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I shared this before.
If you were a person of color, having Uber and Airbnb were a game changer. Taxis and hotels were awful from the 80s-2010s.
Taxis were racists and often wouldn’t even pick you up. If they did, they often took you on a joyride. Hotels were absolute shit holes. Want to complain about your room? Go pound sand.
Those industries werent good for decades. And the disruption actually made car sharing much more consistent and hotel experiences better.
Interesting perspective I never accounted before thank you. Cabs were notorious for not picking up black people. Can’t speak for hotels.
Hotels prior to the Internet would do shitty things like:
- Rates increased. Pay triple.
- You want this moldy room or not.
- Lie and say this is the only thing available in town
Hotels took a long time to actually get online checking. Most hotels were still requiring phone reservations way past 2010. And even if you get a reservation over the phone, they could always take one look at you upon arrival and reject it.
Airbnb forced them to move to the digital age. They forced them to show the pricing up front. They forced them to have photos of the room types. They made them take reservations and actually hold it, else face bad reviews.
You could book hotels online prior to airbnb. I have done that numerous times since 2000…
The big chains for sure. But many did not - especially if you weren’t in a metropolitan area.
I don’t think I’ve ever ridden a taxi without them trying to pull one over me in some way.
My understanding is that Uber basically lifted the idea from queer people. They were tired of not getting taxis so they started a service called homobiles ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homobiles )
Uber then did all the shitty capitalism things and become the huge money hole and exploitation machine we all know.
Airbnb also made the process easy it lead to rents raising by like 30% in some places .
So they have have some convenience and such, but on the whole they’re probably a net negative.
At least here in a european countries, taxis and hotels were overregulated and monopolized af. The business models of Uber and Airbnb may not have been the best at the start, but like you say: it was a needed disruption.
Taxis sucked for white people too.
I’m not sure you understand the parent comment. I didn’t realize how terrible until I hailed a cab, noticed someone who was actually also hailing but must have been doing so before me, so I deferred and offered the cab I hailed to him. The cabby noticed the person was black and just booked it. The person was resigned and indicated this was not uncommon.
I was sitting outside the courthouse with this cool old black guy smoking weed and buying it from him. This guy is a real badass and challenges my perceptions. When he waves me over to sit between him and this other black guy, the other black guy acted like I must have the plague or something and he wouldn’t talk with me or even look at me. He took the first moment he could to go sit back by Bob. The guy had fear in his eyes, plain enough for someone autistic to see. He was afraid of me, and almost certainly for my race. Feels bad man. Not because I super wanted to interact with him or anything, but because he’s clearly been through some awful shit.
Now imagine the old cabbies who wouldn’t pick up a black guy. Why is that? They don’t tip well for not having much money? Maybe there was even worse experiences. I’m just trying to say that there shouldn’t be any pressure for individuals to rub up against something that repels them like that.
The problem here is clearly that some industries have been dominated by particular races who tend to alienate each other and live in echo chambers. An industry should not be occupied by a race because that causes these kinda of rifts and lack of availability. I don’t think it’s fair to just be like “well that cabbie discriminated and let’s prosecute that.” We need to change the gears and lube them up!
Oh fuck off no they didn’t
Why do you think Uber took off in white only countries? Or how does Bolt exist. Lol
The fuck is a “white only” country?
The amount of times their credit card machine would just “break” so that you’d be forced to pay in cash and tip much more back then was staggering.
Reeeeee! USSA, please fix bullshit tips. My country is just 4 km away from you and it’s really concerning.
OR we can keep one fairly easily attainable, ubiquitous job that pays decently.
I’d rather make sure everyone gets healthcare than take away their tips.
If you get them healthcare and $30/hr (by the time we accomplish it), then yeah, take their tips.
Not sure about taking away tips, but they SHOULD be excluded from counting wage. Ability to legally pay worker zero because tips count towards paid wage should not exist.
100%
fake money for criminals is just money in general, at least some crypto currencies don’t allow for tracking
yeah, it has a use case even if the best use case is crime
The problem is that, as something that is used first and foremost as a speculation vehicle, crypto can’t really be a true currency replacement. The amount of deflation, and instability, crypto see, due to the design, basically prevents it from ever being a true replacement for contemporary money.
Now, having a block chain credit system that’s availability is not derived in the way that current crypto is could very well be one. Just not what we are being offered now.
at least some crypto currencies don’t allow for tracking
The blockchain explicitly tracks transactions between wallets.
Extremely confident source of misinformation
I’d say fake money.
For uber, we’ve never had the overpriced cabs that it was made to circumvent in the first place. It was more of a wild west with lots of smaller companies with in-house made sites. We’ve even had an app that checked their prices, ordered the cheapest ones and cancelled others once a car is found. Then a major player entered the market, and they didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, giving estimates but driving by the meter, which ended up consistently much higher in the end. Then uber came, and started undercutting everyone with stupidly low prices, but their app/maps are an unbearable garbage. So they did a merger with previous one, combining the idea with decent app, and continued until competition crumpled. And now they’re screwing both drivers and customers hard, but there’s now no alternative.
The only good thing that came out of it is incentive structure and a punishment for drivers for not taking orders. It made it so that as a customer you can safely order without fear that you’d have to wait for hours to find a car - your hot potato order can’t be passed off forever, and somebody has to pick it up eventually, even if it’s a bad driver who majorly fucked up recently and now has to take it for redemption, or otherwise lose his job.
Airbnb never made financial sense to me. Because every time I looked there, I found the same, and much better options, for as much as half price on local ad boards. Seems to be just a convinience factor, as renters just put their properties at 2x there for an off-chance a rich tourist checks in.
AI to me seems like a dead end. The innovations are cool and flashy, but they inevitably fall short of being reliable enough to be useful. Like, I don’t use chatgpt anyhow because there’s always a chance it’ll spit out plausible bullshit which makes it so that every answer must be double-checked. And if you can find the source to check against, then why even ask the bot in the first place? Same for art, it can get you maybe halfway there, but refining the prompt takes skill and time that’d be better spend learning to edit and make real art instead.
But for cryptocurrencies I should’ve bought in way sooner. Even if they didn’t hit ATH’s every few years. I find that even drug dealers and crooks are more trustworthy than my own government, who is actively malicious, and has hurt my financial wellbeing harder and more often than even the crypto rug pulls. And that’s coming from someone who got hit by luna, ftx, and even mtgox, among others. Still better than the government straight up saying that you don’t own any of your money anymore. Yes, the ecological impact sucks, but it’s not a crypto problem specifically. I don’t see how mining is worse than, than, say, a literal mining operation across the road that uses electrical heating because they’re too poor to fix their windows and put proper insulation, and running heaters just makes financial sense? There must be regulations to make dirty power more expensive, which will make the problem solve itself. And if we have green energy, who cares what one’s using it for? Mine, game, hang christmas lights, whatever, who gives a shit
government straight up saying that you don’t own any of your money anymore
What are you referencing here?
I feel like I should be recognizing some specific thing here, but I can’t figure it out.
Well it’s third world problems, but the specific event I had in mind was when Russia froze all it’s citizen’s foreign assets in 2022 in an attempt to save it’s own currency from plummeting. This left a lot of people stranded, myself included. I did eventually get mine out, but the law, as far as I know, is still in place, so I tend to think it was purely by luck and some mistake on the bank’s side. Others didn’t have it that lucky, I’ve heard of people being fined as much as $400 for just trying. But, it’s just one case, I believe there’s lots of other places where you just can’t trust the government with money - African, South American, Central Asian countries first come to mind. Even Canada had a scandal where they froze COVID protesters assets - I don’t support the cause, but I don’t think the government should have power over dissenters assets either.
Sure, offshore accounts and physical assets can work in those cases too, but it can be challenging to get a hold of them as an ordinary citizen. Crypto circumvents that by being uncontrollable by design and widespread enough that I can exchange it in some back alley in one place and then again in another with less risk and overhead than any other way.
Good analysis, but I’d say your not taking a vital factor into account with “AI”, it’s only going to get better, and crooks, conmen, corporations, etc are going to find new ways to weaponize it. I use LLM’s often, and for my purposes, they are truly amazing (now that Google search is fucking useless)
I wouldn’t be so sure it will get much better. It might just stagnate, barely getting any better as we reach the limits of what is possible with our current hardware.
Also it’s starting to run out of good training material, once they’re ingesting a majority of stuff that’s already AI generated it might devolve like a kid whose dad is also his uncle.
Well, I’d like that to happen, actually. As it stands, the only use of AI I am legit a fan of is music mixers like suno and udio - it makes me smile every time I hear a creative mix of lyrics and genre. Others mostly just litter the internet with unhelpful stuff of questionable legality. When it gets good enough that errors are so rare that I could trust the output without checking, while being built on free and licensed stuff, I’d be much more more inclined to use them.
I used to drive for Lyft, is it not a thing anymore?
Still a thing. A lot of the other competition died out though.
Not in my area, unfortunately. We do have a couple of local competitors still. But, even though I hate it with passion, I rarely bother checking with them because they have so few drivers it is almost never the case they can even find me a car, never mind price-match the offer, and I usually have shit to attend and no time to babysit multiple apps waiting for one.
Tweet[s] now protected but thanks to Netscape/Mozilla founder and San Francisco night club owner JWZ, Jamie Zawinski, here were some results.
Illegal delivery services are my fav ones. People are physically running or riding like slaves to get you tendies from a KFC across the street. No, you are probably not a person who needs that due to some health conditions, you are privileged to buy their labor cheap and further their abuse.
My favorite part about those specifically is the “ghost kitchens” that operate 6 different restaurants out of the same building with the exact same dozen menu items under 6 different names in 6 different sets of packaging
I’m disabled, and I’ll very occasionally make use of them, but I hate them too. Fucking the workers, making my $11 chicken into $24, and complaining that they aren’t profitable to both sides. Absolute bullshit.
Back on the alien site, there was a sub /r/doordash. That place was toxic.
oh I thought you were talking weed or ketamine, not tendies. Fuckin love my online, legal weed market.
I don’t think we are on the same wavelenght, but good for you if you are served well, I guess.
Fake money for criminals only because it was useful for me when I wanted to buy drugs while living in a place with little access to them
It’s especially funny since criminal enterprises have used “legal” currency since its invention. It’s almost like criminals are gonna criminal, regardless of the “tender”. 🤌🏽
“legal” currency
Are you goldbug?
The weed and lsd were to this day the best I have had too. I don’t love crypto currencies for many many reasons but it has been years and I still think about those trips
Cryptocurrency with Tor has unironically done more for drug safety than most administrations worldwide. I hate the framing “fake money for criminals” because while there are despicable crimes, not all of them use cryptocurrency, in fact USD was the most common last time I checked, OTOH what constitutes a criminal can be an arbitrary rule. Woman in Texas having an abortion paying with crypto? Fits the definition but I’m not sure people here would condemn it.
I’m not happy with how cryptocurrency turned out with the huge speculational bubble, NFTs, not even a huge fan of smart contracts but I think the idea of a decentralized and maybe even anonymous ledger is very much in the spirit of the fediverse.
Crypto massively helped me when the banks wanted 45 bucks for an international transfer for my buddy to send me money for something I made him. Fuck banks
I’m gonna pile on the “not happy” side with environmental concerns. You see, with Bitcoin, if crypto mining was as easy as just verifying the next block in the chain, it would be easy and the market would flood. You’d have hyperinflation. The system controls the rate at which new bitcoins are minted by artificially increasing the computational difficulty of the problem. And the end result is that crypto mining intentionally wastes power output comparable to that of a country.
All of you pre Uber zealots are adorably naive. The cab industry is scum.
Uber is also scum tho. Seems there’s always going to be something dodgy about getting into cars with random strangers.
Uber, even today has a FAR higher success rate with my personally. Even two weeks ago I had a driver telling me his card reader wasn’t working until it magically did when I started threatening to simply not pay and walk away. This has happened to me multiple times even with my reduced cab rate.
The worst I’ve ever dealt with in Uber is waiting and cancelled pickup despite using it far more often.
The problem isn’t the user experience, same as with Amazon, it’s the abusive relationship the company has with its employees. That it deliberately tries to avoid labor laws that protect workers via legal technicalities.
replacing scum with even scummier scum? like, taxis were bad but they were fucking regulated.
If uber had simply been an app that handled payment and calling for service, it would have been a panacea to almost all of the problems taxis used to have. Unfortunately they also took the opportunity to screw over their drivers and now that they seem unstoppable they’re taking the opportunity to screw over their customers too.
Uber needed a HUGE pool of labor to draw on for its success, traditional cab companies couldn’t handle it even if they weren’t fucking scummy.
I hate Uber but I’m not crying for the cab industry. Fuck those guys too.
But its success is based on taking jobs that at least had living wages attached to them and replacing them with jobs that are ultra-precarious. The proliferation of jobs like driving for uber is one of if not the most pressing issue with the economy today, where people are employed but they’re not being paid enough.
Agreed.
No. The can industry still sucks ass today, even with the apps. They are all independent with little accountability. Uber fixed that and forced those fuckers out of their service. Uber is just a flat out better service.
Probably illegal car company. AirBNB isn’t terribly different (as a renter) from previous renting sites. I made some money off Bitcoin but even then it is so much wasted power for something not terribly useful. Generative AI and AI art is fun as a toy but eh, that’s mostly it.
Being able to pretty easily get a cab from anywhere to anywhere (obviously within reason) is actually kind of a cool innovation to me. It’s probably saved lives too by giving inebriated people an easy way to get a cab home. (But I’m not giving them a huge pass because I think they’ve been accused of finding ways to charge drunk people more.)
Being able to pretty easily get a cab from anywhere to anywhere
Well before smartphones and uber were a thing, you could call the cab company from anywhere and get someone to come pick you up and take you anywhere else (within their range, of course) - back when I had a clamshell phone the numbers of the three taxi companies in my area were all on my speed dial I used them so much. There is no reason that the simple innovation of putting that capability on an app instead of a phone call should also require enlisting an entire fleet of “independent contractors” who coincidentally also bear the brunt of the costs of running the cab company.
You’re not wrong, but you are leaving out some convenient parts of the experience. Yes, before, you could call a cab company and they would come pick you up and take you somewhere. But, you didn’t know how long it would take for your driver to pick you up. had no idea how much the ride would cost you, and there was a pretty good chance the driver wouldn’t accept a credit card for payment whether it was company policy to or not.
When illegal cab companies came along, they forced competition by giving you realtime information on where your driver was and how long until they would pick you up, price estimates before your ride begins, and a guaranteed method of payment that isn’t cash. Cab companies had to modernize with mobile apps, lower their prices to stay competitive, and improve the overall customer experience.
For as badly as the drivers are treated by the companies, the services were successful because the existing experience with established cab companies sucked.
Taxi accessibility varies wildly depending on where you are.
I lived in a small city (700k-ish people) for a decade and almost never saw a taxi on the streets. One morning, I locked my keys in the house and had to call a cab to take me to work. It took 30 minutes for a taxi to arrive. I lived literally one block away from the city’s taxi depot.
A couple of years later, Uber hit the scene. With their service, I never waited more than 8 minutes for a ride anywhere in the city.
If all the drivers are out on call, it doesn’t matter where the depot is. But waiting half an hour for a cab was also my experience with calling for one
I use to do it in spare time, you can’t have a cab company without professional drivers that do it full time
I think the first three technologies were good in that they shone a light at how shit and abusive currently existing systems were.
The problem is that in the case of hotels and taxis, the systems were immediately monopolized so they could exploit the crap out of it, and in the case of crypto, the technology is foundationally bad, and governments were (and still are) too protective of the abusive banks.
To dive a little more into detail; yes, block chain is a bad and unsustainable idea from the start. World wide credit card transactions coas the electricity of a few servers and the payment machines which are there anyways. Bitcoin, even with a tiny tiny fraction of all worlds credit card transactions, already takes more electricity than multiple countries combined. It’s not sustainable.
Having said that, fuck banks and their horrendous technology and their abusive policies and fuck governments for supporting it. It van be done better, it must be done better, and crypto is NOT the solution.
Uber and Airbnb should be burned to the ground, and an open protocol should be created for this that allows people up to a reasonable degree to rent out their house if they’re gone and want to do so, or give people a ride in their car if they opt so, and the system should adhere to local government laws.
AI is laughably bad right now, but it’s a start. We’re looking at a technology in it’s infancy and it WILL grow to the point where we should be worried about a lot of things. Then again, hopefully, by then AI will be able to help us fix those worries… Until then, though, fix the power usage of AI because right now its aiming to be even worse than crypto
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Fair enough that “infancy” might ne a misnomer, but let’s call it AI as we currently know it and where it can go.
We know that AI can do much MUCH better than currently, as our brains can do much better too. I don’t think it’s wrong to state that if our brains can do it, then one day computers can do it too, and likely a whole lot better than our brains are doing it.
Jesus fucking Christ this is cynical.
That doesn’t make it wrong.
It just might.
It is wrong
Which part, specifically, do you think is wrong?
I think it’s more absurdist than cynical, but is cynical really a problem here?
We’re running 21st-century technology on a 13th-century economic operating system. It’s bound to produce some outlandishly antisocial results.
As a developer and tech enjoyer, there are some inventions in the past 30 years that I can’t imagine living without.
But there are also some horrific economic systems and social dynamics that have taken hold in large part due to inventions of the past 30 years. Some effects that are so bad I’d gladly hit the snooze button on some of the tech to delay it until we figure out the social/economic side first.
Cynics can never see the forest for the trees.
You keep using that word…
It’s really bad out there. Cynicism is at levels I never imagined growing up in more optimistic times. We are surrounded by wonders and have all the opportunities to reshape our world into anything imaginable but we all collectively decided to sit inside, read how other people are miserable, and internalize that misery so we’re also miserable, even though all we’ve done is read about other people’s feelings.
Our species’s default mode is to be cynical and lazy and I hate it.
Our species’s default mode is to be cynical and lazy and I hate it.
Oh, the irony… A less cynical perspective would be that as a whole humans are pretty empathetic, and most people want to live in a world where everyone is happy.
The existence of more optimistic times should be evidence that this cynicism is not the species’ default state. We’re in a bad spot and we don’t even currently have the hope of revolution.
Well yeah but… Fake money, is “real” money real? The support structures behind bitcoin and dollars or euros are different and both have positive and negative aspects. All in all bitcoin is worse, mainly for the power usage, but if it comes to ease and speed of transfer for the average user bitcoin rules. I guess we can mostly thank banks for that.
Only really true in some countries. In the Netherlands you can extremely easily and instantly transfer money from one account to another (even at another bank) for free, using simply their IBAN. There’s also apps for convenient stuff like requesting a small payment by generating a link or splitting the restaurant bill, etc. Again all working directly with your real bank account.
In France you need to physically go to your bank’s branch, prove your identity via 4 different pieces of ID, write a physical check, sacrifice a goat to the overlords, and then the transfer will get there in a couple of weeks.
If anything makes money “real”, it’s the social contract behind it - “use this to pay your taxes or else” gives the dollar weight that no cryptocurrency can claim. That’s why they’re more accurately described as securities rather than currencies.
Okay, but national currencies failed before because people would keep dollars and just convert at the time when they need to pay taxes
Source: I still remember the Soviet ruble collapse and hyperinflation
Do you mean the Russian ruble? The Soviet Ruble was pretty stable during it’s existence.
Of course, but in the end they both rely on a social contract. Bitcoin is worth x amount because that’s what people are willing to pay for it
I’m happier about being able to buy drugs on the dark web than I am about giftcards, even though they’re conceptually related (eg. both “fake money”).
You shouldN’T have to go to the “dark web” to buy drugs, unless it’s highly destructive like meth
(on a side note, I hate that dark wev name, it implies something evil, it implies that only hackers can get there, its just sites you won’t regularly find on Google, or different places like telegram channels)
Edit: damned auto correct
*Shouldn’t
Yeah, autocorrect
This raises the question of how much pollution is created by the dollar in the form of increased consumption from shortened time preferences. The dollar inflates to encourage people to spend more now instead of save, so that the economy gets bigger.
Man it’s so brutal when you think about it like that. Inflation is theft by the back door.
The feds job is to force people to stay productive. It’s a feature, not a bug.
That’s not how it works. When you invest into the stock market, it actually beats inflation in the long run. So inflation doesn’t actually make me spend any more money than I would otherwise, since investing it would still later improve my buying power even more
You mean that investing in the stock market is a hedge against inflation? I can’t argue with that. But not everyone has money to invest in the stock market after rent, bills, food etc. Unless your wages/benefits rise in line with inflation or you have money to spare, you basically only have the option of buying worse stuff or simply going without it.
These gains from productivity have gone to the wealthy, and the costs of pollution have gone to the poor.
Well yeah, but that you can potentially also do with crypto, I’d say that is a whole other level on top of currencies
Yeah but you can’t not do it without crypto
It should be called “unregulated money laundry for criminals”
Well… Partially. It could be so much more than just nerd investment gambling and criminal money, but the technology is just fundamentally too flawed for that.
There are many different technologies, which one is flawed?
I’m referring to all blockchain based ones. Block chain, by design, is beyond extremely inefficient
All money is fake.
I guess? It’s social construct what we all agree to because trading 20 bushels of wheat for a chicken is a pain in the ass.
That’s 1200lbs of wheat for one chicken. You’ve been getting ripped off.
Definitely Illegal hotel chain. It’s actually weirdly exciting to me to go to an airbnb not knowing what amenities or rules to expect, compared to the standardized experience of a hotel.
It’s like a quest in an adventure game. Follow the map to to get to the inn, follow these clues to find the key, is the inn owned by cool NPC or is it owned by a villain? Boss fight! You’ve done well adventurer, you only owe $30 in cleaning fees!
Got to agree with that. Also, I live close enough to several desirable vacation destinations for it to be worthwhile to go for a long weekend. It’s nice to be able to book a house with a yard so my dog can come.
standardized
You and I have been going to different hotels
Uber
Airbnb
Bitcoin
OpenAI
did I guess right
I think the last two are more general, just cryptocurrency and generative AI respectively.
There are also at least three ubers where I’m at. It’s more about a business model.
Also Lyft, Wamo, Cruz, and a few other small ones.
Seems AirBnB is the only main player in their category.
vrbo
