Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Thought experiment (I don't actually want to go down this road): can you out-market Amazon in this scenario? If you have a $400 committed spend for a $500 rent discount, can you find people who would buy things from Amazon anyway and offer to make purchases on their behalf at a 1% discount (which is, on paper, obviously rational for them), such that you're now getting back $396 of the $400? Now you're spending a mere $4 for the $500 rent discount.

And in turn, why would market rent for your area be N instead of N-$500 (or N plus discount matching), if that discount is generally available? If everyone gets the $500 Amazon discount, then everybody has the switching cost problem, and so landlords would want to match what the market is actually willing to pay, not what it looks like they're paying on paper. This is basically the same scenario as early termination fees - when cell phone companies decided to increase the switching cost, other cell phone companies said they'd eat that increase in switching cost just to unlock locked-in customers that they couldn't reach.

And ultimately all of these mechanisms are annoying and fiddly mental overhead, but could purchasers band together and join an organization that negotiates on their behalf, organizes boycotts, etc. for a relatively small fee?

A more wild and outlandish thought experiment: would you become infinitely indebted for infinite reward? Imagining some cyberpunk wasteland where every commodity, pastime, medication, and media content is wildly expensive but offset by huge subsidies from complicated conglomeration of other corporations and government entities. Every action you take in your life adds wild positives and negatives to a fantastically complex and intractable balance sheet of funny money, credits, discounts, loopholes, taxes, rebates, free services, restrictions, obligations.

Watch Spider-Man 87 for $1,340,233 but receive free Chex-mix for life, $3000 off each gas purchase at qualifying locations, in-home massages, the ability to use highway 37 from 11:30-3:30 without charge from Nov 23rd 2043 to Oct 18 2067, increased inspections from police, tutoring for your next born child, and 34 trees are planted in your name in Nigeria.

This obviously grows necessarily from an economy focused on increasing GDP and maximizing the effectiveness of financial instruments :)

> Every action you take in your life adds wild positives and negatives to a fantastically complex and intractable balance sheet of funny money, credits, discounts, loopholes, taxes, rebates, free services, restrictions, obligations.

Sounds like buying an airline ticket. No thanks.

>but receive free Chex-mix for life

I might make that deal...

> Every action you take in your life adds wild positives and negatives to a fantastically complex and intractable balance sheet of funny money, credits, discounts, loopholes, taxes, rebates, free services, restrictions, obligations.

You might enjoy the TV show The Good Place.

Are they fungible? Do secondary markets exist? The whole promise of money is that you can just add and subtract the value of all those things to get a number in a reasonable range. With money you can meaningfully compare "a pound of gold" and "two pounds of silver," and you can settle a debt you owe Alice via a debt Bob owes you instead of keeping both imbalances forever.

Maybe this is me being broken by working in finance (even if just SRE for finance), but your example doesn't seem too far off from the problem of valuing ETFs or options or currencies or cattle futures (in theory, if you buy one and forget to sell it in time, some cows show up at your office...).

The effectiveness of sci fi is the extent to which it exemplifies problems in the real world!

In the future which is rapidly closing in, everything is a "license." You own nothing. Nothing is transferrable or resellable by you. Things will feel like you own them, but you will not. Despite all the marketing and advertising telling you that you are "buying" something, you will actually only be able to secure a license to possess and use it. These licenses will restrict how you use the thing, and circumventing them will result in federal charges of violating the DMCA. These licenses will also not obligate the seller to anything whatsoever and be voidable at any time with no notice for any or no reason. This is already the case with most peoples 'ownership' of most media, and it is already spreading into other products. Farmers have had to fight John Deere for the right to repair their own tractors (they won temporary special exemptions which can only exist for 3 years at a time and have to be re-fought-for every 3 years) but still can't prevent their own tractors from reporting soil data back to John Deere which the company then sells to Monsanto and other companies.

None of the things you 'buy' will be fungible because they will all be discrete licenses locked to you personally and have no actual 'value.'

Sounds like the American drug market.

Another HN commenter wrote about how if you use a Gilead card they will pay the deductible for their HIV medication.

They wanted insurance to pay the high discounted negotiated price of their high price HIV med.

This is awesome.

Creative Fiction calls one in a thousand, but only a handful actually hear the calling

I'll take a cabin in the woods.

Love it. This is like the hacker news version of Late Night Imgur.

Haruki Murakami's novel 'Dance Dance Dance' has a character who is in a similar situation. He's a movie star who because of circumstances related to his divorce has acquired a stunning amount of debt. So most of his income goes into covering this debt. He is very bad with numbers and money, this character, and so he cannot ever figure out how much he owes and how long will the situation last.

However his movie studio rents him a high-class apartment, gets him cool cars to drive, covers various bills from shops and restaurants and whatnot as 'the entertainment expenses', can send him on the high-profile vacations, etc. They can even get him the expensive escorts, because absolutely anything can be worded to fall under the umbrella of the 'enterntainment expenses'. So in short, he can 'have' anything as long as he does not actually own it.

In the end this character kills himself, due largely to the inability to exert agency over his life. And that if you read the book in the face-value 'no-mystical' mode, otherwise the outcome is rather worse.

So to answer your question, going into the infinite debt for infinite reward does not really sound attractive.

Additionally, infinite reward is a risk: what happens when your debtor doesn't pay you?

Your debts don't disappear, but when your Ferrari rental is late to appear, you maybe will realize the hole you've accepted to be dug around you.

This comment takes the cake for me

It's already there. Known as medicare currently :)

From the manufactured spending strategy of "buy gift cards and sell them to people", the proper discount is more like 5-15%, rather than 1%, IIRC.

If something like what is described in the article ever became true, then I really hope someone invents something like APR for credit cards for these kinds of arrangements.

> If you have a $400 committed spend for a $500 rent discount,

That makes no sense, who wouldn't do that. It would be more like $250 rent discount for $500 purchases.

But the cost of the rent is "arbitary" - if amazon owned the apartment, they could set the rent high, and give you a "discouunt". If they get large enough, they can force the high price to become the norm, and so force you to buy the committed spend. This gives them more leverage elsewhere as well (e.g., suppliers).

I was referencing the example from the article, which argues that a $400 committed spend on a $500 discount is a bad thing. If you think the article makes no sense, then my discussion of it will of course make no sense either.

>could purchasers band together and join an organization that negotiates on their behalf, organizes boycotts, etc. for a relatively small fee?

I think you just reinvented unions.

Not quite. The fundamental concept of collective bargaining is similar, but unions are for employees to band together and negotiate with their employers, not for consumers to band together and negotiate with their vendors. (In US law at least, unions are very tightly regulated, managers can't unionize, etc. A group of people negotiating what their Prime membership means would absolutely not be called a "union.")

Understood, thanks for the correction. Collective bargaining against vendors actually sounds like a really useful idea.

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