Not invariably, sadly. Uber, for example, didn't seem to be overly hurt by their lawbreaking.
Middlemen will always try to extract maximum profits, and even if they look better in the short term in the longer term they'll be just as bad or worse, but more entrenched.
They may be good now, but the instant that they see a method of increasing their profit by screwing someone, including customers, over then that's what they'll do.
There's more to the world than NYC
The only things that improved with Uber were price and coverage, and they tried to fool us into seeing other improvements that didn't exist, largely by painting cab drivers as scary, stinky, subhuman swindlers and implying people that drove Uber were all part timers who usually worked at real jobs. Now the prices are sky high and the things take as long or longer as cabs did to show up.
Maybe there's room for an Uber in tiny places that don't need cab companies or even full time cabbies, but everywhere else, they've just added another layer of rentseeking over a familiar experience. We could have gotten rid of the medallion system without replacing it with this thing. Let's make gigwork illegal so Uber will have to contract with local companies, or reduce themselves to people they're willing to employ.
Street hailing never existed.
Okay, but price and coverage are very, very important?
"Uber reported a net income of $394 million in the second quarter. That number includes a $386 million unrealized gain from equity investments, so it's not quite as good as it looks. "
https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/08/02/uber-is-profitable...
It will be interesting to see if they manage to close at least one bookyear in the black. If with a windfall like that they can't manage then they likely never will.
The only time it doesn't make sense in my experience is if you're in a low-traffic area.
The law is not for entrepreneurs, they just see it as a signpost that you have to be aware of. It invariably ends ok in the long run and in the short term everybody calls them tech bros.
Raise your hands if you’d rather go back to a world without Airbnb. Yes, there’s a negative externality aspect — if your neighbors are suddenly renting out their place to random people, that can get painfully annoying for you. But I bet if you did a methodical poll, most people would choose not to un-invent Airbnb.
Self driving cars, ditto. Cruise’s fleet is finally deployed all around SF, according to pg. It’s about to become as ubiquitous as electricity. And in the beginning, so many people argued that it’s against the law and therefore shouldn’t be developed. Then it quietly shifted to well, maybe the law should change.
It’s good to obey the law. I certainly try. But treating it as some kind of holy grail of ethics is fraught with peril. You’re outsourcing your thinking to the lowest common denominator: it’s what people in positions of power feel is justice. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. And when it isn’t, do you really want to be the kind of person that believes it should be obeyed no matter the tradeoffs?
This isn’t a hypothetical for me. People have asked many times if I was worried that someone will try to come after me for making books3 available. Until one week ago, I wasn’t worried. But if the world really wants to say that I’m causing suffering by making books available to machine learning researchers, I have very little leverage to argue that I am not in fact doing that… except ethics. Because without books3, only OpenAI is able to train powerful large models, because they’re the only ones that can get away with it. Is that justice?
You’re an inspiration to me in many ways. I still remember you showing me your workshop, and how friggin cool it was. I’ve tried to channel your maker spirit over the years to be even half as talented. But I just don’t understand where this bitterness comes from against “tech bros”; it’s a fairly common theme in your writing. Sweeping generalizations are such dangerous territory, in terms of history proving that you were mistaken.
Now, maybe this Kenya business is terrible. I think it’s pretty dystopian. But that’s a separate question: evaluate each startup on its merits, and crucify the Theranos frauds. This can be done on an individual basis.
As for whether if you invert it it becomes true: there are exceptions but for the most part the lawbreakers sooner or later end up running into the limits, be they SBF, Thiel, Musk or any other of the ethically challenged individuals that the tech world puts on a pedestal. Money seems to have structurally perverted our world and the rule of law is just about the last barrier that helps keep society functioning.
Tear that down and you lose a lot more than just some 'minor inconveniences'. The law is the ultimate representation of the rules by which we play. Starting off by throwing out the rulebook in a way that will result in net negatives is a clear example of externalization: profits for the owners and investors and the damage for everybody else.
That is not how we're going to get to a nicer and more sustainable future. There is a lot of fuss about the kleptocrats in Russia and how they rape their country and their fellow men. Rightly so. But the tech bros aren't that much better, they just sell it better.
As for AirBnB disappearing: yes, please.
> Now, maybe this Kenya business is terrible.
Maybe?
No, seriously: it is terrible, there is absolutely no way in hell that this is justifiable, it is with distance the worst thing Sam Altman has ever done and that plus OpenAi's blatant attempts at regulatory capture are enough to make me regret ever defending him on HN before because I thought that he was different.
So, that leaves pc and his brother for now, the rest of the tech bro billionaires can go jump in a lake.
That's quite the accusation. What laws have Musk and Thiel broken?
https://www.reuters.com/legal/elon-musks-2018-tweet-tesla-un...
https://www.reuters.com/article/gawker-lawsuit-frankel-idUSL...
And no, Thiel wasn't convicted of anything, but in my view this was a complete perversion of the law, and that's taking into account that I think everybody associated with Gawker is scum.
I’m at a doctor’s appointment, but I wanted to quickly thank you for explaining your side. I disagree with some of it — perhaps even most - but the underlying motive is a good one. I just worry that you throw too many of us into the lake.
Thiel, for example. Your possibly justified outrage against a few have made it more likely for you to argue that some of them are terrible when they don’t seem to be.
Thiel and Musk lack ethics, they see the world as their property and carve it up with the same ease as the rulers of old did and never mind the consequences. With such power there should be a matching sense of responsibility.
This lack of ethics seems to be the default for billionaires, it is very rare to see people that wealthy that use their wealth in a positive sense, more often than not it is used as a weapon and to acquire even more wealth at a cost to society and the environment in general.
Good luck at the doctor's!
Isn’t that the core of what you’re saying you wish billionaires did? Improve the world?
Quoting you:
> I can't stand it that people with such an opportunity for improving the world around them would squander it and wreck it.
This seems like the crux of our disagreement. I feel the law is a means to an end. Is it correct that you feel the law is the end of the debate? Or that people who can afford to accept the penalties under the law are scum for choosing to accept such penalties?
I’m trying to make your worldview consistent and complete, but there might be a Gödel problem here.
Gawker was scum because of what they did to Hogan.
Thiel was scum because of what he did to Gawker.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Thiel used Hogan in much the same way that Hogan was used by Gawker: to further their own goals.
> I feel the law is a means to an end.
It is a reasonably practical approach to a - hopefully - minimal set of rules that society needs to make it all work. Having parties that perform in extra-legal ways breaks that principle and (1) requires the continued expansion of the volume of law to close the holes and (2) creates a non-level playingfield where the rich get to use their money to improve their own station at the expense of everybody else. Nobody should have that kind of power.
> Is it correct that you feel the law is the end of the debate?
No, I think it is very well possible that you find the need to change laws, amend them or remove them based on evaluation by the various legislative bodies, judges and advocates. But once something is written into law things bifurcate considerably compared between say the USA and the EU: in the USA the letter of the law is what drives the process, in the EU it is the spirit of the law that drives the process. This isn't as clear cut as I would like it to be, there are examples of the reverse on both sides but it serves as a useful shortcut. And, incidentally, it is also why US companies tend to have a hard time in Europe when faced with lawsuits that they think they can escape on a technicality: such tricks rarely work here and can easily make your problems worse.
> Or that people who can afford to accept the penalties under the law are scum for choosing to accept such penalties?
I'm not sure I can follow you there. What do you mean exactly?
> I’m trying to make your worldview consistent and complete, but there might be a Gödel problem here.
Or it may simply be that to fully understand someone's worldview you'd have to be that person and that anything else is just an approximation.
I've met > 5 and < 10 billionaires in person. Some of them were the most humble and incredible people I have ever met, you wouldn't know their names and you would never realize that they did what they did because they do so quietly and effectively.
And some are utter jerks that see this world as their personal playground where the rules are for suckers and their money insulates them from the consequences of their actions.
The latter group is over-represented in the SV eco system, and it is something that we will all end up regretting, these people have a lot of power but not a gram of responsibility or ethics. You are not a person to them, you are a disposable unit that either serves to further their interests, can be discarded, ignored or destroyed at a whim.
I realize this is a tangent, but I'm pleasantly surprised you've met billionaires you consider good people. I was actually about to post a comment saying all the billionaires I've met (about the same number as you) are horrible people. If you're willing to share - what was the approximate ratio of good to bad amongst the billionaires you've met?
I just did a tally of the ones I'm sure are well above $1B, and I would say the ratio is about 3:1 for jerks vs really, really good people. I really don't want to drop names and it is one of the reasons why my company website does not list our clients. But my exposure is mostly to EU parties (though I know a very small number in the USA as well and one in Canada).
I mean, this is just textbook ends justifying the means right? It doesn't matter what someone does if you like the outcome?
Step outside of the software bubble we’re in and I’d guess 80% or more people would prefer a world without Airbnb. A significant part of the population does not use Airbnb and is also experiencing negative impacts of a housing shortage and affordability problems.
This is delusional. Here's one survey, by YouGov, pegging their liked-to-dislike ratio at 3.4: https://today.yougov.com/topics/travel/explore/website/Airbn...
The software bubble is nothing compared to a political bubble.
"YouGov Ratings
YouGov Ratings measures Airbnb’s popularity and fame every quarter. The latest data is based on 1532 nationally representative interviews of the US population, collected during Q2 2023."
I have, and the ability to travel (affordably) seems fairly important to working class folks. The people I've seen complain about AirBnb are the same sort of people who sneer at Ryanair - definitely not "the masses".
Then again, things may be different in the USA. I've always assumed the 40 year old man who has never seen the ocean is some sort of a ridiculous stereotype, but who knows.
I guess, cheap AirBnbs may be at similar locations, but that doesn't seem to be necessarily (or usually) true. And often you can't quite figure out how unsafe the place is ahead of time, so you rent something and roll with it, but that's a discussion for another time.
[1] Then again, so is everyone else. A guy a few comments down presented statistics, which were somehow refuted trough the careful deployment of a stereotype.
I don't think gender is a factor here. But it depends on the neighborhood you're in, not whether or not it's a motel.
However, that's not pertinent to the point that I was making, which is that Airbnbs are more of a luxury option, not a cost-saving option. The comment I was replying to appears to be asserting that being opposed to Airbnbs is elitist because it's being opposed to affordable options. In my experience in the US, that doesn't track. Airbnbs tend to be more expensive than someone who runs lean is likely to choose.
Nice, so we should be allowed to break the law if we feel that something is not right?
Yes, laws may be unethical or immoral. There is a system in place to change them, though, at least in a democratic government. Self-driving cars are allowed to be in the streets because laws have changed. AirBnB is allowed to operate because the laws have changed. And I would rather have that, a slow process of adaptation, than a random guy letting their crazy inventions roam free just because he feels like he's "right".
I mean... yes? That's the whole point of things like jury nullification and giving judges leeway in their sentencing. The law is not ethics. There's some correlation, but it's up to us as a society to apply it in an ethical way, and try to keep them aligned as much as possible.
Breaking the law in order to enhance your profit is an entirely different thing, and there is no high ground there.
A few years back the United states had the highest corporate taxes in the OECD, yet nobody was actually paying them in full. What happened? Congress lowered taxes.
I have a question. Are you an altruist? If so, how can you square that with obeying laws that bring misery to others? Aren't others entitled to joy and happiness?
Not really, no. The part of civil disobedience that accelerates change is when people are seen to be punished for the laws.
I don't know about the history of corn laws, but with both alcohol and marijuana, it wasn't the breaking of the laws itself that caused the laws to be changed, it was people getting punished for engaging in activities that others thought should not be illegal. If nobody is seen as being punished by the law, then most people won't be energized to change them because it looks like nobody's being unjustly harmed.
> how can you square that with obeying laws that bring misery to others?
I don't know that I bring misery to others in the laws that I follow. But your question is impossible to answer as stated -- what about laws that bring misery to some but justice to others? The world isn't usually black and white, and that includes laws.
My only point in this discussion is that there may be a moral high ground in breaking some laws under some circumstances. But making a profit is never such a moral high ground.
Companies that break laws to increase their profits are simply criminals, not bringers of justice.
Hand raised.
Two hands raised!
It seems the other way around. You'd have to be willfully blind to ignore that the human experience consists of technological progress.
> The function of the human race isn't to secure commercial services of convenience at any cost.
Who can say what the function of the human race is? I worry that we in software are becoming detached from reality in a strange way. I suspect your sentiment is common among the tech industry, and yet it seems the opposite of empirical observation -- the basis of science.
> It is possible that your beliefs don't correspond to the goals of local or global communities.
Sodomy, for example. To ram the point home, suppose you were born a few hundred years prior. Are you sure it would be unethical to engage in buttsex in the privacy of your own home with a consenting adult? Everyone's fine with that now, but it would quite literally get you executed not so long ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buggery_Act_1533
> This meant that a convicted sodomite’s possessions could be confiscated by the government, rather than going to their next of kin, and that even priests and monks could be executed for the offence—even though they could not be executed for murder. In moving what had previously been an offence tried by ecclesiastical courts into the secular ones, Henry may have intended it as a simple expression of political power along with other contemporary acts such as Submission of the Clergy Act 1533 and one year before the Act of Supremacy 1534. However Henry later used the law to execute monks and nuns (thanks to information his spies had gathered) and take their monastery lands—the same tactics had been used 200 years before by Philip IV of France against the Knights Templar.
The Knights Templar were a powerful organization, yet many of them were sentenced to death on the basis of buttsex being unjust.
I fear we live in an era where, metaphorically speaking, the buttsex corporations engage in is being framed as unjust, even though it seems pretty fair to me. Coinbase, Uber, Airbnb... It's hard to find anyone here that actually thinks startups are a good idea anymore. Or at least, if people speak up and say that they're fine, they tend to be shouted down.
> In summary, we have laws because other people exist and we live in a modern economy.
Our views don't seem so modern. I think history may look back on us the way we look at the people in the 1500s.
There is no Uber in my country (nor Lyft, nor anything similar), yet I always make it back home when I'm drunk, alive and without a need to sit behind the wheel. So does everyone else.
Idealizing being indifferent to the law is pulling the rug under the whole idea of democracy and rule of law. It has dire consequences. Much dire than a less than perfect taxi cab experience.
I'm here, raising my hand!
Zoning requirements exist for a reason. In this AirBNB hellscape, we now have entirely unregulated hotels in my nominally residential neighborhood. I live in a tourist town and it gets the worst kind of tourists, there to drink and play loud music to all hours of the morning.
These companies can fuck right off. Sometimes they accidentally improve things on one axis by ignoring regulations that are no longer relevant or overly burdensome, only to make something much worse on another. They're a blunt instruments of criminality - they indiscriminately tear through both the useless red tape as well as the proper regulations that exist for entirely good reasons.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/what-...
How about we change the angle a bit: why do you think this happened in Kenya and not in Germany?
The tech industry in general lost the "benefit of the doubt" years ago. That's not WC's fault, but WC could have mitigated some of that if they at least put some effort into not appearing shady.
Particularly since they're connected to cryptocurrency, which is one of the scummier segments of the industry to begin with.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqD3QbzSsIs
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/openais-sam-altman-launch...
If Kenyans are getting life-saving money in exchange for their iris scan, how is banning this arrangement helping them? Aren't they in a better position than you, or government bureaucrats, to judge what is best for them?
I'm specifically making this example about WeChat because it's basically impossible to exist in China without it and has the power imbalances inherent in dealing with the CCP that make it "voluntary" the same way donating money to someone with a gun pointed at your chest is "voluntary", since libertarians have a deliberately extremely warped view of that word.
Because as I understand it, they were offered a carrot of $70USD for signing up.
PS: You might know something I don't but to me, it looks like Worldcoin investors are the suckers in this transaction if any.
Just because iris data may not be valuable today, doesn't mean it won't be insanely valuable in the future, but it does practically guarantee that benefits won't be shared equitably. Remember Henrietta Lacks? Her family only just reached a settlement with Thermo Fisher this month. How much money does TFS make, how much are HeLa cells worth, and how much did the Lacks estate end up getting?
If iris scans are so irrelevant, then why did WorldCoin flat out ignore Kenya's order to stop collecting that information for months? Shouldn't a bunch of geniuses work there - they could make their code compliant if they wanted to. So why did they keep collecting?
It really bugs me that this ever passed in any country that has the concept. Companies are technically immortal and if they are given similar rights to people it is unavoidable that they will become superior to people on account of their life span.