Forums

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I already am. As my profit goes up because tech decreases my costs of operation, the taxes I pay increase. You seem to want me to pay again on top of that.

You are confusing consumer benefit in the broad sense with monetary profits. You get a lot of the former. You only pay taxes on the latter. You don't pay any taxes for all of the value you get from your iPhone, for example.

It does not as a rule have high fixed costs. That only occurs as it ramps up initially. FB has very low operating costs relative to its revenue. GM could never approach that in 1000 years.

I don't know what you mean by high and low, but I am talking proportionately. Tech companies tend to have very high fixed costs relatively to marginal costs for additional customers. It costs Facebook nothing to onboard an additional user, but they had to build a big infrastructure to offer that person its services.

I was focusing on Uber, which is an app. (That stupidly decided to create a backbone of physical operations for some bizarre reason.)

Uber's app doesn't cost nothing to produce. It has to spend a ton to be able to offer its services.

I know oil has been low for a while, but airplane flights do not fit in the low marginal cost bucket.

They absolutely do. If United has a flight from Philadelphia to Houston, what's the marginal cost to it of filling another seat on the plane.

It's difficult to define "tech" as it includes myriad companies and in some cases old staid companies employing tech fixes. (By way of example, IBM was a stodgy, failing computer company that now sells shitty predictive software and would be considered a tech company.)

I agree -- it's hard for me to tell what you're talking about sometimes.

Taxi drivers who drive for Uber do not make more money as a result of Uber. Uber utterly destroys their barrier to entry, allowing for hundreds if not thousands of more competitors on the street each day.

Great example. The prior barrier to entry was regulatory. The only reason taxi medallions were worth so much is that they block entry. And driving a taxi is a shitty job! If the government wanted to, it could require a similar license to drive for Uber, and set minimum fares. Uber didn't directly destroy anything -- it just created a much more efficient way to connect taxis and rides, and then people realized how shitty the regulated taxi industry was in most places. Many more people are driving for Uber now than were driving taxis before. Isn't that a good thing? I can get an Uber from my house. Getting a taxi was no sure bet. Isn't that a good thing?

I can't believe it -- you're complaining about tech eliminating jobs, and your example is taxi drivers? Seriously?

Did I not say, "Charge Me More for Tech"? I kinda think that's the point I made three posts ago? Just so explicitly.

So you're happy when government collects taxes on you indirectly through a private party, but not when it collects from you. OK. Doesn't make sense to me, but OK.

Not if you simply charge me more for the tech. This would cause a smoothing of the disruption, as adopters wouldn't be so quick to eliminate labor.

Do you think technological innovation is, on balance, good for society? If so, why would you want less of it?

The person laid off is the externality. And you're cherry picking business closures. The bigger set of layoffs are not accruing from businesses closing, but from businesses replacing employees with tech.

A business that fails because it cannot compete is not an externality. And businesses replace employees with tech in order to be more efficient so they can stay in business. Do you think, boy, I wish we had more railroad porters, video-store employees and buggy-whip makers? We don't have those things because other technology came along and replaced them. You fly to Houston instead of taking an overnight train, you watch a movie on the way on a smart phone instead of carrying a VCR, and when you get to the airport you speed to your hotel in a car instead of a horse and buggy.

I think generally the govt should tax tech more robustly, which would then compel tech to charge me more. At the same time, govt should place a huge tax on the sale of people's personal information by firms like FB and Google. That's a staggering cash pile for the safety net enhancement.

I wouldn't have thought you'd be the person to have Old Left economic views about this, but OK. You want to go to the Google search bar and pay huge tax to run a search? Who thinks that's a good idea? Every using the service now would have to pay a tax to get what they get now for free?

I specifically never joined FB. Yet my wife advises that to the extent I've been tagged somewhere, they have a folder on me.

I don't find anything about FB valuable. But they've placed a value on what they've learned about me by placing cookies in websites I've visited without my knowledge or consent.

If you care, you can use a browser without the cookies. It's not rocket science. Most people accept the cookies because they enable a lot of value-creating stuff. Do you abstain from e-commerce?

FB can build whatever data base it likes, but to me and those like me, it's basically a peeping tom. I rather see Zuckerberg dead than give him any info or any consent, and yet he's made money off me nonetheless.

Many people talk big about how much they care about privacy, but don't actually act accordingly when presented with real-world choices.

If it's govt or nothing, then the question becomes, which taxpayer bears the burden? That's where this interesting: The Tech titan who makes XXXXXXXX off the sale of labor-reducing products? Or the average person who realizes XX benefit from the products?

I'm in favor of rich people paying more taxes, just so we are clear.

When we decide to figure out who pays the freight for the safety net expansion here, the opthamologist feels the pinch a whole lot more than the tech titan. Progressive taxation doesn't even the score given the massive income disparities there.

Let's change the law so that richer people pay more taxes than less rich people.

I never said I didn't. And that farmer is probably not getting his money's worth versus the increased taxes he's paying.

That farmer is almost certainly getting subsidized in a huge way by people who live in blue, urban states. Read Cadillac Desert about how we have paid huge amounts to supply Western agriculture with water. That farmer drives on a federally funded highway to his federally insured bank to cash his farm-subsidy checks for not using his federally-funded water. And the "subsidy" you care about is that he's not using a smart phone?

The previous analysis.

Wal Mart buys inventory at obscenely low prices. (I represented one company Wal Mart put out of business by simply demanding to pay less for product, after having become 75% of its business). Wal Mart is a bully, nothing more or less, just like Amazon. There's nothing innovative or defensible about it at all.

And Wal Mart's labor force is subsidized by our social safety nets.

So Wal-Mart is "tech" too, or are you inching closer to agreeing that the problems you are talking about aren't specific to today's tech industry?