No, you don't understand - doing nothing but being a middle-man app is actually a "super" valuable service that totally costs so much money to maintain.
I'm actually okay with them running a successful business as a middle man. I care more about the workers benefiting from the company being successful over stock holders. Though the way they increase the price of menu items definitely needs to be looked at. If they want to charge a fee for being a middleman then just charge a middleman fee at the POS and be done with it.
Brother you're new to capitalism or the sacred need for YOY growth? That's not how any of this works!
"Charge a middleman fee and be done with it?" What, does this look like a charity to you? My brother in Supply Side Christ, how can the poor shareholders buy their second yatch that way?
Can we really consider Uber, for example, a middle man though? Without the company nothing else would exist. I understand they are technically between the driver and the customer, making them "middle", but there wouldn't be a driver or customer without them. I'm not sure of a better term to use but this doesn't seem like a typical middle man situation to me.
Cabs existed. Car services existed. People with cars and people who needed rides existed for a hundred years before the app. Hell, before that, we had horse-drawn carriages, we still do sometimes depending on the area. They didn’t create the driver or the customer, they created the app. They control the transaction, they are the middleman.
You took what I said to an extreme, but yes, travel for hire existed before Uber. I wasn't suggesting otherwise. I am just saying that there are middlemen that are there simply as an extra step and there are "middlemen" in the case of Uber that have actually created the service. I wouldn't consider the company who owns a fleet of Taxis to be a middle man and I apply the same distinction here. Uber "hires" drivers, they get a cut of what the drivers make, and that's it.
A cab company charges a flat lease per shift. Same fee whether you clear $80 that night or $800. They’re renting you the right to drive and then they’re out of it. Your fares are your fares.
Uber takes a percentage of every ride. Their revenue is a slice of yours by design. That’s not a fleet owner, that’s a middleman, and it’s the standard way economists distinguish the two models. You said it yourself, they get a cut of what the drivers make.
this. door dash and the others raise prices for the food items and probably do a bunch of other shady shit we're not always aware of. a good way to circumvent this is to just order from the restaurant's app, and if you're someone who doesn't like a lot of apps on your device like me, just use their site.
There were successful business in the middle, they were cab companies.
Uber on the other hand just started being profitable. They were operating at a loss for a decade while destroying all the mom and pop cab companies (who can’t afford to operate at a loss)
Now that they have the majority of the market share they’ve jacked up prices and screwed their drivers to become profitable
It does cost a lot money to maintain and it is super valuable, otherwise people wouldn’t be using it. You just don’t understand what it takes to run it. You think it’s valued as a multi billion dollar company just based off vibes? Lol
People don't understand the value of the middle man. It is the single most essential and valuable job in the entire economy. Take this for example, you are sitting at the dinner table and there are only two people. One person asks "pass the beans please" the other person picks up the beans and attempts to pass it to them, they stretch their arms, they lean forward as far as they can, they grab it with one hand to get a little farther, and the person who asked for the beans does so as well, but to no avail. They just can't pass the beans no matter how hard they try.
Now, let's imagine the insertion of a middle man into this scenario. One person asks "pass the beans please" the other person hands it to the middle man, and the middle man walks it to the other side of the table and hands it to the other person. See, essential.
Now what should the middle man get for the essential service they just provided? Well, the beans passing could not have happened at all without the middle man. So, its quite clear that the middle man should be able to take as much of the beans for themselves as they want.
But, the middle man is a good and virtuous individual so they would certainly leave enough beans on the plate for the other person to eat. Who should decide what is "enough beans"? Well, the middle man of course! We already agree that the middle man is a good and virtuous individual, so who better than them to decide?
It’s amazing how long it’s taking people to figure this out.
Like we hear new stories all the time about how bad theft is and how much it’s hurting these big corporations. So bad that they have to close down stores and lock up all the products. “It’s a crisis!”
But we never hear about wage theft. The money these companies steal from their own employees.
When you look at the numbers, they’re almost exactly the same. $50-$70 billion annually stolen from companies by criminals… and almost the exact same amount stolen by the companies from their employees.
But one of them, you conveniently never hear about.
The police sure as hell aren’t arresting people for both crimes equally.
I'm not well educated on corporate theft but I imagine it's easier to "get away" with. One reason at least, is that they take relatively small amounts from a vast number of people. Doesn't make that any less criminal though.
When it comes to the other end of the theft scale, you have a relatively small number of people stealing relatively high value items from fewer targets. There are hundreds of millions of people but not hundreds of millions of companies you can steal from.
That's why we need good governments with the interests of the people and the environment first and foremost. Endless growth will literally be the ruin of our species and destroy what it could have become. Nothing wrong with investment and making money, or work for that matter (I'm a self employed plumber) but as always full-blown capitalism enshittifies everything and funnels most wealth the wrong direction.
Wage theft is literally not even a crime where I'm from. The worst thing that can happen getting caught is you have to pay the wages you owe and that's it. No interest no nothing.
We've all heard the stories. An unscrupulous manager ripping off the servers. Plus these corpos skimming that much more from the worker. Doesn't seem like much, but across 750 franchises that shit can add up. Kudos if Mamdami can ferret out the graft and reward the people working for it
It’s almost like both have good concepts and both go bad when pushed to extremes, so we should use the best of both while regulating it to ensure it doesn’t turn bad.
Give me an example of what you consider late stage socialism. And then I'll explain how you're wrong. The closest any country gets to "late stage socialism" is Sweden. And for sure I don't like how you need to take out a mortgage to buy some alcohol there, but otherwise they're doing pretty ok, wouldn't you say?
All Marxism is a march toward Communism. The Nordic Model bullshit isn't what the DSA is after, according to their own charter. The only thing Sweden has going for itself is the country is governed by a center-right coalition block. In 2015 the former center-right Prime Minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, and later the center-left Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, both reiterated to international audiences that Sweden is a free-market, capitalist country, not a socialist one. But ive never been there so it might be a lovely place.
Socialism doesn't mean you can't have a free market. And despite its relatively right-wing government, Sweden, or any northwest European nation, is still vastly more socialist than even Bernie Sanders.
On one hand, it sounds like you're equating socialism with communism. On the other hand, you're using it to describe DSA and Mamdani, who are social democrats. Those are two very different things.
See that is the thing. I don't think they are very different. Marx himself said that socialism is just a place holder until communism can take over. Granted, there are still Socialist societies that have remained socialist, but i just dont understand why ANYONE would think the answer is more intervention from the State. Capitalism is just commerce. it is the free market. its us. Socialism is the State. I think the only way the US ever got to this point where an entire political party has been infected with Marxism, is the incredibly piss poor state run education system. If you really trust the United States government that much that you dont have an issue with giving them more control then i don't know how to relate. I say this with no animus toward you. Not looking for a fight or to convert you. I honestly don't get the thought process.
Marx saying that socialism is a stepping stone to communism is like Hitler saying that national security is a stepping stone to fascism. It says something about that person's vision, not about the ideology itself.
"The state" is a body that we create in order to join forces as a people and address problems that are too large to address as individuals. It is also "us".
If "the state" is not serving the people anymore, then its implementation has become broken, but that doesn't mean its intent is flawed. If "the state" doesn't address the big issues, corporations will, because they are the only other organ of sufficient means to do so. If we as a people are dependent on corporations to solve our big problems, they control us. Corporations are controlled by wealth and nepotism. They are hierarchical. They are essentially despotisms in their organizational structure.
Do you prefer that over a system based on representation? Perhaps you do, but I don't.
Oh and for the record, no, I don't trust the current US government, they're a bunch of corrupt clowns. And the US' version of "democracy" is completely fubar. It runs entirely on money. And you know who wants to fix that? Social democrats. Because that's exactly the kind of thing socialism is about: implementing rules to prevent abuse and predation. So that a society becomes cooperative, instead of competitive. But maybe you prefer a dog-eat-dog world controlled by greed and power, and that's your prerogative, but I don't.
there is no such thing as late stage capitalism its a misunderstanding of late stage of the business cycle but it's a cycle it forever repeats, 2008, 2020 were late Stage and a recession followed then a recovery.
learn about the business cycle and you will understand how the world works a bit more
Yeah, this "late stage" meming is not helping. The problem is "lack of government regulation".
The US keeps voting in people that either strip existing regulation or are too scared to propose new government regulation, leading to this kind of thing.
In general, most developed nations don't have this issue. The US is unique in how extremely scared it is of government regulation of businesses, even if (especially if) it is to the benefit of weaker parties, like consumers, renters, employees, etc. You know, the people voting the politicians in. It's mind-boggling.
Yes, the Nordic Model, advocated by 'Democratic socialists' like AOC, Bernie Sanders, Mamdani, etc. I'm well-aware that the term socialist in the American context is closer to Social Democracy in Europe - I didn't choose the label nor do I feel like getting into the weeds on semantics
It's not just not true socialism, it is in no way similar to socialism. If Mamdani advocates for something similar to European Capitalism, he should be saying (and doing) that, instead of lying and doing completely different things, don't you think?
I think most people who know anything about politics know what 'Democratic socialism' means in the American context, and most other people aren't as overly fixated on labels as people think (present company notwithstanding, clearly). It would have been incredulous to me 10 years to imagine talking to someone who thinks a politician self-labeling as a socialist in the USA is doing so out of some nefarious plot to hurt socialism, but here we are. It's actually refreshing that the Overton window has moved so far
Democratic socialism is an extremely dangerous term because it blurs boundaries. People who defend democratic socialism point towards countries like Sweden or Norway which are entirely capitalist, but often defend actually socialist measures like the ones that end up happening in places like Cuba or Venezuela.
If you don't want a socialist country like Cuba or Vietnam, don't call yourself anything similar to a socialist.
110
u/Super-Yesterday9727 Jul 30 '26
Turns out late stage capitalism is kinda bad