I've come to the conclusion that to be a CEO you have to wear these blinders and have faith that overall your company is a positive good for the world. That means that when you have a low performing employee you have to fire him even though you know that it may cause terrible consequences for him and his family.
There are two happy people in this story and one unhappy one. But the fact that there is an unhappy one doesn’t seem like nearly enough to me to decide it shouldn’t have played out like it did.
Does it seem like enough to you? If not, what other common element would this story have to have to decide it shouldn’t have happened?
But, the second, more negative thing is that a lot of the inefficiencies removed by these companies were in the form of livelihoods for many people, or adherence to various regulations and laws that was a lot easier to omit with IT in the middle. Examples would be the Mom-and-Pop retail stores going out of business or Uber breaking taxi regulations.
Like you said, Bezos didn't set out to bankrupt Mom&Pop, it was just an unfortunate side-effect of using IT. The thing that I think pg is missing is that projects where this happens are exploitative to a degree, and is why they get rightfully criticized.
As an example: we killed tons of movie rental businesses by switching to Netflix. Life is much better now for everyone who isn't a movie rental store owner, which is almost everyone.
Small business doesn't mean good business and big business doesn't mean bad business. What matters to me is the net effect, and in most cases with Amazon, the net effect is very positive.
The same is true for Google, Uber, and Facebook and most big tech successes. The ratio of bad:good is just worse for some of them than for others, making it harder to judge.
They provide dignified employment (as opposed to invisible work in a warehouse), they encourage entrepreneurship, they increase the tax base of a locality (by ensuring money stays within a local economy), and they contribute to local culture, community and character.
Amazon killing small businesses has sucked even more of the life force out of small towns, and that’s sad because said towns were already shellacked by the death of manufacturing.
It’s hard to argue with Amazon’s excellent customer experience, but the externalities involved are nontrivial and IMO outweigh the benefits.
I would also claim that keeping taxes in the local economy, while a very worthy goal, does not require the presence of small business. Big business can be made to support local community and culture. Just because the Walmart headquarters are outside of my small town, doesn't mean they don't have to pay a percentage of their earnings from the local warehouse to that community.
Also, minor grammar nit, you may have meant to use "shell-shocked" instead of "shellacked", but shell-shocked wouldn't fit the context you're going for either.
The small businesses you say were exploitative is because they were the only shot in town. i.e in a monopolistic position.
multiple small businesses result in a robust economy. if one goes bust there's plenty to keep providing a similar service. MSB's enable other auxiliary business look at Japan | German's economy for an example - mutliple suppliers etc. more employment. Guess the jobs the masses work at amazon - drivers, warehouse workers.
What amazon, provides could've been easily provided by a standardized api connecting different small merchants. some industries already do this - a flower shop needs roses, it can easily contact another flower shop to get roses to it's customers. everyone wins.
netflix yeah was a net positive. it's content so end of day, it was going to be aggregated in Ben Thompson's terms.
Uber is good for me as a consumer. But is it good for the driver, for the environment. if the US had robust public transportation, Uber wouldn't be necessary.
Amazon is substantially worse on most (if not all) of those metrics.
In the case of small bookstores, they think it is enough to toss books on the shelf and wait for people to come browsing. Well, I can now browse from bed.
Then they need to do something that cannot be scaled. Being a general bookseller can easily be scaled.
This is a little glib. There's nothing most of these small business can do.
EDIT: forgot to add, I suspect there are many things small bookstores could do in terms of building a local community (in-person and online) of people who love books, improving discovery options for new books from that community, that kind of thing. So maybe they should be doing that i.e. “do things that don’t scale” to try and delight their users more than amazon does, in a way where their lack of scale is an advantage?
Even big businesses facing Amazon have done very little to compete.
As book store owner, I really think it's an irrational decision to invest heavily in fighting Amazon. You're chances of success are pretty slim.
As for big businesses ? Well, there's Walmart, Target.
In the end, the e-commerce industry is a place where most of the market share would be controlled by a few large companies. That was clear from the beginning.
This again, is glib.
To suggest that you somehow know all these vendors have 'not tried anything'.
How about lobbying government to subsidize their business like the US Government subsidizes delivery? Or the VAT tax breaks that Amazon gets? Or the fact that Amazon is dumping merchandise on the US by selling for negative margins, paid for by profits out of AWS?
A local bookstore has 6 staff. They have no power.
https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-amazon-history-fa...
Even the idea that Uber drivers themselves wanted to keep their contractor status is questionable given that they collected those statistics via polls in the driver app. There is/was legitimate concern that Uber et al would collect that info and retaliate. There is no recourse for this on the workers’ behalf because they don’t have a union! This is a TEXTBOOK example of why gig workers need to be given the right to collectively bargain. Now, thanks to prop 22, overturning its provisions needs a 7/8 majority in the state legislature. Aka, not gonna happen, and that’s by the design of some really cynical lawyers.
More generally, the prop 22 campaign is an indictment of the referendum process, and how easily it can be abused in the absence of sensible campaign finance laws.
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...
Is it possible that maybe the voters actually have their own opinions regarding these ballot propositions? So maybe Californian voters think that drivers should have the right to decide for themselves whether to work with Uber or not?
The choices were 1. the previous system where drivers were purely contractors, 2. the AB5 world where the vast majority of them can't work at all anymore but the ones that remain are full-time employees, without the flexibility that attracted many of them to this work in the first place as opposed to, say, getting a job at a traditional taxi company, or 3. a compromise where the work stays fundamentally the same but pays more in many cases.
Most of the people I saw opposing prop 22, which I'm guessing includes the above commenter, and certainly included the legislator behind AB5, were just bystanders who viewed it as yet another a philosophical showdown of unionized full-time work vs anything goes exploitation. Even though that framework is a poor fit for the details of this particular situation.
The people with skin in the game saw it differently, the details actually mattered to them and they voted accordingly.
> overturning its provisions needs a 7/8 majority in the state legislature.
Given that prop 22 overturns a law that had recently been passed by the current sitting legislature, there wouldn't have been any point to doing it if it could just be immediately repealed by the same people. Prop 22 can be still be overturned with just a >50% vote by a future ballot proposition.
Why do people keep lying that AB5 had a requirement for people to be full-time employees? I know in many office-based work environments, there is a strong preference for all regular (non-contract) employees to be full-time employees, but that’s not true in lots of industries, and there is nothing in AB5 that requires people working in conditions which it defines as employees rather than contractors to be full-time.
The bigger point though is there would still be major limitations on flexibility even if Uber/Lyft was able to offer every driver the option of full or part-time. They still wouldn't be able to set their own hours, only work a few weeks here and there with no predictable schedule, sign up and start working immediately with minimal overhead, etc.
I mean, it's a small sample of course. But the effect size was large.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/22/uber-pr...
I'm sure many would not consider themselves exploited and prefer to be contractors, but I'm personally skeptical that the breakdowns of this opinion are as reported by the companies.
Only after the ride shares corps spent over two hundred million dollars misrepresenting Prop 22. That's one fifth of a billion dollars... to write themselves a law. [1]
Asking in good faith, do you genuinely believe what you wrote above?
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/200-million-uber-lyft-write-own-...
Why is it frustrating? PG discussed an important topic I found to be very relevant in the business world to this day. Being exploitive is praised in most if not all business schools! Cut throat, shark, shrewd, it’s even depicted in movies Wolf of Wall Street, the Founder (McDonald’s), greed is good...
No self made billionaire, at least in the last 100 years, was ever portrayed fairly in movies or history books!
Even Carnegie Mellon!!
I think it's even more simple than that. It's a failure to realize that everyone is the plucky hero doing things with good intentions in their story about themselves, and that others don't see him as he sees himself.
So despite there being a world where the society is becoming increasingly unequal, where the average American struggles to feel financial security and those born without access to education or the right geography (or, perhaps, who just aren't as bright or ambitious) are merciless casualties of a "meritocracy" that excludes them, PG feels like he can't be the bad guy because he can't pinpoint any specific situation where he did something "wrong".
His only fault, perhaps, is being a massive beneficiary of a system that is profoundly and deeply unfair and getting more that way every day, and he's not able to see that as something he's at fault for.
So I have some sense of empathy and understanding for his perspective. But I think he would benefit greatly from really trying to dig into understanding what it might be like not to share his perspective and vantage point, as well as to do a better job understanding how different the world is for people now than it was in the early 1980's when he began his professional life.
If some unfair system exists, and you didn't do anything to create it (it existed before you were born), and you don't do anything to make it worse (and maybe occasionally try to make it a little better)... and the system massively benefits you... are you at fault? Why?
In two of those three cases, you are at fault (or continually become more at fault, more precisely, as the ratio of "how much it existed before you" shifts).
If you replace the word fault with "responsibility" or even a more neutral "influence" it's much more obvious, I think. You would clearly have less responsibility than the person advocating for said policies, but more than the person fighting them more vigorously or more effectively.
Nobody looks back and says "boy, I'm glad there were all those people who occasionally complained about Windows in the late 90s," they look back and respect and value the people who built alternatives instead.
We punish people who do bad things. We don't punish people who have neither helped nor done anything bad. We might we wish they had done better, but wishing and enforcing are very distinct mechanisms.
In this case, being a good CEO means making decisions that are worse for your workers over time. The world is set up in such a way to bias you towards that conclusion unless you work against it.
Does that mean you’re evil if you don’t? Or if you minimize your responsibility? Perhaps. But it’s still complicated. Thinking of the world as a massive weighted graph of wants, needs, and goals can be a helpful model.
What you're talking is a much more interesting conversation to be having. How can we tweak the rules to avoid misaligned incentives? And would it actually be better to end the so-called "exploitation" if it would mean killing most of these jobs altogether, when the allegedly exploited people actually have an ok quality of life and are doing this work because they like it better than their alternatives?
Whether existing billionaires exploit is a separate point.
A couple of thoughts...
New, billion-dollar business are, many times, transformational. Amazon, Uber, AirBnb, DropBox and Stripe all transformed the market they profit from. For sure, it is difficult if not impossible to foresee how the business activities will impact the general population et al. Without foreseeing that impact, it's also difficult to mitigate the impact that the billionaire may genuinely have a moral reaction to. Is it not the nature of the beast to grow as fast as possible, damn all torpedoes, while investors and boards of directors push the business leadership forward? Running at an all out sprint means you have no opportunity to identify these moral slights, let alone address them. Perhaps the boards of directors needs a 'Moral Consequence Committee' to keep an eye on it on behalf of the CEO. I am not asking that rhetorically, by the way. Give it some thought.
The second thought is that in order for the business to prevail, it must provide real value to many, many customers and make their world a better place. Uber transformed the taxi experience and yes, may have wound up in the 'vehicular maintenance arbitrage' business for a while, but anyone with faith in market capitalism should believe that this will eventually balance out and Uber and its drivers will reach a mutually acceptable compensation level.
Taxi drivers have always been undocumented and much poorer than the people they were driving. Uber didn’t change that, and nobody needs permission to boss a poor person around - go to a restaurant, send your kids to school, shop, you will be bossing poor people around. The remedy is immigration and labor law reform, that is something Uber actively worked against - and won! They care because the economic gain they are concentrating comes from people driving below minimum wage because they lack documents or work authorization.
It had nothing to do with lures or whatever, everyone knows what the deal was. Cars could require no maintenance and people would still be screwed. Uber shut down its self driving car unit and none of that shit mattered. Nobody is out there designing cars that are cheaper, we already have $1,000 used cars, in fact all the effort pours into cars that are way more expensive. Uber blew a lot of money on incentives as long as Lyft does and vice versa, and people just drive for both and none of that shit mattered.
The difference I’m trying to illuminate here is, a permanent subclass of undocumented worker is enshrined in the law. The difference between a W2 and 1099 employee is enshrined in the law. Uber spent a fortune maintaining the status quo, not creating a new one, they did not write those laws.
Personally, I believe, like those guys in the 2006 Borat movie who wish they owned slaves, that people like this status quo, and that Uber could have spent 1/10th the money campaigning for Prop 22 and it still would have passed. People like cheap shit. They enshrine the divide in the law. Bernie Sanders was assailed by the NYTimes for his most divisive opinion, that if people are willing to work below minimum wage they will get the job, and that the government has enshrined that arrangement through immigration law - you’re just not seeing how deeply vested the average person is, not just Travis Kalanick is, in an exploitative status quo.
Meanwhile we type this all out on iPhones. Would you rather they cost 5x as much? I don’t know, if phones cost so much more, if you could ban the exploitation of Chinese labor for real, 50% of the ultra high paying jobs of HN readers would cease to exist overnight. It would be like a pandemic hit software, instead of just Main Street.
This shit is complicated, you can certainly point out that billionaires are bad people, but we all benefit from exploiting someone somewhere, and the road to justice will often visit the people who promote it. And maybe that’s why you and I aren’t out there protesting but those other people are.
It's not that people set out to exploit people and as a result they become billionares. It's that their focus on their goal allows exploitation to happen as a by product. It's not that Uber set out to exploit drivers, it's just that get their business to scale they had to lure drivers in with big incentives, and then in order to make their business viable they had to then force their costs down to the point where drivers are paid less than the cost of vehicle maintenance.
It's just a bizarre primary school understanding or morality where there's a group of "Good" people and "Bad" people.