Doctorow: American tech cartels use apps to break the law
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Finally I understand why when the McDonalds app was introduced it asked for permission to access my contacts. Of course I refused and deleted the app immediately. But to this day whenever I go to the McDonalds drive-thru the first question they ask is "Are you using the app today?"
McDonalds seems to care so much about their app that I wonder if selling personal information makes them more money than selling hamburgers.
Earlier this week I was in a regional gas station getting lunch, they've got maybe 30 or so locations scattered around this part of the state, and watched them tell an old man that he couldn't get a loyalty card from them anymore because they only do apps now. "But I don't have a cellphone" - "Uhhh... You can also do it online?"
Technically, McDonald's is a real estate company[1] who wants to spy on people, but that doesn't make it any less egregious.
[1] https://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burg...
If every restaurant is its own small/medium business and the corporate franchisor only ever interacts with the franchisees and never with the end customers, then all the direct revenue for the franchisor will be from services or licenses provided to the franchisees, not from directly selling burgers. But the franchisees are still much more dependent on the franchisor than they would be in a normal B2B relationship. And many of those "service costs" can be freely set by the franchisor and have the purpose of channeling revenue back from the restaurants - revenue that would not exist if no burgers were sold.
The specific point here is that the McDonald's Corporation is often the landlord of its franchisees. Of course most franchisees of any franchisor are required to buy supplies etc from the franchisor, but McDonald's is famous for also charging them rent.
probably implied they knew.
In the same way that American Airlines is a credit card company. How much rent will they receive if they stopped selling burgers?
> The Founder"
Good movie but McDonalds is a long long way away from scrappy, morally-bankrupt Ray Kroc's time. I imagine using pink slime to make the nuggets he sold to kids would be right in his wheelhouse though.
I thought the "they're not what you think" deal with airlines is that they're actually futures trading companies that happen to own and operate some aircraft?
If American Airlines' credit card revenues dried up they wouldn't be able to pay their fuel bills and the company would be gone the next day.
But yes, good movie too.
"It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17."
For example, the Manna software in each store knew about employee performance
in microscopic detail — how often the employee was on time or early, how
quickly the employee did tasks, how quickly the employee answered the phone
and responded to email, how the customers rated the employee and so on. When
an employee left a store and tried to get a new job somewhere else, any other
Manna system could request the employee’s performance record. If an employee
had “issues” — late, slow, disorganized, unkempt — it became nearly
impossible for that employee to get another job.
btw, i just now did glance at the menu online, i had no idea that this crap i wouldn't dare to call food (unless i were starving) is currently selling in spain. this is a tiny bit depressing but was actually to be expected, and i stand by my statement :-)
I have no idea what happens if you order through the app, maybe in that case it's 100% AI.
Some sort of "trickle up" mechanism where if enough people are sufficiently nasty to frontline workers, it'll get back to decision makers who will then change course.
I think that's fantasy and/or rationalization for taking things out on others.
It's the same thing with customers who make a big scene about a missing fries or something. 99% of the time it's not a problem and nobody cares - here's your fries, have a nice day. 1% of the time the person cares less about the fries and more about being hostile about it on principle/for fun/for respect/because they are in a bad mood/whatever, and those are the ones that suck to deal with when you're there but not in charge.
So the premise is "the customer is hostile".
It is a bit off to attack the drones of a corporate, albethey the only available target?
Do you really need that burger? Better to boycot them entirety
(Easy for me to say, I dispise MacDonalds food)
You see, the following headline has more effect on CEO's and decision makers
"McD's sales drop 10% after customers refuse the app and other forms of spying" --Forbes
If it's a silent boycott then you see stupid headlines like
"Are millennials killing McD?"
Remember the entire purpose isn't so that one company doesn't track you with an app, is so every company figures out tracking you with an app is a bad idea.
Being rude or hostile to service people, even just mildly, because of corporate decisions is not only ineffective, but it's also cruel.
What is the better option to pass along that message than modestly increasing retraining costs for that position?
I treat service workers with respect, personally, but I am struggling to see what other venues of communication are still available.
2) Directly email them anyone who might have some say in the matter.
3) Make public posts on social media about your position.
You still may not get heard, but all of these have better odds than complaining to the front-line service workers.
FALSE.
In today's economy and politics of normalized and systemic dark pattern enshittification, fomenting discord toward the turtles all the way down is a responsible civic duty of a disgruntled public captured and corralled by corporate monopolies with no exits.
Same here.
> A customer expressing a preference has never bothered me if they weren't rude about it.
A lot of people are seemingly skipping over OP describing their behavior as creating a “hostile atmosphere”. That is inherently rude.
> If it happens often enough it does get passed on
But we aren’t talking about just telling your manager. There are so many layers of management and bureaucracy with larger corporations, especially ones with a structure like McDonalds’ franchise model, that these complaints will not make it to the decision makers.
But we aren’t talking about just telling your manager. There are so many layers of management and bureaucracy with larger corporations, especially ones with a structure like McDonalds’ franchise model, that these complaints will not make it to the decision makers.
They will eventually. Years ago Starbucks used to insist that customers specify 'tall, grande, or venti' for their medium, large, and x-large cups, to the point of arguing with the customer if they just asked for the large. They abandoned the practice some years ago, presumably due to feedback from their counter staff.
This is also incredibly weird to me. There is nothing in that post that shows any indication of them not being a native speaker. You just agree with their underlying point so you're giving yourself leeway to ignore the parts of what they said with which you disagree. However, you can't actually admit that bias to yourself or to me, so now you're completely fabricating stories about them being a non-native speaker. It doesn't matter to you that this justification is entirely circular, they didn't mean "hostile" because they're a non-native speaker and they're a non-native speaker because they said "hostile" when they didn't mean it.
Whether it bothered you, it was useless for the customer to complain
The pushback has to start somewhere and if it means being mildly rude to some poor cashier for a second, well, that's part of their job and you're not some kind of asshole for making your dislike obvious. You came in there to buy something specific and simple after all, and being pushed on something else is rude too.
You can't be expected to write a strongly worded letter to corporate every one of the many times in an average day that you'll encounter some new, blandly packaged parasitic data harvesting or price gouging practice from some corporation.
On the other hand, if you and enough others create a pattern of responding with a bit of hostility at the customer service end of things, you're nearly guaranteed to fuck up some KPIs somewhere, and raise enough eyebrows to make the executives at X corporation reconsider a few things.
That doesn't mean that you are wrong: there is no point protesting to a cashier. My point is that there is no realistic or effective way for us to actually communicate to the corporate decision makers that rule our world. This becomes even more true as corporations consolidate power, which is precisely the "enshittification" that Cory Doctorow has been writing about.
vote with your mouth and wallet
No one said anything that evenr remotely implied the cashier has the ear of the ceo. Talk about a weird mindset.
It's entirely valid, in fact it's positive, being helpful by being informative, to tell a business what you want or why you are not going to buy their product, instead of simply not buying their product.
It's for damned sure valid to tell them what you would preferr if for some reason you are forced by circumstances or priorities to buy their product under duress.
This whole comment is only 2 sentences yet manages to have like a dozen different facets of weird mindset if you unpack it all.
I think that answer is neither inherently rude nor hostile.
You’ll be asked the next time you visit, guaranteed. No matter your attitude so why be mean?
Maybe it did at some point but it's not in the list of permissions on Android
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mcdonalds....
...I am thinking that does not include payslips....
Historically it's been a real estate company due to the vast portfoloio and usually prime locations. Not sure if this is still the case.
Unless one is using something like GrapheneOS, Android/iOS "app permissions" do not meaningfully impede data collection
As long as apps can connect to the internet, data can be collected. By design Android/iOS does not enable users to deny internet access to specific apps. That design is not a coincidence
It does seem like the number one permission you might wish to choose not to grant, doesn't it?
In a privacy-first design there could also be an API for an encrypted channel that the user has access to, rather than allowing the device to send mysterious black-box data from your device on your behalf in the background whenever it wants. Though I suppose it would just turn into base64 "plaintext" payloads quickly and become normalised rather than a neon sign of fuckery afoot.
Unfortunately, apps can still connect even when they are not "launched"
There are ways to deny apps internet access completely. But this is not something that is provided by Apple or Google
Maybe I should ask Claude Code to kludge together something.
The fundamental similarity is that Apple does not protect the Apple computer owner^1 from Apple anymore than Google protects Android users from Google
Like Google, Apple collects data and profits from ad services. The Apple hardware buyer becomes the product after purchase. Apple profits from selling access to the hardware owner to myriad third parties. It's always making deals
Like the one with Google we learned about in the government's antitrust case. But I digress
There was a meme something like, "Unless you're paying, you are the product". But it's also possible to pay and be the product. For example, when someone purchases an individual Windows license from Microsoft, after purchase the company is still going to _require_ them to create an "account", connect to the internet and be subjected to data collection
Both iOS and Android have "app stores" (MS copies this, too), both expect and intend these "app stores" to earn them revenue from advertising, e.g., allowing apps to do surveillance, data collections and show ads
1. who is forced to use iOS. No "unlocked" bootloaders. No custom ROMs
I'd never defend Apple willy-nilly: they're a megacorp that defrauds the European consumer and is hostile to much I care about. But there is a world of difference between Android and iOS in terms of the protections afforded to the user. Of course most people just don't know where the toggles and settings are that protect them on iOS.
Today's Apple computers try to ping Apple servers the moment they are powered on for the first time. The devices incessantly try to "phone home". Apple's definition of "privacy" does not include privacy from Apple. That is not a coincidence
There is no "toggle" to enable this "convenience", i.e., usage of Apple servers, because it is, by design, on by default
This is not an opinion or a perspective (a "take"). It is a fact, verifiable with tcpdump or the like
One can focus on differences or one can focus on similarities. Many online commentators choose the former. But if focusing on similarities, then it is indisputably clear that Android and iOS are both designed to allow Google and Apple, respectively,^1 to conduct surveillance, data collection and provide ad services
1. Apple also allows Google to collect data from iOS users via default web search in exchange for recurring payement of several billion dollars
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/26/apples-eddy-cue-defends-defa...
One of the other facts that the court learned from the expert tetimony in this case is that defaults matter. If generally no one uses the "toggles", then Apple and Google operate as if they have "consent" to collect data, as if the computer owner voluntarily toggled "Allow surveillance, data collection and ads" to "ON"
"In-app advertising" is a growing business for Apple
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/global-app-store-help...
By design, in order to serve ads to iOS users, an app needs internet connectivity. Even when the app has no need for internet connectivity otherwise
Like clearly they're OK with forcing a choice between "use the app" and "never eat McDonalds again", because that's effectively what they're doing, and they have to know it.
Presumably, some analyst at McDonald's found that the latter group wasn't particularly price sensitive, so they found a way to divide the two groups, and charge them different prices. The occasional McDonald's customer isn't going to jump through hoops, they just want to roll up, get their burger, and leave. The frequent customer is more likely to respond to changes in pricing in both directions. Having a system to actively prompt the frequent consumers to go more often, and then charge them a price that they are willing to pay, while still getting the full benefit of the people who don't really care how much food costs is a win-win from their perspective.
The surveillance is just a sweetener.
McDonald's app-free pricing is now butting against actual sit-down restaurants, or a good local shop. I'm not price sensitive per se, but I don't want a raw deal, so I'll pick the better option. McD's used to be cheap and fast, now it's neither really.
Their sales are falling, and they're doing $5 deals now, so I'm definitely not the only one picking other options.
I don't think we have this problem in Australia, so I haven't noticed...however the converse way of looking at this is they DISCOUNT your meal using the revenue from selling data on you! Win win, right?
...right?
It's so weird to see the first half of this article written as an ode to the virtues of competition and then see the sharp pivot into defending taxi medallions. Say what you will about Uber, but no Uber driver has ever tried to lie and harass a passenger over whether or not the credit card machine is broken in an effort to cheat on their taxes. It's not even like the anti-consumer hostility of the taxi experience translated into better rights for workers, the high price of a medallion meant in practice your typical cab driver was in a situation damned close to indentured servitude to a medallion company.
And to top it all off, taxis demonstrate the fallacy of thinking that hundreds of market participants provides meaningful benefits from competition. In a market with a suitably large number of cab drivers and passengers, the odds of repeat business between any pair of driver and passenger is low enough that neither party is incentivized to treat each other well. It's not like anyone was pulling out a Yelp-like site or review book to pick the best-reviewed cab drivers, or like you went out of your way to stick with a cab driver you'd had a good experience with. Meaningful competition requires that people can make _informed_ choices, and without repeat business you don't get participants informed enough to make meaningful choices between market participants. It also requires leverage. It doesn't matter if you threaten to take your business elsewhere next time if you and they both know _you were going to anyway_.
I'm not saying that Uber is perfect, or even that Uber couldn't be productively regulated better by the government. I'm saying that taxis were a terrible experience, and I don't trust Doctorow to have a good lay of the land when he focuses more on his ideology than the evidence. If subscribing to Doctorow's beliefs requires services to look more like taxis than Ubers, you can count me out.
This is a deflection. Cory is not coming out in defense of taxi medallions so much as it is a re-iteration of the current laws in place and how tech uses apps to get around the laws. Yes taxis suck, but also so does uber in their own way - This is all beside the point. These tech companies are using 'gig'ified models to get around laws set by the city officials elected by the people.
``` To navigate all of these technical minefields, you need the help of a third party. In a modern society, that third party is an expert regulator who investigates or anticipates problems in their area of expertise and then makes rules designed to solve these problems.
To make these rules, the regulator convenes a truth-seeking exercise, in which all affected parties submit evidence about what the best rule should be and then get a chance to read what everyone else wrote and rebut their claims. Sometimes, there are in-person hearings, or successive rounds of comment and counter-comment, but that’s the basic shape of things.
Once all the evidence is in, the regulator—who is a neutral expert, required to recuse themselves if they have conflicts—makes a rule, citing the evidence on which the rule is based. This whole system is backstopped by courts, which can order the process to begin anew if the new rule isn’t supported by the evidence created while the regulator was developing the record.
This kind of adversarial process—something between a court case and scientific peer review—has a good track record of producing high-quality regulations. You can thank a process like this for the fact that you weren’t killed today by critters in your tap water or a high-voltage shock from one of your home’s electrical outlets. ```
And this is central to Doctorow's point, right? The narrow question of the legality of Uber's current service offerings is actually pretty well litigated, and if Uber was as flagrantly illegal as he claims, "we're an app" wouldn't have kept them in business. Doctorow argues that this is happening through regulatory capture -- the case isn't primarily that Uber is violating the currently existing set of laws, regulations, court precedents, etc. It's that Uber is violating what the regulations _would be_ in a world where they had less market power with which to influence regulations.
And so it's not enough to argue about how the apps get around _current_ laws. By Doctorow's own arguments, we're debating the merits of a counterfactual set of different regulations that we would have if you changed current conditions. And at that point, it is absolutely fair game to ask if this counterfactual set of different regulations is actually better for market participants.
More like a forum where expensive lobbyists buy loopholes that make the rules toothless. Rules say companies can't do X, they cry about it and so an exception is carved out where X is allowed for the exact situation one of the corporations finds itself in.
Individual consumers of taxi cab services are not going to governmnet events to "submit evidence". That stuff is expensive and they have far more pressing issues to deal with than watching politics play out in real time. If they're lucky, they'll have some consumer advocacy group making their cases on their behalf.
So it is not that Uber avoided taxi licencing 'because of app', but it avoided taxi licencing by providing slightly different service that do not fit into legal definition of regulated taxi services. And one could argue that these slight differences are in fact important, because the reason why taxis are tightly regulated are for reasons that mostly do not apply to Uber.
And this is exactly why I think the question of "what is the correct way to regulate car ride services" shouldn't hinge on incumbency bias towards taxis, but actually ask the question of what is best for participants in the market (which doesn't just include taxis and Ubers but also includes public transportation and its users, for instance). But that doesn't fit neatly into Doctorow's enshitification narrative.
I've read a bit of his work, seen a couple of his speeches, and don't have the same conclusions about his opinions. You could probably ask for clarification.
In terms of societal change though, they both had a bad law in front of them, they both broke it. In Rosa Parks' case, the law got changed. In Travis Kalanick's case, new laws got passed specifically regulating his company. But the thing is, the taxi medallion laws haven't actually gone away. This results in Uber having to do things in weird ways to satisfy the letter of the law in order to comply with the various laws that exist in each jurisdiction.
Travis Kalanick got rich off the backs of an army of drivers and a swath of passengers. Rosa Parks did not.
He did some pretty shitty stuff along the way, sure.
One thing about Rosa Parks is that she wasn't the first. It was because she was the woman who wasn't going to fall to ad hominem attacks. We can name the logical fallacy, but unfortunately it works in the unregulated court of public opinion.
Neither was Travis, but they were both the ones that succeeded. She succeeded in changing minds and laws, and he succeeded in making a pile of money.
So there's absolutely a gulf between the two, and that gulf is that the laws about sitting in the back of the bus got struck down. The taxi laws did not. One happens to be a rich white guy and the other happens to be a not-exactly-well-off black woman, and the black woman actually managed to get the laws changed.
For example, do you think it is immoral for marijuana people to consume their drug of choice? It remains federally illegal.
In many situations an individual does not feel represented by a certain law and it's equally ok for them to choose to follow their own moral compass as it is for the people who put that law in place to attempt to enforce their ways.
This actually did happen to me. When I was in Hyderabad, I took an Uber from my company's office to the airport, and the driver said his phone died right after picking me up, so I had to pay cash.
The worst problem was finding cabs in the outer boroughs, and that was improved greatly with the "green cab" program (they were restricted to beginning their fares in the outer boroughs).
There's been a lot of time and gradual change since then, but what I see now (Post-Uber): - In most of the city, it is difficult or impossible to hail a cab without an app. - The Uber/app drivers are worse, clearly much less experienced and don't know where they are going. - Price gouging has been outsourced to the app itself, and happens very frequently. - Even once cabs are called on the app they often cancel or fail to show in anywhere near the advertised time.
Personally, I greatly prefer the Pre-Uber situation.
I’ve since realized that in the US, NYC is an exception. When I first came to SF and Seattle for job interview related things, I used taxis, only to find out that the taxis were so terrible I never used them again:
- In the suburbs of Seattle, I was given a taxi chit from the place I was interviewing. I called in for a cab and had to wait over a half an hour for one to pick me up.
- In SF, the airport cab I was using had his GPS unmounted from his dash, and ended up handing me the machine and asking me to help him navigate from the back seat. Then when we got to the hotel, he lamented my choice to pay by credit card as it meant he would get the money much later than if he had cash. After I told him I didn’t have the circa $100 in cash he was charging, he sadly acquiesced, then proceeded to take a literal paper rubbing imprint of the card number before I could leave.
I like to say that the Bay Area made Uber make sense, both in terms of urban planning and in terms of how terrible taxis were.
And I think those may be related: if you can get around well in a place like NYC using public transit or walking, taxis have to be a lot more attractive in order to justify their existence. In SF or Seattle they had much less competition due to the suburban sprawl and worse public transit.
It's legal because there's no law saying AI isn't allowed to copy popular artists, or give legal, medical and physiological advice to random people without possesing any kind of formal qualifications for giving said advice.
If I hired a hundred starving artists and a thousand students to provide the same services, my company would quickly be sued into the ground.
But just fire the people and add AI instead, and then I'm magically no longer responsible for the output. The picture becomes murky and we start to discuss how the AI was trained, if the training data was sourced legally and so on and so forth.
I'm as pro-competition as anybody, but I don't actually buy this argument.
Firstly, regulating a thousand small players is much harder than regulating a few. Which is why there is a lot of evidence that regulation (even when good or needed) eliminates some amount of competition - crash and emission testing put an end to new car manufacturers for a long time.
Secondly, in industries with lots of competition and individual actors (real estate, healthcare, finance, etc) regulatory capture is actually far worse! Increasing the sheer number of special interests does not, in fact, improve regulation. And if anything, smearing it across as many voting districts as possible gives a level of political entrenchment that software companies could only dream of.
Let me flip the Airbnb argument on its head - why are hotels allowed to build dense dormitory-style housing in cities where it's otherwise illegal to do so? Because their regulatory capture is so entrenched that we don't even think about it.
You aren't flipping it on its head at all, the reason hotels exist is because travelers exist and need somewhere to go.
Why does Airbnb think they have a right to invert the social contract that has created a designated place for people who are likely to not know local norms and be operating on strange hours?
Plenty of major destinations (holy places, resorts, etc) would bring in thousands of tourists at a time. The ancient Olympics, for instance, brought in tens of thousands of visitors.
The scale is massively different, they didn't have millions of people coming through a city during the summer, like Paris, Barcelona, or Lisbon gets. Just Lisbon gets some 5-6x its population as tourists per year, it's in a very different scale to some tens of thousands in ancient times, which wouldn't expect the same relative level of amenities as modern tourists do.
What 'local norms' are so different that you won't understand them as a traveler? 99.9% of the population sleep and wake up at the same time. You just need to be a decent human being.
The hallways got scuffed up, some guests were excessively noisy, dropped trash all over the place, broke stuff... as a permanent resident if you do that you face consequences. As someone only resident for a weekend it makes no difference to you.
Firstly, vacation homes existed and were legal long before Airbnb - but finding one anywhere was expensive and a a massive PITA.
Secondly, who's social contract?
The neighborhood social contract. The one where I know my neighbors and we build a vibrant community. Instead of the drunk idiots who show up for 3 days and throw their beer bottles on the ground.
Also there is a reason why places places with lots of vacation homes are considered expensive an dnot the most pleasant to live at permanently. That's why cities etc regulated, they dis not want them to turn into holiday parks.
Some of the cabin rental companies I rent from have been around since the 90s.
Written law was something very important historically: from unwritten norms to codified representations that, however imperfect and provisional, were more or less accessible to all and changeable through whatever process, democratic or otherwise. Over the last decades, we -- and this could be taken rather literally as "the readers of hacker news" -- have been encoding so many aspects of the world into software in a way that doesn't clearly coincide with the legal norms of any particular let alone every country.
On the one hand, software is clearly "better" than law in at least the sense that the former eliminates the necessary ambiguity of the latter: the interpretation or "implementation details" of even just a particular law are always disputed. Perhaps a particular implementation of cross-border financial transactions, say, or of personal identity doesn't in fact reflect what the developers or product managers intended, but if that is identified it can be changed.
Yet, on the other hand, it is certainly true that, from the perspective of regulators let alone the masses, the resulting situation is much closer to pre-law. Nobody has any idea how or why they were suddenly banned from Instagram or their PayPal account closed, let alone how money actually moves around the world when they send a friend funds through Transferwise. Certainly, if we don't even know how things are working there is no process by which it could be decided that things should work differently, let alone a process by which software would concretely be made to work differently.
Indeed, I am skeptical that law as such will ever be able to regulate software: even just considering the problem in terms of a single country/legal system, how does one actually guarantee that the ever-changing corpus of code complies with the ever-changing and essentially ambiguous body of regulations? One of course sees this with the EU as the "avant-garde" of the struggle to regulate software. They pursue either these incredibly general wars on "cookies" that don't solve real problems, or endlessly deliberate when it's already too late about how to handle AI, or produce something relatively well-conceived like GDPR where enforcement is then incredibly unclear if not impossible.
TLDR I have no idea what the solution is, but I think the intrinsic problem of law and software is incredibly important to take seriously as software eats the world. At the very least, it's not just a problem of "competition" since, as you note, monopoly is at least one sufficient condition [1] of eventually rendering the way software regulates the world transparent and open to change.
[1] Undoubtedly, there are other ways this could possibly transpire through open source etcetc -- however, even in that case there has to be a guarantee that particular software defines the operations of a particular domain, i.e. that there exists software through which one can understand that domain and hypothetically change, which is in some sense just a "public" monopoly.
The issues with finance are on the edges and areas where there are really a small number of industry players. They have an outsized impact and the worst practices are usually skirting the regulatory framework.
The Airbnb argument isn’t regulatory capture example - the issue there is that it’s impossible to build anything. You have to build a giant hotel to justify the overhead of building anything hotel. Airbnb fills a gap of creative reuse and provides a tax shelter for rich people.
It makes sense to do if you’re in the 35% bracket. You buy a condo or a house. So you buy a house, airbnb it for one year, then rent for 2-5 more. Then you 1031 exchange it and do it again. If you don’t trade up, you have to keep the property or they recapture the bonus depreciation on a prorata basis later.
Airbnb hasn’t been about couchsurfing in a long time. It’s a mechanism to monetize real estate under more favorable tax rules.
Nonsense. Residents don't complain about hotels because of the perception that hotels are too expensive for poor and working-class people to afford. Whereas the perception of apartments is that they are cheap enough that such people will choose to live in them.
It's all about not wanting to live near "poor" people.
> It's all about not wanting to live near "poor" people.
That much is true. And mostly because poor people make poor neighbors.
I don't agree with this.
Get you and a thousand friends to submit fake mortgages documents and let me know how many of you end up in jail. Compare that too how many people went to jail from Wells Fargo.
More smaller players is easier to regulate because you can literally use any punishments. If you dissolve Wells Fargo the economy is going to throw a fit (see Enron) but if you dissolve a tiny company then nobody cares.
Real Estate and Healthcare seem to be pretty highly concentrated industries imo. Even though there are a zillion agents/doctors they're part of a professional guild and that guild does the lobbying on their behalf. Like good luck getting antibiotics on your own but after a doctor looks at you for 1 minute you have a prescription for the same drug you always take for an ear infection.
What's practically impossible is regulating a few anticompetitive megacorporations. You can't regulate an entity that writes your nation's laws.
How did Microsoft avoid breakup in 2001? Simple: George W. Bush was elected President, and the Bush administration decided to settle the court case with a slap on the wrist. Don't blame the regulators but rather the politicians.
It's ironic that Doctorow uses the example of "whether you should heed your doctor’s advice to get vaccinated", because the regulators all support vaccination, but again as a result of a Presidential election, HHS has been politically captured by an anti-vaxxer who ignores expert advice.
But he addresses that in the post, by saying that these monopoly/olipolyies actors can amass massive war chests that make them become bigger than the regulator. So by the time MS was a monopoly it was already too late.
Bigger than the POTUS? And why wasn't the previous Clinton administration captured?
But it's actually quite clear from the article that the regulators are not politicians:
> In a modern society, that third party is an expert regulator who investigates or anticipates problems in their area of expertise and then makes rules designed to solve these problems.
> To make these rules, the regulator convenes a truth-seeking exercise
> the regulator—who is a neutral expert, required to recuse themselves if they have conflicts—makes a rule, citing the evidence on which the rule is based.
I admit to being especially sensitive since I worked in personalized loyalty marketing for nearly 20 years, so failures and missed opportunities really annoy me as both a customer and practician of the art.
Yeah, maybe you can start with Rogers Wireless. Eh, Cory?
You would hope this would be awful PR for them and anyone using their services. What disgusting corporate sociopathy.
Doctorow pretends these are the ultimate forms, which s how his answers are palliatives not solutions.
It's strange how bureaucratic Silicon Valley has become in relation to his bureaucratic prose, the tech industry once saw solutions beyond the available tech, now it's buried in consultancy rebuttal and Friedman myth ("competition is good").
We have behemoth Goliaths that are living dinosaurs that engage in hierarchical domination of what are really illusions: text, symbols, images. All we need now are the behemoths to mint their own $, copyright it and the circle is complete. Yet these are merely simulations in search of a reality that AI can't deliver, and so the behemoths are using all techniques to remain relevant. It's stillnly one step ahead of a magic act. Obviously they are finished, ready for obliteration by insightful, imaginative succession. Bureaucracies are all targets for replacement, especially Doctorow's type of prose.
So wordy only to use a nonsensical strawman. I get it: you're trying to create a new buzzword the way you did with "enshittification". So the usual suspects will be big fans. Good luck.
(Edit) And they should be setting their own prices!
The reason Uber can get away with pretending it's just a "connector" is because the entire tech ecosystem has been allowed to normalize that kind of control without accountability.
Look at Apple and Google: they take a 30% cut on every sale and ban any competing payment systems. That's the same pattern - absolute gatekeeping disguised as "market facilitation."
Our regulators have become so complacent that this behavior is now seen as the default way digital markets work. The problem isn’t just Uber's misclassification; it's that the entire platform economy is built on pretending these companies are neutral middlemen when they're really gatekeepers.
We had someone come to our house to work on a range hood. They didn’t have ladder training, so the insurance company wouldn’t cover it if they fell off the ladder.
The range hood repairman left without doing any work. I do wonder what a normal day at work looks like for this person. We weren’t billed for the house call.
Par for the course for a vanload of meth-heads who've never attended an hour of formal training in their life to be walking around a 45 degree roof without a harness, or one clipped into an ornamental non-structural member.
I think you are mistaking your point of view, which is probably that of an individual business owner, for the point of view of someone looking at the actuarial statistics or whatever and seeing tens of thousands of preventable ladder injuries a year. Just because an event is rare from your point of view doesn't mean that the event costs nothing or that it should be ignored.
I can't believe how common this attitude of "if its too small for me to notice it doesn't matter" is.
I wonder how many people are killed yearly because they buy various tools and don't read the damn instructions because they're definitely smart enough to use this and be safe already, it's common sense after all!
In your heart of hearts, when you are assigned mandatory trainings, how much do you learn? I'm not asking how much _could_ you learn, I'm asking how much DO you learn? My experience, and the obvious unspoken consensus of all my colleagues, is that you click through mandatory virtual trainings as fast as possible, with the sound down, on fast-forward. If it's a live training with an actual practical skill (like ladder training), then I'd definitely concede it's much more engaging and you probably learn something. But MANY trainings are clearly, obviously, a net friction on society.
"I see a problem - how about we make a law that everybody must learn about that thing?" is the crappiest, laziest way to address the problem that you could possibly think of. If 'mandate a training' was analogized to a pull request on a codebase, it would be like responding to a bug report by adding a pop-up dialog that always pops up whenever you open the program and warns you about the bug. In other words, the shittiest possible non-solution that lets somebody close the issue as resolved. A real solution takes more work and more thinking.
Americans: hold my AR15
"In 2023, the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons reported that 500,000 people were treated for ladder-related injuries, with 300 of these incidents proving fatal." from https://www.usf.edu/health/public-health/news/2024/cc-ladder...
It's me, I'm the idiot.
Standing on the top step? Yes. Putting a hammer on the top step and forgetting about it? Uh huh. Putting the ladder on plywood on a mattress so I could change a lightbulb without moving the bed and buying a taller ladder? You better believe it. Using a paint sprayer with a 25' latter and no spotter? Absolutely not. Wait, yes.
There are dozens of us: https://old.reddit.com/r/MenonUnstableLadders/