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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

Pricing will become increasingly adversarial. The Internet did too much to expose price differences to customers, so sellers are responding. Customers will need aggressive agents to price-shop on their behalf. Take hotel booking as one of the current nightmares of price visibility. Total price often isn't exposed until you show up at the hotel.

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>Customers will need aggressive agents to price-shop on their behalf. Take hotel booking as one of the current nightmares of price visibility.

Or I'll just buy as little as possible and buy used whenever possible.

The only answer I see anyone suggest is _more_ complexity. "This complex system we've built is flawed. I know what to do: I'll add another layer of complexity and abstraction on top of it."

"Needing" buying agents would be the worst possible outcome. How could I possibly trust the buying agent? Wouldn't that agent just take funds from companies to promote their products as suggestions?

> Or I'll just buy as little as possible and buy used whenever possible.

This is the way, but also, places like eBay are increasingly “professionalized” by huge resellers and refurbishers who squeeze out any possible margin. I’ve also noticed that thrift and consignment stores aren’t such a bargain anymore. You can often get a better deal from large retailers when they go on clearance.

P2P transactions still pay off but it’s not as easy as it used to be.

That's good to know regarding ebay. I don't use it much, but I wasn't aware. Agreed with regard to thrift stores. Some of them have seen quite a lot of inflation. I think it's yard sales and minimalism for me.

Even those have price-constraints - if you watch for awhile you get a real feel for the prices that people will pay vs the "value" if you will. Certain thrift stores will be dirt cheap, others (Goodwill) will be barely below Walmart - sometimes you can even scratch the price off and find a clearance sticker for lower under it.

eBay is still worthwhile for some items, but lots of the "deals" on actual used product have moved to other marketplaces like Poshmark.

Shipping kills all of it, however.

Buying used is great and all, but so many more products and product features have become cloud and subscription reliant across all industries. They'll be able to get you profiled and locked into a dynamically priced subscription eventually.

I'm sure someone is working on an AI powered toaster though, and we'll be able to achieve the ultimate goal of a talking toaster as they had in the TV show Red Dwarf. Hopefully it'll use Claude tokens while it engages intelligently with us.

>but so many more products and product features have become cloud and subscription reliant across

And 100% of these products and features are trash, as are the companies pushing them.

> Or I'll just buy as little as possible and buy used whenever possible.

You're forgetting that consuming newly created products is the only way to express yourself or gain a modicum of fleeting happiness. Also, if you're not consuming, you can't "vote with your dollar" which is of course the most effective way in history for ordinary people to hold the powerful accountable.

shopping, 2000: go to store. take item off shelf. hand cashier indicated amount of money. leave.

shopping, 2030: use your personalized AI agent ($100/month subscription) to simultaneously impersonate a dozen clients across five different online shopping platforms with the goal of tricking the sellers' AI agents into thinking you're poorer than you are so that you can pay $5 for bananas instead of $25.

That's just called progress. What are you a Luddite or something?

Sounds like something Macx character from the book Accelerando would do.

Its pretty obvious that a society intent on making capitalism work would enforce price transparency. If you want a productive society, you need efficient markets, and if you want efficient markets, you need to reduce information asymmetry, not maximize it. Hopefully the people in power recognize the positive impact they can make by preventing this awful future.

I think the devil's advocate/libertarian reply would be roughly: its efficient to let consumers prefer venues with different pricing schemes. If dynamic pricing is bad, then competitors will differentiate by not doing it, and price out the ones doing dynamic pricing.

To be clear, I don't believe that (or even the premise that "making capitalism work" is a good social goal--some elements of capitalist economies are socially beneficial, but adopting it as an ideology rather than piecemeal is not). I think your point is generally correct: if your goal is an efficient free market, then price transparency is important. But that's just my hunch as to what the counterargument would be.

The core issue with pure libertarian ideas is that they ignore "shoe leather costs" and the role they play in making consumers "irrational", which the success of a libertarian society depends on.

In this case, plenty of places in the US only have one reasonably close grocery store.

Customers require consumer legislation and protections, not further entrenchment of AI oligopolies.

Citizens require a lack of surveillance. Full stop.

Citizens in the developed world have been heavily surveilled for decades. All of them. And the penetration/rate of increase of surveillance has been increasing rapidly.

There are plenty of downsides to that, and I don't agree or think it's beneficial, on balance. But "citizens require a lack of surveillance" is far from the present-day truth, or even remotely practical as an aspiration.

Citizens require the ability to surveil the watchers. When flock data was FOIAd for the politicians license plates the flock data was exempted from FOIA so fast.

The only legislation needed is one that requires transparent, searchable pricing. If the sellers can use automation to set prices, then buyers can use automation to sort prices, making all the pricing games moot.

Perhaps that is all that is required, but I don't want the minimum. I want a simple life with enough to live. I don't want to optimize everything and I don't want to live in a world which is trying to optimize every interaction I participate in.

We need to invert the markets. Show the demand at a specific price the community is willing to pay for a given thing in a given area and let the grocery stores come down to that price, instead of having the markets guess and fail.

Like, basically how an exchange works. We should go massively capitalistic with purchasing everything, even gum.

Inelasticity and segmenting "the community" is the problem here, like always.

Demand price-point for antibiotics across the community when the average use-case is a road rash? Low.

Demand price-point for antibiotics for a community member with a life-threatening lung infection? Asymptotically higher.

See also: home insurance during wildfires, water during a drought/heatwave, masks during a pandemic.

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