even if something very rare and extreme happens, nobody sane will blast you on social media for failing to dodge a meteor or a suddenly exploding car.
When it comes to social context, you might miss some kind of sign and the worst cases there are pretty terrifying, might even get arrested in UK, which will lead to losing a job, failing any background checks, might even become homeless — and nobody sane will have any empathy for your mistake.
So I really do not get why people are against dating apps, when those are the best thing ever to avoid catastrophic consequences for initial approach.
I know cops are pretty crazy in the UK, but I cant imagine a scenario where you get arrested for saying hello to someone.
The worst case scenario for crossing a road is that you die. Thats worse than some girls laughing at you on social media.
I agree with the adjacent commenter: therapy would help with this.
As someone who has similar anxieties, I was pleasantly surprised in two ways when getting professional help:
Surprise one: the advice for confronting anxiety--specifically social anxiety around forming connections--was actionable and specific rather than woo-woo and "just be present/mindful/listen to your thoughts and they go away"-flavored.
Surprise two: therapists identified specific areas where I had broken or atrophied social skills and helped to build them. Just like crossing a street, most unprompted social interactions:
a) Have an expected script which, if followed, reduces the risk of severe negative consequences to near zero. If you didn't know the script you mentioned ("Wait until all traffic has stopped..."), then crossing a street would be dangerous indeed.
b) Have a higher likelihood of minor, non-lasting negative consequences: getting honked at by oblivious drivers, playing do-I-go-left-or-right chicken with oncoming pedestrians, bumping into people, and so on.
c) Have a lot of rules that are contextual (local traffic laws :: mores about what is acceptable in a park vs. in a pub). Some of those rules can be researched, but a lot of them are unspoken/gained through practice--and practice with others is most effective.
d) Are not practiced perfectly by most people. Those apprehensions you have? Those awkwardnesses and anxieties and hyper-awareness of the consequences of failure? Those are shared by tons of people! Even women in the dating scene--hell, especially women in the dating scene--are screwing up, recovering, bailing out, gathering themselves, and trying again constantly.
If you are worried about "missing some kind of sign and ... losing a job", that sounds a lot like either anxiety (therapy surprise one helps) or some missing/mis-functioning specific skills (therapy surprise two, and I cannot underline this enough, really helps here).
(Caveat: be aware that psych help, just like friends, car mechanics, or clothing stores, is variable in quality and highly preference-based; multiple selection passes may be needed before you find someone that you vibe well with).
I also really recommend Devon Price's writing on the subject. He has a few focuses that may be less relevant here (experiencing autism, being queer/trans), but also writes extensively on social/romantic interaction as a practiced, scripted phenomenon; I have found those essays to really help contextualize some of this stuff: https://devonprice.medium.com/
> I really do not get why people are against dating apps, when those are the best thing ever to avoid catastrophic consequences for initial approach.
I'm not against dating apps; I'm responding to the "unprompted social outreach is risky/a bad cost-benefit" claim.
In fact, you can get a lot more out of dating apps if you have practiced the skills required to be comfortable with ("comfortable with" is not the same as "good at") apropos in-person connection forming!
Also:
> nobody sane will blast you on social media
I agree. Raging about someone's social gaffe on social media is not sane/healthy behavior. Since jackasses raging online is nearly never as life-ruining as you might fear, framing it as "not sane and therefore not worth losing sleep over" is a good approach!
...and people on social media routinely rage about pedestrians, cyclists, slow drivers, etc. With pictures, license plates, death threats--the works. With dating, just like with crossing the street, it is not worth worrying about: be kind/do no harm, learn (potentially with help) the skills needed to progress, be willing to fail a lot while learning, and it will turn out well. I promise.
EDIT: Also, one last thing:
Avoid parts of the internet that use language like "daring to approach while ugly" and "on initial approach" when talking about dating. I've been there. I get how good it can feel to be validated by people with similar experiences, who explain that it isn't your fault/that thinking about dating as adversarial game theory is healthy. But those communities are toxic, self-hatred-reinforcing hostility factories. Seriously, go for a walk/watch TV/read a book instead.
If those are terms you came to use organically, consider avoiding them to avoid being associated with those places.
You're not "carefully considering actions", and enough people have already pointed out to you how therapy is likely a good path to go down.
They are, but they're correct that attitudes have changed.
People largely do not want to be approached in public and actively take steps to make sure it doesn't happen. Simple things like not making eye contact, or wearing headphones everywhere.
The reason men don't approach women in public anymore isn't some crazy conspiracy or anything - it's because women have told them to stop. Both implicitly through behavior and body language, and explicitly by saying "do not approach us in public".
It's complicated, because a lot of men do not know how to be normal or respectful. So who can blame women for being wary? But, the result now is that if you do choose that approach, you're coming in with an implicit bias against that behavior. You sort of have to work harder to overcome that bias, and for a lot of situations you just won't. Which is fine, just try again later, but that's what's going on.
>it's because women have told them to stop. Both implicitly through behavior and body language, and explicitly by saying "do not approach us in public".
Its really situational. And definitely difficult to always identify. But there are avenues. I always found bars and clubs to be the worst way to approach women.
>actively take steps to make sure it doesn't happen
I used to do door to door sales, very briefly. And I was amazed at the fact that, risking fines, my coworkers would approach houses on the government no knock register, and reliably make sales. Not advocating for breach of consent. But there are multiple ways to "meet" someone that don't require a cold open at a bar when they have their headphones in. I always tell other men to go volunteer for a local club or charity. Or take a pottery class or something.
> The reason men don't approach women in public anymore isn't some crazy conspiracy or anything
Respectfully: no, this is just an excuse.
I don't know where y'all lost the plot but when I was growing up it was widely considered that how you talked to other people was a skill. Skills require practice.
There's a billion people out there. Not everyone you meet is going to be against you talking them up. Do the work, lol
I agree. That doesn’t mean it’s a conspiracy, that means society has changed. Not am I saying people shouldn’t approach others. I’m saying it’s harder, which it is and I think you agree with.
I literally had a conversation with a bloke at the same cafe as me yesterday. The restriction is in your mind.
Come on.
I agree with the premise that it is really difficult and sucks to "just go out and talk to people". Depends on where you live I guess though. I think thinking you'll end up on a TikTok because you talk to a person in a queue is just a far off excuse.
This exchange highlights the huge difference in experience people have w.r.t. dating. Some people get approached all the time and others never get approached and it's always been like that. I blame humanity for this unfair system rather than some stupid app.
I remember trying to date a woman in college, she would drop what appeared to me as incredible hints, but if I acted on them she would just ignore me.
We once had a 2 hour conversation about how she just could not find a mexican restaurant in town and would do /anything/ to eat at one. So I found one (willed it into existence) and then she simply wasn't interested.
Thing was, I dont really care about the rejection so much as, it was super easy for me to have relatively deep and interesting conversation with a total stranger. This wasn't even the first one, previous conversations about "Why are cities taking up valuable agricultural land" and "The best gifts to buy a woman are power tools" went down much the same way.
If people are convinced that the conversation to be rejected in cant even take place then I guess I understand concerns about the birthrate a little more.
> You can literally go outside and talk to people.
Only in small towns with high trust societies, sadly.
Otherwise you’ll be assaulted by roving gangs. Or young people who will mock you for wearing your trousers too high.
>High trust society.
I usually see this as an anti immigration dogwhistle.
I live in an actual hellhole by these standards.
For 40 years, every refugee or immigrant population was forced to live in my region. Every time the government wanted to do A/B testing on welfare, my region.
When I first wanted to move here I considered that I would need amazing security and reviewed crime stats. OH NO, its a CRIME HOTSPOT. How could I subject myself to that, I would have to live in fear.
Then I turned off "Drug Crimes" in the police statistics, and that completely normalised the results against much richer, whiter suburbs.
If anything we have a greater density of churches, because everyone wants to hear the bible read in their tongue. Theres an islander community just over the main drag from me where twice a year I see like 200 big islander kids dressed in choir costumes being loaded into busses for a big church thing.
My wife literally takes my toddler out for walks unassisted in the middle of the night.
I have no issues talking to people, or being approached by people.
Wildly untrue, unless you count London or New York City as small towns.
Sorry what? You can go out clubbing and drinking and meet 50 new people in Berlin every night. Pretty cheap too, even these days.
Before you pay for boosts on a dating app, pay for good pictures.
Here is what a man seeking woman profile needs:
1. Good Pictures. Honest. Good lighting. Appropriate grooming and attire (whatever than means in your social context). Smile in a carefree way in most of the pictures.
2. Attractive man in the pictures.
3. No icks.
Yes the pictures are more important than being attractive.
As a matter of storytelling, the theme is "aspirational", but the particular aspiration is up to you.
Or just stop playing the game. Like a parasite, dating apps only survive while their host is alive. You can pay for pictures, spend hours a day scrolling, pretend to be someone you’re not, blunt every aspect of your personality that may be an “ick.”Maybe you’ll eventually win if you keep pulling the lever. But then you’ve just contributed to the problem.
It’s just not worth it in my view. I gave up. Being a singleton is going to become the new normal in the next 25 years, many Western countries are going the way of Japan and South Korea.
The good news for George is he’s a high profile, decent looking, wealthy dude. He’ll be fine.
Playing devil's advocate: embellishing one's own features is a common tactic for attracting a mate in the real world as well. Courtship is a game, not just for humans. During this phase you rarely get to know the other person. You meet their best facade first, and then slowly get to know the person behind it. If you refuse to play this game, then you're just lowering your chances of attracting a partner. Which is fine, but it's good to be aware of this.
What GP is suggesting is simply making an effort to showcase your features. The most attractive person on Earth could be rejected if their pictures are of poor quality. That's just common sense. Being genuinely attractive by modern societal standards is important, but the first step is making an effort.
Dating apps can be a good way of finding a partner. After all, they're just the modern equivalent of making the initial connection. Their problem is the same as with any SaaS: companies are incentivized to keep users on the platform for as long as possible, which they do by engaging in shady tactics like artificially controlling the visibility of user profiles, while squeezing out as much profit out of users as they can. This is bad news for men, who are overwhelmingly the ones using these services and are willing to accept the downright predatory tactics of these companies.
But in theory, there's nothing wrong with the concept of dating apps. They're just corrupted by the usual user hostile incentives. A dating service with the right incentives could appear tomorrow to disrupt this rotten industry.
> pretend to be someone you’re not, blunt every aspect of your personality that may be an “ick.”
You don't have to "pretend" to do anything, or try to get rid of what others consider "icky", but generally I think most people aim to at least be neutral (if not pleasant) in the eyes of others, either by social pressure or because life just gets easier and less frustrating then.
I'd probably wager that the whole pretending thing you think is required, actually backfires as people eventually learn who you are, so better to just be yourself upfront.
Do you really need to be a singleton just because you reject dating apps?
Are you asking me specifically or in general?
I'm in my 20s and the way a significant portion of relationships start in this generation is via dating apps. If you aren't using dating apps, and don't have social circles, there's just no social fabric to build from. Believe me, I've tried activities, they don't really work. It's extremely difficult to build enough rapport with someone in the space of 1-2 hours that they'll care enough to ever meet up again.
From what I read in comment threads like this, dating apps don't really work for the majority of 20-something men, either. So your choice is between paying for an app that doesn't work and going out and doing IRL things that don't work. Why would you pay for the app, when you can get the same result for free?
If you're in your 20s you should change your life so that you live a lifestyle with easy social connections and ways to find partners. Being alone too much in your age will give you permanent mental damage.
So change careers, change city, change country, change whatever is needed so that you can have a decent life.
What do you mean by the permanent damage part?
I actually go out a lot, and moved across the world to Tokyo four months ago. The problem is not meeting people. I can make surface level connections every day of the week. The problem is finding people who want to stick around.
If it's only been four months, then you don't have to worry. To make deeper than surface level connections, find a group activity and show up repeatedly (this can be work or school as well). But perhaps the Japanese aren't too interested in making friends with foreigners? The part about moving I mentioned is also about moving to a place where people are more sociable, I don't know if Tokyo is it.
Permanent mental damage is rather from years spent in loneliness, or lovelessness, or poverty, or any other kind of unsustainable personal situation.
> blunt every aspect of your personality that may be an “ick.”
That’s not what was meant and you know it.
Ten years into a relationship, I sometimes leave my dinner dishes in the sink and wash them in the morning. Had I done that early on in my relationship—or had those dishes in a photo on a dating site—I’d sabotage my chances with a lot of people.
The same is true for interests. Maybe you really like guns: marksmanship, customizing them, restoring them, and so on. If you have guns front and center in your dating app pics you are going to alienate a lot of people. Plenty of those same people would enjoy being introduced to that hobby once you are in a relationship! But guns being a photographed part of your dating-site-identity is not going to help your chances. The people who swipe left are avoiding gun nuts, misogynists, etc. Putting guns in your picture only sabotages yourself.
That’s not “I have to totally be someone I’m not and remove every single thing someone might find objectionable”. That’s basic social awareness and understanding that there’s a time and a place for presenting different parts of yourself.
>That’s not what was meant and you know it.
I believe the zoomer interpretation of "icks" refers to childish/petty reasons to give up on perusing someone, not something like lack of cleanliness.
The zoomer interpretation of "ick" is just an extension of patriarchal attitudes. It means "anything that does not perform masculinity to an adequate degree". Fruity drinks, splitting bills, wearing strange colors or patterns, even having well-groomed nails.
It's childish, it's petty, and it's self-defeating. Most women I know are in a vicious cycle of misogyny because they actively optimize for misogynistic men without knowing it. They then come to the conclusion that men must suck, so they tighten their "standards", which inadvertently results in even more misogynistic men going for them.
We often hear about gen-z men becoming more conservative but anyone who is paying attention knows that gen-z women are also becoming more conservative. And, a lot of the conservatism in men is in response to growing conservative attitudes in women, and vice-versa. We have trad wives and bio-essentialist ideology because conservative men exist. And they exist because they meet our arbitrary patriarchal standards, even the small ones, like paying for the bill.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I'm not talking about only dating apps. Wherever there's an algo, there's someone manipulating you. I just deleted and disabled my Youtube history. It's incredibly liberating!
I’ve come to realize that dating apps are just outright hostile to honest newcomers who don’t know the implicit rules.
It starts with picking the “right” pictures, then saying the “right” things then choosing the “right” place and then confirming at the “right” time. Eventually you are just going down a checklist rather than being your authentic self. If you find yourself minmaxing in this way, take a break.
To be fair, society and social interactions are full of implicit rules. Put a bunch of people in a room(/train/company/island/club/cult) and they will make up some rules along the way.
Someone catch your eye at a party? You'll probably take a moment to choose what you want to say to them there too
No that’s fair - I don’t think I articulated the difference between normal social rules and dating apps.
What I’ve found is that the first couple of interactions (up until the second date) can be completely formulaic - and what can look like outward success is just a treadmill.
If you get too good at optimizing the dating apps funnel you can find yourself on a regular rotation of dates without actually connecting with anyone.
mating has historically almost always been a pretty hostile and unfair experience. That is why female ancestors outnumber male 2:1.
Dating apps prey on the weakest of us all, selling hopes and shattering egos. Not everyone can get good pictures, not everyone is a 10/10 attractive man, and "no icks" is such a vomit inducing term. They are perfectly happy that you don't have a good picture and you don't get matches, because then they can sell you boosts and superlikes and whatever bullshit they've made up today.
Tinder, Hinge and others are directly responsible for tens of thousands of cases of depression and in building up a perfect breeding ground for misogyny and misandry. Everyone involved in their self-worth-destroying app has blood on their hands.
Looksmaxxing discourse on HN, things are getting really bleak.
What's exactly looksmaxing and why is the above comment a suspect? It seemed normal to me.
Yea, that group of people is insufferable and wrong about almost everything. Dating apps are the one place where they kind of have a point; which really raises the question "Are we (app developers) the baddies?" Dating apps are not a nature preserve, they are a created environment.
Also, there's all kinds of maxing stuff, and there's basic advise, like wash your face and get a haircut before you get your picture taken.
He is spot on tho
HN crowd is not what it used to be. It's full of normies, projecting their unproductive form of world-view
More importantly than this, George Hotz is very influential (has a self-driving startup and made the news for a Twitter internship) and presumably quite rich as well, there’s probably easier ways than swiping through Hinge like everyone else.
It seems his LinkedIn dating profile isn't working out.
There is also an alternative strategy. Cut out the bullshit and doomed-to-fail relationships by putting your 'icks' front and center. That is a fishing for the niche situation though.
Huh, I thought this was going to be some sort of self-reflection about fascism and such but no - it's about how a site is too manipulative in its UX. Gosh.
In a way the real baddies was the trivial stuff we fixated on along the way.
I thought so too, but apparently discussing Australian air travel is the topic...
Nothing about testing a home made self driving car on the Highway either
Online dating websites are a waste of time unless you are in the top % of men. Sad reality of online dating is that a small % of men gets attention of most women, while the remaining % of men get little to no attention at all. The whole boosting system makes it even worse.
At one point I was fixated on conversion rates, cost per click, pricing tiers etc for my small software business. Then I realized I'm doing ok, and I don't have to squeeze every last penny out of it. Now I choose what to do based at least as much on how interesting it will be for me, as how much money I think it might earn. It has been quite liberating.
The $*99 prices in shops should have hinted you that we already live in a self-hating society. AI will make it x100 worse. But don't get it wrong - the problem is not with AI itself.
The issue is the market. These things are possible because of the skewed market.
There are far more men than women on dating apps, women don't buy the boosts, etc.
So you are paying for exposure in that skewed market.
If it were a complete free-for-all then women would get thousands of messages a day and not use the apps at all.
Sperms outnumber eggs by millions to one.
Okay? Men don’t outnumber women millions to one.
A woman's reproductive value biologically is several orders of magnitude higher than a man's. Because she is the limiting factor.
You’re defining that in the simplest possible way, ie if the stars aligned a man could, in theory, impregnate thousands of women. In reality, the factors that limit a man’s potential mates are equally real. The population’s sex ratio is no less a biological reality than the structure of a reproductive system. So a woman’s reproductive value fluctuates depending on circumstances, but remains similar to a man’s under most circumstances in a modern country.
Genetical evidence shows that twice as many women as men successfully reproduced during the history of our species. And if it wasn't for a period of massive population increase combined with monogamy, that ratio would probably be maybe five to one or more.
The sex ratio of children is hard coded genetically at 50/50 for pretty much all mammals, since any deviance would be corrected back to 50/50 within a couple of generations.
In modern society, an average woman can have as many sexual partners as she chooses to, and very distinguished men can have that. Birth control means that there isn't any actual children resulting from these encounters, but our biological imperatives are still the same. A woman's reproductive value is infinitely higher than a man's in modern society, where the man's reproductive value is approaching zero.
It gets even more disturbing when the algorithm (or a disgruntled former date reporting you to a tired and underpaid customer support agent overseas) decides to ban you from the dating apps and suddenly your chances of meeting someone go down dramatically (60% plus of all couples meet online in the US), with the apps having become the middlemen for most of dating connections: https://www.vice.com/en/article/banned-from-dating-apps/
Good luck ever getting back onto the apps, especially if you've ever used facial verification to validate that you're you. Every future attempt to sign up again will be immediately blocked. No way to appeal. Dystopian.
Your destiny, and whether you’ll ever have a family of your own, decided by Match Group.
The business model of Match Group, by the way, for those unaware, is to buy every dating app (yes, they own all of them; Bumble was once the lone hold-out but not any more) and then do everything they can to make you pay money for premium. They do not care if you get a date.
It’s genius really. They’ve inserted themselves into the social fabric, hijacked it, and then used cartel tactics to take control of competition. And nobody cares enough to start an antitrust suit.
You described social media first, before dating apps.
Because 95% of us don't live on a computer, and recognize the potential to meet and court suitors at bars or social events.
The data shows the majority of people now meet on dating apps. So yes, dating apps are in control.
Ah, ye-olde Poindexter's Revenge. If only an intelligentsia-class had the gall, the sheer epistemic knowledge required, to disrupt this courtship business once and for-all.
Today I visited the shit website known as Fandom, and within a second of scrolling the page, the entire page was ads. Not joking: https://imgur.com/a/8QzBZGM — and it’s not a contrived example, this is the first thing that happened after reaching the page via a search for some character in a show. This is the default new user experience for Fandom, at least some portion of the time. How is this acceptable to the employees and executives of that company?
The CTO, Adil Ajmal, says “we help people worldwide go deeper on their favorite games, entertainment, and culture.” How can I possibly do that with the absurd number of ads on the page?
The money incentive in software right now is to make it extremely shitty. We need ways to incentivize people, and especially executives, to make friendly decisions for their users.
Right now across the industry, many people are getting promoted and hired for decisions that are extremely hostile to their customers and visitors. Whether it be for replacing support with an unhelpful, dumb AI bot, or marginally growing revenue by shoveling ads down your unwilling throat, we are not incentivizing products that are good and friendly to humans.
Seriously, fuck all the investors who are incentivizing this BS.
Of course, we need drastic changes to the economic system (the counterproductive incentives exist everywhere), but you have a choice in the matter. It’s possible to build a good product and make good money and make some revenue growth without being absolutely insane about it. Companies are betting that customers won’t catch on. Facebook might be a good example. It’s turned into such a shithole that no one in a certain age range wants to deal with it anymore, outside of very specific niches. The primary feed & product has failed.
ads are the most benign form of extraction. They attack your attention but that's just about it. The manipulative algorithms, the walled garden, the subscriptions , the extractive surcharges, the anticompetitive rules , those came after ads and they are far worse and far more profitable. Wish we could go back to a free, ad-supported internet, but the whole internet is now a front for stockholder ponzi schemes.
Ads don't just take your attention lol. The point of getting your attention is to manipulate you into taking actions or making decisions that align with the interests of the advertiser (usually profit) over your own.
Oh, same thing is happening with the regular TV and almost any media that needs attention. Every single channel is shit. News channels are just curated selection of horror stories from all around the globe. Ads are competing be weirder and weirder. Every single channel wants to grab your attention by dishing out concentrated weirdest stuff. I'm terrified to switch on TV.
I’m not a big user of Uber but I need to say that the experiences there are mostly better than your grandad’s taxi (pay up for Uber X if you want a better experience). Mostly cabs were/are badly maintained and some seem downright dangerous with shocks dead, idiot lights on, smoking tailpipes and just general crappy interiors. I once got in a NYC cab where there blood all over the back of the drivers seat, got right back out. Cabbies are quarrelsome and grumpy. One guy picked me up at my house obviously drunk. I mentioned Uber to one guy who became very aggressive. Got out at the next light. Ah the good ole days.
Now for Uber. If you pay to upgrade to Uber X it’s a great experience. One time I got in the wrong Uber (not X). They said silver Nissan at station 4 at the airport in Atlanta. Got in the car and he was obviously going somewhere else than where I requested. When he realized I was the wrong passenger the driver became extremely agitated and aggressive. My bad for not checking his plate, his bad for not checking the passenger out. He was the driver so it’s really his responsibility since I may not know these things. Also I could not leave a bad review as I did not know who this driver was. Always always check you are in the right car.
The layers are part of the evolution. We may like to credit ourselves with great inventions which built these layers, but it is like trees claiming to create the wind, rivers claiming to create water flow etc. Humans are just facilitators or vehicles that carry the wind of change. We don't cause the change. The change has selected the agents who showed least resistance to the change. Then the agents gloriously claimed that they caused the change.
Everyone hates The Algorithm but we're all caught in network effects. Networks can collapse though.
AI is propping up the Web but I'm not convinced it can do that indefinitely.
The dream of Internet enabled disintermediation is not dead. We'll eventually switch protocols, change the incentive structures and build a social internet for ourselves - at least those of us who've not had our souls eaten by Moloch already. It's not inevitable but it is possible and it is what a lot of us actually want.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
This is a lucid but terrifying read.
"are we the baddies?"
We are and without AI. See how people struggle with their computers and devices, and how it is often caused by an undesired software update.
See how software updates, or the lack thereof, are weaponized to make devices unusable or obsolete.
>If you open a government S&P 500 account for everyone with $1,000 at birth that’ll pay their social security cause it like…goes up…wait who’s creating this value again
It changes with production, if production shrinks it shrinks. This is exactly what you need with a retirement account, otherwise you end up with a situation like the UK where the pension system is crushing the workers.
> Will mass starvation fix this? Or will the attitude of thinking it’s okay to manipulate others at scale persist even past that?
As long as everyone is OK with the losers losing big so the winners can win big, it will persist. As long as the “I've got mine, screw you” attitude keeps being culturally ingrained, it will persist.
Tips through apps, much like charity at the grocery store checkout, is a really strong signal that the provider can raise their prices. Basically asking how wealthy do you feel after the transaction.
In my opinion this is one of many simptoms of a decadent society on the brink of collapse. And I also think that cheap money and huge fiscal debts have been feeling this decadence.
I'm so sick of algorithms dictating choices for me. I just don't want to partake anymore. It's no fun anymore, my dopamine reservoirs get drained quicker now and I just want to drop out of this society that has been colonized by companies that hate us. The government hates us, the policies of the too rich are destructive and they hate us.
Oh, so you're sick of it but unwilling to do anything? How about do something about it? I am glad to see the consequences of convenience that you all crave. It's just going to get worse. There is always a choice, whether you believe it or not. Opt-in and realize they own you or opt-out and don't be a slave
I will, with trepidation and my expectations in the gutter, bite: what does “opting out” or “doing something about it” mean for you?
What meta structure allows us to get rid of rent seeking behavior?
I don’t have an answer - is there scientific research on this?
Taxation? Loopholes will be found.
Lawfare against it? Lobbying will win.
I am amazed by capitalism, but at the same time it is a ruthless machine - and in democratic countries it is highly unlikely that a single political party can force the machine into a new direction. Perhaps that is a very nice feature, at the cost of also having to tolerate rent seeking, but it sure as hell sucks to see these downsides.
Social cohesion. People are happy to rip off an outsider, a stranger, a schmuck. But people within a high-trust social group generally don't rip each other off - you still need to be on the look out for fraudsters, but you won't be doing it systematically and virtually openly.
It's not a coincidence that all this has happened as the US' national identity has gotten weaker and weaker. They're shifting from a cohesive nation to one of those "it's a single block on the map but it's actually 200 tribes who all hate each other" countries, and people's values and behaviour are shifting to match.
The bitter truth is that Nirvana doesn't exist.
There is no perfect system. But we can choose the least detrimental.
What can we do to make rent-seeking hurt society less? Imo we should start by decoupling money from power. Right now, people are forced to participate in the rent-seekers game because his wealth implies power over them.
I’m increasingly convinced advertising is a huge mistake and just not normal.
We don’t need advertising, which fundamentally is little different from lying and manipulation, at all, and society would be a lot better if we denormalized advertising.
If a company paying an influencer to talk about them, or placing an ad on a sports game, would be denormalized to the extent that it would lead to people deliberately not buying the product.
Instead one could subscribe to trusted reviewers who make their money off subscription revenues and therefore their interests are aligned with the customer rather than the ad supplier.
If this happened people would complain that "capitalism" made the internet prohibitively expensive.
"Price discrimination is not okay"
Isn't this a reasonable way to achieve many desirable results? Hardcovers/paperbacks, watch a movie right away or after a few weeks, etc.
That's not price discrimination, like hardcover vs paperback if you have two versions of something and people can choose which they want. That's totally fine and actually something that makes capitalism great. The rich usually end up covering more of the costs here cause they are less price sensitive, like business vs economy on airplanes.
Price discrimination is when two people visit a site to buy a book, the algorithm computes an estimate of what they are barely willing to pay, and then shows the two of them different prices for the exact same book based on who they are.
Yours is an overly narrow version of price discrimination in which the discrimination is extended to the customer level. If that's what OP meant he should use a less ambiguous description.
The comment you replied to is OP clarifying his description.
OK thanks.
Hardcovers last longer, resource use is real. Cheap things is a regressive tax on the lower incomes who have to replace cheap stuff faster. They can’t save for better stuff.
When it comes to media like movies… really? Still? The resource use of Top Gun and Star Wars is bonkers. Can’t we just have local theater and you know socialize?
Do we need the movie to come together and socialize over?
I so thought we were done with that stuff around Spider-Man 3. MCU and Star Wars sequels made no sense to me.
Is our attention always going to be coupled to Saturday mornings in 1990s?
Boomers did all the drugs and made music and corny fun shows like SNL and somehow convinced us to stare at computers iterating on word problems like it’s fucking middle school while staring at these over the top delusions of grandeur to borrow from Han Solo.
Paperbacks are _not_ a regressive tax. The book is equally readable in both forms, and often more portable in paperback. Hardcover books are (mild) luxury items that can command a higher profit margin and thus are easier for publishers to justify. Very few individuals are buying hardcover books in order to maximize utility over many decades
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> Someday, people will have to realize we live in a society. What will it take?
Anarchism, socialism and communism can work perfect in a small village where everyone knows and trusts each other. But if you scale it up it does not work well because people can be corrupt. If you want to scale up to a Geo Global level that is trust-less the best way we know is to use Capitalism, but Capitalism ends up becoming more and more centralized.
Because Capitalism is inherently competitive there will always be winners and losers and these are not just businesses it's everyone in the system because capital is required to partake in the system. This competitiveness is also what leads to the lack of "morality".
What will it take?
I think you cannot have the benefits of capitalism without these side-effects.
I think we now have the technology to make decision-making and resource allocation systems that do not need to centralize power. If we can do that, then it wouldn't matter that people can be corrupt, because there would be no positions of power that people can abuse.
I also believe that technology is the solution. But all the key technology is centralized Chips, AI, Batteries, Cryptography, Email, Internet access, Radio Waves
Most people aren't looking to eliminate capitalism. They just want constraints to be put on it. Higher taxes on wealth, stricter antitrust enforcement, investing in social infrastructure, or passing laws that protect consumers don't prevent capitalism from working.
Australia has social healthcare and massive mining companies. They coexist just fine. There really is a lot of wiggle room between fully embracing socialism and going full anarcho-capitalist, and maybe the tradeoffs of shifting towards the socialism side of things are worth considering.
Although, George seems to just want to flip the table out of the belief that real reform that would impact most people positively will never get passed in a democracy. It would require too much change.
> Most people aren't looking to eliminate capitalism. They want sensible constraints to be put on it. Things like higher taxes on wealth, stricter antitrust enforcement, or investing in social infrastructure don't prevent capitalism from working.
In capitalism the capitalists end up being the government. They can choose who gets elected, the laws, they even start political parties.
That's an oversimplification. Yes, wealthy individuals inevitably have more influence. But there are numerous countries whose governments regularly act against corporate interests. For example, as much as I dislike GDPR, it is a strong example of governments implementing a policy that is explicitly against corporate interests. Another example is the OECD global minimum corporate tax.
So, there are governments that oversee capitalist countries that are willing to implement policies that hurt corporate interests with the goal of helping consumers. I'd say the problem is that often these policies made with good intentions, like GDPR, end up being poorly implemented and therefore harming consumers as well as hurting corporations... but that's an entirely different problem.
What are the benefits of capitalism?
With it, you don't have to die from hunger. Not much, but compared to the alternatives, it is one of the strongest arguments in favor of capitalism.
It can scale economies and can run on the global level, it also brings about rapid advances in Science and Technology. It also provides more options for individuals than in Socialism, in this regard Capitalism is more decentralized than Socialism.
Sorry for being clueless but - what is Hinge? A quick search says it's a dating application. But I don't quite understand from the first paragraph that this is the Hinge he's talking about.
Clarifications would be greatly appreciated...
It’s the pay-to-play nature of dating apps that he is railing about.
The author is metaphorically complaining about seeing alcohol for sale after deciding to go to a bar.
Nobody twisted your arm to use Hinge rather than utilize local dating resources like singles meetups, speed dating, and matchmaking services.
Or just get a group-oriented hobby and talk to people in real life.
Yeah that's right. If you don't like AI and data-mining just don't use the internet at all, amirite?
To some extent, yes.
Not every internet thing is an abusive app like dating apps or Facebook.
You can just not use those apps.
It'd be really nice if the title gave an indication of what the article is about.
a lot of the economy seems like a game of value extraction to me
boosts, uber fees, late fees, small order fees, busy hour fees...it's like this is what people spend their time thinking up
when i see people stuck in traffic on their morning commute, i think thats a net positive for humanity in some small way
You want to opt out of this all you say? Good luck running a competitive business! Every metric is now a target. You better maximize engagement or you will lose engagement this is a red queen’s race we can’t afford to lose!
I'm from GenX. It can be done. We used to do it. Just stop playing their game. The only winning move is not to play.
What the open web did for discoverability of businesses, we need to invent again for actual engagement with the businesses.
Uber, Booking.com, AirBnB, ClassPass, Steam, DoorDash - these winner take all middle-men rent seeking tech behemoths are bad for society and are hostile to consumers and the businesses that rely on them.
Let's decentralise this shit.
Everything except for steam, one of the few to do it right. Of course they arent perfect as nobody is, but in general they treat developers right, they treat customers right. Theres no personalized surge prices or other AI BS, and they dont ban randomly like google. If you buy a game on steam, you own it for real.
> If you buy a game on steam, you own it for real.
How so? If Steam goes away, then so does your game. That's not ownership.
Just because they have carefully and honestly fostered a lot of trust in their game rental service, doesn't make it not a game rental service.
If Steam itself goes bankrupt, Gabe himself said you'll still retain access to your games.1 Yes its a non-legally binding promise, but Steam has earned that trust.
Also Steam isn't going away, so for these reasons that is "how so".
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20100605062932/http://forums.ste...
If Steam itself goes bankrupt, that decision is not up to Steam, it's up to its creditors and the bankruptcy court. It's not a credible promise for any US corporation to make, regardless of its trustworthiness.
Ah cool, so an alleged promise made to one user makes it all OK and we should stop worrying and just buy more.
Even if Gaben "money drives the community" Newell did make that promise and was sincere, he's going to be gone in a couple of decades at most and likely not in control of Valve before that.
Steam doesn't do it right, they are just slightly friendlier than the competition. And that can change at a moments notice and you will be locked in because your friend Gaben has been working on making it hard to leave all along.
No, Steam is still in its (unusually long) first phase of enshittification, where it delivers surplus value to consumers.
Probably as long as gaben is alive, it will be so. But don't expect it to last. There's nothing special about Steam the platform.
You definitely don't own Steam games for real, and they don't ban randomly but for example, if you're caught cheating in a game, or talking about illegal things with your friends, you will find out how much you don't own those games.
If you cheat in a game, you'll get VAC banned but still retain access offline.
True, Steam is better - I think it helps they aren't a public company. They still take a huge margin though.
It's not the centralization that's the main problem. Centralization of those services can make sense. It's how and why those centralized services are run. They're run like dictatorships, for the purpose of making the dictator and his friends richer. They should be run democratically, for the purpose of making the lives of the users better. Breaking up monopolies is just a temporary solution, because the systems of capitalism will always create them again. The underlying system, the how and why, needs to change.
> Democracy, haha, you think the algorithms will let you vote to kill them? Your vote is as decoupled from action as the amount Uber pays the driver is decoupled from the fare that you pay.
Relevant here, all the way from 1975:
"...In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate MUST depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society MUST be highly organized and decisions HAVE TO be made that affect very large numbers of people. When a decision affects, say, a million people, then each of the affected individuals has, on the average, only a one-millionth share in making the decision. What usually happens in practice is that decisions are made by public officials or corporation executives, or by technical specialists, but even when the public votes on a decision the number of voters ordinarily is too large for the vote of any one individual to be significant. Thus most individuals are unable to influence measurably the major decisions that affect their lives. There is no conceivable way to remedy this in a technologically advanced society. The system tries to “solve” this problem by using propaganda to make people WANT the decisions that have been made for them, but even if this “solution” were completely successful in making people feel better, it would be demeaning."
- Industrial Society And Its Future, Ted Kaczynski (1975)
Really?
Perhaps this person lived in a fantastic futuristic city before. But for a lot people, getting a cab was not a good experience. Uber singlehanded changed that.
And dating apps are not middlemen for dating. They're middlemen for dating outside your social circle, which is always a mess. Whatever subscription you pay to the app per month is probably cheaper than a single drink at a bar anyway.
> Perhaps this person lived in a fantastic futuristic city before. But for a lot people, getting a cab was not a good experience. Uber singlehanded changed that.
I've been in taxi just about three times in my life and zero in Uber. Usually just take bus/tram/train, walk or bike. Car for utility in the country. I think I do not live in fantastic futuristic city (it is in eastern Europe) but at least it is not dystopia.
Right. It's the consistent lack of healthy social circles that is the problem for most people. Either it is staying afloat that sucks all your energy or focusing on "tech will solve problems" but it doesn't.
You are right but now a single company controls this worldwide. I think taxis would have adopted apps eventually.
Nah even now the taxi apps are still shit
Nothing like opening up Hinge to radicalize an individual!
I went to the hinge website and drowned in the self congratulatory marketing... And I still don't understand what it is or what it is boosting.
>what it is boosting
Their profits
How could it take a smart person until July 5 2025 to realize this? I think that's the most concerning part. Long overdue realization.
Is that a slight against the author? If so, how does publishing an article imply they only just realised something?
George Hotz has spent his career[1] being a "useful idiot" for a series of hypercapitalist techbros, including Zuckerberg in the 2010s and Musk as recently as 2022, so it's somewhat notable that the scales may be falling from his eyes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz
Ah I'd never heard of him before
Yeah, he got his fame in the mid-2000s when he found a vulnerability in the Playstation 3 OS and some idiot lawyers at Sony sued him for it. He parlayed that into a cool, anti-corporate hacker persona, and then got hired by the most powerful corporations and people on the planet to try to give their tech companies some cool hacker cred. It's honestly a pretty funny career arc. I don't dislike the guy, he found a way to get his bag, good for him. But he definitely got played by the pros.
Nice try. I worked at Facebook for 9 months and left (before vesting any shares) because I didn't agree with the mission, even back in 2012. I worked at Twitter for 5 weeks and left because I realized nothing was going to change (and the good food went away). I don't regret trying at either, but in revealed preferences, I've spent most of my life writing open source software, even if that's not what attracts most media about me.
I know you think everyone is just trying to "get their bag" and that's the framework you see this in. But I already had more money at 21 than I've spent to date, and not cause I had a lot of money, but cause I don't buy much stuff. I'm sorry you feel played, but don't project that on me.
Haha, no worries, you're good. But come on, you have to admit it's at least a little funny that the famous Sony/iOS/Android hacker geohotz ended up... working for Facebook and then Elon Musk's X, lol.
Every solution he proposes is based on violence and hate.
How about we try love, empathy, and compassion to solve our problems? Collaboration?
Hello Lex Fridman
I had no idea what Hinge was (had to google), and now I am curious what is it that makes it holy shit with a boost.
Everyone is good and bad, not that question, why the discusion revolves on tipping?
Who is the "we" in the title?
Us. On HN.
AI Entrepreneurs
Tech workers
America
Capitalists
This post, and presumably its author, is reaching escape velocity, or at least max-Q.
A second-order difficulty is that the tools with which we could go about dissecting, reimagining and reconstructing new society are also tainted by the powers that have delivered such malignant incentives and effects. This is not new and the fervour and insistence will continue to mount as the cracks in the dam grow in number and size.
There are, however, positive routes forward but in my experience they are somewhat alienating because the majority of people around you will think you are mad, weird or simply delusional. To be clear, I am probably all of those things (definitely the first two), but I prefer that to being a commodity powering a machine that is disinterested in anything that doesn't make it bigger. Two illustrations:
First, cognitivism. A sneaky, anthropocentric idea that simulataneously promotes and soothes a sense of dissonance. We don't, imo, create meaning primarily by modelling simulations of the world in our heads and forming goals based on them. Sure, this happens, but to give it primacy will lead to all sorts of unexpected and unpleasant effects. Alternative: constructivism.
Second, systems of perpetual (exponential) growth. Every day we buy into this by transacting within a system that has this implicit assumption built into it. We do not (an cannot) comprehend the scale and influence of this, because society is unpredictable and the effects are often emergent. Example: tragedy of the commons. This system didn't just show up by itself, nor was it the creation of a shadowy cabal - it perpetuates because we all use it, all the time. Alternative: imagine harder, build systems that mimic nature in its sigmoidal beauty, not only their growth phase.
An important milestone is, imo, proper systems thinking. This is no-ones fault and we are all complicit, but we all possess the ability for radical adaptation and, where it has been cultivated, the ability to rebuild all that which is broken.
I regularly think/read about, work towards and promote such angles, including ethical algorithm design, open-model behavioural analysis and value-aware technology. If anyone would like to join my micro-revolution, you are most welcome. I should warn you though, it doesn't pay well.
In short. Yes. Sorry- but you can and are able to contemplate the externalities of your creations before you create them... imo most people prefer a little delusion as a treat.
Obviously it is not black and white like this. In turn- we all have the free choice to not engage. I don't engage with 99% of contemporary market economy tech, for these reasons. Heck I still carry cash just so I can leave cash tips, or make small cash payments at stores, bribe an official, etc.
Sure seems like big tech is on the cusp of killing the open internet by pulling the rug out from underneath bloggers etc.
And the antagonistic algo everywhere world is starting to suck. And google removing their "don't be evil" sure seemed very self-aware.
...but not sure about the whole "needs WW3 to reset" angle...seems a bit much
I went to Walmart twice last week, Tuesday and Friday. Passed by the chips aisle twice and the price on Friday was over a dollar higher per-bag. They've got those fancy e-ink screen price-tags now and I guess they're doing surge pricing. I'm tired of this shit.
It's called "dynamic pricing" and it's everywhere. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Pricing
There’s no gain from outrage. Just opt out and move on.
I sold my TV. Don’t wanna get creeped on thanks. A TV with a microphone might be convenient for some but for us that’s a hard pass.
I drive a 12 year old car, its fuel efficiency is horrendous and its entertainment system barely works. But it’s off the grid! When I turn it off it TURNS OFF. It doesn’t creep on me, it doesn’t sell my driving habits or report my location or upload microphone recordings at the dealer when it’s plugged in for a service.
I’m biding my time until enough others think like me that a company takes notice. One day someone will make a car that loudly says it doesn’t creep on you, one day someone will make a TV that doesn’t creep on you. One day companies will care again about the customer. One day people will be wise enough to recognize enshittification and will call companies on their shit, and the market will speak.
Not today, but soon. Eventually.
Why not start that company yourself? DuckDuckGo has been pretty successful, and supposedly they're looking to invest in other privacy-focused companies: https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/23/duckduckgo-will-be-making-...
What was George doing on Hinge? I've seen a stream or two and IIRC he had a significant other.
Absolutely none of my business but technically this is on-topic right now, in this thread.
It’s a pity that (Algorithm free) cohost died.
I sometimes think of the internet as an alternative dimension: as mind space; it was Terra Nova and speculators rode in to grab the available real estate. But as the experience also showed us, there are maybe infinite mind spaces, and the job of anyone dissatisfied with the status quo is to open those new spaces where networks can be built around principles other than enshittification.
America also was once Terra Nova...
Oh, shit. Well said, sir. But I think this may be unrealistically optimistic, assuming that the problem is temporary.
Nothing will make a nerd a communist faster than getting a taste of real life on dating apps.
Dating apps aren't real life - they're holodecks designed to make you think you need to buy premium.
If everyone uses them, they're the real life.
It's like, saying social media is not real. Well, maybe it is. But right now where I live they shaped the politics of our country.
How would communism help with that? Make women common property?
No. It's just that the teachings of totalitarian sects are especially effective against narrow-minded, disillusioned people. The solutions they propose are not supposed to be effective or even realistic.
I suppose if all men made the same salary that would level the playing field to some degree.
It would remove one more option of leveling the playing field for short, ugly, or stupid men, no?
It helps if you read the post to understand. He was bummed people pay for boosts.
Yeah, so how does communism solve the situation when attention of women is limited and needs to be competed for? Does every man get an equal 3-second slice of attention from each girl on communist dating apps?
Attractive women are not such a rare resource. There is no particular problem in collecting it and distributing it fairly. One attractive woman can satisfy tens of thousands of men during the period of her attractiveness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_of_water_theory
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Who writes like this? Another victim of the little shiny screen device.
That’s below HS level of writing and to think he was born in the US.
Very poor thought. Likely written after consumption of some bad drugs.
> It’s not okay. Advertising is not okay. Price discrimination is not okay. Using big data, machine learning, and psychology to manipulate others at scale is not okay.
Stop participating. Hinge is towards the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you'll do just fine without it.
Thanks for parroting https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
I am literally replying to an article worded thusly:
This is obviously written in jest.
Collectivists generally start from premises which discount or even dismiss individual agency.
This is a cheap overgeneralization.
Libertarians and revolutionaries often start from premises that overestimate their worth relative to millions of other ordinary people.
Spend for two weeks in the woods, and you'll find out who brings you food when you're hungry (spoilers: nobody).
And yet individualists reach to secure those network effects while at the same time decrying they don't exist or will never work, anything to deny the advantage of a network to competing agents.
What? Sex is a basic need in Maslow’s hierarchy.
Yes, and Hinge is not the sole human corollary of sexual intercourse. Ask your parents.
Ever tried approaching people in actual real life not internet?
Yes, but nobody ever died because of not having sex.
Except they did. Loneliness shortens life.