[neom]

Any business can be run in a shady manner if the human decided. One fully automated business I think could exist and might be useful is apartment/condo rental. I'd pay a business $100 for a proper report on the rentals available in a city that meet a criteria and are amalgamated from all the the various platforms. Doing it yourself (at least in Canada) means creating accounts on a bunch of platforms, and the process is very tedious.

[justinclift]

> I'd pay a business $100 for a proper report on the rentals available in a city

I'm curious about things of this nature, where it seems like a case of "this information is important to me and I want accurate results".

But then the talk of automation seems to exclude careful human review of those results, which is needed to stop hallucinations from making their way to customers.

[jensensbutton]

> I'd pay a business $100 for a proper report on the rentals available in a city that meet a criteria and are amalgamated from all the the various platforms.

If this can be fully automated then you can just ask your own agent to do this and wouldn't need a business for it. And agents can already fill out web forms just fine.

[neom]

Well like most rich guys, I have an assistant, so I don't need or use "agents" - maybe my assistant could learn to use "agents" - but her core competency isn't, nor should it be, learning to use AI agents in any meaningful way. Maybe she could outsource it to someone who got their agents to do it for her for $100.... Same with my little sister who has a 5 year old and a 2 year old and doesn't really know how a computer works never mind what AI agents are.

[ToucanLoucan]

> Any business can be run in a shady manner if the human decided.

No kidding.

> One fully automated business I think could exist and might be useful is apartment/condo rental.

We're starting strong on the category of businesses that generate no actual value and just scrape an amount of value out of existing transactions that would've happened anyway, i.e., rent-seeking. But good for you, you can now artificially shrink the supply of limited-availability goods in the market, then gate access to them behind a paywall, and you don't even have to do the minimal amount of actual work required to fleece strangers for part of their paycheck while creating no value.

[kortilla]

Despite paying rent for an apartment, it’s not rent-seeking. You get a place to live out of it that wouldn’t exist without the owner renting it to you.

Rent-seeking is a very specific economic term where a party inserts themselves into a transaction and takes a cut without providing anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Being a landlord comes with significant responsibilities and even principal investment risk.

[chimeracoder]

> Despite paying rent for an apartment, it’s not rent-seeking. You get a place to live out of it that wouldn’t exist without the owner renting it to you.

> Rent-seeking is a very specific economic term where a party inserts themselves into a transaction and takes a cut without providing anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

> Being a landlord comes with significant responsibilities and even principal investment risk.

Economist here. Yes, this was a correct use of the term "rent-seeking behavior". It's actually quite funny to see someone try to argue otherwise, when the name was chosen because this is, literally, the textbook example.

[kortilla]

It is not the textbook example. The textbook example is regulatory capture where people put in an artificial gate and charge people to cross it.

Everything functioned fine without the gate and nothing was improved by the gate.

An apartment LEASE is literally nothing like that. You’re borrowing something you don’t have and it’s a rivalrous good so other people can’t use it while you are.

Renting (leasing) a car, an apartment, or any other good like that is not rent seeking behavior. No actual economist would argue that because it dilutes the term to something completely meaningless.

[tardedmeme]

A landlord is partially rent-seeking. Yes they provide the service of making sure the apartment is habitable (cough) and so on, but they charge above market price for that. How do I know? I know because I'd do it myself for cheaper if that was an option, but it's not an option because landlords own all the spare apartments. (Why don't I buy one then? They're very expensive because I have to price-match the landlords, who are paying very high prices for the right to rent-seek!)

The market for real estate is basically the market for taxi medallions. It costs something to run a taxi, but there are a limited number of medallions and you can charge well over that cost because you have a medallion, which also makes the medallions very expensive. Until Uber comes along. But you can't just make an illegal apartment without land the same way you can make an illegal taxi without a medallion.

[kortilla]

Medallions are artificial limits, land isn’t.

Also your rent comes with significant rights beyond a chunk of land.

It’s not rent-seeking at all. Leasing out a rivalrous asset does not land in that category in the slightest.

[hluska]

So if anyone accepts your challenge will you move the goalposts and tell them their business isn’t good enough in your point of view? It doesn’t seem like you’re actually interested in dialogue. You also don’t seem to be aware of the definition of rent seeking but that’s an entirely different topic.

I’ll sit out your little experiment because I’m not in the mood for this kind of response. But you may discover that if you turn down the venom a little, qualified people could teach you things like automated business models that are quite ethical and even the definition of rent seeking.

Have a nice day.

[ToucanLoucan]

> So if anyone accepts your challenge will you move the goalposts and tell them their business isn’t good enough in your point of view?

It's not a value judgement, it's literally rent-seeking behavior. You're seeking, to rent, property that you own, presumably for a profit. Like come on, it's what the word means.

> You also don’t seem to be aware of the definition of rent seeking but that’s an entirely different topic.

Both my command of the English language and the economist elsewhere in this thread disagree with you, but go off I guess.

> qualified people could teach you things like automated business models that are quite ethical and even the definition of rent seeking.

And yet instead of citing one you went off a tone-policing rant.

My question was quite open-ended. I genuinely didn't expect someone to come in and list the textbook example that an actual economist went on to point out was crap for the exact reason I said, truly. But that's the kind of poetic unawareness that one really can't plan for.

> Have a nice day.

I did, thanks!

[neom]

So basically you didn’t ask your original question in good faith. Got it. Thanks for wasting my time.

[jcgrillo]

Could there be a simpler explanation?