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Business, Economics, and Taxes 2: That's Why We Fight to Take the Means Back

beaverhockeyfan said:
There is a furniture/appliance store here that has electronic price tags on most of their products. Talking to the owner, every hour the program they are set up to scours the online competition on the internet and makes sure they have the lowest price on their product.

I suppose it can work in reverse as well, if the online competition raises their prices, they in turn can raise theirs while staying under the online pricing. Must be legal here, as they actually mention this in their advertising.
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I recall a story years ago about very topic specific books sold via Amazon that used a similar method to price themselves "competitively," but as stock was low, two sellers got locked into a feedback loop where each automated system incrementally increased the price due to "demand" and the price of the other seller until the books were thousands of dollars each.

*edit* Correction: Millions of dollars.

 
aparch said:
I recall a story years ago about very topic specific books sold via Amazon that used a similar method to price themselves "competitively," but as stock was low, two sellers got locked into a feedback loop where each automated system incrementally increased the price due to "demand" and the price of the other seller until the books were thousands of dollars each.

*edit* Correction: Millions of dollars.

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This is wonderful, thank you for putting this here! I have about 16 friends who this will land perfectly with.
 
MissThundercat said:
Doordash and Instacart are going to merge, with DD buying Instacart for $17 billion. Having delivered for both of them, this feels like a "I can't make us better, but I can definitely make us worse" situation.

www.theguardian.com

DoorDash to buy Instacart for $17bn in major grocery delivery consolidation

Acquisition will supercharge DoorDash’s grocery delivery, ‘one of the hardest things to get right online’, CEO says
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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Mergers never make things better for employees.
 
ScoobyDoo said:
Mergers always fuck the employees and the consumer.
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Especially the employees of the smaller company. More often than not, the larger company is buying a superior competitor just to take them off the market, and after a handful of months they end up firing 50+% of the swallowed company's employees. I can't tell you how many times I've seen this in the cloud IT world in the past 15 years.
 
That is exactly what happens. Laissez faire will always fuck everyone in the end.

Even all the capitalists not in the Final Boss cartel.

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” -- Adam Smith​

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I once worked for a boutique firm with a CEO who got a $700M buyout offer from IBM. He declined, because while it personally would've been great for him and the other two founders, he knew IBM would pick his baby apart and fuck everyone who'd been loyal to him in the ass within 6-12 months. A rare example of altruism in the C suite.

He ended up selling for $350M to a company who allowed him and current management to continue running the show. Unfortunately for him, he got galloping testicular cancer and died a year later at age 37. The good ones always die young.
 
Consumers will always demand "give me liberty or give me convenience," so it's ultimately the fault of the derps (like everything else). It is kinda fun they cut their own throats through their lard assery -- they destroy their own pathway out of poverty by hollowing out their own economy -- but it sucks that good people like Miss T get taken down along with them.
 
I'd say I'm also in the "exception that proves the rule" camp as far as mergers and buyouts. We were the bigger company and, at least traditionally, more successful. Poor management at the end doomed us and someone with DEEP pockets who owned a smaller company bought us and merged us. Now we have much better leadership and the employees who were worth a damn and understood the implications of having leadership who actually knew how to operate are MUCH better off than we were under the old leadership. But again I acknowledge that is quite rare.
 
It's Binance. They deserve it.

From their website, this is their #1 FAQ:

Is Binance safe to use right now?​


Last updated: 30 October 2026, 13:50 UTC.
On 29 October 2026, Binance identified unauthorized withdrawal transactions linked to a compromised employee device. Binance will cover all hacked losses in full from its SAFU fund and company funds. User balances are not affected. Around $3 billion has been frozen on-chain with blockchain partners, and we have found no evidence that any wallet private key was exposed. Withdrawals are temporarily suspended while security checks are completed. We will publish an updated Proof of Reserves once remediation is complete.
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One compromised employee device. 6 billion dollars. Whaddya say? "My bad"?
 
This makes me want to start a company that pulls eveything from the cloud once, burns it into my firmware, then detaches from everything but end-to-end encrypted, privacy-first, logless VPNs and direct channel, decentralized P2P communications.

The LLMs stole everything humans created. Now let's steal everything they stole and put it in a nice safe place far away from where they or anyone else can bottleneck it or charge for it.

Nice of them to put it all in one place for us. Kind of like a bank to rob, rather than having to break into everybody's house.
 
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