It's just a standard reintermediation play, inject yourself in the middle of a supply chain, and then once established squeeze the living shit out of both sides.

Also use exploitation of regulation (e.g. leveraging contractors via 1099s to access cheap labor and indemnification from liability) to your advantage .

this was the model of like 2/3 of the 'startups' in the 2010s.

> literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more

Or they're built on the idea that they can sell convenience to people and make a lot of money doing so.

It's not so different from a lot of other businesses. First class and main cabin in a flight gets you the same airplane, the same destination the same travel, but slightly different chairs and some food. Is anyone paying for first class suckers? What about if I buy a skip the line pass at a theme park? Am I a sucker because I paid more than the base admission price? Or is it a trade that I'm willing to make because I have excess income and want to actually ride the rides instead of standing in line all day in the heat?

Why do executives have executive assistants? Are businesses all suckers?

I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ripped off just a bit is way lesser than the time it'd take me to get or prepare food myself. That $10 hamburger that I just paid $25 for is outrageous, but the 30 minutes I saved is worth the $15. If you make mid-six figure income like most of big tech, that's a small small price to pay for time.

I don’t think paying someone to perform a service for you makes you a sucker.

I’ve never used DoorDash (and am pretty unlikely to), but if I did, I would look at as paying someone for a service they provided rather than simply “paying more for the item” (and expecting someone to wait on me personally for free?).

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?

This just translates to "anyone paying a margin on anything anywhere is a sucker."

You're definitely a sucker too, probably multiple times over.

Get ready for all the door dash suckers to come defend it.

My time is more expensive than the $15 extra I pay for the food...who's the sucker.

I'm not paying for the food. I'm paying for them to bring me the food. Those are two different products.

Eh, the difference is that DoorDash is a logistics company performing a service that restaurants do not like running (delivery). It’s not a middleman providing no value

Doordash and grubhub are insane for single food purchases. But the fees are barely noticed when feeding my family of 5. We use it every other week or so just because of how chaotic school activity schedules can be. When we order sushi/chinese for the kids the bill before any delivery services is around $200 for enough food for dinner and another meal with leftovers. The service charge is like $7 and I make sure the driver gets at least $10 regardless of the distance. Cheaper than if we ate in the restaurant and were expected to give a 15-20% tip.

> services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more

Strongly disagree with your entire narrative, one that it demonstrably disconnected from reality.

Nobody is forcing anyone --at all-- to use these services. Not one person. Not one company. Not a single law or mandate. If I want to use it and you don't, that's perfectly fine. If I, for whatever reason, want to pay a premium and you think it's stupid, that's fine too. Don't use it. I will. Simple as that.

What's the opposite of that? Obamacare. Mandated and forced on everyone. It's shit. It's three times the cost of the insurance we were all promised we could keep if we wanted to (and we could not, because Obamacare killed those plans). Etc.

See the difference there?

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.

>most of the investigation was done under Adams.

Better than about him like the rest of it, I suppose.

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.

https://archive.is/RWt8f

Disabling javascript let me read the whole article without any account nonsense.

Journalism is labor

Works with any random email, kinda fine tbh

I mean, test@example.com worked so info doesn't have to be that personal...

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.

Too bad having their names associated with this immoral politicking won’t cause them problems. An employee stealing a few hundred bucks would get a felony and probably never work a good job again. Founders stealing hundreds of millions from workers get to say whoopsie.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760317/how-to-rule-... is eye opening. When many of us were in college, there was still some idealism about using technology to make the world a better place. Maybe that still exists at some universities, but Sand Hill Road wiped that out of Stanford.

Is a drEAk meme appropriate here?

(⌐_⌐)ノ Empathy

(•ᴗ•)つ Apathy

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.

"Simply put, we screwed up. We should have given Cuomo two million so we can keep underpaying Dashers."

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

Since when did doordash count as big tech?

Of course! that's always what "disruption" referred to.

It is not like they aren't exploiting businesses either... Looking at Amazon(retail) and almost all SaaS services...

Valuation yes, but if we take a step back, there must be value there. The idea of Uber really provided benefits to many groups. Example: minorities who were discriminated against by regular taxis, declining service level due to Taxi monopolies, etc. (Similar issues that Doordash solved as well.)

How can we separate the valuation from the real value generated by the tech? Would it be possible to allow Uber/Doordash to go bankrupt and instead a smaller worker owned or nonprofit cooperative take its place, replicate the tech stack and then allow the value to then be maximized to the employees + users with little middleman in between?

Obviously this idea has lots of issues to be resolved:

1. How do you you deal with government or other middlemen that wish to insert themselves?

2. Can we really copy Uber/Doordash or are those engineers/managers/middlemen really providing so much additional differentiating value that justifies the cost and thus the required valuation?

3. Worker cooperatives seem to move slower than their SV cohorts. For a company selling groceries, or door Windows (as a famous Bernie Sanders example talks about) its not an issue. But in the fast moving world of tech would it eventually kill the cooperative due to the inability to move as fast as the SV competitors?

I dont know the answers but I do think about it more and more as I traverse the world and see so much poor quality(enshittification) and expense. All of that is stolen value that is extracted from workers + customers to line the pockets of the owner class.

The article disagrees:

> At the time, DoorDash’s campaign contributions in the run-up to the 2025 mayoral election were considered unusually large — it made a single $1 million gift to a super PAC that, at the time, was the largest donation in the race