Get your vote in now!!

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.
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 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.
- 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.
- Oh fuck off no they didn't
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
- 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.
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

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.
replacing scum with even scummier scum? like, taxis were bad but they were fucking regulated.

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.)

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.

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.

Jesus fucking Christ this is cynical.

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.
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.

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
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

AirBnb by far is the worst.

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.

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

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.
- Well yeah, but that you can potentially also do with crypto, I'd say that is a whole other level on top of currencies
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
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.
You would have to define “real” first.

If we use Cory Doctorow’s concept of “moneylike”, then the only thing that makes crypto “real” is ransomware.

So yeah, I’d say “fake money for criminals” is pretty accurate.

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/
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.

Tweet[s] now protected but thanks to Netscape/Mozilla founder and San Francisco night club owner JWZ, Jamie Zawinski, here were some results.

Anonymous and untraceable internet traffic tool for paedophiles, data thieves and occasionally a journalist living under an oppressive regime. But mainly paedophiles.

I used Tor once out of curiosity. Wanted to know what kind of stuff I could run into. I FAFO. I don't use Tor anymore.
- What is FAFO?
- I haven't been on in a bit but last year it was fairly sanitiszed compared to what it used to be. Back in like 2010 you were dodging CP left and right trying to order your weed gummies or whatever. Now it seems like it's still around but segregated into its own spaces.

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.
- 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.

what's the fake money for criminals

Cryptocurrency
- that's not fake money, and it isn't "for" criminals. it's real, and that's why criminals use it.
I can only imagine he means American currency, and the anti-counterfeiting technology embedded in it. It's the most popular currency in the world.

Oh, bitcoin? The accounting package that requires the power of a small nation to maintain it? Well, I guess that works, too.
- the bitcoin blockchain doesn't require all that power. nothing about the code dictates that. it's a social phenomenon, just like the markets.

My brother in Christ, all money is fake. Even gold coins are 'fake' money, because all money is a social construct used to represent an abstraction of value added through labor.

How many Bitcoins for lettuce?
- At current exchange rates, about 0.000029. That's going to vary slightly from day to day, in much the same way that the price in Euros, or Japanese Yen will vary if the price is in USD, because currency valuations fluctuate comparatively.
  
  I remember a time the GBP was worth about $2.50 US; it's currently more like $1.30 US. Euros used to be worth considerably more than US dollars, but it's very near parity right now.
  
  As I said, money is an abstraction, it's not a real thing. European labor didn't used to be more valuable than American labor, and now it's worth the same. The abstraction that money is has drifted farther away from the reality that it's supposed to reflect over time.
- how much lettuce?
- if you were foolish enough to buy a Liz Truss your keeping your damn Liz Truss
all money is a social construct used to represent an abstraction of value added through labor.

That's the definition of money. It's not fake. It is an abstraction, but it's not fake, and we've built an intricate system of laws and regulations about it.

Bitcoin is fake money. It's not backed by any government or any real rules and regulations. It's the same as every other "tech" company. Take an existing thing, remove all regulations, pretend it's a new thing, and pocket the increased revenue.
- government backing only defines money under Adam smiths theory, but we had money and governmentless money long before smith.
- Money existed before there was an intricate system of laws and regulations. Money existed before there were fiat currencies, backed by nothing except a gov't's promises. The fact that bitcoin doesn't have those doesn't make it any more real, or less real, than any other thing used as currency. It has value because people believe that it has value.
  
  Gold is much the same way. Gold has an intrinsic value for making things that conduct electricity (particularly because it doesn't corrode), but all other values exist because it's both relatively rare, and people have decided that it's pretty.
s/added through/extracted from/

Money won't magically appear from air if I will make a chair.

Illegal hotel chain!!!

Thanks to illegal hotel chain I can stay in the big city while helping someone who is pressed on rising rents

More common however it’s apartments renting rooms they can’t lease or houses/condos owned or built solely for AirBnB renting.
They're also partially to blame for the rising rents

Well, one is about to take your job while the others will just make your life slightly easier.

Unless you happen to be subjected to the gig economy.
LLMs simply aren't capable of the precision required for most jobs. But it could attend meetings, write up tasks for human employees, assign tasks, make timelines, put together a project plan presentation.

So yeah it's basically middle management that are most in danger of being replaced by AI. Sure there'd some inaccuracies tasks getting assigned to the wrong eomployee, a task description being wrong or unclear, but all of that happens now with human middle managers now. So having AI do middle management is probably already feasible.

But what is likelihood of management recommending their jobs be replaced?

Y'all were cheering, hollering, and hooting like a 90s sitcom audience when Uber came about. You championed the identity politics because some of you had bad experiences with taxi drivers. You shouted down the opponents and liked how Uber was cheaper because it was being subsidized by venture capitalists.

Now the taxi industry is in control of tech tsars instead of the government and you only have yourselves to blame.

What I find so interesting about painting people you disagree with as a monolith is that it naturally makes the argument you are against contradictory.

One group of people cheers Uber and you disagree with that.

Then another group of people (granted there will be some overlap) decry Uber later on.

These are two different people, but when you treat them as one, you're bound to see your opposition as being contradictory at best and contrarian at worst.
And it's still better than it was 20 years ago, I don't see a problem.