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.
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
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!
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.
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". 🤌🏽
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.
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
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? 🤷🏽♂️
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.
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
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.
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💥
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.
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.)
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.
If all the drivers are out on call, it doesn't matter where the depot is. But waiting half an hour for a cab was also my experience with calling for one
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, 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!
It would also make a good experience you could do over a weekend that takes place in an air b and b? Like a table top game or larping. You enter the air b and b and there are instructions on the table. It could be themed too. There could be a board in the kitchen with different quests you could go on in the town.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Fair enough that "infancy" might ne a misnomer, but let's call it AI as we currently know it and where it can go.
We know that AI can do much MUCH better than currently, as our brains can do much better too. I don't think it's wrong to state that if our brains can do it, then one day computers can do it too, and likely a whole lot better than our brains are doing it.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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 ones based on mesh structures, and other shit I don't quite understand. By design, having multiple currencies offloads a lot of the transaction cost.
Anonymous and untraceable internet traffic tool for paedophiles, data thieves and occasionally a journalist living under an oppressive regime. But mainly paedophiles.
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.
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
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.
Ah, that all makes sense. I live in the US, so I'm looking at it from that lens.
don’t think the government should have power over dissenters assets
Agreed, but this is a thorny problem. Clearly the government has a legitimate cause to freeze some assets in some cases (obvious example: US govt freezing Osama bin Laden's accounts). This becomes an abuse-of-power question, then. Unfortunately, we as humanity don't have a good answer to it.
third world
Russia
Technically, Russia would be second world :)
I do think cryptocurrencies fall short of the promise/hype with the exchange problem -- either there's a big bank-like clearinghouse that the government can target with freeze orders, or you're in "You have to know a guy who knows a guy" territory when it comes time to actually use the cryptocurrency. I can't pay my mortgage by transferring Bitcoin or Ethereum to my bank.
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.
Also it's starting to run out of good training material, once they're ingesting a majority of stuff that's already AI generated it might devolve like a kid whose dad is also his uncle.
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.
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.
They only "use it" to transfer the funds. Once they have it, they cash it in. No criminal is keeping it in crypto form. They use it the same way they use Apple gift cards.
An easy way to tell if it's "real" money or not is to see if goods are ever priced directly in it, where it isn't just directly indexed to the exchange rate of an established currency.
Hint: Even places that accept crypto payments don't do this. The crypto price fluctuates based on the moment by moment exchange rate to the local currency.
Can I ask what the point of arguing semantics here is?
Maybe you have put in the effort to figure out all the avenues to use bitcoin to pay for things, but its not easy and you sound more like a drug addict scrounging for metal and bottles, and then wondering why noone else is interested in your hustle.
Why do you care if people call bitcoin real or not anyways? For most people its not real, for you I guess it is, does that make sense?
sumerians denoted everything in silver shekels but trade was done will all manner of commodities, including barley grains. your theory of money sounds like it comes from the Adam Smith cult.
Are barley grains a currency? I'm not understanding your argument here. In a practical sense, cryptocurrencies are far too volatile to use as a currency and the "stable" coins are tied to things like the US dollar. Well, I should say allegedly tied because "stable" coins like tether haven't been audited to actually prove it's tied to the underlying.
I mean, the same can be said for Norwegian Kroner (assuming you're not in Norway) and nobody doubts that it is money. I can't pay my rent with it, or buy bread with it, I need to exchange it for "real money" (Euro for me) but it is real money.
How to use Stablecoins to Pay Rent
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I hate to be “that guy” but your definition of money is a little constrained. By that definition, the only “money” is the money of the country you’re currently in. Can you walk into a bestbuy and purchase a TV with Yuan?
You’re likely trying to say “Can you walk into a normal store of an appropriate country and pay with that currency” but even that is flawed, as certain stores don’t accept credit/debit, or don’t accept cash.
Crypto is an un-backed and unregulated security -- the value of which fluctuates wildly. Turns out most people don't like being paid in something that can drastically lose value in the span of hours.
The few people and institutions that accept crypto as payment either immediately convert it back into real money or are "investors" treating it like the security it actually is.
I'm assuming those quotes are referring to fiat currency. Faith in the solvency of the issuing government, widely agreed upon exchange rates, and regulated prices of goods are all forms of backing. Sure: you can argue that's "not enough" but crypto "currencies" don't even have that. Hence why their values fluctuate by the minute -- which defeats the entire purpose of "money".
unregulated
... government controlled central banks and entire bodies of law exist to do just that. Nobody is regulating crypto.
Crypto lacks the features that make money "money". It doesn't have a relatively stable, agreed upon value. It's not easily exchanged for goods or services. It technically can be used as "money" but that's true of anything -- trading cards, a pile of gravel, etc.
With real money you can take out a loan. Kinda the whole point of money, it represents value that is owed.
While crypto loans would be technically possible it would be a foolish thing to do since it's effectively a short on something that could increase in value. Real money has a small but steady (well, ideally) inflation so you can be confident in taking out a loan and not having to worry about the currency doing something crazy like doubling in value resulting in you owing double the value than you initially borrowed. This is not the case for crypto so it's simply not a viable currency for financing anything.
Since it's not viable for financing, it's not a real currency and never will be. Like is someone supposed to take out a business loan in real currency, convert it to crypto, pay someone else who would then have to convert it back to real money so they can pay back their loan? Why would people want to do all of these conversions back and forth to and from crypto? Because they like the risk of the value dropping for the brief time they're holding onto it?
Okay, "maintain" isn't the right word, but the mining process is designed that way and it's baked into the whole currency. Actual work could have been done, but instead we burned it all for imaginary money (which isn't much different from fiat currency).
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?
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.
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.
Everything is an abstraction. A cat is an abstraction. There's no cat, only an animal living in your apartment that looks like other similar animals.
What makes this money fake you'd ask? Probably because you cannot buy lettuce for it. Only illegal stuff, money, other fake money and, in some places, you can buy a hotel room for a few nights. Idk, crypto looks more like a commodity than currency to me.
What makes this money fake you’d ask? Probably because you cannot buy lettuce for it.
...But you absolutely can buy lettuce with it. You just have to find someone that will accept that particular currency. Are you seriously going to argue that Canadian currency isn't real money just because I can't buy produce in the US at most stores using Canadian loonies or toonies? And you can use American currency very, very easily to buy illegal stuff; pretty much every in-person drug dealer in the US accepts folding cash. (They just don't take credit cards, PayPal, Venmo, etc. because that's easily traced.)
Edit: a physical cat is not an abstraction. A physical, individual cat is the thing itself. The abstraction is the concept of "cat"; when you think "cat" as a concept, you aren't thinking about a specific, individual animal, but of a concept that defines 'catness'; it probably has fur, whisker, pointy ears, a tail, etc., even though an individual cat may not have any of these things.
But you absolutely can buy lettuce with it. You just have to find someone that will accept that particular currency.
Well, I can find a nerd who would sell me some lettuce for Nintendo Switch. Does it make Nintendo Switch a currency? Nope. With Canadian dimes I guess I can go to any shop in Canada and buy it, which makes it a valid currency in Canada. What you are right about, is that almost every currency is regional.
you can use American currency very, very easily to buy illegal stuff;
Oh thanks, if they allow me to the US I'd probably make use of this information.
Edit: a physical cat is not an abstraction. A physical, individual cat is the thing itself. The abstraction is the concept of "cat"; when you think "cat" as a concept, you aren't thinking about a specific, individual animal, but of a concept that defines 'catness'; it probably has fur, whisker, pointy ears, a tail, etc., even though an individual cat may not have any of these things.
Fuck Kant. As you mentioned, cat is definited through catness, but catness is defined through cats, hence a cat abstracts all cats. Unless you think of all other cats, your physical cat is a cloud of atoms
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.
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.
Currency existed prior to governments; Native Americans in some areas used rare shells as a form of currency; the currency wasn't a part of their governing process, and by any modern standards, their governments were very loose.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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%
If you get them healthcare and $30/hr (by the time we accomplish it), then yeah, take their tips.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Europe?oldformat=true#European_ethnic_groups_by_sovereign_state
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.
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". 🤌🏽
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
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
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? 🤷🏽♂️
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
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
I thought vrbo was more of a timeshare thing but I was probably wrong.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
well put.
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.)
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.
If all the drivers are out on call, it doesn't matter where the depot is. But waiting half an hour for a cab was also my experience with calling for one
I use to do it in spare time, you can't have a cab company without professional drivers that do it full time
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, 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
It would also make a good experience you could do over a weekend that takes place in an air b and b? Like a table top game or larping. You enter the air b and b and there are instructions on the table. It could be themed too. There could be a board in the kitchen with different quests you could go on in the town.
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.
You and I have been going to different hotels
Jesus fucking Christ this is cynical.
It just might.
It is wrong
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Fair enough that "infancy" might ne a misnomer, but let's call it AI as we currently know it and where it can go.
We know that AI can do much MUCH better than currently, as our brains can do much better too. I don't think it's wrong to state that if our brains can do it, then one day computers can do it too, and likely a whole lot better than our brains are doing it.
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.
If you don't have money to save, then inflation doesn't make you spend your money either, since you're basically spending it all anyway
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 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
*Shouldn't
Yeah, autocorrect
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
It lasted longer in some countries, the Russian ruble was introduced in 1993, in my country the soviet ruble lasted until 1992
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/
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
There are ones based on mesh structures, and other shit I don't quite understand. By design, having multiple currencies offloads a lot of the transaction cost.
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.
And it's not like getting rid of Tor would stop CSAM.
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?
Fuck around and find out
Thanks
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
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.
Ah, that all makes sense. I live in the US, so I'm looking at it from that lens.
Agreed, but this is a thorny problem. Clearly the government has a legitimate cause to freeze some assets in some cases (obvious example: US govt freezing Osama bin Laden's accounts). This becomes an abuse-of-power question, then. Unfortunately, we as humanity don't have a good answer to it.
Technically, Russia would be second world :)
I do think cryptocurrencies fall short of the promise/hype with the exchange problem -- either there's a big bank-like clearinghouse that the government can target with freeze orders, or you're in "You have to know a guy who knows a guy" territory when it comes time to actually use the cryptocurrency. I can't pay my mortgage by transferring Bitcoin or Ethereum to my bank.
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.
Also it's starting to run out of good training material, once they're ingesting a majority of stuff that's already AI generated it might devolve like a kid whose dad is also his uncle.
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.
They only "use it" to transfer the funds. Once they have it, they cash it in. No criminal is keeping it in crypto form. They use it the same way they use Apple gift cards.
tally sticks were debt tokens. people used them as money out of convenience, and would exchange them for cash if it was possible.
An easy way to tell if it's "real" money or not is to see if goods are ever priced directly in it, where it isn't just directly indexed to the exchange rate of an established currency.
Hint: Even places that accept crypto payments don't do this. The crypto price fluctuates based on the moment by moment exchange rate to the local currency.
So latin American currencies are not real money. We already knew but wow harsh reality
tally sticks denoted debt in Britain, and were used directly as money out of convenience, but they were themselves denoted in roman currency iirc.
Can I ask what the point of arguing semantics here is?
Maybe you have put in the effort to figure out all the avenues to use bitcoin to pay for things, but its not easy and you sound more like a drug addict scrounging for metal and bottles, and then wondering why noone else is interested in your hustle.
Why do you care if people call bitcoin real or not anyways? For most people its not real, for you I guess it is, does that make sense?
sumerians denoted everything in silver shekels but trade was done will all manner of commodities, including barley grains. your theory of money sounds like it comes from the Adam Smith cult.
Are barley grains a currency? I'm not understanding your argument here. In a practical sense, cryptocurrencies are far too volatile to use as a currency and the "stable" coins are tied to things like the US dollar. Well, I should say allegedly tied because "stable" coins like tether haven't been audited to actually prove it's tied to the underlying.
Gold coins?
Very true, they are called promissary notes for a reason.
OMG Such edge
How is that edgy? It's a fact.
Everyone knows how money has no intrinsic value. What does pointing that out add to anything?
it's all made up but the only fake money I can imagine is counterfeit.
I mean, the same can be said for Norwegian Kroner (assuming you're not in Norway) and nobody doubts that it is money. I can't pay my rent with it, or buy bread with it, I need to exchange it for "real money" (Euro for me) but it is real money.
Many landlords accept USDC
https://realt.co/
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/miami-beach-home-most-expensive-bought-cryptocurrency
https://www.idealista.pt/en/news/financial-advice-in-portugal/2022/05/13/5003-house-in-braga-sold-for-3-bitcoins-1st-100-crypto-transaction-in-portugal
You previously said buying property can't be done. Now you've shifted to "not common".
https://www.muralpay.com/blog/how-to-use-stablecoins-in-your-daily-life
How to use Stablecoins to Pay Rent While direct payment of rent in digital dollars might not be mainstream yet, Rent.App allows its users to pay their rent in USDC or USDT with no fees. By creating or connecting your digital dollars wallet on their website, you can input your landlord’s email and the amount you wish to send them for your rent. However, your landlord will need to create or connect their wallet to the platform to receive the money.
me too
Go throw crypto at a stripper then!
they probably don't accept tally sticks or turquoise as payment either. were those fake money too?
Yes.
great. live in your bigotry.
The fuck are you talking about?
If you're "invested" in cryptogoboligook and you're not ripping someone off--guess what?--you're the mark.
Regardless, you can generally use money to buy things.
You can't buy anything with crypto because it's 15 years later, and "mass adoption" is never happening. It's "fake money".
since people treat crypto as money, it is money.
I hate to be “that guy” but your definition of money is a little constrained. By that definition, the only “money” is the money of the country you’re currently in. Can you walk into a bestbuy and purchase a TV with Yuan?
You’re likely trying to say “Can you walk into a normal store of an appropriate country and pay with that currency” but even that is flawed, as certain stores don’t accept credit/debit, or don’t accept cash.
Is it too thick sarcasm, incompetence or you just wanted to say smart cards?
Can you buy a tv with a silver bar?
I can't buy a TV with turquoise either. or sumerian shillings.
People certainly don't treat crypto like money.
And I suppose that's where our conversation has to stop because you've now outed yourself as willing to say any outlandish thing to support crypto.
Because I do not believe you can actually think that.
I am not defending crypto. I'm correcting people who don't know what money is
Crypto is an un-backed and unregulated security -- the value of which fluctuates wildly. Turns out most people don't like being paid in something that can drastically lose value in the span of hours.
The few people and institutions that accept crypto as payment either immediately convert it back into real money or are "investors" treating it like the security it actually is.
most money throughout history has been "unbacked" and unregulated
I'm assuming those quotes are referring to fiat currency. Faith in the solvency of the issuing government, widely agreed upon exchange rates, and regulated prices of goods are all forms of backing. Sure: you can argue that's "not enough" but crypto "currencies" don't even have that. Hence why their values fluctuate by the minute -- which defeats the entire purpose of "money".
... government controlled central banks and entire bodies of law exist to do just that. Nobody is regulating crypto.
Crypto lacks the features that make money "money". It doesn't have a relatively stable, agreed upon value. It's not easily exchanged for goods or services. It technically can be used as "money" but that's true of anything -- trading cards, a pile of gravel, etc.
Regardless of your personal opinions about cryptocurrency, that is absolutely what this post is referring to by saying fake money for criminal.
they're not opinions, but I'm sure you're right about the post.
With real money you can take out a loan. Kinda the whole point of money, it represents value that is owed.
While crypto loans would be technically possible it would be a foolish thing to do since it's effectively a short on something that could increase in value. Real money has a small but steady (well, ideally) inflation so you can be confident in taking out a loan and not having to worry about the currency doing something crazy like doubling in value resulting in you owing double the value than you initially borrowed. This is not the case for crypto so it's simply not a viable currency for financing anything.
Since it's not viable for financing, it's not a real currency and never will be. Like is someone supposed to take out a business loan in real currency, convert it to crypto, pay someone else who would then have to convert it back to real money so they can pay back their loan? Why would people want to do all of these conversions back and forth to and from crypto? Because they like the risk of the value dropping for the brief time they're holding onto it?
your standards aren't based on historical fact.
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.
Okay, "maintain" isn't the right word, but the mining process is designed that way and it's baked into the whole currency. Actual work could have been done, but instead we burned it all for imaginary money (which isn't much different from fiat currency).
The bitcoin blockchain requires more power than any other blockchain while providing less features.
The only outstanding feature of bitcoin is it's price.
the bitcoin blockchain doesn't require any power. any miner can stop, the blockchain would have less power, and still continue to function.
Yes. It does. No transaction can occur without proof of work being performed.
Marginally less power, but nowhere near the reduction needed to compete with a PoS blockchain.
For example Ethereum PoS uses 2,600 MWh per year (= a single 1MW windfarm). Bitcoin uses 53,000x more energy than Ethereum.
the whole network could be run on two raspberry pis. there is no minimum power requirement in the protocol.
No. Then someone would buy 3 raspberry pis and claim all the bitcoin.
Bitcoin was a great idea in 2008 but in 2024 it has been overshadowed by other blockchains in every single dimension except for market cap.
Well, one is about to take your job while the others will just make your life slightly easier.
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?
Unless you happen to be subjected to the gig economy.
Illegal hotel chain!!!
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.
Everything is an abstraction. A cat is an abstraction. There's no cat, only an animal living in your apartment that looks like other similar animals.
What makes this money fake you'd ask? Probably because you cannot buy lettuce for it. Only illegal stuff, money, other fake money and, in some places, you can buy a hotel room for a few nights. Idk, crypto looks more like a commodity than currency to me.
...But you absolutely can buy lettuce with it. You just have to find someone that will accept that particular currency. Are you seriously going to argue that Canadian currency isn't real money just because I can't buy produce in the US at most stores using Canadian loonies or toonies? And you can use American currency very, very easily to buy illegal stuff; pretty much every in-person drug dealer in the US accepts folding cash. (They just don't take credit cards, PayPal, Venmo, etc. because that's easily traced.)
Edit: a physical cat is not an abstraction. A physical, individual cat is the thing itself. The abstraction is the concept of "cat"; when you think "cat" as a concept, you aren't thinking about a specific, individual animal, but of a concept that defines 'catness'; it probably has fur, whisker, pointy ears, a tail, etc., even though an individual cat may not have any of these things.
Well, I can find a nerd who would sell me some lettuce for Nintendo Switch. Does it make Nintendo Switch a currency? Nope. With Canadian dimes I guess I can go to any shop in Canada and buy it, which makes it a valid currency in Canada. What you are right about, is that almost every currency is regional.
Oh thanks, if they allow me to the US I'd probably make use of this information.
Fuck Kant. As you mentioned, cat is definited through catness, but catness is defined through cats, hence a cat abstracts all cats. Unless you think of all other cats, your physical cat is a cloud of atoms
how much lettuce?
if you were foolish enough to buy a Liz Truss your keeping your damn Liz Truss
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.
And there was a different government backing it (though not in the same sense of the word) and a different set of laws and regulations around it.
you've swallowed the adam smith koolaid. anarchist societies existed with money.
That's a cute fairy tale.
if you want to deny history, i'm not going to stop you, but you should be ashamed of misleading anyone else who reads this.
I'm ashamed that anyone is dumb enough to be taken in by your obvious lies.
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.
Money arose at the same time as government. The two are linked.
Currency existed prior to governments; Native Americans in some areas used rare shells as a form of currency; the currency wasn't a part of their governing process, and by any modern standards, their governments were very loose.
that's not true.
s/added through/extracted from/
Money won't magically appear from air if I will make a chair.
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
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.