[failuser]

Uber and AirBnb are essentially illegal taxi and illegal hotel services. Remember taxi medallions? Remember zoning laws? Being illegal is not a showstopper for a startup because they are under a radar, being illegal is not a problem for a large business because they have enough power to not get prosecuted.

[teraflop]

Anybody else remember that time YC funded an international smuggling operation?

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/backpack

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8199286

[darby_nine]

Hell you could write off all of web3 with that sentence

[timdiggerm]

You say that like writing them off would be a bad thing

[naikrovek]

because web3 was a smuggling/laundering operation and those are illegal. basically, all cryptocurrency activity is immediately a suspicious activity.

[bitcoin_anon]

Reminder that until recently, most cannabis patients relied on smugglers to treat their illnesses.

[naikrovek]

reminder that cannabis has been distributed quite successfully and broadly for hundreds if not thousands of years, all without blockchain.

blockchain is the solution to exactly nothing. zero things are better with blockchain. zero. in the case of hiding cannabis use, the problem is that it is illegal despite having valid medicinal uses.

[bitcoin_anon]

It wasn’t widely distributed over the internet until Bitcoin. Bitcoin solved the problem of irreversible payments over a communications channel without an intermediary.

[tourmalinetaco]

Reminder that a minority of cases does not justify smuggling for recreational use.

[bitcoin_anon]

I disagree. I’m fine with millions of recreational users supporting smugglers so that a single patient can get the medicine they need. It was the black market the safeguarded this plant for generations until we came to our senses again.

[8organicbits]

Their website is "backpack bang"? What a strange name, the last thing I want is for my backpack to "bang" when moving unknown goods across international borders!

[calgoo]

Looks like they are still active!

[oldgregg]

Anyone else remember when HackerNews had an adventurous libertarian ethos before the school marms infested the place with irrelevant and low vibrational commentary?

[failuser]

“Is it legal?” should be a question adventurous libertarian should ask himself. Something being illegal never stopped hackers, being it exploiting vulnerabilities for profit or not complying with outdated regulation. That is just good strategy. I don’t expect libertarians to ask a question “is it ethical” the more anarchist wing of the hacker community might ask themselves.

[romwell]

>Anyone else remember when HackerNews had an adventurous libertarian ethos before the school marms infested the place with irrelevant and low vibrational commentary?

Boy will you not like the "high vibrational" commentary people would have for that adventurous™ libertarianism©* of yours.

The "medium vibrational" ones merely wish its pursuers behind bars, the more energetic ones are discussing optimal guillotine blade shape profiles.

* * * * * * *

Question to you.

Would a startup that maintains a public database of names, addresses, and approximate locations of people with net worth over $1B be libertariously adventurous enough by your standards?

You know, like Page, but crowdsourced, and with wage workers as the users (not as product). Purely opt-in. Give it a higher-energy vibe name, like, say, 'rage (as in "average" - for the average people).

Anyone who sees Elon Musk could anonymously report his location to 'rage, giving wage workers an option to avoid providing services to him - just like Pave gives employers an option to avoid getting services from undesirable workers.

Are you a pastry seller who'd rather call in sick the day Peter Thiel or his buddy JD Vance are in town again? Get 'rage, and avoid the awkward interaction.

Anyone who gets a wind of someone fitting the wealth profile will have an option to anonymously contribute this data to 'rage's Wealth Accumulator Registry (Rage WAR™).

They may be breaking their NDA's while doing so, but that won't be 'rage's problem, of course. 'rage will not be in the business of policing individual actions and limiting users' personal freedoms.

The user identity will be e2e encrypted, guaranteeing anonymity. It will be impossible to prove that someone has a 'rage account against their will, or find out they have one.

The app, however, will also allow users to confirm that they have a 'rage account if they choose to do so. This way, wage workers who are concerned about their peers could ask them to privately confirm their account status and contribution karma to avoid sharing a workplace with a scab.

Registration will require entering your own personal wealth data into 'rage WAR™.

While tax returns can be faked, someone uploading a copy of their W-2 paystub will practically ensure that one does not fit the target wealth profile for the B-status.

Those could be faked too, of course - and one could see large employers not wanting to collaborate with 'rage for whatever reasons.

That's exactly where startups like Pave come into play to verify the correctness of the data.

'rage and Pave would not only complement each other in the financial data ecosystem, they would form a natural symbiosis, giving wage workers incentives to ask their employers to use Pave. As for Pave, 'rage would merely be one of its clients, consuming W-2 data just like everyone else.

I hope you will find this proposal sufficiently adventurous and relevant; and I would love to hear your thoughts on this matter.

[FactKnower69]

he flagged your post, too adventurous for him :(

[Havoc]

Eric Schmidt echoed similar sentiment in his recent interview. Basically do it, if startup fails then it doesn’t matter. If it succeeds then lawyers can sort it out.

[arrosenberg]

He would know. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297...

[SoftTalker]

Also in these "gig" type companies, the people who are actually breaking the laws are the workers, e.g. the drivers or the homeowners in the case of Uber and AirBnB. The startup is the enabler, yes, but they will try to throw their workers under the bus before they take responsibility themselves. They don't own the cars, they don't own the properties, and they are most likely in a far-away jurisdiction.

[ath3nd]

SBF and Elizabeth Holmes would like a word.

And hopefully everyone else "successful" having the morals of a greedy chimpanzee follows the same fate as those swindlers. Whatever happened to doing good by people and society (or at least pretending to)?

[atq2119]

Should inciting others to commit crimes be in itself a crime? Certainly, if somebody influential enough does it, it has the potential to destabilize our society with catastrophic results.

[lisnake]

Didn't work for Elizabeth Holmes

[rodiger]

There's a difference between "doing an illegal thing as a product" and "lying to investors about your product"

[papercrane]

This is true, although it's also true that many startups lie to, or mislead, investors about the state of their products. If things work out, then the investors don't care, and if they don't its usually at scale and messy enough the government isn't going to prosecute.

[santiagobasulto]

Which makes total sense for consumers as well. If the startup succeeds is because consumers are finding value in it. Uber is the best example. Uber is ilegal only in countries with deep corruption where taxi unions can make legislators ignore their constituents. Uber (and any other car sharing app) is the best solution for me as a consumer compared to the traditional old school taxi service.

[Havoc]

> Which makes total sense for consumers as well.

Kinda. Often this casual law breaking isn’t entirely victimless even if it benefits both consumer and the startup. I think Schmidt was talking about using content to train models. So artists getting short end of stick. Or Airbnb causing locals getting prices out or whatever.

There is certainly some dodgy protectionism happening of the sort you describe but there are also externalities borne by society for this break laws startup style.

[warkdarrior]

As a user of GenAI, I get to create and save drawings in the style of any artist I like, without having to pay the artist $$$$. This is important to me because I like certain styles, but do not care for an original drawing nor have the money to pay for such.

And the externalities introduced here are not borne by all of society, but only by a small number of people (How many important artists are there? 10,000? 100,000?). Just like horse-and-buggy drivers were affected by automobiles, while the vast majority of people benefited from automobiles.

[Havoc]

Right so externalities are fine as long as they don’t hit you and it fucks over less than 100k people…

That is…quite a stance. Not quite sure what to even say here.

[consteval]

Uber is objectively worse for every single party involved. Driver makes less, customer pays more, Uber has to coordinate a huge system.

Uber "won" because they cheated. They operated at a loss for almost 15 years, on the welfare of investors. Guess what, mom and pop running a taxi can't live on a negative wage.

[cellis]

> Uber is objectively worse for every single party involved.

Wrong on at least one count. I've never been refused service while black from Uber. The taxi industry was brought out of the dark ages of discrimination by Uber et al. Taxis (around the world) have tried to rip me off almost half the time I've used them, with no accountability.

[santiagobasulto]

I prefer Uber everywhere I go. Even if I pay more, I know it upfront. I have their safety in place, etc.

[consteval]

Okay. Objectively you're paying easily 2x more and, objectively, you're not safer in developed countries.

[talldatethrow]

Totally. I propose we start a brothelBnB next door to your home. Home owner wins, customer wins, worker wins, startup wins! Score! Market has spoken!

I also recommend HoboSleepinCar Driveway as a service next to your home. The consumer has spoken!

[santiagobasulto]

Really good argument, congrats

[yonran]

Ironically for a question about antitrust price fixing you just named two incumbent government-sanctioned cartels (zoning and taxi medallions) that restrict supply and keep prices high. They would be illegal if private companies made them.

[jmward01]

> They would be illegal if private companies made them.

A lot of things governments do would be illegal if private companies did them. Are you arguing that governments shouldn't have special abilities that companies can't have? Should every road be owned by a company? Should the police report to Amazon instead of the local municipality where you may actually have a say in how they are run?

We give governments additional powers because they, at least nominally, answer to citizens and society. Companies have no such responsibility.

[yonran]

I’m saying that government regulations that fix prices should be scrutinized and repealed if they reduce opportunity for ordinary people. Such as zoning codes that price out the poor.

[keerthiko]

I believe the argument here is that the way to do that isn't by establishing a private business that flaunts and undermines those government regulations, but by changing the policies through government process.

Obviously that's easier said than done, and SV has a track record of "ask forgiveness not permission" as a successful tactic for effecting policy change. But many times it results in indefinite undermining of government which leads to selective enforcement and cartels, which is worthy of criticism (of both government and VC-powered undermining of government).

[ascagnel_]

> I believe the argument here is that the way to do that isn't by establishing a private business that flaunts and undermines those government regulations, but by changing the policies through government process.

And to make those who interfaced with the prior system in good faith whole again; eg: drivers who bought taxi medallions for six figures USD, only to have the value of the medallion plummet with the arrive of "rideshare" services.

[yonran]

To make beneficiaries whole is perhaps the worst reason to keep a monopolistic system. In the case of taxi medallions in San Francisco, they are technically still owned by the city and the medallion should never have had any private value to begin with; Mayor Gavin Newsom should have leased them to the drivers instead of creating a $250,000 transfer program to give windfalls to retirees. In the case of zoning, ideally we would tax much of the land rent to reduce the incentive to exclude and increase the incentive to create capital. Rents from a government-created monopoly should not be anyone’s ticket to retirement.

[digging]

> They would be illegal if private companies made them.

Yes, that's kind of the main difference between government functions and private companies. Are you saying the very idea of zoning strikes you as a problem? Or are you trying to call out the bad implementations which strangle urban prosperity in the US?

[yonran]

> Yes, that's kind of the main difference between government functions and private companies

Perhaps that should change. Or at least it’s a reason to scrutinize and repeal laws that are used for price fixing.

> Are you saying the very idea of zoning strikes you as a problem? Or are you trying to call out the bad implementations which strangle urban prosperity in the US?

Zoning Rules! by William Fischel gives good a history of zoning. Zoning was originally for segregation within the city but to the question of prices, no it was not inherently problematic. It was not until the 1970s that zoning was used for growth control to make entire cities unaffordable.

[BeFlatXIII]

Unless it's pollution-based zoning, I agree that the idea of zoning is a problem.

[swatcoder]

That's not ironic. Governments and private companies are not the same kind of entities. They have different roles, different roots of legitimacy, different forms of accountability, different operational objectives, and carry different expectations.

[yonran]

It’s ironic that in response to a question about price fixing, failuser brought up other companies that were formed to circumvent government price fixing, and in his examples the governments doing the price fixing were supposedly the good guys!

In the case of Uber, they successfully broke up the taxi cartel since the state PUC ruled that ride hail is a separate category.

In the case of Airbnb, according to their founding story they were created to help economize on space because rents were high in San Francisco due to zoning. Although they made a useful service, they did not succeed in reducing rents because the underlying zoning is still the constraint that keeps rents high.

[failuser]

I did not say those were even good laws. Many people go to jail for breaking bad laws though.

And the government can establish monopolies on many things, my private nuclear weapons startup did not get much traction either.

[ein0p]

Zoning, ok, but yellow cabs are now often cheaper than Uber. Last time I took a ride from the airport the difference was not small, like 50%.

[asdasdsddd]

compete or die

[ein0p]

The problem with that is thanks to many years of below cost pricing Uber has become synonymous with taxi now, and most people don’t even realize (or care) that taxis are often cheaper.

[asdasdsddd]

Uber is not seen as synonymous to taxi, its seen as better; more convenient (one app for any city), less fraudulent, and more safe. Uber more readily kicks drivers off the platform (for better or for worse)

[fwip]

Many things a government does would be illegal if private companies did them. For example, prison, the draft, and taxes. The government is allowed to do it because we (as a society) believe it's better for the government to do these things than private individuals or companies.

[yonran]

Can you give examples of the topic at hand, price fixing, that are justified? There are a handful of progressive forms of price fixing (e.g. minimum wage laws), but many others should be added to the Niskanen Center’s list of bad regulations in the Captured Economy.

[__loam]

Utilities that trend towards natural monopolies due to high barriers to entry like water and electricity infrastructure are often run by the government or heavily regulated because pricing would be extortionate if the market were allowed to set prices.

[yonran]

Fair enough, utility regulations fix prices except in the opposite direction. Without zoning, landowners could not act as a cartel since that would violate antitrust laws, whereas without utility regulation, a natural monopoly could set prices as high as the market will bear.

[keerthiko]

Yep, basic human rights are priceless, and by capitalist mechanics, their pricing will always converge at "how much can we get away with in the current economy?" Government oversight is the only way we currently have to manage this somewhat.

As an example in support of this, healthcare is barely price-regulated and hardly run by the government in America, and is thus extortionate.

[yonran]

> As an example in support of this, healthcare is barely price-regulated and hardly run by the government in America, and is thus extortionate.

They are supply-regulated by governments. According to Niskanen Center, the high cost of health care is due to the American Medical Association limiting new accredited medical schools and certificate-of-need laws limiting new hospitals. https://www.niskanencenter.org/faster_fairer/liberating_the_...

[fwip]

Sure, zoning and taxi medallions are two examples of justified "price fixing."

[rrrix1]

You have heard of the Prison Indistrial Complex right? Our Prisons have been For-Profit for a long time now. Totally legal, government sanctioned privatized penitentiaries.

[fwip]

Yes, I have. Perhaps I should have made clear that putting people in prison was the thing that was illegal for private companies, not operating a prison.

[insane_dreamer]

> essentially illegal taxi and illegal hotel services

I don't know about Uber, but Airbnb deflects this by saying they are not in fact a hotel service. Rather hosts are hotel services, and Airbnb is simply a discovery platform matching buyers and sellers. It's up to an individual host to make sure they are complying with local laws including whether their city or district allows an individual to rent out their house or a room in it without a hotel license (this varies from city to city). In this way Airbnb (fairly or unfairly) pushes the burden and liability onto the hosts.

I believe this is also a huge reason why Uber doesn't want to classify drivers as employees because then it is the taxi service, whereas it could argue that the drivers are each operating their own taxi service and Uber is just a discovery and payment platform.

[failuser]

I’m pretty sure an assassination marketplace would not fly under the same legal pretense. The platform won’t do the killing, right?

If hotel or taxi lobby was more powerful or caught the threat early on AirBnB and Uber would have been destroyed.

[Manuel_D]

Taxi medallions were (and AFAIK still are) required to respond to people hailing a taxi from the street. It is not required to book a ride via phone or internet. Uber and Lyft drivers never needed taxi medallions.

[whimsicalism]

uber: mostly not technically because the key thing is that they are not soliciting rides from the street, was my understanding.

airbnb had a much more legally tenuous start

[failuser]

Uber even had a whole program to thwart law enforcement attempts to investigate them called “greyball”. They knew what they are doing. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...