Hacker News Reader

Comment by bofadeez | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

> * Just look at the actual checkout price like everyone else

Why should I have to go through the entire process just to see the price? Have you ever been in a store that has the tax added onto the price tag? It is very nice to not have to do mental math.

What, you don't run through the checkout process on each of 100 different Airbnb listings and compile a spreadsheet of results to ascertain the true prices after fees and charges? That's gotta be the best part of vacation planning after buying plane tickets!

Because it isn't very important and the more degrees of freedom the seller has the more likely they are to do something to make the whole process cheaper for customers. Although it does seem appropriate that everyone should know the price of something before they buy it, as long as it happens before the money is handed over that is fine.

cheaper for customers??? What world do you live in where sellers care about customers?

a world where profit motive means you have to beat competition in innovation/efficiency and separate money from consumers by providing them value. fraud / intentional deception (broadly) is already illegal.

> the more degrees of freedom the seller has the more likely they are to do something to make the whole process cheaper for customers.

I think this is the crux of our disagreement. In my experience, the more degrees of freedom the seller has, the more chances to fuck you over they have.

I think - and this might be my European perspective and maybe why we feel differently about regulations than Americans - the main source of risk is corporations trying to take advantage of you, not the government. Curbing said risk through regulations is a core part of good governance.

If you let yourself get taken advantage of by corporations the result is substantially higher median incomes [0]. I remain unconvinced that adopting an adversarial stance toward the people who are trying to give you real stuff is the best strategy. Cooperation and forming a consensus with them seems like a better path.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/median-income-after-tax-l...

I think this, too, is a case of cultural differences. This ranking [0] seems much more meaningful to me than the one you linked.

[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/best-countries-fo...

You're going to have to draw the meaning out a bit more for me, continuing with the assumption that "Americans" means the US then they score 69.8 vs a list top of 73.2. Given that the list sets out to compare the incomparable that seems pretty much equivalent. The US's worst score in its worst scoring category is "Sustainable Trade" which is driven more by their historically dominant military position than anything else and not all that relevant to their corporate governance policies.

And there are a huge number of subjective judgements about what the worth of individual categories is, especially given the political nature of quality. Picking on one of my favourites - the US scores low on "Income Inequality". Income inequality is a weird measure because we'd expect the poorest people in society to have literally nothing (because some people are beyond help). Therefore the wealthier a society is and the more income inequality I'd expect as a baseline. People get worked up about it even though in practice it is a struggle to articulate how it is even a good or bad thing.

Everything is subjective - including which metrics we focus on and how we interpret them - since humans are inherently subjective beings.

I'd invite you to sit out at a cafe in Florence, or on a terrace in Amsterdam, watching the boats go by.

I'd then invite you to take a walk through the Tenderloin of SF, global hub of tech capital.

I've done both. I've lived both. I can tell you that as far as my subjectivity is concerned, there is a clear winner, numbers on a bank account be damned.

One more note: A society in which the poorest are seen as a "beyond help" and left with literally nothing is not a society I would feel comfortable living in. It is precisely those folks that need the most help to make society livable.

I'm not an American at all.

And all of these are definitely worse than just making the vendor behave properly...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com