this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Microblog Memes

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[–] [email protected] 138 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (20 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Interesting perspective I never accounted before thank you. Cabs were notorious for not picking up black people. Can't speak for hotels.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Hotels prior to the Internet would do shitty things like:

  1. Rates increased. Pay triple.
  2. You want this moldy room or not.
  3. 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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 103 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 59 points 4 months ago (8 children)

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". 🤌🏽

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

"legal" currency

Are you goldbug?

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[–] andrew_bidlaw 92 points 4 months ago (7 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 67 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

Back on the alien site, there was a sub /r/doordash. That place was toxic.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Uber

Airbnb

Bitcoin

OpenAI

did I guess right

[–] [email protected] 55 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I think the last two are more general, just cryptocurrency and generative AI respectively.

[–] andrew_bidlaw 24 points 4 months ago

There are also at least three ubers where I'm at. It's more about a business model.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

Also Lyft, Wamo, Cruz, and a few other small ones.

Seems AirBnB is the only main player in their category.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I like the map that shows me where public toilets are. I don't know how that fits into this paradigm.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago

Nah that's a different app

[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 months ago (1 children)

As a fan of major environmental catastrophe, can I vote for all four?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

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💥

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago

I guess I've found the plagiarism machine the most entertaining so far.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago

Extremely confident source of misinformation

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (12 children)

fake money for criminals is just money in general, at least some crypto currencies don't allow for tracking

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

at least some crypto currencies don’t allow for tracking

The blockchain explicitly tracks transactions between wallets.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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!

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (10 children)

Jesus fucking Christ this is cynical.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago

That's 1200lbs of wheat for one chicken. You've been getting ripped off.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

AirBnb by far is the worst.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (18 children)

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.

[–] explodicle 8 points 4 months ago (8 children)

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.

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[–] brbposting 11 points 4 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (10 children)

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

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