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Comment by dsacco | Hacker News Reader

Eh, I don't think Dollar Shave Club fits in with the article's examples. The value created is that many people want to spend more money and less of their time with consistent results. The company doesn't try to ratchet up margin with unnecessary tech, it just satisfies a legitimate customer demand. That might be a customer demand you don't identify with, or which you believe shouldn't exist; it's still a legitimate demand.

The article is mainly talking about companies that augment existing products with shallow improvements for the sake of large margin increases. Dollar Shave Club is novel in that it adds a service to abstract away the thinking portion of buying a razor. It makes no attempt to increase profits with shitty tech.

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Just like the "legitimate demand" for heroin or cigarettes!

While we're at it can we get rid of the FDA so we can go back to a world filled with the "legitimate demand" for laudnum sold as a miracle cure for consumption, hysterics and gout?

Neoliberalism, by mixing ethical relativism with social Darwinism, allows for some rent seeking asshat to sleep well at night because they authorised a marketing campaign featuring a black woman.

Good job, Team Progress! All we need are just a few more empty words and a few more empty products... We're almost there!

Yeah, no. Heroin and tobacco are products, and I am in agreement that products with crappy value propositions and high margins are unethical. But I don't know why you chose those extremes. They paint a false dichotomy of the danger inherent to liberty of consumption.

If we have to use extreme analogies, I would rather use prostitution, because it is a service. Just like Dollar Shave Club, I think there is legitimate customer demand and it shouldn't be illegal. I also am not going to judge someone for partaking of it even though there exist easier or cheaper options for getting the product - sex. So that just brings us full circle to my original point, which appears to still stand.

Yes, please, FDA isn't doing anyone any favors right now. Throw it out and build something more reasonable like they have in basically every other nation on earth.

I have gout, which is well controlled by not eating too much meat at a sitting and occasional "doses" of tart cherry juice. FDA would prefer I spend hundreds of dollars a year on drugs. I'm not sure what to recommend for your hysterics, however.

> FDA would prefer I spend hundreds of dollars a year on drugs.

Would you elaborate on this? It leads me to think that the FDA is either recommending against you handling your gout as you see fit through diet, or strongly encouraging you to use the medication you'd rather not spend money on. The FDA may approve drugs for specific treatments, but that doesn't mean you have to use them, does it?

I think it's the pharmaceutical industry that would prefer you give them money, not the FDA which is government funded.

Admittedly some in the FDA are probably protecting the pharma industry.

"More than a quarter of the Food and Drug Administration employees who approved cancer and hematology drugs from 2001 through 2010 left the agency and now work or consult for pharmaceutical companies..." [0]

Of course some naive person might demand some sort of smoking-gun admission of collusion or whatever...

[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/09/28/49569455...

Ah I see your point.

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