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Comment by jokethrowaway | Hacker News Reader

That's terrible news. When middlemen are thriving, everyone else loses.

Travel was already horrible after 9/11 and the idiotic anti terrorism rules.

The myriad of different covid regulations make traveling ridiculously hard, even for people who are vaccinated, at least in Europe.

I was planning a multi countries trip and I gave up after a week of trying to find reliable testing facilities for a good price, matching with flights, matching with Airbnbs. My stomach ulcer started to act up because of the extra stress so I decided to avoid the pain.

We'll just book a one way flight, do one stupid test, cross one border, stay in one country and book everything last minute after we know we passed whatever idiotic rules are valid at the moment.

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All the complications you're describing can be helped with having a travel agent... this is literally why you pay someone a commission.

The idea that its just a massive waste of money among the tech space is hilarious when people will also make the most minute changes to their workflow to save fractions of a second, but not pay someone $50 to remove hours of headache from a fun event like a holiday.

I agree with you and I find the other comments dismissing you to be completely mind blowing and heartless.

We are making society increasingly more difficult to navigate and creating more barriers that imped the movement of people. We are all hurt by these policies and I have not seen sufficient evidence that they do anything to curb the spread of covid now with high transmission rates all over the world. The time for travel restrictions for most of the world has long passed.

Without delving into COVID-related travel restrictions, the very first sentence was about dismissing middlemen in general. There are middlemen who add value and those who... don't. But the idea that I should, for example, be only able to buy a product directly from the manufacturer is not a great idea. Amazon retail and Alibaba and Walmart (among many many others) are middlemen.

I'm giving the commenter some grace and I do not truly believe they meant all middlemen are bad. I think your interpretation requires you to assume too much intent. And also that claim at face value is preposterous, which is why I don't think they are making that.

You're right, I could have been more kind to middlemen.

I agree there are middlemen who add value.

I also think that when middlemen become essentials, it's a sign we are over-regulating society.

I have a lot of respect for Amazon in the early days: they really changed the world of online shopping.

In the last years, they didn't innovate their e-commerce offering and I attribute a lot of their growth to pure government regulation.

The great european VATMOSS (together with GDPR, SCA, cookie banners) killed small independent e-commerces with and pushed the survivors on Amazon, just to avoid the complexity. Let all remember how VATMOSS was supposed to "tax big tech". COVID lockdowns are now killing physical small businesses and Amazon is benefiting from it.

All middlemen provide "some" value, or else they get eliminated by the market. Sure, some might stick around vestigially for momentum sake, but that gets worked out over the long run.

The question is more one of a value judgement. Is that value "fair" at its price? At the vary least many middle-provide market making functions. Even with your more recent Amazon example, there was nothing stopping smaller e-commerce stores from complying with VATMOSS. If Amazon wasn't there, most of them probably would have been able to hire consultants or other firms to help them comply. They didn't because Amazon was cheaper/easier. Is the loss of control to Amazon worth it? For the vendor? For society? Unclear, but we are only in the position because of the value Amazon provided even it comes with a social cost.

I'm arguing against regulation; before VATMOSS was there small businesses didn't need to comply.

The question I'm hinting at is: is Amazon using the money they earned in their first phase by being a useful middleman to push the narrative in a certain direction (eg. lobbying, owning a newspaper, etc) and influence governmental bodies so that they introduce more regulation which Amazon benefit from?

If the capital we're giving to Amazon gets reinvested to make everyone's life more complicated so that we need more Amazon and Amazon can grow more, then it's not something I want to spend my money on.

No one's forcing you to use a travel agent, but middlemen aren't bad simply for existing. In this case, upon a frothy sea of changing regulations, you can either keep pace with all of the regulations, orrrrrrrr you could pay someone else to do it.

He’s faulting the regulations for creating a complex situation that requires expertise, not saying no one should pay to navigate them.

> When middlemen are thriving, everyone else loses.

You may be right, but that's the particular phrase I took issue with.

That’s fine—hopefully you understand what he meant by it now.

Instead of "stomach ulcers", wouldn't you rather consult a professional...travel agent?

I legitimately cannot tell if this is a line from a TV commercial.

My point is that I never needed one before these 1.5 years of collective hysteria and bureaucrats spouting new rules every day.

I've had no issues doing a bit of pandemic travel around the US and Latin America. It's important to pick your targets wisely, and Europe is not a wise target at this juncture.

And contrary to what you're saying, I've gotten some awesome travel deals during the pandemic. I had many months of AirBnBs for 20-30% less than the normal rate.

Just be a reasonable person and go to only one country. There’s enough stuff to see in France, Spain or Germany to last you a lifetime.

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