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All of you pre Uber zealots are adorably naive. The cab industry is scum.
Uber is also scum tho. Seems there’s always going to be something dodgy about getting into cars with random strangers.
Uber, even today has a FAR higher success rate with my personally. Even two weeks ago I had a driver telling me his card reader wasn’t working until it magically did when I started threatening to simply not pay and walk away. This has happened to me multiple times even with my reduced cab rate.
The worst I’ve ever dealt with in Uber is waiting and cancelled pickup despite using it far more often.
The problem isn’t the user experience, same as with Amazon, it’s the abusive relationship the company has with its employees. That it deliberately tries to avoid labor laws that protect workers via legal technicalities.
replacing scum with even scummier scum? like, taxis were bad but they were fucking regulated.
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Uber needed a HUGE pool of labor to draw on for its success, traditional cab companies couldn’t handle it even if they weren’t fucking scummy.
I hate Uber but I’m not crying for the cab industry. Fuck those guys too.
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Agreed.
No. The can industry still sucks ass today, even with the apps. They are all independent with little accountability. Uber fixed that and forced those fuckers out of their service. Uber is just a flat out better service.
Well yeah but… Fake money, is “real” money real? The support structures behind bitcoin and dollars or euros are different and both have positive and negative aspects. All in all bitcoin is worse, mainly for the power usage, but if it comes to ease and speed of transfer for the average user bitcoin rules. I guess we can mostly thank banks for that.
Only really true in some countries. In the Netherlands you can extremely easily and instantly transfer money from one account to another (even at another bank) for free, using simply their IBAN. There’s also apps for convenient stuff like requesting a small payment by generating a link or splitting the restaurant bill, etc. Again all working directly with your real bank account.
In France you need to physically go to your bank’s branch, prove your identity via 4 different pieces of ID, write a physical check, sacrifice a goat to the overlords, and then the transfer will get there in a couple of weeks.
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Okay, but national currencies failed before because people would keep dollars and just convert at the time when they need to pay taxes
Source: I still remember the Soviet ruble collapse and hyperinflation
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Of course, but in the end they both rely on a social contract. Bitcoin is worth x amount because that’s what people are willing to pay for it
It should be called “unregulated money laundry for criminals”
Well… Partially. It could be so much more than just nerd investment gambling and criminal money, but the technology is just fundamentally too flawed for that.
There are many different technologies, which one is flawed?
I’m referring to all blockchain based ones. Block chain, by design, is beyond extremely inefficient
I’m happier about being able to buy drugs on the dark web than I am about giftcards, even though they’re conceptually related (eg. both “fake money”).
You shouldN’T have to go to the “dark web” to buy drugs, unless it’s highly destructive like meth
(on a side note, I hate that dark wev name, it implies something evil, it implies that only hackers can get there, its just sites you won’t regularly find on Google, or different places like telegram channels)
Edit: damned auto correct
*Shouldn’t
Yeah, autocorrect
This raises the question of how much pollution is created by the dollar in the form of increased consumption from shortened time preferences. The dollar inflates to encourage people to spend more now instead of save, so that the economy gets bigger.
Well yeah, but that you can potentially also do with crypto, I’d say that is a whole other level on top of currencies
Yeah but you can’t not do it without crypto
Man it’s so brutal when you think about it like that. Inflation is theft by the back door.
The feds job is to force people to stay productive. It’s a feature, not a bug.
That’s not how it works. When you invest into the stock market, it actually beats inflation in the long run. So inflation doesn’t actually make me spend any more money than I would otherwise, since investing it would still later improve my buying power even more
You mean that investing in the stock market is a hedge against inflation? I can’t argue with that. But not everyone has money to invest in the stock market after rent, bills, food etc. Unless your wages/benefits rise in line with inflation or you have money to spare, you basically only have the option of buying worse stuff or simply going without it.
These gains from productivity have gone to the wealthy, and the costs of pollution have gone to the poor.
Illegal hotel chain!!!
Y’all were cheering, hollering, and hooting like a 90s sitcom audience when Uber came about. You championed the identity politics because some of you had bad experiences with taxi drivers. You shouted down the opponents and liked how Uber was cheaper because it was being subsidized by venture capitalists.
Now the taxi industry is in control of tech tsars instead of the government and you only have yourselves to blame.
What I find so interesting about painting people you disagree with as a monolith is that it naturally makes the argument you are against contradictory.
One group of people cheers Uber and you disagree with that.
Then another group of people (granted there will be some overlap) decry Uber later on.
These are two different people, but when you treat them as one, you’re bound to see your opposition as being contradictory at best and contrarian at worst.
And it’s still better than it was 20 years ago, I don’t see a problem.
I guess I’ve found the plagiarism machine the most entertaining so far.
Thanks to illegal hotel chain I can stay in the big city while helping someone who is pressed on rising rents
They’re also partially to blame for the rising rents
More common however it’s apartments renting rooms they can’t lease or houses/condos owned or built solely for AirBnB renting.
what’s the fake money for criminals
Cryptocurrency
that’s not fake money, and it isn’t “for” criminals. it’s real, and that’s why criminals use it.
With real money you can take out a loan. Kinda the whole point of money, it represents value that is owed.
While crypto loans would be technically possible it would be a foolish thing to do since it’s effectively a short on something that could increase in value. Real money has a small but steady (well, ideally) inflation so you can be confident in taking out a loan and not having to worry about the currency doing something crazy like doubling in value resulting in you owing double the value than you initially borrowed. This is not the case for crypto so it’s simply not a viable currency for financing anything.
Since it’s not viable for financing, it’s not a real currency and never will be. Like is someone supposed to take out a business loan in real currency, convert it to crypto, pay someone else who would then have to convert it back to real money so they can pay back their loan? Why would people want to do all of these conversions back and forth to and from crypto? Because they like the risk of the value dropping for the brief time they’re holding onto it?
your standards aren’t based on historical fact.
Go throw crypto at a stripper then!
they probably don’t accept tally sticks or turquoise as payment either. were those fake money too?
Yes.
great. live in your bigotry.
The fuck are you talking about?
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.
tally sticks were debt tokens. people used them as money out of convenience, and would exchange them for cash if it was possible.
An easy way to tell if it’s “real” money or not is to see if goods are ever priced directly in it, where it isn’t just directly indexed to the exchange rate of an established currency.
Hint: Even places that accept crypto payments don’t do this. The crypto price fluctuates based on the moment by moment exchange rate to the local currency.
sumerians denoted everything in silver shekels but trade was done will all manner of commodities, including barley grains. your theory of money sounds like it comes from the Adam Smith cult.
Are barley grains a currency? I’m not understanding your argument here. In a practical sense, cryptocurrencies are far too volatile to use as a currency and the “stable” coins are tied to things like the US dollar. Well, I should say allegedly tied because “stable” coins like tether haven’t been audited to actually prove it’s tied to the underlying.
tally sticks denoted debt in Britain, and were used directly as money out of convenience, but they were themselves denoted in roman currency iirc.
Can I ask what the point of arguing semantics here is?
Maybe you have put in the effort to figure out all the avenues to use bitcoin to pay for things, but its not easy and you sound more like a drug addict scrounging for metal and bottles, and then wondering why noone else is interested in your hustle.
Why do you care if people call bitcoin real or not anyways? For most people its not real, for you I guess it is, does that make sense?
So latin American currencies are not real money. We already knew but wow harsh reality
If you’re “invested” in cryptogoboligook and you’re not ripping someone off–guess what?–you’re the mark.
Regardless, you can generally use money to buy things.
You can’t buy anything with crypto because it’s 15 years later, and “mass adoption” is never happening. It’s “fake money”.
since people treat crypto as money, it is money.
The only ones that treat it as money are in on it. Otherwise, you could go to a Best Buy and get a TV with your crypto-card.
Is it too thick sarcasm, incompetence or you just wanted to say smart cards?
Bitcoin isn’t legal tender. Just accept it.
I can’t buy a TV with turquoise either. or sumerian shillings.
And what does that tell you? That maybe those things aren’t legal currency??
I hate to be “that guy” but your definition of money is a little constrained. By that definition, the only “money” is the money of the country you’re currently in. Can you walk into a bestbuy and purchase a TV with Yuan?
You’re likely trying to say “Can you walk into a normal store of an appropriate country and pay with that currency” but even that is flawed, as certain stores don’t accept credit/debit, or don’t accept cash.
My definition of money is “legal tender.”
Can you buy a tv with a silver bar?
No, because it’s not legal currency. Are you getting it now?? Valuables aren’t all accepted currency….
Your argument is DEEPLY flawed.
People certainly don’t treat crypto like money.
And I suppose that’s where our conversation has to stop because you’ve now outed yourself as willing to say any outlandish thing to support crypto.
Because I do not believe you can actually think that.
I am not defending crypto. I’m correcting people who don’t know what money is
Crypto is an un-backed and unregulated security – the value of which fluctuates wildly. Turns out most people don’t like being paid in something that can drastically lose value in the span of hours.
The few people and institutions that accept crypto as payment either immediately convert it back into real money or are “investors” treating it like the security it actually is.
most money throughout history has been “unbacked” and unregulated
“unbacked”
I’m assuming those quotes are referring to fiat currency. Faith in the solvency of the issuing government, widely agreed upon exchange rates, and regulated prices of goods are all forms of backing. Sure: you can argue that’s “not enough” but crypto “currencies” don’t even have that. Hence why their values fluctuate by the minute – which defeats the entire purpose of “money”.
unregulated
… government controlled central banks and entire bodies of law exist to do just that. Nobody is regulating crypto.
Crypto lacks the features that make money “money”. It doesn’t have a relatively stable, agreed upon value. It’s not easily exchanged for goods or services. It technically can be used as “money” but that’s true of anything – trading cards, a pile of gravel, etc.
Regardless of your personal opinions about cryptocurrency, that is absolutely what this post is referring to by saying fake money for criminal.
they’re not opinions, but I’m sure you’re right about the post.
All money is fake, it’s legitimately just made up.
it’s all made up but the only fake money I can imagine is counterfeit.
Gold coins?
OMG Such edge
How is that edgy? It’s a fact.
Everyone knows how money has no intrinsic value. What does pointing that out add to anything?
Just to contrast somewhat the saying that crypto is “fake” Edit: grammar
Money refers to some token which is commonly accepted as a form of payment for goods and services and for the repayment of debts. In some contexts - dark web marketplaces, for example - certain cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Monero are money. In the context of the physical world, generally cryptocurrency isn’t considered to be money, but rather a security - a tradable financial asset, but not a form of directly usable money - the asset has to be exchanged for e.g. USD to be spent.
In this way, cryptocurrency is a bit like WoW gold. I can’t pay for my rent with it, and I can’t really buy any physical property with it, so it’s not money in that context, but in Azeroth, it’s money. I might be able to exchange my digital asset for real money or physical assets, but only in black markets.
Hope this helps
me too
I mean, the same can be said for Norwegian Kroner (assuming you’re not in Norway) and nobody doubts that it is money. I can’t pay my rent with it, or buy bread with it, I need to exchange it for “real money” (Euro for me) but it is real money.
Yeah, that’s what I was trying to explain - NOK is money, but only in Norwegian contexts. Runescape gold is money in a Runescape context. Bitcoin is money in the context of dark web marketplaces. The more contexts that some asset is considered to be money, the more widely recognised that asset is as a “real” money. If cryptocurrency becomes more commonly accepted as a medium of exchange, then it will more broadly be recognised as money. But as it stands, for most people in most contexts, cryptocurrencies are not money. I hope that makes sense!
I can’t pay for my rent with it
Many landlords accept USDC
and I can’t really buy any physical property with it
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/miami-beach-home-most-expensive-bought-cryptocurrency
Dude, if it’s newsworthy then it’s not a common occurrence. And no, many landlords do not accept crypto lol.
You previously said buying property can’t be done. Now you’ve shifted to “not common”.
https://www.muralpay.com/blog/how-to-use-stablecoins-in-your-daily-life
How to use Stablecoins to Pay Rent While direct payment of rent in digital dollars might not be mainstream yet, Rent.App allows its users to pay their rent in USDC or USDT with no fees. By creating or connecting your digital dollars wallet on their website, you can input your landlord’s email and the amount you wish to send them for your rent. However, your landlord will need to create or connect their wallet to the platform to receive the money.
Now you’ve shifted to “not common”.
The opening line of my comment literally reads:
Money refers to some token which is commonly accepted as a form of payment
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.
the bitcoin blockchain doesn’t require all that power. nothing about the code dictates that. it’s a social phenomenon, just like the markets.
The bitcoin blockchain requires more power than any other blockchain while providing less features.
The only outstanding feature of bitcoin is it’s price.
the bitcoin blockchain doesn’t require any power. any miner can stop, the blockchain would have less power, and still continue to function.
The bitcoin blockchain doesn’t require any power.
Yes. It does. No transaction can occur without proof of work being performed.
any miner can stop, the blockchain would have less power, and still continue to function.
Marginally less power, but nowhere near the reduction needed to compete with a PoS blockchain.
For example Ethereum PoS uses 2,600 MWh per year (= a single 1MW windfarm). Bitcoin uses 53,000x more energy than Ethereum.
the whole network could be run on two raspberry pis. there is no minimum power requirement in the protocol.
the whole network could be run on two raspberry pis.
No. Then someone would buy 3 raspberry pis and claim all the bitcoin.
Bitcoin was a great idea in 2008 but in 2024 it has been overshadowed by other blockchains in every single dimension except for market cap.
Okay, “maintain” isn’t the right word, but the mining process is designed that way and it’s baked into the whole currency. Actual work could have been done, but instead we burned it all for imaginary money (which isn’t much different from fiat currency).
AirBnb by far is the worst.
My brother in Christ, all money is fake. Even gold coins are ‘fake’ money, because all money is a social construct used to represent an abstraction of value added through labor.
How many Bitcoins for lettuce?
if you were foolish enough to buy a Liz Truss your keeping your damn Liz Truss
At current exchange rates, about 0.000029. That’s going to vary slightly from day to day, in much the same way that the price in Euros, or Japanese Yen will vary if the price is in USD, because currency valuations fluctuate comparatively.
I remember a time the GBP was worth about $2.50 US; it’s currently more like $1.30 US. Euros used to be worth considerably more than US dollars, but it’s very near parity right now.
As I said, money is an abstraction, it’s not a real thing. European labor didn’t used to be more valuable than American labor, and now it’s worth the same. The abstraction that money is has drifted farther away from the reality that it’s supposed to reflect over time.
Everything is an abstraction. A cat is an abstraction. There’s no cat, only an animal living in your apartment that looks like other similar animals.
What makes this money fake you’d ask? Probably because you cannot buy lettuce for it. Only illegal stuff, money, other fake money and, in some places, you can buy a hotel room for a few nights. Idk, crypto looks more like a commodity than currency to me.
What makes this money fake you’d ask? Probably because you cannot buy lettuce for it.
…But you absolutely can buy lettuce with it. You just have to find someone that will accept that particular currency. Are you seriously going to argue that Canadian currency isn’t real money just because I can’t buy produce in the US at most stores using Canadian loonies or toonies? And you can use American currency very, very easily to buy illegal stuff; pretty much every in-person drug dealer in the US accepts folding cash. (They just don’t take credit cards, PayPal, Venmo, etc. because that’s easily traced.)
Edit: a physical cat is not an abstraction. A physical, individual cat is the thing itself. The abstraction is the concept of “cat”; when you think “cat” as a concept, you aren’t thinking about a specific, individual animal, but of a concept that defines ‘catness’; it probably has fur, whisker, pointy ears, a tail, etc., even though an individual cat may not have any of these things.
But you absolutely can buy lettuce with it. You just have to find someone that will accept that particular currency.
Well, I can find a nerd who would sell me some lettuce for Nintendo Switch. Does it make Nintendo Switch a currency? Nope. With Canadian dimes I guess I can go to any shop in Canada and buy it, which makes it a valid currency in Canada. What you are right about, is that almost every currency is regional.
you can use American currency very, very easily to buy illegal stuff;
Oh thanks, if they allow me to the US I’d probably make use of this information.
Edit: a physical cat is not an abstraction. A physical, individual cat is the thing itself. The abstraction is the concept of “cat”; when you think “cat” as a concept, you aren’t thinking about a specific, individual animal, but of a concept that defines ‘catness’; it probably has fur, whisker, pointy ears, a tail, etc., even though an individual cat may not have any of these things.
Fuck Kant. As you mentioned, cat is definited through catness, but catness is defined through cats, hence a cat abstracts all cats. Unless you think of all other cats, your physical cat is a cloud of atoms
how much lettuce?
all money is a social construct used to represent an abstraction of value added through labor.
That’s the definition of money. It’s not fake. It is an abstraction, but it’s not fake, and we’ve built an intricate system of laws and regulations about it.
Bitcoin is fake money. It’s not backed by any government or any real rules and regulations. It’s the same as every other “tech” company. Take an existing thing, remove all regulations, pretend it’s a new thing, and pocket the increased revenue.
government backing only defines money under Adam smiths theory, but we had money and governmentless money long before smith.
And there was a different government backing it (though not in the same sense of the word) and a different set of laws and regulations around it.
you’ve swallowed the adam smith koolaid. anarchist societies existed with money.
That’s a cute fairy tale.
if you want to deny history, i’m not going to stop you, but you should be ashamed of misleading anyone else who reads this.
I’m ashamed that anyone is dumb enough to be taken in by your obvious lies.
Money existed before there was an intricate system of laws and regulations. Money existed before there were fiat currencies, backed by nothing except a gov’t’s promises. The fact that bitcoin doesn’t have those doesn’t make it any more real, or less real, than any other thing used as currency. It has value because people believe that it has value.
Gold is much the same way. Gold has an intrinsic value for making things that conduct electricity (particularly because it doesn’t corrode), but all other values exist because it’s both relatively rare, and people have decided that it’s pretty.
Money arose at the same time as government. The two are linked.
Currency existed prior to governments; Native Americans in some areas used rare shells as a form of currency; the currency wasn’t a part of their governing process, and by any modern standards, their governments were very loose.
that’s not true.
s/added through/extracted from/
Money won’t magically appear from air if I will make a chair.
Extremely confident source of misinformation
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.
vrbo
There are also at least three ubers where I’m at. It’s more about a business model.
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.
Crypto massively helped me when the banks wanted 45 bucks for an international transfer for my buddy to send me money for something I made him. Fuck banks
I’m gonna pile on the “not happy” side with environmental concerns. You see, with Bitcoin, if crypto mining was as easy as just verifying the next block in the chain, it would be easy and the market would flood. You’d have hyperinflation. The system controls the rate at which new bitcoins are minted by artificially increasing the computational difficulty of the problem. And the end result is that crypto mining intentionally wastes power output comparable to that of a country.
the whole Blockchain could be run by two raspberry pis, and the cap is still limited to 21million. I suspect you don’t know what you’re talking about
It could be. I explained why it isn’t. Why don’t you offer an alternative hypothesis for why so much power is used?
it’s used because because more machines areining than 2 raspberry pis
Calling hashing “mining” was probably the most stupid thing in bitcoin. Since it have nothing to do with minting new coins. It is tru that miners get a bonus in addition to the fees of the block when successful. But that bonus is reduced regularly and will eventually go away.
The power consumption used by hashing became quickly insane by companies chaseing a quick buck.
That’s not even touching on the glaring fact that this anti-crypto sentiment is propped up by those who stand to benefit from downplaying its utility - until they’ve got all their plans ready to fire, of course. The same is true of cannabis these days, and (for those that read) was the same for alcohol only a little while ago, and tobacco before that. There is nothing in this current timeline that will be allowed to attack the economic power dynamic, much less correct it. This hype is as much a pre-packaged and deftly engineered product as the military-sports complex is, but where is the conversation on that, citizens? 🤷🏽♂️
“legal” currency
Are you goldbug?
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.)
Generative AI and AI art is fun as a toy but eh, that’s mostly it.
If you keep an eye on low budget Netflix / Max shows and on a number of the popular digital journals (particularly financials) you’ll notice a rising tide of AI generated content. We’ve had this in the financial press for a long time - Benzinga is notorious for churning out tons of automated functionally-unresearched articles that amount to “Stock price changed because news happened”. But its creeping into everything else.
Generative AI is increasingly a way of making really cheap, lazy templated art into the framework for an endless flow of vapid white noise media. And that’s there to keep you subscribed to these paywalled services, with the illusion of continuously fresh content. The real implementation of this tech isn’t as a toy for media hobbyists. Its as a wholesale replacement of the human-generated fine arts and journalism to reduce costs.
It is about cheapening new media until nobody human can afford to participate anymore and everything in the market space is this thin tasteless slop.
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Taxi accessibility varies wildly depending on where you are.
I lived in a small city (700k-ish people) for a decade and almost never saw a taxi on the streets. One morning, I locked my keys in the house and had to call a cab to take me to work. It took 30 minutes for a taxi to arrive. I lived literally one block away from the city’s taxi depot.
A couple of years later, Uber hit the scene. With their service, I never waited more than 8 minutes for a ride anywhere in the city.
You’re not wrong, but you are leaving out some convenient parts of the experience. Yes, before, you could call a cab company and they would come pick you up and take you somewhere. But, you didn’t know how long it would take for your driver to pick you up. had no idea how much the ride would cost you, and there was a pretty good chance the driver wouldn’t accept a credit card for payment whether it was company policy to or not.
When illegal cab companies came along, they forced competition by giving you realtime information on where your driver was and how long until they would pick you up, price estimates before your ride begins, and a guaranteed method of payment that isn’t cash. Cab companies had to modernize with mobile apps, lower their prices to stay competitive, and improve the overall customer experience.
For as badly as the drivers are treated by the companies, the services were successful because the existing experience with established cab companies sucked.
I use to do it in spare time, you can’t have a cab company without professional drivers that do it full time
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.
standardized
You and I have been going to different hotels
But you could get rooms from other sites before AirBNB. It wasn’t really too huge of a change. Probably more for people renting out space. Stuff like VRBO existed before I think.
Got to agree with that. Also, I live close enough to several desirable vacation destinations for it to be worthwhile to go for a long weekend. It’s nice to be able to book a house with a yard so my dog can come.
It’s like a quest in an adventure game. Follow the map to to get to the inn, follow these clues to find the key, is the inn owned by cool NPC or is it owned by a villain? Boss fight! You’ve done well adventurer, you only owe $30 in cleaning fees!
Well there’s an idea for a video game. The Airbnb adventure full of absurdity and adventure but played 100% straight
Tweet[s] now protected but thanks to Netscape/Mozilla founder and San Francisco night club owner JWZ, Jamie Zawinski, here were some results.
