Illegal hotel chain!!!
AirBnb by far is the worst.
Extremely confident source of misinformation
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
government straight up saying that you don’t own any of your money anymore
What are you referencing here?
I feel like I should be recognizing some specific thing here, but I can’t figure it out.
Well it’s third world problems, but the specific event I had in mind was when Russia froze all it’s citizen’s foreign assets in 2022 in an attempt to save it’s own currency from plummeting. This left a lot of people stranded, myself included. I did eventually get mine out, but the law, as far as I know, is still in place, so I tend to think it was purely by luck and some mistake on the bank’s side. Others didn’t have it that lucky, I’ve heard of people being fined as much as $400 for just trying. But, it’s just one case, I believe there’s lots of other places where you just can’t trust the government with money - African, South American, Central Asian countries first come to mind. Even Canada had a scandal where they froze COVID protesters assets - I don’t support the cause, but I don’t think the government should have power over dissenters assets either.
Sure, offshore accounts and physical assets can work in those cases too, but it can be challenging to get a hold of them as an ordinary citizen. Crypto circumvents that by being uncontrollable by design and widespread enough that I can exchange it in some back alley in one place and then again in another with less risk and overhead than any other way.
Ah, that all makes sense. I live in the US, so I’m looking at it from that lens.
don’t think the government should have power over dissenters assets
Agreed, but this is a thorny problem. Clearly the government has a legitimate cause to freeze some assets in some cases (obvious example: US govt freezing Osama bin Laden’s accounts). This becomes an abuse-of-power question, then. Unfortunately, we as humanity don’t have a good answer to it.
third world Russia
Technically, Russia would be second world :)
I do think cryptocurrencies fall short of the promise/hype with the exchange problem – either there’s a big bank-like clearinghouse that the government can target with freeze orders, or you’re in “You have to know a guy who knows a guy” territory when it comes time to actually use the cryptocurrency. I can’t pay my mortgage by transferring Bitcoin or Ethereum to my bank.
Good analysis, but I’d say your not taking a vital factor into account with “AI”, it’s only going to get better, and crooks, conmen, corporations, etc are going to find new ways to weaponize it. I use LLM’s often, and for my purposes, they are truly amazing (now that Google search is fucking useless)
Well, I’d like that to happen, actually. As it stands, the only use of AI I am legit a fan of is music mixers like suno and udio - it makes me smile every time I hear a creative mix of lyrics and genre. Others mostly just litter the internet with unhelpful stuff of questionable legality. When it gets good enough that errors are so rare that I could trust the output without checking, while being built on free and licensed stuff, I’d be much more more inclined to use them.
I wouldn’t be so sure it will get much better. It might just stagnate, barely getting any better as we reach the limits of what is possible with our current hardware.
Not in my area, unfortunately. We do have a couple of local competitors still. But, even though I hate it with passion, I rarely bother checking with them because they have so few drivers it is almost never the case they can even find me a car, never mind price-match the offer, and I usually have shit to attend and no time to babysit multiple apps waiting for one.
fake money for criminals is just money in general, at least some crypto currencies don’t allow for tracking
at least some crypto currencies don’t allow for tracking
The blockchain explicitly tracks transactions between wallets.
The problem is that, as something that is used first and foremost as a speculation vehicle, crypto can’t really be a true currency replacement. The amount of deflation, and instability, crypto see, due to the design, basically prevents it from ever being a true replacement for contemporary money.
Now, having a block chain credit system that’s availability is not derived in the way that current crypto is could very well be one. Just not what we are being offered now.
crypto can’t really be a true currency replacement
Its been increasingly popular among the unbanked, as it grants a lot of the functions of the modern financial system at a marginally lower cost than check cashing companies and payday lenders without requiring the participant to be considered “credit worthy” by the transacting institution.
You can have a digital wallet and make digital transactions and you don’t need to carry a giant wade of cash on you all the time, even if a traditional financial institution wouldn’t touch you. That’s a boon for crooks, sure. Its also a boon for people working in the gray market - migrant laborers sending money home to family, state-legal pot/mushroom dealers who don’t have federal sanction and can’t use normal banks, gig workers and other contractors, international workers and businesses needing a universal currency to trade against. And its a boon for the working poor, particularly folks who don’t have a physical bank nearby.
Because the currency has material benefits for the unbanked (and therefore legally vulnerable) population, it becomes a popular place to ply scams and grifts and other dirty financial tricks precisely because you know the people you’re fleecing will have no legal recourse after the fact. But that’s the parasitic nature of second class citizenship.
You’re not vulnerable because you’re using crypto nearly so much as you’re vulnerable because you’re denied access to traditional banks and courts.
I am aware of this, still doesn’t make it a viable replacement for traditional currency