“He called in and placed an order for 10 pizzas to a friend’s house and charged $160 to his personal credit card. A Doordash call center then called into his restaurant and put in the order for those 10 pizzas. A Doordash driver showed up with a credit card and paid $240 for the pizzas.”
“The toilet paper made for the commercial market is a fundamentally different product from the toilet paper you buy in the store. It comes in huge rolls, too big to fit on most home dispensers. The paper itself is thinner and more utilitarian. It comes individually wrapped and is shipped on huge pallets.”
“[W]hoever’s running these art theft bots found a much more profitable way of generating leads: by scanning Twitter for people specifically telling artists they’d buy a shirt with an illustration on it.”
“There are now nine women in the preppers’ group chat, soliciting advice and swapping tips on how to best package goods for Amazon. … [E]very day Roundup [Montana] receives 3,000 to 4,000 Amazon-bound packages — about double the number of people who actually live there.”
“Endless money-losing is a variant of counterfeiting, and counterfeiting has dangerous economic consequences. … Competitors have to copy their fraudulent competitors. It’s a variant of Gresham’s Law, which says that ‘bad money drives out good’.”
“Uber has no hope of expanding its transport services beyond taxis. Uber’s costs are higher than traditional cab operators, and nothing in Uber’s IPO prospectus offers any clue as to how it could ever reduce its costs to the point where they became competitive with mass transit or private cars.”
“While not entirely free of bias — opportunities for discrimination by postal workers and Sears employees were still possible — the Sears ordering process was essentially a blind retail transaction, a screen placed between the store and black customers.”
“An unkind summary, then, of the past half decade of the consumer internet: Venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people, while subjecting all parties to increased surveillance.”
“The researchers also looked specifically at the 2008 economic collapse and estimate that a $1 minimum wage increase could have prevented over 13,000 suicides if previous trends held for this period.”