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Comment by pgt | Hacker News Reader

Why would you want to regulate it? Consumers benefit from VCs subsidising Uber and food delivery.

Uber's sales pitch was always "We're going to charge artificially low prices for a while in order to crush the competition, and, once we achieve monopoly status, we'll start jacking prices up." It's hard for me, as a consumer, to see what they're doing as a benefit to me in the long term.

Given that that's the basic business strategy behind all of these hyper-capitalized startups, I have similar suspicions around food delivery companies. As it stands, I'm guessing that it's affecting me more immediately, too, as restaurants raise their prices in order to cover whatever large cut the GrubHubs and DoorDashes of the world are taking. Similar to how everything's just 5% more expensive now to cover the money that's being skimmed off of every transaction in the form of credit card fees that have been justified to consumers with the promise that they'll give 1/5 of what they took back to you in the form of "rewards".

The collateral damage is immense, to both gig workers and in the case of food delivery, restaurants who do the actual work of making the food.

EDIT: I mean, just go UBI instead of advocating for siphoning sovereign fund dollars from ruthless dictators and unsophisticated investors like Masayoshi Son. Save us all the paperwork and bikeshedding about not being able to afford what we clearly (based on central bank monetary policy) can afford. I will certainly miss the Matt Levine pieces about these folks though.

How restaurants suffered? I mean if restaurants were so unable to cooperate to set up their own delivery service to compete against the VC funded ones, then they were already well destined to go out of business.

(And I'm not saying the state shouldn't step in, because these are the typical pathological market states that need some intervention.)

Delivery services have monopolized many peoples restaurant ordering habits. Many restaurants have their own delivery service, but people don't use it because they order from grubhub/doordash/uber eats instead. If the restaurants take themselves off the services people don't order from them anymore.

So it turns people value UX and simplicity than restaurant diversity. And I'm not exactly blaming them. Restaurants' own ordering/delivery systems all usually suck.

People value TV ads and newspaper articles/PR, and they value new things.

Is that really true everywhere?

Where I live, we have these services, but I don’t see huge push of Grubhub/DoorDash/Uber. If anything, restaurants are all setting up their own ordering platforms.

Nobody is forced to work for Uber and the like, restaurants can also ban these services.

This is a tired argument. We live in a society, not Somalia. Government exists to regulate to protect citizens, and I'm starting to believe these arguments are put forth to give these monstrosities more time before death gasps.

This is laughable, since the government also created an artificial taxi monopoly that benefitted no one but a small subset of people.

Uber is a godsend to millions of people and drivers around the world, to say otherwise in order to drive your political agenda it’s akin to living under a rock.

And if you want some proof, just ask every Uber driver if they would be sad or happy if the service disappeared tomorrow and hear their answers. There is a world out there that lives and thrives thanks to companies like Uber.

> not Somalia

I'm curious why you would choose this example. Is somalia a country without a society ?

Uber is artificially starving out the markets it enters by offering dumping prices. Restaurants are similarly dragged into participating at gunpoint (in particular, the likes of DoorDash, Yelp and GrubHub will absolutely hold the restaurant's reputation hostage until it joins the platform).

Wrong. Uber made the market bigger and a result to that there are more people overall working for the transportation industry. It’s not like every Uber driver would have been a taxi driver if Uber didn’t exist..

Of course it made the market bigger, because it forced the competitors to lower prices to unsustainable levels. Lower prices = more demand = more supply = bigger market. For now.

It's also true that the more fast neutrons hit your fissile matter, the more energy you can extract faster. Yet it doesn't make an atomic bomb work as a viable power source.

But doing so is a classic Prisoner's Dilemma in the short term - if you don't acquiesce to Uber Eats delivery fees, but your competitors do, who captures the market share? Even if it isn't fruitful for them in the long term, it shafts you in the short term.

So do the locusts benefit from all the free food all these farmers have neatly planted close together.

The article is from 7 years ago, but it nicely describes the consequences of the larger "sharing economy" that we're experiencing now: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/.

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