Is Big Tech Needlessly Ruining Entire Industries? (salon.com) 325
Salon tech editor Keith A. Spencer just published a new article describing what happens when "venture capital-backed entrepreneurs jackhammer their way into a new industry, 'tech'-ify it in some way, undermine the competition and declare their new way superior once the old is bankrupted."
- Being a taxi driver was once a much-vaunted job, so much so that a taxi medallion was perceived of as a ticket to the middle class. Then came Uber and Lyft, who flooded the market for private transit and undercut the taxi industry by de-skilling the industry and paying their workers far, far less....
- Building devices to quantize as much fitness data as possible wasn't an example of capitalism fulfilling consumer desire -- no one, save a few data scientists, ever said, "I want to turn my leisure activities and exercise regime into spreadsheets" -- but the tech industry has been very effective at making us desire just that....
- The thing is, baristas and cashiers aren't things that we are all dying to get rid of... Silicon Valley is only trying to put baristas and cashiers out of business because human labor costs money; the difference between a $4 coffee from a robot and a $4 coffee from a human is that there are no labor costs in the former purchase, something that makes Silicon Valley go googly-eyed with dollar signs. The tech industry's vision of the future is of a world with less human interaction, less conversation, less humanity; and more surveillance and more monetization of our buying habits. No one wants this, but it's being forced upon us.
The article is adapted from Spencer's recent book, A People's History of Silicon Valley: How the Tech Industry Exploits Workers, Erodes Privacy and Undermines Democracy.
The article's title? "Silicon Valley makes everything worse: Four industries that Big Tech has ruined."
- Building devices to quantize as much fitness data as possible wasn't an example of capitalism fulfilling consumer desire -- no one, save a few data scientists, ever said, "I want to turn my leisure activities and exercise regime into spreadsheets" -- but the tech industry has been very effective at making us desire just that....
- The thing is, baristas and cashiers aren't things that we are all dying to get rid of... Silicon Valley is only trying to put baristas and cashiers out of business because human labor costs money; the difference between a $4 coffee from a robot and a $4 coffee from a human is that there are no labor costs in the former purchase, something that makes Silicon Valley go googly-eyed with dollar signs. The tech industry's vision of the future is of a world with less human interaction, less conversation, less humanity; and more surveillance and more monetization of our buying habits. No one wants this, but it's being forced upon us.
The article is adapted from Spencer's recent book, A People's History of Silicon Valley: How the Tech Industry Exploits Workers, Erodes Privacy and Undermines Democracy.
The article's title? "Silicon Valley makes everything worse: Four industries that Big Tech has ruined."
People want cheap (Score:2)
Re: People want cheap (Score:2, Interesting)
No, people just want lazy. There's a saying that the best engineers are lazy, they're always automating everything. That applies to any kind of engineer, programmer or not. Also, the article is dumb for saying that nobody wants this. Existing businesses want automation, as do people thinking about starting a new business. For example, it's much easier for a person to start a new business if they don't need to hire a cashier. That is, the barriers of entry become smaller. If this person didn't start their ne
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Replace "massages" with "blowjobs" and you'll see a sharp decline in the number of couples.
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Re:People want cheap (Score:4, Funny)
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No they didn't. They helped a *small percentage* of people doing those jobs. They also put the vast majority out of that line of work. At one point, ~60-80% of the world population were *farmers* (https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture). Today, it's more like close to 2%.
ALL THOSE JOBS LOST BECAUSE OF TECH.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
The stock market is what ruins perfectly viable businesses by convincing them they need eternally increasing profits and the only way to accomplish that is by taking funds from the NYSE. Big Tech is just following the shortsighted MBA profits over people money trail to the same place.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Something is fishy (Score:5, Insightful)
- Being a taxi driver was once a much-vaunted job, so much so that a taxi medallion was perceived of as a ticket to the middle class. Then came Uber and Lyft, who flooded the market for private transit and undercut the taxi industry by de-skilling the industry and paying their workers far, far less....
If you can undercut the taxi market by such a margin, doesn't that indicate that the prices were artificially inflated to begin with?
- The thing is, baristas and cashiers aren't things that we are all dying to get rid of... Silicon Valley is only trying to put baristas and cashiers out of business because human labor costs money; the difference between a $4 coffee from a robot and a $4 coffee from a human is that there are no labor costs in the former purchase, something that makes Silicon Valley go googly-eyed with dollar signs. The tech industry's vision of the future is of a world with less human interaction, less conversation, less humanity; and more surveillance and more monetization of our buying habits. No one wants this, but it's being forced upon us.
If a barista coffee costs $4, and a robot coffee costs $4, then what's the value to the customer? The taxi market got cheaper with Uber/Lyft, yet now the barista and robot coffees cost the same? That doesn't make sense at all. It sounds more as if the author has an axe to grind.
I am more than willing to pay less for the same taxi service. I am more than willing to pay less for equally decent coffee at a cafe chain. I am not willing to pay less for a robot waiter at a restaurant, or less for a robot coffee at a specialty store, or less for anywhere I value the human interaction.
Re:Something is fishy (Score:5, Insightful)
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What Uber is doing at this point is map out the routes at a loss. Eventually they will figure out why. The routing data they are gathering is their gold mine.
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Gonna have to further explain this one because it sounds like BS to me.
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Taxi companies were often the only game in town, and their prices reflected it. Without a legislatively enforced monopoly, that's not going to occur.
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I don't think the drivers held the medallions anyway. The taxi company does.
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Do you not understand that it was by common agreement and understanding inflated using the medallion system, for the common good - the ability for taxi drivers to earn an actual living?
Re:Something is fishy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Something is fishy (Score:2)
When the roads were built, what method would the various road owners have used to ensure that only paying customers used them? These days they could use GPS tracking but how would being tracked wherever you drive suit a freedom-loving libertarian like yourself?
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Crapitalism is piss-poor at managing limited resources.
Actually, that is what it is best at. Unless the market is distorted by government. If the Manhattan roads were privately owned, I am betting it would by as close to full without congestion as possible.
There are a couple ways markets fail that come to mind. First is when companies get control of things that tend to be natural monopolies, then they can hold everyone hostage. You can add to the first when there are exceptional barriers to entry to a particular domain. The second way markets fail is by optimizing purely around money, ignoring secondary costs to the environment, human health, etc.
Your example of privately owned roads would mostly fall under a natural monopoly situation, similar to how the
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...there are more private for-hire vehicles now and congestion is much worse.
So much fo the argument that ridesharing destroys public transit. More street congestion causes people to favor the subway.
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If a barista coffee costs $4, and a robot coffee costs $4, then what's the value to the customer? The taxi market got cheaper with Uber/Lyft, yet now the barista and robot coffees cost the same? That doesn't make sense at all. It sounds more as if the author has an axe to grind.
I am more than willing to pay less for the same taxi service. I am more than willing to pay less for equally decent coffee at a cafe chain. I am not willing to pay less for a robot waiter at a restaurant, or less for a robot coffee at a specialty store, or less for anywhere I value the human interaction.
Depends on the service. I am totally willing to pay a few cents more per gallon to not go in and deal with the people at the gas station!
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If you can undercut the taxi market by such a margin, doesn't that indicate that the prices were artificially inflated to begin with?
Depends on how you look at it (and where). In many regulated taxi markets, prices are high but the drivers must meet certain criteria and abide by certain rules. Often those rules include fixed fares and minimum wages. Uber bypasses taxi regulations by calling their business "ride sharing", and labor laws by calling their workers "freelancers". Cab fares might be too high, but cabbies cannot compete with Uber if they aren't forced to play by the same rules. In countries where Uber is forced to abide by
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You can say cabbies "reply to certain rules" (fine...) but in the times I've taken
a cab I never felt safe and often felt ripped off. With Lyft...
I've been happy.
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I suppose he's talking about navigation. Knowing how to get from anywhere to anywhere in London or NYC was actually quite a thing. When I was in London in the early 90's I remember hearing how cabbies had to apprentice for an extended peri
Re:Something is fishy (Score:5, Insightful)
- Being a taxi driver was once a much-vaunted job, so much so that a taxi medallion was perceived of as a ticket to the middle class. Then came Uber and Lyft, who flooded the market for private transit and undercut the taxi industry by de-skilling the industry and paying their workers far, far less....
If you can undercut the taxi market by such a margin, doesn't that indicate that the prices were artificially inflated to begin with?
Also, don't forget that the whole taxi industry was annoying, frustrating, and often functionally useless to anyone who didn't live in the NYC/Manhattan area (or someplace similar). For all their "issues", companies like Lyft/Uber pretty much made the whole concept of easily-obtainable taxi services accessible to the rest of us. They basically opened up an enormous under-served market.
Now you could argue that an enterprising individual in the taxi industry could-have/should-have done this instead. But they didn't, so here we are.
Re:Something is fishy (Score:5, Insightful)
Wish I had mod points. This is spot on. The only things cabs in south Florida can claim is "more expensive, less reliable by an order of magnitude, corrupt, gouge by taking longer routes, try to intimidate, Try to maintain a monopoly by bribing council members.
They don't bring, professionalism, reliability, due care, or safety.
Before Uber, too many people would risk driving drunk because the alternative was not to go out at all, because cabs were so fucking expensive, and might not show up for HOURS. That changed with the ride share companies.
Re:Something is fishy (Score:5, Informative)
Uber are only cheaper because they cheat.
Employees cost more than contractors, so make all the drivers contractors even though they are really employees. Background checks and handling reports of crimes costs money, so just don't them. Taxi regulations that protect the public and stop places getting clogged up with hire cars eat into profits, so pretend to be a "ride hailing service" and exempt from them.
It's not just Uber, lots of businesses are at it. Companies with fleets of commercial vehicles realized that they could sell off their car parks if they just made the employees take them home, but then people couldn't park in their own streets any more because of all the vans.
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If a barista coffee costs $4, and a robot coffee costs $4, then what's the value to the customer? The taxi market got cheaper with Uber/Lyft, yet now the barista and robot coffees cost the same?
Because if dispensing Starbucks became automated and a larger part of that $4 became pure profit, competition would push down the price. Regulation does not reduce profit, because regulations can be gamed; competition does.
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- If you have forced minimum wage, it does nothing but effect inflation.
- If you have entitlements then you move to having more jobs than applicants and you have to pay more so retail prices go up and inflation goes up and so the govt has to put the entitlements up and tax goes up with it in a never ending circle of doom.
- If only we had record unemployment which would push up wages without artificial stimulus.
The problem with living wage is
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What does work best is having a strong economy and not an unlimited supply of illegals to work for less than you, taking your jobs and wages leaving you crying about UBI or some crap.
Because Americans would work in the fields picking lettuce or strawberries if those illegals weren't here, right?
While the bogeyman of illegals is strong nowadays, their very existence is why fruit and vegetables is (somewhat) affordable. Using your scenario, the farmers would have to raise the pay enough to get Americans to w
It's not only Big Tech... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's Big Tech combined with greed, fear/cowardice, and a moralistic desire for control...
(1) Big Tech doesn't necessarily want to get rid of jobs. The Wall Street VC types who finance tech love the idea though.
(2) People and governments are all too willing to fall for big-pig data and surveillance. After all, there are big bad terrorists that they want to be kept safe from. The average person is a coward without understanding of relative risks.
(3) Bosses want to know what their employees are doing outside of work. It started with Henry "The Nazi" Ford hiring private investigators to see if his employees drank outside of work. Now, employers can claim to want their employees to be healthy, while threatening to punish them for legal behaviors by taking away insurance discounts (e.g. sleep tracking technology that also knows if you're staying up late/partying on weekends).
Why is coffee so costly? (Score:2)
the difference between a $4 coffee from a robot and a $4 coffee from a human is that there are no labor costs in the former purchase, something that makes Silicon Valley go googly-eyed with dollar signs.
Can a Slashdotter here speculate on my behalf, the actual value of the coffee in a cup that costs $4?
That is: The water, cream/milk, sugar/sweetner, coffee itself and the [paper] cup? Ohh, how about heating the thing?
Someone is making a killing here, no?
Because people are willing to pay for it (Score:5, Insightful)
This is Economics 101, you charge what the market can bear.
Starbucks and their ilk took a commodity that used to be given free with meals (I'm not that old and I remember $0.05 coffee here in Toronto) and turned it into an "experience" and a premium item.
Re: Because people are willing to pay for it (Score:2)
I never thought I'd ever see someone put starbucks and premium in the same sentence.
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After watching Foamy the Squirrel from iLL WiLL PrEss in Small, Medium, Large [youtube.com] I always call them Star-Schucks.
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I'm not that old and I remember $0.05 coffee here in Toronto
That would have been when you made $5,000 a year.
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1975 - Average Canadian Income was $7,500 according to Stats Can. That works out to $36,267 in 2019 dollars. Average salary in Ontario for 2018 is $37,700.
$0.05 in 1975 would be $0.24 today.
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Starbucks and their ilk took a commodity that used to be given free with meals (I'm not that old and I remember $0.05 coffee here in Toronto) and turned it into an "experience" and a premium item.
They are essentially restaurants that sell coffee.
Restaurants were never expensive because of the food; it's precisely the "experience" that is costly.
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Can a Slashdotter here speculate on my behalf, the actual value of the coffee in a cup that costs $4? That is: The water, cream/milk, sugar/sweetner, coffee itself and the [paper] cup?
The water is an interesting point, Starbucks goes to a lot of effort to make sure the water in their locations is purified, and the right mineral balance. Water is the primary ingredient in coffee, and for example, you will never have good coffee from San Jose municipal water. The water is just bad.
If you actually cared about price, you would just drink water because that is free. If you need to wake up, exercise and get a good night sleep at night so you can wake up energized in the morning without coffe
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the difference between a $4 coffee from a robot and a $4 coffee from a human is that there are no labor costs in the former purchase, something that makes Silicon Valley go googly-eyed with dollar signs.
Can a Slashdotter here speculate on my behalf, the actual value of the coffee in a cup that costs $4?
That is: The water, cream/milk, sugar/sweetner, coffee itself and the [paper] cup? Ohh, how about heating the thing?
Someone is making a killing here, no?
A cup of coffee isn't $4.
"A soy non-fat grande caramel latte cappuccino espresso macchiato with extra foam" is what people go to Starbucks and pay $4+ for.
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Even if you opened a store that only sold smiles, you'd still have the overhead of the lease, taxes, smiling employees, their managers, advertisement, insurance, accounting, etc. Don't even look at me. It's too expensive.
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the difference between a $4 coffee from a robot and a $4 coffee from a human is that there are no labor costs in the former purchase, something that makes Silicon Valley go googly-eyed with dollar signs.
Can a Slashdotter here speculate on my behalf, the actual value of the coffee in a cup that costs $4?
That is: The water, cream/milk, sugar/sweetner, coffee itself and the [paper] cup? Ohh, how about heating the thing?
Someone is making a killing here, no?
You forgot the building, the lot, the property tax, the insurance, the maintenance, the utilities, the salaries of everyone who works there, and some profit for the owner.
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It depends. It costs quite a bit of money to have someone take your order, make your coffee, and hand you the cup. Also, coffee shops tend to occupy fairly prime real estate. Starbucks seems to make about 10-15% profit overall.
I have no problem paying $4 for a cup of coffee because I then use the shop as a workspace, often for several hours.
Re: Why is coffee so costly? (Score:2)
Real coffee is espresso.
Real espresso machines are 600 dollars.
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You pay $200 per pound for coffee? Christ.
Can't disrupt without providing value (Score:4, Insightful)
Tech can't ruin an industry by disrupting it unless they're providing some kind of value. In the case of Uber, they disrupted taxis on two fronts. They used a phone app and back-end driver scheduler to make pickups quick and reliable. This part is good. They also used a flood of venture capital to unfairly smother competition and pay colossal legal fees for flouting regulation. This part is bad and, frankly, ought to be criminal.
You see this trend across every industry that tech touches. They bring automation or logistical assistance that adds value, and that is great. This is the actual tech part. It's usually good, and when it's not, it fails. Then along with the tech, sometimes you see its evil friend: finance. Finance makes a big bet on tech, then uses its clout to make it a sure-thing, regardless of whether people want it or the market supports it.
If a robot barista can make good enough coffee at a low enough price to displace humans, great. One fewer lower paying job being done by a valuable person. If not, then it should fail.
The real enemy isn't tech, it's loss-leader strategies and entrenched capital subverting the market to establish a new order in nobody's interest but their own. Not sure how to regulate this kind of stuff, but it sure isn't "outlaw automation" or "enact protectionist laws prohibiting competition".
Medallions are not good (Score:2, Informative)
Taxi Medallions are an artificial barrier to market created by Governments. For example, the prices for a medallion in Chicago used to be $250K+. That's an unaffordable ticket to the middle class. What happened in practice is that investors held these medallions and charged people to use them, driving the prices up. Say what you want about Uber and Lyft but the effect on medallion prices has been a net positive. These apps essentially democratized work.
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So blame Silicon Valley ? (Score:5, Interesting)
So Silicon Valley is to blame for everything now ?
I blame Wall Street, if not for Wall Street pushing for nothing but the quick buck, we would not be in this situation.
There was a time when as long as a busness made a profit t was considered good enough, now if it's magrin is not 99.9% it is considered a failure
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As long as we don't blame the consumers giving these dirty companies all of that cash... you are good.
When people talking about there being a "natural" control on monopoly.... they erroneously say that control comes from "competition". No that control comes from "informed consumers". Something people "refuse" to become. They instead send easy to buy "humans" that they like to call politicians in their places these days. And then they wonder why they keep losing the fight.
Hello folks, you are not even fi
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Doesn't matter how informed people are, for a significant proportion of the population the decision is almost always made on cost. The wider issues, the morality of the decision don't enter into it. They have to pick the cheapest because that's the only way to survive on low wages.
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Taxis were an industry that needed ruining (Score:2)
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Accepted cash and thus respected privacy.
Paid their drivers a decent wage without subsidies from (often foreign) VC scum -- if this were a product, it would be considered "dumping."
Service? All you need is a hand, not a smartphone that's charged and has a data connection. Simple, intuitive UX.
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And accepted more cash than they were entitled to with practices such long hauling.
Paid their drivers a decent wage without subsidies from (often foreign) VC scum -- if this were a product, it would be considered "dumping."
What about the drivers who earned zero because they couldn't get a cab to drive from the false scarcity created by the medallion system?
Service? All you need is a hand, not a smartphone that's charged and has a data connection. Simple,
Inventing solutions in search of a problem (Score:2)
I recently read a puff piece about some bars moving to pre-mixed cocktails. It started out with an attempt to convince you that, quality-wise, this wasn’t as bad a thing as you probably think; but, after lots of vague hand-waving, at the end it had magically changed into “demonstrably superior to the old-fashioned way of making cocktails”.
While reading it, all I could think was - there has to be some VC behind this story who’s trying to invent a market and whose ultimate goal is to a
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pre-mixed cocktails are decades old of course, a lot appeared in the 1970s. Low quality cheap booze for those who only care to get hammered. A butt of jokes then and now by cocktail drinkers.
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Right, but this was an attempt to sell them to people who see going to a bar as more of an upscale social activity.
Not "Needlessly" "Ruining" Industries but changing (Score:5, Interesting)
From the "Needlessly" column; there is a need to make more profit from industries to enable them to grow and move forwards. If you stagnate, you die.
As for "ruining" them, I would argue that of the four examples in the TFA, big tech has improved them.
- Light bulbs? Over the past 10+ years, the switch to LEDs has resulted in a few hundred dollar savings per year as well as eliminating the hassle of replacing bulbs (which is a huge positive for me because my house came with a shit ton of halogen bulbs which lasted only 18 months or so). We've got a couple/three WiFi connected bulbs which we turn on/off when we're going to be late eliminating the need for the old dial timers.
- Fitness? I like to track my exercising and see if I can figure out what works best for me.
- Cabs? Thank god for Uber and Lyft - here in Toronto, before Uber came in cabs were small, smelly, sticky, noise and uncomfortable spaces that you paid to be tortured in. They're not much better now, but I have the option of calling clean personal transportation that I can rate, rates me and I know when I can expect a pick up.
- Convenience Stores. I'm on the fence on this one as I generally like having somebody I can have a brief interaction with when buying convenience items - but I prefer self checkout at a supermarket/big box store. I like being able to organize my groceries according to how I'm going to unpack them when I get home, it makes me a lot more efficient taking bags straight from the car to the freezer in the basement, or the fruit and vegetables to the fridge in the kitchen and the dry goods straight to the pantry.
After RTFA, I would change "Ruining" in the article to "Changing", technology is changing the way we live and work and there will be things we like better and some that we won't like in terms of our own personal preferences.
But the best changes will win out in the end. I just find it interesting that of the four examples given in the article, I would consider three of them to be clear improvements over what we had before, clearly an example of personal preferences being different between individuals.
Re:Not "Needlessly" "Ruining" Industries but chang (Score:5, Insightful)
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I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own!
FTFY
Selling a dollar for 80 cents is disruption, bro (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks to zero interest rate policies from the Fed during the Obama and Bush era, now we have all of these zombie "tech" companies funded by free money from the Fed that end up selling a dollar for 80 cents in the name of disruption. The zero interest rate money supposedly had nowhere else to go in the eyes of Wall Street, so Wall Street chased and backed up tech companies in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, leading to one of the biggest periods of inequality the U.S. has ever seen after a recovery from a recession (something like only 22 counties in the U.S. recovered and all in tech or government centered counties), and Bernake cutting rates to zero and Yellen maintaining them is squarely to blame. It is the most ridiculous example of socialism for the rich the U.S. has ever seen.
That's why we have these garbage companies like Uber and Lyft (massively unprofitable, and their business model is simply undercutting taxis at a loss while relying on the venture funds and capital markets to subsidize the losses), Tesla (despite having an advantage in electric cars from the get go, they haven't had a full profitable year in their entire history), WeWork (subleasing at 80c on a dollar just because), the ridiculous scooter companies, SnapChat, Netflix (massively cash flow negative), and the list goes on and on. Supposedly they will grow into profits, but selling more dollars at 80 cents just ends up in larger losses.
When the next recession comes, not only will all of these companies die off, it will also drag down all of the previously legitimate companies that did have a good business model until loss subsidized zombie tech companies came and destroyed them, thereby taking down the entire U.S. economy with them.
I fear that should this scenario come to pass, the U.S. will vote in for full socialism, because this socialism for the rich tech bros fueled by zero interest rate money given to wall street from the fed shall not go unpunished.
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the cure would be kind of socialism Venezuela has? no thanks... really same problem with different label stuck on it
Re:Selling a dollar for 80 cents is disruption, br (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: Selling a dollar for 80 cents is disruption, b (Score:2)
There are other alternatives aside from OMG VENEZUELA!!!!!!
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Shush. The Americans heard that Venezuela is socialist and also a hellhole, confirming their suspicions.
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This again? (Score:2)
No, Big Tech is not ruining anything.
Institutionalization... that's it. Nothing else ruins anything more.
Humans just need to apply names and false labels to everything they disagree with to rest their weary little hypocritical heads at night and feel good about their equally evil and poor choices they too make in their lives.
The people that keep using these companies and giving them their money and allow themselves to be abused when they don't have to are equally guilty.
But hey... what you don't know can't
taxi drivers were cosmopoliton, sophhisticated (Score:5, Insightful)
- Being a taxi driver was once a much-vaunted job,
That's the biggest lie of the week, no one ever grew up and said, "I wish I were a taxi driver." It was always a trash job, they abused their customers, the taxi companies abused them, and driving for Uber/Lyft is actually an upgrade. Uber's not great, the people who work at their corporate offices are worse, and I happily mocked their miserable IPO, but come on, let's not pretend that taxi driving 'used to be' something glamorous. They even mock the taxi driver in It's a Wonderful Life.
Seriously, is there anything this author says that is worth reading?
Re:taxi drivers were cosmopoliton, sophhisticated (Score:5, Insightful)
The core of the lie is the conflation of being a taxi driver and being the owner of a taxi medallion.
Back in 2013-2014, NYC taxi medallions were selling for $1,300,000, Boston medallions were $625,000, Philadelphi medallions were $400,000, Chicago medallions were $330,000, Miami medallions were $300,000, and San Francisco medallions were $250,000. Sure, some individuals could get loans the size of mortgages and cover them by driving, but most of the time medallions were owned by cab companies (who also had economies of scale in fleet operations) and driven by employees of the companies. Even owner-drivers usually had an employee driving in off hours to help cover the loan. So, yeah, the people who owned the medallions were screwed by Lyft and Uber.
The guys who worked for the owners of medallions, not so much. It's actually a lot more accessible to get a car loan (Uber was even helping arrange them at one point, though I'm not sure it still does) than it was to buy a medallion and go into the taxi business, cheaper than leasing a medallion from an owner, and more independent than working for a taxi company. So the drivers switched away; to quote the Washington Post in 2014 [washingtonpost.com]:
The threat to medallion owners isn't that they'll lose passengers to these services. It's that they'll lose drivers -- who have been aggressively courted by Uber. A taxi driver who doesn't own a cab and medallion can earn comparable fares driving UberX passengers in his private car, without paying a lease fee.
So, yeah, can the BS about drivers being hurt. Drivers-qua-drivers have a insecure working-class job driving for Uber and Lyft, but they were in insecure working-class jobs driving for the medallion owners, too. Heck, driving taxis is the job most likely to result in death by murder [cbsnews.com], and that's largely driven by robberies for the cash they carry, something Uber/Lyft drivers don't have to do.
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already had functional, licensed, clean, safe, and practical taxi services
Where?
They only do that if we let them. (Score:2)
That's it, basically. The reason I use Uber when it's available is because Taxis are obscenely expensive and have shitty service, especially in Germany. An 8km ride cost well north of 30 Euros and they often can't even process ec or credit-cards correctly. It's a mess and desperately needs some viable competition but German lawmakers would rather have it that we're still stuck back in the 80ies with our cabs.
However, I don't want my driver to be a bum with a car. Those guys are creeeepy. Me and my SO, we me
No. It provided progress. (Score:3)
Eventually, the mechanism of distributing the wealth of society by "work" will fail. It already fails in many instances, at the top end for example by people having inherited or gotten rich by accidentally doing something just at the right time. At the bottom end people working multiple jobs and still not living well.
This effect just gets worse, but there is no stopping it and, in principle, it is hugely desirable. The current implementation is just severely flawed.
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Even with a large fundamentally stupid and self-destructive class, a country that is _not_ burning has advantages for everyone.
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That was pretty mach a non-event in comparison. Think French Revolution and you may be coming closer.
Fitness data, the ultimate geek-to-jock converter (Score:2)
Terrible (Score:4, Funny)
It's frigging Salon. What do you expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
When Salonistas opine about technology, they have a habit of being spectacularly wrong. Look at this article's take on transportation as an example.
Ridesharing didn't take over from medallion cab service because Silicon Valley has magical powers to force us to take jobs we don't want and use services we don't need. That was the job of corrupt big-city councils who set up those medallion cab systems. They accomplished it by passing ordinances to protect a bad model. Cabs reeking of urine driven by people who don't speak English and who can 'take you for a ride' to generate extra profits.
Rideshare drivers, on the other hand, follow a GPS-determined route that you are already aware of. If you puke in their cab, you get charged for the cleanup rather than bequeathing the smell to the next day's riders. There is no anyonymity in ridesharing, which benefits both drivers and riders. If you lose something in your Uber, the company knows who was driving at the time. If you leave the driver in an alley with his throat slit, the company knows who booked that ride. Safer and better for all.
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Online anonymity is what gives us social justice tweetstorms, ransomware, trolling, and innumerable entertaining online scams. Sorry, but I'll take social credit over all that crap.
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Grossly Oversimplified (Score:5, Interesting)
This lazy genre of analysis is as dumb as it is useless.
In step 1, the arguer, because they can summarize an issue in a sentence, assumes that sentence represents the full reality. In step 2, they tweak their fake reality with some improvement. It's an easy improvement because in their fake reality it doesn't cost anything to implement. In step 3, they bemoan the world for not being as clever as them and realizing that their reality from step 2 is better than the world's reality from step 1.
For instance, does the author's consideration of robots making coffee investigate,
- if having more powerful means of tweaking the coffee output will open the doors to serving it as a more skilled and well-compensated profession, like transition from candlemakers to electricians
- if the baristas will be able to spend time doing more valuable things than monitoring the coffee
- how the amount of money saved on labor costs would be invested and spent
- if coffee prices really would be unaffected (an account what would be the secondary and tertiary effects if not)
- the opportunities for more skilled and well-paid labor in maintaining more sophisticated devices
- whether there could be fewer coffee shop locations and consequently more opportunity for other business ventures
- whether more focused technology will provide opportunity to reduce waste, reuse materials, etc.
No. The answers to these will probably only be known by actually developing the concept further, and many effects may remain unquantifiable regardless, especially as they become more removed from the source. The authors conclusions are a lie built around their reduction of the entire scenario to "either baristas getting paid to make coffee or not getting paid to make coffee because a machine is doing it."
Notably, we already have machines to make coffee. Why doesn't the author rail against those? How many people are put out of work by not having to hand grind the beans, or boil the water over a fire? Somehow, anything these opinionists are familiar with always winds up being acceptable and good, and it's only the new improvements which are clearly bad and a step backwards
No one wants this, but it's being forced upon us
I wonder who's holding the gun forcing the people who "don't want this" to take ubers instead of taxis? I would bet the author is the one itching to force people to live exactly the way he imagines is best. The problem is that his imagination is not big enough to accomodate all the potential variables involved even in making coffee, let everything technology is changing.
Wow, you've got that all backwards (Score:4, Informative)
Baristas are useless because if you ask "where's the coffee from" they say "it's a blend". If you ask "what's the difference between them" they say "this one's dark". So with no help from no passion, no one's loyal to the human barista. Might as well kill'em all.
As for the robot, the robot is more expensive than the human barista. I should know, I program them. Like most automation, they are priced to ROI in under two years compared to a barista. And they are touted as never-get-sick, never-call-in-late, never-swap-shifts, no-payroll.
Unfortunately, the reality is very very very different. They do get sick -- the harder you work them, the more often they break. The IT repair team makes six times what you used to pay the barista. You do have payroll -- there's a maintenance plan, like your car. They do come late -- sometimes they need someone to reboot them. And they do swap shifts -- you should have an extra unit in the closet in case the first one doesn't turn on, you know, until we send the repair team. But don't worry, you do pay two-years' salary to buy the unit up-front.
And we know that they are total rip-offs. A big coffee vending machine would obviously work far better. Just wouldn't be slick-ass cool, because those existed in the '80s.
Like with any new business, the trick is to get your others to test it for you. When it comes to automation, it's not the operation that needs testing, it's the profitability that needs testing. Virtually every single one has failed.
But hey, my GPS unit would have happily killed me four times yesterday, when it suggested that I turn onto the freeway ramp -- going the wrong way. Self-driving cars my ass.
There's probably only one technological device that has never ever let me down. It's a household product. It's never needed repair. It's inexpensive. When I need it, I NEED it, and a need it FAST. It's a plunger.
Big Tech vs Useless Tipping (Score:4, Interesting)
Needs to Die!
Taxis? Why should I pay a premium for a medallion-granted monopoly that expects tips in addition to the contracted service, and always manages to do it in a less sanitary and more olfactory way than a subway?
Baristas? I'm still unclear on why I need a human, when in Switzerland over a decade ago the automated machines in the airports and trainstations prepared better drinks. And I'm hard-core... I used to blend my own drinks. So riddle me this... I stand in line for five minutes, spend 20 seconds placing the order, which will take another seven minutes to come out... why has society decided this warrants a two-dollar tip? Screw that, give me Big Tech!!!!
Non-Issues
Smart Home? I was in it before Big Tech. Big Tech is late to it, and still losing. Remember X11?
Fitness? Perhaps Kevin has never been hardcore about fitness. I was nationally ranked in an Olympic sport long before he was born. You know what? Everyone used every tool. (He's a tool, but the wrong kind.) I've had chest heart-rate monitor straps for literally decades. Fifteen years ago, a partner of mine had to go to a lab to sleep to be diagnosed with a few minor disorders and Sleep Apnea; now your Fitbit can do it. Big Tech didn't change it, it just lowered the cost and effort.
I have my Big Tech concerns... erosion of privacy, a one-sided political bent... but the concerns in this article are all benefits to me. I don't want more "human interaction." That crap's even less reliable than Windows Vista!
Problems with examples. (Score:2)
- Being a taxi driver was once a much-vaunted job, so much so that a taxi medallion was perceived of as a ticket to the middle class. Then came Uber and Lyft, who flooded the market for private transit and undercut the taxi industry by de-skilling the industry and paying their workers far, far less....
This isn't due to tech, and more to do with companies sidestepping taxi regulations by declaring 'not taxi' when they are taxis, and taking huge losses to further drive down costs so that customers are very much anti-city when it comes to cracking down on the new taxi services.
- Building devices to quantize as much fitness data as possible wasn't an example of capitalism fulfilling consumer desire -- no one, save a few data scientists, ever said, "I want to turn my leisure activities and exercise regime into spreadsheets" -- but the tech industry has been very effective at making us desire just that....
I don't get the trend but I'm also failing to see the huge hurt inflicted by all the fitness tracking data by itself. I don't know what the policies are around mining that data for insurance companies and the like which could lead to
Nothing to do with Uber/Lyft... (Score:5, Insightful)
The demise of the taxi had nothing to do with Uber/Lyft.
Here are problems w/ taxis:
These are the things that made taxis so bad and a prime target for disruption.
And disruption was only successful because they were so bad and felt that they could fight Uber/Lyft in the courts and using laws, medallions, etc. instead of making adjustments to deal with the obvious problems in their industry.
Taxis had been the brunt of many jokes long before Uber/Lyft came around. The jokes were all based upon the truths that anyone who hopped into a NYC taxi for the first time quickly realized. Instead of trying to tackle the real problems, they were left to perpetuate themselves and were able to kill their own business off as soon as viable alternative came forward.
Class War Fought with Carelessness (Score:2)
(eye roll) (Score:2)
>"Silicon Valley is only trying to put baristas and cashiers out of business because human labor costs money; the difference between a $4 coffee from a robot and a $4 coffee from a human is that there are no labor costs in the former purchase, something that makes Silicon Valley go googly-eyed with dollar signs."
What is implied, above, is not true in a free market. Competition is what drives prices to their lowest levels- unless there is an illegal conspiracy between businesses (such as "price fixing").
er (Score:2)
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Baristas are not going to away. There will always be coffee hipsters and other people who want to pay extra for something they consider luxury.
More generally, remember that the service sector now accounts for 70% to 80% of GDP [wikipedia.org] in the Western world, because the agricultural and industrial sectors have been heavily automated in the past. In a sense, most of the economy is already about luxuries. As you automate away the lower end of services, people will find new ways to spend their money.
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Yes. What a wonderful world it will be when we can automate away the service industry and have 80% of the human effort go into science and art.
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Great bait for soliciting a meaningless discussion
Stalin.com is specifically designed for articles like that.
It runs two kinds of screeds:
1. Fake problems it whipped up out of nowhere, like calling everyone else Nazis.
2. Apocalyptic takes on real problems, like greenhouse warming, with automatic rejection of any engineering solutions.