That's a stawman, nobody's using these apps to make some guy with an app money. Users are on them because it's convenient and fun to have your neighbor cook an extra few portions of what they're having without necessarily doing the dinner party thing or owing them a meal back. Also, like we're seeing with airbnb, the sharing economy doesn't undo regulations, they just demand new types of regulation. I totally agree that there's a food safety concern with these services, I just don't think we should dismiss them entirely because they don't fit well with our current style of regulating restaurants. For example, a single unsterile kitchen in the food-sharing economy presents an order of magnitude less risk than a high throughput restaurant because they serve an order of magnitude less food. It's a slightly different potato, but if we can manage to peel it there are enormous gains to be had in terms of health and community -- just imagine if a healthy home-cooked dinner was as cheap and convenient as picking up a family meal from KFC or take-out chinese food.
At the same time we have to remember these apps exist for a reason.. to make a small group of people money. In the quest to accomplish this goal marketing, combined with PR, government relations, and legal, attempt to manipulate society in such a way that society will conform to the goals of the business. If we forget this, either intentionally or due to ignorance, we become much more susceptible to manipulation which may or may not be detrimental to us.
I disagree with the premise that these apps exist to make a small group of people money...
1) Nobody's working on this kind of stuff just for the money, and if they are then they've lied to a lot of people and are fucking up. If you're a strong engineer with good quantitative skills, the expected value of working on wall street, working at googazonsoft, or even becoming a realtor in the bay (if you have the soft skills) is much higher than striking out on your own to create something new. A technical founder I met from one of these companies could have easily done one of these other things but felt really passionate about improving our relationship to food. I really doubt there's a money grubbing evil genius working on food sharing apps in order to amass great wealth and power.
2) You can't really manipulate society with $50M of facebook ads and no product (and I think that's more than any of these companies have raised). If you're making a consumer app and it's not something people want, there's no "marketing, combined with PR, government relations, and legal" that's going to get them to use it and "conform to the goals of the business".
IDK, maybe I'm just a dumb optimist but I'm excited about what the future holds for this stuff.
> If you're a strong engineer with good quantitative skills, the expected value of working on wall street, working at googazonsoft, or even becoming a realtor in the bay (if you have the soft skills) is much higher than striking out on your own to create something new.
With an essentially zero chance of becoming a billionaire.
If you're driven by the desire to become a billionaire, startups it is.
He is also a US Senator's son and took advantage of his family's many connections to get his startup capital. He was also born at the right time to take advantage of postwar prosperity.
Without those advantages, it's almost laughable to replicate that career path
I happily grant you that what I wrote looked like a strawman, and read out of context it was. However, I used the "to make a small group of people money" bit as a piece of euphony, paralleling the original sentence construction of the poster to whom I was replying. The entire point of my parallel - the only point - was not about someone profiting, but rather that I think the important element is the massive public health concern, not about zoning regulation.
That said, I disagree completely and vehemently with most of what you said. Allow me to respond to what I believe the salient pieces were. I'll rephrase for brevity, but please let me know if I've mis-represented your position in doing so:
1 - "Sharing economy doesn't undo regulations, they just demand new types." To date, we haven't seen the sharing economy demand "new types" of regulations; we've seen it completely ignore existing regulations and lobby against any replacement, even where those regulations are reasonable (e.g., requiring commercial drivers to have commercial auto insurance, w/r/t Uber).
2 - "Don't fit well ... not a reason to dismiss them entirely." That is a strawman. I did not advocate for dismissing them entirely. I don't generally advocate for eliminating viable business models out of bureaucratic laziness. The current situation, however, is "ignore public health regulations until we kill enough people to draw attention to ourselves." That is not an acceptable road forward under any circumstance, and being adamantly opposed to it is not the same as being entirely opposed to the existence of an "uber for chefs", or whatever we're calling it.
3- I disagree about the "order of magnitude" argument. It's rather like dismissing an Uber approach to user safety on the argument that each driver is just one driver. We must address it as the entire service, which collectively - if it scales, and let's be fair, scaling is the point - would end up serving enormous numbers of people.
4- "Imagine if healthy, home-cooked dinner was cheap and convenient." An appeal to pathos. Largely irrelevant to the discussion, and also to the services as they exist(which generally involve sit-down meals for groups of people at fairly immodest prices).
> "Imagine if healthy, home-cooked dinner was cheap and convenient." An appeal to pathos. Largely irrelevant to the discussion, and also to the services as they exist(which generally involve sit-down meals for groups of people at fairly immodest prices).
Here's one from the OP that's starting with affordable stuff (users price, kind of like sidecar): https://josephine.com/
I think what they're doing is pretty cool and I've heard it's mostly busy parents buying the meals. Hope they come to LA soon as I'd love to try some of the yummy smells I pick up walking around Echo Park in the evening! (sorry for the pathos?)
I don't think there need be any cognitive dissonance between the ideas that A) anyone running a business is going to skirt/avoid any regulation they can get away with and B) existing regulation is not designed to be reasonable for the realities of the app-economy.
In other words, new startups pushing the envelope should be expected, and there's nothing wrong with that. We just have to decide as a society how far they should be able to code and adapt the regulation accordingly.
