The sci-fi epic series The Expanse features humanity spreading throughout the solar system and developing political, cultural and linguistic faultlines as it goes. The poorest and most marginal cultural group, scraping by in asteroid colonies and long-haul ships, spend enough time in full environment suits that their gestural communication has had to adapt as well: facial expressions are meaningless, while shrugs are whole-arm affairs that can convey uncertainty at a distance and through bulky safety equipment. (The language system got complicated enough, and central enough to the plot, that they actually hired a linguist for the TV adaptation).
Just thinking about that, you know, for no reason.
Arbitrage
Back in May, Ranjan Roy’s Substack post about DoorDash went mildly viral: a friend of his owned a pizza joint, and DoorDash had started offering delivery from his restaurant without consulting him. Only they had gotten the prices wrong when they scraped the website and were losing like eight bucks on every sale before even paying the drivers. Roy and his friend started ordering as many as ten pizzas at a time, and wound up taking DoorDash for a couple hundred bucks before the typo got fixed and the game ended.
Except it didn’t. DoorDash kept on spending huge amounts of money to acquire customers and influence regulations that allowed it to underpay its workers. Roy’s back with followup, now analyzing S-1 filing as DoorDash prepares for its IPO.
It’s all within the rules. The regulatory rules. The labor rules. The antitrust rules. The consumer protection rules. Full credit to Tony Xu and their team – they have out-executed every competitor. They are winning this weird and twisted game of heavily-funded food delivery apps.
But this is less a ‘good for them’ than a ‘bad on us’ sentiment.
…
While we were laughing about $8 in pizza arbitrage profits, Doordash built a $25 billion business powered by a combination of regulatory and labor arbitrage. While Doordash’s messy financial controls ended with us swapping a few pizzas, our broken regulatory system has fundamentally reshaped the economy in a way that allows Doordash to extract billions in revenue during a time of national crisis.
Social Media Edit
- Tobe Nwigwe performs his viral hit “Try Jesus, Don’t Try Me” at the BET Hip Hop Awards.
- A former “fancy grocery store” worker recounts their worst holiday special order customers.
This:
This democratic backsliding is hilarious through the lens of the petty shit the US has overthrown governments around the world over, our president is screaming “Fake election! I won!” like dude we overthrew Allende because *the phone company* wanted him gone — Mass for Shut-ins (Podcast) (@edburmila) November 10, 2020
May You Live in Interesting Times
- This is why I refuse to call DCA “Ronald Reagan National Airport.”
- Secret renegade superspreader homecoming dance? Are you kidding me? (May I suggest a pairing of “people who deny that COVID is real even as they’re gasping for breath in an ICU?”)
- Foreign Policy prescribes ranked-choice voting as a potential cure to America’s ills. Sure. Good luck.
Secretly Ironic 