Ah, the Tech Revolution - it was supposed to take us to Utopia, but somewhere along the line, the system malfunction and chose Dystopia as the destination.
"Getting Americans fired up about their personal data has been notoriously difficult, which helps explain why we still have no federal digital-privacy law. Perhaps if more voters understood that strong privacy protections would also protect them from price discrimination, Congress would feel more pressure to get something done." Um, so my personal data (this week = shoe size, discount retail) is public data until the Republican Business Congress is persuaded that making more money off us is not nice?
Seems to be a colossal game of Whack-a-Mole. When the federales come down hard on one practice, say, usurious lending rates, the numbers crowd finds another spot in the economy in which to plant a punji pit for consumers. The current corporate goal seems to be guaranteed shareholder dividends and obscene CED and CFO salaries, with all business risks absorbed by consumers, the opposite of where risks fell under other older economic models. So much baloney is now hidden in the pits of rewards, coupons, memberships, introductory offers, customer loyalty programs, etc. It's an economic phantasmagoria.
As for capitalism, I remember the economist Joseph Schumpeter writing that socialism would crowd out capitalism because capitalism at its foundation is an immoral system. Clearly he was more sanguine about our species evolution than I am.
I'm still reading but I'm commenting anyway. Most USians *still* haven't figured out that "capitalism" and "democracy" are not synonymous. Major education and news media fail. Capitalism has been subverting democracy big-time since the Reagan administration, and for well over a century before that. Why the hell don't we get it *yet*? (See above reference to education and media.)
Hanging is too good for these jibrones. A slow Inquisition garrote, or drawing and quartering, would be far more satisfying (and more of an object lesson)..... It is all too obvious that whatever Smokin' Joe Biden is trying to do to reverse neoliberalism, American business is still firmly in the neoliberal supply-side economics camp, and until and unless that culture is broken or run out of town on a rail, we will not see any significant changes in the way US companies do business..... This simply confirms my belief that I remain an Amish Luddite and not use apps on my phone or succumb to any other of the lures they throw out, like the evil Scylla and Charybdis they have turned out to be.....
Maybe an incorrect observation, but it seems to me that whenever something dystopic comes up, the U of Chicago's Business, Economics or Law Schools are present and accounted for, "...a professor of marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business told me the public reaction to the Wendy’s announcement amounted to “hysteria,”...
Tragic that no one pays a whit of attention to their Divinity School. Do departments ever engage with one another?
I must have 100 apps on my iPhone I think I'll spend some time tonight watching the news about the insipid bastard's trial, deleting apps that I never use, I know what I use, they will probably fit on one page not 20. The weather channel is the first thing to go, Apple has a weather app, they need to know where you are to tell you the weather and unlike the weather channel they have no interest in your data. When Apple implemented their opt in policy Zuckerberg said that it was going to break Facebook because no one would opt in. I think I'll do a little house cleaning tonight ;-)
Painful as they are airfares are still far cheaper than during regulation.
Wendy's proposal may be unqiue to the fast food business, but its just another form of "congestion-based pricing". These have been a favorite amongst urban planners and greens for things like bridge and highway tolls as well as urban parking, Anyone who's driven across many of the Bay's bridge's will be familiar with it.
What seems forgotten in this kerfuffle are two things: 1) Wendy's will likely decrease prices in off peak hours, and 2) customers are perfectly capable of going to MacDonald's, In-and-Out, or in Texas, Whataburger, especially if the price increases are out of line.
The freer the markets the better for all involved, as capitalism for all its flaws still beats out any alternative. Certainly better than government dictated burger prices.
Being old enough to remember the days of flying on a well-regulated airline with a union flight crew, superb service even in coach, an no worries about having to put up with some fucking ignoramus among the passengers who was going to make a scene out of something, returning to that might make me think flying on an airline was something worthwhile. In the meantime, there's an old aviation saying that describes modern airline flights well: "If you've time to spare, go by air!"
As a long, long, long time business traveler, it has come to be dreaded. The planes are too crowded, space too narrow and short, over head bins crammed with too many bags, animals sharing the cabin, screaming tykes, and too many drunks. Plus in the southwest mother nature during the spring always manages to f*** up the best laid plans. And the view from the tarmac sucks.
This is the price me and thee paid for democratizing air travel. As fares dropped, flying became more affordable, and the infamous and continuous fare wars began because too many travelers laser focus on "airfare" and hence the airlines' focus on them as well, while adding sneaky fees and shortened legroom, etc to survive. Every single major airline has gone bankrupt except SWA, and the way the courts and government handled these contributed to the present mess. Further, the airlines are pushing the Feds to clamp down on alternatives like JSX.
We should admit our elitism. We long for the days when both air travel and Las Vegas were special and rue that they've become the equivalent of taking Greyhound to Six Flags.
Yeah, well, I'm already on it; I don't do apps. Everyone acts like they think I'm a Luddite, but I use my phone for a phone and camera and now and then I read an article but my lap top is my shopping and news baby and all that's done in a straight forward way.
You know, with all the "surge pricing" info I think one very common use of it for a service vs product which might have been mentioned in passing if that... but: Easy Pass Lanes or whatever they're called wherever you are. You buy a pass and they grab your info as you pass readers going on and off the lanes and are charged a price that goes up and down based on how dense the traffic is. Not the time of day or anything you could plan on, but traffic which is only very loosely correlated with time. Traffic accident ahead slowing things down? The price could go up. What makes those doubly irritating is that they often use lanes built with tax money and then experimentally or after a heavy sales pitch handed over to companies under contracts to maintain the roads, for example. HOV lanes, converted that way, turn into Privilege lanes and increase the clogging on the "normal" roads.
Pretending "dynamic pricing" serves those who need it most pretends need equates to ability to pay. I'd say it's more like an inverse relationship between ability to pay and degree of stress one learns to or must endure. The statement "according to Dubé, that can benefit rich people, but it can also benefit people with greater need, like someone taking an Uber to the hospital" reeks of privilege in that it is ignorant of the degree to which some must stress and stretch themselves to make ends meet. In fact, the descriptions of rich and poor people sound to me like stereotyping stories made up to justify a point.
until the day he died, I was engaged in a Battle Royal with my father over his utter, complete refusal to allow an internet connection in his house. he said that one time at work, getting a response to a question took the whole day and I'd counter with "now there are search engines. it would go back and forth like that and we'd always end with him saying "it's a place where bad people can find other bad people and plan to do bad things" and capping THAT with with "okay...I just don't think that having the internet in my house will enhance my life in any way I care about." and we'd go on watching the rerun detective show he'd have on, insisting that he didn't know who the murderer was, while I'd yell about it being the third time we seen it and it was the guy in the green shirt...then, five minutes before the end, he'd say "oh yeah...I think it WAS the guy in the green shirt." we'd laugh about it, but it was also always a little bit infuriating.
now is a good time to say that on a bad day, I can calm down watching several SVU reruns in a row, knowing exactly who the pervert is and how he did whatever he did.
and that thing he had about the internet...I am reminded of (I think) Mark Twain talking about how every year his father got a little smarter.
yes, we have amazing conveniences at our fingertips (at least in the shortest possible run). in the long run, I fear more every day that the convenience has cost much too much. when I wax rhetorical, I find myself saying that it's cost us our souls.
the multiple levels of irony involved in the fact that I'm typing this on Substack do not elude me. but shit...isn't IRONY one of the best things ever invented?
You present an argument I can only counter by the fact that if you read my Korean War books and Vietnam War books, that they would not exist without the internet. I wrote "Frozen Chosen" the year the USMC put EVERY piece of paper generated by EVERY UNIT in Korea on the net in a searchable database, and the Chinese Foreign Ministry put up English translations of all the documents from the negotiation between Kim Il Sung, Mao and Stalin over the decision to "forcibly unify" Korea. No more financing trips to DC to go to NARA and paw though mislabeled boxes of documents I couldn't copy.
With Vietnam, I became internet friends with Dr. Nguyen Hy Sung, Historian of the VPAF and author of "Historic Confrontations in the Skies of Vietnam," the most accurate history of the air war over North Vietnam according to the Americans who fought there, as well as Lt General Pham Phat Phu, retired as Deputy Commander of the VPAF and t he MiG pilot shot down by Roy Cash Jr. (Johnny's nephew) in 1968, and Colonel Tu De of the VPAF, the only living survivor of the special VPAF team that attacked Ton Son Nhut and closed down evacuation in April 1975, flying captured VNAF A-37s, an event that has been blamed on VNAF "turncoats" for 50 years, who both gave me their first-hand accounts of their battles in the war. I was also able to take every code name I found in US records, google it, and download a PDF report on what that was previously classified Top Secret and declassified by the "50 year rule". No other Vietnam histories had the access I got to "the other side" thanks to the internet. Among the reports I discovered was "Project Feather Duster" held three months after the VPAF cleaned the USAF's clock in their first encounter, which proved teaching Air Combat Maneuvering to Air Force pilots would save their lives (and wasn't acted on) four years before the Ault Report led to the creation of Top Gun. Through the 'net, I found declassified report after declassified report that They Knew! They knew they were fucking up and they did it anyway!
I submit the above alone is proof of the value of the internet, despite the fact that 99% of what's there is bullshit.
Yes, 98% of the internet is cat videos, and the rest allows traitors to conspire.
I really do get it, Tom. the research possibilities are extraordinary and have been (and I hope will continue to be game-changing. but what good is any of it if we end up destroying ourselves (or being destroyed) with or by that 99%?
I can't imagine how 1/6 (and subsequent developments related to it) could have happened without the internet.
the main point I was making was that my father is a lot smarter in retrospect than I thought at the time. jeez, if somebody told me in, say, 1998 or so that there was a chance that millions of people might have access to my credit card numbers (I won't go into the half-dozen scam attempts that have probably cost me months off my life), I would have recommended one of those dementia exams TFF thinks he "aced."
The internet is a hammer. If I use it to build you a house, it's a good thing. If I use it to bash your skull in, it's a bad thing. Actually, it's just a hammer and it's our actions that are "good" or "bad." It's just a tool. So is the internet. I can't keep anyone else from using their hammer as a murder weapon, but I can make sure I use mine to build houses. That's about all we can do - that and encourage everyone we know to put it to use positively.
"Getting Americans fired up about their personal data has been notoriously difficult, which helps explain why we still have no federal digital-privacy law. Perhaps if more voters understood that strong privacy protections would also protect them from price discrimination, Congress would feel more pressure to get something done." Um, so my personal data (this week = shoe size, discount retail) is public data until the Republican Business Congress is persuaded that making more money off us is not nice?
Seems to be a colossal game of Whack-a-Mole. When the federales come down hard on one practice, say, usurious lending rates, the numbers crowd finds another spot in the economy in which to plant a punji pit for consumers. The current corporate goal seems to be guaranteed shareholder dividends and obscene CED and CFO salaries, with all business risks absorbed by consumers, the opposite of where risks fell under other older economic models. So much baloney is now hidden in the pits of rewards, coupons, memberships, introductory offers, customer loyalty programs, etc. It's an economic phantasmagoria.
As for capitalism, I remember the economist Joseph Schumpeter writing that socialism would crowd out capitalism because capitalism at its foundation is an immoral system. Clearly he was more sanguine about our species evolution than I am.
I'm still reading but I'm commenting anyway. Most USians *still* haven't figured out that "capitalism" and "democracy" are not synonymous. Major education and news media fail. Capitalism has been subverting democracy big-time since the Reagan administration, and for well over a century before that. Why the hell don't we get it *yet*? (See above reference to education and media.)
One hundred "likes" for your comment and the thought behind it.
Thank you!
Hanging is too good for these jibrones. A slow Inquisition garrote, or drawing and quartering, would be far more satisfying (and more of an object lesson)..... It is all too obvious that whatever Smokin' Joe Biden is trying to do to reverse neoliberalism, American business is still firmly in the neoliberal supply-side economics camp, and until and unless that culture is broken or run out of town on a rail, we will not see any significant changes in the way US companies do business..... This simply confirms my belief that I remain an Amish Luddite and not use apps on my phone or succumb to any other of the lures they throw out, like the evil Scylla and Charybdis they have turned out to be.....
Maybe an incorrect observation, but it seems to me that whenever something dystopic comes up, the U of Chicago's Business, Economics or Law Schools are present and accounted for, "...a professor of marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business told me the public reaction to the Wendy’s announcement amounted to “hysteria,”...
Tragic that no one pays a whit of attention to their Divinity School. Do departments ever engage with one another?
U Chicago is Sauron's throne room.
The week is young, but this might be my favorite comment for the week.
To your question: not nearly enough!
Whenever someone says we should do it their way because it is more efficient, we should ask the question and demand an answer. Efficient at what?
"To Serve Man" is a cookbook!!
Yes indeed. The Nazi death camps were, in their way, "efficient," but when the end is the extermination of innocent people, efficiency is a war crime.
I must have 100 apps on my iPhone I think I'll spend some time tonight watching the news about the insipid bastard's trial, deleting apps that I never use, I know what I use, they will probably fit on one page not 20. The weather channel is the first thing to go, Apple has a weather app, they need to know where you are to tell you the weather and unlike the weather channel they have no interest in your data. When Apple implemented their opt in policy Zuckerberg said that it was going to break Facebook because no one would opt in. I think I'll do a little house cleaning tonight ;-)
good idea
Painful as they are airfares are still far cheaper than during regulation.
Wendy's proposal may be unqiue to the fast food business, but its just another form of "congestion-based pricing". These have been a favorite amongst urban planners and greens for things like bridge and highway tolls as well as urban parking, Anyone who's driven across many of the Bay's bridge's will be familiar with it.
What seems forgotten in this kerfuffle are two things: 1) Wendy's will likely decrease prices in off peak hours, and 2) customers are perfectly capable of going to MacDonald's, In-and-Out, or in Texas, Whataburger, especially if the price increases are out of line.
The freer the markets the better for all involved, as capitalism for all its flaws still beats out any alternative. Certainly better than government dictated burger prices.
Being old enough to remember the days of flying on a well-regulated airline with a union flight crew, superb service even in coach, an no worries about having to put up with some fucking ignoramus among the passengers who was going to make a scene out of something, returning to that might make me think flying on an airline was something worthwhile. In the meantime, there's an old aviation saying that describes modern airline flights well: "If you've time to spare, go by air!"
As a long, long, long time business traveler, it has come to be dreaded. The planes are too crowded, space too narrow and short, over head bins crammed with too many bags, animals sharing the cabin, screaming tykes, and too many drunks. Plus in the southwest mother nature during the spring always manages to f*** up the best laid plans. And the view from the tarmac sucks.
This is the price me and thee paid for democratizing air travel. As fares dropped, flying became more affordable, and the infamous and continuous fare wars began because too many travelers laser focus on "airfare" and hence the airlines' focus on them as well, while adding sneaky fees and shortened legroom, etc to survive. Every single major airline has gone bankrupt except SWA, and the way the courts and government handled these contributed to the present mess. Further, the airlines are pushing the Feds to clamp down on alternatives like JSX.
We should admit our elitism. We long for the days when both air travel and Las Vegas were special and rue that they've become the equivalent of taking Greyhound to Six Flags.
I loved Vegas when the mob ran it. Interesting entertainment and they weren't robbing you blind from the minute you walked in the joint.
Yes, we're old elitists. :-)
Ah, yes. And when you had to seek out poker games, hidden in a back room only at certain places.
I look back on days like that and wonder how the hell we all survived. It certainly wasn’t clean living. 🤣
So true. :-)
Yeah, well, I'm already on it; I don't do apps. Everyone acts like they think I'm a Luddite, but I use my phone for a phone and camera and now and then I read an article but my lap top is my shopping and news baby and all that's done in a straight forward way.
You know, with all the "surge pricing" info I think one very common use of it for a service vs product which might have been mentioned in passing if that... but: Easy Pass Lanes or whatever they're called wherever you are. You buy a pass and they grab your info as you pass readers going on and off the lanes and are charged a price that goes up and down based on how dense the traffic is. Not the time of day or anything you could plan on, but traffic which is only very loosely correlated with time. Traffic accident ahead slowing things down? The price could go up. What makes those doubly irritating is that they often use lanes built with tax money and then experimentally or after a heavy sales pitch handed over to companies under contracts to maintain the roads, for example. HOV lanes, converted that way, turn into Privilege lanes and increase the clogging on the "normal" roads.
Pretending "dynamic pricing" serves those who need it most pretends need equates to ability to pay. I'd say it's more like an inverse relationship between ability to pay and degree of stress one learns to or must endure. The statement "according to Dubé, that can benefit rich people, but it can also benefit people with greater need, like someone taking an Uber to the hospital" reeks of privilege in that it is ignorant of the degree to which some must stress and stretch themselves to make ends meet. In fact, the descriptions of rich and poor people sound to me like stereotyping stories made up to justify a point.
until the day he died, I was engaged in a Battle Royal with my father over his utter, complete refusal to allow an internet connection in his house. he said that one time at work, getting a response to a question took the whole day and I'd counter with "now there are search engines. it would go back and forth like that and we'd always end with him saying "it's a place where bad people can find other bad people and plan to do bad things" and capping THAT with with "okay...I just don't think that having the internet in my house will enhance my life in any way I care about." and we'd go on watching the rerun detective show he'd have on, insisting that he didn't know who the murderer was, while I'd yell about it being the third time we seen it and it was the guy in the green shirt...then, five minutes before the end, he'd say "oh yeah...I think it WAS the guy in the green shirt." we'd laugh about it, but it was also always a little bit infuriating.
now is a good time to say that on a bad day, I can calm down watching several SVU reruns in a row, knowing exactly who the pervert is and how he did whatever he did.
and that thing he had about the internet...I am reminded of (I think) Mark Twain talking about how every year his father got a little smarter.
yes, we have amazing conveniences at our fingertips (at least in the shortest possible run). in the long run, I fear more every day that the convenience has cost much too much. when I wax rhetorical, I find myself saying that it's cost us our souls.
the multiple levels of irony involved in the fact that I'm typing this on Substack do not elude me. but shit...isn't IRONY one of the best things ever invented?
You present an argument I can only counter by the fact that if you read my Korean War books and Vietnam War books, that they would not exist without the internet. I wrote "Frozen Chosen" the year the USMC put EVERY piece of paper generated by EVERY UNIT in Korea on the net in a searchable database, and the Chinese Foreign Ministry put up English translations of all the documents from the negotiation between Kim Il Sung, Mao and Stalin over the decision to "forcibly unify" Korea. No more financing trips to DC to go to NARA and paw though mislabeled boxes of documents I couldn't copy.
With Vietnam, I became internet friends with Dr. Nguyen Hy Sung, Historian of the VPAF and author of "Historic Confrontations in the Skies of Vietnam," the most accurate history of the air war over North Vietnam according to the Americans who fought there, as well as Lt General Pham Phat Phu, retired as Deputy Commander of the VPAF and t he MiG pilot shot down by Roy Cash Jr. (Johnny's nephew) in 1968, and Colonel Tu De of the VPAF, the only living survivor of the special VPAF team that attacked Ton Son Nhut and closed down evacuation in April 1975, flying captured VNAF A-37s, an event that has been blamed on VNAF "turncoats" for 50 years, who both gave me their first-hand accounts of their battles in the war. I was also able to take every code name I found in US records, google it, and download a PDF report on what that was previously classified Top Secret and declassified by the "50 year rule". No other Vietnam histories had the access I got to "the other side" thanks to the internet. Among the reports I discovered was "Project Feather Duster" held three months after the VPAF cleaned the USAF's clock in their first encounter, which proved teaching Air Combat Maneuvering to Air Force pilots would save their lives (and wasn't acted on) four years before the Ault Report led to the creation of Top Gun. Through the 'net, I found declassified report after declassified report that They Knew! They knew they were fucking up and they did it anyway!
I submit the above alone is proof of the value of the internet, despite the fact that 99% of what's there is bullshit.
Yes, 98% of the internet is cat videos, and the rest allows traitors to conspire.
I really do get it, Tom. the research possibilities are extraordinary and have been (and I hope will continue to be game-changing. but what good is any of it if we end up destroying ourselves (or being destroyed) with or by that 99%?
I can't imagine how 1/6 (and subsequent developments related to it) could have happened without the internet.
the main point I was making was that my father is a lot smarter in retrospect than I thought at the time. jeez, if somebody told me in, say, 1998 or so that there was a chance that millions of people might have access to my credit card numbers (I won't go into the half-dozen scam attempts that have probably cost me months off my life), I would have recommended one of those dementia exams TFF thinks he "aced."
The internet is a hammer. If I use it to build you a house, it's a good thing. If I use it to bash your skull in, it's a bad thing. Actually, it's just a hammer and it's our actions that are "good" or "bad." It's just a tool. So is the internet. I can't keep anyone else from using their hammer as a murder weapon, but I can make sure I use mine to build houses. That's about all we can do - that and encourage everyone we know to put it to use positively.
well put, Tom.
thank you.