Such as private prisons? Or the need for welfare caseworkers who know all the details of the system and are the last resort in emergencies, because otherwise it's impossible to make sense of all the requirements and conditions?
Oh, you mean abuse cases OF basic income.
Pretty sure some of those abuse cases can be seen as just 'redistribution nodes'. Deadbeat alcoholics getting free money means (in the crassest possible terms), start a liquor store and get rich. They won't get rich, they're alcoholics and out of control, but you can get rich by having them give all their government money straight to you. Messy, but it'd work.
If you're that kind of rich person your time is too valuable and you'll do a terrible job of redistributing what little income you are prepared to let go.
Seriously. You're not going to spend hours out of your day finding poor people and inspecting them to see if they're worthy. You'll do nothing of the sort, so your 'support' will trend towards zero, as the people you know won't need it.
There will be people who'd meet your standard, but you won't know them. Welfare case workers will know them. You'll never have to see them or the ones who aren't so worthy in your eyes. You don't hang around people like that so you have no basis on which to grade them for worth.
Just be taxed and hush. I really doubt you intend to work as a welfare caseworker for the rest of your life, so you're actively choosing not to know the answers to the questions you assume must be asked. That ought to be enough to disqualify you from the chain of command there.
People in extreme, brutal poverty are TERRIBLE at buying goods and services.
The liquidity of your customer base is important. If you're a T-Bone steak salesman, you can't do your job if only the three richest guys in town buy your steaks, because there aren't enough of them to sustain you. If you want to BECOME a T-Bone steak salesman, you need to redefine your product as something ordinary people can buy and enjoy, and if the social rules are 'ordinary people must STARVE!' then good luck starting a food-related business as everybody will try to wipe out your potential customer base, crippling you.
Plus we're a mighty long distance away from a 91% top marginal bracket. Just saying.
Here's a question. If a class of people takes ten times the compensation of everyone else for simply gaming the system through mathematical and social exploits, such as advanced-level investment bankers and their technical support systems, but the things they 'create' are not tangible in any way and do nothing but increase capital reserves for their recipients, do they count as people who have stopped contributing?
On the contrary. As a person who's been on disability and started a business and now takes no services at all and pays taxes, you're missing two relevant points worth considering:
1) you're making a choice between starving 'those people' or feeding them like animals, but you can't really change people. Wealthy people do exactly the same behavior you object to, but apparently it's fine for them. It's actually good that people find a level and typically stay at that level of engagement, because it makes them predictable and you can make plans around them if you know what they'll do.
2) If you're doing the behavior you prefer, say starting a business and creating things and working, you must have customers and cannot take money only from other entrepreneurs because they don't have it. There has to be a base of people who are spending money rather than seeking to grow their capital, which is where the money comes from. If 'those people' don't exist, the money supply isn't there to start a business and you're dead in the water.
So, not wanting to give out welfare IS both a selfish and a deluded proposition. I've been self-supporting for years and I have to pay attention to the world out there in a way that salaried Silicon Valley libertarians perhaps don't. You guys get to make value judgements, I can't: I won't get paid if there aren't customers, where a lot of Slashdotters will get paid regardless, or will get paid in proportion to income inequality, not in inverse proportion to it.
I've seen a correlation in income not to capital or the stock market, but to the extent that 'welfare' is stepped on and austerity rules. If you are trying to run a business, which by definition is part of Gross Domestic Product, a well regulated welfare state is your best ally giving you more liquidity in your customer-base, and austerity measures are your worst enemy unless you specifically sell aviation jet fuel for hedge fund managers to flee the country to safe houses when everything comes crashing down.
Pro tip: that is a very small market and job opportunities there are effectively nonexistent.
Read some Mark Blyth, Slashdotters: or of course Piketty. There are experts in this field and your casual opinions might not be the last word in awesome, any more than your boss's casual opinions in code are the last word in effective.
The financier share is disproportionate to the social benefit of finance to the extent that the value of financial instruments is disproportionate to the value of everything and everybody in the world all put together.
We discovered that the relationship between the financial economy and the underlying real economy has reached a decisive turning point. The rate of growth of world output of goods and services has seen an extended slowdown over recent decades, while the volume of global financial assets has expanded at a rapid pace. By 2010, global capital had swollen to some $600 trillion, tripling over the past two decades. Today, total financial assets are nearly 10 times the value of the global output of all goods and services.
That is not a band of angry hippies saying that. It is Bain Capital, who are financiers and like how things stand, seek to make it more so.
To anybody else, this is ridiculous and overleveraged. We cannot go on serving the whims of capital alone, because not only will it lead to ridiculous situations that are unsustainable bubbles on the brink of catastrophe, it HAS led to a ridiculous bubble in capital itself that is unsustainable.
Over-paying financiers merely encourages them to get worse. Being ten times more important than anybody who actually makes or does anything, is not a 'dominant fraction', it is ridiculous and unsustainable. You only CAN sustain it by making these people out to be Gods controlling all life itself, and they are simply not: they are MBAs and quants and clueless humans manipulating things they don't understand, and they are not worth ten times everybody else.
I would think on Slashdot people would understand this, as this is the class of people who don't understand why their demands (for code, say) are unreasonable, but they're in the corner office so they gain more from your work than you do. Quit defending them.
Why should there be an incentive for people to grow their $5 million to $25 million? It no longer makes any difference to them. The only difference is in the ability to direct and control large numbers of other people towards some worthy task.
Money is a stupid mechanism for doing that. Try 'having a good idea that other people want to support'.
Yes, people will want to grow their money to $25 million just so they can say they did, but why should there be an INCENTIVE to do that? What's accomplished in any sense by a stunt like that? It's like growing your belly to wider around than you are tall, just so you can say you did.
Where's the line between 'brain that has a consciousness' and 'Skynet, Elon Musk's worst nightmare'?
Google could easily afford to grow a brain the size of ten thousand human brains. Would there be network effects of some kind, or a transition akin to the way turbulent flow passes a threshold and goes into chaos from normal oscillation? At what point is a brain a super-brain and are humans near that threshold?
Interesting times we live in. Someone, somewhere, WILL try it.
The oil industry has been trying to pay for anti-global-warming papers for ages, according to people I know who were offered money directly and didn't take any.
Maybe the title should read, "Uber offering big bucks for any sort of paper or report which appears to establish positive externalities for them doing exactly what they want":)
He'll lose, but could literally move to Texas, secede, and become King. He could open hotels in every red state and increase his wealth by an order of magnitude: and you think Sarah Palin was a media darling after the McCain/Palin campaign?
Donald Trump doesn't have to win the Presidency to get an insanely huge return on THIS investment. Those aren't voters he's courting. They're obsessive lifelong customers bordering on worshippers, in a cult of personality that suits him just fine. This will make the Apple cult of Jobs look smalltime.
In the Fox debate, Trump was literally on the central throne, the position of power, all the lesser pols lined up to the sides helplessly. He is loving this and will continue to love it and have the most hyoooogely awesome time ever.
If I could have as much fun as Trump is having, telling the truth, I'd count it a life well spent.
Damn straight. Talk about flat tax but if you're not talking about capital gains and all those little high-frequency transactions also being taxed at the flat rate, you're just blowing hot air.
Flat tax is regressive and has no justice and would STILL be an improvement if it jacked up capital gains taxation a whole bunch.
Amazon could make it waaaaay more economical to run a welfare state and feed starving mouths, if they chose to do so. If you can get a video delivered for a little over $8 it's evidence you have really done amazing (ha!) things in streamlining distribution, inventory and so on. I'm willing to bet that even with the huge economies of scale we see in things like government food stamp services, Amazon could do all that at half the overhead.
If you went for universal programs such as UBI so the administrative overhead went away, you'd be getting even closer to the largely automated systems Amazon has perfected. Basically, though Amazon is stealing the opportunity for meaningful work, they're also a possible model for super-efficient ways to implement distribution and supply networks (say food, fuel, clothing etc.) and are likely doing way better than the government is.
You could leverage that distribution network to wipe out starvation, homelessness, very cheaply. If you wanted.
People will just have to make the time, do all that they're doing AND see the big picture and the innovations.
They'll be dying like dogs, decades ahead of their time, but they will do it because that's the culture. We're talking about personalities for which there is no such thing as 'too much work', so long as there is a culture celebrating and encouraging their attitudes. It's a workplace-cultural thing. Ego plays a part.
Depends. If you don't have to work to live (your Star Trek replicator future) then let 'em entertain themselves by trying to be the awesomest of sauces. People devote as much effort to running up and down a field and kicking a ball, and nobody seems to mind.
If this defines how people are compelled to live in order to exist in society, we have a problem.
There's two solutions and only one of them requires muzzling Amazon and its like. The other solution is making sure that working this way is optional and that you don't have to work, to live and spend and sleep under a roof. In that case, Amazon's actually helping the world go around, by increasing efficiencies of things.
Sure, a bit. Uber's the same thing. It's designed to make maximum use of crazy people and force the others to live up to that standard or be fired.
I'll define 'crazy Uber people' not as 'danger to customers', but 'people who are bringing more value in terms of vehicle, skill and desire to please, than they are getting back in pay and benefits'. So the crazy Uber person is the one who keeps buying a new Lexus or whatever, vacuums their car three times a day and busts their ass to outperform all the other Uber drivers, so they can continue to win out over anybody else seeking to be a driver.
The key factor is that they are giving more than they get back, in the belief that they're cornering some kind of market or buying in to something important.
If you make a business that relies on people like this, you can demolish anybody else because you've worked out how to get voluntary unpaid labor, like the Amazon exec who was said to use her own money to hire subcontractors to do more. As long as there are people who are willing to do that, the market breaks and Amazon/Uber get to do what Wal-Mart did in small towns, break the back of other market participants so they can't break even or continue.
Another way to be a crazy Uber person is to put more depreciation and wear and tear on your car than you can afford to repair (or replace). It's easy to be crazy in these ways. It's externalities which are easy to overlook. These Amazon/Uber business models are designed to leverage that kind of crazy as hard as possible, and kick out everybody who's not willing to lose (one way or another) on the deal. Psychology is useful in getting people to buy into this stuff.
No, this happened before. They called it Enron, and exactly the same corporate attitude about 'culling everybody all the time' to force all the workers to work like rabid weasels was in place. There was even a movie about it which is quite good. "Enron- The Smartest Guys In The Room"
Youtube appears to be trying to sell it outright, so no link, but I'm sure you can find it (I actually own it on DVD, that's how good it was)
This is sort of what you get with Googles and Amazons and such barging around. I can instantly give you that video for $8.14, but everybody now has to play by their rules to keep up. You can't do another 'marketplace' or 'internet' that's nicer to work at, the crazy people will just eat you for lunch, so it's increasingly impossible to work at all unless you want to work in this kind of way.
Anyway, Enron existed and was just like that and held all California for ransom because they could, it was an arbitrage opportunity. Once arbitrage opportunities come up for Amazon, they'll not only seize them but seize them harder and faster than anybody else because that's the culture. Look at the recent big Amazon Prime Day. That's what you get but only after they kill everything else that can do what they do.
Not necessarily. The trouble with this situation is a bit like Uber: it preys upon people who've lost all perspective.
One woman in the article was said to spend her own money hiring someone in India to do data entry so she could get more personally done. At her own expense.
That will become first common, and then obligatory. It becomes a situation where you (not the guy in India) keeps the stock options, and you're totally an Amabot as far as your belief system, so you go hungry because you're spending all your money subcontracting out so that you can radically outperform everybody else. There's clearly no rule against it and it doesn't hurt the company so that becomes the new normal.
It becomes a game of only the craziest, most kool-aid drinking people competing directly with each other to bring new value to Amazon, and the cost of this is not taken out of the consumer (they free-ride) but out of these executives and white-collar workers. It becomes easier for them to expect the same from the blue-collar guys who haven't been replaced by robots, and again the customer doesn't pay for that, they free-ride.
It produces a situation where if you intend to compete against Amazon you have to be batshit insane AND have all the network effects Amazon has. So bye-bye Wal-Mart, they are absolutely toast now that this new monster has eclipsed them. Amazon has worked out how to Wal-Martize people's minds, not just their hometowns.
They will continue to deliver better value to the consumer than say Wal-Mart, but it's still a cancer on society unless everybody's living on a basic income and ability to work no longer matters at all. In the absence of that, this is basically corporate trade war on all of society.
They cry at their desks because it's their job not to be amazing, but to drain the most money as possible out of society across the largest possible market (not on any one transaction but making it up on volume) while delivering as little as possible in return.
These guys are not Google or Apple, who are largely convinced they're messiahs bringing the best things to the world in their respective ways. These are the ones who need to design a new box that slices up worker hands while costing 0.02% less in materials and surviving delivery 0.007% better than the previous design, and if you can do that by GOD that will be the box to use! And they don't care how many white collar guys they go through doing it. In fact they'll fire all the white collar guys who didn't do something like that last month.
They don't care about your video. You must want something that's not as important as, say, lining up more shows for this video service or coming up with a better way to get people to buy it.
Somebody would have to make an argument that customers need to spend less time searching or less time going over the watch list. Maybe your time as a customer is better spent looking at newer things you could buy from them, so the watch list is supposed to be not appealing to fool with. Is buying new stuff more streamlined? Then it's working as designed.
The question is whether society is supposed to set things up so only these guys win everything.
That's what rules are for. Since the days of soot-covered London it's always been like this. Hell is what you make it and society is always drawn in the colors of the biggest hell it can get away with, and always will be.
Since the Internet's brought about a much closer link between research and marketing (think something like Facebook: they can conduct extensive experiments on their userbase, and do) this is more or less a recipe for really nailing down not just how to influence a kid toward products, but how to define the relations of products and people with each other and get the absolute most out of the situation.
It's not likely to be creating the ultimate drooling cretins slavering after plastic stuff, you have to think bigger for this. It's more about getting ownership of culture itself much like Sesame Street (funded by public television with a 'commons' educational message) became a cultural icon, and snuck lots of interesting things in there during its run.
Lots of effort went into optimizing how kids could learn, and then after that Blue's Clues went even further in optimizing both how kids learn and how they engage. This would be about probably ignoring how they learn (or selling the content to whoever's buying) and optimizing how they engage and how they make persistent connections with external products, brands and services. I don't think learning gets to be front and center when the funding is strictly 2015 corporate monster, and beyond. The whole concept of a common social interest in learning is basically shot at this point.
Could be worse. Could literally be Facebook. I think Amazon's a little more suspect than HBO. You have to look at what the primary agenda of the megacorporation in question is. HBO's branded entertainment. Amazon is more 'internet disruptive', so they have more of an agenda with children, much like if Uber was funding this.
In the United States, there is something called "thug culture". It glorifies things like not getting any sort of a useful education, not getting a legitimate job, joining gangs, engaging in violence, engaging in the abuse and peddling of drugs, engaging in the abusive use of guns, committing theft, committing robbery, committing murder, and so forth.
It works so well, sometimes we call 'em 'bankers' and 'republicans' and 'capitalists'.
A fish rots from the head down, friend. If there's lower class thuggery it only shows they've learned the lessons of America well. Literally everything you said is the moral standards of the ruling class except for 'drugs' read 'pharmaceuticals', for 'robbery' read 'arbitrage', and well, I guess nothing else need be changed.
It's nice you calling for unilateral disarmament, but mind your own thugs first please. Nobody's buying it.
Slashdot Mirror
Such as private prisons? Or the need for welfare caseworkers who know all the details of the system and are the last resort in emergencies, because otherwise it's impossible to make sense of all the requirements and conditions?
Oh, you mean abuse cases OF basic income.
Pretty sure some of those abuse cases can be seen as just 'redistribution nodes'. Deadbeat alcoholics getting free money means (in the crassest possible terms), start a liquor store and get rich. They won't get rich, they're alcoholics and out of control, but you can get rich by having them give all their government money straight to you. Messy, but it'd work.
If you're that kind of rich person your time is too valuable and you'll do a terrible job of redistributing what little income you are prepared to let go.
Seriously. You're not going to spend hours out of your day finding poor people and inspecting them to see if they're worthy. You'll do nothing of the sort, so your 'support' will trend towards zero, as the people you know won't need it.
There will be people who'd meet your standard, but you won't know them. Welfare case workers will know them. You'll never have to see them or the ones who aren't so worthy in your eyes. You don't hang around people like that so you have no basis on which to grade them for worth.
Just be taxed and hush. I really doubt you intend to work as a welfare caseworker for the rest of your life, so you're actively choosing not to know the answers to the questions you assume must be asked. That ought to be enough to disqualify you from the chain of command there.
People in extreme, brutal poverty are TERRIBLE at buying goods and services.
The liquidity of your customer base is important. If you're a T-Bone steak salesman, you can't do your job if only the three richest guys in town buy your steaks, because there aren't enough of them to sustain you. If you want to BECOME a T-Bone steak salesman, you need to redefine your product as something ordinary people can buy and enjoy, and if the social rules are 'ordinary people must STARVE!' then good luck starting a food-related business as everybody will try to wipe out your potential customer base, crippling you.
Plus we're a mighty long distance away from a 91% top marginal bracket. Just saying.
Here's a question. If a class of people takes ten times the compensation of everyone else for simply gaming the system through mathematical and social exploits, such as advanced-level investment bankers and their technical support systems, but the things they 'create' are not tangible in any way and do nothing but increase capital reserves for their recipients, do they count as people who have stopped contributing?
On the contrary. As a person who's been on disability and started a business and now takes no services at all and pays taxes, you're missing two relevant points worth considering:
1) you're making a choice between starving 'those people' or feeding them like animals, but you can't really change people. Wealthy people do exactly the same behavior you object to, but apparently it's fine for them. It's actually good that people find a level and typically stay at that level of engagement, because it makes them predictable and you can make plans around them if you know what they'll do.
2) If you're doing the behavior you prefer, say starting a business and creating things and working, you must have customers and cannot take money only from other entrepreneurs because they don't have it. There has to be a base of people who are spending money rather than seeking to grow their capital, which is where the money comes from. If 'those people' don't exist, the money supply isn't there to start a business and you're dead in the water.
So, not wanting to give out welfare IS both a selfish and a deluded proposition. I've been self-supporting for years and I have to pay attention to the world out there in a way that salaried Silicon Valley libertarians perhaps don't. You guys get to make value judgements, I can't: I won't get paid if there aren't customers, where a lot of Slashdotters will get paid regardless, or will get paid in proportion to income inequality, not in inverse proportion to it.
I've seen a correlation in income not to capital or the stock market, but to the extent that 'welfare' is stepped on and austerity rules. If you are trying to run a business, which by definition is part of Gross Domestic Product, a well regulated welfare state is your best ally giving you more liquidity in your customer-base, and austerity measures are your worst enemy unless you specifically sell aviation jet fuel for hedge fund managers to flee the country to safe houses when everything comes crashing down.
Pro tip: that is a very small market and job opportunities there are effectively nonexistent.
Read some Mark Blyth, Slashdotters: or of course Piketty. There are experts in this field and your casual opinions might not be the last word in awesome, any more than your boss's casual opinions in code are the last word in effective.
The financier share is disproportionate to the social benefit of finance to the extent that the value of financial instruments is disproportionate to the value of everything and everybody in the world all put together.
We discovered that the relationship between the financial economy and the underlying real economy has reached a decisive turning point. The rate of growth of world output of goods and services has seen an extended slowdown over recent decades, while the volume of global financial assets has expanded at a rapid pace. By 2010, global capital had swollen to some $600 trillion, tripling over the past two decades. Today, total financial assets are nearly 10 times the value of the global output of all goods and services.
That is not a band of angry hippies saying that. It is Bain Capital, who are financiers and like how things stand, seek to make it more so.
To anybody else, this is ridiculous and overleveraged. We cannot go on serving the whims of capital alone, because not only will it lead to ridiculous situations that are unsustainable bubbles on the brink of catastrophe, it HAS led to a ridiculous bubble in capital itself that is unsustainable.
Over-paying financiers merely encourages them to get worse. Being ten times more important than anybody who actually makes or does anything, is not a 'dominant fraction', it is ridiculous and unsustainable. You only CAN sustain it by making these people out to be Gods controlling all life itself, and they are simply not: they are MBAs and quants and clueless humans manipulating things they don't understand, and they are not worth ten times everybody else.
I would think on Slashdot people would understand this, as this is the class of people who don't understand why their demands (for code, say) are unreasonable, but they're in the corner office so they gain more from your work than you do. Quit defending them.
Why should there be an incentive for people to grow their $5 million to $25 million? It no longer makes any difference to them. The only difference is in the ability to direct and control large numbers of other people towards some worthy task.
Money is a stupid mechanism for doing that. Try 'having a good idea that other people want to support'.
Yes, people will want to grow their money to $25 million just so they can say they did, but why should there be an INCENTIVE to do that? What's accomplished in any sense by a stunt like that? It's like growing your belly to wider around than you are tall, just so you can say you did.
Where's the line between 'brain that has a consciousness' and 'Skynet, Elon Musk's worst nightmare'?
Google could easily afford to grow a brain the size of ten thousand human brains. Would there be network effects of some kind, or a transition akin to the way turbulent flow passes a threshold and goes into chaos from normal oscillation? At what point is a brain a super-brain and are humans near that threshold?
Interesting times we live in. Someone, somewhere, WILL try it.
The oil industry has been trying to pay for anti-global-warming papers for ages, according to people I know who were offered money directly and didn't take any.
Maybe the title should read, "Uber offering big bucks for any sort of paper or report which appears to establish positive externalities for them doing exactly what they want" :)
Oh, he's intelligent all right.
He'll lose, but could literally move to Texas, secede, and become King. He could open hotels in every red state and increase his wealth by an order of magnitude: and you think Sarah Palin was a media darling after the McCain/Palin campaign?
Donald Trump doesn't have to win the Presidency to get an insanely huge return on THIS investment. Those aren't voters he's courting. They're obsessive lifelong customers bordering on worshippers, in a cult of personality that suits him just fine. This will make the Apple cult of Jobs look smalltime.
In the Fox debate, Trump was literally on the central throne, the position of power, all the lesser pols lined up to the sides helplessly. He is loving this and will continue to love it and have the most hyoooogely awesome time ever.
If I could have as much fun as Trump is having, telling the truth, I'd count it a life well spent.
Damn straight. Talk about flat tax but if you're not talking about capital gains and all those little high-frequency transactions also being taxed at the flat rate, you're just blowing hot air.
Flat tax is regressive and has no justice and would STILL be an improvement if it jacked up capital gains taxation a whole bunch.
If you don't have free snacks and beers, AC, they're sure to give you some now :)
NO! DAMMIT! NO! (says Bezos)
Okay, new rules, guys! Now you will follow all the previous suggestions that are making us the greatest company in the world.
And you'll be HAPPY about it!
And you'll RELAX!
Everyone who doesn't keep up all their previous expectations plus be relaxed is clearly not good enough and is to be fired
Amazon could make it waaaaay more economical to run a welfare state and feed starving mouths, if they chose to do so. If you can get a video delivered for a little over $8 it's evidence you have really done amazing (ha!) things in streamlining distribution, inventory and so on. I'm willing to bet that even with the huge economies of scale we see in things like government food stamp services, Amazon could do all that at half the overhead.
If you went for universal programs such as UBI so the administrative overhead went away, you'd be getting even closer to the largely automated systems Amazon has perfected. Basically, though Amazon is stealing the opportunity for meaningful work, they're also a possible model for super-efficient ways to implement distribution and supply networks (say food, fuel, clothing etc.) and are likely doing way better than the government is.
You could leverage that distribution network to wipe out starvation, homelessness, very cheaply. If you wanted.
People will just have to make the time, do all that they're doing AND see the big picture and the innovations.
They'll be dying like dogs, decades ahead of their time, but they will do it because that's the culture. We're talking about personalities for which there is no such thing as 'too much work', so long as there is a culture celebrating and encouraging their attitudes. It's a workplace-cultural thing. Ego plays a part.
Specifically, it's the 'people must work and compete or they deserve to STARVE!' mindset that creates a problem.
If you discount that, Amazon gets a lot more freedom to do what they want without harming society.
Depends. If you don't have to work to live (your Star Trek replicator future) then let 'em entertain themselves by trying to be the awesomest of sauces. People devote as much effort to running up and down a field and kicking a ball, and nobody seems to mind.
If this defines how people are compelled to live in order to exist in society, we have a problem.
There's two solutions and only one of them requires muzzling Amazon and its like. The other solution is making sure that working this way is optional and that you don't have to work, to live and spend and sleep under a roof. In that case, Amazon's actually helping the world go around, by increasing efficiencies of things.
Define understaffed. This, too, is working as intended. That's how it's SUPPOSED to be.
Sure, a bit. Uber's the same thing. It's designed to make maximum use of crazy people and force the others to live up to that standard or be fired.
I'll define 'crazy Uber people' not as 'danger to customers', but 'people who are bringing more value in terms of vehicle, skill and desire to please, than they are getting back in pay and benefits'. So the crazy Uber person is the one who keeps buying a new Lexus or whatever, vacuums their car three times a day and busts their ass to outperform all the other Uber drivers, so they can continue to win out over anybody else seeking to be a driver.
The key factor is that they are giving more than they get back, in the belief that they're cornering some kind of market or buying in to something important.
If you make a business that relies on people like this, you can demolish anybody else because you've worked out how to get voluntary unpaid labor, like the Amazon exec who was said to use her own money to hire subcontractors to do more. As long as there are people who are willing to do that, the market breaks and Amazon/Uber get to do what Wal-Mart did in small towns, break the back of other market participants so they can't break even or continue.
Another way to be a crazy Uber person is to put more depreciation and wear and tear on your car than you can afford to repair (or replace). It's easy to be crazy in these ways. It's externalities which are easy to overlook. These Amazon/Uber business models are designed to leverage that kind of crazy as hard as possible, and kick out everybody who's not willing to lose (one way or another) on the deal. Psychology is useful in getting people to buy into this stuff.
As they say, a cult.
No, this happened before. They called it Enron, and exactly the same corporate attitude about 'culling everybody all the time' to force all the workers to work like rabid weasels was in place. There was even a movie about it which is quite good. "Enron- The Smartest Guys In The Room"
Youtube appears to be trying to sell it outright, so no link, but I'm sure you can find it (I actually own it on DVD, that's how good it was)
I could give you an Amazon link? ;) http://www.amazon.com/Enron-Th... $8.14 for the DVD.
This is sort of what you get with Googles and Amazons and such barging around. I can instantly give you that video for $8.14, but everybody now has to play by their rules to keep up. You can't do another 'marketplace' or 'internet' that's nicer to work at, the crazy people will just eat you for lunch, so it's increasingly impossible to work at all unless you want to work in this kind of way.
Anyway, Enron existed and was just like that and held all California for ransom because they could, it was an arbitrage opportunity. Once arbitrage opportunities come up for Amazon, they'll not only seize them but seize them harder and faster than anybody else because that's the culture. Look at the recent big Amazon Prime Day. That's what you get but only after they kill everything else that can do what they do.
Not necessarily. The trouble with this situation is a bit like Uber: it preys upon people who've lost all perspective.
One woman in the article was said to spend her own money hiring someone in India to do data entry so she could get more personally done. At her own expense.
That will become first common, and then obligatory. It becomes a situation where you (not the guy in India) keeps the stock options, and you're totally an Amabot as far as your belief system, so you go hungry because you're spending all your money subcontracting out so that you can radically outperform everybody else. There's clearly no rule against it and it doesn't hurt the company so that becomes the new normal.
It becomes a game of only the craziest, most kool-aid drinking people competing directly with each other to bring new value to Amazon, and the cost of this is not taken out of the consumer (they free-ride) but out of these executives and white-collar workers. It becomes easier for them to expect the same from the blue-collar guys who haven't been replaced by robots, and again the customer doesn't pay for that, they free-ride.
It produces a situation where if you intend to compete against Amazon you have to be batshit insane AND have all the network effects Amazon has. So bye-bye Wal-Mart, they are absolutely toast now that this new monster has eclipsed them. Amazon has worked out how to Wal-Martize people's minds, not just their hometowns.
They will continue to deliver better value to the consumer than say Wal-Mart, but it's still a cancer on society unless everybody's living on a basic income and ability to work no longer matters at all. In the absence of that, this is basically corporate trade war on all of society.
They cry at their desks because it's their job not to be amazing, but to drain the most money as possible out of society across the largest possible market (not on any one transaction but making it up on volume) while delivering as little as possible in return.
These guys are not Google or Apple, who are largely convinced they're messiahs bringing the best things to the world in their respective ways. These are the ones who need to design a new box that slices up worker hands while costing 0.02% less in materials and surviving delivery 0.007% better than the previous design, and if you can do that by GOD that will be the box to use! And they don't care how many white collar guys they go through doing it. In fact they'll fire all the white collar guys who didn't do something like that last month.
They don't care about your video. You must want something that's not as important as, say, lining up more shows for this video service or coming up with a better way to get people to buy it.
Somebody would have to make an argument that customers need to spend less time searching or less time going over the watch list. Maybe your time as a customer is better spent looking at newer things you could buy from them, so the watch list is supposed to be not appealing to fool with. Is buying new stuff more streamlined? Then it's working as designed.
The question is whether society is supposed to set things up so only these guys win everything.
That's what rules are for. Since the days of soot-covered London it's always been like this. Hell is what you make it and society is always drawn in the colors of the biggest hell it can get away with, and always will be.
Since the Internet's brought about a much closer link between research and marketing (think something like Facebook: they can conduct extensive experiments on their userbase, and do) this is more or less a recipe for really nailing down not just how to influence a kid toward products, but how to define the relations of products and people with each other and get the absolute most out of the situation.
It's not likely to be creating the ultimate drooling cretins slavering after plastic stuff, you have to think bigger for this. It's more about getting ownership of culture itself much like Sesame Street (funded by public television with a 'commons' educational message) became a cultural icon, and snuck lots of interesting things in there during its run.
Lots of effort went into optimizing how kids could learn, and then after that Blue's Clues went even further in optimizing both how kids learn and how they engage. This would be about probably ignoring how they learn (or selling the content to whoever's buying) and optimizing how they engage and how they make persistent connections with external products, brands and services. I don't think learning gets to be front and center when the funding is strictly 2015 corporate monster, and beyond. The whole concept of a common social interest in learning is basically shot at this point.
Could be worse. Could literally be Facebook. I think Amazon's a little more suspect than HBO. You have to look at what the primary agenda of the megacorporation in question is. HBO's branded entertainment. Amazon is more 'internet disruptive', so they have more of an agenda with children, much like if Uber was funding this.
In the United States, there is something called "thug culture". It glorifies things like not getting any sort of a useful education, not getting a legitimate job, joining gangs, engaging in violence, engaging in the abuse and peddling of drugs, engaging in the abusive use of guns, committing theft, committing robbery, committing murder, and so forth.
It works so well, sometimes we call 'em 'bankers' and 'republicans' and 'capitalists'.
A fish rots from the head down, friend. If there's lower class thuggery it only shows they've learned the lessons of America well. Literally everything you said is the moral standards of the ruling class except for 'drugs' read 'pharmaceuticals', for 'robbery' read 'arbitrage', and well, I guess nothing else need be changed.
It's nice you calling for unilateral disarmament, but mind your own thugs first please. Nobody's buying it.