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