Of these, I'd like to point out that unironically Uber is the obvious choice for Best. Hear me out...
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Outside of the really big cities, taxi service was trash. You had to find a number and a phone, the price was almost impossible to figure out in advance, and none that I am aware of were doing anything to keep up with the times or improve anything. The competition that it hurt deserved some pain.
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People can now paw drunkenly at their phone and generally arrive home safe. Easy access to rides has almost certainly saved lives. I don't think you can say that about any of the others on the list.
But wait! I'm not saying that Uber is good. I'm just saying that, theoretically, you could start a service like Uber that isn't hot garbage, that has employees or at least better paid contractors that take home a more reasonable share of the money. Hell, a local government could create a ride hailing app that passes the entire amount back to the driver, and it would be a net benefit to society. Though at that point, maybe they should have just been looking into better public transportation and planning instead.
No Uber driver ever scammed me into paying double fare or refusing credit cards.
Uber is objectively a cancer upon society. They should legally employ their drives and pay a fair wage with prices to match.
All I’m saying is, it takes a real shitty industry for Uber to still be the better option. Every “innovation” in the picture is a complete joke and should never be used even for practical purposes, except Uber…
Every “innovation” in the picture…should never be used…except Uber
It’s the holidays, there are a dozen(+) people in your family, and you want folks to fly in from out of state and have the kids play together in a living room while the adults cook together in a kitchen.
VRBOs are sold out.
Is Airbnb OK, if you respect the neighborhood (as best you can while still doing a short term rental)? If you rent from a family who happens to be out of town and not from a superhost with a hundred homes?
I say this every time this comes up, Taxis are trash, the only reason they're decent in big cities is because that's the only place you've got real competition.
Everywhere else has a single company, at best, and a lot of the times it's a one person LLC. Even my midsize city has a single person LLC taxi and Uber.
Uber the company is cancer, Uber the service (Or idea/concept whatever) was exactly what was needed. No more calling dispatch and being told "It's just around the corner" for 3 hours or them realizing I'm not local and taking me the LONG way around or even just taking fucking card lmao
Yes taxi companies were trash but Uber/ride shares forced them to evolve. Big city taxi companies now have all the same features as Uber. (route and price in advance, app for requesting a ride, info about your driver, safety features, card payment, and scheduling.) I'm now back to using taxi companies. The price is actually lower on busy days as they don't surge charge anymore. I've actually become a "regular" at one taxi company and they know me and I know the drivers. That's something that would never happen using Uber. The only time I use ride share is when I wasn't able to plan ahead. (like when my car broke down, and I needed a ride asap.)
Enough people were pissed off at cabs that Uber took off. Instead of cabs looking inward to improve, they decided to act worse. I know Uber has room to improve but if that is the reaction from big cab, Cabs should be completely removed from society. Cabs were a complete fail.
Budapest banned Uber due to pressure from taxi drivers union which ended up implementing an app and matching services. It took a while to mature, but the quality of the service definitely beats that of Uber now.
Alas, public transit is already really good in Budapest, so mostly only people that were using Taxis before Uber existed are using the services now. Except that you are less likely to get scammed on fares and be the victim of CC fraud due to the streamlined app process.
Wait before you hear of inter-city transit and a company called BlaBlaCar. While by their own claims they just organize people to give someone a ride while going to the same town, the way to really min-max it was to get a retired, nearly scrapped bus, act like multiple virtual vehicles, and then carry 10+ people without any legal safeguards for them. The've got some pushbacks and the service now is less tolerant to such cases, but that's still insane. Yet, for various reasons, people take it over dying public infrastructure like official bus depots, trains, for it's cheaper and stops when it crosses town instead of being based in a distant station on the edge of city limits. They weren't great, but they were at least career drivers looking into each other with some minimal checks, timetables, that municipal power could regulate. And then there's a rando (even if ex-driver) who bought an old vehicle and drives it until it either pays off or they get asleep behind the wheel on a highway leading to dozens dead.
People can now paw drunkenly at their phone and generally arrive home safe. Easy access to rides has almost certainly saved lives. I don’t think you can say that about any of the others on the list.
This cannot be overstated.
A close friend of mine almost got robbed when taking a dodgy cab home. Driver did a detour to a rough part of town, told him to wait and then went into a random takeaway. When he saw the driver come out with four other guys wielding cricket bats, he bolted out of the cab and ran away.
Uber had unquestionably made taking cabs back home in England both safer and more convenient.
Everyone will have something good to say of each of these, eg crypto doesn’t just benefit criminals.
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Airbnb has destroyed housing market for young people trying to get out of their parents' homes in all major Western European cities
Interesting. I thought it was just the US and Canada where AirBnb was messing up housing for new buyers (as well as taking away options from renters).
I think it was Britain that recently made headway on changing their housing laws to put a halt on Airbnb screwing up the economy on people who need homes. Canada are just catching up to it. in some places in Canada there are 7 empty houses to each homeless person. They are just changing the laws now. Even people who have jobs can’t afford a home. It’s so absolutely stupid airbnb went unchecked.
Same for Malaysia. Lot and lot of highrise are build for exactly this purpose. High cost, "luxury" looking design, and boasting a "mall" just below the highrise. The result is a tons of dead mall, empty apartments, empty house, and unaffordable housing.
The government then regulate it, where they allow these place to continue to run but only on "commercial building", which mean only on these highrise build for the purpose of short term renting. It still doesn't solve the fundamental issue but at least we have law to combat these.
Everytime this pops up I have a brief moment where I'm like "what the hell is an illegal crab company?"
"Plagiarism machine"
Ironically, this is a repost
So is the screenshotted post (afaik)
Fake money for criminals bought me a lot of fun drugs back in the day so...
Right? Thanks Ross Ulbricht!
Edit: Ulbricht not Ulbrecht
How is the usd a tech innovation 💀
I think they're justbtalking about crypto
Uber (and other similar apps) are expensive than traditional taxi where I live.
You couldn't pay me to take a taxi again, Uber can get as expensive as they want (Eventually it'll start to be cheaper to just rent a car for the day lmao)
I’d still take that over ever using a taxi again.
Most are a lot more like Uber and a lot less like taxis of 15 years ago now.
The fact that GenAI is the top choice is just more proof.
I’d rather an illegal cab company doing things right because the ‘official’ unchecked cab company is corrupt doing illegal things and people finally got fed up with it. that shouldn’t have been a thing that needed to happen to get a safe(and reliable and relevant i mean you could enter your credit card for fuck sakes that should have been updated in cabs by then) and affordable enough ride anywhere. That is a sign of a broken system when the word ‘legal’ in application lost all relativity to who it was supposed to protect in that situation. Heck, I’d drop it from all use in this case.
How is the illegal cab company doing things right? It's clearly monopolistic and therefore anti-consumer.
One cab driver blackmailed my friend for money to return a phone to her she left in the back seat. One of my friends was threatened to be raped by one and busted her wrist to get away from them. I’ve been physically threatened by cab drivers who want to get sex from women they think are alone. they are protected by a union which is clearly corrupt. I been left out in the cold with a busted ankle. They wouldn’t even call an ambulance for me.
Haven’t run into that shitty behaviour not even once with Uber.
Cabs are the mob.
Up with Uber. Down with cabs.
You forgot extensive algorithmic protection for art thieves.
So its just violations of capitalism. Perhaps the problem isn't the tech.
Are you implying that capitalism is violating or being violated?
Yes
I don't think the poster was blaming tech for the problems that resulted. The intent seemed to be to point out that these ventures weren't so innovative as popular media would have had us believe until recently. Plenty of blame to go around for the companies' exploitative practices, for media that just repeats what's in the press release/ads uncritically, and for government regulators, as well.
Permanently Deleted
I think this is a pretty cynical take on all of these.
Accurate tho.
Uber succeeded by burning invester money early and evading taxi regulations.
Airbnb succeeded by burning inverter money early and evading hotel regulations.
Crypto was originally hyped as untraceable, and that drove early buters.
AI only works well if/because it's trained illegally on copyright works.
That whole "disrupter" shit was always:
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finding loopholes in regulations
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convincing rich people it will do well so they invest
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Spend their money while operating at a loss to gain market share
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Raise prices higher than original regulated service.
Then optionally drop all your stock immediately before prices plummet and the late investors get fucked.
Not really accurate, just very cynical.
All those disrupters did their job and either broke up monopolies or forced industries to adapt where they would have otherwise been perfectly content sitting on their ass and doing nothing for the consumer.
Cabs/Taxis - artificially controlled in number to keep fares high and service sucked.
Crypto - try to remember before crypto, the idea of cashless was non-existent. Want to make international transfers? Pay up the ass in fees and at rates they choose. Crypto forced companies to do better with digital currency.
Generative AI - is the future and will propel innovations we have not even considered.
Admittedly Airbnb is the only"disruptive" tech that isn't so great and has more serious consequences, but I'm all for the hotel industry having more competition.
We can argue the current state of Uber/Lyft and crypto isn't great, but they started off well and did disrupt in good ways for the consumers.
If the privacy features didn't work they wouldn't be making it a felony to use them
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Welcome to Twitter, every idea has to be distilled into the smallest version then skewed into ragebait.
ironically you're also doing it with this comment
Which one is the plagiarism machine? Is that the Harvard president?
ChatGPT
Ok. I’m going with fake hotel.
Probably all the generative models, including those that generate text (e.g. ChatGPT) and images (e.g. StableDiffusion).
GPT or one of the other Large Language Model AIs
ChatGPT and/or YouTube kinda?
