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Maybe people just like Uber etc...
only the rent-seeking owners and their shareholders 'like' it. if you cannot see how this business model is dehumanizing and parasitic, and sucks wealth to the top, I'm honestly not so sure what to say to you...
SV companies get their wealth from monopolies granted by the state.
_“The basic idea is simple; it is that the ‘state vs market’ diagram of the world is flawed. In reality, there is no such thing as The Market; there are many markets. Even the civil service is a market (for funding, promotion, reputation etc). Competition and collaboration are inevitable functions of any human system. Similarly, the concept of ‘big’ or ‘small’ government makes no sense. In the end, we are always taxed and regulated by someone, it is just a question of who, and to what end?
A better way to understand the relationship between ‘the state’ and ‘the market’ is to see nation states as platforms: makers and shapers of markets. They provide the land, infrastructure and set the rules and goals – in the same way that, for example, the App Store creates, regulates and taxes the market for iOS apps.
The moment you begin to look at government through this lens, two things immediately become clear.
First, a lot of what has been sold to us as ‘free market’ capitalism was in fact the opposite; the privatisation of the platform, creating a series of privately owned monopolies protected from competition, extracting taxation without representation, and profits without prosperity.”_
Source:
https://medium.com/@AlastairParvin/progress-again-6f6213bdcd...
One bit I don't quite understand: how is Uber a state granted monopoly? I get that they're allowed to exist only because the state so decides. But as far as I am aware, the state doesn't ban anyone else (lyft or your and me) from competing do they?
Sorry if I'm missing your point. Also, I quite like the "State as Platform" model.
> Uber a state granted monopoly?
Well, they were able to setup a "Taxi Service" that undercut all existing Taxi's everywhere in the US. They were able to do this without concern about any of the regulations that Taxi services have to follow. Government regulation and existing Taxi providers were too slow to respond and were out-classed by the aggressiveness of Uber.
It's not accurate to say "state granted". Maybe it's more accurate to say "state granted by virtue of incompetence by the state"?
> incompetence by the state
"In the movie Steve Jobs, a character asks, “So how come 10 times in a day I read ‘Steve Jobs is a genius?’” The great man reputation that envelops Jobs is just part of a larger mythology of the role that Silicon Valley, and indeed the entire U.S. private sector, has played in technology innovation. We idolize tech entrepreneurs like Jobs, and credit them for most of the growth in our economy. But University of Sussex economist Mariana Mazzucato, who has just published a new U.S. edition of her book, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, makes a timely argument that it is the government, not venture capitalists and tech visionaries, that have been heroic.
“Every major technological change in recent years traces most of its funding back to the state,” says Mazzucato. Even “early stage” private-sector VCs come in much later, after the big breakthroughs have been made. For example, she notes, “The National Institutes of Health have spent almost a trillion dollars since their founding on the research that created both the pharmaceutical and the biotech sectors–with venture capitalists only entering biotech once the red carpet was laid down in the 1980s. We pretend that the government was at best just in the background creating the basic conditions (skills, infrastructure, basic science). But the truth is that the involvement required massive risk taking along the entire innovation chain: basic research, applied research and early stage financing of companies themselves.” The Silicon Valley VC model, which has typically dictated that financiers exit within 5 years or so, simply isn’t patient enough to create game changing innovation."
Source:
https://time.com/4089171/mariana-mazzucato/
I don't think 'state granted monopoly' is a good way to phrase it. If you go by the quoted excerpt (which I largely agree with) then it's not so much a monopoly but more of a captive market, and it's not so much granted as merely 'allowed'.
And sure you could set up your own competing ride-sharing market, though you'd have to convince people to share and buy rides through your market and not the well known one, so eventually a free or mostly free market may come into existence but until that happens we'll have to deal with markets held captive by apps and webpages.
Yeah, instead I'd rephrase to: 'state-enabled monopoly'. It is enabled through Patents and Copyright laws that keep knowledge, in the form of IP and 'trade secrets', artificially scarce and limited to American/Silicon Valley corporations.
_"How can politicians look into TV cameras and say we have a free market system when patents guarantee monopoly incomes for twenty years, preventing anyone from competing? How can they claim there are free markets when copyright rules give a guaranteed income for seventy years after a person’s death? How can they claim free markets exist when one person or company is given a subsidy and not others, or when they sell off the commons that belong to all of us, at a discount, to a favoured individual or company, or when Uber, TaskRabbit and their ilk act as unregulated labour brokers, profiting from the labour of others?"_ [1]
+
_"The IP system is an artificial construct that excessively rewards owners of intellectual property, granting them monopolies over inventions and ideas that in many cases are the product of generations of thinkers and/or publicly funded research.”_ [2]
[1]
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
[2]
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/the-precariat-populis...
Cool, and reverting it requires an 8/9 majority. Because that's a thing that a proposition can do.
Tesla basically has level 5 autonomy or looks to be super close with the beta they are running. Go watch the YouTube videos. In three to six months it will probably be good enough for robo taxis.
So in a year or two Tesla will destroy Uber and Lyft with far lower prices.
If your prediction is correct, than that's both Uber and Lyft were trying to get going by working on it by themselves. Means that either them not far from that too, or Uber and Lyft will partner or just buy the majority of cars from Tesla, and reduce employed workforce to a minimum.
This will just cause a deepening of the Digital and Information Feudalism that is already going on. It will result in a violent revolution by the working classes, to throw off these chains, and to democratize the use and application of the underlying technologies used by Uber et al. I am sad that American citizens are subjected to these experiments by American billionaires. They are systemically dehumanized, exploited and pushed to their limits. [1]
Why do people still stand behind copyrights and patents, in this age of zero-marginal cost reproduction and transmission of information? [2]
[1]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9abrZwnPThE
[2]
https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...
If regulatory capture weren't a big enough issue, how about some nice, manufactured astroturfing and mental gymnastic rationalizations to cheat employees? Hurray for "disruptive" startups that can buy laws with saturating media with half-truths. Let's not forget Lyft and Uber's business model is to socialize the costs of a taxi business, including vehicle acquisition, maintenance, and deprecation onto the drivers. How is that anything other than stealing from what would otherwise be taxi drivers with economic slavery volunteerism?
PS: Hello from Colorado so far. Bye CA, thanks for all of the earthquakes, fires, and power outages.
You haven't noticed any fires in Colorado yet? And as I recall, we spent about twelve hours without power our first autumn in Colorado long ago--an October snowstorm, or maybe the lightning that accompanied it, saw to that.
I liked Colorado, don't get me wrong.
That is not what any of those words mean at all. Socializing costs means an externality to bear costs to those not a party to the transaction and their drivers are party to tbe transaction.
Stealing by making vehicle owners pay the cost of their vehicles, maintenance, and the drop of value over time? Uber is not entropy itself. Just how would you get that concept?
"Economic slavery volunteerism" just what? That is several different contradictions rolled into one. They are slaves but they only stay around because they are paid and volunteer.