Invisible asymptotes (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Invisible asymptotes (2018)

eugenewei.com

21 pointsvikrum12 comments

Amazon identified that people hate paying for shipping, so they deceived their customers about the price of shipping and compelled any vendor using Amazon to double-charge for shipping everywhere else. This may be clever, especially since they're getting away with it, but is hardly something to be praised.

really wish it was just illegal to bake that in. I have no interest in subsidizing people with no patience/ idea of when they actually want something.

"People hate paying for shipping. They despise it."

Similarly, the hate for add-on charges from the likes of airlines, hotels, and Live Nation.

Forcing airlines to quote one price and one price only is one of the more wonderful things that the EU has done for average Joes.

The article is interesting and all, but this aside was wildly out of touch:

> Wealthy people tend to receive a much more direct and immediate payoff for their time which is why they tend to be better about valuing it. This is why the first thing that most ultra-wealthy people I know do upon becoming ultra-wealthy is to hire a driver and start to fly private. For most normal people, the opportunity cost of their time is far more difficult to ascertain moment to moment.

Are you kidding? Poor people value their time, they just can't afford to use it more efficiently. I can't speak for Amazon shipping fees in particular, but if someone is eschewing a $5 delivery fee in favor of $3 of gas + 20 minutes of driving, it's because the marginal value of that $2 greater than the marginal value of that 20 minutes.

yeah, like, the downside of not using your time efficiently when you're poor is you might not get to eat. Usually the poor work hourly, so they have a direct value assigned to their time.

Most people know exactly the value of their time and the opportunity cost is in things like food and shelter. Wealthy people don't work for a living so their time isn't obviously valuable at all, have their wealth tied up in stocks and so can't predict their returns, and aren't materially affected by gaining or losing even billions of dollars.

Most people don't fly private because they can't afford it. Duh.

(And when we're dealing with real people, not homo economicus, it's clear that working 100 hours a week and hiring staff to do everything else would be miserable even if it made financial sense.)

EDIT: Replaced "poor people" with "most people".

This is not entirely true. The poor may value their time like anyone else, but they often have a very different grasp on the time/money tradeoff. Not having money warps the value of time since (for the poor) lack of money is acute and how much time they have is abstract.

Anyone who has grown up poor or known those who are poor has seen this in action. People will go to great lengths to not spend small amounts of money to the point that working for minimum wage would take less time to cover the expense.

By "poor", I actually meant "not stupendously wealthy". This includes the merely rich.

A doctor or plumber or engineer or cashier knows how to translate their time into quality of life. A wealthy person cannot possibly do this. They don't know what their time is worth in money, and money doesn't change their quality of life.

This is a good point, and (charitably) this might be what the original author was trying to describe. If you are used to something being particularly scarce or valuable, you might continue to overvalue it on the margin even when it becomes less scarce.

My classic example is if you go to a crafts store you will find 200 different skeins of acrylic yarn and one of wool. It takes 20 hours to knit a scarf with either, it will come out much nicer than wool, people really must not value their time very much.

Rather, time isn't fungible. Most jobs don't allow you to just work a couple extra hours for more money. I'm an engineer, I get paid a decent hourly salary, but after 8h my time is worth basically nothing.

If someone else drives an exec, do they get to make N more deals? Are they working in the car on their way to work? Calling other execs being driven to work?

I don't know if your questions are rhetorical, but have you ever been in the car with an exec? They very much do work in the car and take meetings from the car.

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