Thread

1. toomuchtodo · 1790194803 · focus · HN ↗

   More evidence Big Tech valuations are driven primarily by worker exploitation. Keep 'em coming.

   1. ausbah · 1790195432 · focus · HN ↗

      the common unifying theme of most tech companies over the past 15 years has been rent extraction. whether posing as middlemen who VC’d their way to monopoly power ruining both sides of their target market, or taking a common good without attribution (attention, knowledge) tech hasn’t been much a game changer beyond digitizing something and charging everyone more for it

      1. shadowgovt · 1790196083 · focus · HN ↗

         And they mostly keep getting away with it because digital makes things preposterously more convenient.

         I missed the bus by 1 minute today, putting me in a place to wait 30 minutes for the next one.

         Lyfted to the office in 10 minutes. Cost $10. That $10 was worth 30 minutes of my day.

         1. krispyfi · 1790197563 · focus · HN ↗

            It's surprising to me that you would need to wait 30 minutes for a bus. Are you in a very rural area? Was it outside of normal commute hours? Or is your city's public transportation network wildly underfunded?

            1. saturn8601 · 1790198569 · focus · HN ↗

               Are you European or American? To a lot of America, that is considered a good numbers. Its worse in many parts of this vastly large country. The country has chosen to invest heavily in road networks. It appears that you can have one or the other but not both without great expense and reform.

               I like to remind my European friends that this is what the US looks like placed on top of Europe: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;HkRZfKd.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;HkRZfKd.png

               Its not a perfect illustration but it drives home the point.

               1. mfost · 1790203116 · focus · HN ↗

                  That surface area map is a seriously bad argument: We are talking about bus lines here. Local transit just requires local lines. This isn&#x27;t about train lines crossing through the whole country.

                  And how come China does a much better job than the US while they have the same surface area? Why aren&#x27;t you overlapping those two maps?

                  1. shadowgovt · 1790346767 · focus · HN ↗

                     In our city, what happened was a demographic shift that the bus network never adapted to. The city had a &quot;hub and spoke&quot; model where the vast bulk of buses went into and out of downtown; it&#x27;s optimized to get suburbanites to their jobs and back home.

                     But as the city transitioned from a manufacturing &#x2F; industry &#x2F; banking to a service economy, the jobs spread out. If your primary business need is an office park to answer phones or crunch numbers or move lightweight product, property in the suburbs is cheaper. So now you have a situation where someone lives in the two o&#x27;clock suburb and their job is in the three o&#x27;clock suburb... And there&#x27;s no bus from here to there, there&#x27;s a bus from two o&#x27;clock to the center and back out to three.

                     ... or they could use a car (carpool or owned), which will cut the travel time by a third.

                     Retooling to the modern needs is going to really goose the cost (especially since nobody wants to tear down the current model at the same time; the people who rely on it do rely on it to get to their jobs and back, still; their job isn&#x27;t heavy industry anymore, but people still work downtown!).

               2. scun · 1790204029 · focus · HN ↗

                  imgur is geoblocked for some of Europe
            2. shadowgovt · 1790199262 · focus · HN ↗

               Wildly underfunded? I don&#x27;t think so.

               America underfunded? Yes.

               There are three buses that go from the main depot to my office. They all arrived in a line back to back to back, picked up zero passengers, and went their merry way.

               I watched this happen from one block over, waiting for the stoplight to change so I could cross the street and catch any of them. Unfortunately, since they were all moving in a blob, the next blob was going to be around in 30 minutes instead of the average 10 minutes one might expect from a non-blob arrangement.

               But that part of the story was anecdote. The more relevant part was that in the event of disruption of the infrastructure solution, modern cellular radio and digital technology let us ad hoc book a one-off service solution on the fly, and that is so convenient that the people who facilitate it can get away with some massive wealth extraction as a result.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.