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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

> to make money it helps to insert yourself between people and something they may want or need. this is how pretty much every business works.

Even though there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of grifters and rentiers, it's unreasonable to say that "this is how pretty much every business works".

If you buy a car the mfr is hardly inserting themselves between something you could have without them. Same for a haircut, a restaurant, or the food the restaurant used, for that matter.

There is even a small segment of the banking industry that does more than just insert itself and charge a toll!

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> If you buy a car

That's a particularly amusing example to pick considering that dealers are the dominant distribution channel from which to acquire a car, at least in the U.S.

The grifters are car dealers in this case, increasingly. Mfgs create value.

Not unlike how writers/artists created a bunch of value and ClosedAI and similar are grifts built on top of them. except unlike car mfgs authors don't have much pull to stop it

... and there isn't a person in the US that doesn't hate car dealers (including other car dealers).

We had a Toyota dealer in our town that both customers and former employees speak reverently of.

Some of those employees jumped ship to the Honda dealer after the Toyota dealer was bought by the guy who owned all the other car dealerships in town. For a long time the Honda dealer was the only competitor to Maguire, but then Maguire bought the Honda dealer.

Those employees don't speak ill of Maguire but they certainly don't speak about in him in glowing terms.

That’s how it was done pre-Internet, but now Tesla is one of the most valuable auto manufacturers and it sells directly to end users, no middlemen dealers.

Toyota-5x

Ford, Honda, Chevrolet-4x

Jeep, Nissan, Hyundai, Kia, Ram, Subaru-3x

These are many more multiples of Tesla’s sales.

Teslas sales make up a minuscule portion of the market. Tesla cannot sell directly to users in any of the continental US, they must sell through a website and ship the vehicle.

Federal Dealership laws preclude direct to customer sales.

Tesla may be valuable but its effects on the market are negligible.

The point stands even if the example was bad.

The other day I purchased some particle board and had them cut it to size. I do not believe that hardware store is on the same level of grift as the companies being described in this article.

>> If you buy a car

>That's a particularly amusing example to pick considering that _dealers_

Fyi... The gp you replied to specifically wrote about manufacturer as the example and not dealers when he wrote: "If you buy a car the _mfr_ is hardly inserting themselves"

Ohhhhh I thought ‘mfr’ was ‘motherfucker,’ but ‘manufacturer’ makes more sense

Yeah, since gumby wrote that, I assumed it was motherfucker, too! Maybe he was referring to Tesla.

> If you buy a car the mfr is hardly inserting themselves between something you could have without them.

They start to, though. What was that about BMW and having telemetry on car radio I heard about the other day? Or attempts by manufacturers to turn pieces of car into services, which has an effect of them inserting themselves into car resales?

> it's unreasonable to say that "this is how pretty much every business works".

i don't mean it in a totally negative sense. maybe it came across that way in the context.

a business is still a facilitator between you and something you need. they have an advantage be it money, resources, technology, connections...something that allows them to act as that middle man and in many case monopolise it.

on social media its much easier for anyone to do that. you dont really need any resource aside from "hustle" as they call it.

Perhaps it isn't the orginization in that example, but the detached and shareholders who have limited liability.

Of course they do. Toyota inserts itself between me and my need to go places.

In this case transportation grift is a trillion dollar problem in the US, but maybe slightly different than you're saying. A huge portion of US infrastructure is built on the idea that no one in their right mind would walk to it. Our shops are box islands in multi acre oceans of black asphalt. Vast arteries of concrete separate people from where they live to where they buy. So, yea I would say there is plenty of grift at different levels.

I think we have a different interpretation of "between".

I just meant that they see a costly thing that people do, and they do something to reduce that cost. That basically is what all companies do.

I believe that's what GP meant as well, but apparently everyone else interpreted it differently.

> A huge portion of US infrastructure is built on the idea that no one in their right mind would walk to it.

No one in their right mind would want to walk to any business in the US due to its urban planning and transport infrastructure.

Even biking is an absurd risk that only rare people dare to make.

In the US it's not abnormal to express the length of even mundane car trips in how many hours you spend driving. That's definitely not a halmark of a walkable region.

> No one in their right mind would want to walk to any business in the US due to its urban planning and transport infrastructure.

> Even biking is an absurd risk that only rare people dare to make.

Neither of these things are true everywhere in the US. There are many cities where walking and biking are common forms of transportation. But there are certainly many places where the infrastructure appears to be actively designed to kill pedestrians and bicyclist as well.

People went places before cars were invented, you can too. Toyota offers you a better way, if you can afford to avail yourself of their offer -- that's all.

People went places before cars were invented, and then General Motors put itself between people and the desire to move around by buying up public transit only to dismantle it. Now car companies are offering not "a better way" but "the only real way" unless you want to get hit by a suburbanite driving a Ford F-150 while sitting in an unprotected bike lane.

I'm really tired of people acting like it's just a free market where everyone is an equal, rational actor. There was a concerted effort to redesign Americana around cars that was not replicated globally, and you see the consequences of it play out in real time.

> I'm really tired of people acting like it's just a free market where everyone is an equal, rational actor.

It's never been a free market. There was no golden age where everybody had access to public transit. There were zero public services at all, you were on your own. And often had to contend with bandits and worse.

I'm really tired of people acting like the only thing standing in the way of utopia, is capitalism.

> There was no golden age where everybody had access to public transit. There were zero public services at all, you were on your own. And often had to contend with bandits and worse.

I think you're thinking of Skyrim and not the actual world, but there are certainly historical periods that were famously bandit-free even in antiquity like the Mongol Empire.

> General Motors put itself between people and the desire to move around by buying up public transit only to dismantle it

I know this story and for a long time believed it. But it appears that developers building new towns (urban expansion) in the mid 20th century put in streetcars to get people to move in (connected to city networks etc) and ran them at a loss. As the new town filled up and the developers went on to the next one, the streetcars became the uneconomic responsibility of the town.

The cities put price caps on streetcars because they thought it would make it cheaper, which ended up bankrupting them, and then more recently cities have infinite amounts of pro-car policies like parking minimums that make it unreasonable to use any other kind of transport.

Funny enough, this is being repeated in modern times because a lot of transit activists want to force all transit to be free and instead be funded by theoretical rich peoples' taxes.

That's what I meant by "between" in this case. Apparently other people interpreted it differently.

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