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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.
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.
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.
My understanding is that Uber basically lifted the idea from queer people.
That doesn’t make sense as it seems Homobiles was first “thought of” in 2010 and properly founded in 2011. While Uber was founded in 2009 and was already operational in 2010.
I got it from “the cold start problem” , so it’s possible the author was mistaken or I mangled the details.
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!
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%
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?
Countries where the population is predominantly white and minorities are other also white ethnicities.
Which of these countries is not white? They’re all whiter than the USA. Ask anyone here and they’ll also say taxis suck lol.
Country Majority % Regional majorities Albania Albanians 97% Greeks ≈3%, others Armenia Armenians 98.1% - Azerbaijan Azerbaijanis 91.6% Lezgin 2%, Armenians 1.35% Belarus Belarusians 83.7% Russians 8.3% Belgium Flemings 58% Walloons 31% Bosnia and Herzegovina Bosniaks 50.11% Serbs 30.78%, Croats 15.43% Bulgaria Bulgarians 84% Turks 8.8% Croatia Croats 91.6% - Czech Republic Czechs 90.4% Moravians 3.7% Denmark Danes 90% - Estonia Estonians 68.8% Russians 24.2% Finland Finns 93.4% Finland-Swedes 5.6% Georgia Georgians 86.8% - Greece Greeks 93% Albanians 4% Hungary Hungarians 92.3% - Iceland Icelanders 91% - Republic of Ireland Irish 87.4% - Italy Italians 91.7% Southtyroleans Kosovo Albanians 92% Serbs 4% Latvia Latvians 62.1% Russians 26.9%, Belarusian 3.3%, Ukrainian 2.2%, Polish 2.2%, Lithuanian 1.2% Lithuania Lithuanians 84.61% Poles 6.53% Malta Maltese 95.3% - Moldova Moldovans 75.1% Gagauzs 4.6%, Bulgarians 1.9% Montenegro Montenegrins 44.98% Serbs 28.73% North Macedonia Macedonians 64% Albanians 25.2% Norway Norwegians 85-87% Sami 0.7% Poland Poles 97% Germans 0.4% Portugal Portuguese 95% - Romania Romanians 83.4% Hungarians 6.1% Russia Russians 81% - Serbia Serbs 83% - Slovakia Slovaks 86% Hungarians 9.7% Slovenia Slovenes 83% - Sweden Swedes 88% - Switzerland Swiss Germans 65% French 18%, Italians 10% Ukraine Ukranians 77.8% Russians 17.3%
“I will never forget the look on that cab driver’s face as he drove away.”
-former business contact extolling Uber (this was in its early days), describing a taxi driver scamming her in a foreign country with unfamiliar currency
And now I’ve never forgotten her words…
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.
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.
Calling hashing “mining” was probably the most stupid thing in bitcoin. Since it have nothing to do with minting new coins. It is tru that miners get a bonus in addition to the fees of the block when successful. But that bonus is reduced regularly and will eventually go away.
The power consumption used by hashing became quickly insane by companies chaseing a quick buck.
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
That’s not even touching on the glaring fact that this anti-crypto sentiment is propped up by those who stand to benefit from downplaying its utility - until they’ve got all their plans ready to fire, of course. The same is true of cannabis these days, and (for those that read) was the same for alcohol only a little while ago, and tobacco before that. There is nothing in this current timeline that will be allowed to attack the economic power dynamic, much less correct it. This hype is as much a pre-packaged and deftly engineered product as the military-sports complex is, but where is the conversation on that, citizens? 🤷🏽♂️
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.
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.
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 wish luck to delivery workers union, one of few functioning unions.
Did someone go through my comments and added two downvotes to each?.. Two downvotes, which is exactly same number to amount of them received by other recent comments. I call it “brown stripe”, because someone clearly has diarrhea.
You’ve made a friend.
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.
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.
As a fan of major environmental catastrophe, can I vote for all four?
O’Doyle rules!! O’Doyle rules!! O’Doyle rules!! O’Doyle rules!! drives car with entire humanity off of cliff while continuing self-aggrandizing chant O’Doyle rules!! O’Do💥
I like the map that shows me where public toilets are. I don’t know how that fits into this paradigm.
Illegal Gloryhole finder?
Nah that’s a different app
I guess I’ve found the plagiarism machine the most entertaining so far.
Extremely confident source of misinformation
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
Generative AI and AI art is fun as a toy but eh, that’s mostly it.
If you keep an eye on low budget Netflix / Max shows and on a number of the popular digital journals (particularly financials) you’ll notice a rising tide of AI generated content. We’ve had this in the financial press for a long time - Benzinga is notorious for churning out tons of automated functionally-unresearched articles that amount to “Stock price changed because news happened”. But its creeping into everything else.
Generative AI is increasingly a way of making really cheap, lazy templated art into the framework for an endless flow of vapid white noise media. And that’s there to keep you subscribed to these paywalled services, with the illusion of continuously fresh content. The real implementation of this tech isn’t as a toy for media hobbyists. Its as a wholesale replacement of the human-generated fine arts and journalism to reduce costs.
It is about cheapening new media until nobody human can afford to participate anymore and everything in the market space is this thin tasteless slop.
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!
Well there’s an idea for a video game. The Airbnb adventure full of absurdity and adventure but played 100% straight
It would also make a good experience you could do over a weekend that takes place in an air b and b? Like a table top game or larping. You enter the air b and b and there are instructions on the table. It could be themed too. There could be a board in the kitchen with different quests you could go on in the town.
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.
But you could get rooms from other sites before AirBNB. It wasn’t really too huge of a change. Probably more for people renting out space. Stuff like VRBO existed before I think.
standardized
You and I have been going to different hotels
fake money for criminals is just money in general, at least some crypto currencies don’t allow for tracking
at least some crypto currencies don’t allow for tracking
The blockchain explicitly tracks transactions between wallets.
Snip
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.
crypto can’t really be a true currency replacement
Its been increasingly popular among the unbanked, as it grants a lot of the functions of the modern financial system at a marginally lower cost than check cashing companies and payday lenders without requiring the participant to be considered “credit worthy” by the transacting institution.
You can have a digital wallet and make digital transactions and you don’t need to carry a giant wade of cash on you all the time, even if a traditional financial institution wouldn’t touch you. That’s a boon for crooks, sure. Its also a boon for people working in the gray market - migrant laborers sending money home to family, state-legal pot/mushroom dealers who don’t have federal sanction and can’t use normal banks, gig workers and other contractors, international workers and businesses needing a universal currency to trade against. And its a boon for the working poor, particularly folks who don’t have a physical bank nearby.
Because the currency has material benefits for the unbanked (and therefore legally vulnerable) population, it becomes a popular place to ply scams and grifts and other dirty financial tricks precisely because you know the people you’re fleecing will have no legal recourse after the fact. But that’s the parasitic nature of second class citizenship.
You’re not vulnerable because you’re using crypto nearly so much as you’re vulnerable because you’re denied access to traditional banks and courts.
So it is a replacement for Western Union. Not a bad thing if it’s helping people transfer money without a middle man taking too much.
I am aware of this, still doesn’t make it a viable replacement for traditional currency
Not for someone with access to the traditional banking sector, no. But for those locked out, it’s the only available alternative.
It is only good for that at a limited scale. The issue is that it’s adoption will be stymied, governments not wanting to give up hold to their influence over currency, or not, by the simple fact that it is either in a near constant state of deflation, or it gets abandoned by the broad market. There will have to be one implemented that has it’s scarcity regulated in such a way that it retains a mostly gradual inflation. The way their scarcity is currently designed it essentially forces the currency value to increase significantly, without huge periods without value growth, or it gets dumped.
A block chain, crypto, that holds a relatively steady value, in a similar manner to normal currency, is what will be needed for it to truly take off as a full market replacement.
That’s just a Stablecoin, like Tether. Unfortunately, stablecoins have a rather tawdry history as ponzi schemes. Terra/Luna being a classic example.
Yes, I am also aware of this. The execution of an anonymous currency was done so poorly, for something trying to be an actual currency alternative, that is set having something like it back decades, if it didn’t kill the idea of a currency that a country didn’t control.
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…
Even a paranoid schizophrenic is right twice a day…
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.
I wish I could care enough to hate this comment
Yeah. Other people’s cynicism is bad enough but what really gets to me is my own.
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.
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.
Can confirm. I used to play RotMG and everyone defaulted to trading potions and knowing a bunch of conversion rates
And used by criminals.
AirBnb by far is the worst.
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
AI is laughably bad right now, but it’s a start. We’re looking at a technology in it’s infancy
Well…
The field of AI research was founded at a workshop held on the campus of Dartmouth College, USA during the summer of 1956.
The first machine learning algorithm was devised in 57. Back propagation in 74. IBM defeated Kasparov in 97.
The field is making steady progress but it’s not exactly an infant and there’s no telling at which rate it will progress in the future.
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.
