So will this impact Uber that does some extremely shady stuff around your profile / phone type / battery life / account history / micro location / etc to tease out level of desperation & price elasticity.
Uber goes a bit further and finds ways to modify software/service such that they comply with the letter of the law but not the spirit.
Example was the minimum wage law.
They complied by projecting if there was enough demand for certain number of drivers on the app at any time to hit minimum wage. They boot logged in drivers from the app without warning or notice of when they'd be allowed back in, in order to reduce the supply of drivers to meet demand.
Of course the drivers remained in their cars, driving around the streets of the city, frantically trying to log back in. So in practice their pay likely went DOWN for the same amount of actual hours worked. They just weren't in-app for all those hours.
So curious how they will figure out a way to do that here. I don't want to even speculate here in case any Uber Pricing Quants are reading.
The links you provide do not disprove the claim. The first link shows the user with the lower battery actually was charged slightly more and the second link is evidence of an n=1 test where both were charged similarly. I don’t know if Uber does this, has done this or has never done this practice but it wouldn’t surprise me if they had.
The profile based pricing is obvious because I habitually used Uber over Lyft for last 5 years.. now when I open both I can see Uber pricing me at 2x what Lyft offers at each tier, aside from airport rides which seem more fixed.
Gonna have to wait two years for the fed to do anything. Right now it’s a lame duck president who can still veto and cause unlimited drama. Nothing is going to happen.
Dynamic pricing seems to be a personalized form of price gouging. It's encouraging to see regulators jump on this quickly and try to nip it in the bud. I can't imagine working on a team that helps enable individual price gouging at a company.
Thank god everyone got their heads out of their ass on the e-ink pricetags on shelves as part of these law packages. Turns out employees love working with them and they don't "cut jobs" like the UFCW said they do?
Price controls are always and everywhere a net welfare negative because they interfere with the ability of the market to route resources to their best use.
I find it both naive and ignorant to think markets just magically work in everyone's favor. Did we forget the 19th and 20th centuries where capital was given basically free reign to do anything and we ended up with robber barons, monopolies, live shootouts between unions and companies, shanty towns, and massive economic depressions?
What the hell does the Soviet Union and China have to do with robber barons and the ills of capitalism? Why does the US have such a high prison population, murder and crime rate, and such a large wealth disparity? Why is it run by a host of clown politicians completely beholden to capital? Why do smaller countries with stronger social policies and larger restrictions on capital holders have better educated and happier populations with less crime? How does a country under embargo and economic sanctions for 60+ years and the ills of "communism", which is what I assume you are defaulting to since you mentioned the USSR and China, have the same life expectancy as the rich and powerful US?
If the US is so bad, why people from any other countries migrate to USA, specially from socialists countries, and no the other way?
The worse things you point about USA, the more the good things have to be to compensate, for everybody trying to get into the country, even illegally, even risking their lives to get inside.
Life under capitalism is sooo good, that everybody tries to get inside. Think of it. If the socialist discourse were right, it should be the opposite.
People want to immigrate to Norway too, does that mean people want to move there because of the heavy restrictions on Capital and the socialist government oil fund?
Trying to claim every good thing is thanks to capitalism and then ignoring every bad thing is myopic. You really think the US is the only country people want to move to? That people fleeing literal famine and persecution in other nations means nothing and they really just want more capitalism? Please.
>people fleeing literal famine and persecution in other nations means nothing
Everybody tries to escape FAMINE AND PERSECUTION in socialist countries. You defeated yourself.
Socialism ALWAYS causes famine and persecution because it doesn't work, so life is miserable, and socialism is a collection of lies (like pretending that the Nordic countries are socialist).
Socialism is hate speech, blaming innocent people for imaginary crimes. So, when socialism fails, and it always fails, it starts persecuting innocent people, whom socialists blame for the failure of the system. But even after killing everybody, socialism still doesn't work.
Norway is top-ranked in the Index of Economic Freedom. Norway is literally one of the most capitalist countries on the planet. Is top 8 out of 184 countries.
Socialism is so bad that socialists have to deny that socialist countries are socialist, meanwhile lying about the most capitalist countries being "socialist" to try to manufacture a lie.
Maybe climb down from the whole bicameral economic model hobby horse, it's an overly simplistic take in a broad rich hybrid world and clinging to it as you are isn't doing your credibility any favours.
The parent thinks that only the government implements price controls.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Depends on what they are. Inflexible and broad price caps like what the U.S. had starting in 1974 can cause a lot of damage because they create backpressure where inflation is crushing everything up against the cap.
Sliding price caps that target only specific things can work, like parking fees that scale according to the median wage of a given part of a city.
This seems to be more like the latter rather than the former. Retailers can still adjust prices before the business day is over based on immediate feedback, they're just not allowed to dig through a potential customer's device to do so or target specific individuals.
The utility of money is not linear, and the utility of goods is different based on individual needs. That means a policy that reduces absolute efficiency can still improve total welfare by distributing things in a way that's more useful.
Price controls don't create more supply but they reduce the percentage of buyers income taken up by the inflated item. That increases their total utility because they can buy more things for that money. It also leads to higher growth through aggregate demand, invested savings and avoiding nonlinear negative effects (small businesses shutting down because they can't pay their bills).
The problem of optimizing the use of resources is called the "Economic Calculation Problem."
The free market has plenty of books and theories, backed by experimental data, so it's scientific.
Socialism has absolutely nothing, because socialists believe that the value of things is equal to the cost of production, and that's absurd.
If the value of things were equal to the cost of production, then a machine that is inefficient and consumes double the energy would produce double the value and would be better, when in fact it is worse.
If the value of things were equal to the cost of production, it would not matter how you assign the resources: whatever use you make of them uses the same resources, has the same cost, and is equally valuable. Using iron to make a pile of garbage would have to have the same value as using iron to build hospitals, machines, and airplanes.
That's why, under socialism, resources are always turned into products that are less valuable than their cost, and socialism creates poverty: the more socialists work, the poorer they get.
Reality is that the value of things is INDEPENDENT of the cost of production, and the only what to know the value, is from free market prices.
With free-market prices, you can make the right choices: you try to maximize profit, so you decide to minimize costs while maximizing the value produced. Profit is the actual driver of social progress and poverty reduction, but that's exactly what socialists hate the most and try to destroy.
And that's scientifically why socialism always fails.
A profit is the creation of something more valuable than its cost, so the people who generate more profit can acquire more resources than those who generate less. The people who create more wealth with those resources get more money.
For example, if 1 kg of iron produces more value when used to make cars than when used to make hammers, car manufacturers can pay more for the iron and acquire more of it, benefiting the community because the iron is used to make something more valuable. The extra cars produced are worth more than the hammers lost.
But, the abundance of cars makes cars less valuable, while the scarcity of hammers makes them more valuable. At some point, hammer manufacturers generate the same profit per kilogram of iron as car manufacturers. It is mathematically demonstrable that, at that point, the total value of cars and hammers reaches its highest level, and iron is being used at maximum efficiency.
Socialism has nothing even close to that because socialists don't know the value of things.
For that reason, one of the main tasks of Soviet spies was to go to USA supermarkets and record the prices of everything so that those prices could be applied in the Soviet Union, so they could plan what to produce. But that didn't work because free market prices are optimal, for local conditions, which were completely different in the Soviet Union.
So your Marxist economic beliefs simply don't work at all. They had been tried on more than 100 countries and failed on all of them. The Soviet Union produced fewer cars than Argentina and was never able to produce enough food to feed itself.
Therefore, it is easily demonstrable that the free market optimizes the use of resources, while socialism cannot even begin to start.
Second, profit is an increase in money, not value. If I make a mud pie and lobby the government $500 to impose a $1500 subsidy on mud pies and sell it for $1400, my profit is $899. If I hypnotise people and make them want to spend $1400 on a mud pie, my profit is $1399.
Third, you cannot "demonstrate" something by merely talking about it. It has to work in the real world.
Fourth, I don't recall saying anything about Karl Marx.
The free market price is the measurement of value, so value can absolutely be measured, and you were demonstrated wrong.
You do not understand what value is: it is not absolute, but relative. If you choose to buy food instead of rats, you raise the value of food and reduce the value of rats. So "value," or price, reflects priorities.
Value does not matter as an absolute value, but relative to other things.
If you are thirsty, a bottle of water has great value to you in that situation. But if you have a million bottles of water, the value of water to you is lower. So value depends on utility and abundance: it changes with the situation.
The free market assigns resources optimally because, as the situation changes, prices also change, and the market adapts.
Your example about "lobbying the government" is false because lobbying the government is not the free market; it is socialism. Only under socialism does the government manipulate prices and impose subsidies.
Socialists are the only ones always demanding governments that alter prices and make subsidies.
So you are criticizing socialism, not the free market. The free market is free FROM THE GOVERNMENT.
The free market works in the real world: all rich and developed countries are capitalist. All socialist countries are poor and miserable.
That's the scientific, experimental proof that socialism is wrong and capitalism is right.
Free markets don't exist in the real world, and neither does capitalism according to your logic.
The governments of all rich and developed countries regulate their markets, alter prices and make subsidies. No modern economy is free from the government.
No. That argument doesn't work because there are degrees of free market and capitalism. For example, there are two indexes of economic freedom: one by the Heritage Foundation and the other by the Fraser Institute.
Both indexes show that standards of living and wages rise statistically with economic freedom, and fall with lack of economic freedom.
Doesn’t personalized pricing by definition make stuff cheaper for people with less money on a relative basis (compared to people who are able to pay more)? The point is to extract the most each person can pay, so it is people who are able and willing to pay more who end up worse off here. Not poor people.
NY state did it in June https://gothamist.com/news/ny-lawmakers-vote-to-ban-surveill... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48443192)
The part of the headline you dropped (that relies on personal data) is the new part
So will this impact Uber that does some extremely shady stuff around your profile / phone type / battery life / account history / micro location / etc to tease out level of desperation & price elasticity.
Given Uber's history of ignoring laws they don't like, I don't expect anything to change until NY goes after them in court.
Uber goes a bit further and finds ways to modify software/service such that they comply with the letter of the law but not the spirit.
Example was the minimum wage law. They complied by projecting if there was enough demand for certain number of drivers on the app at any time to hit minimum wage. They boot logged in drivers from the app without warning or notice of when they'd be allowed back in, in order to reduce the supply of drivers to meet demand.
Of course the drivers remained in their cars, driving around the streets of the city, frantically trying to log back in. So in practice their pay likely went DOWN for the same amount of actual hours worked. They just weren't in-app for all those hours.
So curious how they will figure out a way to do that here. I don't want to even speculate here in case any Uber Pricing Quants are reading.
> battery life
lol - amazing how often highly technical people will believe urban legends when they fit their priors.
That one in particular has not only been denied, but disproven.
[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/uber-surge-pricing-phone-bat...
[1] https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/verify/verify-does-uber-ch...
The links you provide do not disprove the claim. The first link shows the user with the lower battery actually was charged slightly more and the second link is evidence of an n=1 test where both were charged similarly. I don’t know if Uber does this, has done this or has never done this practice but it wouldn’t surprise me if they had.
How can you possibly disprove it with a single test?
Uber is known to intentionally offering different experience for different users at different times.
The profile based pricing is obvious because I habitually used Uber over Lyft for last 5 years.. now when I open both I can see Uber pricing me at 2x what Lyft offers at each tier, aside from airport rides which seem more fixed.
[dead]
This is a good step.
Ban facial recognition by the government on civilians and ban Flock and similar. But they aren't interested in limiting their own power.
LexisNexis is another one. Shady broker that is buying our data and f*** reselling to everybody. Even hacked data from what I've heard
We should be doing this on the federal level we should not be doing it on the city level.
Gonna have to wait two years for the fed to do anything. Right now it’s a lame duck president who can still veto and cause unlimited drama. Nothing is going to happen.
Dynamic pricing seems to be a personalized form of price gouging. It's encouraging to see regulators jump on this quickly and try to nip it in the bud. I can't imagine working on a team that helps enable individual price gouging at a company.
I can't imagine living in an economy where every price I see may be singling me out for pricing abuse.
Thank god everyone got their heads out of their ass on the e-ink pricetags on shelves as part of these law packages. Turns out employees love working with them and they don't "cut jobs" like the UFCW said they do?
Price controls are always and everywhere a net welfare negative because they interfere with the ability of the market to route resources to their best use.
I find it both naive and ignorant to think markets just magically work in everyone's favor. Did we forget the 19th and 20th centuries where capital was given basically free reign to do anything and we ended up with robber barons, monopolies, live shootouts between unions and companies, shanty towns, and massive economic depressions?
Now explain why countries with more robber barons became the richest and most developed countries, with the highest standards of living.
And explain why the Soviet Union and China failed miserably and killed millions of people, mostly through extreme poverty.
It should had been the opposite. Explain why your arguments are the opposite of what happens in reality.
What the hell does the Soviet Union and China have to do with robber barons and the ills of capitalism? Why does the US have such a high prison population, murder and crime rate, and such a large wealth disparity? Why is it run by a host of clown politicians completely beholden to capital? Why do smaller countries with stronger social policies and larger restrictions on capital holders have better educated and happier populations with less crime? How does a country under embargo and economic sanctions for 60+ years and the ills of "communism", which is what I assume you are defaulting to since you mentioned the USSR and China, have the same life expectancy as the rich and powerful US?
Pick a random place in the USA.
https://shorturl.at/EbDPm
And compare it to a random place in Cuba.
https://shorturl.at/XUVCU
Pick a random place in New Zealand.
https://shorturl.at/Kfri1
And compare it to a random place in Venezuela.
https://shorturl.at/hCMMh
Pick a random place in the Netherlands.
https://tinyurl.com/yedrdx8t
And compare it to a random place in Russia.
https://tinyurl.com/5n7vjjpa
Socialists literally live in the garbage. There is trash everywhere.
If the US is so bad, why people from any other countries migrate to USA, specially from socialists countries, and no the other way?
The worse things you point about USA, the more the good things have to be to compensate, for everybody trying to get into the country, even illegally, even risking their lives to get inside.
Life under capitalism is sooo good, that everybody tries to get inside. Think of it. If the socialist discourse were right, it should be the opposite.
People want to immigrate to Norway too, does that mean people want to move there because of the heavy restrictions on Capital and the socialist government oil fund?
Trying to claim every good thing is thanks to capitalism and then ignoring every bad thing is myopic. You really think the US is the only country people want to move to? That people fleeing literal famine and persecution in other nations means nothing and they really just want more capitalism? Please.
>people fleeing literal famine and persecution in other nations means nothing
Everybody tries to escape FAMINE AND PERSECUTION in socialist countries. You defeated yourself.
Socialism ALWAYS causes famine and persecution because it doesn't work, so life is miserable, and socialism is a collection of lies (like pretending that the Nordic countries are socialist).
Socialism is hate speech, blaming innocent people for imaginary crimes. So, when socialism fails, and it always fails, it starts persecuting innocent people, whom socialists blame for the failure of the system. But even after killing everybody, socialism still doesn't work.
[dead]
You are lying again
Norway is top-ranked in the Index of Economic Freedom. Norway is literally one of the most capitalist countries on the planet. Is top 8 out of 184 countries.
https://economicfreedom.heritage.org/pages/country-pages/nor...
Socialism is so bad that socialists have to deny that socialist countries are socialist, meanwhile lying about the most capitalist countries being "socialist" to try to manufacture a lie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJgVqsLEATg
Maybe climb down from the whole bicameral economic model hobby horse, it's an overly simplistic take in a broad rich hybrid world and clinging to it as you are isn't doing your credibility any favours.
You ran out of arguments.
Look at Google Street View in any capitalist country and compare it to any socialist country.
Socialist countries are literally trash dumps.
> You ran out of arguments.
Nope. You stopped paying attention to usernames.
You made an ad hominem attack. That's a fallacy used by people without arguments.
That's your (incorrect) assertion.
The parent thinks that only the government implements price controls.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Depends on what they are. Inflexible and broad price caps like what the U.S. had starting in 1974 can cause a lot of damage because they create backpressure where inflation is crushing everything up against the cap.
Sliding price caps that target only specific things can work, like parking fees that scale according to the median wage of a given part of a city.
This seems to be more like the latter rather than the former. Retailers can still adjust prices before the business day is over based on immediate feedback, they're just not allowed to dig through a potential customer's device to do so or target specific individuals.
The utility of money is not linear, and the utility of goods is different based on individual needs. That means a policy that reduces absolute efficiency can still improve total welfare by distributing things in a way that's more useful.
Price controls don't create more supply but they reduce the percentage of buyers income taken up by the inflated item. That increases their total utility because they can buy more things for that money. It also leads to higher growth through aggregate demand, invested savings and avoiding nonlinear negative effects (small businesses shutting down because they can't pay their bills).
[dead]
The market actually has no such ability, despite what libertarians think.
The problem of optimizing the use of resources is called the "Economic Calculation Problem."
The free market has plenty of books and theories, backed by experimental data, so it's scientific.
Socialism has absolutely nothing, because socialists believe that the value of things is equal to the cost of production, and that's absurd.
If the value of things were equal to the cost of production, then a machine that is inefficient and consumes double the energy would produce double the value and would be better, when in fact it is worse.
If the value of things were equal to the cost of production, it would not matter how you assign the resources: whatever use you make of them uses the same resources, has the same cost, and is equally valuable. Using iron to make a pile of garbage would have to have the same value as using iron to build hospitals, machines, and airplanes.
That's why, under socialism, resources are always turned into products that are less valuable than their cost, and socialism creates poverty: the more socialists work, the poorer they get.
Reality is that the value of things is INDEPENDENT of the cost of production, and the only what to know the value, is from free market prices.
With free-market prices, you can make the right choices: you try to maximize profit, so you decide to minimize costs while maximizing the value produced. Profit is the actual driver of social progress and poverty reduction, but that's exactly what socialists hate the most and try to destroy.
And that's scientifically why socialism always fails.
Your statement is easy to make but false
How do you assign resources without free-market prices?
You have no answer. You don't even know how to start because socialism has no answers.
Your statement is easy to make but false
A profit is the creation of something more valuable than its cost, so the people who generate more profit can acquire more resources than those who generate less. The people who create more wealth with those resources get more money.
For example, if 1 kg of iron produces more value when used to make cars than when used to make hammers, car manufacturers can pay more for the iron and acquire more of it, benefiting the community because the iron is used to make something more valuable. The extra cars produced are worth more than the hammers lost.
But, the abundance of cars makes cars less valuable, while the scarcity of hammers makes them more valuable. At some point, hammer manufacturers generate the same profit per kilogram of iron as car manufacturers. It is mathematically demonstrable that, at that point, the total value of cars and hammers reaches its highest level, and iron is being used at maximum efficiency.
Socialism has nothing even close to that because socialists don't know the value of things.
For that reason, one of the main tasks of Soviet spies was to go to USA supermarkets and record the prices of everything so that those prices could be applied in the Soviet Union, so they could plan what to produce. But that didn't work because free market prices are optimal, for local conditions, which were completely different in the Soviet Union.
So your Marxist economic beliefs simply don't work at all. They had been tried on more than 100 countries and failed on all of them. The Soviet Union produced fewer cars than Argentina and was never able to produce enough food to feed itself.
Therefore, it is easily demonstrable that the free market optimizes the use of resources, while socialism cannot even begin to start.
That statement is easy to make but false.
First, value can't be measured.
Second, profit is an increase in money, not value. If I make a mud pie and lobby the government $500 to impose a $1500 subsidy on mud pies and sell it for $1400, my profit is $899. If I hypnotise people and make them want to spend $1400 on a mud pie, my profit is $1399.
Third, you cannot "demonstrate" something by merely talking about it. It has to work in the real world.
Fourth, I don't recall saying anything about Karl Marx.
The free market price is the measurement of value, so value can absolutely be measured, and you were demonstrated wrong.
You do not understand what value is: it is not absolute, but relative. If you choose to buy food instead of rats, you raise the value of food and reduce the value of rats. So "value," or price, reflects priorities.
Value does not matter as an absolute value, but relative to other things.
If you are thirsty, a bottle of water has great value to you in that situation. But if you have a million bottles of water, the value of water to you is lower. So value depends on utility and abundance: it changes with the situation.
The free market assigns resources optimally because, as the situation changes, prices also change, and the market adapts.
Your example about "lobbying the government" is false because lobbying the government is not the free market; it is socialism. Only under socialism does the government manipulate prices and impose subsidies.
Socialists are the only ones always demanding governments that alter prices and make subsidies.
So you are criticizing socialism, not the free market. The free market is free FROM THE GOVERNMENT.
The free market works in the real world: all rich and developed countries are capitalist. All socialist countries are poor and miserable.
That's the scientific, experimental proof that socialism is wrong and capitalism is right.
You are the one going against reality.
Free markets don't exist in the real world, and neither does capitalism according to your logic.
The governments of all rich and developed countries regulate their markets, alter prices and make subsidies. No modern economy is free from the government.
No. That argument doesn't work because there are degrees of free market and capitalism. For example, there are two indexes of economic freedom: one by the Heritage Foundation and the other by the Fraser Institute.
Both indexes show that standards of living and wages rise statistically with economic freedom, and fall with lack of economic freedom.
So you are proven wrong again by the facts.
We need us gdpr General data protection legislation
Doesn’t personalized pricing by definition make stuff cheaper for people with less money on a relative basis (compared to people who are able to pay more)? The point is to extract the most each person can pay, so it is people who are able and willing to pay more who end up worse off here. Not poor people.
Income/wealth isn’t the only indicator.
Should a woman with cancer pay more for a headscarf because she’s likely to need it more than a woman looking for a fashion accessory?