I shared this before.
If you were a person of color, having Uber and Airbnb were a game changer. Taxis and hotels were awful from the 80s-2010s.
Taxis were racists and often wouldn’t even pick you up. If they did, they often took you on a joyride. Hotels were absolute shit holes. Want to complain about your room? Go pound sand.
Those industries werent good for decades. And the disruption actually made car sharing much more consistent and hotel experiences better.
Interesting perspective I never accounted before thank you. Cabs were notorious for not picking up black people. Can’t speak for hotels.
Hotels prior to the Internet would do shitty things like:
- Rates increased. Pay triple.
- You want this moldy room or not.
- Lie and say this is the only thing available in town
Hotels took a long time to actually get online checking. Most hotels were still requiring phone reservations way past 2010. And even if you get a reservation over the phone, they could always take one look at you upon arrival and reject it.
Airbnb forced them to move to the digital age. They forced them to show the pricing up front. They forced them to have photos of the room types. They made them take reservations and actually hold it, else face bad reviews.
You could book hotels online prior to airbnb. I have done that numerous times since 2000…
My understanding is that Uber basically lifted the idea from queer people. They were tired of not getting taxis so they started a service called homobiles ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homobiles )
Uber then did all the shitty capitalism things and become the huge money hole and exploitation machine we all know.
Airbnb also made the process easy it lead to rents raising by like 30% in some places .
So they have have some convenience and such, but on the whole they’re probably a net negative.
My understanding is that Uber basically lifted the idea from queer people.
That doesn’t make sense as it seems Homobiles was first “thought of” in 2010 and properly founded in 2011. While Uber was founded in 2009 and was already operational in 2010.
I’m not sure you understand the parent comment. I didn’t realize how terrible until I hailed a cab, noticed someone who was actually also hailing but must have been doing so before me, so I deferred and offered the cab I hailed to him. The cabby noticed the person was black and just booked it. The person was resigned and indicated this was not uncommon.
I was sitting outside the courthouse with this cool old black guy smoking weed and buying it from him. This guy is a real badass and challenges my perceptions. When he waves me over to sit between him and this other black guy, the other black guy acted like I must have the plague or something and he wouldn’t talk with me or even look at me. He took the first moment he could to go sit back by Bob. The guy had fear in his eyes, plain enough for someone autistic to see. He was afraid of me, and almost certainly for my race. Feels bad man. Not because I super wanted to interact with him or anything, but because he’s clearly been through some awful shit.
Now imagine the old cabbies who wouldn’t pick up a black guy. Why is that? They don’t tip well for not having much money? Maybe there was even worse experiences. I’m just trying to say that there shouldn’t be any pressure for individuals to rub up against something that repels them like that.
The problem here is clearly that some industries have been dominated by particular races who tend to alienate each other and live in echo chambers. An industry should not be occupied by a race because that causes these kinda of rifts and lack of availability. I don’t think it’s fair to just be like “well that cabbie discriminated and let’s prosecute that.” We need to change the gears and lube them up!
The amount of times their credit card machine would just “break” so that you’d be forced to pay in cash and tip much more back then was staggering.
Reeeeee! USSA, please fix bullshit tips. My country is just 4 km away from you and it’s really concerning.
Why do you think Uber took off in white only countries? Or how does Bolt exist. Lol
Fake money for criminals only because it was useful for me when I wanted to buy drugs while living in a place with little access to them
It’s especially funny since criminal enterprises have used “legal” currency since its invention. It’s almost like criminals are gonna criminal, regardless of the “tender”. 🤌🏽
The weed and lsd were to this day the best I have had too. I don’t love crypto currencies for many many reasons but it has been years and I still think about those trips
Cryptocurrency with Tor has unironically done more for drug safety than most administrations worldwide. I hate the framing “fake money for criminals” because while there are despicable crimes, not all of them use cryptocurrency, in fact USD was the most common last time I checked, OTOH what constitutes a criminal can be an arbitrary rule. Woman in Texas having an abortion paying with crypto? Fits the definition but I’m not sure people here would condemn it.
I’m not happy with how cryptocurrency turned out with the huge speculational bubble, NFTs, not even a huge fan of smart contracts but I think the idea of a decentralized and maybe even anonymous ledger is very much in the spirit of the fediverse.
For now… 🖕🏽 They worded that so weasely, they’re just waiting for the storm to pass and for Legal to come up with some compelling reason why they’re totally “obligated” to make it happen, “hands tied” “so sorry” and all that.
Fuck Sony. They made this SOP way back when, and there’s no way they let this stop them forever. It’s all about profit, not what “we” want.🤌🏿
Illegal delivery services are my fav ones. People are physically running or riding like slaves to get you tendies from a KFC across the street. No, you are probably not a person who needs that due to some health conditions, you are privileged to buy their labor cheap and further their abuse.
I’m disabled, and I’ll very occasionally make use of them, but I hate them too. Fucking the workers, making my $11 chicken into $24, and complaining that they aren’t profitable to both sides. Absolute bullshit.
I wish luck to delivery workers union, one of few functioning unions.
Did someone go through my comments and added two downvotes to each?.. Two downvotes, which is exactly same number to amount of them received by other recent comments. I call it “brown stripe”, because someone clearly has diarrhea.
oh I thought you were talking weed or ketamine, not tendies. Fuckin love my online, legal weed market.
Uber
Airbnb
Bitcoin
OpenAI
did I guess right
I think the last two are more general, just cryptocurrency and generative AI respectively.
Also Lyft, Wamo, Cruz, and a few other small ones.
Seems AirBnB is the only main player in their category.
As a fan of major environmental catastrophe, can I vote for all four?
