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Comment by travoc | Hacker News Reader

That depends. Does the government website have the answer to the question in the query? Often it does not.

Here in the UK, we have a problem of disreputable businesses - I'm not sure that they're actually illegal - charging fees for government services

They aren't really providing a service, but they're getting between confused people and public services

Consumer finance journalists complain a lot about their sites appearing before the real thing in search results

We have this in the US. Open a business and you'll get spammed with a lot of providers offering stuff that is either free, un needed, or overpriced.

"You need this sign in your break room else you'll be fined $10,000! Just subscribe for $299/year and we'll mail you labor posters each year." These can be found for like $10 and don't change yearly.

"This form needs to be filed else you'll be fined! Pay us $499 and we'll take care of it!" Free to file online.

Even forming a business in my state is like 2 forms and $125 and can be done all online. But if you were to google how to, you'd find all these people to "Help out" and it'd end up costing you $1000-2000 for their "Help".

To be fair a lot of people are not privy to the “correct” way to open a business. You should not list your name on any public facing documents nor should you use your personal address anywhere. It helps to consult a lawyer when starting up.

I always tell people to expect a minimum of $1k/yr to maintain a business and that’s to pay for a registered agent, a virtual office, and a domain and website (I also recommend a CPA). A registered agent exists only to forward legal correspondence directly to the owner. A virtual office handles all of the mail (which includes the junk mail you mention but can be silently processed out using their virtual mailbox service). And a website to provide an easy means of communication (again with spam filters in place)

I never see junk mail and I have started 5 successful businesses over the past 20 years. Spam phone calls is a completely separate unsolved problem, however

As they say, a fool and his money are soon parted, and there are many that would like to facilitate this process...

I don't think society should treat "Stupidity Arbitrage" as an acceptable business model. These guys are predators, exactly like scammers that call up elderly people and try to get them to buy gift cards. We should have a clearly defined regulatory framework to get rid of them.

As long as a free market exists, there will still be a stupid tax. That's just what happens when you let people sell other people stuff through marketing and advertising, you fill the gap between "expected utility" and "realized value" with lies. White lies, not like "our product will fly you to the moon" but unrealistic stuff like "the Humane AI pin will read you recipes while you cook!" The Humane pin will be dead in a drawer in 6 weeks; the people selling that know full-well they don't have market fit.

The worse practice IMO is exploiting a captive audience. It doesn't matter how stupid you are if you're an Apple developer or an Oracle customer; these companies will bleed you dry for simply touching their product. The only path of recourse is antitrust settlement, which is a lengthy and unnecessary process that is inherently stacked in the favor of whoever can hire more lawyers. Because of this, companies have no motivation to improve a paid product. Instead, the goal is to make you reliant on it somehow and then increase the price. We see this in Netflix, Amazon Prime, Windows/Office365/OneDrive, Apple developer program/Apple One/iCloud/App Store, and YouTube's TV/subscription services. The most successful businesses in our daily lives are the ones that have dug their claws into us and refuse to be anything other than a parasite.

How do you diffentiate stupidity arbitrage from lazy arbitrage though? Food delivery is super convenient.

I don't know how reliably you can distinguish between stupidity arbitrage and lazy arbitrage, and there might be grey areas, but if it's actually more convenient it's probably lazy arbitrage and if it's easily confused with a service it's reselling it's probably stupidity arbitrage

I'd like to distinguish between those that bring services closer to customers and those that hinder customers getting to the services they intend to use

Every time I search up a DMV question I get a DMV FAQ link that answers my question. Nine out of ten times when researching a tax question (I do my own taxes) I get a link to the IRS or the franchise tax board for my state with the specific directions I need.

When I'm searching for in for that the ultimate answer is coming from a government entity, usually it's because I want authoritative information, and I'm not willing to rely on a third party hopefully getting it right.

The only thing I want from Google when making these searches is to deep link me into the appropriate section of the official site. The only reason I'll visit a third party site is if I don't have a good official link and I'm hoping to get a clue to refine my search by reading specific laws or statute id's they might reference, since I'm not going to make tax filing decisions or assume directions given regarding a DMV process are correct from some random online website.

The moment you allow someone to rank above a government site for something the government site should do, you create the incentive to profit from that position. Answering a question is probably harmless, but scrolling an extra 300 pixels is also harmless. At worst, consumers get scammed into paying for services they are entitled to for free (with a worse quality of service). Sometimes hundreds or thousands of dollars. It's not hypothetical, it's already happening.

> That depends. Does the government website have the answer to the question in the query?

Dodgy site that appears so correct you enter your private info < legit gov portal.

True even if gov site could be better designed.

> Often it does not.

Then we need to fix that problem, not make it OK for it to exist. A government site should be the source of truth on information about governmental affairs, or relevant to this article, if I search for "$STATE DMV", I should end up there first. If I search "how do I register my car in $STATE", that answer should also come from a governmental site.

I think I disagree actually, if I’m looking for info from a government agency I would rather see the absence of information on the government site, and explore from there. Possible see why I misunderstood the what regulations I have to follow or how I misunderstood what services the government provides. That’s much better than somebody’s (even well intended) best guess or interpretation.

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