I swear that most commenters are young people because back in the 90s-2000s, taxis and hotels were hot fucking garbage.
Taxis would go on joy rides to up the cost or refuse you if you were black.
Hotels would tell you to go suck a dick because their price listed outside is not for you, and if you want a place, they have a room with roaches near the heater.
Uber/Airbnb were gamechangers that broke that monopoly.
Unfortunately, they have gotten to shit. But you know what? Taxis and hotels have cleaned up their act. Because the moment they go to shit again, Uber/Airbnb will come in and eat their lunch.
Taxis in my country would routinely ask for extra (usually 25-30% of the total fare) or have you pay them a fixed amount that's way higher than if only the meter was used (about 2-3x the normal fare) . There are also taxis that have meters that are way too fast. Uber was a godsend when it first came out here.
In Italy taxis are a monopoly and uber is forbidden. For a 1h ride they ask you 120-150€. Luckily by train you can do the same ride quicker and for 5-10 euro.
I have fond memories of sitting drunk on a driveway waiting for the promised cab for hours. Because if they drive up and didn't see you, they were gone.
I've never really had problems with taxis and hotels from the late 90s-2010s, only if I had a language barrier or a unique circumstance, mostly all my hotel problems involved other guests. Hotels were definitely cheaper I'd prefer to go back to that.
Where I lived and traveled, hotels never had a monopoly. Small B&Bs and hostels have always existed, it was never a choice between big hotel and staying in a tent. There was no need to wreak havoc on the housing market.
The problem with the gig economy is that these platforms are not content with being what they're advertising themselves as. "Be your own boss". "Make some money in your own time". Guess what, if you drive for Uber, Uber is your boss. You're an employee in anything but name. They penalise you if you reject too many jobs. They penalise you if you go on break too long. They penalise you for all kinds of other things. Here in Australia most rideshare vehicles have at least two badges, because the drivers can't make ends meet driving for just one. And then they've gone and fucked up the delivery market as well. It's an economy of rent-seekers and middlemen.
Uber and Airbnb DID break that monopoly but they got their competative advantage by simply breaking the laws that existing taxis and hotels were required to adhear too. Still do break those laws but weight of cash > law.
The solution to the taxi problem is not Uber, it's functional public transport.
I'm nearing 40 and I've taken probably less than 20 cab rides in my home country in my life (traveling to countries with poor public transport is a different story). And I grew up in the middle of nowhere.
Airbnb is trickier. It's done good things for travelling, but terrible things for housing affordability in popular locations. Tourist towns have priced out locals because investors buy apartments to rent out via some broker.
Calling AirBnB "a hotel chain" is an insult to hotels.
Hotels don't require you to clean somebody else's house while you are on vacation like a maid, and then charging you a cleaning fee for missing a spot. There isn't even much of a price difference nowadays, so staying at a hotel wins every time.
I would be charged a cleaning fee even though we're asked to clean anyhow, regardless of how well we cleaned. Toward the end, I stopped doing any basic cleaning and disputed additional fees relating to my not doing their job for them. Now I don't use them at all.
Oh there is a price difference these days. I used to use AirBnB because it was an actual saving. Now, unless you want to rent an entire cabin or something, you're almost definitely better off with a hotel or specific industry standard business. Also love how they handle pricing, at least when I looked last year:
$99
$249incltaxes/fees
This isn't even hyperbole, it was entirely common to see a $100+ cleaning fee for a one night stay, and still have a list of more things to clean than I expect actual hotel employees to do.
I have two younger kids. We can very close to renting a hotel on our last in-state vacation. It would have actually been somewhat cheaper. The reason we still went for the AirBnB was because our kids are asleep by like 7:30 and we didn't want to be 'trapped' in the hotel room and didn't want to rent a second. AirBnB made it significantly easier to find a house to rent.
That said, the number of AirBnBs in that area of the state has really grown. I can't imagine that's doing the people who live there any favors.
I'm bringing my dog. A house with a fenced yard beats a hotel for that hands down every time.
Using the house is a major feature of the vacation. We live in an apartment in a city so sometimes it's nice to just spend a week in a cabin in the mountains or a long weekend at a house with a pool.
I'm traveling with a group and I actually want to spend time with those people. It's nice to have a private social space that isn't someone's bedroom.
I prefer hotels if:
I'm traveling solo. If I'm not renting a whole house, I want the hotel amenities. Plusi can pretend to be a bachelor again and act like a slob.
I have an action packed trip planned. Every time I've been to Vegas I was pretty much only in my room to shower or sleep.
I'm traveling with a group and know I'll need some personal space.
This is pretty much my criteria as well. It’s funny, because since vacation rentals became a mainstream thing, my hotel experience has gotten better. I remember a time where booking a Vrbo was a preference because the accommodations would be nicer / better maintained at the same or lower price than a hotel. But these days I haven’t found that to be the case, and as such rely on contextual requirements to determine the best path forward.
It is really terrible for the housing market when real estate investors buy out homes on the market for the sole purpose of renting them out in AirBnBs.
I doubt that anyone would want to live next to an AirBnB house.
"They make for shit neighbours" not the worst of it. It also significantly contributes to the increase in cost of living in the area because buyers and renters no longer have to compete with just each other but also with investors, and every house or flat that's off the market only increases that competition further.
These days I mostly use Booking, they list hotels as well as private properties which are properly classified and taxed and all that. Haven't had an issue in years.
Tough question. I'm a big fan of making the plagiarism machine pretend to be a text based adventure game for my amusement, but I also like that the illegal cab company will also deliver food or groceries when I don't feel up to leaving my house.
Try out AI Dungeon which is an app that has it all set up for you. It's free to try, but pay for access to the best model. Last I checked there were some privacy concerns, so assume someone might read your adventure and don't tell it your real name or anything.
I've personally been tinkering with KoboldAI which is a way to run the models yourself, if you have access to a beefy computer or cloud computing workspace. This has the benefit of being free and controlled entirely by you, but requiring you to choose a model and giving you the opportunity to change your own settings might be a benefit or a drawback depending on how much you enjoy tinkering with your toys before (and while) playing with them. The models that will run on my RTX 3080Ti seem generally not as good as the paid tier of AI Dungeon, but I might also not be doing it right? It's hard to tell. Futzing with parameters and trying to divine what impact they're having on the output is still fun for me, though.
Yeah I still stand by the technology (Eth and other smart coins, not Bitcoin), but there's just so much bullshit surrounding the tech that it makes it really unpalatable and trashy
Reality/causality also moves at the speed of light, and observations of time and space are relative to the observer. So it's still present reality, for you at least.
This means that you should feel touch from your finger before your toe, since it has less far to travel.
What actually happens is that you feel both your toe and finger touching at the same time. Your brain buffers the signals and plays them back at the same time, giving the illusion of simultaneity.
So yes, not only are you experiencing the world slightly behind, but it's in differing amounts of delay.
You can search for "brain buffer simultaneity" to find tons of research on this topic.
Ah but that is just nerve sensor input time, it does not include the time spent processing inputs into an awareness (or however one wants to describe our internal model.) Perceptual lag is a subject of a lot of unfortunately paywalled research.
The lag is not dissolved by relativity. Reality, as many athletes know, will let you know when your perceptual lag is a critical shortcoming.
I suspect perceptual lag is the term. I had heard it from a memory standpoint, I think. Something like:
Our minds operate on our memories, our memories are always beind reality. Our interpretation affects our memories, or at least the recall, and are always reacting to the past.
Perceptual lag seems more to the point. (Long thing included in case someone else happens to have another idea.)
Love em. Peak Capitalist innovation! By shipping a 99% complete product for a low price, you can gain a large user base. Then, you make it addictive as fuck and add pseudo-gambling, to take advantage of people likely to routinely make small purchases. Then, all you need to do is spend a fraction of dev time on new skins or stickers, and make obscene profit!
What, you don't like living in the modern orphan crushing machine, designed to commodify literally every second of your existence? Are you some kind of radical? Spooky!
Those aren't the only alternatives, lmao. Do you think humans stop innovating if they share tools and democratize production, rather than having a bunch of unaccountable mini-dictators?
Do you think the Capitalists are the ones who innovate, or is it the Engineers and Scientists that do?
So you're saying engineers and scientists aren't capitalists. That's pretty dumb of them, then again engineers and scientists aren't terribly keen on history.
Engineers and Scientists are workers, not Capitalists. Capitalists are owners.
You're quite literally on the explicitly leftist, anti-capitalist alternative to Reddit. Instead of a centralized, closed, Capitalist system filled with ads, you're on a federated, decentralized, openly shared platform that deliberately rejected the profit motive and Capitalistic development for its own innovation.
Did it legitimately never occur to you that FOSS is a leftist structure? Right now, you're using an example of anticapitalist innovation.
Also the commentor above probably doesn’t realize that engineers and scientists have all throughout history had a pretty negative take on capital. Academics are generally left leaning
Absolutely. Engineers aren't the ones that see any of the benefit of the IP they create unless they have the money, connections, resources, and Capital to also manufacture and sell said products. The ones who create what people use every day get to see the IP they designed get resold countless times with no kickback. Same with Scientists, many go uncredited for critical research, especially women, historically.
And yeah the capitalists are the ones that drive the innovation since they're the ones that allocate the capital where it would generate the most return, which sometimes means innovation.
You're literally on one of the alternatives. FOSS is a rejection of the profit motive, and individual ownership of Capital. It is, quite literally, an anticapitalist statement. Are you under the impression you're on Reddit?
Money doesn't need to come from Capitalists, and again, Capitalists aren't doing the innovating. That's like saying the bread baker that fed the Engineer is doing the innovating, because without the bread baker, the Engineer couldn't innovate. Of course humanity is interlinked, no one man is an island, but that doesn't mean labor performed by one person is actually labor performed by another.
I'll make it simple for you, and give you 2 choices.
Factory 1: Capitalist owner, non-owner workers. The only voice workers have is to either get a new job, or unionize.
Factory 2: Workers are the owners, and thus production is democratized. One of the workers is elected as a manager, and may be stripped of power by the rest of the workers at any time.
Which one is better?
To circle back: what you listed is a very, very narrow vision of what Socialism can mean. Socialism is Worker Ownership of the Means of Production, and can be just as varied as Capitalist organization. Are you going to say that Sweden is the same as Pinochet's Chile, just because both were/are Capitalist? Absurd.
FOSS is not necessarily a rejection of the profit motive, it just says that there shouldn't be restrictions to redistribute work to the masses. Just look at Linux itself. The project is maintained largely by contributions from (big tech)[https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/] even though it's under the most restrictive copyleft license.
Also, I'd rather the factory that has the incentive to reduce prices to compete with others instead of the one that has all the incentive to increase costs (wages).
Besides, you can absolutely create any co-op you want in a capitalists system. If you think it's just as innovative then just go and start one instead of screeching at people that capitalism bad.
Are you really that dumb? The point of open source software is that anyone can contribute and use. So of course some tech companies are going to contribute to the Linux kernel, why? Because it’s more innovative than the alternatives. The best innovation happens when you let go of the profit motive and just let engineers tinker.
Buddy look around. We are in a capitalist paradise and what is happening? Oh right, costs are rising! Why are you pretending that capitalism means that companies keep the costs low, when it literally incentivizes monopolies to form, and thus drives UP costs??
Capitalism is the reason for institutional racism (in the US), for the degregation of the environment, for poverty in first world countries, for so many wars and violent coups, for literal slavery. If you think that billionaires controlling society will create innovation, it might, but for the a cost of exploitation and destruction that 100% isn’t worth it.
It’s crazy to me that people like you genuinly believe that a worker led society is somehow bad. You do know that you are a worker right?
FOSS is undeniably a rejection of the profit motive. People may use something developed as FOSS to make a profit, but FOSS itself is rejecting profit. Linux being used by for-profit companies does not mean it's suddenly privately owned, a la Capitalism.
You didn't answer the question, you dodged it entirely. If this is your way of massaging that you think antidemocratic measures to ensure workers have no say other than to unionize or leave is a good system, then it's a very odd dodge. You can have normal wages and normal sale prices with worker ownership.
Being able to start a co-op within a market based system does not mean co-ops are Capitalist. They are firm rejections of Capitalism. Additionally, if we can agree that democratic control is better than authoritarian, centralized control of Production a la Capitalism, then it makes sense to advocate for a more democratic and horizontal structure.
Am I not allowed to make my case against Capitalism when clearly relevant? Shutting me down by claiming I'm screeching at others, when you yourself attacked my comment first, is ironic to say the least.
I guess as someone who has received IP royalties for my work, I feel a little more aligned with the original intent. When it comes to major corps using IP to hamstring prices and progress I agree with you, but on the individual scale it works as a decent incentive to share your work.
Just like most systems, at an individual level it can work for the individual. However, that's in the context of the current, IP beholden system. Alternative forms of property ownership and control have alternative mechanics, solutions, and problems.
It would of course not be fair at all to outlaw IP at the individual level alone, without outlawing IP at the corporate level as well.
Damn. Are people so far gone that you can't tell that I'm joking when I suggest that we can just use AI when we need to count something? That's a bit depressing.
Robux technically are just as legitimate as dollars it's just we arbitrarily do not accept robux for milk because it's new (aka not "legal tender"). If you want legal money, you'll have to specify lmao
That seems to be the original point of this chain, am I wrong?
Edit: technically legitimate not meaning backed but as legitimate as any other made up tradable token, aka crypto. It might be more correct for me to say robux are technically as legitimate as crypto, but I'm not entirely sure right now about the exact phrasing I want to use.
The American corrupt government insures your money through the FDIC, so if the bank collapses, you get to keep your money. Also, corrupt credit card companies do not force you to pay for transactions from a stolen credit card and you don't lose money because of it.
What guarantees like those do crypto currencies have?
I added an edit that covers the tradable token part.
Their point is they don't want to give you anything because, per the nerdy ass phrasing, those fake tokens are also tradable for things of minor interest, which is more interesting to have than not have. So why give away the tokens for free?
Their original point is just that money is made up (aka that it only has agreed upon socially determined value)
I know, and here I am walking around using my legs to walk around like some kind of idiot. And living in an apartment full of GRAVITY for god'ssakes. Isn't this supposed to be the 21st century?!! Where's my ice palace on the moon?? And my moon maidens in anti gravity maid costumes waiting on my every need??
May be there’s a way to use tech to illegally infringe on people from the sky even more, then you might be onto something. Just think like a government then a capitalist in that order. May be some kind of flying device that spies on people like a blanket satellite network that operates 100m above peoples homes. It can monitor people coming and going from your home like a real time google maps/street view. Use facial recognition on an angle with high zoom lenses to build a richer advertising/intellegence profile of peoples movements and activities to fill the gaps that mobile phone/mic spying lets through plus it could be used to look into peoples windows and through the gaps in their curtains/blinds. Make sure you pollute the air a fair bit, turn them into gay frogs. And also make them flying cars. The government can call it OBSNAD - the Opressive Blanket Spy Network Aerial Dome and we regular folk can call it Good Times Flying Cars
It's true, I heard about that part of iceland that just got wiped out from rising sea levels. It's already a reality. And polar bears starving because their ice sheets are melting and leaving them without a way to hunt for food. I won't be around to see the next century, and I've very glad I won't be!!
I don't think it is ihe primary purpose of cryptocoin either. It's just that crime found a great valuable tool in it. Just like nuclear fission is not just for atomic bombs. Or the internet for porn. The most known use case is not always the only or intended one.
Not defending the money-grabbing, resource-hungry spectacle that it has become, but the original intent was probably a bit nobler than the current results.
ETA: ah, I see what you mean. Purpose as in current main use, not "intended purpose". I think I picked up the wrong meaning. My mistake.
Also, nothing wrong with porn, but everyone knows the internet should be about cat pictures.
Crypto is like stamping your thumbprint on every bill that passes through your hands. If they can ever link you to your crypto wallet(s), the blockchain lets them trace every other transaction you have conducted, every wallet you have ever done business with, even decades later.
Maybe the statute of limitations has run out on something from years ago, and they can't charge you for something you did in the past. But there is no statute of limitations on intelligence gathering. Maybe they run a suspect's trail backward 15 years, find where they did business with your old wallet, then follow that trail forward until they find what you're doing today.
Don't know what to tell you, but crypto is constantly being used for illegal activities, and I have yet to hear of any big busts resulting from the use of crypto.
not able to use it anywhere except in like, 5 niche ATM locations
can’t even mine it for value and have to go by proof-of-stake for any useful amount of money
can make a random shitcoin to pull the rug under cryptobros and NFT shills
only legitimate use case was to buy drugs via The Silk Road
Yeah, cryptocurrency is a fuckin waste of the tech lmao. You could theoretically prevent identity theft with blockchain tech and it could also theoretically replace SSNs, but instead we used it for a fake currency and jpegs of bored apes.
EDIT: Should also mention that you literally cannot trade crypto in some states of the US because those states require crypto institutions to have physical assets that equal their digital assets, which is actually pretty smart. Because people can’t buy shit with their 0.2 BitCoins and 50k DogeCoins, this means that those institutions don’t operate or allow trading from these states.
And you have a terrible list of reasons all separated out into single comments for some reason :)
you keep conflating cryptocurrency and blockchain and bitcoin. are we talking about bitcoin here?
Any cryptocurrency because it works off the blockchain. You have the transactions committed on a wallet that exists on the blockchain, which is how you get the public transactions in the first place.
what backs turquoise?
Literally any fiat currency, or you could even barter with it if somebody wanted it. It has tangible value because it has a physical demand.
have you tried mining any other money? you can’t mine dollars at all, and proof of stake is a great way of explaining the compound interest system.
Actually, if you work a job, you get paid in money. Crazy, I know - you don’t have to speculate and hype on a fake currency :)
that has nothing to do with bitcoin.
But we’re talking about cryptocurrency, no? Unless you’re saying BitCoin is not a crypto?
In practice it’s happening multiple times a day. All it takes for one is to snoop the private key to get full control over a wallet.
True, and there’s also that 51% majority control thing too. Nothing can get rid of social engineering either, but perhaps there’s a chance to develop better security for blockchain-based tech.
there are a lot of vendors that do or have in the past accepted bitcoin. where can you spend turquoise? or confederate dollars?
Physically or online? Because you can spend crypto at like Microsoft online, for example, but could you go to a bar or a restaurant and pay with crypto?
Any cryptocurrency because it works off the blockchain. You have the transactions committed on a wallet that exists on the blockchain, which is how you get the public transactions in the first place.
you don't seem to understand that most cryptos don't work on the bitcoin blockchain. bitcoin has its own blockchain.
Actually, if you work a job, you get paid in money. Crazy, I know - you don’t have to speculate and hype on a fake currency :)
this is distinct from mining, the process by which new bitcoins are actually put into circulation. you can't MAKE dollars: the cia are the only people allowed to do that.
Literally any fiat currency, or you could even barter with it if somebody wanted it. It has tangible value because it has a physical demand.
you don't seem to know this, so i'm going to explain it to you: turquoise was the currency of indigenous people in the northeast of the so-called united states. it's not money now. what backed turquoise? nothing. the point was its ubiquity.
Yeah, cryptocurrency is a fuckin waste of the tech lmao. You could theoretically prevent identity theft with blockchain tech and it could also theoretically replace SSNs, but instead we used for a fake currency and jpegs of bored apes.
you keep conflating cryptocurrency and blockchain and bitcoin. are we talking about bitcoin here?
EDIT: Should also mention that you literally cannot trade crypto in some states of the US because those states require crypto institutions to have physical assets that equal their digital assets, which is actually pretty smart. Because people can’t buy shit with their 0.2 BitCoins and 50k DogeCoins, this means that those institutions don’t operate or allow trading from these states.
that doesn't change whether bitcoin is real. it only changes whether crypto exchanges can operate legally in arbitrary jurisdictions.
that doesn’t change whether bitcoin is real. it only changes whether crypto exchanges can operate legally in arbitrary jurisdictions.
Reason I brought that fact up is because those states are saying that crypto needs to backed by something physical instead of an intangible hype and speculation factor.
What makes BitCoin worth $42k? Or Ethereum worth $2.2k? Like, what is physically driving the worth of these cryptocurrencies? Some fiat currencies moved away from precious metals, sure, but they’re back by at least the economies of each country. From what I can tell and have seen, crypto is backed by… hype and speculation. There’s no tangible thing that can back crypto, hence why it’s a fake currency because it’s more or less arbitrarily at a price point just because it is.
Oh, come on. That is a really simplistic, and unfortunately, inaccurate view of value.
I ask: what makes anything valuable? Let me pose some examples:
Suppose I have a gold bar. That's clearly valuable and it's value is very "real", isn't it? Gold can be used in many industrial applications and can be made into jewellery. But why is it specifically worth what it is? Why not infinity or zero? Because (1) gold is scarce, and (2) that's what people are willing to pay for it.
Now suppose instead I have a mint condition first-edition base set Charizard. That's also valuable, and it's value is also "real", isn't it? But the way it derives its value is a bit more abstract than the gold bar. It doesn't do anything and the card isn't even legal to be played in the actual Pokemon card game. But yet, it has value. Why? Because the card is (1) scarce, and (2) people are willing to pay money to have it, even though it doesn't do anything.
Let's get a bit more abstract. Suppose I hold the copyright to a popular book series. The copyright is also valuable, isn't it? But also at the same time, "copyright" is not a physical thing; it is a creation of law and is a fictitious thing that we have all agreed is worth something. Now, if we all suddenly agree that copyright is meaningless, then my copyright instantly becomes worthless. Worth even less than the Charizard, because the Charizard at least has some nominal value as firewood or an art piece! Yet, copyright is still valuable, because we, as a society, agree that it is worth something, and this is also backed by the power of the State.
If you get even more abstract than that, think about shares of a company that is not only unprofitable but is completely underwater in debt. Is that company still valuable? Well, Uber is an example of a company that fits that description. If you think about it logically, that company should have a value of zero; it's not making anyone of its owners money and it owes more money than it has. It's backed by a "something", but that "something" is a pile of debt that outweighs its assets. Whereas a copyright has the backing of the State, shares in a company don't. But then, why is Uber worth something? Again, because (1) there is only one Uber, and (2) people are willing to pay money for it thinking that its value will increase in the future.
The final step of abstraction is a digital currency. I'll use Bitcoin here, because Ethereum does actually have "real" usage (you can use it as "gas" to perform computations on the Ethereum Virtual Machine). Bitcoin is backed by diddly-squat and has only nominal usage. But why it is valuable? The same reasons as everything else on this list—because (1) it's scarce, and (2) people are willing to pay money for it with the expectation it might increase in value in the future.
Whatever reasoning you use, whatever rebuttal you have for my argument, unless you're actively cherry-picking and straining your logic just so you can not be wrong in this instance, you'll find that any reasonable argument for why Bitcoin has no value will also apply to argue what I think you'll see is an uncomfortably large number of "real" things are worthless as well.
Electricity has physical properties. It is energy. Mining Bitcoin requires the use of energy. To the miner, the value of Bitcoin is equal to the cost of acquiring the electricity used to mine it.
Bitcoin is a fungible store of value used to convert KWh into commodities and services.
From what I can tell and have seen, crypto is backed by… hype and speculation.
bitcoin is a network protocol. cryptographic tokens are issued within it. what backs it is the security of the cryptographic system and the combined hashing power of the network. if you think it doesn't have value, that's ok: value is subjective. some people do think it's valuable to be able to control these cryptographic tokens. and that's ok, too: value is subjective.
No government backing, and I can't use it anywhere. The only way for me to use Cryptocurrency as money in 99.9% of the places I shop is to exchange said crypto for real money.
Money doesn't predate governments, governments have been around since the earliest tribes, and bartering was the most common way to exchange goods until large governments started issuing currency.
And no, there aren't. I can't walk into any store anywhere I have been and buy goods with bitcoin, nor can I use bitcoin on any of the online shops I have ever been to.
bartering was the most common way to exchange goods
you clearly haven't been keeping up with anthropology in the last 20 years. i recommend reading Debt: The First 5,000 Years. i also suggest pirating it if you can: the author is dead. he won't mind.
People often use humour to communicate about serious things such as exploitation and oppression. This post is a joke, even though the underlying issues are serious.
I wish "illegal cab company" would too, but I also have no sympathy for shitty actual cab company. It's not even about the money for me, they had many chances to innovate their systems and squash the illegal cab companies before they got started while at the same time generating more fare revenue, but instead tried to use the status quo to smother out the competition.
I feel you’re under the impression that I share the GP point of view. I don’t. I live in a place where ride sharing apps are regulated and I’m thankful for it. Gig economy jobs can fuck right off.
That being said, it’s not cost that killed taxis and made Uber/Lyft appealing. It’s convenience. If the taxis had joined the modern era instead of being stuck in the 90s (including but not exclusively having a “broken” credit card machine and other dubious tactics), they’d probably have had a way better time. They were caught with their pants down and their head up their asses.
I don't understand comments like this. Where do you think those "savings" come from? Do you think the suits are like "yeah we're going to shut down our competition by reducing our own pay/cut of the revenue"? Or do you think they're going to fuck over the workers?
Sorry, but Taxis have left me waiting for hours and ripped me off 1 too many times on top of every cab I've been in has been quite dirty. They tried using their near-monopolistic position in most places to ignore basic innovations, like having an app to request a taxi (and having that app not look like it's a time capsule from 2008) or even taking card.
It's not even really private unless you're using Monero similar (which you can't buy on most exchanges for that very reason). Most CC blockchains are entirely public ledgers that are very thoroughly mapped out by government agencies and by private companies looking to monetize the data.
You forgot "cable television, but over the internet and no one has all the channels."
"...and it all still has ads."
🏴☠️
So, Internet cable TV
Personally I'm a fan of fake certificate that says you paid money for one of the plagiarism machine's works
You mean the Amazon rain forest destroyer machine?
Hate this argument. No one ever discusses Fiat currency's environmental impact.
*Which includes literally, actually destroying the Amazon rainforest.
Bitcoin does need to be proof of work. any system without that isn't bitcoin.
ethereum also has no supply cap. they are different technologies almost entirely.
i would not call PoS bitcoin anything except p.o.s.
there is still a pow blockchain running for ethereum, and there would be for bitcoin, too, and that is the blockchain i would call bitcoin.
They talk about it all the time and the impact is much, much less.
And not all crypto is proof of work, some is proof of stake, which actually isn't too bad environmentally
* fake money
That's fair enough, but idk if anyone's purchased an nft with anything but crypto.
That doesn't contradict the fact that crypto is fake money
Dude. I didn't claim you called crypto real money. I'm insinuating you misinterpreted the previous comment. Maybe cool down your projector.
it's not fake if people accept it.
So you're saying it's fake?
no, because some people accept it
Fair point
Do you mean Schrodinger's artwork?
I swear that most commenters are young people because back in the 90s-2000s, taxis and hotels were hot fucking garbage.
Taxis would go on joy rides to up the cost or refuse you if you were black.
Hotels would tell you to go suck a dick because their price listed outside is not for you, and if you want a place, they have a room with roaches near the heater.
Uber/Airbnb were gamechangers that broke that monopoly.
Unfortunately, they have gotten to shit. But you know what? Taxis and hotels have cleaned up their act. Because the moment they go to shit again, Uber/Airbnb will come in and eat their lunch.
Taxis in my country would routinely ask for extra (usually 25-30% of the total fare) or have you pay them a fixed amount that's way higher than if only the meter was used (about 2-3x the normal fare) . There are also taxis that have meters that are way too fast. Uber was a godsend when it first came out here.
In Italy taxis are a monopoly and uber is forbidden. For a 1h ride they ask you 120-150€. Luckily by train you can do the same ride quicker and for 5-10 euro.
When you call a cab it was often a game of 'will the can actually show up?"
Ah yes, I too remember the good old days of stumbling home drunk in the dark because my cab never came.
I have fond memories of sitting drunk on a driveway waiting for the promised cab for hours. Because if they drive up and didn't see you, they were gone.
Don’t forget they take you the long way and go slow
I only know taxis and hotels as normal boring things in this time range.
They always where. Except in big touristic cities. There everything still is shit.
So nothing changed. We went from shit taxis and hotels to shit taxis and hotels complemented with shit uber and shit airbnb.
Ssdd.
I've never really had problems with taxis and hotels from the late 90s-2010s, only if I had a language barrier or a unique circumstance, mostly all my hotel problems involved other guests. Hotels were definitely cheaper I'd prefer to go back to that.
Almost as if it’s not the commodities that are the problem, but the economy they operate. 🧐
Where I lived and traveled, hotels never had a monopoly. Small B&Bs and hostels have always existed, it was never a choice between big hotel and staying in a tent. There was no need to wreak havoc on the housing market.
The problem with the gig economy is that these platforms are not content with being what they're advertising themselves as. "Be your own boss". "Make some money in your own time". Guess what, if you drive for Uber, Uber is your boss. You're an employee in anything but name. They penalise you if you reject too many jobs. They penalise you if you go on break too long. They penalise you for all kinds of other things. Here in Australia most rideshare vehicles have at least two badges, because the drivers can't make ends meet driving for just one. And then they've gone and fucked up the delivery market as well. It's an economy of rent-seekers and middlemen.
Uber and Airbnb DID break that monopoly but they got their competative advantage by simply breaking the laws that existing taxis and hotels were required to adhear too. Still do break those laws but weight of cash > law.
Laws that the taxi and hotel companies lobbied for to stop competition.
And also (for Airbnb at least) regular zoning laws meant to prevent subletting and the loss of affordable housing to illegal hotels.
The solution to the taxi problem is not Uber, it's functional public transport. I'm nearing 40 and I've taken probably less than 20 cab rides in my home country in my life (traveling to countries with poor public transport is a different story). And I grew up in the middle of nowhere.
Airbnb is trickier. It's done good things for travelling, but terrible things for housing affordability in popular locations. Tourist towns have priced out locals because investors buy apartments to rent out via some broker.
Calling AirBnB "a hotel chain" is an insult to hotels.
Hotels don't require you to clean somebody else's house while you are on vacation like a maid, and then charging you a cleaning fee for missing a spot. There isn't even much of a price difference nowadays, so staying at a hotel wins every time.
I would be charged a cleaning fee even though we're asked to clean anyhow, regardless of how well we cleaned. Toward the end, I stopped doing any basic cleaning and disputed additional fees relating to my not doing their job for them. Now I don't use them at all.
Oh there is a price difference these days. I used to use AirBnB because it was an actual saving. Now, unless you want to rent an entire cabin or something, you're almost definitely better off with a hotel or specific industry standard business. Also love how they handle pricing, at least when I looked last year:
$99
$249incltaxes/feesThis isn't even hyperbole, it was entirely common to see a $100+ cleaning fee for a one night stay, and still have a list of more things to clean than I expect actual hotel employees to do.
They have started including cleaning fees in the posted price.
After they lost a class action lawsuit, yeah.
I have two younger kids. We can very close to renting a hotel on our last in-state vacation. It would have actually been somewhat cheaper. The reason we still went for the AirBnB was because our kids are asleep by like 7:30 and we didn't want to be 'trapped' in the hotel room and didn't want to rent a second. AirBnB made it significantly easier to find a house to rent.
That said, the number of AirBnBs in that area of the state has really grown. I can't imagine that's doing the people who live there any favors.
I use a AirBnB if:
I prefer hotels if:
This is pretty much my criteria as well. It’s funny, because since vacation rentals became a mainstream thing, my hotel experience has gotten better. I remember a time where booking a Vrbo was a preference because the accommodations would be nicer / better maintained at the same or lower price than a hotel. But these days I haven’t found that to be the case, and as such rely on contextual requirements to determine the best path forward.
It is really terrible for the housing market when real estate investors buy out homes on the market for the sole purpose of renting them out in AirBnBs.
I doubt that anyone would want to live next to an AirBnB house.
"They make for shit neighbours" not the worst of it. It also significantly contributes to the increase in cost of living in the area because buyers and renters no longer have to compete with just each other but also with investors, and every house or flat that's off the market only increases that competition further.
These days I mostly use Booking, they list hotels as well as private properties which are properly classified and taxed and all that. Haven't had an issue in years.
Thanks for the heads up, we will try this next season.
Where is “social media surveillance apparatus”?
“Illegal surveillance of activities, contacts and communications”
Don't be like that, it's perfectly legal under the 5 eyes legislature and all those backdoors are government mandated.
I forgot that they are looking after me
What about hyper-intrusive handheld ad machine?
I see no one has mentioned Nazi microblog platform yet.
Hey, Lemmy is a Marxist microbloging platform! The Nazis are mostly ... oh, you were talking about X, weren't you?
Maybe one of the ones run by right-wing populists. Truth Social or Gab, perhaps?
OP is just cross posting nazi-microblog posts to Lemmy.
Doorbell camera surveillance network
Tough question. I'm a big fan of making the plagiarism machine pretend to be a text based adventure game for my amusement, but I also like that the illegal cab company will also deliver food or groceries when I don't feel up to leaving my house.
Yo what do you say to the plagiarism machine to start off an adventure? I've never used it before but now I want to lol
Try out AI Dungeon which is an app that has it all set up for you. It's free to try, but pay for access to the best model. Last I checked there were some privacy concerns, so assume someone might read your adventure and don't tell it your real name or anything.
I've personally been tinkering with KoboldAI which is a way to run the models yourself, if you have access to a beefy computer or cloud computing workspace. This has the benefit of being free and controlled entirely by you, but requiring you to choose a model and giving you the opportunity to change your own settings might be a benefit or a drawback depending on how much you enjoy tinkering with your toys before (and while) playing with them. The models that will run on my RTX 3080Ti seem generally not as good as the paid tier of AI Dungeon, but I might also not be doing it right? It's hard to tell. Futzing with parameters and trying to divine what impact they're having on the output is still fun for me, though.
Thank you! I'm so excited now lol
Money for criminals*
Until everybody ruined it. When people started investing instead of spending, we were fucked.
Yeah I still stand by the technology (Eth and other smart coins, not Bitcoin), but there's just so much bullshit surrounding the tech that it makes it really unpalatable and trashy
Me too. As long as there's a demand for services that can't be paid for in regular currency, crypto will be around.
Hey, its not fake money for criminals! It's barely legal casino, sheesh!
Man, just wait until this guy hears a out the US dollar!
Good ol fiat currency
I misread "Illegal crab company" and was so confused.
Noooo, Ferris don't do it!
Looks legal to me 👍
it actually is. only the logo is owned by the rust foundation, not the mascot
We're crab people now, Dee. We live and die by the crab!
Crabbbb people Crabbbb people. Walk like crab, talk like people.
We actually experience reality a fraction of a second in the past.
I actually live in the now. It’s just everything else that’s slightly ahead.
Living it the now is hard work. I live in the when.
Reality/causality also moves at the speed of light, and observations of time and space are relative to the observer. So it's still present reality, for you at least.
It still takes your brain some time to process everything.
Hey! I have been looking for a source on this. Would you have one?
Here's one about vision:
https://theconversation.com/everything-we-see-is-a-mash-up-of-the-brains-last-15-seconds-of-visual-information-175577
Although for me the simplest demonstration is to touch your toe with your finger. Sensory nerves travel something like 100 meters per second:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_conduction_velocity
This means that you should feel touch from your finger before your toe, since it has less far to travel.
What actually happens is that you feel both your toe and finger touching at the same time. Your brain buffers the signals and plays them back at the same time, giving the illusion of simultaneity.
So yes, not only are you experiencing the world slightly behind, but it's in differing amounts of delay.
You can search for "brain buffer simultaneity" to find tons of research on this topic.
That is fun! Thank you
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light
That is one small fraction, but fair enough.
Also this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_conduction_velocity
Ah but that is just nerve sensor input time, it does not include the time spent processing inputs into an awareness (or however one wants to describe our internal model.) Perceptual lag is a subject of a lot of unfortunately paywalled research.
The lag is not dissolved by relativity. Reality, as many athletes know, will let you know when your perceptual lag is a critical shortcoming.
I suspect perceptual lag is the term. I had heard it from a memory standpoint, I think. Something like:
Our minds operate on our memories, our memories are always beind reality. Our interpretation affects our memories, or at least the recall, and are always reacting to the past.
Perceptual lag seems more to the point. (Long thing included in case someone else happens to have another idea.)
Cheers
If you’re looking for a philosophical viewpoint on this, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” will fuck with your head.
Trust me bro, Capitalism is necessary for innovation, just trust me bro
Love em. Peak Capitalist innovation! By shipping a 99% complete product for a low price, you can gain a large user base. Then, you make it addictive as fuck and add pseudo-gambling, to take advantage of people likely to routinely make small purchases. Then, all you need to do is spend a fraction of dev time on new skins or stickers, and make obscene profit!
What, you don't like living in the modern orphan crushing machine, designed to commodify literally every second of your existence? Are you some kind of radical? Spooky!
Yeah you're right let's follow the great innovations of the USSR, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba
Those aren't the only alternatives, lmao. Do you think humans stop innovating if they share tools and democratize production, rather than having a bunch of unaccountable mini-dictators?
Do you think the Capitalists are the ones who innovate, or is it the Engineers and Scientists that do?
So you're saying engineers and scientists aren't capitalists. That's pretty dumb of them, then again engineers and scientists aren't terribly keen on history.
Engineers and Scientists are workers, not Capitalists. Capitalists are owners.
You're quite literally on the explicitly leftist, anti-capitalist alternative to Reddit. Instead of a centralized, closed, Capitalist system filled with ads, you're on a federated, decentralized, openly shared platform that deliberately rejected the profit motive and Capitalistic development for its own innovation.
Did it legitimately never occur to you that FOSS is a leftist structure? Right now, you're using an example of anticapitalist innovation.
Also the commentor above probably doesn’t realize that engineers and scientists have all throughout history had a pretty negative take on capital. Academics are generally left leaning
Absolutely. Engineers aren't the ones that see any of the benefit of the IP they create unless they have the money, connections, resources, and Capital to also manufacture and sell said products. The ones who create what people use every day get to see the IP they designed get resold countless times with no kickback. Same with Scientists, many go uncredited for critical research, especially women, historically.
Show the alternatives then.
And yeah the capitalists are the ones that drive the innovation since they're the ones that allocate the capital where it would generate the most return, which sometimes means innovation.
You're literally on one of the alternatives. FOSS is a rejection of the profit motive, and individual ownership of Capital. It is, quite literally, an anticapitalist statement. Are you under the impression you're on Reddit?
Money doesn't need to come from Capitalists, and again, Capitalists aren't doing the innovating. That's like saying the bread baker that fed the Engineer is doing the innovating, because without the bread baker, the Engineer couldn't innovate. Of course humanity is interlinked, no one man is an island, but that doesn't mean labor performed by one person is actually labor performed by another.
I'll make it simple for you, and give you 2 choices.
Factory 1: Capitalist owner, non-owner workers. The only voice workers have is to either get a new job, or unionize.
Factory 2: Workers are the owners, and thus production is democratized. One of the workers is elected as a manager, and may be stripped of power by the rest of the workers at any time.
Which one is better?
To circle back: what you listed is a very, very narrow vision of what Socialism can mean. Socialism is Worker Ownership of the Means of Production, and can be just as varied as Capitalist organization. Are you going to say that Sweden is the same as Pinochet's Chile, just because both were/are Capitalist? Absurd.
FOSS is not necessarily a rejection of the profit motive, it just says that there shouldn't be restrictions to redistribute work to the masses. Just look at Linux itself. The project is maintained largely by contributions from (big tech)[https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/] even though it's under the most restrictive copyleft license.
Also, I'd rather the factory that has the incentive to reduce prices to compete with others instead of the one that has all the incentive to increase costs (wages).
Besides, you can absolutely create any co-op you want in a capitalists system. If you think it's just as innovative then just go and start one instead of screeching at people that capitalism bad.
Are you really that dumb? The point of open source software is that anyone can contribute and use. So of course some tech companies are going to contribute to the Linux kernel, why? Because it’s more innovative than the alternatives. The best innovation happens when you let go of the profit motive and just let engineers tinker.
Buddy look around. We are in a capitalist paradise and what is happening? Oh right, costs are rising! Why are you pretending that capitalism means that companies keep the costs low, when it literally incentivizes monopolies to form, and thus drives UP costs??
Capitalism is the reason for institutional racism (in the US), for the degregation of the environment, for poverty in first world countries, for so many wars and violent coups, for literal slavery. If you think that billionaires controlling society will create innovation, it might, but for the a cost of exploitation and destruction that 100% isn’t worth it.
It’s crazy to me that people like you genuinly believe that a worker led society is somehow bad. You do know that you are a worker right?
FOSS is undeniably a rejection of the profit motive. People may use something developed as FOSS to make a profit, but FOSS itself is rejecting profit. Linux being used by for-profit companies does not mean it's suddenly privately owned, a la Capitalism.
You didn't answer the question, you dodged it entirely. If this is your way of massaging that you think antidemocratic measures to ensure workers have no say other than to unionize or leave is a good system, then it's a very odd dodge. You can have normal wages and normal sale prices with worker ownership.
Being able to start a co-op within a market based system does not mean co-ops are Capitalist. They are firm rejections of Capitalism. Additionally, if we can agree that democratic control is better than authoritarian, centralized control of Production a la Capitalism, then it makes sense to advocate for a more democratic and horizontal structure.
Am I not allowed to make my case against Capitalism when clearly relevant? Shutting me down by claiming I'm screeching at others, when you yourself attacked my comment first, is ironic to say the least.
Plagirized reddit
Intellectual property is a figment of our imaginations. So I’m voting for the magical copyright violator box.
You are now a moderator of r/sino
More like r/piracy. Even China has IP regulations.
Maybe they respect their own IP I guess. Everything anyone else makes is up for grabs.
IP honestly holds human progress back. It's supposed to encourage RnD, but if someone can produce something more efficiently, let them.
I guess as someone who has received IP royalties for my work, I feel a little more aligned with the original intent. When it comes to major corps using IP to hamstring prices and progress I agree with you, but on the individual scale it works as a decent incentive to share your work.
Just like most systems, at an individual level it can work for the individual. However, that's in the context of the current, IP beholden system. Alternative forms of property ownership and control have alternative mechanics, solutions, and problems.
It would of course not be fair at all to outlaw IP at the individual level alone, without outlawing IP at the corporate level as well.
Self-driving road killer machines.
I just want high speed rail...
There's always Europe
UGV killer drones
It's the technological paradise!
We already have those. They are called humans.
"Fake money for criminals" The US dollar has been around for quite some time...
clearly they mean monopoly money. i myself am a self made millionaire thanks to purchasing several used versions at goodwill.
anyy time now…
ChatGPT, I think.
"AI"
Or as I like to call it: Two sort algorithms and an Eliza in a trenchcoat.
Maths
Statistics and mathematical optimization
I'll take the surveillance cameras strapped to a garbage screen strapped directly to my face with controllers
In case any of you are confused about what these are supposed to be:
Uber/Lyft
AirBnB
Bitcoin
ChatGPT
Can we have option 4?
-Love all the disruption and none of the intended product
Edit: or the option where I can count…
No one needs to be able to count any more, because we can just ask the AI to do it. I'm sure there's a counting app on your phone or something.
Excel? Calculators? An abacus? People not relying solely on their brains for counting has been a thing for a long time.
Damn. Are people so far gone that you can't tell that I'm joking when I suggest that we can just use AI when we need to count something? That's a bit depressing.
Just put a /s after your comment. Text-based communication is notorious for not transmitting emotional subtext.
I'm not crazy, but I still didn't interpret your message as a joke.
No, your joke just kinda sucked I'm sorry. Needed the background that you aren't a disgruntled boomer, but you forgot your audience didn't know you
Image Transcription: Twitter Poll
Adam Kotsko, @adamkotsko
What's your favorite tech innovation?
Illegal cab company [16%]
Illegal hotel chain [17%]
Fake money for criminals [32%]
Plagiarism machine [35%]
all money is fake tho?
Feel free to give me any of your fake money.
robux is also fake money, but i dont want to give you my robux.
Let me know when your Robux can buy a gallon of milk.
Seems like one of these things is not like the other to me...
There are multiple official and unofficial ways to trade robux for real life currency.
So yes, Robux can basically buy you a gallon of milk.
Oh boy we've engaged nerd mode, my favorite!
Robux technically are just as legitimate as dollars it's just we arbitrarily do not accept robux for milk because it's new (aka not "legal tender"). If you want legal money, you'll have to specify lmao
That seems to be the original point of this chain, am I wrong?
Edit: technically legitimate not meaning backed but as legitimate as any other made up tradable token, aka crypto. It might be more correct for me to say robux are technically as legitimate as crypto, but I'm not entirely sure right now about the exact phrasing I want to use.
Fine, feel free to give me both your illegitimate dollars and robux.
If they're not legitimate, you won't be needing them for anything... unless this is a meaning of 'legitimate' I was previously unaware of.
no money has inherit value, but we give it value. just like crypto.
really what is the actual difference? just because crypto is not backed by a corrupt government?
The American corrupt government insures your money through the FDIC, so if the bank collapses, you get to keep your money. Also, corrupt credit card companies do not force you to pay for transactions from a stolen credit card and you don't lose money because of it.
What guarantees like those do crypto currencies have?
I added an edit that covers the tradable token part.
Their point is they don't want to give you anything because, per the nerdy ass phrasing, those fake tokens are also tradable for things of minor interest, which is more interesting to have than not have. So why give away the tokens for free?
Their original point is just that money is made up (aka that it only has agreed upon socially determined value)
It's as made up as morals and language and all sorts of other things that we only all agree on has meaning to us as a society.
Yesterday I went to a shop and they let me take away some stuff after I handed over some colourful bits of paper. Seems real enough to me.
by that logic crypto is real too. since you can buy things with it
All money derives its value from pople believing in it. That goes for any currency, including gold.
trueee
only relatively recently, since 1971
So how is money based on a gold standard more real than money that isn't? Gold also has only has value because people believe in it.
Nah money wasn't real before either.
32% voted NASDAQ, huh?
Right... But it's been there since the 1800s.
And yet I'm still without a flying car. :/ Or a round house on stilts (like the Jetsons). You call this living??
I was promised a personal jetpack for commuting and a domed city on the moon!
It's like nobody even listened to the people who made EPCOT.
I know, and here I am walking around using my legs to walk around like some kind of idiot. And living in an apartment full of GRAVITY for god'ssakes. Isn't this supposed to be the 21st century?!! Where's my ice palace on the moon?? And my moon maidens in anti gravity maid costumes waiting on my every need??
"We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives."
Apparently they were too woke at Epcot.
Good news, houses on stilts were invented like 7000 years ago
I’m sure that conveyor belt that just takes you from the front door to the next room breaks down a lot.
I may as well be stranded in China if they expect me to walk two feet from one room to the next. Where's my anti-gravity pants??
May be there’s a way to use tech to illegally infringe on people from the sky even more, then you might be onto something. Just think like a government then a capitalist in that order. May be some kind of flying device that spies on people like a blanket satellite network that operates 100m above peoples homes. It can monitor people coming and going from your home like a real time google maps/street view. Use facial recognition on an angle with high zoom lenses to build a richer advertising/intellegence profile of peoples movements and activities to fill the gaps that mobile phone/mic spying lets through plus it could be used to look into peoples windows and through the gaps in their curtains/blinds. Make sure you pollute the air a fair bit, turn them into gay frogs. And also make them flying cars. The government can call it OBSNAD - the Opressive Blanket Spy Network Aerial Dome and we regular folk can call it Good Times Flying Cars
We're getting to the house on stilts part. Just need to let the ice caps melt a little bit more.
It's true, I heard about that part of iceland that just got wiped out from rising sea levels. It's already a reality. And polar bears starving because their ice sheets are melting and leaving them without a way to hunt for food. I won't be around to see the next century, and I've very glad I won't be!!
I'm not getting baited into well akshuallyying any of these, nice try!
My favorite is still "Human Misery Threshold" for businesses
How about toilet cleaning robots stealing our jobs?
Thaey tuhk meh damn JEB!
Cause nobody ever committed crimes for USD?
When you do it with a computer it's patentable and turns into a billion dollar business.
There's definitely more money to be made from people not having to talk to other people than I thought there would be, tbh
That's the future! I'm anxious about it, because, well, I'm an anxious person trying to avoid people, only good at doing computer jobs.
there's no patent on bitcoin
That's not the point of that particular claim.
It's actually embarrassing that we live in a world where people don't know crypto is for money laundering, whores, and drugs.
Crypto is mainly for speculation.
Money laundering, drugs and prostitution is commonly done in other currencies.
Yes, you should feel at least a bit embarrassed.
Why is it that when the tankies got defederated Lemmy got dumber?
That's not what's supposed to happen.
I don't know either, but you surely move the needle.
😢
Committing crime isn’t the primary purpose of USD.
I don't think it is ihe primary purpose of cryptocoin either. It's just that crime found a great valuable tool in it. Just like nuclear fission is not just for atomic bombs. Or the internet for porn. The most known use case is not always the only or intended one.
Not defending the money-grabbing, resource-hungry spectacle that it has become, but the original intent was probably a bit nobler than the current results.
ETA: ah, I see what you mean. Purpose as in current main use, not "intended purpose". I think I picked up the wrong meaning. My mistake.
Also, nothing wrong with porn, but everyone knows the internet should be about cat pictures.
Depends who you ask.
Not unless you count war crimes
What is "illegal cab company" supposed to represent?
They also use private cars for hire service which in may places means that the insurance is invalid (i.e. they are facilitating uninsured drivers)
Wow, that's new for me, thanks.
Uber/Lyft.
Not many people commenting the fake money for criminals lol.
I thought it was pretty cool when I used it to buy drugs.
probably because it doesn't describe a real thing, much like the plagiarism machine.
Sounds like BitCoin to me.
It'll probably be safer for criminals to use real money than bitcoin. As they say the block chain don't lie
People have been using crypto for drugs since it was created, so I don;t know what to tell you, seems plenty safe for that purpose.
Crypto is like stamping your thumbprint on every bill that passes through your hands. If they can ever link you to your crypto wallet(s), the blockchain lets them trace every other transaction you have conducted, every wallet you have ever done business with, even decades later.
Maybe the statute of limitations has run out on something from years ago, and they can't charge you for something you did in the past. But there is no statute of limitations on intelligence gathering. Maybe they run a suspect's trail backward 15 years, find where they did business with your old wallet, then follow that trail forward until they find what you're doing today.
Don't know what to tell you, but crypto is constantly being used for illegal activities, and I have yet to hear of any big busts resulting from the use of crypto.
That says more about your hearing than anything else.
what makes it any less real than any other money?
Yeah, cryptocurrency is a fuckin waste of the tech lmao. You could theoretically prevent identity theft with blockchain tech and it could also theoretically replace SSNs, but instead we used it for a fake currency and jpegs of bored apes.
EDIT: Should also mention that you literally cannot trade crypto in some states of the US because those states require crypto institutions to have physical assets that equal their digital assets, which is actually pretty smart. Because people can’t buy shit with their 0.2 BitCoins and 50k DogeCoins, this means that those institutions don’t operate or allow trading from these states.
In practice it’s happening multiple times a day. All it takes for one is to snoop the private key to get full control over a wallet.
what backs turquoise?
oof, found out you were wrong too late, eh?
that has nothing to do with bitcoin.
have you tried mining any other money? you can't mine dollars at all, and proof of stake is a great way of explaining the compound interest system.
there are a lot of vendors that do or have in the past accepted bitcoin. where can you spend turquoise? or confederate dollars?
this is a terrible list of attributes to use to establish whether any currency is "fake money"
And you have a terrible list of reasons all separated out into single comments for some reason :)
Any cryptocurrency because it works off the blockchain. You have the transactions committed on a wallet that exists on the blockchain, which is how you get the public transactions in the first place.
Literally any fiat currency, or you could even barter with it if somebody wanted it. It has tangible value because it has a physical demand.
Actually, if you work a job, you get paid in money. Crazy, I know - you don’t have to speculate and hype on a fake currency :)
But we’re talking about cryptocurrency, no? Unless you’re saying BitCoin is not a crypto?
True, and there’s also that 51% majority control thing too. Nothing can get rid of social engineering either, but perhaps there’s a chance to develop better security for blockchain-based tech.
Physically or online? Because you can spend crypto at like Microsoft online, for example, but could you go to a bar or a restaurant and pay with crypto?
you don't seem to understand that most cryptos don't work on the bitcoin blockchain. bitcoin has its own blockchain.
your other issues with crypto have nothing to do with bitcoin.
the comment i responded to said bitcoin.
to keep ideas separate. it helps prevent a gish gallop and walls of text.
this is distinct from mining, the process by which new bitcoins are actually put into circulation. you can't MAKE dollars: the cia are the only people allowed to do that.
you don't seem to know this, so i'm going to explain it to you: turquoise was the currency of indigenous people in the northeast of the so-called united states. it's not money now. what backed turquoise? nothing. the point was its ubiquity.
you're moving teh goalposts.
you should respond to the person who actually left this comment. i'm not a part of that conversation.
you keep conflating cryptocurrency and blockchain and bitcoin. are we talking about bitcoin here?
where do you use turquoise?
that doesn't change whether bitcoin is real. it only changes whether crypto exchanges can operate legally in arbitrary jurisdictions.
Reason I brought that fact up is because those states are saying that crypto needs to backed by something physical instead of an intangible hype and speculation factor.
What makes BitCoin worth $42k? Or Ethereum worth $2.2k? Like, what is physically driving the worth of these cryptocurrencies? Some fiat currencies moved away from precious metals, sure, but they’re back by at least the economies of each country. From what I can tell and have seen, crypto is backed by… hype and speculation. There’s no tangible thing that can back crypto, hence why it’s a fake currency because it’s more or less arbitrarily at a price point just because it is.
Oh, come on. That is a really simplistic, and unfortunately, inaccurate view of value.
I ask: what makes anything valuable? Let me pose some examples:
Whatever reasoning you use, whatever rebuttal you have for my argument, unless you're actively cherry-picking and straining your logic just so you can not be wrong in this instance, you'll find that any reasonable argument for why Bitcoin has no value will also apply to argue what I think you'll see is an uncomfortably large number of "real" things are worthless as well.
Electricity has physical properties. It is energy. Mining Bitcoin requires the use of energy. To the miner, the value of Bitcoin is equal to the cost of acquiring the electricity used to mine it.
Bitcoin is a fungible store of value used to convert KWh into commodities and services.
money existed before dollars. the dollar value of any asset is not determinate of whether that asset is money.
bitcoin is a network protocol. cryptographic tokens are issued within it. what backs it is the security of the cryptographic system and the combined hashing power of the network. if you think it doesn't have value, that's ok: value is subjective. some people do think it's valuable to be able to control these cryptographic tokens. and that's ok, too: value is subjective.
lots of currencies have never had a physical backing.
those states aren't authorities on what money is
No government backing, and I can't use it anywhere. The only way for me to use Cryptocurrency as money in 99.9% of the places I shop is to exchange said crypto for real money.
money predates governments, and there are vendors who will sell goods for bitcoin.
Money doesn't predate governments, governments have been around since the earliest tribes, and bartering was the most common way to exchange goods until large governments started issuing currency.
And no, there aren't. I can't walk into any store anywhere I have been and buy goods with bitcoin, nor can I use bitcoin on any of the online shops I have ever been to.
you clearly haven't been keeping up with anthropology in the last 20 years. i recommend reading Debt: The First 5,000 Years. i also suggest pirating it if you can: the author is dead. he won't mind.
the impression i'm getting is that bitcoin isn't money to you, but bitcoin is money to some people, so it's real money.
you haven't been to every store on earth, nor visited every online vendor.
Yes, it's because this whole post is meant as a joke or a jest. It's meant to be taken as funny.
How did you understand it?
the exploitative "gig economy" capitalists aren't a joke to me.
They are jokes tho
People often use humour to communicate about serious things such as exploitation and oppression. This post is a joke, even though the underlying issues are serious.
Only 73 votes though. That's not a good enough sample size. OP didn't try hard enough
I'll take illegal cab company over shitty actual cab company any day tyvm
"Shitty actual cab company" pays its drivers a fair wage. And they are often unionized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Taxi_Workers%27_Alliance
I wish "illegal cab company" would too, but I also have no sympathy for shitty actual cab company. It's not even about the money for me, they had many chances to innovate their systems and squash the illegal cab companies before they got started while at the same time generating more fare revenue, but instead tried to use the status quo to smother out the competition.
They never seem to clean their cars though for some reason. That's one thing I'll give to Uber, the cars are cleaner.
I've never been in a dirty cab but cabs were never a big deal in my area so I'm not an expert.
It's also more expensive where I live ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
EDIT: Sorry, my bad. I meant that Uber and Lyft are more expensive than normal cabs in my area.
Yes, because the drivers aren't being exploited like the Uber and Lyft drivers are. They offer cheaper fares because they're paid an unfair wage.
The trick is them unionising too.
Then it’s gonna be the same price.
There’s a cost to everything. Taxis were already reasonably efficient. Enjoy your VC funded discount rides while you can
I feel you’re under the impression that I share the GP point of view. I don’t. I live in a place where ride sharing apps are regulated and I’m thankful for it. Gig economy jobs can fuck right off.
That being said, it’s not cost that killed taxis and made Uber/Lyft appealing. It’s convenience. If the taxis had joined the modern era instead of being stuck in the 90s (including but not exclusively having a “broken” credit card machine and other dubious tactics), they’d probably have had a way better time. They were caught with their pants down and their head up their asses.
Sorry, my bad. I meant that Uber and Lyft are more expensive than normal cabs in my area.
I don't understand comments like this. Where do you think those "savings" come from? Do you think the suits are like "yeah we're going to shut down our competition by reducing our own pay/cut of the revenue"? Or do you think they're going to fuck over the workers?
Sorry, my comment was unclear. I do agree, I meant Ubers being more expensive for whatever reason...
Doing things right costs money. "Ride share" companies are only cheaper because they screw over their drivers.
And that’s what those illegal cab companies bank on people thinking.
Is it a bit more expensive? Yes. Is it waaaaaaay less exploitative than Uber and Lyft? Fuuuuuuuuck yes.
See my edit :)
Sorry, but Taxis have left me waiting for hours and ripped me off 1 too many times on top of every cab I've been in has been quite dirty. They tried using their near-monopolistic position in most places to ignore basic innovations, like having an app to request a taxi (and having that app not look like it's a time capsule from 2008) or even taking card.
I have no sympathy for taxis, they're dead to me
It's not even really private unless you're using Monero similar (which you can't buy on most exchanges for that very reason). Most CC blockchains are entirely public ledgers that are very thoroughly mapped out by government agencies and by private companies looking to monetize the data.
It's just a me e dude.
Totally read this in the Mario voice.