> The McDonald’s-backed company Plexure sells surveillance data on you to vendors, who use it to raise the price of items when they think you’ll pay more.
Finally I understand why when the McDonalds app was introduced it asked for permission to access my contacts. Of course I refused and deleted the app immediately. But to this day whenever I go to the McDonalds drive-thru the first question they ask is "Are you using the app today?"
McDonalds seems to care so much about their app that I wonder if selling personal information makes them more money than selling hamburgers.
It can be interesting to look at all the servers these apps try to reach after being installed
Unless one is using something like GrapheneOS, Android/iOS "app permissions" do not meaningfully impede data collection
As long as apps can connect to the internet, data can be collected. By design Android/iOS does not enable users to deny internet access to specific apps. That design is not a coincidence
One good response to that question is "I don't and I never will, sorry", some people think you can only vote with your wallet but that's not true, they really don't like the hostile atmosphere such kind of answers give, so if it became a common answer I bet they would stop asking so directly.
This is such a weird mindset. How much interaction do you think the person hearing your response has with the person in corporate that made them all ask that question?
Being rude or hostile to service people, even just mildly, because of corporate decisions is not only ineffective, but it's also cruel.
Rudeness in hostility is in how you state your position. Having a position (that you dislike and won't participate in a corporate sales funnel is always OK, and it's always OK to politely express that to representatives of the corporation. Even if they happen to be employees of the franchise owner, they're wearing the uniform and promoting the brand, rather than representing 'local burger restaurant.' Of course, you can just not eat there at all (I don't) but in that case no communication is taking place. Many people are OK with McDonalds' food offerings but not with their invasive app marketing.
Trust me, no communication is happening in either situation. Your complaint is not being run up the corporate ladder. All you're doing is making someone's day a bit worse in order to get some fleeting feeling of self-satisfaction for voicing your opinion. You're of course free to be that person, but the rest of us are free to judge you for it.
Fair enough, but where do you draw the line? What if they ask you for ID for a burger? What if they ask to see your browsing history? Or your medical history? At what point is "I will never give that to you" or "Ha ha, no" justified?
At some point you just buy your burger elsewhere. "Can I see ID!" is absolutely across that "go elsewhere" line. No need to be rude, just stopping giving your money to them.
These questions are missing the point. The person you're talking to has no control over the policy so any response directly to them is not going to impact that policy which means the objectionable nature of the policy and your desire to change it are irrelevant. If you're so deeply offended by the question, either stop patronizing the business or voice your criticism in a more constructive manner like trying to reach out to corporate or organizing some consumer action. Don't go the easy and lazy route of attacking the messenger.
There are definitely some people who think that directing anger and unpleasantness at the person they talk to (who has no control over the situation other than choosing not to do their job) is a valid approach to providing "feedback".
Some sort of "trickle up" mechanism where if enough people are sufficiently nasty to frontline workers, it'll get back to decision makers who will then change course.
I think that's fantasy and/or rationalization for taking things out on others.
I was a customer facing employee for a company whose underhanded policies caused me to face a lot of (legitimate) hostility.
I eventually quit for this reason, and I know at least one other employee who did. That company lost two otherwise good employees.
It works, it's just a question of how much collateral damage you're ok with.
If management want to use front facing employees to shelter them from customer grievance, what other target to people have?
The particular problem here is there's no feedback as to why you boycott them.
You see, the following headline has more effect on CEO's and decision makers
"McD's sales drop 10% after customers refuse the app and other forms of spying" --Forbes
If it's a silent boycott then you see stupid headlines like
"Are millennials killing McD?"
Remember the entire purpose isn't so that one company doesn't track you with an app, is so every company figures out tracking you with an app is a bad idea.
Indeed. I think anything short of tossing your drink at McDonalds workers probably doesn't phase them. They deal with much worse shit from the public than somebody snarking at the premise of having an app.
“Well, I’ll tell you what, pal. I am not mad at you, okay? I am mad at the system. Okay, but unfortunately the system isn’t here for me to direct my frustrations at it—“ Dennis
No, just to ask you if you're using the app. After you say no a human comes on the intercom. The human doesn't have to suffer the abuse of asking about the app, wouldn't surprise me if part of that is because it's set lots of people in a rage so they let them just vent to a computer.
I have no idea what happens if you order through the app, maybe in that case it's 100% AI.
btw, i just now did glance at the menu online, i had no idea that this crap i wouldn't dare to call food (unless i were starving) is currently selling in spain. this is a tiny bit depressing but was actually to be expected, and i stand by my statement :-)
It sure seems like whenever a corporation grows old, large or expansive enough, it will inevitably morph into an spy agency. Even what is obstensibly a burger flipping business wants to spy on people.
Earlier this week I was in a regional gas station getting lunch, they've got maybe 30 or so locations scattered around this part of the state, and watched them tell an old man that he couldn't get a loyalty card from them anymore because they only do apps now. "But I don't have a cellphone" - "Uhhh... You can also do it online?"
If every restaurant is its own small/medium business and the corporate franchisor only ever interacts with the franchisees and never with the end customers, then all the direct revenue for the franchisor will be from services or licenses provided to the franchisees, not from directly selling burgers. But the franchisees are still much more dependent on the franchisor than they would be in a normal B2B relationship. And many of those "service costs" can be freely set by the franchisor and have the purpose of channeling revenue back from the restaurants - revenue that would not exist if no burgers were sold.
In the same way that American Airlines is a credit card company. How much rent will they receive if they stopped selling burgers?
> The Founder"
Good movie but McDonalds is a long long way away from scrappy, morally-bankrupt Ray Kroc's time. I imagine using pink slime to make the nuggets he sold to kids would be right in his wheelhouse though.
> a burger flipping business wants to spy on people
"It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17."
For example, the Manna software in each store knew about employee performance
in microscopic detail — how often the employee was on time or early, how
quickly the employee did tasks, how quickly the employee answered the phone
and responded to email, how the customers rated the employee and so on. When
an employee left a store and tried to get a new job somewhere else, any other
Manna system could request the employee’s performance record. If an employee
had “issues” — late, slow, disorganized, unkempt — it became nearly
impossible for that employee to get another job.
```When Uber entered the taxi market without securing taxi licenses or extending the workforce protections required under law, it said the move didn’t count because it did it with an app.```
It's so weird to see the first half of this article written as an ode to the virtues of competition and then see the sharp pivot into defending taxi medallions. Say what you will about Uber, but no Uber driver has ever tried to lie and harass a passenger over whether or not the credit card machine is broken in an effort to cheat on their taxes. It's not even like the anti-consumer hostility of the taxi experience translated into better rights for workers, the high price of a medallion meant in practice your typical cab driver was in a situation damned close to indentured servitude to a medallion company.
And to top it all off, taxis demonstrate the fallacy of thinking that hundreds of market participants provides meaningful benefits from competition. In a market with a suitably large number of cab drivers and passengers, the odds of repeat business between any pair of driver and passenger is low enough that neither party is incentivized to treat each other well. It's not like anyone was pulling out a Yelp-like site or review book to pick the best-reviewed cab drivers, or like you went out of your way to stick with a cab driver you'd had a good experience with. Meaningful competition requires that people can make _informed_ choices, and without repeat business you don't get participants informed enough to make meaningful choices between market participants. It also requires leverage. It doesn't matter if you threaten to take your business elsewhere next time if you and they both know _you were going to anyway_.
I'm not saying that Uber is perfect, or even that Uber couldn't be productively regulated better by the government. I'm saying that taxis were a terrible experience, and I don't trust Doctorow to have a good lay of the land when he focuses more on his ideology than the evidence. If subscribing to Doctorow's beliefs requires services to look more like taxis than Ubers, you can count me out.
This is a deflection. Cory is not coming out in defense of taxi medallions so much as it is a re-iteration of the current laws in place and how tech uses apps to get around the laws. Yes taxis suck, but also so does uber in their own way - This is all beside the point. These tech companies are using 'gig'ified models to get around laws set by the city officials elected by the people.
The opening of the article is laying out the case that the laws are good -- they make the market legible to participants. As he says:
```
To navigate all of these technical minefields, you need the help of a third party. In a modern society, that third party is an expert regulator who investigates or anticipates problems in their area of expertise and then makes rules designed to solve these problems.
To make these rules, the regulator convenes a truth-seeking exercise, in which all affected parties submit evidence about what the best rule should be and then get a chance to read what everyone else wrote and rebut their claims. Sometimes, there are in-person hearings, or successive rounds of comment and counter-comment, but that’s the basic shape of things.
Once all the evidence is in, the regulator—who is a neutral expert, required to recuse themselves if they have conflicts—makes a rule, citing the evidence on which the rule is based. This whole system is backstopped by courts, which can order the process to begin anew if the new rule isn’t supported by the evidence created while the regulator was developing the record.
This kind of adversarial process—something between a court case and scientific peer review—has a good track record of producing high-quality regulations. You can thank a process like this for the fact that you weren’t killed today by critters in your tap water or a high-voltage shock from one of your home’s electrical outlets.
```
And this is central to Doctorow's point, right? The narrow question of the legality of Uber's current service offerings is actually pretty well litigated, and if Uber was as flagrantly illegal as he claims, "we're an app" wouldn't have kept them in business. Doctorow argues that this is happening through regulatory capture -- the case isn't primarily that Uber is violating the currently existing set of laws, regulations, court precedents, etc. It's that Uber is violating what the regulations _would be_ in a world where they had less market power with which to influence regulations.
And so it's not enough to argue about how the apps get around _current_ laws. By Doctorow's own arguments, we're debating the merits of a counterfactual set of different regulations that we would have if you changed current conditions. And at that point, it is absolutely fair game to ask if this counterfactual set of different regulations is actually better for market participants.
(depends on jurisdiction) there was already concept of pre-booked transport that was distinct from taxi and does not require taxi medaillon to operate. Uber just made pre-booked transport as convenient to use as taxi.
So it is not that Uber avoided taxi licencing 'because of app', but it avoided taxi licencing by providing slightly different service that do not fit into legal definition of regulated taxi services. And one could argue that these slight differences are in fact important, because the reason why taxis are tightly regulated are for reasons that mostly do not apply to Uber.
The Doctorow school argument, as best I can tell, would go 'the regulations on black car service were meant for things like limo services that don't compete directly with taxis, and once Uber started competing directly with taxis, regulators and authorities should have moved more aggressively to write new regulations/laws that regulated Uber the same way taxis are regulated.' They would not agree with "the reason why taxis are tightly regulated are for reasons that mostly do not apply to Uber."
And this is exactly why I think the question of "what is the correct way to regulate car ride services" shouldn't hinge on incumbency bias towards taxis, but actually ask the question of what is best for participants in the market (which doesn't just include taxis and Ubers but also includes public transportation and its users, for instance). But that doesn't fit neatly into Doctorow's enshitification narrative.
These claims of incumbency bias, based on a fragment of a sentence, seem unnecessarily presumptive.
I've read a bit of his work, seen a couple of his speeches, and don't have the same conclusions about his opinions. You could probably ask for clarification.
I want to gently push back on this from my perch in NYC. Pre-Uber, taxis had their monopolistic issues but were:
- available at most times on major thoroughfares with a raise of the hand.
- reliable - I was never once jerked around or overcharged by an NYC yellow cab, which I can not say about private cab companies I've seen in other cities.
The worst problem was finding cabs in the outer boroughs, and that was improved greatly with the "green cab" program (they were restricted to beginning their fares in the outer boroughs).
There's been a lot of time and gradual change since then, but what I see now (Post-Uber):
- In most of the city, it is difficult or impossible to hail a cab without an app.
- The Uber/app drivers are worse, clearly much less experienced and don't know where they are going.
- Price gouging has been outsourced to the app itself, and happens very frequently.
- Even once cabs are called on the app they often cancel or fail to show in anywhere near the advertised time.
Personally, I greatly prefer the Pre-Uber situation.
>Say what you will about Uber, but no Uber driver has ever tried to lie and harass a passenger over whether or not the credit card machine is broken in an effort to cheat on their taxes.
This actually did happen to me. When I was in Hyderabad, I took an Uber from my company's office to the airport, and the driver said his phone died right after picking me up, so I had to pay cash.
Actually most people agree that legality and morality are overlapping but separate categories. There are legal and immoral things as well as illegal but moral ones. I have no problem with someone breaking a law I see as immoral if the act itself is morally positive or neutral. It is a matter of benefit versus odds of being caught.
For example, do you think it is immoral for marijuana people to consume their drug of choice? It remains federally illegal.
taking into account all the impacts on society, uber is a substantial improvement on what came before. sometimes laws are bad and it is good when you break them
> Competition is an essential component of effective regulation, for two reasons: First, competition keeps the companies within a sector from all telling the same lie to its regulators.
I'm as pro-competition as anybody, but I don't actually buy this argument.
Firstly, regulating a thousand small players is much harder than regulating a few. Which is why there is a lot of evidence that regulation (even when good or needed) eliminates some amount of competition - crash and emission testing put an end to new car manufacturers for a long time.
Secondly, in industries with lots of competition and individual actors (real estate, healthcare, finance, etc) regulatory capture is actually far worse! Increasing the sheer number of special interests does not, in fact, improve regulation. And if anything, smearing it across as many voting districts as possible gives a level of political entrenchment that software companies could only dream of.
Let me flip the Airbnb argument on its head - why are hotels allowed to build dense dormitory-style housing in cities where it's otherwise illegal to do so? Because their regulatory capture is so entrenched that we don't even think about it.
I disagree. Finance is a good example. The core regulated parts of finance like retail and commercial banking are pretty good. Costs are low, they’ve gotten more efficient, services are uniform and poor performers get purged.
The issues with finance are on the edges and areas where there are really a small number of industry players. They have an outsized impact and the worst practices are usually skirting the regulatory framework.
The Airbnb argument isn’t regulatory capture example - the issue there is that it’s impossible to build anything. You have to build a giant hotel to justify the overhead of building anything hotel. Airbnb fills a gap of creative reuse and provides a tax shelter for rich people.
Most modern (20th century) regulations on topics like hotels were formalizations of existing socially accepted practices and often attempts to address obvious issues (eg many guests unable to escape a fire).
It depends on whether you're measuring competition as "number of competitors" or "market concentration". You can have a lot of actors but still have high concentration. Healthcare for example has many actors but the concentration is very high among the big health systems and insurance providers.
People take regulations for granted. The economics not only survive, they thrive. It doesn't exist in a vacuum. Protected citizenry is happier and more productive.
> Firstly, regulating a thousand small players is much harder than regulating a few.
I don't agree with this.
Get you and a thousand friends to submit fake mortgages documents and let me know how many of you end up in jail. Compare that too how many people went to jail from Wells Fargo.
More smaller players is easier to regulate because you can literally use any punishments. If you dissolve Wells Fargo the economy is going to throw a fit (see Enron) but if you dissolve a tiny company then nobody cares.
Real Estate and Healthcare seem to be pretty highly concentrated industries imo. Even though there are a zillion agents/doctors they're part of a professional guild and that guild does the lobbying on their behalf. Like good luck getting antibiotics on your own but after a doctor looks at you for 1 minute you have a prescription for the same drug you always take for an ear infection.
> Because their regulatory capture is so entrenched that we don't even think about it.
Nonsense. Residents don't complain about hotels because of the perception that hotels are too expensive for poor and working-class people to afford. Whereas the perception of apartments is that they are cheap enough that such people will choose to live in them.
It's all about not wanting to live near "poor" people.
Hotels are a specially designated category for temporary housing so that permanent residents can exclude travelers from their neighborhoods.
You aren't flipping it on its head at all, the reason hotels exist is because travelers exist and need somewhere to go.
Why does Airbnb think they have a right to invert the social contract that has created a designated place for people who are likely to not know local norms and be operating on strange hours?
I like the modern social contract and hotels, but to be fair, AirBNB is inverting what had already been inverted. In some sense, AirBNB is returning to the old model before hotels were everywhere. A traveler would reach a new town and ask for lodging in someone's home. In many countries, providing lodging to strangers is still the norm.
Em. Tourism has been a thing, complete with travel guides, tour operators, souvenirs made for tourists and tourist attractions for millennia.
Plenty of major destinations (holy places, resorts, etc) would bring in thousands of tourists at a time. The ancient Olympics, for instance, brought in tens of thousands of visitors.
Funny, in my experience Airbnb never captured the vacation home market to anywhere near the degree of the apartment in a popular city market. Where I am you still have a much better bet of finding a vacation home via the websites that existed previously than Airbnb.
Also there is a reason why places places with lots of vacation homes are considered expensive an dnot the most pleasant to live at permanently. That's why cities etc regulated, they dis not want them to turn into holiday parks.
Travel management companies and other business who rent property for tourism have been doing this for decades. I have several great small websites that had cabins or short term rentals in cities I frequent and I wasn’t getting killed my stupid cleaning prices or junk fees.
Some of the cabin rental companies I rent from have been around since the 90s.
And now they’re easy to find and everyone buys them for investment which crowds out community members.
The neighborhood social contract. The one where I know my neighbors and we build a vibrant community. Instead of the drunk idiots who show up for 3 days and throw their beer bottles on the ground.
Am I allowed to stay with a relative or a friend when I visit their town? I am totally ignorant of local norms, maybe I should be in the Holiday Inn next door instead?
"not know local norms and be operating on strange hours?"
What 'local norms' are so different that you won't understand them as a traveler? 99.9% of the population sleep and wake up at the same time. You just need to be a decent human being.
Yeah I don't buy OP's "local norms" argument but as someone who lived in the same building as an AirBnB it's inarguable to me that it affects the standard of living for others in the building.
The hallways got scuffed up, some guests were excessively noisy, dropped trash all over the place, broke stuff... as a permanent resident if you do that you face consequences. As someone only resident for a weekend it makes no difference to you.
Completely agreed: the way he articulates the problem is self-defeating. Apologies if this sounds absurdly abstract or hand-wavy, but I think the correct framing really has more to do with a sort of essential clash between law and software as technologies of social regulation.
Written law was something very important historically: from unwritten norms to codified representations that, however imperfect and provisional, were more or less accessible to all and changeable through whatever process, democratic or otherwise. Over the last decades, we -- and this could be taken rather literally as "the readers of hacker news" -- have been encoding so many aspects of the world into software in a way that doesn't clearly coincide with the legal norms of any particular let alone every country.
On the one hand, software is clearly "better" than law in at least the sense that the former eliminates the necessary ambiguity of the latter: the interpretation or "implementation details" of even just a particular law are always disputed. Perhaps a particular implementation of cross-border financial transactions, say, or of personal identity doesn't in fact reflect what the developers or product managers intended, but if that is identified it can be changed.
Yet, on the other hand, it is certainly true that, from the perspective of regulators let alone the masses, the resulting situation is much closer to pre-law. Nobody has any idea how or why they were suddenly banned from Instagram or their PayPal account closed, let alone how money actually moves around the world when they send a friend funds through Transferwise. Certainly, if we don't even know how things are working there is no process by which it could be decided that things should work differently, let alone a process by which software would concretely be made to work differently.
Indeed, I am skeptical that law as such will ever be able to regulate software: even just considering the problem in terms of a single country/legal system, how does one actually guarantee that the ever-changing corpus of code complies with the ever-changing and essentially ambiguous body of regulations? One of course sees this with the EU as the "avant-garde" of the struggle to regulate software. They pursue either these incredibly general wars on "cookies" that don't solve real problems, or endlessly deliberate when it's already too late about how to handle AI, or produce something relatively well-conceived like GDPR where enforcement is then incredibly unclear if not impossible.
TLDR I have no idea what the solution is, but I think the intrinsic problem of law and software is incredibly important to take seriously as software eats the world. At the very least, it's not just a problem of "competition" since, as you note, monopoly is at least one sufficient condition [1] of eventually rendering the way software regulates the world transparent and open to change.
[1] Undoubtedly, there are other ways this could possibly transpire through open source etcetc -- however, even in that case there has to be a guarantee that particular software defines the operations of a particular domain, i.e. that there exists software through which one can understand that domain and hypothetically change, which is in some sense just a "public" monopoly.
> The death of competition spells doom for regulation. Competition is an essential component of effective regulation, for two reasons: First, competition keeps the companies within a sector from all telling the same lie to its regulators. Second, competition erodes companies’ profits and thus starves them of the capital they need to overpower or outmaneuver their regulators.
Yeah, maybe you can start with Rogers Wireless. Eh, Cory?
I would say that regulatory capture is merely a consequence of political capture. The politicians write the regulations, supervise the regulators, and in most cases, appoint the judges.
How did Microsoft avoid breakup in 2001? Simple: George W. Bush was elected President, and the Bush administration decided to settle the court case with a slap on the wrist. Don't blame the regulators but rather the politicians.
It's ironic that Doctorow uses the example of "whether you should heed your doctor’s advice to get vaccinated", because the regulators all support vaccination, but again as a result of a Presidential election, HHS has been politically captured by an anti-vaxxer who ignores expert advice.
> I would say that regulatory capture is merely a consequence of political capture. The politicians write the regulations, supervise the regulators, and in most cases, appoint the judges.
>
> How did Microsoft avoid breakup in 2001? Simple: George W. Bush was elected President, and the Bush administration decided to settle the court case with a slap on the wrist. Don't blame the regulators but rather the politicians.
>
But he addresses that in the post, by saying that these monopoly/olipolyies actors can amass massive war chests that make them become bigger than the regulator. So by the time MS was a monopoly it was already too late.
> these monopoly/olipolyies actors can amass massive war chests that make them become bigger than the regulator.
Bigger than the POTUS? And why wasn't the previous Clinton administration captured?
But it's actually quite clear from the article that the regulators are not politicians:
> In a modern society, that third party is an expert regulator who investigates or anticipates problems in their area of expertise and then makes rules designed to solve these problems.
> To make these rules, the regulator convenes a truth-seeking exercise
> the regulator—who is a neutral expert, required to recuse themselves if they have conflicts—makes a rule, citing the evidence on which the rule is based.
Pretty nonsensical argument. Uber isn't an employer not because it's an app but because it's a service that connects you to someone. Your phone company isn't an employer just because you use them to hire a handyman.
So wordy only to use a nonsensical strawman. I get it: you're trying to create a new buzzword the way you did with "enshittification". So the usual suspects will be big fans. Good luck.
Exactly. If Uber is really just providing a service to the drivers, the drivers should be paying a subscription to Uber while taking money directly from the customer.
(Edit) And they should be setting their own prices!
I would caution against using this as a discriminator, since the scheme whereby you are billed by the phone company for third-party services has long existed, but that doesn't make AT&T your boss.
If Uber is just a service that connects you to someone, why does Uber take the majority of a user's payment and why is it against Uber's TOS to share contact information with your drivers so you can call them and ask for a ride outside the app?
I think you have a strong argument here, but there's a problem of deeper and widespread rot at play.
The reason Uber can get away with pretending it's just a "connector" is because the entire tech ecosystem has been allowed to normalize that kind of control without accountability.
Look at Apple and Google: they take a 30% cut on every sale and ban any competing payment systems. That's the same pattern - absolute gatekeeping disguised as "market facilitation."
Our regulators have become so complacent that this behavior is now seen as the default way digital markets work. The problem isn’t just Uber's misclassification; it's that the entire platform economy is built on pretending these companies are neutral middlemen when they're really gatekeepers.
There is a lot of jurisprudence regarding whether or not the employer-employee relationship exists, and you can't simply dismiss that with a few words. Obviously the phone company does not employ the handyman, because if the handyman declines to fix your house the phone company is not going to disconnect his phone. But in the case of Uber, Uber absolutely will throw a driver off the platform unless they hew to a strict set of behaviors.
Doctorow should be tried in absentia by professors of English composition, on the charges of poisoning the discourse with his stupid word, and of making posters incorrectly believe they have scored a profound point by including it in their sentences.
Anyway let's dismantle these rickety arguments. 1) That RealPage says they can break the law because they are an app. This has no factual basis. You can read RealPage's argument[1] and draw your own conclusion. RealPage argues that they do not engage in price fixing, they distribute marketplace data which is protected by the First Amendment. No aspect of this argument has anything to do with means or venue. Indeed, the debate is exactly the opposite of what Doctorow suggests. RealPage's opponents are saying that RealPage must be regulated because they are a software platform, even though their activities would obviously be protected by the First Amendment in any other context. Doctorow fails to address the First Amendment implications.
2) That competitive markets have brought us things like antilock brakes. This lacks even the slightest resemblance to reality. The only reason we have widespread functioning ABS is because the whole industry is totally dominated by a few players, and always has been, even if the cartel membership has changed over the decades. The existence of the cartel and its co-evolution with automotive regulators is the enabling reason why the technology works. Doctorow throws out this example but does not grapple with the implications. He believes you won't think about it.
That RealPage argument is funny. It's not that they can do it because they are an app, but because they are a third party. So if I create a company that "sells information on the optimal price of eggs", and every grocery store in the country aligns to that, it's somehow protected speech rather than price fixing.
> Doctorow should be tried in absentia by professors of English composition, on the charges of poisoning the discourse with his stupid word, and of making posters incorrectly believe they have scored a profound point by including it in their sentences.
>
> Anyway let's dismantle these rickety arguments. 1) That RealPage says they can break the law because they are an app. This has no factual basis. You can read RealPage's argument[1] and draw your own conclusion. RealPage argues that they do not engage in price fixing, they distribute marketplace data which is protected by the First Amendment. No aspect of this argument has anything to do with means or venue. Indeed, the debate is exactly the opposite of what Doctorow suggests. RealPage's opponents are saying that RealPage must be regulated because they are a software platform, even though their activities would obviously be protected by the First Amendment in any other context. Doctorow fails to address the First Amendment implications.
>
But Doctorows argument is that a non-app service that says, "hey we bring all landlords together in a room to discuss how we can get the best rents on our properties" would run clearly a foul of antitrust laws (and no the activity is not protected by free speech). RealPage argument is a distraction, they try to muddy the waters and they do it exactly how Doctorow is saying, by creating confusion around what their software service actually is.
> 2) That competitive markets have brought us things like antilock brakes. This lacks even the slightest resemblance to reality. The only reason we have widespread functioning ABS is because the whole industry is totally dominated by a few players, and always has been, even if the cartel membership has changed over the decades. The existence of the cartel and its co-evolution with automotive regulators is the enabling reason why the technology works. Doctorow throws out this example but does not grapple with the implications. He believes you won't think about it.
>
Doctorow is one of those older bloggers from the pre-influencer era who realized that they get a lot more eyeballs on their content by leaning into memeing and rage baiting than by sober analysis. At first it was fun but eventually the rigor of his arguments took backseat to his influencer game. What makes him particularly interesting is he's an influencer for the type of person who claims they hate influencers and the modern social media landscape.
I wish he went back to writing cool fiction but I'm guessing that's a lot more effort for a lot less influence. And honestly he's done his bonafides in the fiction world so it's not like he has anything to prove.
(Yes I know he had some fiction out last year but he took a long break. Maybe he's back on the fiction horse?)
Fundamentally the issues precede the end states. Neither present-day software nor law-government are efficient enough to service the users to whom the possibilities (and deficiencies) are now apparent to the developers. Tech didn't create new formats it merely reformatted them into databases. Both are trapped in their inefficiencies which force the reduction of competition or their monopoly. The state is a myth we workaround by going global. Software operates arbitrary things and then automates them as expedient interfaces that disperse and charge access for what is ultimately specific (a good or service). Decent was a trial and error workaround that simply creates status.
Doctorow pretends these are the ultimate forms, which s how his answers are palliatives not solutions.
It's strange how bureaucratic Silicon Valley has become in relation to his bureaucratic prose, the tech industry once saw solutions beyond the available tech, now it's buried in consultancy rebuttal and Friedman myth ("competition is good").
We have behemoth Goliaths that are living dinosaurs that engage in hierarchical domination of what are really illusions: text, symbols, images. All we need now are the behemoths to mint their own $, copyright it and the circle is complete. Yet these are merely simulations in search of a reality that AI can't deliver, and so the behemoths are using all techniques to remain relevant. It's stillnly one step ahead of a magic act. Obviously they are finished, ready for obliteration by insightful, imaginative succession. Bureaucracies are all targets for replacement, especially Doctorow's type of prose.
Yes, they use apps to break the law.
But, still, regulation - when in doubt - should be avoided. Did you know that in Germany, you need to send your employees to a specialised training if they use a ladder in their day to day work? You don't need to regulate what's common sense.
What is ridiculous is that you think this isn't a good idea. Safely using ladders isn't common sense and ladder injuries probably cost the state and the places where they occur a lot of money.
I think you are mistaking your point of view, which is probably that of an individual business owner, for the point of view of someone looking at the actuarial statistics or whatever and seeing tens of thousands of preventable ladder injuries a year. Just because an event is rare from your point of view doesn't mean that the event costs nothing or that it should be ignored.
I can't believe how common this attitude of "if its too small for me to notice it doesn't matter" is.
The analysis isn't done yet though:
- How much do you trust the statistics about which ladder deaths were preventable?
- Do you have the numbers on the counter-factual: once ladder training is introduced, these sub-populations see X reduction in ladder deaths, offsetting for reduction in ladder use due to people not having their ladder license?
- What is the productivity cost of assigning every single ladder user a training class, in perpetuity? This analysis should include the cost of creating a cottage ladder training industry that provides the trainings, the hourly productivity loss of sending people to trainings, the administrative cost of ensuring the trainings have been conformed to, etc.
In your heart of hearts, when you are assigned mandatory trainings, how much do you learn? I'm not asking how much _could_ you learn, I'm asking how much DO you learn? My experience, and the obvious unspoken consensus of all my colleagues, is that you click through mandatory virtual trainings as fast as possible, with the sound down, on fast-forward. If it's a live training with an actual practical skill (like ladder training), then I'd definitely concede it's much more engaging and you probably learn something. But MANY trainings are clearly, obviously, a net friction on society.
"I see a problem - how about we make a law that everybody must learn about that thing?" is the crappiest, laziest way to address the problem that you could possibly think of. If 'mandate a training' was analogized to a pull request on a codebase, it would be like responding to a bug report by adding a pop-up dialog that always pops up whenever you open the program and warns you about the bug. In other words, the shittiest possible non-solution that lets somebody close the issue as resolved. A real solution takes more work and more thinking.
I love this comment. I am so sick and tired of the term "common sense" being used as a panacea for those on the bottom of a Dunning Kruger curve to justify wanting their ignorance to be taken as seriously as other people's knowledge. I can think of dozens of ways someone could misuse a ladder that would definitely result in property damage and quite possibly injuries and even fatalities.
I wonder how many people are killed yearly because they buy various tools and don't read the damn instructions because they're definitely smart enough to use this and be safe already, it's common sense after all!
That's such a gross simplification that it's highly misleading. Yes you need training to if your work involves ladders, just like any other tool that is potentially dangerous. The type of training highly depends on the danger, so for someone using a stepladder to get something from a shelf will not need more than "use the ladder from the closet, put it back after use", while someone climbing up to the antennas on a skyscraper will receive very different training (i.e. always clip in your safety harness, how to use double carabiners ...). I don't know how this is controversial?
We had someone come to our house to work on a range hood. They didn’t have ladder training, so the insurance company wouldn’t cover it if they fell off the ladder.
The range hood repairman left without doing any work. I do wonder what a normal day at work looks like for this person. We weren’t billed for the house call.
Par for the course for a vanload of meth-heads who've never attended an hour of formal training in their life to be walking around a 45 degree roof without a harness, or one clipped into an ornamental non-structural member.
You do need to regulate what is common sense to protect employees. There's a lot of pressure from employers to do things that go against common sense, accidents happen. The employee is hurt, employer doesn't care. A large role of regulation is to protect employees from greedy employers. That's why some employers like illegals, they don't complain about not following regulations.
> The McDonald’s-backed company Plexure sells surveillance data on you to vendors, who use it to raise the price of items when they think you’ll pay more.
Finally I understand why when the McDonalds app was introduced it asked for permission to access my contacts. Of course I refused and deleted the app immediately. But to this day whenever I go to the McDonalds drive-thru the first question they ask is "Are you using the app today?"
McDonalds seems to care so much about their app that I wonder if selling personal information makes them more money than selling hamburgers.
>Finally I understand why when the McDonalds app was introduced it asked for permission to access my contacts
Maybe it did at some point but it's not in the list of permissions on Android
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mcdonalds....
"Financial information " is on the list...
...I am thinking that does not include payslips....
It can be interesting to look at all the servers these apps try to reach after being installed
Unless one is using something like GrapheneOS, Android/iOS "app permissions" do not meaningfully impede data collection
As long as apps can connect to the internet, data can be collected. By design Android/iOS does not enable users to deny internet access to specific apps. That design is not a coincidence
>> I wonder if selling personal information makes them more money than selling hamburgers.
Historically it's been a real estate company due to the vast portfoloio and usually prime locations. Not sure if this is still the case.
One good response to that question is "I don't and I never will, sorry", some people think you can only vote with your wallet but that's not true, they really don't like the hostile atmosphere such kind of answers give, so if it became a common answer I bet they would stop asking so directly.
This is such a weird mindset. How much interaction do you think the person hearing your response has with the person in corporate that made them all ask that question?
Being rude or hostile to service people, even just mildly, because of corporate decisions is not only ineffective, but it's also cruel.
Rudeness in hostility is in how you state your position. Having a position (that you dislike and won't participate in a corporate sales funnel is always OK, and it's always OK to politely express that to representatives of the corporation. Even if they happen to be employees of the franchise owner, they're wearing the uniform and promoting the brand, rather than representing 'local burger restaurant.' Of course, you can just not eat there at all (I don't) but in that case no communication is taking place. Many people are OK with McDonalds' food offerings but not with their invasive app marketing.
Trust me, no communication is happening in either situation. Your complaint is not being run up the corporate ladder. All you're doing is making someone's day a bit worse in order to get some fleeting feeling of self-satisfaction for voicing your opinion. You're of course free to be that person, but the rest of us are free to judge you for it.
Fair enough, but where do you draw the line? What if they ask you for ID for a burger? What if they ask to see your browsing history? Or your medical history? At what point is "I will never give that to you" or "Ha ha, no" justified?
At some point you just buy your burger elsewhere. "Can I see ID!" is absolutely across that "go elsewhere" line. No need to be rude, just stopping giving your money to them.
These questions are missing the point. The person you're talking to has no control over the policy so any response directly to them is not going to impact that policy which means the objectionable nature of the policy and your desire to change it are irrelevant. If you're so deeply offended by the question, either stop patronizing the business or voice your criticism in a more constructive manner like trying to reach out to corporate or organizing some consumer action. Don't go the easy and lazy route of attacking the messenger.
The person mandating the question doesn't care if you sound hostile to the person at the window, they just care how many start using the app.
There are definitely some people who think that directing anger and unpleasantness at the person they talk to (who has no control over the situation other than choosing not to do their job) is a valid approach to providing "feedback".
Some sort of "trickle up" mechanism where if enough people are sufficiently nasty to frontline workers, it'll get back to decision makers who will then change course.
I think that's fantasy and/or rationalization for taking things out on others.
I was a customer facing employee for a company whose underhanded policies caused me to face a lot of (legitimate) hostility. I eventually quit for this reason, and I know at least one other employee who did. That company lost two otherwise good employees. It works, it's just a question of how much collateral damage you're ok with. If management want to use front facing employees to shelter them from customer grievance, what other target to people have?
Yes. But...
It is a bit off to attack the drones of a corporate, albethey the only available target?
Do you really need that burger? Better to boycot them entirety
(Easy for me to say, I dispise MacDonalds food)
The particular problem here is there's no feedback as to why you boycott them.
You see, the following headline has more effect on CEO's and decision makers
"McD's sales drop 10% after customers refuse the app and other forms of spying" --Forbes
If it's a silent boycott then you see stupid headlines like
"Are millennials killing McD?"
Remember the entire purpose isn't so that one company doesn't track you with an app, is so every company figures out tracking you with an app is a bad idea.
Many people here seem to think a customer clearly stating their preference is inherently angry and unpleasant to front line workers. It isn't.
Indeed. I think anything short of tossing your drink at McDonalds workers probably doesn't phase them. They deal with much worse shit from the public than somebody snarking at the premise of having an app.
You can simply reply no, and be polite about it.
You’ll be asked the next time you visit, guaranteed. No matter your attitude so why be mean?
The teenager on the other end of the headset isn't the person you should be fighting this battle against.
“Well, I’ll tell you what, pal. I am not mad at you, okay? I am mad at the system. Okay, but unfortunately the system isn’t here for me to direct my frustrations at it—“ Dennis
It's usually asked by AI, at least at Taco Bell. There is no human that will feel the hostility.
Are you saying AI takes your order at Taco Bell drive through? If so, good thing to avoid.
No, just to ask you if you're using the app. After you say no a human comes on the intercom. The human doesn't have to suffer the abuse of asking about the app, wouldn't surprise me if part of that is because it's set lots of people in a rage so they let them just vent to a computer.
I have no idea what happens if you order through the app, maybe in that case it's 100% AI.
if ones tirade is of sufficient duration, [or volume] the human will hear at least part of it.
like a glance at the menu wasn't enough ...
btw, i just now did glance at the menu online, i had no idea that this crap i wouldn't dare to call food (unless i were starving) is currently selling in spain. this is a tiny bit depressing but was actually to be expected, and i stand by my statement :-)
It did but I think they're rolling that back now.
careful !
https://survivalfreedom.com/how-much-does-it-cost-mcdonalds-... [2023]
https://hpshplaidline.org/2024/02/08/breaking-down-the-cost-... [2024]
It sure seems like whenever a corporation grows old, large or expansive enough, it will inevitably morph into an spy agency. Even what is obstensibly a burger flipping business wants to spy on people.
Earlier this week I was in a regional gas station getting lunch, they've got maybe 30 or so locations scattered around this part of the state, and watched them tell an old man that he couldn't get a loyalty card from them anymore because they only do apps now. "But I don't have a cellphone" - "Uhhh... You can also do it online?"
> Even what is obstensibly a burger flipping business
Technically, McDonald's is a real estate company[1] who wants to spy on people, but that doesn't make it any less egregious.
[1] https://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burg...
Isn't that technically true for all franchises?
If every restaurant is its own small/medium business and the corporate franchisor only ever interacts with the franchisees and never with the end customers, then all the direct revenue for the franchisor will be from services or licenses provided to the franchisees, not from directly selling burgers. But the franchisees are still much more dependent on the franchisor than they would be in a normal B2B relationship. And many of those "service costs" can be freely set by the franchisor and have the purpose of channeling revenue back from the restaurants - revenue that would not exist if no burgers were sold.
McDonalds is a real estate business. I recommend you check out the 2016 movie "The Founder" which is the story of Ray Kroc. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Founder
> McDonalds is a real estate business.
In the same way that American Airlines is a credit card company. How much rent will they receive if they stopped selling burgers?
> The Founder"
Good movie but McDonalds is a long long way away from scrappy, morally-bankrupt Ray Kroc's time. I imagine using pink slime to make the nuggets he sold to kids would be right in his wheelhouse though.
While very interesting and a great movie, maybe can you explain how it's pertinent to this conversation?
>> "Even what is obstensibly a burger flipping business"
Ostensibly ;)
But yes, good movie too.
> a burger flipping business wants to spy on people
"It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17."
https://marshallbrain.com/manna2```When Uber entered the taxi market without securing taxi licenses or extending the workforce protections required under law, it said the move didn’t count because it did it with an app.```
It's so weird to see the first half of this article written as an ode to the virtues of competition and then see the sharp pivot into defending taxi medallions. Say what you will about Uber, but no Uber driver has ever tried to lie and harass a passenger over whether or not the credit card machine is broken in an effort to cheat on their taxes. It's not even like the anti-consumer hostility of the taxi experience translated into better rights for workers, the high price of a medallion meant in practice your typical cab driver was in a situation damned close to indentured servitude to a medallion company.
And to top it all off, taxis demonstrate the fallacy of thinking that hundreds of market participants provides meaningful benefits from competition. In a market with a suitably large number of cab drivers and passengers, the odds of repeat business between any pair of driver and passenger is low enough that neither party is incentivized to treat each other well. It's not like anyone was pulling out a Yelp-like site or review book to pick the best-reviewed cab drivers, or like you went out of your way to stick with a cab driver you'd had a good experience with. Meaningful competition requires that people can make _informed_ choices, and without repeat business you don't get participants informed enough to make meaningful choices between market participants. It also requires leverage. It doesn't matter if you threaten to take your business elsewhere next time if you and they both know _you were going to anyway_.
I'm not saying that Uber is perfect, or even that Uber couldn't be productively regulated better by the government. I'm saying that taxis were a terrible experience, and I don't trust Doctorow to have a good lay of the land when he focuses more on his ideology than the evidence. If subscribing to Doctorow's beliefs requires services to look more like taxis than Ubers, you can count me out.
> sharp pivot into defending taxi medallions.
This is a deflection. Cory is not coming out in defense of taxi medallions so much as it is a re-iteration of the current laws in place and how tech uses apps to get around the laws. Yes taxis suck, but also so does uber in their own way - This is all beside the point. These tech companies are using 'gig'ified models to get around laws set by the city officials elected by the people.
The opening of the article is laying out the case that the laws are good -- they make the market legible to participants. As he says:
``` To navigate all of these technical minefields, you need the help of a third party. In a modern society, that third party is an expert regulator who investigates or anticipates problems in their area of expertise and then makes rules designed to solve these problems.
To make these rules, the regulator convenes a truth-seeking exercise, in which all affected parties submit evidence about what the best rule should be and then get a chance to read what everyone else wrote and rebut their claims. Sometimes, there are in-person hearings, or successive rounds of comment and counter-comment, but that’s the basic shape of things.
Once all the evidence is in, the regulator—who is a neutral expert, required to recuse themselves if they have conflicts—makes a rule, citing the evidence on which the rule is based. This whole system is backstopped by courts, which can order the process to begin anew if the new rule isn’t supported by the evidence created while the regulator was developing the record.
This kind of adversarial process—something between a court case and scientific peer review—has a good track record of producing high-quality regulations. You can thank a process like this for the fact that you weren’t killed today by critters in your tap water or a high-voltage shock from one of your home’s electrical outlets. ```
And this is central to Doctorow's point, right? The narrow question of the legality of Uber's current service offerings is actually pretty well litigated, and if Uber was as flagrantly illegal as he claims, "we're an app" wouldn't have kept them in business. Doctorow argues that this is happening through regulatory capture -- the case isn't primarily that Uber is violating the currently existing set of laws, regulations, court precedents, etc. It's that Uber is violating what the regulations _would be_ in a world where they had less market power with which to influence regulations.
And so it's not enough to argue about how the apps get around _current_ laws. By Doctorow's own arguments, we're debating the merits of a counterfactual set of different regulations that we would have if you changed current conditions. And at that point, it is absolutely fair game to ask if this counterfactual set of different regulations is actually better for market participants.
(depends on jurisdiction) there was already concept of pre-booked transport that was distinct from taxi and does not require taxi medaillon to operate. Uber just made pre-booked transport as convenient to use as taxi.
So it is not that Uber avoided taxi licencing 'because of app', but it avoided taxi licencing by providing slightly different service that do not fit into legal definition of regulated taxi services. And one could argue that these slight differences are in fact important, because the reason why taxis are tightly regulated are for reasons that mostly do not apply to Uber.
The Doctorow school argument, as best I can tell, would go 'the regulations on black car service were meant for things like limo services that don't compete directly with taxis, and once Uber started competing directly with taxis, regulators and authorities should have moved more aggressively to write new regulations/laws that regulated Uber the same way taxis are regulated.' They would not agree with "the reason why taxis are tightly regulated are for reasons that mostly do not apply to Uber."
And this is exactly why I think the question of "what is the correct way to regulate car ride services" shouldn't hinge on incumbency bias towards taxis, but actually ask the question of what is best for participants in the market (which doesn't just include taxis and Ubers but also includes public transportation and its users, for instance). But that doesn't fit neatly into Doctorow's enshitification narrative.
These claims of incumbency bias, based on a fragment of a sentence, seem unnecessarily presumptive.
I've read a bit of his work, seen a couple of his speeches, and don't have the same conclusions about his opinions. You could probably ask for clarification.
I want to gently push back on this from my perch in NYC. Pre-Uber, taxis had their monopolistic issues but were: - available at most times on major thoroughfares with a raise of the hand. - reliable - I was never once jerked around or overcharged by an NYC yellow cab, which I can not say about private cab companies I've seen in other cities.
The worst problem was finding cabs in the outer boroughs, and that was improved greatly with the "green cab" program (they were restricted to beginning their fares in the outer boroughs).
There's been a lot of time and gradual change since then, but what I see now (Post-Uber): - In most of the city, it is difficult or impossible to hail a cab without an app. - The Uber/app drivers are worse, clearly much less experienced and don't know where they are going. - Price gouging has been outsourced to the app itself, and happens very frequently. - Even once cabs are called on the app they often cancel or fail to show in anywhere near the advertised time.
Personally, I greatly prefer the Pre-Uber situation.
>Say what you will about Uber, but no Uber driver has ever tried to lie and harass a passenger over whether or not the credit card machine is broken in an effort to cheat on their taxes.
This actually did happen to me. When I was in Hyderabad, I took an Uber from my company's office to the airport, and the driver said his phone died right after picking me up, so I had to pay cash.
Uber is almost always cash in cities I’ve visited in India. Some take UPI too but it’s hard to use that as a foreigner.
Yeah, it's a real thing that happened to me, to. In multiple US cities. And I'm sure we're far from alone.
So breaking the law is ok if you don't agree with it?
Actually most people agree that legality and morality are overlapping but separate categories. There are legal and immoral things as well as illegal but moral ones. I have no problem with someone breaking a law I see as immoral if the act itself is morally positive or neutral. It is a matter of benefit versus odds of being caught.
For example, do you think it is immoral for marijuana people to consume their drug of choice? It remains federally illegal.
taking into account all the impacts on society, uber is a substantial improvement on what came before. sometimes laws are bad and it is good when you break them
That is how change is made. See also: Civil Rights Act, circa 1964
Whether or not taxi medallions are a good thing I hope we can agree that there's a gulf between Rosa Parks and Travis Kalanick?
> Competition is an essential component of effective regulation, for two reasons: First, competition keeps the companies within a sector from all telling the same lie to its regulators.
I'm as pro-competition as anybody, but I don't actually buy this argument.
Firstly, regulating a thousand small players is much harder than regulating a few. Which is why there is a lot of evidence that regulation (even when good or needed) eliminates some amount of competition - crash and emission testing put an end to new car manufacturers for a long time.
Secondly, in industries with lots of competition and individual actors (real estate, healthcare, finance, etc) regulatory capture is actually far worse! Increasing the sheer number of special interests does not, in fact, improve regulation. And if anything, smearing it across as many voting districts as possible gives a level of political entrenchment that software companies could only dream of.
Let me flip the Airbnb argument on its head - why are hotels allowed to build dense dormitory-style housing in cities where it's otherwise illegal to do so? Because their regulatory capture is so entrenched that we don't even think about it.
I disagree. Finance is a good example. The core regulated parts of finance like retail and commercial banking are pretty good. Costs are low, they’ve gotten more efficient, services are uniform and poor performers get purged.
The issues with finance are on the edges and areas where there are really a small number of industry players. They have an outsized impact and the worst practices are usually skirting the regulatory framework.
The Airbnb argument isn’t regulatory capture example - the issue there is that it’s impossible to build anything. You have to build a giant hotel to justify the overhead of building anything hotel. Airbnb fills a gap of creative reuse and provides a tax shelter for rich people.
How does Airbnb provide a tax shelter? Also aren't they all doing "buy, borrow, die" thing so don't need a tax shelter?
Hotels are allowed to do that because democratically elected representatives passed laws to allow it, subject to strict regulations.
This is backwards. Hotels have always existed, but zoning restrictions on who or what could be a hotel came afterwards through law.
Most modern (20th century) regulations on topics like hotels were formalizations of existing socially accepted practices and often attempts to address obvious issues (eg many guests unable to escape a fire).
It's process over product, but somehow we've come to regard the 'product' as end goal over all else. Yet no product lasts forever.
It depends on whether you're measuring competition as "number of competitors" or "market concentration". You can have a lot of actors but still have high concentration. Healthcare for example has many actors but the concentration is very high among the big health systems and insurance providers.
People take regulations for granted. The economics not only survive, they thrive. It doesn't exist in a vacuum. Protected citizenry is happier and more productive.
> Firstly, regulating a thousand small players is much harder than regulating a few.
I don't agree with this.
Get you and a thousand friends to submit fake mortgages documents and let me know how many of you end up in jail. Compare that too how many people went to jail from Wells Fargo.
More smaller players is easier to regulate because you can literally use any punishments. If you dissolve Wells Fargo the economy is going to throw a fit (see Enron) but if you dissolve a tiny company then nobody cares.
Real Estate and Healthcare seem to be pretty highly concentrated industries imo. Even though there are a zillion agents/doctors they're part of a professional guild and that guild does the lobbying on their behalf. Like good luck getting antibiotics on your own but after a doctor looks at you for 1 minute you have a prescription for the same drug you always take for an ear infection.
> Because their regulatory capture is so entrenched that we don't even think about it.
Nonsense. Residents don't complain about hotels because of the perception that hotels are too expensive for poor and working-class people to afford. Whereas the perception of apartments is that they are cheap enough that such people will choose to live in them.
It's all about not wanting to live near "poor" people.
Clearly your familiarity with lower-tier hotels is limited. People can and do complain when Motel 6 wants to build.
> It's all about not wanting to live near "poor" people.
That much is true. And mostly because poor people make poor neighbors.
Hotels are a specially designated category for temporary housing so that permanent residents can exclude travelers from their neighborhoods.
You aren't flipping it on its head at all, the reason hotels exist is because travelers exist and need somewhere to go.
Why does Airbnb think they have a right to invert the social contract that has created a designated place for people who are likely to not know local norms and be operating on strange hours?
I like the modern social contract and hotels, but to be fair, AirBNB is inverting what had already been inverted. In some sense, AirBNB is returning to the old model before hotels were everywhere. A traveler would reach a new town and ask for lodging in someone's home. In many countries, providing lodging to strangers is still the norm.
Yes, inverting it back to before there was regulations and a massive tourism industry.
The only travelers at that time arriving by the thousands would be armies, it's not comparable when scale matters.
Em. Tourism has been a thing, complete with travel guides, tour operators, souvenirs made for tourists and tourist attractions for millennia.
Plenty of major destinations (holy places, resorts, etc) would bring in thousands of tourists at a time. The ancient Olympics, for instance, brought in tens of thousands of visitors.
> Why does Airbnb think they have a right to invert the social contract
Firstly, vacation homes existed and were legal long before Airbnb - but finding one anywhere was expensive and a a massive PITA.
Secondly, who's social contract?
Funny, in my experience Airbnb never captured the vacation home market to anywhere near the degree of the apartment in a popular city market. Where I am you still have a much better bet of finding a vacation home via the websites that existed previously than Airbnb.
Also there is a reason why places places with lots of vacation homes are considered expensive an dnot the most pleasant to live at permanently. That's why cities etc regulated, they dis not want them to turn into holiday parks.
Travel management companies and other business who rent property for tourism have been doing this for decades. I have several great small websites that had cabins or short term rentals in cities I frequent and I wasn’t getting killed my stupid cleaning prices or junk fees.
Some of the cabin rental companies I rent from have been around since the 90s.
And now they’re easy to find and everyone buys them for investment which crowds out community members.
The neighborhood social contract. The one where I know my neighbors and we build a vibrant community. Instead of the drunk idiots who show up for 3 days and throw their beer bottles on the ground.
Am I allowed to stay with a relative or a friend when I visit their town? I am totally ignorant of local norms, maybe I should be in the Holiday Inn next door instead?
but you aren't doing that when you stay at airbnb
"not know local norms and be operating on strange hours?"
What 'local norms' are so different that you won't understand them as a traveler? 99.9% of the population sleep and wake up at the same time. You just need to be a decent human being.
Yeah I don't buy OP's "local norms" argument but as someone who lived in the same building as an AirBnB it's inarguable to me that it affects the standard of living for others in the building.
The hallways got scuffed up, some guests were excessively noisy, dropped trash all over the place, broke stuff... as a permanent resident if you do that you face consequences. As someone only resident for a weekend it makes no difference to you.
Completely agreed: the way he articulates the problem is self-defeating. Apologies if this sounds absurdly abstract or hand-wavy, but I think the correct framing really has more to do with a sort of essential clash between law and software as technologies of social regulation.
Written law was something very important historically: from unwritten norms to codified representations that, however imperfect and provisional, were more or less accessible to all and changeable through whatever process, democratic or otherwise. Over the last decades, we -- and this could be taken rather literally as "the readers of hacker news" -- have been encoding so many aspects of the world into software in a way that doesn't clearly coincide with the legal norms of any particular let alone every country.
On the one hand, software is clearly "better" than law in at least the sense that the former eliminates the necessary ambiguity of the latter: the interpretation or "implementation details" of even just a particular law are always disputed. Perhaps a particular implementation of cross-border financial transactions, say, or of personal identity doesn't in fact reflect what the developers or product managers intended, but if that is identified it can be changed.
Yet, on the other hand, it is certainly true that, from the perspective of regulators let alone the masses, the resulting situation is much closer to pre-law. Nobody has any idea how or why they were suddenly banned from Instagram or their PayPal account closed, let alone how money actually moves around the world when they send a friend funds through Transferwise. Certainly, if we don't even know how things are working there is no process by which it could be decided that things should work differently, let alone a process by which software would concretely be made to work differently.
Indeed, I am skeptical that law as such will ever be able to regulate software: even just considering the problem in terms of a single country/legal system, how does one actually guarantee that the ever-changing corpus of code complies with the ever-changing and essentially ambiguous body of regulations? One of course sees this with the EU as the "avant-garde" of the struggle to regulate software. They pursue either these incredibly general wars on "cookies" that don't solve real problems, or endlessly deliberate when it's already too late about how to handle AI, or produce something relatively well-conceived like GDPR where enforcement is then incredibly unclear if not impossible.
TLDR I have no idea what the solution is, but I think the intrinsic problem of law and software is incredibly important to take seriously as software eats the world. At the very least, it's not just a problem of "competition" since, as you note, monopoly is at least one sufficient condition [1] of eventually rendering the way software regulates the world transparent and open to change.
[1] Undoubtedly, there are other ways this could possibly transpire through open source etcetc -- however, even in that case there has to be a guarantee that particular software defines the operations of a particular domain, i.e. that there exists software through which one can understand that domain and hypothetically change, which is in some sense just a "public" monopoly.
> The death of competition spells doom for regulation. Competition is an essential component of effective regulation, for two reasons: First, competition keeps the companies within a sector from all telling the same lie to its regulators. Second, competition erodes companies’ profits and thus starves them of the capital they need to overpower or outmaneuver their regulators.
Yeah, maybe you can start with Rogers Wireless. Eh, Cory?
> In its promotional materials, Plexure uses the example of charging extra for your breakfast sandwich on payday.
You would hope this would be awful PR for them and anyone using their services. What disgusting corporate sociopathy.
I would say that regulatory capture is merely a consequence of political capture. The politicians write the regulations, supervise the regulators, and in most cases, appoint the judges.
How did Microsoft avoid breakup in 2001? Simple: George W. Bush was elected President, and the Bush administration decided to settle the court case with a slap on the wrist. Don't blame the regulators but rather the politicians.
It's ironic that Doctorow uses the example of "whether you should heed your doctor’s advice to get vaccinated", because the regulators all support vaccination, but again as a result of a Presidential election, HHS has been politically captured by an anti-vaxxer who ignores expert advice.
> I would say that regulatory capture is merely a consequence of political capture. The politicians write the regulations, supervise the regulators, and in most cases, appoint the judges. > > How did Microsoft avoid breakup in 2001? Simple: George W. Bush was elected President, and the Bush administration decided to settle the court case with a slap on the wrist. Don't blame the regulators but rather the politicians. >
But he addresses that in the post, by saying that these monopoly/olipolyies actors can amass massive war chests that make them become bigger than the regulator. So by the time MS was a monopoly it was already too late.
> these monopoly/olipolyies actors can amass massive war chests that make them become bigger than the regulator.
Bigger than the POTUS? And why wasn't the previous Clinton administration captured?
But it's actually quite clear from the article that the regulators are not politicians:
> In a modern society, that third party is an expert regulator who investigates or anticipates problems in their area of expertise and then makes rules designed to solve these problems.
> To make these rules, the regulator convenes a truth-seeking exercise
> the regulator—who is a neutral expert, required to recuse themselves if they have conflicts—makes a rule, citing the evidence on which the rule is based.
Pretty nonsensical argument. Uber isn't an employer not because it's an app but because it's a service that connects you to someone. Your phone company isn't an employer just because you use them to hire a handyman.
So wordy only to use a nonsensical strawman. I get it: you're trying to create a new buzzword the way you did with "enshittification". So the usual suspects will be big fans. Good luck.
Who pays the driver?
Exactly. If Uber is really just providing a service to the drivers, the drivers should be paying a subscription to Uber while taking money directly from the customer.
(Edit) And they should be setting their own prices!
I would caution against using this as a discriminator, since the scheme whereby you are billed by the phone company for third-party services has long existed, but that doesn't make AT&T your boss.
Do you mean “but that doesn’t make AT&T _their_ boss”? Because in this scenario I’m paying AT&T, right?
If Uber is just a service that connects you to someone, why does Uber take the majority of a user's payment and why is it against Uber's TOS to share contact information with your drivers so you can call them and ask for a ride outside the app?
I think you have a strong argument here, but there's a problem of deeper and widespread rot at play.
The reason Uber can get away with pretending it's just a "connector" is because the entire tech ecosystem has been allowed to normalize that kind of control without accountability.
Look at Apple and Google: they take a 30% cut on every sale and ban any competing payment systems. That's the same pattern - absolute gatekeeping disguised as "market facilitation."
Our regulators have become so complacent that this behavior is now seen as the default way digital markets work. The problem isn’t just Uber's misclassification; it's that the entire platform economy is built on pretending these companies are neutral middlemen when they're really gatekeepers.
There is a lot of jurisprudence regarding whether or not the employer-employee relationship exists, and you can't simply dismiss that with a few words. Obviously the phone company does not employ the handyman, because if the handyman declines to fix your house the phone company is not going to disconnect his phone. But in the case of Uber, Uber absolutely will throw a driver off the platform unless they hew to a strict set of behaviors.
Doctorow should be tried in absentia by professors of English composition, on the charges of poisoning the discourse with his stupid word, and of making posters incorrectly believe they have scored a profound point by including it in their sentences.
Anyway let's dismantle these rickety arguments. 1) That RealPage says they can break the law because they are an app. This has no factual basis. You can read RealPage's argument[1] and draw your own conclusion. RealPage argues that they do not engage in price fixing, they distribute marketplace data which is protected by the First Amendment. No aspect of this argument has anything to do with means or venue. Indeed, the debate is exactly the opposite of what Doctorow suggests. RealPage's opponents are saying that RealPage must be regulated because they are a software platform, even though their activities would obviously be protected by the First Amendment in any other context. Doctorow fails to address the First Amendment implications.
2) That competitive markets have brought us things like antilock brakes. This lacks even the slightest resemblance to reality. The only reason we have widespread functioning ABS is because the whole industry is totally dominated by a few players, and always has been, even if the cartel membership has changed over the decades. The existence of the cartel and its co-evolution with automotive regulators is the enabling reason why the technology works. Doctorow throws out this example but does not grapple with the implications. He believes you won't think about it.
1: https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/re...
That RealPage argument is funny. It's not that they can do it because they are an app, but because they are a third party. So if I create a company that "sells information on the optimal price of eggs", and every grocery store in the country aligns to that, it's somehow protected speech rather than price fixing.
Third parties publishing market information is a common product. It's only price fixing if there's collusion across competitors on price.
Selling people the order book for Item Z is a business that exists for every value of Z, but if you do it for apartments suddenly everyone freaks out.
By the way, the market-clearing price of eggs is a government service that comes out every day.
> Doctorow should be tried in absentia by professors of English composition, on the charges of poisoning the discourse with his stupid word, and of making posters incorrectly believe they have scored a profound point by including it in their sentences. > > Anyway let's dismantle these rickety arguments. 1) That RealPage says they can break the law because they are an app. This has no factual basis. You can read RealPage's argument[1] and draw your own conclusion. RealPage argues that they do not engage in price fixing, they distribute marketplace data which is protected by the First Amendment. No aspect of this argument has anything to do with means or venue. Indeed, the debate is exactly the opposite of what Doctorow suggests. RealPage's opponents are saying that RealPage must be regulated because they are a software platform, even though their activities would obviously be protected by the First Amendment in any other context. Doctorow fails to address the First Amendment implications. >
But Doctorows argument is that a non-app service that says, "hey we bring all landlords together in a room to discuss how we can get the best rents on our properties" would run clearly a foul of antitrust laws (and no the activity is not protected by free speech). RealPage argument is a distraction, they try to muddy the waters and they do it exactly how Doctorow is saying, by creating confusion around what their software service actually is.
> 2) That competitive markets have brought us things like antilock brakes. This lacks even the slightest resemblance to reality. The only reason we have widespread functioning ABS is because the whole industry is totally dominated by a few players, and always has been, even if the cartel membership has changed over the decades. The existence of the cartel and its co-evolution with automotive regulators is the enabling reason why the technology works. Doctorow throws out this example but does not grapple with the implications. He believes you won't think about it. >
Citation needed
Doctorow is one of those older bloggers from the pre-influencer era who realized that they get a lot more eyeballs on their content by leaning into memeing and rage baiting than by sober analysis. At first it was fun but eventually the rigor of his arguments took backseat to his influencer game. What makes him particularly interesting is he's an influencer for the type of person who claims they hate influencers and the modern social media landscape.
I wish he went back to writing cool fiction but I'm guessing that's a lot more effort for a lot less influence. And honestly he's done his bonafides in the fiction world so it's not like he has anything to prove.
(Yes I know he had some fiction out last year but he took a long break. Maybe he's back on the fiction horse?)
I read what I think is his newest book and I liked it. It takes an special author to write a thriller that makes spreadsheets exciting.
Doctorow the fiction author and Doctorow the commentator must be considered separately.
> I wish he went back to writing cool fiction but I'm guessing that's a lot more effort for a lot less influence.
What are you on about, he released a new fiction book last year.
He took a long break during which his commentary output really, really increased. I perceived that as a shift in focus.
Fundamentally the issues precede the end states. Neither present-day software nor law-government are efficient enough to service the users to whom the possibilities (and deficiencies) are now apparent to the developers. Tech didn't create new formats it merely reformatted them into databases. Both are trapped in their inefficiencies which force the reduction of competition or their monopoly. The state is a myth we workaround by going global. Software operates arbitrary things and then automates them as expedient interfaces that disperse and charge access for what is ultimately specific (a good or service). Decent was a trial and error workaround that simply creates status.
Doctorow pretends these are the ultimate forms, which s how his answers are palliatives not solutions.
It's strange how bureaucratic Silicon Valley has become in relation to his bureaucratic prose, the tech industry once saw solutions beyond the available tech, now it's buried in consultancy rebuttal and Friedman myth ("competition is good").
We have behemoth Goliaths that are living dinosaurs that engage in hierarchical domination of what are really illusions: text, symbols, images. All we need now are the behemoths to mint their own $, copyright it and the circle is complete. Yet these are merely simulations in search of a reality that AI can't deliver, and so the behemoths are using all techniques to remain relevant. It's stillnly one step ahead of a magic act. Obviously they are finished, ready for obliteration by insightful, imaginative succession. Bureaucracies are all targets for replacement, especially Doctorow's type of prose.
Writing/Reading exercise: Consider this article from the perspective of someone who is pro-ICEBlock-being-removed-from-the-Apple-App-Store.
Yes, they use apps to break the law. But, still, regulation - when in doubt - should be avoided. Did you know that in Germany, you need to send your employees to a specialised training if they use a ladder in their day to day work? You don't need to regulate what's common sense.
What is ridiculous is that you think this isn't a good idea. Safely using ladders isn't common sense and ladder injuries probably cost the state and the places where they occur a lot of money.
I think you are mistaking your point of view, which is probably that of an individual business owner, for the point of view of someone looking at the actuarial statistics or whatever and seeing tens of thousands of preventable ladder injuries a year. Just because an event is rare from your point of view doesn't mean that the event costs nothing or that it should be ignored.
I can't believe how common this attitude of "if its too small for me to notice it doesn't matter" is.
The analysis isn't done yet though: - How much do you trust the statistics about which ladder deaths were preventable? - Do you have the numbers on the counter-factual: once ladder training is introduced, these sub-populations see X reduction in ladder deaths, offsetting for reduction in ladder use due to people not having their ladder license? - What is the productivity cost of assigning every single ladder user a training class, in perpetuity? This analysis should include the cost of creating a cottage ladder training industry that provides the trainings, the hourly productivity loss of sending people to trainings, the administrative cost of ensuring the trainings have been conformed to, etc.
In your heart of hearts, when you are assigned mandatory trainings, how much do you learn? I'm not asking how much _could_ you learn, I'm asking how much DO you learn? My experience, and the obvious unspoken consensus of all my colleagues, is that you click through mandatory virtual trainings as fast as possible, with the sound down, on fast-forward. If it's a live training with an actual practical skill (like ladder training), then I'd definitely concede it's much more engaging and you probably learn something. But MANY trainings are clearly, obviously, a net friction on society.
"I see a problem - how about we make a law that everybody must learn about that thing?" is the crappiest, laziest way to address the problem that you could possibly think of. If 'mandate a training' was analogized to a pull request on a codebase, it would be like responding to a bug report by adding a pop-up dialog that always pops up whenever you open the program and warns you about the bug. In other words, the shittiest possible non-solution that lets somebody close the issue as resolved. A real solution takes more work and more thinking.
I love this comment. I am so sick and tired of the term "common sense" being used as a panacea for those on the bottom of a Dunning Kruger curve to justify wanting their ignorance to be taken as seriously as other people's knowledge. I can think of dozens of ways someone could misuse a ladder that would definitely result in property damage and quite possibly injuries and even fatalities.
I wonder how many people are killed yearly because they buy various tools and don't read the damn instructions because they're definitely smart enough to use this and be safe already, it's common sense after all!
That's such a gross simplification that it's highly misleading. Yes you need training to if your work involves ladders, just like any other tool that is potentially dangerous. The type of training highly depends on the danger, so for someone using a stepladder to get something from a shelf will not need more than "use the ladder from the closet, put it back after use", while someone climbing up to the antennas on a skyscraper will receive very different training (i.e. always clip in your safety harness, how to use double carabiners ...). I don't know how this is controversial?
Have you considered whether such training might possibly have a positive result?
"In 2023, the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons reported that 500,000 people were treated for ladder-related injuries, with 300 of these incidents proving fatal." from https://www.usf.edu/health/public-health/news/2024/cc-ladder...
That’s true in the US too.
We had someone come to our house to work on a range hood. They didn’t have ladder training, so the insurance company wouldn’t cover it if they fell off the ladder.
The range hood repairman left without doing any work. I do wonder what a normal day at work looks like for this person. We weren’t billed for the house call.
Lol you must not live in the country.
Par for the course for a vanload of meth-heads who've never attended an hour of formal training in their life to be walking around a 45 degree roof without a harness, or one clipped into an ornamental non-structural member.
Haha very true. Last time I had a roof done, several cases of Natural Ice were consumed by the working party. The roof was perfect though.
>You don't need to regulate what's common sense.
Americans: hold my AR15
Most state do require a security license though to carry a weapon for remuneration (not needed if just for personal protection).
You do need to regulate what is common sense to protect employees. There's a lot of pressure from employers to do things that go against common sense, accidents happen. The employee is hurt, employer doesn't care. A large role of regulation is to protect employees from greedy employers. That's why some employers like illegals, they don't complain about not following regulations.
Did you know in the US Federal law does not require any specific licensing or safety training to purchase a firearm.