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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Where's the crying from laughing so hard emoji? We need that for statements like this.
The "better" always includes "cheaper." And the "cheaper" part comes from avoidance of the bigger costs. And the biggest cost is always this: Labor.
Now answer me seriously.
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I'll give you two examples. Pierre Omidyar started eBay in his spare time while he was working a day job, as a way for people to connect with each other to sell things. He said he knew he had something with potential when there was a transaction for a broken laser pointer. He was creating value because he created a market where there really wasn't one before. Maybe you could go to a flea market to sell a broken laser pointer, but you'd have a hard time finding a buyer. eBay created value for a lot of people who wanted to buy and sell things that were hard to find, in part through bringing enough people that you could use auctions for price discovery for goods that are hard to value.
Undeniably, eBay has both created jobs and killed jobs. If you had a shop specializing in some sort of collectibles, you're either selling on eBay or you're out of business. But if you think Omidyar's motivation was to cut labor costs, you don't know what you're talking about.
Another example is PayPal, which had a bunch of founders with a bunch of ideas, but which took off because people who were buying and selling on eBay needed a way to take credit cards and the legacy card networks were not interested in solving that problem. They wouldn't use their rails to let the smallest businesses receive funds. So PayPal built a way to use ACH to do that. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Keith Rabois have no love for traditional jobs, but PayPal succeeded because they found a problem to solve by creating value, not because they were trying to find a less labor-intensive way of doing things that other people are already doing.
Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Square, Stripe, Twitter -- they all have similar stories.
Now, give me a counter example. Tell me about a prominent tech company that was started to do what people were already doing, only with less labor. You're going to be tempted to try with Amazon, but you'll be wrong.
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But an algorithm that is designed to meet if not outperform an analyst is designed to avoid the cost of paying that analyst. A kiosk in a grocery store is not any more efficient than a worker. It actually makes the consumer's job harder. It's sole purpose is to eliminate labor costs.
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Now you're moving the goalposts. Of course there are successful companies that use technology to try to do things cheaper, and there always have been. Eli Whitney's cotton gin is more than two hundred years old. But you were making a different argument, that today's tech companies were founded primarily to eliminate labor costs, in a way that is fundamentally different than the rest of the Industrial Revolution.
I'll leave the rest of what you said for another post.
eta, never mind this is easy. You said, look how bad things are. I said, so which side are you on? You said, your own. You are a combination of selfish, fatalistic, and apathetic, shifting from one to another whenever someone tries to pin you down too well. OK then.
And maybe you read something once about a way to tax tech. I think I've been pretty clear that I'm more inclined than the average bear to regulate or tax tech if we can find a way to do it that works. If you really cared, we could talk about it. But your interest seems to be more about sticking it to people who have found success than about solving a societal problem, because you generally lack any kind of interest in solving any kind of societal problem.
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He who makes the massive profits bears the risk.
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My point was, you "profit" too by using the tech products. If they weren't making your life better, considering the money you pay for them that turns into those companies' profits, you wouldn't use them. Tech creates a lot of consumer welfare, not just for the tech companies. You have a principled position that you want all the stuff you want, but other people shouldn't make money making it for you.
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You know any huge company that exists on one campus alone? They all own pricey commercial space in multiple city centers.
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No kidding. I didn't say large companies put their employees on one single campus. I said large companies put their people in offices, and they need large offices, because they have lots of people. You were explaining that the pricy commercial space isn't going to be necessary. I'm saying, large companies are all organized around have people in space like that.
