If capatilism was working the way it was supposed to, the customer could choose between paying more up front, but having the option of a "free" return, or paying less upfront byt having to pay for a return (or not be able to return it).
And for that matter, the customer would have enough information to know the quality of the product before purchasing, but that is often not possible.
Everybody knows the cows are not actually spheres. It's about how you deal with it.
If you try to sell "return insurance" then some customers don't buy it but end up wanting to return it anyway and then leave you a bad review for not having free returns. That costs you more than charging somewhat higher prices and having free returns, so that's what you do instead. But now efficiency requires some other mechanism of allowing the people who don't do excessive returns to pay a lower price.
Also, suppose you actually did sell return insurance. Then you notice that a subset of the customers who buy return insurance rarely use it, so you want to give them a discount to try to get more of their business.
Your idea of charging less to customers who know what they want is also a spherical cow.
They’ll buy your entire life from a data broker and charge you more because yesterday you accidentally viewed some Lamborghini seat covers. They’ll calculate that you have less willpower on Thursday nights and change their advertised price from $10 to ON SALE $2 off $12. They’ll just do coincidentally use the same algorithm to determine their price as all the other stores do so they don’t have to worry about competing on price.
> They’ll buy your entire life from a data broker and charge you more because yesterday you accidentally viewed some Lamborghini seat covers.
You're describing incompetence. You're not actually rich just because you viewed something by accident which means you're not actually price-insensitive and they just lost the sale to someone else. That has nothing to do with algorithms, incompetent companies put themselves at a disadvantage and make fewer sales than other companies all else equal, and the ones that are sufficiently bad at it go bust.
> They’ll calculate that you have less willpower on Thursday nights and change their advertised price from $10 to ON SALE $2 off $12.
They do that regardless of whether it's Thursday.
> They’ll just do coincidentally use the same algorithm to determine their price as all the other stores do so they don’t have to worry about competing on price.
This again has nothing to do with algorithms. They can do the same thing by just looking at the prices other merchants are charging and setting the same ones, and if you really want to prevent this then the law you want is the one that prohibits manufacturers from enforcing "no sales below MSRP" against retailers.
Because in a market with a large number of retailers, the individual retailers all have the incentive to defect from a price fixing scheme, because increasing your market share from 0.5% to 20% by having the lowest price when those other idiots are refusing to compete on price is worth way more than having slightly better margins. This is why it's important that the number of competitors be large instead of small. Laws should be directed to ensuring that rather than trying to micromanage a consolidated market full of incumbents so large they can buy the government anyway.
What if they’re not incompetent and you intentionally looked at Lamborghini seat covers, then, and correctly flagged you as willing to pay more as a result?
What if that fake sale tactic only works on you when your willpower is low and they know it?
Price fixing by software is a real thing. I agree that ensuring lots of competitors is a better way to avoid it. How would Colorado do that?
> What if they’re not incompetent and you intentionally looked at Lamborghini seat covers, then, and correctly flagged you as willing to pay more as a result?
What they're more likely to do is show you higher end products, because a rich person (or the person they hire to buy things for them) still has the capacity to compare prices for the same product and then charging more for the same thing still loses them the sale in a competitive market. Whereas if they show you the premium product instead of the base product because they've correctly surmised that you'll prefer the better product even if it costs more, is that even bad?
> What if that fake sale tactic only works on you when your willpower is low and they know it?
Then they still use it all the time because that's more effective than trying to guess when your willpower is lower and sometimes being wrong.
> Price fixing by software is a real thing.
It's a hypothetical thing where it works as long as everybody is using the same software. Like the other methods of price fixing, it stops working as soon as anybody does something different because then customers just start buying from them, and then we're back to needing to make sure there are enough competitors that that's what happens.
> I agree that ensuring lots of competitors is a better way to avoid it. How would Colorado do that?
In a lot of markets it's already the case but they're applying laws like this to them anyway. In consolidated markets, we largely already have antitrust laws and the main problem is a lack of enforcement, so maybe go chop up some large corporations.
There are also some cases when the courts issue a bad antitrust interpretation and then you need the legislature to pass a short bill that basically points to that case and says "no, the opposite of that".
Dynamic personalized pricing is a real thing. Has been for ages. The old-fashioned techniques are coupons and loyalty cards, or just having higher prices in higher-end stores. Competition isn't nearly as perfect as you say. It's very common for high-end stores to sell identical items at higher prices and still sell plenty of them.
These days you can do a much better job if you have data about your prospective customer. This is not a hypothetical. For example, Target was found to charge higher prices in their app if your location was close to one of their stores. Orbits and Delta have both been found to offer personalized prices as well.
Price fixing where everybody uses the same software is a real thing. RealPage recently settled a lawsuit over this.
You seem to be taking a very Libertarian approach where you assume economics 101 wins out over anything more complex, but if you look at what's actually going on in the world this is not the case.
On the other hand, without private right to action, consumers may have no recourse if the AG doesn't wish to pursue action (possibly due to corruption, or lack of resources).
I like the idea, but I'm not sure how enforceable it will be in practice. It seems like it would be relatively difficult to prove a company is using surveillance pricing, and companies may just accept the risk of paying a fine.
If you can do traffic interception, there's a pretty good chance there's going to be traces of price levels in the API and the analytics. Especially since it's probably going to be bolted on to the side of anything PCI compliant. If there isn't, then it's probably going to be really easy to subpoena to prove mens rea, because getting that right is tricky and requires a fair amount of review and coordination.
It's actually not that hard to prove. For example, PSN now has dynamic pricing for their games which can vary quite wildly and all it takes is a small number of consumers with price differences to prove it. The same is true for grocery stores or whatever else.
Enforcing it is another question though and you're right that companies will likely just accept the fine. It's all the more reason why this sort of thing needs to aggressively be legislated against and denied.
There are dubious results published in every subject, including math and physics (whether theoretical or experimental). The difference is that such results are less likely to be widely cited and accepted by the field. For math and theoretical physics, the reader can (assuming sufficient knowledge and skill) verify the result themselves, so if your proof is incorrect or not rigorous enough, you won't get cited. For experimental physics, it is more common for different teams to reproduce a result, or verify a result using a different method, so papers aren't usually widely cited unless they have been independently verified. Part of that is cultural, part of that is attempting to reproduce results is relatively straightforward compared to say experiments involving human subjects, and part if is because results are usually quantitative, so "we did the same thing as paper X, but with more precision" is still interesting enough to be published.
How would you do that? One reason peer reviews are usually anonymous is to prevent retribution (ex. rejecting someone's paper, because they rejected yours). Not that it is perfect at doing that, but if you make it more transparent, you may trade one problem for another.
> their policies allow only authors to request corrections
Say what now?
So the only way to get a correction for a paper is if the author is willing to publicly admit they messed up? Something that an unethical researcher is very unlikely to do.
That may work for some businesses, but IME, the people who hold the purse strings generally aren't ok with just giving money to a project without getting something in return. Especially if it isn't a 501(c) non-profit they can get tax deductions for. I think it is actually a bit of a gap in tax law, because I don't think such a donation would count as a business expense either if you don't get something concrete in exchange.
I don't expect to get paid for the open source work I do in my free time. But I would also really like it if I could work on open source software full time (or for the software I work on at my day job to be open source), but to do so I would need a source of income from somewhere.
> What you need is the ability for consumers to replace the firmware.
I don't think that's enough. Most people aren't going to replace the firmware on their device with an open source replacement made by someone else. Now if the firmware was required to be open source, and automatic updates could be seamlessly switched over to a non-profit or government agency in the event of the company going out of business, you might have something. But there would be a lot of details to work out.
I have a PC hooked up to my TV in my living room that has been running the latest version of Kubuntu for over 18 years now. It has had many upgrades in that time but it's still the same basic hardware: A CPU, some memory, USB ports, a video card, and an ethernet port on the back.
That "genericness" is what's missing in the router space. Literally every consumer router that comes out has some super proprietary design that's meant to be replaced in its entirety in 3-4 years. Many can run Linux, sure, but how many have a replaceable/upgradable board? How many are like a PC where you can install whatever OS you want?
Sure, you can forcibly flash a new OS (e.g. OpenWRT) but that is a hack. The company lets you do that because they figure they'll get a bit more market share out of their products if they don't lock the firmware so much. They key point remains, however: They're not just hardware—even though they should be!
The world of consumer routers needs a PC-like architecture change. You can buy routers from companies like Banana Pi and Microtik like this but they're not marketed towards every-day consumers. Mostly because they're considered "too premium" and require too much expertise to setup.
I think there's a huge hole in the market for consumer-minded routers that run hardware like the Banana Pi R4 (which I have). When you buy it, you get the board and nothing else. It's up to you to get a case and install an OS on it (with OpenWRT, Debian, and Ubuntu being the normal options).
We need something like the Framework laptop for routers. Not from a, "it has interchangeable parts" perspective but from a marketing perspective. Normal people are buying Framework laptops because geeky friends and colleagues recommend them and they're not that much more expensive/troublesome than say, a cheap Acer/Asus laptop.
> They key point remains, however: They're not just hardware—even though they should be!
This is the most thoughtful comment I've seen on this topic. I hadn't even considered this approach, but you're right. The hardware needs to be commoditized in a way that makes the software a layer that can be replaced. Someone else said this but in a way that described flashing a third-party package as HN nerds would. That's too much effort and it won't work.
It should be as generic as PC hardware. Every router manufacturer should build devices that can run the OSes of all their competitors' devices and vice versa. Maybe some features won't work with the other company's OS cause it isn't designed for that, but overall it ought to be replaceable. "Normal people" still wouldn't flash a new OS, but making it an option is a step towards making devices more secure.
If every router could get a new OS as easily as your techy friend could install Firefox or an ad-blocker or whatever else, we'd start the long march to a real longterm solution.
You completely missed the point of what I said. I have a Linksys as a cheap backup in case my real router (Netgate / pfsense) dies. The Linksys is running OpenWRT and hopefully I'll never need to plug it in ever again.
I had to verify that OpenWRT was compatible when I bought it _to be a backup_. Re-read what I said about everything being commodity hardware that can run any other device firmware / OS.
It's not so simple. Routers, like most tech emitting and modulating an RF signal by design, are certified products. The radio frequency bands, output power, allowed channels are all tightly controlled. Allowing end-users control without restrictions over such equipment would be unsafe.
It's quite different. The transceiver in your device is mainly a low-power receiver, transmit power is limited to ~100mW at best. Meanwhile a typical AP can go up to 1W per antenna for transmit. Also, the firmware that operates the wifi stack on your network card is not open source or user-modifiable beyond firmware updates issued by the manufacturer. I suggest reading up on wifi and RF before going further.
> I suggest reading up on wifi and RF before going further.
I'd suggest neither matter in the face of how the problem is solved in the consumer cards the OP was talking about. They solve it by locking down the firmware that controls the radios.
The reality is most routers do that too. You can replace the firmware in most of them with OpenWRT or something similar. You still can't exceed regulatory limits because of the signed blobs of firmware in the radios.
Nonetheless, here we are getting comments like yours, which imply all firmware in the device must be behind a proprietary wall because a relatively small blob of firmware in them must be protected. It has its own protections. It doesn't need to be protected by the OS or the application that runs on top of it.
Yet it's in those applications where most of the vulnerabilities show up. Making them consumer replaceable would help in solving the problem. Protecting the firmware is not a good reason to not do it.
If you make something internet commected you must provide lifetime warranty for security. no import or sales sor even leases) until you have in escrow the money to pay for them.
i will allow sunsetting and removing ipv4 after 2020 (that is more that 5 years ago)
And for that matter, the customer would have enough information to know the quality of the product before purchasing, but that is often not possible.
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