Comment by throwaway27448
1 day ago
The economics of a service economy really just don't make sense. We pay way too much for software (which should trend towards zero-cost to distribute), we pay too much for ads. The value of it is inherently downstream of the real economy, which is about making and distributing goods and stuff people actually need to live. Especially a company like facebook only provides a glorified forum, which should be free or collectively subsidized.
In the 90's i thought a government forum would be interesting because a forum is really about 1) moderation and the legal system offers the most elaborate speech moderation system. Part 2) is account management for which national id mechanisms seem specifically designed. Part 3) organizing content will probably be frozen in some half baked tree but accepable.
It would make a refreshing addition to the anon big tech ecosystem.
> The economics of a service economy really just don't make sense.
> …real economy, which is about making and distributing goods and stuff people actually need to live
I don’t know about you, but I depend on services every day in order to live.
I think they're more referring to the scalable service economy. Haircuts, which are a service, don't scale (unless we're talking about robotics or something).
So things like fintech, telemedicine, Bolt/Uber?
Start by understanding how to price a product. Say a chair. From first principles, you'd take however much wood it takes, plus however many hours it took you to turn that wood into a simple chair, then add in whatever you consider a reasonable profit margin, and that's how much you should sell the chair at. Which is totally and utterly wrong.
You throw away that number, and look at how much other chairs are selling for, compare features, the landscape of the whole market, and set your prices that way.
Process that, and things start to look different.
> You throw away that number, and look at how much other chairs are selling for, compare features, the landscape of the whole market, and set your prices that way.
Maybe this is true. Price is inherently bound among what people will pay, upstream (material/supply chain) costs, and labor. The west has overpriced its labor and material values by probably orders of magnitude for a long time, and people will pay less than ever. The rest of the world has been undervalued both in the effort for it to gain access to the markets that allow increased quality of life. But the market correction will lead to severely reduced market evaluation in terms of demand and price for all three factors in the west for many decades, I think.
Selling out our supply chains was suicide. I am too young to understand why people let this happened, but I think people bought into the idea of progress a little too hard to keep in mind their own civilizational health.
The business plan is really different depending on your starting capital.
If you have none, don't bother you can't afford the wood.
If you have a little, maybe your approach above is what makes sense.
If you have a lot, you might start looking at ways to lock down the chair distribution market within a region by maybe buying up some of the major warehousers - a bit of the old vertical integration. Maybe use some "free speech" of the financial kind directed towards some politicians to mandate that all workplaces have a certain minimum ratio of chairs to people.
The pricing strategy will be different for each approach.
You gotta do both. Ideally, the bottom-up price (the price you want to charge) is less than the the top-down price (what people will pay). If it's not, you gotta go back to the drawing board.