Comment by JumpCrisscross

6 years ago

> The owner made a massive profit and the shelter gets free food and it didn’t cost you anything?

We’re in the midst of a pandemic. The restaurant stays afloat, nothing more. The shelter got a donation, and I got promises of comped deliveries and catering.

It cost me $5,000; it cost DoorDash over twenty thousand.

That’s fine, I wasn’t trying to expose you, I just wanted to understand. It looks like everyone is happy, the restaurant gets cash, the shelter gets food, and you get... a lot of pizza for the rest of your life! I don’t think I’ve eaten 5,000$ worth of pizza in my life so far haha

Time for some cross-platform integration: start GoFundMes to crowdfund arbitrage of SoftBank derivatives in support of local small businesses.

This seems very unethical. The fact that you don't like Softbank or DoorDash or the gig-economy or that you're sending pizza to homeless people is irrelevant. The fact is you're exploiting a bug to personally benefit at the expense of investors.

Why wouldn't you apply the same principals of ethical hacking, where you would notify the party of the exploit?

  • I'm confused. Doordash is knowingly reselling an item for 75% off and someone bought many of the items. No one was defrauded; everyone in the transaction was paid what they wanted to charge, and everyone got what they paid for. What is unethical here? Are you saying it's unethical to take advantage of a sale?

    • what's unethical is that doordash is undercutting competitiors who can't offer such deals.

      in germany, reselling something for less than what you paid for (predatory pricing) is illegal (unless it's already devalued because it's old or used)

  • It's nog a bug, it's a feature. Doordash uses investment money to evaporate competitors, take over the market and then raise prices for restaurant owners once they gain control. It's a tried and proven concept.

    Paying part of the meal is part of that strategy. They know full well that large orders and large amounts of transactions cost them more money and they're betting on nobody actually doing this. They're selling products below the cost of production at this point, something that I would argue should not be allowed in ethical capitalism. Investors know fully well what they're investing in, and of not, they've either not kept their responsibility on reading about the company they're investing in, or the company itself is pulling massive investment fraud.

    Play shit games, win shit prices. If they don't want to lose money like this, maybe they should have a business strategy that isn't oriented about purposely losing money to bankrupt competitors. They easily could've set a reasonable limit of say $200 dollars to their cheaper transactions but they chose not to.

    Would I go full ethical when finding exploits for an inherently unethical company? Would I dutifully report flaws to companies selling "adult supervision" apps used by controlling spouses? Would I give "bank phishing on demand" websites a 90 day trial period? I don't think so. Making such software is perfectly legal (in many jurisdictions) but is rarely ever ethical. Ethics would need to come from two sides for me to consider responsible disclosure. I have flooded several phishing databases with fake information, got some of them over their resource limit and shut down as well, and I don't feel the smallest bit of regret.

    • Just a note: it's not a tried and proven concept.

      Predatory pricing hardly works in economic theory and is working disastrously for a lot of the companies trying it (eg. Ubers financials)

      16 replies →

    • My original comment said its not okay to steal from a company even if you don't like that company. Your post is a lot of words about why you don't like that company. You don't directly address my claim that its unethical to steal from a company even if you don't like the company.

      And then you make a weird point that software can be unethical (e.g. phising software) and this somehow applies to Doordash. Just to get this straight, making peer to peer scheduling software used for deliveries is unethical? And because of that, its okay to steal from their investors (including many US investors and pension funds)?

      10 replies →

  • What makes it unethical is the "quid-pro-quo". If he didn't expect to get free food for life it would be OK.

    • Interesting take, but I think the compensation only takes it from an act of charity down to exchanging favors, which isn't unethical in itself. The very act of buying a pizza is a quid pro quo. This money for that pizza.