There is more than just liability, imagine that the "union" services are no longer required (or simply the benefit of the few workers still beneficial to the company does not outweigh the cost of paying for all the workers, including ones no longer required) - the company simply terminates (or doesn't renew) the contract with the union, and the union is now on the hook for any severance, or other benefits (or maybe paying the workers while they look for another job as a collective, which is likely to take much more time than an individual job search).
I understood you loud and clear. No problem there. Such unions can already exist today if someone wanted to start it, there is nothing stopping them. As you say, they would simply be staffing corporations, proving staff. That is not the kind of unions which people in Silicon Valley are trying to start by the way.
PS> I do remember a while back, during.com boom there were teams of engineers in Silicon Valley who actually did this, they banned together and marketed themselves as a team (one even went to auction themselves off on ebay) - they had an additional advantage of actually being a specialized team of designers, each with complementary roles. Those didn't do so well and didn't start any trends.
Ok. Let's summarize: 1. The unions you propose as simply corporations offering an umbrella collective bargaining. I agree, THAT would not be socialism. Personally I would have no problem with such unions. In this article example of Linetix, the 15 quit and their employers should not be subject to any penalties. They decided to terminate their individual employment and start negotiating a single 15 person entity, employer said "no thanks". Unions with special protections which they have today, are a form of socialism, so that's why people call them out as such. 2. You Best Buy example is dead in the water from the get-go. An exclusivity contract like the one you suggest would be illegal - lookup how Intel got in trouble with anti-trust laws by striking a deal with Dell not to sell AMD CPU's. 3. Not sure where the "I demand you interview me" or "I demand you hire me" argument fits. Nobody has any right to demand to be hired just because someone else is paying a company, or individuals, for some service. If you pay some company to maintain your lawn, why on earth would anyone even think they any right to come to you and demand that you interview and hire them instead? Or is this some socialism ideal I am not aware of?
I responded to you not because I wanted to make an anti-union argument, but to reply to you asking why people conflate unions with socialism. That is not to say that I think unions are good, but that is an argument for another thread. That said, I thought I should mention that I would have absolutely no problems with unions as you describe (basically corporations, subject to the same laws, including anti-trust laws).
You are missing one big point, unions over time have lobbied for and received a lot of legal protections which your concept of "consultant-firm-like union" would not have. Using the example from the OP, 15 of Lanetix employees choose to unionize, no problem, Lanetix chooses not to hire the 15 employee "consulting firm". According to you, that should be just fine, the 15 employees can shop around for another job, however, because of laws protecting unions, the employer was forced to pay a penalty for not hiring this new collective. Other socialist aspects of the unions include the ability for the union to force each and every employee to join the union, conversely preventing the employer from hiring non-union employees and violating individual rights not to belong to a union. THAT is the difference between socialized unions and the collective representation that you described. Unions with their socialistic protections are basically mobs supported by the government - they can extort companies with government standing by with guns (yes, actual people with guns will come to arrest you if you don't obey) to back them. That creates a hostile environment between employers and employees. Unions had their use in the past, but with the labor laws now in place, unions have long outlived their usefulness - just like communism, the idea seems great, but in practice it doesn't work because it fails to account for human nature.
And that employee is free to go to another employer.
? But that other employer will be just as opportunistic!
They cannot be. Nobody will switch jobs if they pay the same, they will have to pay more. If you are right, and each mechanic is making $200 per hour for their employer, and they are only getting paid $20 per hour, the next employer will gladly pay them $30 (50% more!) and still pocket $170 per hour of profit. Not just that, another greedy business will pay them $40 and pocket $160, still major profit to be had. So see, greed is good, allows employees to make more money.
Unfortunately, all that is based on whether or not you are correct about the mechanics getting paid 10% their worth. The fact that there are no businesses competing with each other over those employees and those employees making progressively more money, indicated that you are wrong, meaning you over-estimate how much value those mechanics create per hour. Think about it this way, if you were selling two packs of $100 bills on ebay for $20, in no time would you find people willing to pay more than $20 for two $100 bills. Think of those mechanics as machines creating $200 per hour, why wouldn't someone pay even $100 to them to get $200 back? There are some professions where this bidding happens by the way, so you can't say it's employers colluding to keep the wage down, because that is not feasible in a very large free market (many, many businesses hiring mechanics would have to all collude together, because even a single business not doing it would steal all the profits from the rest). The uncomfortable truth is, many people often way overestimate their own value to the employers. It sounds like you are one of those people.
And that employee is free to go to another employer. Using your own example, if the mechanic is in fact worth $200 per hour, but only gets paid $20, there should be plenty of businesses that will be willing to pay them $50 and pocket $150, right? The problem is that people often think they are worth a lot more than they produce. I briefly ran a student paint business with a friend very long time ago. We paid students $7.50 per hour to paint. We charged $29.99 per hour. After insurance, taxes, modest advertising, tool rentals, etc we netted less than $6/hr of profit, and we didn't even have any fixed office overhead (no management salaries since the me and my friend worked for free, no office space to rent).
As I said before, if you truly believe what you say, you start a garage, pay mechanics $30 (so 50% more, you'll be a sought after employer) and pocket the $170 difference, If you don't know how to run one, hire a business manager, with $170 per hour per mechanic of profit, you will be rolling in cash so should able to hire a good manager.
Unlike in a communist country, a mechanic in the US has the freedom to rent his own garage and tools (as you say, pay off the garage) and charge however much they want for the services. The problem is that now the mechanic has to cover his own benefits, his own customer acquisition, his own idle time, etc. I know a guy who always talked just like you, how he was undervalued, how the employer got rich from him. So, one day he took his retirement money and started a restaurant with his best friend. Guess what, that's when he realized all the other costs businesses have to cover, how he had to pay his employees even when there was no customers in the restaurant. Long story short, he got out of running a business a year later and went back to be an employee - except now he appreciated not having to worry about what if customer doesn't pay, or what if there are no customers, what if an employee quits or simply doesn't show up, what if stuff needs repairs, what if your supply costs go up, etc, etc.
I'm telling you, if you want to discover your true value, start your own business.
Why would I pay for automation when I don't own the company? I'm the one who is learning how to use the automation and I am producing more for the company. If my salary is not in line with my productivity as an employee how am I getting a fair deal?
Simple, if you want all the benefit from the increased productivity, you should pay all the costs for increasing the productivity. If you dig ditches with a shovel and your employer spends a money on machinery, it makes you more productive but not worth equivalently to your increased productivity. You get some increase due to increased skill level to operate the heavy machinery, but that's it. The cost of the work is not just you, it's you + the machinery + machine maintenance and operating costs. The money invested in the machinery needs to come back with interest since nobody is investing to break even - if it wasn't making more money than invested, you'd still be digging with a shovel. It also needs to make enough money to cover loses in any other investments which didn't work out for the business, since not all investments make money - it's a game of averages.
It really sounds like you should be your own boss - that is the only situation where you get paid exactly what you're worth - every penny of your productivity.
You aren't getting it. If I can buy twice as much because prices are cheaper, then SO CAN EVERYONE ELSE. The benefit of my hard work is spread to anyone that wants that product, which only benefits the company directly. I just want to be paid the money so I can be the one to decide how it is used.
Well, it's your employer who automated the receptionist or improved the process to increase your productivity, so why should it be you, as an individual, who gets paid more? As I mentioned before, you get indirect benefits (and often shared with others), but if you want to have direct benefit from automation and process improvements, it sounds like you need to be doing and paying for said automation yourself. Some companies do offer bonuses for any efficiency or cost improvements you bring to the table, plus you always have the option to go into business for yourself - that way whenever you want a raise, just go to the mirror and ask, the answer should always be "you got it, effective as soon as you become more effective".
If for one our work you get twice the goods as compared to what you got before, then you do benefit. Of course this requires that all goods producing businesses optimize, but overall that is happening (e.g. nobody has a switchboard operators on staff anymore). Before the industrial revolution, you worked more than 10 hrs a day and owned maybe 10 shirts in your lifetime, today you can buy 10 shirts a month if you so desire while working 8 hrs a day. So yes, the shirt making seamstress got displaced by machines, but everyone wins on that one. If you want to look farther back, you have better healthcare, longer life expectancy, and more choice of foods (feel like chinese tonight, or italian, or burgers) than most kings had in the old days, even if you consider yourself poor. The point is, your standard of living is higher than what the wealthiest had few hundred of years ago, before all the automation.
Not only that, it wasn't an actual UBI test either since all participant were unemployed. It was simply a "streamlined unemployment benefit" test where the participants had lass paperwork to fill out and didn't have to report all their activities. The fact that people were happy with less bureaucracy is not a surprise result.
Google needs to develop a new AI which will make management decisions for Google based on "lowest social outrage algorithm". They should buy data from Facebook to train the AI on social outrage. Given their history over the past couple of years, this could be a very high ROI internal project.
This is by design. Making serviceable goods yields very little revenue, especially with "right to repair" laws coming to public focus lately. Apple ran out of innovation, so now they have to survive selling services and disposable accessories - earpods, headphone adapters, charging cables. Why do you think Apple makes everything proprietary? Because even charging cables break and are disposable and Apple doesn't want to miss out on the recurring revenue. I don't use Apple products, but my family does, and they go through cables and adapters at a fairly steady rate (they stop working, not lost).
They already were planning to leave, then decided to just build a second HQ in New York, then decided to just expand everywhere. If this passes, it will give them incentive to setup headquarters elsewhere sooner. Boeing did it, still has factories in Washington, but HQ moved to Chicago in 2001.
I can see another problem with guests installing tiny hidden cameras, tapped into main power (say a bathroom light) and using WiFi internet to stream videos.
I'm not sure what "any means necessary means". Does NASA get a blank check from the government? If Elon says for 10 trillion he can get us to the moon earlier, they'll fund it? If it involves paying large sums to Russia of China, that's ok too? How about safety? Send 10 rockets, as long as one makes it there that's fine, even if 9 crash and burn? Who exactly decides what means are necessary?
It is not in the interest of future customers for the company to give away product to today's customer and go under. Hence my original question "which customer are we talking about here?" - what's best for one customer may not be best for the other.
"The customer's interest must always come before the company's." Which customer? Is the company thriving, expanding, and being able to take advantage of economies of scale to provide better and cheaper product to future customers considered in customer's interest or not? Or are we talking about customers who can't afford the product, so we should just give them the product for free and bankrupt the company, since customer interest comes first? Or are the workers at the company also customers, or is it ethical to exploit them just to provide cheaper products?
The above are hyperbole's, but herein lies the problem, if you want to put "customer" interest above the company, you must specify "which customers".
University of Washington had a presentation I saw almost a decade ago where security researchers showed how they can use the fact that the implantable defibrillator uses plain text serial communications (via RF) and how they can remotely do many things, including: * read all of patients data, including their social security numbers * change settings of the device, including disabling it completely * kill a person (theoretical exploit) by disabling the defibrillator function and enabling a test mode which induced a heart attack to stop the heart (the mode is supposed to be used during implantation only, with chest open and doctor ready to standby to revive if the defibrillator didn't revive the patient) All of the above done with a laptop and $50 worth of parts, up to 100 feet away. The presentation I saw did not disclose which manufacturer that was, but they did say that FDA did not have rules at that time that would prevent manufacturers from using un-encrupted, un-authenticated, not even simple password, connections to control all functions of the device.
I would expect those governments of the offending websites should be dealt with as per GDPR, therefore warned, fined, or however any other company violating GDPR is supposed be dealt with. Unless of course EU governments believe that their own laws don't apply to them. This should tell us. Wouldn't be the first government which believed they are above the law.
I am not a fan of Facebook, however, what is wrong with zipcode targeting? If I have a product to which some zipcodes are more receptive to, why would I want to pay for advertising in zipcodes where people cannot afford it, are not interested, or simply cannot even legally buy the product. Say for example I am selling financing for Tesla vehicles, why would you force people in states where you cannot legally buy a Tesla to view my ads (e.g. in Michigan)? Also, if my yield for Tesla vehicle financing is greatest for 30-55 year olds, why would I want o pay for teenagers or 20'somethings to view my ads? Best example, what if I have a mortgage company which only gives mortgages for NYC properties, why do I have to now pay for advertising in other zipcodes hoping to catch the tiny percentage of people who are moving to NYC?
Pre-pay for a year in advance, with fine print stated in the OP's post. I wonder if "we are short on funds, therefore any of your usage of the pass impact's MovePass's system-wide capacity, therefore no more movies for you this year, and no refund either".
It sounds like company's last ditch effort to get some capital, hoping most people who buy it will never use it. It didn't work before, so what exactly is different now?
You don't need John Deere as an example. Pick California's (and Silicon Valley's) own Tesla Motors. They flat out refuse to allow owners to service their own cars, even when their own service centers are bursting at the seams with month long waits for appointment, and weeks long waits after you're dropped the car off for service!
Slashdot Mirror
There is more than just liability, imagine that the "union" services are no longer required (or simply the benefit of the few workers still beneficial to the company does not outweigh the cost of paying for all the workers, including ones no longer required) - the company simply terminates (or doesn't renew) the contract with the union, and the union is now on the hook for any severance, or other benefits (or maybe paying the workers while they look for another job as a collective, which is likely to take much more time than an individual job search).
I understood you loud and clear. No problem there. Such unions can already exist today if someone wanted to start it, there is nothing stopping them. As you say, they would simply be staffing corporations, proving staff. That is not the kind of unions which people in Silicon Valley are trying to start by the way.
PS> I do remember a while back, during .com boom there were teams of engineers in Silicon Valley who actually did this, they banned together and marketed themselves as a team (one even went to auction themselves off on ebay) - they had an additional advantage of actually being a specialized team of designers, each with complementary roles. Those didn't do so well and didn't start any trends.
Ok. Let's summarize:
1. The unions you propose as simply corporations offering an umbrella collective bargaining. I agree, THAT would not be socialism. Personally I would have no problem with such unions. In this article example of Linetix, the 15 quit and their employers should not be subject to any penalties. They decided to terminate their individual employment and start negotiating a single 15 person entity, employer said "no thanks". Unions with special protections which they have today, are a form of socialism, so that's why people call them out as such.
2. You Best Buy example is dead in the water from the get-go. An exclusivity contract like the one you suggest would be illegal - lookup how Intel got in trouble with anti-trust laws by striking a deal with Dell not to sell AMD CPU's.
3. Not sure where the "I demand you interview me" or "I demand you hire me" argument fits. Nobody has any right to demand to be hired just because someone else is paying a company, or individuals, for some service. If you pay some company to maintain your lawn, why on earth would anyone even think they any right to come to you and demand that you interview and hire them instead? Or is this some socialism ideal I am not aware of?
I responded to you not because I wanted to make an anti-union argument, but to reply to you asking why people conflate unions with socialism. That is not to say that I think unions are good, but that is an argument for another thread. That said, I thought I should mention that I would have absolutely no problems with unions as you describe (basically corporations, subject to the same laws, including anti-trust laws).
You are missing one big point, unions over time have lobbied for and received a lot of legal protections which your concept of "consultant-firm-like union" would not have. Using the example from the OP, 15 of Lanetix employees choose to unionize, no problem, Lanetix chooses not to hire the 15 employee "consulting firm". According to you, that should be just fine, the 15 employees can shop around for another job, however, because of laws protecting unions, the employer was forced to pay a penalty for not hiring this new collective. Other socialist aspects of the unions include the ability for the union to force each and every employee to join the union, conversely preventing the employer from hiring non-union employees and violating individual rights not to belong to a union. THAT is the difference between socialized unions and the collective representation that you described. Unions with their socialistic protections are basically mobs supported by the government - they can extort companies with government standing by with guns (yes, actual people with guns will come to arrest you if you don't obey) to back them. That creates a hostile environment between employers and employees. Unions had their use in the past, but with the labor laws now in place, unions have long outlived their usefulness - just like communism, the idea seems great, but in practice it doesn't work because it fails to account for human nature.
And that employee is free to go to another employer.
?
But that other employer will be just as opportunistic!
They cannot be. Nobody will switch jobs if they pay the same, they will have to pay more. If you are right, and each mechanic is making $200 per hour for their employer, and they are only getting paid $20 per hour, the next employer will gladly pay them $30 (50% more!) and still pocket $170 per hour of profit. Not just that, another greedy business will pay them $40 and pocket $160, still major profit to be had. So see, greed is good, allows employees to make more money.
Unfortunately, all that is based on whether or not you are correct about the mechanics getting paid 10% their worth. The fact that there are no businesses competing with each other over those employees and those employees making progressively more money, indicated that you are wrong, meaning you over-estimate how much value those mechanics create per hour. Think about it this way, if you were selling two packs of $100 bills on ebay for $20, in no time would you find people willing to pay more than $20 for two $100 bills. Think of those mechanics as machines creating $200 per hour, why wouldn't someone pay even $100 to them to get $200 back? There are some professions where this bidding happens by the way, so you can't say it's employers colluding to keep the wage down, because that is not feasible in a very large free market (many, many businesses hiring mechanics would have to all collude together, because even a single business not doing it would steal all the profits from the rest). The uncomfortable truth is, many people often way overestimate their own value to the employers. It sounds like you are one of those people.
And that employee is free to go to another employer. Using your own example, if the mechanic is in fact worth $200 per hour, but only gets paid $20, there should be plenty of businesses that will be willing to pay them $50 and pocket $150, right? The problem is that people often think they are worth a lot more than they produce. I briefly ran a student paint business with a friend very long time ago. We paid students $7.50 per hour to paint. We charged $29.99 per hour. After insurance, taxes, modest advertising, tool rentals, etc we netted less than $6/hr of profit, and we didn't even have any fixed office overhead (no management salaries since the me and my friend worked for free, no office space to rent).
As I said before, if you truly believe what you say, you start a garage, pay mechanics $30 (so 50% more, you'll be a sought after employer) and pocket the $170 difference, If you don't know how to run one, hire a business manager, with $170 per hour per mechanic of profit, you will be rolling in cash so should able to hire a good manager.
Unlike in a communist country, a mechanic in the US has the freedom to rent his own garage and tools (as you say, pay off the garage) and charge however much they want for the services. The problem is that now the mechanic has to cover his own benefits, his own customer acquisition, his own idle time, etc. I know a guy who always talked just like you, how he was undervalued, how the employer got rich from him. So, one day he took his retirement money and started a restaurant with his best friend. Guess what, that's when he realized all the other costs businesses have to cover, how he had to pay his employees even when there was no customers in the restaurant. Long story short, he got out of running a business a year later and went back to be an employee - except now he appreciated not having to worry about what if customer doesn't pay, or what if there are no customers, what if an employee quits or simply doesn't show up, what if stuff needs repairs, what if your supply costs go up, etc, etc.
I'm telling you, if you want to discover your true value, start your own business.
Why would I pay for automation when I don't own the company? I'm the one who is learning how to use the automation and I am producing more for the company. If my salary is not in line with my productivity as an employee how am I getting a fair deal?
Simple, if you want all the benefit from the increased productivity, you should pay all the costs for increasing the productivity. If you dig ditches with a shovel and your employer spends a money on machinery, it makes you more productive but not worth equivalently to your increased productivity. You get some increase due to increased skill level to operate the heavy machinery, but that's it. The cost of the work is not just you, it's you + the machinery + machine maintenance and operating costs. The money invested in the machinery needs to come back with interest since nobody is investing to break even - if it wasn't making more money than invested, you'd still be digging with a shovel. It also needs to make enough money to cover loses in any other investments which didn't work out for the business, since not all investments make money - it's a game of averages.
It really sounds like you should be your own boss - that is the only situation where you get paid exactly what you're worth - every penny of your productivity.
You aren't getting it. If I can buy twice as much because prices are cheaper, then SO CAN EVERYONE ELSE. The benefit of my hard work is spread to anyone that wants that product, which only benefits the company directly. I just want to be paid the money so I can be the one to decide how it is used.
Well, it's your employer who automated the receptionist or improved the process to increase your productivity, so why should it be you, as an individual, who gets paid more? As I mentioned before, you get indirect benefits (and often shared with others), but if you want to have direct benefit from automation and process improvements, it sounds like you need to be doing and paying for said automation yourself. Some companies do offer bonuses for any efficiency or cost improvements you bring to the table, plus you always have the option to go into business for yourself - that way whenever you want a raise, just go to the mirror and ask, the answer should always be "you got it, effective as soon as you become more effective".
If for one our work you get twice the goods as compared to what you got before, then you do benefit. Of course this requires that all goods producing businesses optimize, but overall that is happening (e.g. nobody has a switchboard operators on staff anymore). Before the industrial revolution, you worked more than 10 hrs a day and owned maybe 10 shirts in your lifetime, today you can buy 10 shirts a month if you so desire while working 8 hrs a day. So yes, the shirt making seamstress got displaced by machines, but everyone wins on that one. If you want to look farther back, you have better healthcare, longer life expectancy, and more choice of foods (feel like chinese tonight, or italian, or burgers) than most kings had in the old days, even if you consider yourself poor. The point is, your standard of living is higher than what the wealthiest had few hundred of years ago, before all the automation.
If prices of goods go down and your salary goes up, it's the same as if you got a raise and prices stayed the same.
Not only that, it wasn't an actual UBI test either since all participant were unemployed. It was simply a "streamlined unemployment benefit" test where the participants had lass paperwork to fill out and didn't have to report all their activities. The fact that people were happy with less bureaucracy is not a surprise result.
Google needs to develop a new AI which will make management decisions for Google based on "lowest social outrage algorithm". They should buy data from Facebook to train the AI on social outrage. Given their history over the past couple of years, this could be a very high ROI internal project.
Then why are you coming back to them to give them more of your information?
This is by design. Making serviceable goods yields very little revenue, especially with "right to repair" laws coming to public focus lately. Apple ran out of innovation, so now they have to survive selling services and disposable accessories - earpods, headphone adapters, charging cables. Why do you think Apple makes everything proprietary? Because even charging cables break and are disposable and Apple doesn't want to miss out on the recurring revenue. I don't use Apple products, but my family does, and they go through cables and adapters at a fairly steady rate (they stop working, not lost).
They already were planning to leave, then decided to just build a second HQ in New York, then decided to just expand everywhere. If this passes, it will give them incentive to setup headquarters elsewhere sooner. Boeing did it, still has factories in Washington, but HQ moved to Chicago in 2001.
I can see another problem with guests installing tiny hidden cameras, tapped into main power (say a bathroom light) and using WiFi internet to stream videos.
I'm not sure what "any means necessary means". Does NASA get a blank check from the government? If Elon says for 10 trillion he can get us to the moon earlier, they'll fund it? If it involves paying large sums to Russia of China, that's ok too? How about safety? Send 10 rockets, as long as one makes it there that's fine, even if 9 crash and burn? Who exactly decides what means are necessary?
It is not in the interest of future customers for the company to give away product to today's customer and go under. Hence my original question "which customer are we talking about here?" - what's best for one customer may not be best for the other.
"The customer's interest must always come before the company's."
Which customer? Is the company thriving, expanding, and being able to take advantage of economies of scale to provide better and cheaper product to future customers considered in customer's interest or not? Or are we talking about customers who can't afford the product, so we should just give them the product for free and bankrupt the company, since customer interest comes first? Or are the workers at the company also customers, or is it ethical to exploit them just to provide cheaper products?
The above are hyperbole's, but herein lies the problem, if you want to put "customer" interest above the company, you must specify "which customers".
University of Washington had a presentation I saw almost a decade ago where security researchers showed how they can use the fact that the implantable defibrillator uses plain text serial communications (via RF) and how they can remotely do many things, including:
* read all of patients data, including their social security numbers
* change settings of the device, including disabling it completely
* kill a person (theoretical exploit) by disabling the defibrillator function and enabling a test mode which induced a heart attack to stop the heart (the mode is supposed to be used during implantation only, with chest open and doctor ready to standby to revive if the defibrillator didn't revive the patient)
All of the above done with a laptop and $50 worth of parts, up to 100 feet away. The presentation I saw did not disclose which manufacturer that was, but they did say that FDA did not have rules at that time that would prevent manufacturers from using un-encrupted, un-authenticated, not even simple password, connections to control all functions of the device.
I would expect those governments of the offending websites should be dealt with as per GDPR, therefore warned, fined, or however any other company violating GDPR is supposed be dealt with. Unless of course EU governments believe that their own laws don't apply to them. This should tell us. Wouldn't be the first government which believed they are above the law.
I am not a fan of Facebook, however, what is wrong with zipcode targeting? If I have a product to which some zipcodes are more receptive to, why would I want to pay for advertising in zipcodes where people cannot afford it, are not interested, or simply cannot even legally buy the product. Say for example I am selling financing for Tesla vehicles, why would you force people in states where you cannot legally buy a Tesla to view my ads (e.g. in Michigan)? Also, if my yield for Tesla vehicle financing is greatest for 30-55 year olds, why would I want o pay for teenagers or 20'somethings to view my ads? Best example, what if I have a mortgage company which only gives mortgages for NYC properties, why do I have to now pay for advertising in other zipcodes hoping to catch the tiny percentage of people who are moving to NYC?
Pre-pay for a year in advance, with fine print stated in the OP's post. I wonder if "we are short on funds, therefore any of your usage of the pass impact's MovePass's system-wide capacity, therefore no more movies for you this year, and no refund either".
It sounds like company's last ditch effort to get some capital, hoping most people who buy it will never use it. It didn't work before, so what exactly is different now?
You don't need John Deere as an example. Pick California's (and Silicon Valley's) own Tesla Motors. They flat out refuse to allow owners to service their own cars, even when their own service centers are bursting at the seams with month long waits for appointment, and weeks long waits after you're dropped the car off for service!