I spent last night rewatching Cast Away. The last time I watched it was when I was lost, my perception about it was alike the one I had to other mainstream films that his return to life was not respectful to everyone around him (i.e. main character delima). What I could remember before my watch was something like that her wife either stays with her new husband, or she leaves her new husband for him, both are equally awful. But the ending doesn't show Kelly leaving her new husband. Instead, there's a bittersweet final meeting between Chuck and Kelly where they acknowledge their love for each other, but Kelly chooses to stay with her current family. Chuck ultimately lets her go and drives away to start his new life. The film ends with Chuck at a crossroads (literally and figuratively), suggesting hope for his future as he decides which direction to take. #Cinema

From The Big Tech Extortion Racket: "One of the first to understand its promise was a Berkeley economics professor named Hal Varian. In 2001, Varian cowrote a paper titled “Conditioning Prices on Purchase History,” which explained that the “rapid advance in information technology now makes it feasible for sellers to condition their price offers on consumers’ prior purchase behavior.”

Varian then offered a suggestion to online businesses: “if enough customers are myopic, or the costs of anonymizing technologies are too high, sellers will want to condition pricing on purchase history.” The paper included a warning to the buyer: “purchasing at a high price is not the best strategy, since it guarantees that [you, the consumer] will face a high price in the future.”

In short, online sellers are free to provide you with prices, terms of service, and information tailored to exploit your weaknesses. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

Uber is cited as a company designed to manipulate both buyer and seller using personalized price discrimination. Uber collects vast amounts of data to determine how much people in a particular region are willing to pay:

But Uber differs from older monopolists in at least two key respects: it enjoys the ability to capture and make sense of vast amounts of data about individuals, and it enjoys a license to discriminate.

Absent common carrier rules, Uber’s bosses are free to favor some drivers with more rides and disfavor others with fewer, for whatever reason they choose. They are free to pay some drivers more per mile than others, for whatever reason they choose. They can make some drivers travel farther than others to earn the same fare. And they can pay a particular driver a certain rate one day and a different rate the next. They have even adopted techniques typically used in video games to more effectively manipulate their drivers. Uber’s bosses are also free to do the same thing to riders. In a statement admitting to price discrimination, Uber implied that its goal is to charge richer people more for the same level of service. The corporation’s pricing system is designed to determine how much the people in a particular region are willing to pay, then charge accordingly. But people agree to pay more for a particular service for many reasons other than a higher disposable income, including lack of economic sophistication, or just plain desperation.

Although what you see on your screen has been designed to look a lot like a market system, in which the price of each particular ride you take is regulated by supply and demand—with prices, for example, “surging” during rush hour—what is actually happening is much different. Fluctuations in pricing have nothing to do with demand; prices go up during rush hours and during off-hours. Uber’s system is designed to carefully study your travel and shopping habits so it can figure out how to charge you the maximum amount for any particular ride, without leading you to decide to take the bus or walk instead.

Uber’s vast cache of data about where people go and when provides an ever more perfect map of traffic to and from a community’s bookstores and coffee shops and churches—and to its backroom casinos and drug dealers and sex clubs. All this information gives the corporation the ability to understand just how badly you need a ride. Do you rush off every Thursday at 8 pm to see your boyfriend? Do you like to squeeze your Sunday visit to mom in between a morning round of golf and the afternoon NFL game? Every Tuesday and Thursday at 3 pm, do you have to get to your psychiatrist and back without your boss knowing?

Well, your boss may not know, but Uber does. And it exploits this knowledge to extract more money.

Nowhere has Uber demonstrated its capacity to deliver different service to different people more perfectly than in its treatment of officials charged with ensuring the provision of safe and affordable taxi services. The corporation has repeatedly been caught providing false information to regulators around the world.

Uber has developed a system that enables it to gather intimate information about you, your habits, and your needs, then jack up the price you pay for its service whenever and however it chooses. This system also allows the corporation to cut you off, for whatever reason, whenever it wishes.

#Capitalism