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[-] Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world 147 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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.

[-] whoisearth@lemmy.ca 50 points 5 months ago

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

[-] Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world 23 points 5 months ago

Hotels prior to the Internet would do shitty things like:

  1. Rates increased. Pay triple.
  2. You want this moldy room or not.
  3. Lie and say this is the only thing available in town

Hotels took a long time to actually get online checking. Most hotels were still requiring phone reservations way past 2010. And even if you get a reservation over the phone, they could always take one look at you upon arrival and reject it.

Airbnb forced them to move to the digital age. They forced them to show the pricing up front. They forced them to have photos of the room types. They made them take reservations and actually hold it, else face bad reviews.

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[-] jaybone@lemmy.world 19 points 5 months ago

Taxis sucked for white people too.

[-] dariusj18@lemmy.world 37 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] criss_cross@lemmy.world 17 points 5 months ago

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.

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[-] Microw@lemm.ee 15 points 5 months ago

At least here in a european countries, taxis and hotels were overregulated and monopolized af. The business models of Uber and Airbnb may not have been the best at the start, but like you say: it was a needed disruption.

[-] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 11 points 5 months ago

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.

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[-] sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 103 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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

[-] littlebluespark@lemmy.world 66 points 5 months ago

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". 🤌🏽

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[-] andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 99 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 72 points 5 months ago

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.

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[-] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 60 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Uber

Airbnb

Bitcoin

OpenAI

did I guess right

[-] LostXOR@fedia.io 54 points 5 months ago

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

[-] andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 23 points 5 months ago

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

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[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 32 points 5 months ago

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

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[-] iAvicenna@lemmy.world 31 points 5 months ago

Extremely confident source of misinformation

[-] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 30 points 5 months ago

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

[-] RGB3x3@lemmy.world 30 points 5 months ago
[-] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 18 points 5 months ago

Nah that's a different app

[-] IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world 26 points 5 months ago

All of you pre Uber zealots are adorably naive. The cab industry is scum.

[-] mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 13 points 5 months ago

replacing scum with even scummier scum? like, taxis were bad but they were fucking regulated.

[-] TheControlled@lemmy.world 24 points 5 months ago

Jesus fucking Christ this is cynical.

[-] ameancow@lemmy.world 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It's really bad out there. Cynicism is at levels I never imagined growing up in more optimistic times. We are surrounded by wonders and have all the opportunities to reshape our world into anything imaginable but we all collectively decided to sit inside, read how other people are miserable, and internalize that misery so we're also miserable, even though all we've done is read about other people's feelings.

Our species's default mode is to be cynical and lazy and I hate it.

[-] Ajen@sh.itjust.works 23 points 5 months ago

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.

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[-] 737 24 points 5 months ago

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

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[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 22 points 5 months ago

Probably illegal car company. AirBNB isn't terribly different (as a renter) from previous renting sites. I made some money off Bitcoin but even then it is so much wasted power for something not terribly useful. Generative AI and AI art is fun as a toy but eh, that's mostly it.

Being able to pretty easily get a cab from anywhere to anywhere (obviously within reason) is actually kind of a cool innovation to me. It's probably saved lives too by giving inebriated people an easy way to get a cab home. (But I'm not giving them a huge pass because I think they've been accused of finding ways to charge drunk people more.)

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[-] 58008@lemmy.world 21 points 5 months ago

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

[-] BackOnMyBS@lemmy.world 13 points 5 months ago

I used Tor once out of curiosity. Wanted to know what kind of stuff I could run into. I FAFO. I don't use Tor anymore.

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[-] drathvedro@lemm.ee 17 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I'd say fake money.

For uber, we've never had the overpriced cabs that it was made to circumvent in the first place. It was more of a wild west with lots of smaller companies with in-house made sites. We've even had an app that checked their prices, ordered the cheapest ones and cancelled others once a car is found. Then a major player entered the market, and they didn't know what the fuck they were doing, giving estimates but driving by the meter, which ended up consistently much higher in the end. Then uber came, and started undercutting everyone with stupidly low prices, but their app/maps are an unbearable garbage. So they did a merger with previous one, combining the idea with decent app, and continued until competition crumpled. And now they're screwing both drivers and customers hard, but there's now no alternative.

The only good thing that came out of it is incentive structure and a punishment for drivers for not taking orders. It made it so that as a customer you can safely order without fear that you'd have to wait for hours to find a car - your hot potato order can't be passed off forever, and somebody has to pick it up eventually, even if it's a bad driver who majorly fucked up recently and now has to take it for redemption, or otherwise lose his job.

Airbnb never made financial sense to me. Because every time I looked there, I found the same, and much better options, for as much as half price on local ad boards. Seems to be just a convinience factor, as renters just put their properties at 2x there for an off-chance a rich tourist checks in.

AI to me seems like a dead end. The innovations are cool and flashy, but they inevitably fall short of being reliable enough to be useful. Like, I don't use chatgpt anyhow because there's always a chance it'll spit out plausible bullshit which makes it so that every answer must be double-checked. And if you can find the source to check against, then why even ask the bot in the first place? Same for art, it can get you maybe halfway there, but refining the prompt takes skill and time that'd be better spend learning to edit and make real art instead.

But for cryptocurrencies I should've bought in way sooner. Even if they didn't hit ATH's every few years. I find that even drug dealers and crooks are more trustworthy than my own government, who is actively malicious, and has hurt my financial wellbeing harder and more often than even the crypto rug pulls. And that's coming from someone who got hit by luna, ftx, and even mtgox, among others. Still better than the government straight up saying that you don't own any of your money anymore. Yes, the ecological impact sucks, but it's not a crypto problem specifically. I don't see how mining is worse than, than, say, a literal mining operation across the road that uses electrical heating because they're too poor to fix their windows and put proper insulation, and running heaters just makes financial sense? There must be regulations to make dirty power more expensive, which will make the problem solve itself. And if we have green energy, who cares what one's using it for? Mine, game, hang christmas lights, whatever, who gives a shit

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[-] ssm@lemmy.sdf.org 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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.

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[-] MiDaBa@lemmy.ml 14 points 5 months ago

All money is fake.

[-] VictoriaAScharleau@lemmy.world 13 points 5 months ago

what's the fake money for criminals

[-] otto_von@lemmy.world 48 points 5 months ago
[-] VictoriaAScharleau@lemmy.world 20 points 5 months ago

that's not fake money, and it isn't "for" criminals. it's real, and that's why criminals use it.

[-] BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 22 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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.

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[-] Phegan@lemmy.world 13 points 5 months ago

All money is fake, it's legitimately just made up.

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[-] GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca 13 points 5 months ago

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.

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[-] MehBlah@lemmy.world 13 points 5 months ago

AirBnb by far is the worst.

[-] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 10 points 5 months ago

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

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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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