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More evidence Big Tech valuations are driven primarily by worker exploitation. Keep 'em coming.
It is not like they aren't exploiting businesses either... Looking at Amazon(retail) and almost all SaaS services...
You eat an elephant one bite at a time. This bite was good, lots more bites to go.
I realized what most of sibling comments refer to as soon as Mamdani quoted DoorDash's CEO on the "Greedy Algorithm," which I had not heard of before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_algorithm
https://x.com/FortuneMagazine/status/2084806653472358752
Ahh, they're all paperclip maximizers building the torment nexus for valuations and shareholder returns at the cost of everyone else. This is the lens through which I see these enterprises now until proven otherwise. I wish it wasn't so, but we must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be. It's such a shame most of this is turning out to be equal parts grift and worker exploitation in some fashion. The tech and code is just the cover as progress and innovation, "ignore the man behind the curtain."
the common unifying theme of most tech companies over the past 15 years has been rent extraction. whether posing as middlemen who VC’d their way to monopoly power ruining both sides of their target market, or taking a common good without attribution (attention, knowledge) tech hasn’t been much a game changer beyond digitizing something and charging everyone more for it
And they mostly keep getting away with it because digital makes things preposterously more convenient.
I missed the bus by 1 minute today, putting me in a place to wait 30 minutes for the next one.
Lyfted to the office in 10 minutes. Cost $10. That $10 was worth 30 minutes of my day.
Of course! that's always what "disruption" referred to.
What does "this is not a pay wall" mean - if I have to give personal information over, that is a price.
Didn't read - too expensive.
I am so trained now, that I didn’t even read what they were asking for. Just closed the tab and came here to see if there was anything of value. Too expensive to even read their wall.
Yep this is what I did as well. I also just close tabs if it ever pops up a "sign up for our newsletter" thing.
I mean, test@example.com worked so info doesn't have to be that personal...
Journalism is labor
Information wants to be free. But other than AI slop (where the tokens have become too cheap to meter), information costs money to produce. Pay with you info or your money. It's amazing how many people just cannot come to grips with that concept.
https://archive.is/RWt8f
Disabling javascript let me read the whole article without any account nonsense.
I just reload the page and hit 'esc' a bunch of times right after it loads but before the paywall pops up. Works on 3/4 of these soft paywalled sites.
Your identity isn't considered of value to you, you can't monetize it. We can, but since it has no value to you, give it to us for free.
Works with any random email, kinda fine tbh
Seems like they spent more on campaigning than they did on the extra pay and fines here though. Who's making these financial calculations?
They just agreed to a $131 million settlement. The article says this is a hundred times what they spent to prevent Mamdani from getting elected.
Presumably somebody who thinks the Mamdani’s policies will be popular and spread to other jurisdictions. After all, why campaign against an idea that you think will fail? It’d exist as a prominent warning flag for the next group that considers it.
services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more. you order a meal that costs $10. total charge comes to $25. then delivery worker made $5 on that order. + the delivery worker expects a tip.
which means the company sees both the delivery worker and the person who ordered as suckers. no wonder ride-share companies jumped onto food-delivery.
I thought they were built on "time is money". If you make the equivalent of $70 an hour, do you care about spending $15 for someone to bring you lunch and save you 15-30 minutes of your workday?
only $1.4M? DD was not confident in their efforts to stop Mamdani. This is like a couple weeks of work from high priced political consultants in NYC.
The article disagrees:
If they were honest about it and said something like "we believe our actions were fair and legal and disagree with this decision" it would at least be ideologically consistent.
This is villain shit.
Even though the press likes to give Mamdani all the credit for these types of things, this started with a law passed under DeBlasio, and most of the investigation was done under Adams.
Mamdani deserves credit for taking this all the way.
Adams was "indicted in September 2024 on federal charges including bribery and wire fraud, accused of accepting over $100,000" from Turkey. He's now an Albanian citizen, because "he loves travel."
I don't really agree that this judgement would have happened with anyone as mayor. That road is long and paved with gold distractions.
How did you arrive to this conclusion?
Better than about him like the rest of it, I suppose.
Josh Johnson has a great bit about Mamdani:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SCKj7gwbYrc
I'm not so sure this is a victory lol
Guess never got a chance to learn empathy.