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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.
“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…
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 don’t think I’ve ever ridden a taxi without them trying to pull one over me in some way.
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.the whole Blockchain could be run by two raspberry pis, and the cap is still limited to 21million. I suspect you don’t know what you’re talking about
It could be. I explained why it isn’t. Why don’t you offer an alternative hypothesis for why so much power is used?
it’s used because because more machines areining than 2 raspberry pis
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? 🤷🏽♂️
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
For now… 🖕🏽 They worded that so weasely, they’re just waiting for the storm to pass and for Legal to come up with some compelling reason why they’re totally “obligated” to make it happen, “hands tied” “so sorry” and all that.
Fuck Sony. They made this SOP way back when, and there’s no way they let this stop them forever. It’s all about profit, not what “we” want.🤌🏿
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.
vrbo
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
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.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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, rather than 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
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
Jesus fucking Christ this is cynical.
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It just might.
It is wrong
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
AirBnb by far is the worst.
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.
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.
These gains from productivity have gone to the wealthy, and the costs of pollution have gone to the poor.
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.
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
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 should 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)
*Shouldn’t
Yeah, autocorrect
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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
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
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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.
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
