- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
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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.
And not all crypto is proof of work, some is proof of stake, which actually isn’t too bad environmentally
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.
Don’t forget they take you the long way and go slow
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.
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.
Almost as if it’s not the commodities that are the problem, but the economy they operate. 🧐
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.
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 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.
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.
I use a AirBnB if:
- 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.
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.
Doorbell camera surveillance network
Trust me bro, Capitalism is necessary for innovation, just trust me bro
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?
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?
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.
“Fake money for criminals” The US dollar has been around for quite some time…
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
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…
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.
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.
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?
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.
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%]
Can we have option 4?
-Love all the disruption and none of the intended product
Edit: or the option where I can count…
My favorite is still “Human Misery Threshold” for businesses
Self-driving road killer machines.
