This wasn't the first story to describe animosity between restaurants and food delivery apps. Not too long before that article there was also this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23194727

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10551312

Perhaps one could also say their attempts to cheat their staff out of tips is also an externality in the sense that it further devalues the labor power of gig workers, but I suspect I'm just overusing that word by now.

> Not exactly the apocalypse or "a cluster bomb" or whatever you called it.

It's less of an apocalypse, than collateral damage. Perhaps during the first dot com bubble the majority of the losers- Enron excepted- kept the damage within the tech sector. Nowadays with software having eaten the world, the capacity to cause problems for the rest of the world is much greater.

> I see it has some externalities that you don't like, but literally every business has externalities. It's fine that you don't like them but that's not an indictment of capitalism or SV. It's just a business you don't like. Are you equally upset with most of the Fortune 500 that probably have worse externalities than driving up prices in some trendy neighborhoods?

So this is the crux of if tall, which could provide fertile ground for a more extended discussion. There's something to be said that many of these grow-at-all-costs VC-cash infused unicorns have modus operandi that includes cutting corners and aggressive business tactics. Stories about early-stage Uber telling its drivers to drip off mustaches from competing Lyft vehicles come to mind, presaging the much more excessive and extensive abuses that later resulted.

The question is, would this sort of reckless behavior have manifested if the overall pace that these companies were operating under were not as aggressive and fast? Does the the medium of the money eventually dictate the behavior of the company? It would seem like in some of these examples, the promise of big dumb money, coupled with incentives to pursue cash flow-negative business models, coupled with the problems resulting from having to make good on the big dumb money investments while digging themselves in deeper with said half-baked business models, leads to them engaging in even more risky and externality-creating behavior. And generally promotes a toxic business culture that excuses bad behavior.

If they had less money to play around with and lower expectations and thus less incentive to desperately flail around trying to justify their crazy valuations, could this behavior be preempted, or at least lessened?

> Airbnb is a great business model (cash flow positive with solid growth).

And yet, their losses were mounting pre-pandemic:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/17/airbnbs-quarterly-loss-repor...

> You should focus 100x this rage on the Permian Basin. Are you?

You don't need to be livid with rage to mention someone is contributing to a larger problem, however proportionally small. You don't even need to mention climate change as a reason to blame ridesharing for driving up traffic; the increase in traffic is inconvenience enough, let alone its influence on public policy wrt urban planning, decrease in investment for transit, etc.

> They could very quickly become cash flow positive if they wanted to (they would just have to change their growth trajectory).

Great idea! Will they? Can they?