This is for stock sales which they did not restrict. Robinhood stopped the purchase of stock which does not require a collateral because the money is coming directly from the users cash balance. Don’t believe whatever they say, RH action was specifically to stop the short squeeze.
The clearinghouse collateral requirements in part protect the clearinghouse from things that can go wrong at the brokerage, like if Robinhood had a vulnerability that let people place huge orders without paying for them, and they were, like, put out of business overnight.
The DTCC requirements are all about protecting brokerages (and other counter parties) from each other. Basically (and I’m not an expert in this) it’s a risk sharing scheme where if Robinhood (or any other broker) goes under all the other members cover the positions.
I don’t think it has anything to do with margin vs non-margin accounts for instance. It’s just a formula where you split up the outstanding shares by the VaR as I’d get a capital requirement.
Thanks. I don't use Robinhood but I thought your buying fund there consisted of actually-deposited cash. In that case why can't they use a customer's money to cover the collateral? Is it a business practice or a requirement for some other reason?
A) no they, and most brokers will let you start trading as soon as you “deposit” money even though you have many days to reverse those deposits. But:
B) your shares trading immediately is a fiction. It takes days for those trades to settle. And any subsequent trades you make with those funds are all subject to credit risk. The central clearing house collateral rules are about risk management around that multi day float.
I think but am not an expert on this that the DTCC times explicitly require the capital to come from the brokerage not the clients. I don’t know why but can guess that it’s because it’s the brokerages taking on the risk not the individuals.
If the pandemic continues for another 9 months probably if not things are going to get worse, because people are going to go out a lot more when the pandemic is over and order delivery’s much less.
This is a regulatory response to Silicon Valley’s implementation
of predatory pricing.
Let me explain:
Predatory pricing is defined as “the pricing of goods or services at such a low level that other suppliers cannot compete and are forced to leave the market.”
For silicon valley startups like Doordash and Grubhub this is accomplished by acquiring customers at a significant loss in ways that may often seem idiotic.
The End game is to be the dominant food ordering platform in any given town where you get to dictate rates like 25%.
Since predatory pricing is illegal, this response is justified. However, it would be better if regulators enforce predatory pricing rules to begin with, which they rarely ever do.
The problem is that this response is in the wrong direction. By forcing prices lower, we guarantee that only over-capitalized predatory businesses can compete in the space.
The problem is that consumer advocacy and anti-monopoly are practically the opposite thing. The end result of government action here should be short-term higher prices to the consumer, that reflect the actual cost of operations, rather than lower prices to the consumer (i.e. "free delivery") that is achieved by pricing at a loss to drive out competitors.
> we guarantee that only over-capitalized predatory businesses can compete in the space.
Assuming you can't make money at 10%, why would even a well-capitalized company that's OK with having a loss leader enter that market? The Uber strategy has been to enter a market fast, drive competitors out (possibly taking a loss), then (and looking at their earnings, this never happened, probably because there's a competitor in most of their markets) raise prices and finally turn a profit. If you can never turn a profit, why would you enter the market?
> If you can never turn a profit, why would you enter the market?
Because you can still raise money, sell your company, and make money in the process. An extreme form would be a pyramid scheme where early investors make lots of money, leaving later investors with the problems.
Because they want to make a bet on the future being different. Or they just want to pump up the company's value enough that the initial investors can get out with their cash and leave the shareholders/acquirer holding the bag.
If the delivery companies start shifting the burden to consumers, or if they start forcing bicycle couriers to comply with the rule, or if they can successfully contest it in court, then it makes sense to some degree to stay in the fight.
Was that really the case? Netflix delivered DVDs for a decade before it started online streaming.
If I remember correctly Netflix’s original business model was more like a gym membership than brand building for an online platform that was a decade in the future.
Only if they don't change it in the future in response to "market forces", or if they start charging consumers fees directly or some other workaround and then the city council has to retract this guidance because people are complaining about the higher prices.
The restaurant should get paid regular price for their food and maybe even a little extra to cover boxing it nicely for delivery, keeping it warm. The delivery company should charge the customer the price they need pay to have it delivered to them. I expect the 10% max fee if around the margin the restaurant is making so I'm not sure this fixes anything.
Food delivery is an awesome service but it costs money, consumers should expect to pay a higher right for food and grocery delivery in the long term.
And delivery companies should expect smaller margins for coordinating it.
You think all of that hasn't been tried already? Why would the delivery services leave free money on the table if it worked? Consumers would not pay those high costs in enough numbers to make it work so we end up with this model. It's a very price sensitive market.
OTOH, maybe the restaurant should get paid less for the food because the patron isn't tying up a table, isn't using the restroom, isn't consuming any water/ice, isn't creating any linen/silver/plates/glasses that need washing.
I'm just repeating what another comment said. The 10% cap doesn't include the delivery fee. It's about the price of the food. Delivery services can't charge more than $55 for $50 worth of food but they can still charge $10 for the delivery if that is what it costs.
Yes, but neither is the rent for an in-store experience. Having the item of the price subsidize the shipping vs. pay the merchant's rent is not all that different.
They take existing, established chefs or restaurants and clone the cuisine so that the food can be produced in a larger kitchen, potentially reaching a wider delivery area.
I'm struggling to call this predatory pricing when most of the food delivery app industry is unprofitable.
The correct industry action: push through higher pricing for the end users, share gains with drivers and restaurants to get to a sustainable business model, and accept the resulting decline in unit volume. (which also means fewer drivers will have jobs, so there's a human cost here as well)
It's easy to tell "corporations" to just suck it up, but you're dealing with a pure variable cost business here. If you make it unprofitable to serve a particular geography, they'll just exit the market. That only consolidates future market power in the surviving businesses....
"Predatory" refers to competing businesses, not customers. The fact that the industry is unprofitable is the main indication that the pricing is predatory.
It's unclear to me if this industry would exist at all if it were profitable. There's a minimum volume needed to make the industry viable, once you fall below some (quite high) density of people ordering food delivery, it doesn't work.
> The End game is to be the dominant food ordering platform in any given town where you get to dictate rates like 25%.
You fight back by calling your order in and having them deliver it or pick it up yourself. I do this 99%* of the time as I refuse to pay a web server $8+ order+delivery fee for a meal that costs the same. It's absurd to think that people are so lazy that they cant pick up a phone or walk a few blocks/cycle/drive to get their meal.
*save for the rare late night drunk+high AF Dominoes orders.
I really hate this sort of argument... that people who use the newer, more convenient, technology are just lazy and should keep using the old way of doing things.
Why stop at delivery apps? Why are lazy people driving cars instead of just riding horses? Why are you ordering things online instead of just going to the store? Why are you farming using that tractor instead of a horse drawn plow?
Small conveniences add up. I don't want to live in a world where we aren't allowed to make things slightly easier.
Because sometimes the net result of individual optimization (predatory food delivery apps) is social deoptimization (local restaurants close).
And for the same reason that we don't allow health insurance to charge people different rates on the basis of their genetic profiles, the exercise of government prerogative to optimize for the greater good, on behalf of all, is apt here.
Whether or not this particular approach is the best way to produce that good is a valid debate.
We don't even let health insurance to charge people different rates based on pre-existing conditions anymore, which is what drove health insurance premiums through the roof.
Almost in perfect correlation as one by one pre-existing condition limits were legislatively banned over the years. And ACA eliminated almost all remaining pre-existing conditions, so of course it drove insurance costs and pricing sky high.
If pre-existing conditions were the primary cause for premium increases, the ACA's one-fell-swoop removal of them would've had far more significant impact on that chart.
Limits on pre-existing conditions mainly affect individual policy pricing, corporate health insurance are already pooled and because of that always had fewer pre-existing condition limits.
The whole reason for health insurance in the first place is for healthy, wealthy, or young people to pay for unhealthy, poor, or old people.
That’s the whole reason for any kind of insurance. It’s a mechanism for lucky people to pay the costs of unlucky people. And even lucky people pay for it it because you never know how your luck will change.
If you take your idea for a pricing model to the extreme, everybody pays pretty much what they need to cover their own costs, which could be extremely low or extremely high. This is no different than if nobody had insurance at all.
The difference is statistically, most people are going to get old. Lucky is if you either don’t need insurance when you’re young or you live to be old.
Many of these platforms charge a fee for phone calls to the restaurant too.
Platforms like Seamless go so far as to set up websites for restaurants (that often have better SEO than the restaurant's original website), so the phone number listed routes through Seamless, helping to ensure they get their cut of any order.
There are a number of restaurants listed on Yelp in my area for whom the phone number listed is answered by GrubHub. I refuse to deal with GrubHub, so I make an effort to search for a direct number, but it is often difficult to find.
I'm not sure how GrubHub is getting themselves set as the primary number for restaurants in Yelp, but it's happening.
>If people don’t understand that a middleman adds cost as an adult, then that is an education issue.
I think the point is that middlemen are now using deceptive business practice to obscure the fact they are involved and in many ways cannibalizing direct business to the restaurants using "dark patterns". In the case of middlemen changing the phone number of the restaurant on services like Yelp/Google Maps without the consent of the restaurant should be fraud...its almost like I go to a bank and put my ATM machine in front of the bank ATM machines and charge customers withdraw fees...then claiming well I am a 3rd party of course I had fees (even disclosed it in order to proceed), while ignoring the totality of the circumstances.
"The solution is high-resistance individual actions to address a situation with no societal benefit created by a company with more money than you can even begin to visualize."
This is the sort of thing one says to either feel very, very clever about themselves or because they don't want things fixed. Which is it?
I don’t consider using a browser or google maps or Apple Maps to search name and phone number of a restaurant to be high resistance.
If people want to give their money to middlemen because they are too lazy to call or use a search website, that is their problem. We don’t need laws around every single idiotic behavior people do, and if they find value in paying an app maker an extra $10, so be it. I’ll continue to do the common sense thing and spending 30 seconds calling them because I can’t afford $10 to door dash for what is a useless service to me.
How much money they may or may not have is irrelevant.
"You fight back by calling your order in" -- if they are offering free delivery through an app, all you are doing is paying inflated prices to subsidize their delivery customers. If they are not offering you an explicit called-in or picked-up discount, you're not really helping anyone except all those people using the app.
I've noticed more and more restaurants in the Seattle area are listing higher prices for the GrubHubs/UberEats (some have explicitly told me during pickup to just call it in if I want to save some money). The picked up discount already exists within the app. So what you're saying is starting to happen as restaurants wise up.
I am really glad to hear that! I can only hope that this practice spreads. I want there to be a viable business model in the restaurant delivery business, but it has to be actually viable, which most likely means that it will have to be local approaches.
That makes no sense. Maybe normally ordering at my favorite place nets them about $5. I don't want any gig economy startup cutting into that profit, when I pay it. I understand it is worth it for the restaurant to take GH orders and net $3 on them, I just think using that service is the wrong option.
I care about supporting my favorite local eats. Same reason we should all be tipping full even when getting take out. Support your local restaurants. Many are about to go out of business.
Sometimes it’s really hard to do this though. I recently wanted to order from a sushi place and I couldn’t find the paper menu with their number so I searched DDG. The first three or four things I clicked on weren’t the direct website of the restaurant. And only one was an ad.
I get that for some of these small local restaurant owners the margins are tight and I’ll do my best to make sure my money goes directly to them and not GrubHub/Yelp/Uber but I also understand that most of these places aren’t run by front-end developers and SEO experts. I’m not sure what the answer is but I also don’t think it’s always quite as simple as you’re making it out to be.
The answer is another tool that reduces friction to setting up a website. I'm friends with a bunch of bands that don't have websites, but they do have facebook pages! Why? Because they're free and they do what the band needs from a website.
A restaurant doesn't need more than a page with contact info and link to a pdf menu. But even standing that up is a massive hurdle for <people who don't browse HN casually>.
In my experience, most restaurant staff get super upset about this -- especially if you ask them to bring your order out. Restaurant owners need to be more clear with their staff about needing to support this.
> It's absurd to think that people are so lazy that they cant pick up a phone or walk a few blocks/cycle/drive to get their meal.
You don’t have kids. Calling me lazy because I don’t have time to load up for small children in the car to drive a few miles then have to wait 0-25 minutes — potentially having to get out of the car and unloading said four kids to pick up the food, then reloading them to return home. Such an assumption that I am “lazy” is just bullshit and represents a failed understanding of a good portion of the market. We aren’t all childless adults sitting around smoking pot playing XBox waiting around for a key lime pie to be delivered. (Not saying you are, but that people who value their time more than the delivery costs are “lazy” is exactly the point you are making.)
I am happy to pay 25% for the time I am saving. It’s the same reason I don’t wash my own car: sure I could do it, but I have more valuable uses for my limited time.
Very true - I think it's important to be careful we don't generalize our own experience to others.
If people ARE paying 25%, (i.e. 60% of US consumers order at least once a week [1]) then the service is valuable enough to them (for whatever reason) to pay that much.
> You don’t have kids. Calling me lazy because I don’t have time to load up for small children in the car to drive a few miles then have to wait 0-25 minutes
My mother did that all day long when we were children.
Do you need these services that badly that you're willing to get the government involved? If you don't like the product or the company ethics then don't give them money. The only lesson greed will ever learn from is No Sale.
I don't need these services badly at all. But since they exist, and are predatory, they "naturally" interpose themselves between the restaurants and their customers unless great effort is made by both the restaurants and all of their customers to avoid it.
It's not a question of wanting or not wanting the services. Some of these companies are so nasty and predatory that they are very, very hard to avoid.
In the middle of a pandemic, that's simply not true.
Otherwise, sure, you just go get the food yourself in your ca--oh wait, ride hailing. In a taxi? On a bike? Within walking distance? But yes, just go to the restaurant, unless there's a global pandemic that requires many people to not leave their homes.
Did take out or kitchens stop existing in your world? Do you really think grubhub or uber is even a rounding error in terms of how the majority of people get their food? There's being out of touch but your comment is a whole new level of reality disconnect. And your comment doesn't even make sense internally. You can't avoid ridesharing but you can't leave your house? LOL okay.
Please, calm down, and keep the personal insults in check.
I have eaten food that was not cooked in my home no more than six times since February. All but one of those times were takeout. I'm well aware of how both kitchens and takeout work. I'm very privileged in that sense.
However, I was practicing empathy. Many people do not have the options I do, and I'm not sure mockery is the best way to think about them.
You mentioned both delivery and ride hailing in your initial comment, so I made the starting assumption that you were talking about someone who doesn't have a car. If you don't live within walking distance of a restaurant offering takeout, and you don't have a car, how do you get takeout?
In the suburbs where more than half of Americans live, access to restaurants within walking distance isn't ubiquitous. Many restaurants in my state remain closed, including in my case, both of the restaurants within walking distance.
So, much of America cannot eat out, and some percentage don't have cars or can't drive due to injury or fear of the pandemic. That leaves cooking at home, yes, from groceries they've had delivered or taken public transit (quite the disease vector) or via ride hailing. And it leaves food delivery.
GrubHub reported 22.6 million "active diners" in Q4 2019. That's a small number compared to everybody in America who eats, but it's not a tiny number. And GrubHub isn't the only food delivery company.
My bottom line is that it may be easy for you or I to avoid food delivery or ride hailing services, but that is simply not true for everyone, and it's not even a value shared by everyone.
If you want food delivery, and many people clearly do, it can be very hard to avoid GrubHub and Doordash due to their slimy and unethical practices. If you don't want food delivery, then clearly this issue has nothing whatsoever to do with you.
Getting the government involved is exactly the right solution here, and they could implement a rule to keep things fair at near 0 cost. Our particular government being incompetent is mostly due sabotage by people who stand to gain from its continued incompetence.
No! Absolutely do not do this! Do not listen to this idea! Regulation is the wrong solution here! Warning! Jaguars will eat you if you do this!
Prosecute the dumb startups for breaking the law. Don't force everyone to comply with some stupid pricing regulations and fill out a trillion forms when they're not doing anything wrong. Legislators should legislate, law enforcement should enforce laws. Regulators will just be captured by private equity and forced to set rules to that make the regulatory burden higher and higher for new companies, unless they have "friends" who can "cut" the "red tape", which means being financed by these predators.
Regulation is the lazy answer for politicians who want to have no understanding of the issues of business responsibility, and just pay some unaccountable "experts" to decide what is acceptable.
I don't really see your distinctions here. Regulations have the force of law, and regulators are law enforcement.
Unless you are referring to some of the anti-trust laws which are actually criminal statutes? In that case I'm on the same page that we should actually start enforcing those.
I am referring to existing anti-trust laws, and I do favor criminal action in almost every case here.
Regulations do have the force of law, theoretically, but rarely have the ability to enforce at scale, and would much rather deal with a couple of giant companies rather than try to deal with a variety of different companies, so there's a natural push back in that direction.
There is this misconception that the absence of regulation is bad. But that is not true for sane appropriate rules. Absence of public rules is not a vacuum of rules but a universe where rules are made by the strongest.
Also laws do often not prescribe details but empower regulators to manage the details. There may be laws against predatory pricing. There is also case laws against predatory pricing. But markets also evolved and it us extremely costly and time consuming to prosecute monopoly cases based on principles (read up on e.g. the case against IBM way back). It is more efficient to put in place industry specific rules which then can be enforced with much simpler reasoning.
> It is more efficient to put in place industry specific rules which then can be enforced with much simpler reasoning.
I could not disagree more strongly. If you could point me to a rule that meets these criteria I'd love to see them -- all the rules that I've had to deal with in my professional life have been contrived to benefit the small number of companies actually capable of complying with them, rather than supporting the end goal of the regulation directly, and most of the time, allowed sufficiently large players to circumvent them entirely.
Antitrust legislation is hard to enforce, costly and time consuming, as you say, but it should be hard, and it should be time consuming, because the alternative is that you outsource the hard and time consuming parts to the industry, which is just "weaponizing the complexity" -- the cost to comply does not scale linearly with the benefits, so small players are just wiped off of the board.
(Note: I think you got confused with the double negatives in your first sentence -- you say "There is this misconception that the absence of regulation is bad" but I think you mean "There is this misconception that regulation is bad" or "There is this misconception that the absence of regulation is good". Not that I agree with you, but the rest of your post argues for sane regulation rather than deregulation)
Rules e.g. establish markets and enable competition: Standard screws or standard contracts. The absence of basic rules like disclosure of service prices is doubling the cost of US health care. Other rules force the airlines to compete on services and price but not on safety.
This is a grab bag of regulatory and non-regulatory stuff.
How long do you spend in jail for making a nonstandard screw?
Standard contracts are industry standards (mostly) not government or regulated. Where contracts abut government function is enforcement and to some degree limitations and exclusions on what contracts are allowed to cover.
US health care is not easy to one-line, but I think you’d be hard pressed to argue that the space is not heavily regulated already, and yet mysteriously still has tons of problems.
Safety regulations I’ll grant you are probably a net benefit to society. Largely because limitations of liability make the situation too asymmetric.
Do you have any evidence that this particular rule actually involves any additional cumbersome paperwork? Is this just a knee-jerk reaction to the word "regulation"? Would it be better if the word "law" was used instead?
The post I was replying to said "Or just regulate the dumb behavior of these dumb start ups to not distort the market in dumb damaging ways,"
I assume that the proposed regulation here was larger in scope than the Portland City Council rule, especially since that rule does not do anything to correct the market distortion -- arguably, it makes it worse, by mandating that they undercut economically viable approaches, rather than just letting them do so. That was what I was addressing.
This particular rule is innocent enough on the face of it -- it has only two requirements [1]; that they cannot charge more than 10% of the purchase price, and that they cannot reduce payments based on compliance with the first part. To enforce this (especially given how broad the definition of a delivery service is) will be a supreme act of discretion, and clarifying this rule and eventually handing it off to the local commissioners of the counties' health departments for enforcement will complete the slide into the endless land of bureaucracy.
If prices are only legally allowed to rise so far it will be harder to find investors willing to throw money in the "make prices low to grab market share fire" as the highest possible rate in now 10% regardless of market share.
I think this has little to do with predatory pricing, but more with abuse of power. This power has been obtained in an unfair way, by collecting money from investors.
Would you please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, including in this thread, and it's not what HN is for.
It's good to see that cancel culture is alive and well on HN.
You're free to ignore my comments, and I encourage you to do so, if you're not swayed by my arguments.
However, if there's one thing I _won't_ do, it is to go along blindly with the gaping-mouth masses. I pride myself in being a free thinker, both behind the keyboard and in person. Not everyone expresses opinions the same way, and to tell me that my comments are unsubstantial is definitely a violation of the guidelines you posed.
In the immortal words of Bob and Doug McKenzie: "Take off, eh?"
Let's take the first-order approximation that 15% of the population is disabled and cannot get their own food. A quick, but by no means, thorough search shows both government and private programs to help these people obtain nutritious food. We could delve into this and go down the rabbit hole of what % of that 15% cannot prepare food or even feed themselves, but I don't have data on that. Yes, delivery might be a need in some of those cases where family, friends, programs, etc. don't exist. These can be a special case, perhaps < 10% of total population.
My comments are directed at the other 90% of keyboard pushers who whine that they're getting charged too much / businesses are being harmed when they click a button for Beef Lo Mein.
There are 330,000,000 people in the USA. 1% of that is 3,300,000 people. Therefore, the Portland-Vancouver MSA (only 2.2 million people) does not exist for any nationwide consideration.
You announced that below some percentage of the population, people don't matter and shouldn't be accommodated. By your logic, I showed that Portland doesn't matter.
I hope we can all agree that this is a very stupid conclusion, and therefore you should rethink your argument.
We accommodate disability because it is the right thing to do. We require businesses to spend extra money, lowering their profits, in order to put in ramps and openable doors, in the name of our common humanity. Not everything is done for a profit motive; not everything should be done for profit motives. In conclusion, Ayn Rand can spin in her grave but it would still be wrong to wrap her in wires and use her to generate electricity.
Yes, this is a completely unnecessary law. Restaurant phone numbers are seconds away using the same device used to order from these apps, and a phone call is free.
Absolutely no reason a restaurant can’t recoup extra costs by charging the app users more or simply refusing to do business with the app.
A family member of mine owns a restaurant that does mostly delivery business. He employs his own drivers; he's on GrubHub because it brings in more business and is a net positive for his bottom line. He includes flyers with every order that says, in large obvious text, "Call us directly at [this number] and save 20% compared to GrubHub."
He still gets a sizeable amount of repeat business from GrubHub.
I've experienced the opposite. I used to order pizza on a phone from a local shop a few times a month but then one day a machine answered the phone telling me to order using Grubhub. I've never bought anything from that business again.
Non competes, price parity rules, and simply market exposure.
You cant start a book selling website without selling on amazon. The market share is too large to function without participating in the monopolistic market platforms.
People use these apps because they're in some manner more convenient. The perplexing part is that anyone complains about such convenience to the point that government uses its heavy hand.
You could always obtain a TDD terminal, use those facilities to call the restaurant (call TDD, interpreter then calls the restaurant, ..) to place the order.
IANAL. You could also sue and see how it comes out.
There is a limit to reasonable accommodations. For instance, restaurants are not required to feed you if you cannot lift a fork.
From my reading, social anxiety has only recently been suggested as a disability under the ADA, in one state. I am unable to locate ADA material which outlines if, and to what extent, accommodations for this disability are to be provided.
I live in a state which has one of the highest new-cases-per-day number, and we can still go get take-out.
1) I call in my order.
2) I drive to the restaurant.
3) I put my mask on.
4) I go inside, get my sack of food.
5) I drive home.
We do a lot of cooking at home, which we find to be enjoyable, so this doesn't happen very often. Costco same-day (via Instacart), even when it tacks on 20% to the cost of items, is perfectly acceptable to me.
Quarantine means quarantine. It sounds like you're failing to properly observe quarantine.
1. I don't have a vehicle of any kind.
2. I am at severely high risk for COVID-19 complications due to multiple medical problems, and I cannot enter a building other than my house under any circumstances.
3. Masks do absolutely nothing to protect you; they protect other people from you. You should wear a mask in case you're sick and asymptomatic so nobody gets the virus from you, but it won't prevent you from getting infected.
4. I am autistic and cannot wear a mask for more than a couple of minutes due to sensory issues, and during those couple of minutes I am constantly touching my face. Because I'm not an irresponsible maniac, I am doubly committed to staying home 24/7 for the entire duration of the pandemic. Even if I wasn't at elevated risk for complications, I would not leave my house unless I was dying.
5. Multiple studies have shown that the virus aerosolizes in your breath and hangs in the air after you breathe for several minutes, if not hours. If there is any kind of fan, the aerosol will be blown all over the entire interior of the building and everyone gets infected. If not, it hangs in place and anyone who walks through anywhere you ever stood will get infected.
I'm not talking about lockdown laws. I'm talking about observing proper quarantine procedures. If you are leaving your house for any reason, you are not properly quarantining even if you aren't violating lockdown laws, and you are actively _part_ of the reason your state "has one of the highest new-cases-per-day number". I am under a proper, strict quarantine.
> Your choice. You failed to plan, so you planned to fail.
Hi, I have considerable disabilities and cannot operate a motor vehicle under any circumstances. Engaging in victim blaming really doesn't make you look good.
(replying here because in your flagged post you asked for lockdown laws that prevent you from going out to buy food)
In BC and probably most of Canada, you have to quarantine for 14 days when you enter the country. You are not allowed out farther than your front yard/balcony, and you need to sign a form before you enter claiming that you acknowledge this and have arranged all necessary plans in advance to allow you to get the food and medication that you'll need.
The penalty for violating this is $750,000 and/or six months in prison.
The restaurants have this option, and I frankly have no idea why they don't pass the entire cost of delivery onto the customer. I'm happy to pay a delivery fee, though not everyone will, but the restaurant can strike a balance -- they can choose to raise their prices in general, to fund some of the delivery cost from their direct-ordering and in-person traffic. That's what they're doing anyway, just not being explicit about it.
There's some information asymmetry. A $24 pizza with free delivery might look to a consumer like a better deal than a $15 pizza with $9 delivery because the consumer can't tell that it's the same pizza. The $24 pizza might be more expensive because they use better ingredients, and the delivery might be free because of a loss leader. Or at least it might look that way to the consumer.
Another, probably cleaner way around this information asymmetry is the reviews that already exist on these apps. If you order a $24 pizza and something the quality of Domino's arrives at your door, you're not going to enjoy that place and you're not going to rate it very highly. There are plenty of problems with review systems, but there are problems with price caps too.
Are you attempting to explain why we don't see restaurants offering free shipping while rolling the cost into the food price?
Because we do see this happen, which suggests to me that reviews are not effective enough in practice to overcome the perception advantage of the information asymmetry.
No, I'm suggesting that, to the degree that customers suffer from delivery fees rolled into prices, that should be reflected in reviews. Pricing isn't determined entirely by ingredient cost, so there's nothing inherently wrong with a $24 pizza A that has cheaper ingredients than an $18 pizza B (maybe Mr. A is just better at making a pizza). What matters is that the customer feels like the value they're getting from pizza A isn't dramatically misaligned with its cost (incl the delivery fee). This is the kind of thing that reviews do capture.
You don't seem to realize that restaurants already pass the costs of delivery to consumer?
Out of a $15 order at a restaurant. There is $5 paying for the food (30% of the price, general practice in the industry). The other $10 are supposed to cover waiters, chefs, service, rent, taxes, profits, etc...
But there is no service and no large rent when doing delivery rather than dine in. The extra money should be enough to cover delivery. Yet restaurants and apps prefer to tack on another $5-10 in delivery fees, easy margin.
In some ways this is what I find most bothersome about it. The restaurants all want us to order directly from them, but you pay the same prices as if you went through Grubhub or whatever. So if you call them directly, you're not really "helping" them -- you're just subsidizing all the Grubhub people.
Delivery apps and websites highlight and promote restaurants with "free" delivery. Anecdotally, people like feeling like they are getting a good deal. The "free delivery" that is included in food pricing is more enticing than cheaper food with a $9 delivery.
Maybe; as a gimmick. But as you become familiar with restaurants in the area instead of just trying them out for the first time, you'll start to develop affinities. Maybe not everyone, maybe not every time, but if the restaurants doing the free delivery thing are losing money on every sale, eventually this achieves an equilibrium (so long as the market is not being artificially pumped by capital injections).
Yes, and the author is misinformed to think that Peloton can lose the customers who take their online classes to Apple free options. People take classes for the inspiration and guidance from the teachers. Before Apple there were plenty of free options so this isn’t new, fitness is and will continue to be a very competitive market.
Do any of those companies actually have a live customer? Not a demo store, a real paying customer with more than one location live?
Standard.ai apparently has a demo store in SF, although it's been closed due to the coronavirus epidemic.
Grabango - one installation in test at a Giant Eagle store.
Getzippin - one installation in test at a Lojas Americanas store. Their site gives the impression that it's really about getting people to install their phone app, so they can be spied upon.
https://www.thirdeyelabs.com/
- real customers
- real money
- multiple-sites
Plus they beat Amazon to this concept by a good few months. https://www.thirdeyelabs.com/news. Granted all the focus/attention in this space is in the US. But it is happening elsewhere too.
"Beat them to this concept"? I can't even remember the first time I heard about this idea. 2003? 1995? I half-suspect I read about the idea in OMNI Magazine.
It's always been a question of when the supporting technology was going to be good enough to make it work. The idea has been around long enough for most of the early patents to expire.
History is full of examples of visionaries coming up with ideas that have inspired and fueled others--in some cases whole industries have been founded on these ideas. For instance, Doug Engelbart gave the "Mother of All Demos" in 1968 [1]. It was a proof of concept, but the ideas he talked about were implemented by other companies--who profited from it.
It is unfortunate that we live in a world where ideas hold such little monetary value, but they're most certainly not worthless.
Bell Labs was responsible for much of the underlying technology, and these applications had been foreseen. But they were undoubtedly deluded about their ability to deliver those applications.
Doing something well means you already imagined doing something well first.
Or, in other words, "imagining doing something well" is necessary, but not sufficient to actually do something well.
Coming up with an idea for something, and then sharing this idea with other people in an open manner, can plant the seed that germinates the execution for that idea.
To me, that's part of the reason why thought pieces are valuable to me. Also, unconventional tracks at academic conferences, like provocations at DIS 2020 [1] (which I cite here since it's on my mind because I'm personally applying to it right now).
I mean, you're not wrong, but at the same time whether you call it "imagining" or "coming up with ideas", if done well the results of said process are valuable.
One should also consider that good ideas usually come out of having a lot of domain knowledge in a particular area. And that requires effort and work ("execution" but in the past).
There are some fully automated stores the size of shipping containers in Beijing, but they're mostly demos, too.
I don't think anybody really has this working well enough to deploy. It has that machine learning "we got to 95%" look. This is something that's easy to almost do, and the last 5% is really tough.
I do love how the very first banner video standard.ai shows is how one person passes an item to another. I'm curious to see all the edge cases Amazon Go ran into over the year or two they ran. I can see a lot of messy cases like that coming up.
I think there is an argument to be made of an acceptable increase in false negatives as the cost can be recouped through the efficiency of the system. Not to mention that a system like this should also cut down on theft.
I don't think so, because people will figure out the weak spots and share this information. It will become a sport and people will think "last time I grabbed the milk like this, and they didn't charge me for it, what if I do it again tomorrow?" Hackers will start wearing special clothes with dazzle patterns or with grocery items to fool the system, etc.
What you're describing is no different than the thief mentality that exists today. Most people don't care to steal a carton of milk just because they can. And there's no denying the cost effectiveness of removing your checkout staff or else this tech wouldn't exist.
Uber limits the amount of rides you can deny, i.e. you deny 5 rides in 30min they log you off the platform after awhile you get penalized. They want high acceptance rate.
This is the key. When the drivers lack the ability to freely decline rides every time every time without consequences, they are not contractors anymore.
By the way, the take-it-or-leave-it offer with dictated pricing is a really inefficient way to reach a market price. The driver logs off because they can't decline too many times, then there are less drivers, so the rideshare app has to raise prices, but then the drivers nearby are no longer online.
Climate change is a red herring, air pollution is a clear and present danger. India and China have ignored this in the past and now they are making some efforts to correct course because people are dying from it.
Air pollution is a big problem. The biggest problem IMO is water and soil pollution. We're putting far worse chemicals into our food and water (and in household products we absorb) than what we're putting into the air (in the developed world, anyway).
True, it's a fact. But what's not a fact, that CO2 is the reason for that. We humans can do nothing about it. How do you else explain some ice age with 10x the CO2 amount in the far past. But don't misunderstand that I am against a cleaner future. Efficiency should be always improved, in every field. But I am against unnecessary change just because of CO2. For example it's better for the environment to use your old car as long as possible instead building new electric cars. This is less efficient overall than repairing and maintaining the tech of today. The whole climate change topic is far more political than actually fact based.
They focus on the team because that’s the how startups raise money these days, investors figure they could always pivot to something else. Obviously this can be problematic especially when the founder(s) is good at raising money, see Wework
Fair point "WeWork", but this early on I think the focus of an investor should be more on the founders vs. product/business idea. This early on there's a potential for pivoting, and you'd rather have smart, talented individuals that can deliver vs. a product idea
> In multiple lineages, the substitutions A119S and A119N preceded substitutions to 111 and 122 (Hemiptera, Hymenoptera, Diptera). In Drosophila, where we have the greatest phylogenetic resolution, A119S was established before substitutions to sites 111 and 122 in the evolutionary lineage leading to D. subobscura, which appears to be polymorphic with respect to CG-insensitivity.
That is a hypothetical used to promote a narrative, all the test & observations presented show all mutations must be present for specialization. The Monarch only feeds on milkweed, but somehow it survived the A119s phase feeding on milkweed plant (CG-containing plant)without the needed 111& 122 mutation?
In an hypothetical adaptive walk. A119S does NOT provide sufficient CG-insensitivity so an insect with just A119S will die specializing in CG. The are other mutations needed for survival.
Moreover u left out:
“A119S is a common substitution among taxa that do not specialize on CG-containing hostplants“
Natural selection is undefeated.
Therefore the need for immediate substitutions to sites 111 & 122 in order to specialize on “CG-containing hostplants“
An adaptive walk has to show adaptation in the environment. If all the mutations occur outside the natural environment, without natural selection, it is not an adaptive walk.
