This is exactly what I immediately thought while reading the article. It almost feels like the legal system only punishes general public, while most of these guys are above it.
VC funding allowed them to move quickly enough that they got to a scale where they could afford legal and lobbying protection when challenges eventually happened.
That's just a trope. They were initially losing money because they had high fixed costs (developing a platform, spending enough on advertising to get a critical mass of people using it), which are long-term investments. If you only spread the cost of the long-term investment over the short-term sales, they were "losing money" in the early years, but that's how all long-term investments work.
Dumping is when you sell below the unit cost, e.g. paying drivers more than you charge customers, which isn't what they were doing in general. And as long as they weren't doing that, the incumbents could have responded by lowering their own prices (and therefore margins) without themselves losing money on each sale, which is competition working as intended. Unless the competition is too hidebound to accept a reduction in profits in order to stay competitive or otherwise insists on using a less efficient method of operating, in which case they go under.
especially with hotels, i would have expected there to be small enough oligopoly to overcome the freerider problem (taxis are more regional, so i don't expect them to be able to fight an (inter)national company very easily)
plus the president owning a hotel chain
Medallion systems often prevented any competition, sometimes to absurd effect. The number of licenced taxis often didn't keep pace with population growth, sometimes even staying flat. Many drivers didn't own their own medallians then had to rent from owners, often making little money. In my city (Toronto) cabs were often dirty, broken, refused short distance fares (illegal) and smelled of cigarette smoke that was obviously from the driver.
Examples (paywalls, but you get the idea):
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/26/nyregion/amid-a-heritage-...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/adventure/red-li...
Post-2008, ZIRP and QE pumped trillions into financial markets, making capital nearly free for those who could borrow at scale. That money didn’t go into raising wages; it went into inflating asset prices. If you owned stocks or real estate, you got richer. If you earned a paycheck, you watched housing and living costs go up while your wages stagnated.
VC was one of the biggest beneficiaries. With bonds yielding nothing, institutional investors had to chase returns, flooding venture funds with capital. That’s how we got an era of insane startup valuations, SoftBank-style mega-funds, and entire sectors built on free money. Growth-at-all-costs became the norm because the cost of capital was effectively zero.
Then COVID hit, and the Fed doubled down—more QE, more stimulus, even lower rates. Another massive wealth transfer. Money printer go brrr, asset prices moon, and suddenly we have SPACs, meme stocks, and a startup funding frenzy. Meanwhile, workers got a couple of stimulus checks, and by the time the dust settled, everything from rent to food to cars was way more expensive.
Now AI companies are running the same playbook that cloud megascalers ran before them—monetizing open-source work while locking out the people who actually built it. Cloud providers took open-source databases, infrastructure, and developer tools, turned them into managed services, and extracted billions in profit without meaningfully compensating the people who did the work. AI companies are now doing the same thing—scraping open-source repositories, academic papers, and public datasets, building models upon it then slapping on proprietary fine-tuning and charging for API access all the while blatantly raising capital by promising to make the same workers they stole from obsolte. All of it built on the backs of researchers, engineers, and artists who never see a dime, but also on the backs of everyone else via the cantillon effect.
Now rates go up, the bubble deflates, and who gets left holding the bag? Not the VCs who cashed out early. Not the bankers who took their fees. It’s the workers, the middle class, the open-source devs, and the late-stage startup employees who thought they had something real. The cycle repeats.
Or is it just "illegal" for an overseas competitor to a domestic industry, in trade disputes?
What is the fine? How many days in jail does the company spend? What portion is its stock diluted by?
We remember the tale of Jeff Bezouis the Wise, who tragically lost his company when he decided he didn't want to buy diapers.com at the offered price, and instead wanted to dump 200 million dollars into selling diapers well below cost until their site folded.
If you as an individual can prevent the enforcement of a law, or be sure that it will not be enforced against you, then it does not apply to you.
Laws are ment to be broken. Especially in cronist systems where incumbents write the laws.
Taxis were discriminatory and "uncool" to the point were Uber has saved thousands by preventing drunk driving.
Now if you go out with the boys and get drunk, it's a 30 second casual call to get an Uber and get home.
Live in a neighborhood Taxis are afraid to service，you can either make some extra income working for Uber or use it yourself. When Ubers used as its intended purpose, to basically make a quick buck, it's a lifeline to many low income people .
Say your rents it's going to be late, you can pick up 20 or 30 hours of Uber this month to make it happen. It's not really a career though...
Laws matter to the extent that they don't interfere with actual progress. Laws that would have prevented the LLMs we have today from being developed should be ignored, as should laws requiring us to pay tribute to taxi and hotel cartels.
Respect for the law is going to be an increasingly-hard sell going forward, and that's mostly the lawmakers' own fault. When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law.
There's no purpose of having an executive branch of government separate from the other two branches if not to cushion the inflexible and glacial nature of the other branches of government.
> There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
> This quotation is often incorrectly attributed to Francis M. Wilhoit:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
> However, it was actually a 2018 blog response by 59-year-old Ohio composer Frank Wilhoit, years after Francis Wilhoit's death.
Big corps tend to be extremely conscientious of the the law. The law may not be ideal, but they tend to be hyper aware of it and have lawyers to ensure it. Small companies on the other hand are the wild fucking west, and tend to be overflowing with "turn a blind eye to that".
What big corps love is regulation that is expensive for small shops to overcome. They can drop $500k on a product cert no problem, be legally in the clear (and graciously compliant!), while making it near impossible for small guys to compete.
If you do something wrong as "part of your job" then you're typically not held responsible and accountable but the company is (the exceptions being spectacular fraud: Enron, VW diesel).
It's not hard to see how this can go off the rails.
It’s because the legal system is not about justice, it’s about money
Most people can’t afford lawyers or expensive legal battles
On the other hand, individuals and organizations with a lot of money get to weaponize and exploit the legal system to their advantage
“To my friends, anything; to my enemies, the law”
I'll refrain from value judgments on the above - but for heaven's sake, we're on a site called "Hacker News." We should understand that a machine like this could turn on any one of us in an instant for any reason.
In more general terms, the legal system punishes what can be made a profit or an example when punishing.
Also, I don't think the legal system itself wants to get too much into "big institutions against the work of others", save for the fictional TV representations of smart lawyers and clever arguments, 99.9% of the legal system output is copy/paste.
I think Aaron Swartz went to Harvard, not MIT
Welcome to the modern day aristocracy. Not only what you mentioned, this world is also divided into a group of insider who can get capital from 0 - 2%, while rest of us has a cost of 17%, 22% or 30%?
That's why democracy often feels "failed" in that no change can be achieved because "it's just more of the same". Few Lobbyists representing the interests of a few people have more power than millions voting differently.
For me the annoying part is that people vote for a guy because of a couple heavily advertised issues, ignoring all the other plans or the fact that he might not keep his word. Then they are unhappy that things "fail" for them.
I'd argue that, even if some change does happen in the US. Most change (see healthcare, military spending, etc) won't happen because big money will beat the majority of the populace every time.
"This problem will be solved in the favor of the (party) which has the most money to throw into the problem" (paraphrase mine).
So, yeah.
People often elevate deeply flawed figures to heroic status when those figures seem to challenge authority or "the system." This happens especially with individuals who present themselves as outsiders fighting the establishment, have a compelling personal struggle narrative, or voice grievances that resonate with public frustrations
Trump fits this pattern - his supporters overlook concerning behaviors and statements because they see him as fighting a system they distrust. Like Manning and Swartz, his mental state and fitness are often ignored in favor of the "hero against the system" narrative.
This dynamic creates a feedback loop where legitimate criticism becomes harder to discuss rationally.
A story in which we are the hero, in which we are not mortal, in which we are important, in which people care about us, in which we are intelligent and our perceptions rarely fail us, in which our life has a meaning and also in which the social game we play is determined, or at least influenced, by some just principles. We would despair if we were aware of the full extent of our meaninglessness and powerlessness.
I believe that it is the core reason why we love to believe that God/Nature is good, that the king is legitimate and that the laws are fair.
The poets write laments about such false ages. Prophecies were written about such ages thousands of years ago.
The cycles are larger than us all.
One stable insight is that the chaos breeds possibility, and thus hope. In the meantime, however…
For some reason, whenever you're a billionaire or company, things suddenly get so difficult that you can claim that it's impossible to be held accountable for anything. Murder, insider trading, laundering, treason, etc.
OpenAI complained about this, as did Google and everyone else. If your company can't exist without stealing data, then it's not a viable company. Companies don't have a constitutional right to exist.
