Bitcoin is not a company

That's what happens when the majority of people don't actually support the regulations.

If people thought it was wrong to be an unlicensed airbnb or uber, they wouldn't use them. In reality, those regulations are mostly protection rackets and most people don't care about violating them.

I disagree. When you give people strong economic incentives to ignore morality, some people will. Not all, but enough to make a hash of things. In any population there will be some people who will do things they know are wrong just to get ahead.

For Airbnb landlords I'm sure the thought process goes like " I'm just one person so I can't be having enough of an impact to be a problem. And besides, I need the money." But then enough people pile on and in aggregate they ruin the local housing market. But nobody thinks that they themselves are culpable

I’m struggling to understand the moral character of taxi service regulatory capture and monopolization.

Your taxi crashes because the driver skipped brake maintenance and his insurance doesn't reimburse you for your hospital costs because commercial transportation isn't covered. Sure would be nice to have some minimum requirements for taxis.

If maintenance schedules and insurance regulations are “moral” issues, what isn’t?

The moral issue is when the executives at Uber know with certainty that their driver compensation and incentives push drivers to neglect required maintenance on their vehicles.

Much in the same way tobacco companies knew for a long time how addictive and harmful smoking was.

And how Facebook knows they let their advertisers scam their users, and the way social media was pushing teen suicides higher. They knew and kept pushing policies which made the problem worse. All so they could collect bigger compensation packages.

Eh… there’s a point to be made about “enforced low risk tolerance” being a societal issue.

Lead in gasoline is bad, but in general I think individuals are perfectly capable of determining whether they are willing to risk a taxi ride.

Would they risk a taxi ride if they knew that Uber failed to properly background check a driver, who later kidnapped and raped one of his passengers, and Uber's response was to hire private investigators to dig up personal information on the victim in an attempt to discredit her? [1]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42291495

That's interpreting a failure to fight to preserve ethics as an internal rejection when it could be explained by a lack of fighting spirit, either because the fight seems impossible or the given hill not worth dying on. Another interpretation would be a comfort-oriented, avoidant, and possibly cynical culture facing a power imbalance.

that can't be right. If 90% of people are anti-airbnb and the other 10% are pro-airbnb then the 10% just open all the airbnbs.

People were (and mostly still are) very opposed to Airbnb rentals in their neighborhood.

... but the customers of these Airbnb rentals are not. :-)

that's the point of the regulations...

People whose houses are robbed are against robbery, people who rob houses are very much for it.

That’s a false analogy.

You have two parties who want to enter into a contract and a third party unrelated to the contract that doesn’t for whatever reason. Just based on contract law and common sense the unrelated party shouldn’t have standing. Now if there’s externalities to the contract that impact that unrelated party sure, but only insofar as to get those externalities addressed.

This is not the same as a robbery which involves no contract or a willing counterparty to the robbery.

Yeah, IME, if the guests of the rental acted exactly like locals, and the units were not removed from the local housing supply (not sure how that could be), or the local housing supply was in excess to the needs of the population (not sure where that is), it would be fine.

I don’t understand why the local housing supply is privileged in your scenario. And if the local housing supply is a problem it’s one the locals created themselves so…

You believe that the local area has no standing, that's incorrect. Laws and regulations are third parties impeding on the contract all the time. Libertarians may dislike this, but it's one problem with democracy - the majority make decisions you don't like.

People support anti-pollution measures yet corporations still choose to pollute. Curious.

That's none of their business.

There are already laws in place against the kinds of behavior that neighbors are afraid will happen.

Noise, litter, etc, "nuisance" laws are on the books, but mostly depend on people following them voluntarily. The local authorities don't have the time/staff to investigate and resolve them all the time.

This is certainly the most uncharitable way to think about it.

I see a prisoner’s dilemma where people often support regulations even if on an individual basis they would personally violate them, because they prefer living in a the less chaotic society. For example anti-dumping regulations… the expected value for any given individual is +EV, but when everyone is dumping, it’s a big -EV

The perfect example is speed limits: everybody thinks they're good and yet they all seem to classify all other drivers into two categories: slowpokes and maniacs.

Nobody seems to be able to agree on what a responsible set of rules is around the speed of vehicles.

This is entirely made up? Most people are totally fine with speed limits being what they are and don't say anything about it.

Oh, that explains the massive difference in speed limits from one country to another then, especially if they're next door neighbors.

i don't see what that has to do with it

In the sense that they don't care what the sign says when it comes to their own driving? Sure.

no, in the sense that they just follow whatever the rules are and don't care very much, or mildly break them as is convenient and still don't care very much

That's because they are slowpokes and maniacs: In a decently flowing road, the majority of distinct cars you see are either moving significantly faster or slower than you (and the more extreme the difference the more likely you are to see them). Of cars that go at a similar speed to you, they approach you / you approach them more slowly so you'll see fewer of them.

From an economic perspective the majority of those regulations destroy economic value and those companies are unlocking value by finding clever ways around them.

No, they just shift the economic downsides to someone else so they can collect the difference. That's what I mean by arbitrage. Someone always pays the price, and now it's you and I.

That's not always true. Regulations increase the cost of transacting and make ranges of transactions non-viable, just like a tax.

So there is "dead weight loss", where transactions that would have been mutually beneficially and socially productive are eliminated by the regulation, and restored when somebody finds a loophole, restoring the individual and social benefit.

The world is not zero sum!

I agree, once they have bypassed regulations, they use that to essentially rent-seek from their monopoly/their unique position where the rent is paid by us public.

Their behaviour is very rent-seeking imo and at moments like these, its best to remind us that even the father of Capitalism, Adam Smith didn't like landlords

Had to search up some quotes from adam smith right now but here's a relevant one (imo) to this discussion:

"[the landlord leaves the worker] with the smallest share with which the tenant can content himself without being a loser, and the landlord seldom means to leave him any more." - Adam smith

i can find clever ways around d crippling debt, its called robbing a bank at gunpoint

I can't say this for the companies listed above but atleast within the realm of social media, they also want to bypass regulations and well, we all know how's it going.

On a long term, I do feel like there will be a drop in producitivity, thus destruction of economic value because of lack of enforcement of policies/such companies having reckless attitude about them.

Many of the products listed above actually seem to be very rent-seeking in my opinion (IIRC Someone on HN once said that from their personal experience talking to drivers, uber takes an approximate at the very least 40% cut or more)

(This might be a little off-topic?_ but one thing I think about tech regulations is that Facebook used to see if a young girl/minor girl took a selfie and then if they don't upload it, detect that she was insecure and then try to show them face beauty recommendations.

These girls can be our sisters/daughters fwiw. Facebook profits from insecurity/rage-bait and I would say that many social medias are the same as well, its just that the facebook example to me feels so eggregious and should be a uniting front for many to agree that there's a problem indeed.

You will be right when you say economical value is generated from profiting from insecurity/bypassing regulations but at what cost?