Far Left-Far Right Protectionist Dreams - vezzy-fnord http://econbrowser.com/archives/2016/03/far-left-far-right-protectionist-dreams <comment><AUTHOR> It's not meaningful to categorize this as 'Far Left-Far Right' by only picking out the views of Sanders and Trump. Just about everyone high-level politician or candidate claims that China manipulates its market (in a way they don't like):

Clinton (2016): "Clinton vows to impose tariffs on China to fight currency manipulation" \- [http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/rupee/clinton-vows-to- impos...](http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/rupee/clinton-vows-to-impose- tariffschina-to-fight-currency- manipulation_5773681.html?utm_source=ref_article)

Kaisch (2016): "If the Chinese are going to be participating and be a part of the market basket, you understand that that means they've got to come clean because they're going to have to let this thing work out. They can't keep manipulating things." \- [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-markets-usa- kasich-i...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-markets-usa-kasich- idUSKBN0UL1VZ20160107)

Romney (2012): "Mitt Romney has loudly and frequently said on the campaign trail that he would label the People's Republic of China a "currency manipulator"" \- [http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/10/19/currency_mani...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/10/19/currency_manipulation_it_s_not_just_china_lots_of_other_countries_do_it.html) \- and "Romney has vowed to declare China a currency manipulator on the first day of his presidency for artificially depressing the value of its currency" \- [http://news.yahoo.com/rubio-agree-obama-china-currency- issue...](http://news.yahoo.com/rubio-agree-obama-china-currency- issue-190127937--politics.html) .

Rubio (2015): "in order for China to join it, they will have to change their policies on imports, the way they manipulate exports, the currency manipulation, how they steal intellectual property and secrets from our companies." \- [http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/08/28/marco_rubi...](http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/08/28/marco_rubio_advocates_pacific_trade_deal_as_a_tool_to_force_china_to_stop_economic_manipulation.html)

Don't forget that "In September of 2010 the House voted on the Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act to address the Chinese manipulation of currency. The bill passed the house 348-79." \- [http://www.thepoliticalguide.com/Profiles/House/Ohio/Dennis_...](http://www.thepoliticalguide.com/Profiles/House/Ohio/Dennis_Kucinich/Views/China/)</comment>


Lyft's IPO disclosure shows it's not close to profitability - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-lyft-ipo-disclosure-20190307-story.html <comment><USER3> Yeah. And while this says a lot about Lyft, for me it really really says a lot about Uber too.

It has never been impossible to run a company by injecting money into it to cover the difference between how much customers 'value' the product versus what it costs to provide the product. But the dot com days showed that without a point in the business model where the value exceeds the cost by enough margin to keep the business going, such businesses don't survive.

What neither Lyft, nor Uber, has yet provided is a credible 'size' at which they would be a going concern (covering all their costs), nor a really good idea of how being larger scales revenues more than costs in sufficient measure to become profitable.

I would love to see a document that describes the 'per driver' costs that these companies incur on a location basis (so costs per driver in Los Angeles CA, and per driver in Minot ND) vs revenue expectations per driver vs total available livery miles (how many people would have to want to go somewhere to support those numbers). Then you could at least see if there were any islands of profitability in that solution space.

So far, I've yet to see anything where the answer is net positive. Worse, any positive solution will be very fragile by definition because the barrier to entry is zero and so a third party can unilaterally drain profits out of a ride share company by starting up an unprofitable competitor and funding it out of pocket until it has done the required amount of damage.

<comment><USER4> What's really interesting, and I think what's unclear is this: what's costs these services so much that they can't turn a profit?

Their costs, other than taking a haircut on the ride, doesn't seem entirely clear, or obviously large.

A 2017 number says Lyft completes about 360 million rides per year. For fun, let's say they make $1 per ride, are they really not able to run their front- end operations with around 1,000 employees? (assuming an employee costs about $250k-300k/yr)?

That seems crazy to me, but I don't know what hidden costs there are. From an outside PoV it appears they need to run a more or less static website, about 4 smartphone apps with some back-end routefinding and accounting systems.

What am I missing?

<comment><USER5> Last I looked at Uber's financials, 90-95% of their expenses was driver earnings. And then you have operating expenses that includes employees, promotions, r&d, regulatory fees, marketing, support, new investments etc.

Uber's margin is probably under 5% which simply isn't enough.

<comment><USER6> You were looking at the wrong numbers, or you didn't understand if those were the conclusions you came to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sadly for Lyft I think the best comparison will be Snap. And just one look at the SNAP chart will tell you why you should avoid the Lyft IPO.

It will go public at an inflated price and hold that valuation for a quarter or two and then people will start asking where either the profits or growth are and Lyft will need to start growing or erasing their huge operating losses right at the same time Uber is trying to grab as much ride share as possible gearing up to their own IPO.

So at a time when the market will be starting to really pressure them to cut losses, probably by cutting the driver's portion of revenue and raising prices, Uber will be trying their best to inflate their own ride share metrics by giving drivers more and cutting ride costs.

What is the story you can tell that paints Lyft as a good investment over the next 2 year period?

Then there is Lyft's dual share structure will get it kicked out of many ETF's. This locked in money is a godsend to most companies as they help buoy the stock price by having locked in holders of teh stock during turbulent times. I think MSCI will put Lyft into some of its indexes given that it just put in 8-10 Chinese companies with dual listing share structures

One thing I do like in Lyft's favour is that they could be a counter cyclical stock, ie they do well when the rest of the market isn't, due to people using Lyft to replace a second car or a lease that they've given up.

We just haven't had a recession while ride sharing was a main stream thing.

> Zimmer, Lyft's cofounder, went on to assert that private car ownership would > "all but end in major U.S. cities" by 2025.

Given that people are currently signing leases and payment plans for cars that won't expire by then I'd say this is a bit of a stretch:)

<comment><USER8> An investment thesis for Lyft is if you expect Lyft to get acquired. If profitability is nowhere in sight, then the end-game is acquisition. Companies that might want to get into ridesharing is long, and Lyft is the fastest (and probably cheapest if the stock tanks) path towards competing against Uber in the US market.

Any company that is working on self-driving cars will want to acquire Lyft: Google, Apple, Tesla, GM, etc

Any company that is in logistics space will want to acquire Lyft: Amazon, DoorDash, Grubhub, etc.

Any ridesharing company will want to acquire Lyft: Uber (defensively), Didi, Ola, probably not Grab, etc.

There will likely be a bidding war for Lyft because that's the only reasonable path towards competing against Uber unless you think self-driving car is < 5 years away.

<comment><USER9> This is all predicated on someone thinking that the rideshare buisness is profitable. It hasn't shown that it is. Uber is also losing money on every ride, isn't profitable, and still has multiple rideshare options, and side hustles of food delivery and freight. Same is true with every other similar company the world over. Nowhere is there the indication that the industry will be profitable anytime soon. People have assumed that if you could just stop paying drivers, the profits will come. They might, but fully autonomous cars don't exist, and also, they seem much further off than they did just two years ago. Even Andrew Ng publically suggested that pedestrians should just change their behavior, because the AI doesn't work, and won't work for a very long time.[0] So betting on magic cars to save the industry is a bit iffy.

It's certainly plausible that at some point, the companies simply burn through all their cash, and investors give up on expecting a return. That would kind of suck, but why keep throwing good money after bad?

[0] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-16/to-get- re...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-16/to-get-ready-for- robot-driving-some-want-to-reprogram-pedestrians)

<comment><USER10> People are convinced that autonomous vehicles are a 'data problem' and if we just log enough miles and 'train' our 'ai' enough, they'll be perfectly safe.

I'm of the opinion it's literal fantasy. Maybe in 50 years, heck, maybe in 30. 5-10? I can't see it.

<comment><USER11> That is a very strong statement -- what odds would you put on a "literal fantasy"? One in a thousand? One in a billion?

I'd back "self-driving, in-traffic, no-safety-driver taxi service available to the public in 5 cities in 10 years" at even money any day of the week (so long as it doesn't mean losing half of any money in escrow to inflation...)

<comment><USER12> If we define "city" to include real cities like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and DC, I'd take the other side of that bet. Two things will make closing the "last 10%" gap extremely difficult if not impossible.

1) Navigation. The D.C. street grid literally changes daily due to closures, detours, and construction. Google Maps does not keep up with these changes in real time. If self-driving tech can't understand when a construction worker is hand signaling drivers through a single lane for both directions of traffic, it won't work at scale.

2) Weather. Apparently, self-driving tech relies on following lane markings, which routinely are invisible during/after snow.

I don't think it's a strong statement. I'm taking the other side of the "everyone will be flying in supersonic airliners in 10 years" bet in 1960. There is a huge difference between tech that kinda works, and tech that works reliably enough to serve as a basis for transportation infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article seems excessively negative about a company:

* Which provided $8B worth of rides in a single year

* Didn't hurt anyone

For crimes which amount to:

* May cost some IPO underwriters money

* May not make all of the employees rich

* May cost VCs money

The worst thing to really say about such a company is "I enjoy their convenient rides but I won't buy their stock".

Instead, the article attacks the founders for their age (too young), ridicules their visions of the future, and compares them to other young founders. Bewilderingly, the author compares the founders to Zuckerburg, which doesn't fit the point of the article at all. Not content with all of that, the author takes a shot at Musk for selling fantasies, when he has done more than many people thought possible.

<comment><USER14> Didn't directly hurt anyone in an easily quantifiable way.

It's not clear that Uber or Lyft are net positives to society. They are disruptive, but not necessarily in a good way.

Yes, they provided $8B worth of rides. But before that people still got around. What the world might have been like without Lyft is impossible to know, but the way it's changed the job landscape isn't exactly a huge net positive. It's put a lot of cars on the road and it's set to new "floor" for jobs in general. Uber, Lyft, Taskrabbit, DoorDash have created a new kind of serfdom.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing, necessarily, but I wouldn't say that they didn't hurt anyone. They definitely hurt social progress.

<comment><USER15> They (Uber and Lyft) radically reduce drunk driving in every city they enter. They also radically simplify access to transportation for people of color, women, etc.

<comment><USER16> > They (Uber and Lyft) radically reduce drunk driving in every city they enter

This is cool if true. Does it show up in accident statistics?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Giving the founders 20-to-1 voting rights over regular investors while losing as much money as they are is insane. This really looks like a lemon, and the VC's want to cash out and leave public investors holding the bag.

I don't see how self driving cars are going to help them. Waymo and Tesla are both the farthest along, and they're going to run their own networks - competing against Lyft and Uber.

<comment><USER18> I don't really disagree with you, but I think (or, at least, hope) that there will be room for more than 2-3 players in the "self driving taxi" market.

<comment><USER19> The thing that would cause that is if there is some requirement for massive amounts of difficult to obtain data that is required to build a competitive system.

I do think data is a competitive advantage right now. But I find it really hard to believe that 10 years from now it will be harder to build a self driving system than today. That's just not how tech is. Building YouTube was a herculean endeavor 15 years ago, but today you can hack a YouTube clone together in hours.

Not just will we have more off the shelf software and hardware, but maybe you can license the data too.

In the end, I don't see the moat around a self driving cab company. If someone has a good app and a single car that operates in my area, why not switch to them?

Sure there are wait times and availability in odd places. But that doesn't inhibit a startup getting early adopters. You could literally just do the same commutes every day and have a profitable business.

Lastly, I expect the variety in vehicles and "mobile spaces" will provide a huge landscape of opportunity that a single company will not be able to fill. Just like there is not one "housing" company, there won't be one mobile housing company either. Too much variation in taste and preference.

<comment><USER20> > Building YouTube was a herculean endeavor 15 years ago, but today you can > hack a YouTube clone together in hours.

Ha, good one.

Would your clone have large scale spam, fraud, and abuse systems in place? Would it work on all browsers, mobile devices, TVs, set-top boxes, etc? Is your streaming tech cost-efficient and can it deliver reliability across all regions? Will you be able to respond to DMCAA takedown requests and comply with IP laws across states and countries?

I can go on and on.

Simply put, serving a video over the internet isn't rocket science. Building YouTube...is much more like rocket science.

<comment><USER19> You don't need those things until after you hit scale, so I wouldn't include them in an initial quote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _" The dual class structure of our common stock has the effect of concentrating voting power with our Co-Founders, which will limit your ability to influence the outcome of important transactions, including a change in control. Our Class B common stock has 20 votes per share, and our Class A common stock, which is the stock we are offering by means of this prospectus, has one vote per share."_

No-voting-power stock for a company that's losing money? No. Companies that have done that before, such as Google and Facebook, were profitable _before_ the IPO. That's when you want to keep the management team. With Lyft's numbers, firing the current management might not be a bad idea. They've had their growth phase; now they need to move to profitability.

If you haven't read an S-1 before, you skip all the happy talk and go directly to "Consolidated Statements of Operations".

<comment><USER22> To be fair, I doubt any management could make ride-sharing companies profitable. The sooner they go under, the sooner drivers start making livable incomes again.

<comment><USER23> > The sooner they go under, the sooner drivers start making livable incomes > again.

Have you actually been a driver? I can assure you that having been one, in the Bay area, even, the income was quite livable.

<comment><USER24> There's the common impression - misconception? - that driving for rideshare companies is a losing game, and that drivers end up making very little money after fuel, repairs, and depreciation. For a while, it seemed like every day there was another article breaking this down and "exposing" Uber and Lyft.

Having never driven for them, I can't verify whether this is true, but just a quick back-of-the-envelope guess seems like drivers in the Bay Area could average $40 - $50 an hour. That doesn't seem like minimum wage level to me.

<comment><USER25> The weird thing is I almost never get a driver with more than 1-2k trips. If the job actually paid well, you would think there would be a lot of people doing it full-time for more than one year. Maybe the skew is due to the rapid growth of rideshare in general but I suspect the main reason there don't seem to be seasoned super-drivers is that the job simply isn't as good as it seems

<comment><USER24> It's been said is some of the articles I mentioned that Uber's business plan is to profit of drivers who are financially illiterate, until those people either wise up or break. That seems like hyperbole, but if there is a kernel of truth to it, that would explain your observation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> For me the saddest thing is that even if Lyft stock tanks after the IPO the founders Zimmer and Green will have very little impact to their personal finances. The founders along with the investors will be able to move most of their stock through the markets making them billionaires. It's mostly the Lyft employees stuck in the post IPO lock up period who will be hurt by the dip in stock value. Another reason why the rich keep getting richer.

<comment><USER27> Isn't the founders' holding severely diluted? They've gone through, iirc, over a dozen rounds of funding and own very little in the company

<comment><USER28> Even owning 1% of a $15B company still makes you worth $150 million.

Dumping even 2% of that $150M would give you enough to retire.

<comment><USER29> 3M is not even close to enough for retirement in Silicon Valley. Also... 1.6M after taxes.

<comment><USER30> I thought the usual track was _Move to SV - > Get rich -> Retire somewhere cheaper_. ~1 million is plenty almost anywhere on the planet. Especially if they go the FIRE route.

<comment><USER27> $1M isn't plenty for everywhere. Even in India, $400-500k is what you would need to buy a new 3-4 bedroom apart in a good area of, say, New Delhi. In Mumbai, $1M is the bare minimum

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> throwaway-1283 Basically what will happen is that in some month X after IPO the company will be forced to pull back on new driver incentives (the thing that is really making these companies bleed cash), which will slow driver supply growth, which will increase rider wait times and/or make prices spike, which will lower demand, and thus slow growth, and kill the stock price.

I wouldn't touch this at all. Or short it if you're brave :)

<comment><USER31> If/when Lyft decides it can't grow any more, it will dump the unprofitable cities and focus on the cash cows: LA and New York, etc. The large cities are quite profitable and will be enough.

That said, it's better for society if the unprofitable cities are served by competing ride sharing services. It's kind of like how the US Postal Service makes money in the cities and loses it in rural areas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Well same for Uber and we all knew that. It's just the business model (for now).

So, in a world where we are all used to Uber/Lyft and there's no turning back, the only way forward is for fares to go up, close to - if not the same - <USER2> conventional cab fares. Which will decrease usage, which will decrease the size of Uber/Lyft and therefore their market cap. Sounds like 1999

<comment><USER33> I honestly, albeit naively, expected that when Uber put in a new CEO, they'd take that opportunity to raise prices to break even levels which presumably end up around where taxis are. Take the volume hit; customers who are only interested in VC-subsided rides aren't customers you want. But I guess everyone decided to continue to pretend that the current business is sustainable.

<comment><USER22> They're probably still holding on to the dream of the self driving vehicle ... which is practically at least 15 years out at this point .. probably more like 20~25.

<comment><USER33> Note that holding onto a dream and making public statements to sucker investors are not necessarily the same thing.

I agree with your basic point, especially in the areas dense enough to make taxi-like services work well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm bullish on ridesharing as a segment but bearish on uber and Lyft, simply because I think both have been run like landgrabs - large VC backed pushes to jumpstart demand and find drivers. In this case though I think the land won't stay "grabbed".

Every driver I have seen is driving for both services and would add a third if someone told them about it and it payed equitably, so I think all the work uber and Lyft have done to make a market can be leveraged by third party competitors if they start dialing up prices to become more profitable. And I think they will need to do that to meet their valuations.

This isn't like Facebook where a larger network acts like a moat keeping competitors out. Instead, I think it actively makes a market for competitors- the friction for drivers is pretty small, and I don't know the friction involved for getting users to download another app but I imagine it's pretty low. Because the drivers are the same it's a commodity, and switching between apps costs me nothing.

Disclaimer: I probably don't know what I am talking about.

<comment><USER31> I agree that neither riders nor drivers have any affinity toward the ride sharing platforms beyond cost and availability. That said, the incumbent in an area typically wins due to the chicken and egg problem of riders and drivers. Didi vs. Uber, Grab vs. Uber, Uber vs. Juno, etc.

Lyft's market share is as high as it is because they invented the ride sharing category. Uber's market share is higher because the Uber Black service was present in more cities, so it could use its existing operations staff and rider network (and lobbying presence).

<comment><USER34> But the chicken and egg problem is partially solved by having lots of chickens already around laying eggs for other services. So I only have to convince people already driving to download my third-driver-app, and then riders have chickens. There is some evidence of this happening in places like Austin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think both Lyft and Uber are pursuing IPOs because the private market has soured on them. The VCs want to get their payout and are starting to fear a down round…so the companies will go public, the investors will get their payouts, and whoever buys will eventually regret it.

</comment><comment><USER36> What are the big expenses that cost Uber and Lyft so much? The driver takes the cost of owning and maintaining the vehicle, and they're only paid a fraction of whatever rides they get. Aren't the companies just running an app?

<comment><USER37> Because of churn and driver recruitment incentives Lyft pays the driver more than it charges the rider. For example a new driver gets 80% of the fare plus $8 per trip in the first month. If you can pick up 155 people per week, Lyft also eats the entire cost of your vehicle. Also, Lyft is paying 100s of millions of dollars to Amazon and Google to run their app.

<comment><USER38> I'd be really interested to know what resources they are using in cloud and why it is so expensive. I don't disagree they need resources but 100s of millions seems a bit on the wasteful side.

<comment><USER22> It's running in hundreds cities in tons of countries with huge pools of drivers. The server costs alone are going to be big. Plus you have to hire and pay for really good reliability engineers. Any outages are going to cost you a lot of confidence, and a lot of money. This is a really big amount of data, more than most people realize.

<comment><USER39> Lyft only operates in the US and a few cities in Canada.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I would gladly pay more than a cab to continue to have the convenience of being able to get a ride when and where I need it.

I remember back in the pre-rideshare days, trying to call a cab ahead of time, and having them simply not show up, with no warning or notification.

</comment><comment><USER22> Lately my phone will die at 30% charge. I've ordered a new battery but last week it went out while I was looking for a Lyft. I normally don't use taxis but it was cold and I was tired.

Luckily I was near a train station and it was still early enough the buses were running, so I knew which transfers to make and which bus to get on without needing a map.

Still I thought about how only a decade ago, I could be on this same street and hold up my hand and flag down a Taxi. Today if I really wanted a taxi, they're pretty much only in the city. I'd have to hunt around for a payphone and would need change too.

If I didn't know my public transport routes back home or if it was late enough the trains stopped running, I'd be kinda SOL. I realize Taxis not just driving around saves on fuel consumption, but have we lost something by simply not being able to hail a cab without a charged phone or laptop with a Wi-Fi point?

I wonder if Uber or Lyft will start putting out kiosks people can use to flag down rides when their phones or out.

<comment><USER41> Yes, we've lost it. However, it can be fixed. I created app so everyone can be a taxi driver. It's PoC, but actually works. There are tons of problems, no critical mass, security. But anyway, I was once able to find a ride back home from San Francisco.

This app is for everyone at [https://libretaxi.org](https://libretaxi.org) (non-profit, open source)

Disclaimer: I'm founder

<comment> jon-wood As much as I love to see Open source solutions to problems having looked at the website this seems like a disaster waiting to happen without any sort of driver vetting. You've effectively made an app where people can broadcast to random strangers that they're waiting around in the street, carrying cash, and far enough from home to need a lift. Sadly we don't live in a world where something like that isn't going to be flooded by people with ideas other than making a few bucks driving people home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> All of this talk sound surprising similar to airlines.

\- LCCs (Low Cost Carriers can come in and disrupt your fragile net profit, if you get close to it in a quarter)

\- Always pretty much operating in the negative.

\- Consumers find a lot value in the company even though the operating cost are insane.

\- The only way to solve the issue of airlines being in debt for years was time to slowly cut operation cost and scale, massive scale (albeit, there are a couple exceptions today now).

\- Local market competition in cities are hell to forecast and balance out operating cost to how profitable you can be vs competitors. Which create cities you grow dominant and via reputation and government policies.

\- They piss off investors because they have to trade off and invest in the operating cost (fleet or employees) some years, which can effect the companies earning for years.

I get they the rideshare industry is vastly different than the airline industry in many ways (for example, oil price influencing one more than the other), but I think they are similar in important ways.

Uber and Lyft will have to start taking out pages from LCCs in Europe to get ideas on how to become profitable (and probably piss off customers by nickel and diming them) and any ideas they haven't from the taxi industry that they may have over looked. Hell maybe even adapt into the rental space. I don't know the answers, but just sounds like an industry I've seen before that will have to move mountains to been profitable.

Sidenote: I will not be surprised just like American, Delta, and United that Lyft and Uber will soon see government sponsored competition (China, Russia, Middle East countries) in future and be pissed because of how unfair they are because they can operate in the negative without consequences of failing.

</comment><comment><USER43> The problem with both Lyft and Uber is they have MASSIVE VC investments they need to pay back, and while the business model is good its not nearly good enough to payback VC within the 10 year window. Uber will be in the exact same boat next year.

<comment> throwaway-1283 What do you mean "pay back"? If you're talking about liquidation preferences those all go away in an IPO.

<comment><USER43> All the investors that 'purchased' a percentage of the private company with their investment during funding rounds will want to see ROI when the company goes public (or if the company is insanely profitable while private). Most of these VC's expect to start seeing ROI around the 10yr mark. The company isnt remotely profitable still privately held, so lets go public and get other suckers to buy in so the early investors can cash out and hopefully make a buck or two or at least breakeven.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I have been reading Lyft S-1, especially their risk factor assessment. While it is full of normal warnings like limited operating history, competitors etc. One of the warnings stood out for me.

 _Our results of operations vary and are unpredictable from period-to-period, which could cause the trading price of our Class A common stock to decline._

If this is the case, I wonder how do they can they even predict their future growth? How much credence can be given to the data they present or expect about their growth?

</comment><comment><USER45> In the past two weeks I've been receiving offers for discounted rides from Lyft. First was 30% off for a week, then yesterday I received a code for 50% off this week. It seems they're trying to inflate their ride numbers quickly. I have not received any promotions prior to this, and I've been a member for over a year.

<comment><USER46> No question. It's pretty evident they are aggressively spending on acquisition to boost their top line numbers. Timing wise, this effect will probably show up after they IPO and for their first publicly reported earnings announcement. Which will hopefully keep the stock price high long enough for the employee lock-up to expire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'm trying to think of some way a large equity firm could make money on shares that are almost certain to go from high to low...

</comment><comment><USER48> Once Waymo has fully autonomous vehicles on the road, they'll look to acquire Lyft for a decent price. Lyft has the brand value and the infrastructure for ride calling (intentionally not using ride sharing) except that drivers will no longer be needed. Profits will be through the roof when that happens.

<comment><USER49> There are 1.4 million Lyft drivers in US and Toronto.

Waymo is going to buy and retrofit and provide 1.4 million cars?

<comment><USER50> Those 1.4 millions drivers aren't all driving at the same time. They would only need a fraction of that many cars and they could be built over an extended period of time.

<comment><USER49> OK so Waymo is going to buy and retrofit and provide 500k cars?

<comment><USER48> Self-driving cars will be feasible only if LIDAR/camera costs go down to $10k/car or lower. No one is going to pay $250k for a self-driving car. At $10k/car, it's $5B for 500k cars, something that Google can easily afford.

<comment><USER49> Google would have to own the cars that this point tho right? They can't just plop a LiDAR on a car and call it self driving. So 10k+ the cost of car. Maybe 50k.

<comment><USER48> Not really. They could sell their technology to a car company and all cars sold by that company could be self-driving enabled. Maybe we'll get true ride sharing then. I'm at home and not planning to use my car for the day. It could be used to give someone rides without me having to go drive. Waymo/Lyft could still own some cars but not all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I get a lot of promotions from lyft that make me think they're desperate.

<comment><USER52> They're not really promotions. All those 20% off emails only give you 20% off Lyft's fee, not the whole fare. It saves you a total of maybe $2 on an average ride.

<comment><USER45> I disagree, my email yesterday said "50% off your next 10 rides. You have 10 rides remaining. Max savings of $6 per ride. Discount applies to the fare, Prime Time charges, Service fee, tolls, and taxes only."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Would it be wise for someone to go work for lift given this information? Asking for a friend...

</comment><comment><USER54> they are the literal definition of a parasite how are they not profitable?

</comment><comment><USER55> Three words: Ads, ads, and ads.

Ads is how you make money. All lyft needs to do is incorporate ads into its platform and it will start printing money.

<comment><USER56> At this point I'm convinced this is a troll account

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> What level of equity are Uber and Lyft drivers given in the company? Any?

Are they "earning shares per mile" or anything like that?

If not - then screw both companies, and I hope they do poorly in the IPO -- even though ridesharing is such a wonderful service - I really hope they do right by the literal foundation of their existence, which is the drivers.

<comment><USER58> That seems completely unreasonable. Lyft contracts with more than 700k drivers. How in the world could they give each driver a meaningful share of options while also maintaining a controlling interest in the company? Let's also be real here; the supply of drivers is endless. It's about as far from a skill position as one could imagine. Would you be ok with their pay being decreased as well?

<comment><USER59> > How in the world could they give each driver a meaningful share of options > while also maintaining a controlling interest in the company?

Not commenting on the practicality, but when choosing between traditionally cab companies, I preferentially go with ones that are driver/employee owned.</comment></comment></comment>


How much of my company should I give away? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a startup (A) that is about to launch a product. I am the only founder. I have 2 friends that have a brilliant idea for a startup (B) and they are going to start working on it soon. They think my startup is an ok idea. They want 20% each of my startup (A) [I have to give up 40%] and they will give me 20% of their new startup(B)

Is this a fair deal?

<comment><USER2> Could you monetize these ideas? How much would they make you?

Also, how do you see these shares? As a commitement? How much of your time would you spend on each? They had the idea so they deserve a premium but if you will spend just as much time as them on it, that premium is all that separates you from them.

Commitement matters. As important as ideas are, without commitement and execution, they are nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Its commitment and Cash. We are going to fund ourself. Its a brilliant idea. Its simple and it applies to a long tail economy. I believe its a multi million dollar idea that needs to be executed well. Also I think that my idea can be a platform for theirs... Everyone will win from working together. I just think that giving up 40% of a nearly finished product is big.</comment></comment></comment>


The Danger of E-Books - <AUTHOR> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/the-danger-of-ebooks.html <comment><USER2> On one hand, I understand the dangers from a philosophical viewpoint. On the other, I don't care what Amazon considers their rights or licenses with my Kindle.

I'm going to read what I want to read, when I want to read it, on my Kindle, whether Amazon wants me to or considers me to have a license or not. Basically: I don't care what the EULA states for my Kindle.

It's the same attitude I have around pirating movies or shows: if a movie company won't let me pay them to let me watch a movie/TV show via Steam, Netflix, or even from their own site, then I'll just watch it on Popcorn Time and it's their loss.

If it ever came to the point of Amazon disabling Kindles for sharing this viewpoint, then I'm sure there would be a groundswell of support for an open- source OS for the Kindle and we'd all get coding. In the end, I'm not all that scared.

<comment><USER3> > if a movie company won't let me pay them to let me watch a movie/TV show via > Steam, Netflix, or even from their own site, then I'll just watch it on > Popcorn Time and it's their loss.

Right, except you don't have the right to do that. You have no carte blanche entitlement to access media or entertainment. If the executives at HBO figure that, financially speaking, it's in their best interest to keep new _Game of Thrones_ episodes accessible to cable customers only, you have the right to not buy it and be frustrated at that and protest it until eventually enough people protest for HBO to budge.

What you don't have the right to do is then to circumvent the legal and technological system set up for you to purchase _Game of Thrones_ and access it for free, which, yes, is fucking theft. I can hear the scoffing through TCP/IP.

And you're not just harming the company, you're not just harming the already rich suits at HBO. This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons. People figure getting their music for free is a more rational individual choice than paying $16 for a CD. Everyone then makes the decision to get their media for free. Who cares about those stupid record labels, anyways?

Suddenly, smaller markets around the world have their industry gutted by piracy, smaller labels have to shut down, bigger labels have to fire hundreds of less successful artists that they used to be able to support from the money they made on the more successful artists, the more successful artists have to stop relying on royalties from album sales and have to whore themselves out doing nonstop touring year-round for money. Thank God it's physically impossible to "pirate" concert tickets.

I know we're going on a tangent here, but people often falsely conflate open- source access to information and piracy into this one big, happy revolution against the evil gatekeepers and their evil transactions that involve my money. No. Piracy is just fucking theft, period.

<comment><USER4> >No. Piracy is just fucking theft, period.

No, you don't get to redefine a word because you feel like it. "Piracy" is often wrong, but it is not theft (the owner is not deprived of the item).

<comment><USER5> I am a lawyer...I know these definitions pretty well, so Ill chime in.

Let's take George Bernard's famous quote: "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas." According to your definition, one could not engage in theft of an idea, because one could never be deprived of an idea like with the taking of an apple.

However, let's look at the actual legal definition of theft: The actus reus (act) of theft is usually defined as an unauthorized taking, keeping or using of another's property which must be accompanied by a mens rea (mental state/intent) of dishonesty and/or the intent to permanently deprive the owner or the person with rightful possession of that property or its use.

You limited the definition of theft to only include when one's mental state intends to deprive someone. The actual definition is not limited though, but alternatively includes when the taking was done dishonestly. Therefore, if someone takes something not belonging to them, and does so dishonestly that in fact is theft. Since I foresee the definition of dishonesty being the next issue here, that has been defined in case law, but generally where the person intended to take property they did not have a legal right to take.

<comment><USER6> _You limited the definition of theft to only include when one 's mental state intends to deprive someone._

As a lawyer, I'm surprised you are not familiar with the Dowling case, which is where that definition comes from. It wasn't pulled out of GP's ass.

<comment><USER5> I am very familiar with the Dowling case. However, I assure you the definition of theft does not come from a case from 1985, the common law definition has been around quite a bit longer than 1985. There were a few issues on appeal, but most likely what you and GP are referncing has nothing to do with _theft_ but a conviction under 18 USC 2314 which was over turned because the counterfeit goods in question being transported across state lines were not physical goods, and the court found there must have been a physical taking. This is not about theft, this is about 18 U.S. Code § 2314 - Transportation of stolen goods, securities, moneys, fraudulent State tax stamps, or articles used in counterfeiting, and under that very specific law of transporting _goods_ , not theft, there has to be a physical taking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow. E-books such as non-DRM'ed ePub are great sharing and accessibility tool. I can't quite decide whether this conflating of e-books with the Amazon Kindle store is stupid or dishonest. The Kindle format/store is only "typical" in that Amazon is a major bookseller. There is nothing preventing every benefit listed there of printed books with ePub, and even people who are blind can access them too.

<comment><USER8> I don't get the complaint. This is the context:

 _" printed books …(stuff that applies to printed books) ..Contrast that with Amazon e-books (fairly typical).. (stuff that applies to kindle ebooks and other DRM restricted formats):"_

Its fairly typical in that Amazon is the biggest retailer, a trend setter and other retailers and tech providers follow their lead putting out similar stuff.

I don't perfectly agree with the Free Software Foundation at a high level, but I think this comparison is pretty fair. If you compare in most people's physical and legally obtained digital book collections, this is what you will find. The ebooks don't come with the same rights.

<comment><USER7> e-book != DRM

EDIT: To be more clear, it says "We must reject e-books until they respect our freedom." But every single benefit it notes of printed books is also true of non-DRM'ed ePub book, except that non-DRM'ed ePubs respect your freedom _even more_ —your freedom to freely copy and distribute it, your freedom to have it displayed by a screenreader or braille device.

If you want more free e-books, just go to m.gutenberg.org, find one, and open it in your app of choice.

<comment><USER8> I don't disagree with this and neither does the article.

It is however true that in the practice, in the wild, ebooks mostly do have DRM. Hence, it's a problem with e-books to the the extent that it is a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I own several kindle devices, have never purchased an ebook through Amazon, and do not connect any of them to the internet for any reason. It's a battery hog, and I have no desire to buy books directly from the device, and if i need to access the web, i have a plethora of other devices capable and at hand.

Furthermore, I don't allow myself to restricted to DRM'd books. In the event I was unable to acquire a book in a non-DRM'd format, I'd purchase the book (using a prepaid credit card, as i do with all my internet transactions) and strip the DRM. If it was unavailable in that manner, then I would purchase a physical copy of the book. But that is not a deterrent for me. I own a few ebooks that don't exist in physical form (at least not for mass market to my knowledge) and I own a few physical books that do not exist in digital format (once again, to my knowledge). Neither will kill the other, they can both co- exist happily, and in my case, they do. I carry my kindle keyboard everywhere and often time have at least 2-3 paperback books on me as well. As a matter of fact, I am currently reading a book on my kindle, another in paperback form and a third is being read to me on Audible. Not all at the same time mind you, but concurrently.

</comment><comment><USER10> Should really be called "The Dangers of DRM'ed E-Books".

There are several advantages of ebooks over paper books:

* Less environmentally harmful * Take up less space * Easier to copy, I can send 1 subversive ebook to 1,000 people.

<comment><USER11> > _Less environmentally harmful_

I believe this is a pretty naive analysis. If you look at the energy expenditures for maintaining a library over a decade, let alone a century, a paper book would be far more environmentally friendly.

<comment><USER12> Well, how many joules does it take to maintain a paper library for a century and how many joules to maintain an ebook library?

<comment><USER13> On a hard drive or tape system?

On a reader - if you're counting the cost of electricity, let's count the cost of shipping entire forests of paper around the world, first to paper mills, then to print factories, then to bookshops and libraries.

And the cost of travel to and from a lending library for every reader.

And why not also include the cost of lighting to read the book? (I can read my Kobo in the dark because it has a very low energy backlight. My eyes don't work so well with the lights off, so I've never been able to do that with paper.)

I wonder how many people here understand that _giant warehouses_ full of overstocked print are regularly shipped back from stores and pulped. Does everyone understand how much space and weight a million copies of a failed bestseller takes up? Does everyone know that paper books are always sold sale- or-return, so if they don't go out the front door they go out the back door onto a truck, with the covers stripped so they can't be resold?

The original article is _factually wrong_ in significant ways.

Not all ebooks are sold by Amazon, not all ebooks have DRM, and not all ebooks that start with DRM continue to have DRM.

At this point, arguing against digital publishing because Amazon is like arguing against the printing press because the medieval Catholic church was fond of censorship and burning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is one of those things where the FSF has the completely correct idea, but has accidentally pointed their finger at the wrong culprit. The problem here is not e-books, it's DRM. The article even says as much at the bottom. I completely agree with the whole point of this article but wish it had used this case as a further tie-in to the various other articles asserting DRM's horrible. I think that the use of the specific case with specific examples to draw into a larger argument is often more effective than continuing to just point the finger at the single instance of the problem.

<comment><USER15> > The problem here is not e-books, it's DRM. The article even says as much at > the bottom.

So… how did the FSF point their fingers at the wrong culprit when they state black on white that the problem is DRMs but that ebooks are not intrinsically problematic?

<comment><USER14> The title and major thrust of the article is that ebooks are generally bad. The real point only made at the end though is that they aren't, they're only bad when corporations and DRM are in-control.

Imho, if they had been clearer from the get-go that the problem is DRM, not ebooks in-general, it would be much more powerful.

<comment><USER15> > The title and major thrust of the article is that ebooks are generally bad.

Which is not wrong either given ebooks are generally from a DRM-using company (namely Amazon which has the vast majority of ebooks market share)

<comment><USER16> This is actually true only for the US market and possibly the UK one. In other countries it's vastly different. Of the hundred+ books I have on my reader only three or four are coming from Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just pirate your ebooks online or buy hard copy if you're uncomfortable with Amazon's tomfoolery. Or, "borrow" them via Amazon, then rip the DRM out with some pirate jag.

Technologically, DRM is a solved problem, and has been for years-- just check out the Pirate Bay.

Notice how I've mentioned the word "pirate" so many times? This is the result of finding a practical solution to the problems that Amazon has created. This costs them money, directly, as I could just as easily be buying books from them rather than using them to scout books then finding the pirated version.

</comment><comment><USER18> Yesterday I wanted to share a sentence of text from an ebook with two friends on Google Hangouts. I clicked the 'share' button in Nook Reader and chose 'Hangouts' as the destination. It pasted a URL pointing to a barnes and noble site with some ID appended. This is not what I want to happen.

I ended up screenshotting the page, cropping it, and pasting the image onto chat. It might have been easier to type the whole thing out (though I'm not great at typing on mobile).

This annoyance alone has spurred me to look again at keeping my own catalog of DRM-free files in Calibre and using a reader that doesn't do this sort of thing.

Any advice on 'flow' to make this sort of approach easy is welcome (apart from the DRM bit, that's off-topic).

<comment><USER19> Put your calibre library in Dropbox or Google Drive. Get Calibre Cloud Pro to have a good-looking, easily searchable library on your device (you download from there as needed). Use Moon+ or some other reader to read the books. Calibre also has a server function (which Moon+ supports), but not everybody has a public IP to access their books everywhere.

These are all Android, but there's probably some equivalent on iOS. You will want to convert all your ebooks to a format that your reader supports, such as epub. There are extensions for Calibre that will strip DRM if you're into that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have a concrete anecdote about ebooks I bring up in these discussions, which I am just copying-and-pasting below [1]:

In 2006 I purchased from Amazon the special edition of Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep", an Adobe eBook (the only way this special edition was available). Last year [six years ago, as I paste this], when I went to have another look at the eBook on my latest computer (not the one I originally purchased the book on), I found that it no longer worked: I could not enable the book on my new computer because Amazon's license server for Adobe eBooks no longer worked. It took me several back-and-forth emails with Amazon's customer support to get someone to admit that once Amazon moved over to the Kindle, support for the Adobe ebooks went away (most of them didn't even seem to be aware that there were eBooks prior to the Kindle). I'd have settled for them replacing my eBook with the Kindle equivalent, but I don't own a Kindle. At the time there was no Kindle eBook reader for OS X. I eventually got a refund, but it took a lot of work to get them to even recognize that there was a problem. Additionally, I didn't want a refund, I wanted to read the special content in this special version of the book, one that is not available in paper. Given that experience, I'm a bit reluctant to purchase the Kindle version, even though there is apparently an OS X reader now.

I think the thing that most disturbs me about this whole incident is not just that a book I bought stopped working it is that I had no indication that it had become unavailable to me until the instant I went to re-read it. It had probably been inaccessible for months if not years without me knowing, with me thinking that I had the book ready for me to go read whenever I felt like, but when I went to check on something, it just didn't work. My shelves of paper books don't present me with that kind of problem.

NOTE that when I bought this ebook I registered it to my email address. They HAD my email address, and could have sent me an alert when the server's retirement was imminent, so I would have a chance to at least authorize my book on my current crop of devices.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1333441](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1333441)

</comment><comment><USER21> Is e-book DRM even remotely effective? It seems like with something like the Kindle web reader, it would be trivial to write a script that took screenshots of every page of the book, and optionally applied OCR.

Of course, this could also be done with the physical devices and an appropriate machine to press the buttons. The "Analog Hole" is quite present in books, which can be reproduced with no loss of quality.

I actually wonder if the Kindle DRM is more a way of appeasing publishers than something that was actually intended to be effective.

<comment><USER15> Depends what you mean by "effective".

It's similar to e.g. steam or appstore DRM: relatively easy to trivial to bypass (or you can access the content with bypassed/removed DRM easily enough) but the system is convenient enough that most won't care to do so unless and until it's being repeatedly and widely (ab)used by the keys authority.

It won't hinder the motivated and technologically inclined but they're a small minority, meanwhile the scheme spreads, and if/once devices or accounts get killed it's too late.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A bit over the top. Yes, utilizing Amazons devices gives them full power over the content on your device but why do we need to suggest that E-books have to deliver on the same business model as print books?. There are benefits to e-books that regular books don't offer so just ask yourself if the tradeoff is worth it. I'm certain Amazon, in general, does not want to be in the business of removing books from peoples devices.

<comment><USER23> Basically. "A bit over the top" could very well be the byline of gnu.org/philosophy. They are the impractical philosophical anchor at one end of a line of conversation; if the world worked the way the philosophy described, everyone would be a bit technologically poorer (but "freer", at least).

<comment><USER24> How exactly would we be technologically poorer in this case? Would Amazon / B&N / Apple / any ebook distributor suddenly lose their impetus to develop ebook-reading tech / devices?

<comment><USER25> Maybe they wouldn't lose their impetus, but they might lose their ability to sell the idea of e-books to publishers.

The major stores sell DRM-free music now, but do you think that Apple would have been able to get music publishers on board if the iTMS had no copy protection on day one?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I download books from my library (Boston Public). They are DRM'd and only usable on my Kindle for a few weeks. But that is enough. The range of books available is good. ANd if it is a text or something I like, I can then buy it. If it is just a garbage novel to ease a flight, then that is good too. The Kindle, on a per book rate, was really cheap and the library is even cheaper!

</comment><comment><USER25> > Amazon can remotely delete the e-book using a back door. It used this back > door in 2009 to delete thousands of copies of George Orwell's 1984.

Tell the whole story, guys. Framing it just this way is dishonest.

<comment><USER27> Do the other details matter? That Amazon had to recall the book and refunded customers? Not to me. They simply could not have "recalled" all books if they had been physically sold.

They are holding a loaded weapon pointing at our e-books. The circumstances that make them fire it are not as important as the bizarre fact that they have this loaded weapon in the first place.

<comment><USER23> That's one way of looking at it.

Another way is that building the loaded weapon was a prerequisite for their capacity to offer the world's largest library of commercially-viable ebook content, and without that "bizarre fact," the content simply wouldn't be available to anyone electronically because of the legal wrangling necessary to get it into publicly-accessible electronic format.

<comment><USER27> These manacles are always sold to the public as "for your own" or "for your own protection" as if they were an inevitable fait accompli of how things should proceed. Very Machiavellian, very gangsterish. We have evidence of these libraries growing without these restrictions, so we know it's simply a lie that we need these restrictions.

The ends do not justify these means.

<comment><USER23> They grow faster with the restrictions. Digital music was doable, but wasn't easy until Apple did the business work necessary to make the iTunes Music Store possible. eBook access to the latest publications on day-of publication across fiction and nonfiction was functionally a non-starter until Amazon did the business work necessary to make the Kindle Store possible. Their competition who didn't want to play by the rules of the restrictions the content owners wanted were plowed under by the volume and convenience generated by successful business partnerships.

It's inconvenient for those who prefer a world without business-driven constraints that the processes that create those constraints also create massive convenience. But they do, and the world is full of potential customers who want that convenience. Because the alternative of a marketplace where they can pay someone (and play by that someone's terms of service) to do the work for them is to learn to do that work themselves, and that's not what people want to specialize in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Awesome places to get DRM free ebooks:

Baen has their entire catalog online, DRM free: [http://www.webscription.net/](http://www.webscription.net/) They also include CDs with some p-books that have the complete collection of a given series, which you can download for free here: [http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/](http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/) (Check out the Miles Vorkosigan series and the Honorverse series, if you're looking for some good reading.)

All Tor/Macmillan ebooks are available DRM free from Google, Amazon, and everywhere else they are sold.

Where are your favorite sources of DRM free books?

</comment><comment><USER29> I would like to add three other dangers of e-books.

First, that a central authority could reach out and change _all copies_ of an extant work. Not delete it, but selectively change it. The Information Ministry never had it so good!

Second, and this is true especially for kids, I think e-books are psychologically problematic. A physical book has fewer degrees-of-freedom, and that's good because the content has nearly infinite-degrees-of-freedom. The way _the device_ works is no mystery to kids, and once you've read it you put it on the shelf (or give it away). With e-books, you always have your whole library right there, and focus becomes an act of will instead of the default.

Third, and this is true especially for thoughtful books, you can't read an e-book with a pen. I shudder to think about reading Marcus Aurelius _Meditations_ without pen in hand!

As an added bonus, books trap carbon! So the more books we have, the better off our environment!

<comment><USER16> Your first point (like the points raised by OP) is not about e-books at all, it's about a certain kind of books sold by a certain vendor.

<comment><USER29> Consider that a sufficiently talented programmer constructing a very powerful piece of malware could, in fact, alter every copy of something everywhere, simultaneously, no matter what it's format.

And they wouldn't have to be 100% successful, they'd only need to affect enough copies to sow doubt into people minds about which is the authentic copy.

My point applies to all digital media, for the simple reason that computers are remarkable in their ability to modify the state of very small things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I use Calibre and the DeDRM plugin to remove the DRM from all the ebooks I buy. Very convenient and only takes a second.

<comment><USER31> Does this leave it in mobi format and if so, can t still be read on a kindle?

<comment><USER32> You can export as various formats and it is still 100% readable on Kindle (I have experience with both apps and a few devices). It doesn't mangle anything. Not who you replied to, but I've been using this exact setup to protect my e-book collection for a long time and couldn't be happier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I agree to some points but still, pdfs/ebooks will help distributing books to more people making information more available. And with these arguments, are libraries bad? Considering you need to identify yourself and they are in charge for choosing which books you're can to read, and which ones you can't.

<comment><USER34> Was looking for this point. For me I moved over to ebooks because I didn't want more physical books cluttering up my already small living area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> YES. Ebooks are a great idea, but definitely not in the way currently implemented. I hate the idea that XYZ Corp., can start streaming ads into my books or have detailed analytics of which lines I read/skipped/copied/researched just because I bought it from them. It's really convenient: they control the format, hence they control the software to (legally) read it, hence that software can behave pretty much any way it likes!

It's even further horrible when you consider a future when books will only be available in one format, that too by XYZ Megacorp ONLY. I don't want the world I inhabit waltzing into that future. Thank GNU that GNU exists.

<comment><USER16> From the comment in the thread it seems people are not aware of Kobo readers… They are great hardware-wise and the default format is standard epub. You can find everything in this format, create your own books with tools like Sigil, convert from other formats with Calibre, etc.

Please stop conflating ebooks with the crappy format of one vendor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> As far as free flow of information goes, you can't torrent a paper book.

It's also not true that Amazon pushes DRM. They include it as a gesture to the publishers. You can put a DRM-free ebook on Amazon if you choose so.

<comment><USER37> "You can put a DRM-free ebook on Amazon if you choose so."

Absolutely, and many do so. You can spot the ones that don't have DRM by looking for "Simultaneous device usage: unlimited" in the description.

Most indie books and some major publishers (O'Reilly and Baen have been mentioned here) don't use DRM, even on Kindle.

Blaming Amazon for DRM is pointing the finger at the wrong party, IMO.

<comment><USER38> Blaming Amazon is totally pointing the finger at the culprit:

Amazon has been threatening publishers that if they choose no drm, their books won't benefit from text-to-speech, and various other possibilities of the kindle, including future compatility!

[http://lexbrage.tumblr.com/post/13212628647/amazon- bragelonn...](http://lexbrage.tumblr.com/post/13212628647/amazon-bragelonne- drm) explains (in french) why Bragelonne (french publisher against DRMs) surrendered to having DRM on amazon.

<comment><USER37> "Amazon has been threatening publishers that if they choose no drm, their books won't benefit from text-to-speech, and various other possibilities of the kindle, including future compatility!"

Sorry, that is not correct.

I've got several indie books on Amazon, none with DRM, and Amazon has never "threatened" me with anything. It's a checkbox in the publishing portal. All of them have text to speech enabled.

Here's a link to an O'Reilly book (not one of mine). Check for yourself that "simultaneous device usage" is "unlimited" (i.e., no DRM) and that "text-to- speech" is "enabled".

[http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Programming-Chas-Emerick- ebook...](http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Programming-Chas-Emerick- ebook/dp/B007Q4T040)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> We went through this with music, and DRM-free files won. They were rightly seen as intrinsically more valuable, and no one was willing to buy a restricted file when a regular mp3 of the same content was available for the same price.

The same is true of ebooks. Many publishers offer DRM-free ebooks, but they cannot compete with kindle ebooks on price. A freely distributable PDF is worth more to me than a one with DRM, but not infinitely more. Eventually the prices will equalize and everyone will buy open formats.

</comment><comment><USER40> I've thought about getting the amazon kindle a few times. I really can't make myself do it though. It would be nice to have on airplane trips, as I normally only read tech manuals/programming books, but the fact that there is no "used book" market for the kindle is what drove me away. I'd rather pay $5-$10 for a used tech book then buy the E version for $15-$30. Sure I could get online and bootleg an ebook version but that is not really right either.

</comment><comment><USER41> e-books != Amazon.

The vast, vast majority of e-books in the world do not come with DRM nor are related in any way to Amazon. (They also infringe on copyright, but that's another issue.)

</comment><comment><USER42> I own a Kindle Voyage and read heavily on it and yet I can get behind this FSF campaign with all my heart.

1\. There is no reason Amazon/publishers can't distribute DRM free books which I can backup and share (within reason, not putting for torrent).

2\. It is amazing how badly Kindle supports other languages. I was trying to read a book written in Hindi on it and it was meh. Page turning is slow, font rendering is awful. Are we ready for a world where literature means English literature?

</comment><comment><USER43> It is easy to write a list of upsides of Thing A and downsides of Thing B. But unless you also do the opposite, you can't really come to a good determination of which is better for a given task.

They could just as easily written an article about how printed books are cumbersome, and how you can easily copy text from ebooks.

It's like watching a truck commercial, reading this piece. The Good thing is the best at everything. The Bad Thing is the worst at everything.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm always confused by the contradiction implied by the fact that the "free market economy" seems proud that the price of any good or service should be defined by _what people are willing to pay_ , until such time that people _aren 't_ willing to pay for it at all. After which, not paying for it rapidly becomes a criminal offense.

Somehow reminds me of Mozart and Allegri's Miserere.

</comment><comment><USER45> There are e-book publishers who offer tech books with zero restrictions beyond basic copyright requirements applicable to physical books. Immediate access and freedom to make copies or even resell. What's not to like? People can make up their own mind about Amazon from whom I buy hardbacks. I wouldn't touch their e-format but I'm not that someone else for whom the formula fits.

</comment><comment><USER46> Obligatory xkcd [https://xkcd.com/488/](https://xkcd.com/488/)

</comment><comment><USER47> The major difference between the ebooks and paper books is that if you share a paper book with someone, you lose it from the moment you lend it out, until you get it back. But sharing an e-book is much painless and convenient, thus can easily abused.

<comment><USER48> >But sharing an e-book is much painless and convenient, thus can easily abused.

I find it strange to see the word "abuse" used when talking about sharing. Sharing is caring, after all, not abusing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> This comment is probably going to be unpopular with this audience, but there is a really good argument to be made for DRM in the e-book space.

When selling a physical book there is a real barrier to propagation of the entire work in the form of a prohibitive cost or effort for the average person to produce unauthorized copies.

In an era where even little kids know how to do a copy and paste this is definitely not the case with e-books. An author who releases his/her e-book without DRM would be, for all practical purposes giving it away to the vast majority of the reading audience.

Maybe the future of both books and music are that recorded and written works will be freely given as promotion for other more lucrative efforts (like concerts, seminars, and so forth) but as long as the publishing industry and authors rely on the sales of books/e-books for the majority of their income, DRM is here to stay.

<comment><USER6> That may be the case if it weren't for the fact that DRM both completely destroys fair use (I should be able to move my Amazon/Audible purchased books to any device I want), and is completely ineffectual at its stated goal, stopping copyright infringement.

<comment><USER50> It's ineffectual at completly stopping copying, but it's far from completely ineffectual. The average person doesn't have a good tracker and doesn't know how to use calibre. They could learn / be taught but it's a pain. Easier to just pay. It's not all or nothing.

If you prevent 70% of copying, that's a huge win.

I'm not sure drm is actually worth it, music has shown its not needed in that industry. But that industry had piracy catch on in a way that no other had. My mom can't pirate anything except for mp3s. The napster legacy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I sort of agree, except I try to buy from publishers who provide PDF, iPad, and Kindle versions.

When I do buy from Amazon, I try to copy to a PDF for backup for my own use, which I believe to be legal. Backing up to a PDF does not always work however.

</comment><comment><USER52> There are a lot of other sources for ebooks. I've never bought one from amazon. This article is FUD.

<comment><USER53> So where do you buy general interest non-DRM ePubs these days? I used to buy from Barnes & Noble when it was easy to remove the DRM. They've made it much more difficult, so I don't buy from them anymore.

P.G. Wodehouse is a good example of an author I like to buy as ePub.

<comment><USER54> Kobo has some, but doesn't make them easy to find. It's a note on the bottom of each store page instead of something you can search by. I have no idea why; if I could find the good books with no DRM I'd have spent way more money there.

Recently discovered that Brandon Sanderson's books are among the DRM free (Mistborn, Stormlight Archive, others), which is a great set of reads for fantasy fans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> The Stallman "cube root" thing is adorable and quotable but wasn't the right curve then, and certainly isn't the right curve now.

Love the guy, disagree with many his methods, but love the results he seeks to achieve. But like licensing, he seems willfully ignorant of outliers and is increasingly guilty of oversimplification. And more so as he ages.

He's also obsessing on Amazon, and not entirely for reasons that immediately make sense. Prior discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9355978](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9355978)

</comment><comment><USER56> Does anyone know of a store front for fiction and non-computer non-fiction books that _all_ are unencumbered by DRM?

I _think_ Tor is releasing everything DRM free right now, but I'd like to see any stuff from other publishers that is also DRM free.</comment>


Lantern proxied sites lists – China - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/getlantern/lantern-proxied-sites-lists/blob/master/china/autoproxy/list.txt <comment><USER2> These 35105 webpages are blocked in Turkey, almost EU country.

[http://engelliweb.com/](http://engelliweb.com/)

<comment><USER3> Turkey will probably not become a member of the union any day soon, though.

<comment><USER2> True, but it is still interesting that they have so controlled environment. We don't talk about things that are going on in Turkey, because Turkish government is supportive of western world. They get away with some interesting things.

(I'm here only temporarily 6 months, so it is different view point from people who live here)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm surprised Russia wasn't thrown in there too. Why it is always the usual suspects of China and Iran?

Why don't we get to see a list of webpages blocked by Western countries?

Who is the team responsible for GetLantern and who is funding the developers?

<comment><USER5> How many "western countries" (whatever that means these days) actually have black lists? Because Canada and the US do not, as the Internet is all provided by non-gov't telco's. Chinatel is the only telco in China allowed to have international trunks, and Chinatel is 51% owned by the gov't. No one even knows how many international trunks Canada and the US even have, as they aren't regulated. At least mostly. In Canada, long distance phone carriers must register. But data over fibre is totally unregulated.

<comment><USER6> This should give some indication.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_blocking_access_to_Th...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_blocking_access_to_The_Pirate_Bay)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hey, I put that list up. All credit for that list goes to [http://autoproxy- gfwlist.googlecode.com](http://autoproxy-gfwlist.googlecode.com). I just used the firefox plugin and extracted that list with some regex and de-duplication.

I made the list for [http://getlantern.orga](http://getlantern.orga) censorship circumvention app I work on. So the list is designed to work with our app, and it's easier to just use the whole domain than the domains that are blocked.

Contributions welcome, we just want more of these types of lists for users in China to plug in to their Lantern's.

<comment><USER8> Oh God please stop this. Autoproxy using encoded format[1] for a reason: Avoid getting Google Code or Github getting blocked.

Your plain text list will lead to total blocking of Github, All it takes is some random assholes to "report" Github to [http://net.china.com.cn/](http://net.china.com.cn/) and oops, github IP will be inaccessible indefinitely.

Just find another way please!

[1]: [https://code.google.com/p/autoproxy- gfwlist/source/browse/tr...](https://code.google.com/p/autoproxy- gfwlist/source/browse/trunk/gfwlist.txt)

<comment><USER7> What other way would you recommend? I'm definitely open to other solutions. Patches accepted - but we need a way to easily get users a good default list.

I'm also not sure I'm convinced that just that list will get all of github blocked. What evidence do you have to support that? Lantern itself on github seems more 'dangerous' than just the list of sites. And none of our Chinese users seemed to think this is an issue.

I'll ask the greatfire guys, as I'm in touch with them. They wrote a great article on the last time github was blocked: [https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2013/jan/github-blocked- china-...](https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2013/jan/github-blocked-china-how-it- happened-how-get-around-it-and-where-it-will-take-us)

Also will try to ask the autoproxy guys directly - I'm not sure if their reason for using the encoded format is the reason you say.

<comment><USER8> just encode is with whatever method you choose, don't leave the list as plain text so anyone could view it and "judge" it.

greatfire.org is an OK website for now, history record shows it's not that reliable. If you need any in-depth prior art take a look at Chinese researchers did at GFW Review [http://gfwrev.blogspot.com/](http://gfwrev.blogspot.com/) They reversed engineered almost everything about GFW, socially and technically.

Btw also this masterpiece [http://www.chinagfw.org/2009/08/gfw_30.html](http://www.chinagfw.org/2009/08/gfw_30.html) which triggered a man hunt and serious online crack down in China

<comment><USER7> Ok, I took it down. It won't be as simple as 'just encod[ing[ with whatever method', as users right now copy and paste their lists in. So this will be a step back. We need someone to code a way to add encrypted lists, and we've got several higher priority things on our plate. Hopefully someone will help out with an open source contribution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Djangosnippets is clearly just too dangerous for the Chinese people to be allowed access.

Having seen what some people have done with Django, I'm not completely unsympathetic to this view :p

<comment><USER8> It's EC2 IP, some other "unwanted" site is sharing the IP address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The fact that Bloglovin is on that list must mean we're doing something right. The blogosphere is all about taking control over both production and consumption of media.

</comment><comment><USER10> Awesome! I made the list~ But do I have to go to China to get the reward?

<comment><USER11> yes, please surrender yourself at the airport police, indicating that you are a wanted international terrorist by Chinese National Security, you will be promptly delivered to your reward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > adultfriendfinder.com

What? Why would anyone block that

>porn.com

>porn2.com

>pornbase.org

>pornhub.com

>pornmm.net

>pornoxo.com

>pornrapidshare.com

>pornstarclub.com

>porntube.com

>pornvisit.com

What? Why?

<comment><USER13> The PRC government doesn't like porn. Here's an article that touches on that: [http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/news- features/a-l...](http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/news- features/a-land-where-porn-doesnt-exist-20121003-26yiy.html)

<comment><USER14> And they also blocked python.org, freebsd.org, sourceforge.org,google code. Orz...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Man, China really hates streaming music services.

<comment><USER13> More likely streaming music services have various agreements which only allow them to operate in select countries. I recall that when I was visiting Canada in 2010, I had to proxy my traffic back to the US to use Pandora.

<comment><USER5> It is not up to countries to enforce Pandora's contract though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Google is blocked. How do they get anything done?

<comment><USER17> This list is much too broad -- Google is NOT universally blocked in China.

Rather, they look for forbidden keywords in queries and block results.

<comment><USER7> See my other comment here. The list was made not to inform what is blocked, but to configure a piece of circumvention software. It's easier for us in the early days to just proxy all of google from a friend's computer than to just send particular queries. The source list from autoproxy is much better with the queries and parts of google that are blocked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > hulu.com

> pandora.com

That seems superfluous.</comment>


GitHub for Desginers - <AUTHOR> A few years ago, several companies (Pixelapse) tried to create such a thing - GitHub for Designers.   All of them failed... any thoughts why? There are many version control for Designers and also many portfolio websites (Dribbble, Behance) But there is nothing that combines them both. <comment><USER2> because coders work on open textual files. Designers work on closed binary files. Version controlling binary files is difficult, especially when you need to reverse engineering the file formats sometimes.</comment>


If Blockchains Ran the World – Disrupting the Trust Business - <AUTHOR> http://worldif.economist.com/article/13525/disrupting-trust-business <comment><USER2> > _On the contrary, if people's identity is anchored in one or several > blockchains, this would give them more control over it and their personal > data. If a potential tenant, for example, wants to prove to a landlord that > his income is high enough to pay the rent, he need only disclose that bit of > information, instead of allowing access to his entire credit history, as is > often the case today._

I'm not sure how, exactly, it follows that having my data stored in a blockchain means that I can choose what is and isn't visible to my landlord, or to everyone else for that matter.

<comment><USER3> Zcash has a "selective disclosure" feature. Not sure what else there may be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article is out of date.. Regardless, I love reading business press writing about the blockchain: the key takeaway for me is that the tech has a ways to go before many of these concepts are ready to be implemented at scale.

Making identity and personal information "self-sovereign" is necessary and a big area of focus for us. Would love to collaborate with others looking into this on the blockchain.</comment>


Basecamp Co-Founder David Heinemeier Hansson On: The Founding of Ethical SaaS - <AUTHOR> https://www.saasmag.com/basecamp-co-founder-david-heinemeier-hansson-on-the-founding-of-ethical-saas/ <comment><USER2> I happened across the Bezos investment announcement from 2006 yesterday while cleaning up emails:

</comment><comment>=

Hey there-

BEZOS INVESTS IN 37SIGNALS Today we have a very special announcement to make: Bezos Expeditions, a personal investment company of Jeff Bezos, has made a minority private equity investment in 37signals.

BACKGROUND ON THE DECISION Over the past two and a half years we've accomplished a lot on our own. We've released 5 products (Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire, Tadalist, and Writeboard) which over 500,000 people have signed up for so far, wrote Getting Real which has sold nearly 20,000 copies in less than six months, changed the web development world by writing and open sourcing the Ruby on Rails framework, presented at conferences around the world, and more. We're proud of what we've been able to do without outside help. But we think we can do even better with the right kind of help. And we're picky.

Since we launched Basecamp we've been contacted by nearly 30 different VC firms. We've never been interested in the typical traditional VC deal. With a few exceptions, all the VCs could offer us was cash and connections. We're fine on both of those fronts. We don't need their money to run the business and our little black book is full. We're looking for something else.

What we've been looking for is the wisdom of a very special entrepreneur who's been through what we're going through. Someone who sees things a little differently and makes us feel right at home. Someone with a long term outlook, not a build-to-flip mentality. We found a perfect match in Jeff. Jeff is our kinda guy.

It will be great learning from Jeff as we build 37signals into one the great companies of the next 20 years. Daniel Burnham, the great visionary architect of Chicago, said, "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will themselves not be realized." We agree. We hope this boost of ambition, and Jeff's personal vote of confidence, will help us achieve our big plans.

So here we go.

-Jason Fried, 37signals

<comment><USER3> I wonder if that decision in 2006 and the experience that followed is what motivates this point of view.

People make mistakes and can learn from them.

<comment><USER4> this is 100% speculation, but guessing this came at a time when Rails was on the rise and Bezos saw the potential of it. The terms of the deal are super- favorable to 37signals, so why not?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "... nothing, it sounds harsh, but nothing important should happen in chat. Anything that's really important that requires serious deliberations and major decisions and major point of information should be in a format where someone can catch up on their own time."

</comment><comment><USER5> The discussing of ethics is at the very end, summarized by the influence of investors:

> The investors are optimizing for growth rates because that's how you get the > big multiple and that's how you get the biggest bang for an IPO. I'm not a > big fan of these methods, because most of the time, the large valuations are > based on the premise and promise that these companies will dominate the > market that they're in, capture a monopoly and then one day, once they have > eradicated every competitor and become the top dog that dominates everyone, > they can raise prices because customers will have nowhere to go and that's > when they make money. Is that an aspirational place for us to be, that we > should be cheering on monopolists who are cornering markets and then when we > have eradicated all competitors, they raise rents? That's not a very > appealing prospect to me. I'd much rather see healthy marketplaces where > there's lots of different providers.

If you want to be ethical, don't take money from those who care about nothing but getting more money.

Greed is _not_ good.

<comment><USER6> Basecamp is not a non profit. Of course they also care about making more money. If I recall correctly, everyone's compensation there is based partially on profit sharing. They are feeding starving children in Africa.

And that's not meant to be a value judgement. I think a company that has a business model of getting $x amount money from customers and spending $y where $x > $y is much better aligned with customers than a company where $y > $x, they are subsidized by VCs, and the company's ultimate goal is to be acquired or pawn their money losing business off onto the public markets.

<comment><USER5> The key is to care about _more than just_ money.</comment></comment></comment>