I worked at AT&T in the late 1990s on an early music sales (not streaming) service called a2b Music. It sounds ridiculous now (why would AT&T think they could succeed in consumer-facing music sales!) but at the time they were a co-owner of the AAC patents and wanted to commercialize them. They also had lots of bandwidth and thought this made sense.
Being "responsible" folks (and also having no choice in the matter) AT&T bent over backward to accommodate the labels. Half the product was proprietary DRM that made everything constantly unusable. Despite this, the labels still strangled us by limiting what we could sell. Apple quite correctly ignored all of this and solved the problem by first launching the iPod, waiting until it had critical mass (much of which involved tons of unpaid MP3 downloading) and then launching the iTunes Store in 2003 when they had an installed base full of piracy - and the major labels had no choice but to join on their terms. (Obviously I pity the small labels who got screwed in the dynamic.)
I think about this a lot when people complain about cryptocurrency or Uber/Lyft evading regulations or destroying legacy businesses. Often this kind of behavior is bad, often the little guy gets crushed. But at the end of the day, legacy businesses really are poison and much of the awfulness could be avoided if they weren't trying to hold on to things so tightly.
> why would AT&T think they could succeed in consumer-facing music sales
Their customers already had the devices on them all the time for playing music, but it was still owned by AT&T (sim lock) and they had the paymen platform with the phone bill. Of course both wasn't really good and they tried to avoid any bigger investment, which made them lose. But still it kinda made sense from a buisness perspective.
Sony bought CBS records entirely because of how the disastrous the whole DAT rollout was because of the record companies fears of consumers being able to make digital recordings at home.
FairPlay DRM was an utter breath of fresh air compared to the DRM we were using at AT&T. There were other companies like InterTrust competing at the time to build incredibly-restrictive powerful DRM, and despite all this crazy work (many PhDs in cryptography!) the labels kept asking for more before they would begrudgingly put a few titles on sale. FairPlay DRM was "just good enough" to satisfy the DRM requirement while also being pretty easy to break, and it remained more or less regularly "broken" for many years. This didn't matter because it turned out that very few people pirated content by breaking the DRM (especially when you could just rip a CD yourself.) As you pointed out, Apple eventually got rid of it.
In my later security evaluation career I saw a similar dynamic play out for other DRM companies, and even saw how corrupt the industry was. If you knew the right people or had enough market power your DRM would be "good enough", and if not: tough luck. Technical evaluation didn't matter.
The DRM was totally reasonably. Even though it was hackable, you didn't really need to, at least in my use cases it was fine.
I contrast that with some phone I bought before that supported some number of songs (nightmare), with zune (nightmare). Apple picked a level of lockdown that I'd guess for 80% of users didn't interfere. That compares to the other foks dramatically.
and allowed you to stream your whole library to, well, pretty much anyone.
early iTunes was pretty slick, in my opinion. We had so many shares streaming in the office. people curated playlists and clicked that share button. loved it.
That's a weird takeaway. My takeaway is that content is king. Content has tilted our whole legal system to its advantage, and the transition to digital has made it worse. It is anti-consumer, anti-competition, anti-innovation, anti-capitalist.
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I suspect you mean speed/bandwidth when you say scale, but that isn't the entirety of what scale means. try being in russia right now and buying products like netflix or similar sold in USD. With crypto you have free (as in freedom) money that enables consenting people to trade without the permission of oppressive governments.
As for bandwidth and speed there are _plenty_ of crypto solutions that match or beat SWIFT, which as of last year was probably peaking somewhere around 150k (very generous assumption based on 40 million messages a day) FIN messages a second. It takes many FIN messages to complete a transaction of exchanging money and there are numerous blockchains which do in excess of 50k tx/sec
I was also once dissed by Steve Jobs at a keynote!
Back when widgets first came out for OS X I was in college and was beginning to learn programming. I was sill very bad, but these widgets interested me because they were essentially just little HTML/CSS/JS webpages. I looked around and saw there was no widget for CNN news.
CNN had RSS feeds of their news, I found some other widget that displayed an RSS feed and basically just plugged this new data source in and it worked! Next I just restyled it to look like it the CNN website which at the time was light blue and pretty ugly, but I made this widget to match.
I released it, and it got some downloads! Months later at the WWDC keynote, I was watching live and I saw Steve sit down at the demo computer and show off some widgets on the big screen. The CNN widget I made was there on screen at the keynote! I didn't believe it at first, I was in shock. Next though, when he showed my widget his only comment was that "it's not as nice looking as [some other news widget] but it gets the job done."
Ouch! Not only was Steve Jobs personally aware of a piece of software I (kind of) wrote but he demoed it at WWDC! But he also said it looked pretty bad... And he was right, it did.
Shortly after this I restyled the widget to look nice on its own, regardless of what the CNN website actually looked like. While this stung, it was a good design lesson to learn. Thanks Steve!
> I flew home that night, posted my meeting notes on my website, emailed all of my clients to announce the news, and went to sleep.
>When I woke, I had furious emails and voicemails from my contact at Apple.
>“What the hell are you doing? That meeting was confidential! Take those notes off your site immediately! Our legal department is furious!”
Wait, who the hell posts meeting notes on their website (and also emails all their clients without a written confirmation at the said meeting)? I would assume any meeting you'd have with a client/potential would be assumed to be confidential. I felt this particular move was very unprofessional on the OP's part.
A meeting with a hundred of your closest friends isn't a meeting, much less a private meeting, it's a public announcement. Maybe if all of those hundred are your employees you could consider it private, but assuming it wouldn't leak would be naïve. Apple wanted a couple weeks head start on Rhapsody and Napster, and they fucked up and forgot to inform their guests that the announcement was under wraps. There's not more to it.
Right. More than that, you get NDAs signed before the meeting. I’ve never known this to not be standard practice. At least when the person you’re talking to doesn’t have a greater leverage in the meeting—but then you naturally restrict what you say under such a circumstance. This sounds like childish behavior on the part of Apple, but honestly when I’ve never been able to change the snooze time on the alarm app, that is what I expect. If I were CD Baby, I would have never gone back to that, as long term you’ve got greater leverage when all the competitors are getting access. In fact, I would have doubled down and paid developers to start working on iPod compatibility for the competitors.
In all honesty, your slashdot post contains massive amount of proprietary Apple information that was disclosed to you, valuable statistics, Apple’s business plan and what not. This was at the time when Apple was vulnerable and much bigger competitors could have easily eaten their lunch. I can’t believe they had no NDAs. I think the original article is bit one sided story.
Are you seriously appealing to sentimental sympathies right now? Apple is and was an entirely for-profit entity whose vendors are likewise. And we're supposed to extend one another sympathy? There are limits to professional courtesy.
If Apple was so vulnerable, failing to get attendees to sign NDAs was just more severe incompetence of the kind that made them vulnerable. It's not someone else's job to babysit them.
If a deal is inked, you can post, but even then usually you’d check in about messaging. I think you were just super pumped :) but it’s still a faux pas.
I guess it depends whether OP made their service as startup looking for a great exit, or a passion project based on their hobby that got extended to their friends.
Personal or business it doesn’t matter. If you met your friend for coffee and they told you they are pregnant (for example) would you feel emboldened to post on Twitter congratulations without even asking her if she wants the world to know?
I get that this was 2003 but if anything it would have seemed even more rude before social media made posting about your life online more acceptable.
But to use your analogy, if my friend invited a few hundred people she knew and told us she was pregnant, then yes, I would feel fine posting about it on Instagram.
The difference is that the pregnancy doesn’t affect the lives of all the people on Twitter. This guy was communicating with his clients, who had to respond to the news by working to prepare their albums for upload to iTunes. He had a perfectly legitimate reason for posting this on his website.
It was a meeting about a new service/product relevant to the services he provides his clients. It doesn’t seem that weird, especially if he saw his responsibility to then to be similar to that of a level or agent.
If I understand the article correctly, are (some/most) files for sale on the iTunes store taken from CD rips rather than made directly from the masters?
That sounds impressively sketchy; anyone who has used AccurateRip can probably testify that CD ripping errors and manufacturing errors are surprisingly common.
At the time, the CD was often the practical master. Many recordings had come from analog tape, sent to a mastering house, who burned the final master to a CD.
Anyway, I skipped this detail in the original article, but Apple let go of the requirement to use their special “put the CD in the drive” tool. We were able to deliver using master WAV/FLAC files, converted to their AAC requirements, and uploaded.
Or I guess you might have been able to do a scriptable method that does involve re-ripping.
That is, stick a CD-RW in the drive, and write a program that would:
(1) Erase the CD-RW, then burn one album's worth of WAV files to it. (Ideally, do it accurately like with a cue sheet file.)
(2) Drive the Apple software's GUI (using AppleScript?) to enter the track metadata, re-rip, and upload.
(3) Repeat until done.
If something ejects the CD-RW, that might mess up the automation. Some drives will pull the CD back in if the tray or disc bumps into something while ejecting, so maybe a strategically-placed heavy object is enough.
Note that this is from the early days of iTunes--things could be radically different behind the scenes now.
I suspect if it isn't listed as 'Apple Lossless' or one of the other fancy labels, its probably originally from a CD rip somewhere. I know from listening to niche-y music, that music catalogs can often be wrong and will be published to multiple music sites. For example Junior Brown's album 'Junior Brown: Greatest Hits' has a track on it that is half glitches AND its the exact same on multiple services and has persisted for years even though I reported it several times on each service. There's also a sea shanty album where half the tracks are static. I reported it to iTunes and Amazon and received boilerplate responses. I then sent an email to the actual band (hard to believe, but its a bunch of old guys) and they contacted their record company...but even they couldn't get it straightened out.
Even when it lists Apple Lossless, there can still be errors in the files.
I found an album from 2001 on Apple Music recently and discovered one of the tracks cuts out at just after one minute, even though Discogs reports the track should be 4 minutes 30 seconds (Slide - Closure (Lounge-Tech Mix), on the Nu Progressive Era compilation: https://www.discogs.com/master/90383-Red-Jerry-Nu-Progressiv...). The album is listed as "Apple Lossless".
I went and bought the original CD version JUST to have that one track in full.
"Mastered for iTunes" is the tag that means someone actually listened to it. (Technically it means the AAC file was checked that it doesn't have more clipping after encode than before it. There's a public PDF about this out there somewhere.)
It's usually missing, but hopefully someone listened anyway.
Back in the early 2000s, I worked for a company that was supplying audio media to Apple, Spotify, etc. and yeah, the record companies would ship them boxes of CDs for ripping, cover scanning, track listing inputting, etc. For some of the companies, it was the only way they had - they didn't have the metadata or cover art in easy digital form, masters available, etc., especially for older stuff.
Yes. I was initially in charge of getting all the music from all the major and indie labels into our system when I worked at what was the biggest competitor to iTunes in Europe. It was 100% from CD. I remember at the end we had a storage unit with hundreds of thousands of CDs. We had teams of young girls and guys working day in, day out ripping CDs.
We did our absolute best to get the high quality rips we could. We sat on the forums and figured out what the best CD-ROM drives were, even if it meant buying really expensive SCSI versions.
But none of the labels had anything in digital format in prior to 2003. I think the majors only started their conversions of their catalogs in about 2004 or 2005.
Just some other background I'll throw out there - the company I worked at opened all the doors at most of the record labels. Most weren't ready to sell their stuff online (WTF) and needed a lot of persuasion. After we got them to sign, Apple would follow us in days or weeks later and have a nice easy job. That was how we found out Apple was trying to build a music store of their own.
And Apple had a good time with the labels. At that time, and perhaps even now, most record labels used Macs for practically everything they did, even admin stuff. So when we went in with a mostly-PC demo, they looked at us sideways. Apple could slide in with shiny stuff and impress them more :)
@sivers: Did we have all your catalog? This was OD2 (On Demand Distribution) in the UK. I have a feeling we did?
It was probably the fastest way at the time to build up their initial catalog quickly; for masters or the best quality recordings, they would need some way to get the music from the masters into the software, and I don't believe Apple had any good audio in ports.
I do recall at some point they had a headphone jack that also supported optical, but don't quote me on that.
Anyway, it would have been better if they had an app that accepted .wav files or something like that.
They could have easily hired a specialized company to receive masters and send them digitized versions. They weren't as ludicrously opulent as they are today, but they were still a pretty wealthy and profitable company.
But why pay, when you can get your own vendors to do it for free after a little song and dance by the Jobster? That's much more Apple.
In Apple Music today they indicate if the track is lossless and if it's taken from a master. I believe that lossless studio master rips are 24-bit / 192 kHz (CD is 16-bit / 44 kHz).
The originals are whatever the artist has. There isn't going to be a standard, especially for indie music, and there's nothing magical about 24-bit/192khz that makes it a good format.
CD quality is already perfect, impossible for a human to hear any improvement on. Except of course that it's only available in stereo post-mix.
>> anyone who has used AccurateRip can probably testify that CD ripping errors and manufacturing errors are surprisingly common.
CDs have significant error correction codes so if it sounds right it IS right. Having said that, I have one song I always skip because it ripped badly and I've never got around to re-ripping it and replacing the bad one. But it's obvious that it's a bad rip to the point that I skip the song so I don't have to hear the glitch.
In other words, if they checked each song before uploading it would be fine.
> CDs have significant error correction codes so if it sounds right it IS right.
For data CD formats, yes. For audio CD formats, readers are allowed to interpolate over uncorrectable errors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C2_error), which would not necessarily result in an abrupt skip or pop.
No, player will interpolate samples with detected but uncorretable errors. Uncorrectable error rate of CD-DA was deemed too high for CD-ROM, thus it uses additional layer of ECC data on top of it.
> Having said that, I have one song I always skip because it ripped badly and I've never got around to re-ripping it and replacing the bad one.
Heh. I have one that has about five seconds of silence, at the end of an album, then about ten seconds of horrifically loud noise. It still catches me off guard every time, but it’s not in heavy rotation so I still haven’t gotten around to trimming it.
"""A plus indicates not only frame jitter, but an unreported, uncorrected loss of streaming in the middle of an atomic read operation. That is, the drive lost its place while reading data, and restarted in some random incorrect location without alerting the kernel. This case is also corrected by Paranoia."""
Article was written in 2010 about events that took place in 2003 or so. Seems like a strange approach even then but I don't know much about music distribution back then, or now for that matter.
Definitely not, there's a specific website for uploading stuff, it's not done trough iTunes. If you're a musician or a small label you're gonna use something like CDBaby or DistroKid though, which uses an API or something equivalent.
I imagine it hasn’t been the case for any new or remastered music added in at least the last 10 years. They upgraded to 256 kbps in 2009 so CD-originated music surely would have ended by then.
That is factually incorrect. An ISO9660 is a filesystem on a data CD. An Audio CD is just a stream of bits. That is why you need to rip an audio CD, the CD player needs to transform that stream of bits into blocks of 4096 bytes. It has to remember where the previous block ended and the next block starts. For many years, you had to buy a luxury brand like Plextor to be sure that ripping process would happen without much stuttering and gaps.
Audio CDs do have framing information (in the subchannel). However, the subchannel has no error correction (only basic error detection), so the CD player has to interpolate across subchannel errors (which are normal and common) to figure out where it is, and doing that properly can get complicated.
Also, the audio frame size is 2352 bytes. Those correspond to 2048 data bytes for data CDs (plus extra error correction).
Sure, but many of the cd cloning tools at the turn of the century would name your bit stream dumped to file with a .iso file type, not .IMG . That's what I'm referring to. I think it was wondering the meaning of that file format that led me to even learn what an ISO standard was.
>The name "Audion" simply popped into my head during a shower
Not much of an electronics history buff, I guess. Also the name of (arguably) the most important electronics invention of the first half of the 20th century.
Spinning fewer available songs as an advantage is some high level bullshitting. Particularly when you immediately go out and get all those "edited" tracks.
Which was sad. If they had said "this makes your phone last 5 minutes longer when it gets wet" even I would have been cautiously optimistic. But "courage" is a stupid argument.
That said, the real reason is they decided bluetooth headphones were finally reliable enough
Bluetooth is a nightmare. My jbl little box won't catch my phone's awesome vibes unless they touch, otherwise audio gets chopped. I'm still trying to find my simple in-in jack which has much better range than "touching" and will make the setup give me less cancer.
Also to hell with cordless peripherals, my so called keyboards and pointers are all catching dust because there's an inexorable demand for these little toxic disgusting things called batteries, and don't you dare go a year or two without using your computers and thus managing their little chernobyls! technology from Apple and the modern crowd can be trusted alone as much as a newborn and a rattlesnake.
I’m not saying your argument is invalid but…sure the iPhone could also have a waterproof headphone jack if we wanted port covers on it too. The phone you linked looks nothing like something I want in my pocket all day
The Pixel 5a has a headphone jack, is waterproof, and has no port covers. It has an actual IP rating, with all the added expense that comes with, and still is shockingly cheap. It has a great looking design and is very close in size to a contemporary iphone.
It can be done, Apple didn't do it because they didn't want to.
Many many phones had waterproof headphone jacks without flaps before the iPhone 7 added waterproofing like the Galaxy S5. Many still do, e.g Samsung A52.
I'm not sure whether I'm more shocked you have multiple reasons/causes for breaking your phone or that you have enough data points available that you can reliably identify a "main reason" amongst those multiple reasons.
Seriously, have you considered taking better care of your possessions?
How the hell do cabled headphones lead to a broken screen? I've owned quite a variety of mobile phones over the last 23 years, have never used a case to protect any of them, have used cabled headphones with a bunch of them, and the only one I've broken is one that I deliberately dropped into a glass of vodka and coke back in the year 2000 because I was smashed off my tits and it seemed like a good idea at the time (it wasn't, even though I'd been planning to replace it anyway - in the interim the lack of a phone was a major PITA for several days).
The majority didn't own a car in the Standard Oil days (and it certainly wasn't a necessity of life). But it was an aspirational thing to own, and de rigueur for those of a certain social class.
The Samsung phones are waterproof, I have seen it accidentally tested.
I love my iPhone but, I really think it's no coincidence the headphone jack removal coincided with the release of airpods, just over a year and a half after the purchase of beats by Dre.
Yep, an S7 went swimming with me for about half on hour one day and after a quick pat down it worked just fine. I wouldn't mind the switch away from jacks so much if most phones & bluetooth earbuds supported higher quality codecs, but it seems relatively rare.
And most other high end phones followed suit. I can’t understand why people are so attached to cords. They tangle, get caught into stuff and are plain inconvenient.
Is there anything nasty in a standard wired headphone though? My impression was that basic electronics are much easier to dispose of than lithium batteries.
No, because I'd have to swap it out if I wanted to use a different device. As my second paragraph ays, having to swap it out frequently is a downside compared to my client device having a standard socket.
The headphone has a mini-XLR to 3.5mm connector built in. If it fails it's easy to replace. If the client device supports the standard 3.5mm connector it doesn't have to give a shit that the other end is XLR on IntelMiner's headphone (or in the case of my own headphones, 2.5mm for one set and 3.5mm for the other).
Bluetooth syncing issues? I put my AirPods in my ear and my phone immediately switched to them. I put my phone in my pocket and switch to my iPad and the audio switches. I get a phone call and answer it and my phone switches back.
If my wife wants to listen to the same thing I’m listening to, we can share the audio.
...and I tell my iphone to stop sending audio to the bluetooth speaker and it disconnects, then immediately reconnects, until I un-pair it. And when my wife pulls into the driveway my phone call unexpectedly switches to her car. Or my headset just announces "disconnected" in my ear in the middle of a zoom occasionally. It's positively weird how infrequently these type of things happen when you just ... plug or unplug a wire.
and today while I was making dinner and listening to music on the bluetooth speaker in the kitchen, it suddenly disconnected from my phone and connected to my daughter's laptop where she was playing minecraft with her friends and everyone started screaming "what's going on?!" at me at a volume loud enough for the neighbors to hear.
Yes, having them get caught on something is annoying, but 99.44% of my headphone use is seated at my desk, where that never happens, and where most of my bluetooth problems DO happen. I doubt in my entire life I've ever gotten on or off an airplane or run through an airport while wearing headphones.
I don’t either. I have my Beats Flex just for travel and I fly on average at least once a month. I take them off and hang them around my neck - not connected to my phone.
But that begs the question. Has the entire industry not figured out BT headphones aside from Apple?
I think that's a fair question. My understanding is that when airpods are talking to an iphone, they are not acting as merely BT devices, but use some proprietary apple juju that's "better." And I'm sure it's better, if wirelessness is your priority. But the drawbacks and price are far too much for me. I like being able to have all my computers, devices, mixers, and headphones be compatible without worrying about software. It's just two analog signals going through a wire, and it's easy. And as a bonus I don't have to have two separate sets of headphones to accommodate the non-bluetooth things like my electric piano.
My AirPods Pro work well almost all the time, but notably, not 100% of the time. Everything feels like magic until the things won't pair for some reason, or there's minor gaps in the audio, or the case won't show its charge state when opening it near the phone — and there's zero UI or feedback to deal with it. It's infuriating.
Lastly, I enjoyed both wired headphones AND my Airpods when I still had my iPhone 6S. The choice between wired or wireless is a false dichotomy.
So the solution to a problem that didn't exist before is to buy new hardware? Seems pretty wasteful and worse, not to mention some of that hardware is a vehicle with only an AUX port.
The $10 adapter apple sells doesn't sound as good as the one they used to build into their phones, and removes inline volume/play/pause controls. Not only that, but now I lose access to my phone's charging port in order to use a wired connection (Charging needed during GPS usage), unless I buy an even more expensive adapter — most of which are unreliable and have universally terrible reviews.
Macs still enjoy the best of both worlds with wired + wireless support — including the upcoming 2022 models — and it's hard to deny the phone (And tablet!) experience hasn't gotten worse without the 3.5mm jack.
That adapter forces one to choose to listen to music or charge a phone, which is very problematic when using GPS, as it's very battery intensive, especially as the phone is often in direct sunlight.
>Time moves on, should they also have not gotten rid of the 30 pin adapter?
Apple is still releasing new hardware with a 3.5mm port! The port is far from outdated. Again, both wireless and wired audio coexisted nicely on the iPhone, this is a problem of their own doing, and they've made the experience objectively worse.
Apple is also releasing new hardware with multiple USB-C ports and an SD card reader. Does that mean it should also release an iPhone with all of those features?
iPhone never had SD card support, so that's a non-sequitur [Edit: Because we're talking about unnecessarily deprecated features, not new ones]. And yes, iPhone with USB-C support would be incredibly well received! Time to ditch the Lightning port asap.
It takes a fraction of a second to 'pair' my wired headphones to my phone and have music start coming out. With BT I would have to charge them, turn them on, fiddle with a menu, wait for them to connect, and listen to a silly sound effect. Even the tiny fade-in they add really annoys me. I like instant feedback with my devices, I like how I can feel the jack click into place and music starts coming out with no perceptible delay.
I can't say I've ever had a problem with cords tangling or being inconvenient.
I just open my AirPods Pro case and stick the buds in my ear and audio automatically switches to my AirPods.
Even with my $59 Beats Flex, I just press a button and turn them on and they automatically pair. When they are taken out my ear and stuck together via the magnets, audio returns to my phone.
Not to mention how they seamlessly switch from my iPhone, iPad and Mac as I change what I’m doing.
Many reasons have already been mentioned, but I have some more.
Corded peripherals may be inconvenient. In my experience though, they are usually less inconvenient than bluetooth ones. This probably varies by application.
Another major problem is latency. If I want to use headphones to play a keyboard, very little latency is tolerable. Bluetooth doesn't even come close.
No. What is your obsession with phones? Apple has removed the ability to use wired headphones. So the wired headphones I have couldn't be used with my (hypothetical) Apple phone.
Yes. Ok, we've almost looped all the way back around. In the context of talking about high end phones, this question was posed. (by you)
> I can’t understand why people are so attached to cords.
On the assumption that you wanted to understand some reasons people like corded headphones, I provided some real reasons. I use my headphones for things other than my phone. But it would be nice to use them with the phone also.
If I'm listening to something and my phone battery is about to die, I can just plug it in and continue listening. Not really an option with any Bluetooth headphones I've tried, even my set with a cord connecting the two doesn't allow use while charging.
Reminds me of Nintendo Seal of Quality for the NES. The uncontrolled amount of crap games coming out for Atari was the demise of the home videogame wave at that time.
Nintendo felt the need to closely control the supply of games and their quality to "guarantee" a good experience.
> Nintendo with its lockout chip held an absolute stranglehold on supply of NES games that came out
Yes, not only did Nintendo possess the unilateral authority to decide which games got published, but Nintendo was the sole manufacturer of the game cartridges.
This meant that Nintendo decided when those cartridges would be manufactured, and set an upper limit on the quantity. (Plus, they required you to pay for the manufacturing in advance.)
The fact that they controlled the manufacturing schedule meant that they might delay your cartridges if they had a first-party game in the pipeline which might compete with yours.
Or yesterday, when they claimed that buying a $4000 Mac Studio advances social justice. That must have been the most tortured attempt at checking off that box I've seen in a while.
Hearing this story makes my heart boil in rage. Is only way to achieve true success is by being ass Like Jobs ? If you have read anything about him by accounts of people who know him, You will know that he prepared that speech to spite on Sivers. Once his ego was satisfied after Sivers had to refund the money he then gave a go ahead for deal. There is no benefit of doubt about it.
12 years later, does anyone have any additional perspective on this? The story didn’t make much sense to me. Especially the end where they went ahead and uploaded the music to Apple anyway. Why would they do that? If someone treated me the way Apple treated CD Baby, I wouldn’t put up with that level of abuse.
It was an example of Steve being Steve: he wanted their back catalog but he also wanted to extract a pound of flesh for their perceived slight more. He had absolutely no problem doing or saying things that put partners (such as the Motorola Rokr presentation a couple years later) or even employees (the time he indirectly joked about getting rid of Tony Fadell on stage) in a bad light/spot. Not saying he didn't often have a point, but he did it in a way that often came off as petty and vindictive. In this case, he probably knew exactly where Apple was heading re: the music business and also probably viewed CD Baby as a competitor to be taken out, so there was that aspect to it as well.
While I don't think they've been (as) vindictive at a corporate level since Steve, Apple as a company has been yanking 'partners' around like this whenever they had the power to for at least the last 15-20 years, depending on the industry.
His responsibility is primarily to enabling his clients (the musicians) to make money from selling their music. Regardless of his feelings Apple was offering a sales channel for his musicians.
CD Baby was the biggest independent music distribution channel at the time (I have to image its been surpassed by Bandcamp now?) and iTunes was very clearly going to be one of the biggest markets available.
Getting the hundreds of thousands artists that use your service banned from iTunes because someone was rude would've been a really terrible business decision.
I don't think the artists would be happy to miss the opportunity to be on iTunes just because Jobs was slow, involved in marketing spin, and specifically obnoxious to this one guy. People and companies (yes, major ones) behave far worse all the time. Boycotts can make sense, but relatively rarely compared to the number of times such bad behavior occurs.
i think i remebered an arstechnica article (was it that? i dont remember) that explained in simple terms how jobs does keynote better. they explained stuff like "just write in as few words as possible your topic and speak. if you wrote a paragraph on screen, why would anyone hear you repeat that?"
and other stuff like using a plain background instead of fancy things.
i would love to revisit that but sadly i have been unable to find it
There was an entire book on Jobs' presentations called Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo. Perhaps Ars wrote a review and summarized some of the top points?
Guy Kawasaki has also written quite a bit about effective presentations and has a 10/20/30 rule. Ten slides, twenty minutes, 30 point font. The idea of putting as few words as possible on a slide sounds like a Kawasaki thing.
Watching yesterday’s keynote, I couldn’t help but notice the “homogenized diversity” that’s become a mainstay of Apple’s post-COVID product announcements. Even though there were folks from all cultures (which is great), their hand gestures and word emphasis were unusually uniform.
I’d love to see a glimpse of the presentation skills class they probably have through Apple University.
I remember a lesson from years ago about presentations, this was in a military context, that either you can do the talking or the slides can do the talking. Pick one, don't try to do both.
I once read somewhere that we only have one language center in the brain, and thus can't read and listen simultaneously, so those text-laden slides basically do nothing but provide a distraction; you're alternating between listening and reading, there is no such thing as doing them both at once.
There may be some room for providing illustrations, but bullet point presentations really do far more harm than good.
A marketing slide or a visual aide to a speech should be as light in prose as possible. But it is valid to use slides as primary information delivery mechanisms with the speech as a complement.
Right, but since you can't actually listen to the speech as you read the slides (or read the slides as you listen to the speech), then the slides really should be a complementary booklet or some other written text intended to be read at a different time.
Slides are perfectly fine and readable if you only talk about content on the slide. Just make simple bullet points that are reiterated in your speech and keep it on topic
I just designed a presentation for a Zoom talk I'm doing, and its intended use case is not only that I'll be going through it during the talk, but that printouts will be available, and the handout/resource will be available digitally perpetually.
Since the presentation involves complex, easily confused topics (voting research), being very specific is necessary in this case.
Marketing a product or making an argument require different types of presentations than teaching. Each can be done well or poorly.
I actually sent it to them both ways (I just consider it basic good practice since I have a background in accessibility; presentation + some form of 'just text' is my default)!
Which is fun, because there's notes and then True Notes(TM) with all my terrible jokes.
One benefit of slides that largely duplicate the same content that was in the talk is that if they are made publicly available, then you can go back over them if you forget/weren't there/learn better through reading/etc. Of course, the same is true for transcripts, but noone makes transcripts and everyone makes slides.
I've met at least two people in my lifetime who had 2 or 3 language processors in their brain. They could type unrelated sentences while listening/speaking in a different conversation.
That's not me, though - I can't even finish typing a word I've thought of if I'm trying to listen to someone talk or say something to them at the same time. I have 1 language processor at the best of times.
This is how you do presentations if you're someone that spent some time learning how to do presentations. It doesn't take Steve Jobs. The better lecturers know that.
The thing about writing as few words as possible on the slide isn't unique to Jobs. I've been teaching that to my students for 20 years or more. I got it from a book( well, more like a booklet. it is really thin with tons of pictures) called Save Our Slides.
I remember sitting in a short session at a small UK university, about presenting, in 2002. The main message was to keep the audience's attention on you, not the screen. In many ways it was stating the obvious, but it's true that few people ever stop and reason about these things.
To this day, the few tips I picked up in that silly little session still make me a much better presenter and slide-maker than 99% of my colleagues, hands down, and I'm really not bragging.
that's something I learned at university, though I don't remember if it was explicitly told in class or something I picked up when preparing presentations
I think this works effectively in many situations (particularly keynotes), but I frequently give presentations that are (1) meant to inform more than persuade or entertain, (2) are often given to an audience with a substantial fraction of non native English speakers, and (3) the slides are regularly distributed after the fact. This pretty much necessitates having texty slides that I have to read more or less verbatim, even if that makes the experience more dull.
Only tangentially related, but last year I’ve tried ripping some CDs with iTunes^wMusic.app and it’s still unable to do it right - there was a lot of skipping. Which is frankly pathetic when compared with cdparanoia, which had that working some 30 years ago.
that whole period from mid to late 90s to early 2000s had so many easy and cheap entrepreneurial opportunities. You didn't need to spend millions to reinvent the wheel to make a product or exit.
This passive-agressive crap is unnerving. And the worse thing is that they only get away with it because the competition is worse.
Also the "yes you have to use our software" BS. Sounds like someone thinks they're too important. Sure let me have someone using a desktop app all day just because you can't be bothered to "think differently"
They still DRM Apple Music (which you could argue is selling music, but as a service), and files which had DRM when you bought them, and movies, it seems.
Movies have DRM. Blame that on the studios But Apple, Amazon, Google, Vudu and a couple of the other digital movie services participate in Movies Anywhere with most of the studios. You buy a movie from one place and it is automatically considered purchased from the other stores.
Movies have always had copy protection - even back in the analog days with Macrovision.
Music was supposed to be copy-protected, too: the RIAA fought tooth and nail to kill Digital Audio Tape, and then settled for the AHRA which mandated all "consumer" digital recorders have DRM in them. The problem was that this was legally ineffective[0] once PCs got CD drives and enough storage and processing power to deal with the firehose that was CD-DA. Insisting on DRM for legal music downloads was their way of putting the genie back in the bottle, but that also gave Apple a monopsony over all digital music, much like the App Store does for iOS software today. Going DRM-free let the labels sideload MP3s onto people's iPods and cut Apple out of the equation. But they would have never agreed to do it if Apple was willing to license FairPlay on FRAND terms like Microsoft did with PlaysForSure.
More generally, consumer copying technology was never really "supposed" to exist. It's often been said that "copyright was supposed to regulate publishers, not consumers", which I agree with. But the flipside of this was "consumers weren't supposed to become casual publishers", which is what the AHRA, DMCA 1201, and DRM as a whole was/is trying to achieve. But that's largely failed, and we live in the world where everyone is a publisher all the time, which is why everyone has to be regulated like a publisher all the time.
It's kind of funny, because at the same time Jobs is explaining why DRM sucks and basically can't be standardized, they were also developing the iPhone which would go on to repeat the whole "only we sell things wrapped in this DRM" thing... except without the sideloading option.
The article you linked adds it's own commentary which has aged like milk. Jobs wasn't so much opposed to DRM in general, as much as he just didn't like it on music. This probably has more to do with the fact that Apple was not a music label[0], and thus he was predisposed to look at music solely as a consumer[1]. When it comes to things Apple does publish[2], such as software, they are extremely protective of it.
[0] And legally, cannot, because of numerous trademark lawsuits with Apple Records, the record label of The Beatles
[2] "Publishing" in this case means funding the creation, marketing, and physical manufacturing of some creative work. This is primarily what a music label does, and is part of the reason why they take so much from artists.
The market changes as far as your second foot note. No one has ever made a successful business with subscription music. By “successful” I mean “decently profitable”.
Spotify makes around $3 million a quarter in profit.
Movies Anywhere should be called Movies Anywhere So Long As It's in the U.S. It doesn't exist anywhere else. What's more annoying is Movies Anywhere seems to have led to the demise of Ultraviolet which actually existed outside the U.S so digital codes are even worse than they used to be where I live or not existent.
Been using iTunes Match for many many years but honestly you can tell it's not getting attention anymore. Very glitchy these days with playback you can't scrub sometimes or just skipping tracks for no reason, struggling to sync tracks up to it sometimes.
Also you can't turn off the Apple Music ads anymore, or at least the setting claiming to turn them off just resets itself after a few hours.
>And the worse thing is that they only get away with it because the competition is worse.
I'd say it is because some form of digital / streaming music is what a lot of people want ...
Is having access to "all the music" that big of a deal for most people?
I just want music accessible to me, most platforms all provide that now, and it's all WAY MORE accessible than back in the day when I had binders of CDs.
If someone has 4,000,000 songs, or 8,000,000 I probably wouldn't know... I don't really care what the justification for either is.
They were competing with the ubiquity of CDs back then. To get people to go for the whole digital download thing, they had to be more convenient. A big part of that was not having gaps in their offerings in terms of back catalog.
More songs = more music that is potentially accessible to more people with different tastes. I don't use apple music or spotify because they lack quite a few albums that I've had to source myself.
I'm not talking about discoverability. I do that myself externally by reading discogs credits for an album and going from there.
I would prefer a music streaming service to have nearly all of the albums or songs that I want to listen to. Having more songs means that is much more likely.
I know!! That had me LOLing so hard. Why now? Hahaha. It's like Apple was playing some next level chess with this supplier. They'd angered them, and Apple didn't forget. My God :)
Can you imagine having to manually insert 100000 CDs and all their metadata into some GUI, even though you have everything on file elsewhere already? And not just any GUI application, but the complete garbage that is iTunes.
Because some dev/clown has the hubris to proclaim "there is no other way"? I'd not care if you're Steve Jobs himself. That's some just laugh and leave the room level of Kafkaesque ridiculousness.
Glad I work in the era of public-facing APIs. Even if Apple still seems to be clinging on to their consume-only mentality.
I’ve become an Apple fan as I’ve spent most of my IT time in their ecosystem over last 5 years. I’ve come to appreciate their UI pattern (which was confusing at first due to my conditioning of Linux), the consistency, nifty little features.
However to this day I just couldn’t get used to their iTunes (and now Apple Music) UX. I’m always fumbling around, searching for a song is a same sequence of confusing clicks and swipes. I thought it was me but now I’m convinced that it’s just a garbage of a software.
Speaking of their UI pattern, I just don't understand why MacOS doesn't indicate when one software has 2 or more open windows. For example, if you open 2 Word documents, the Word app will only show one, and there's no intuitive way to tell if there's a second window, and no intuitive way to switch to the second window. My wife has had a Mac for 10 years and still only semi understands how these windows work.
Edit: comments below are trying to tell me how to switch windows, of course I know how. My point is MacOS doesn't tell you there are multiple windows. On PC, the Dock will show "stacked" icons.
Yeah this is fucking horrible. I have tons of shit open
I shouldn't have to see all of it to find the one thing I want. I should be able to pick from the app.
There's an app out there called ubar which replaces the dock and it's functionality is amazing. But it's memory hog and freezes all the time.
I'm forced to use a Mac for work
Probably the most powerful machine I've ever owned. I have a giant ass 40+ in curved monitor.
I still prefer my 10+ year old Dell laptop with an aging Linux distro on it.
Hell.. I prefer Windows.
Using a Mac is so painful. The moronic fn key placement.
Using a terminal reverts back to using the Ctrl key but everything else uses ⌘
There's no real concept of window management.
The version of Bash is 10+ years old.
I've always hated the "menu bar" but now that I have a monitor bigger than Lizzo's ass I really hate it. Having to drag my cursor 45miles up to get to Edit is idiotic.
The number of apps I have to install to get it to function like a real desktop makes my system tray look like it did on Windows XP SP2.
Nevermind whenever my non-apple Bluetooth headset connects it auto-opens Apple Music even though I've never once used it and I never will. There's zero way to disable this functionality. Zero.
If only there were a way to script Apple applications, perhaps some kind of architecture, for scripting, that was open, and Apple's own apps actually supported it...
Well his brain is not your brain, and no matter how ridiculous you think he is, he has the final outcome of Apple to prove he's right. Put a different person in his position and the company would have bankrupted.
Yeah, no doubt. Everything can be automated. And I'm sure some dirty hack was cobbled together to work around the situation rather than turning some poor human into a zombie with both RSI and PTSD. I'd hope.
But let's not turn the tables that way. My point is that "opportunity" should have been addressed _before_ Steve Jobs decided to fly in all those industry bigwigs to do his sales pitch. I mean, who was selling who here exactly? Different times I guess...
I wouldnt say thats a correct analogy though, a traditional bank / cryptocurrency provide similar user experiences these days with how their mobile apps work. At the end of the day even in crypto an overwhelming majority of users interact with blockchains from centralized bank like platforms that function in an incredibly similar way, especially with the advent of neo banks like Chime. Downloading a song was a completely different experience from driving to a store to get a CD.
The analogy falls flat on its face when you realize that crypto transactions both take more time and cost more money than PayPal, credit/debit, ACH, etc.
When Apple introduced iTunes, the appeal to consumers was obvious: You can buy only the songs you want, you are not forced to buy a whole album. You can do it from the comfort of your home. And you don't have to go through the (then time consuming) process of ripping a CD to get it on your iPod.
With cryptocurrencies, I see no such obvious benefits that would compel consumers to trade their bank accounts and credit cards for ethereum wallets. The transaction fees are considerably higher. Their decentralized nature, often touted as their greatest asset, becomes and anti-feature once you need to issue a chargeback for a purchase from a fraudulent seller. Crypto does not solve a problem people regularly deal with, and nothing about it is fundamentally easier than the systems it seeks to replace.
It’s true that txs take more time and money in POW chains such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, but it is certainly not true of many many other cryptocurrencies.
For example, Terra is a Proof of Stake blockchain with negligible fees and a 6 second settlement time. It is currently widely used as a payment system in South Korea.
I live in South Korea and like to think that I keep track of the current state of fintech but I have never heard of Terra or any cryptocurrency being widely used for payments. Where is it usable?
https://www.terra.money - to learn about Terra, founded by Do Kwon a Korean Billionaire entrepreneur
They offer many currrency mirroring stablecoins including Korean Won in addition to the US dollar-pegged coins.
https://chai.finance/ Chai is the Payments solution. I’m told they have 2 million users in Korea but you may know better. It can be used to pay in MacDonalds and Starbucks to name a couple examples.
Ah, I see. I haven't used Chai but from what I can tell it's a service that lets you make payments through multiple methods (e.g credit card, bank transfer). I don't think they've published statistics but I'm guessing most of their payments don't go through crypto.
I can’t speak to the payments solution https://chai.finance/ but UST is censorship-resistant like Bitcoin and does not have chargebacks. I consider that a feature, not a bug.
You may consider that a feature, but most people don't. As someone who has had to issue a chargeback in the past, I'm not about to give it up in exchange for solving a hypothetical problem that does not affect me. Chargebacks are not "censorship".
Fair enough. I still use my credit card for most purchases also and I too appreciate the ability to chargeback if needed.
Still, it is important to appreciate that consumers do pay a premium for this feature on all transactions built into the price because merchant account for the risk of chargebacks when setting their prices. I can’t estimate the amount of premium but I would guess it adds up to a few percent.
That’s not a problem the average consumer has, not even close to the same way music was really annoying to consume before the iPod. Like, sucks for those it happens to, but it just isn’t a “real” problem in the grand scheme of life
The average consumer is currently facing the prospect of high-inflation, exploding gas prices, and is facing a real challenge if they want to safely save the purchasing power of their earnings. I consider these to be important problems to solve so the average consumer can continue to stay above water and maybe even get ahead in life.
There is a joke about how the things we want are getting cheaper (iPhones, TVs, music streaming) while the things we need are getting more expensive (food, housing, healthcare, higher education)
Offering society a high-yield stablecoin savings option finally allows people to grow their savings and stay ahead of inflation with low relative risk.
These aren't problems crypto actually solves. If used as an actual day-to-day replacement for the dollar, they would still be subject to the same market pressures that drive inflation and gas prices.
Perhaps you missed my other comments on this thread where I explained multiple ways to earn savings rates on stablecoins that significantly exceed the inflation rate. No traditional bank offers similar options.
Right now the average on-chain Bitcoin payment for $0.94 USD. I bought a conference ticket a couple weeks ago from someone in Thailand for $0.24 USD. One confirmation took 6 minutes. This isn’t a Lightning payment which would be nearly instant and almost free. It is a payment on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Remember, that payment includes final settlement, something that can take months for a credit card merchant.
Also, there are many other Proof-of-stake chains that offer faster and cheaper settlement.
Whether consumers realize it or not, the risk of chargebacks does increase the cost to the merchants which they absolutely pass onto consumers in the form of higher prices.
And those merchants will still charge those higher prices no matter what method you're using to pay, unless they only accept crypto. So by paying with crypto you're paying an artificially-higher price _and_ paying gas fees.
PayPal is around 2-3%, credit/debit around 0.5-5% depending on where and whether you have a physical card reader.
ACH is, to my understanding, cents or even less than one, but suffering from an utter lack of security/authentication.
Meanwhile, in the Eurozone, electronic cash and wire transfers have had fees of exactly €0.00 for many years, and my online-only bank does “instant” transfers (takes a few seconds but that’s mostly the app latency) up to €2000 for the same price.
The transaction-cost problem has many possible solutions.
Last I looked, they did not seem to be free for commercial use (including cases with just B2C transactions).
I see these as worse, because they suggest to the average consumer American that sending money is free, reducing pressure on a proper low-delay settlement system with sufficiently low fees to allow users to ignore the fees in most instances.
Say, 1ct + 0.05%. (That's AFAIK comparable to SEPA's version of electronic checks (i.e., asynchronous pull), and fees for low-latency push shouldn't exceed 0.2%, either. With delayed settlement, even push should allow the very low fees, though.)
The music comparison is not driving to the store compared with downloading.
It's pirating to downloading legally. iTunes made it just as convenient to buy as it did to pirate, which is the main reason people pirate anything - inconvenience. Steam did exactly the same thing for PC gaming. Netflix did the same for TV and Film. (Only now stuff is split between so many streaming services pirating is becoming the path of least resistance again).
Sort of a tangent but your parenthetical about streaming services is why, after roughly 10 years of “keeping my nose clean,” I’ve found myself slowly firing up my home server more and more frequently with “very legal and very cool” content I am slowly (but increasing in speed) acquiring.
I don’t mind paying for my content. I have several subscriptions. But the constant shuffles and searches for where i can watch anything is becoming a bigger and bigger obstacle. I’m going to pick the easiest route, not the cheapest one. Hell it’s why I don’t download music - I don’t love Spotify as a company, but damn they make it easy to listen to my music. If they were to fracture or 20 other competitors pop up and licensing starts getting all spread out/hard to follow, then you can bet music will be in line for me too.
This doesn't completely fill your needs, but the Apple "TV" app does a great job with cross-app searching. For most any content I want to watch, I have one place to go to search for it, I know if it's available on any of the streaming services I subscribe to and if it's not available for free it's trivially easy to rent / buy a high-quality stream.
It's not perfect, as far as I know Netflix content isn't indexed and frequently it suggests I watch a movie in an app that doesn't actually serve that movie, but it's mostly OK.
It’s funny you mention Apple TV. I was considering that just yesterday as a way to simplify things. It just seems kind of silly to buy a (somewhat) redundant piece of hardware though in the age of smart tv’s. I’ve got an LG C1 and I just find it silly I may need to go around the onboard apps to access the exact same stuff. But maybe it’s at least a stop gap idk
Not sure how familiar many here are on the difference in savings rates available in crypto stablecoins vs traditional banks.
My US FDIC savings account offers a measly interest rate of 0.03% APY right now. By contrast rates on crypto stablecoins are often 7-10% APY easily with some such as UST on a Terra offering an amazing 19.53% APY.
Yes the crypto stablecoins are riskier in some ways than USD and FDIC insurance is still the gold standard, at least up to their limit. On the other hand, there are now decentralized insurance protocols available on stablecoin yields which cover risks of a stablecoin or an unintended behavior in a smart contract for ~2% APY.
Everyone should do their own research of course, but crypto can be compelling in that at the very least it can allow your savings to preserve their purchasing power net of inflation, something that isn’t possible with a traditional bank savings account.
I have no knowledge of stablecoins. But are my savings secured? As in if the bank breaks down, becomes insolvent and dissolved my money is still backed by the government and I will not loose a dime?
Else I don't care about 0.03% or 7 to 10%.
Regardless of me thinking that a growth economy is eating the planet. When it comes toy savings I am more conservative as a mythical pope mixed with Ronald Reagan. I don't care about it growing. I care about it not vanishing in the blink of an eye.
Everything else is just playmoney. No problem if I loose it or use it to light a fire in my fireplace at home. Just printed paper (virtual) that I can spend for whatever.
As I mentioned in the GP, for 2.5% per year you can insure any amount of stablecoin savings against risk of loss, so yes they are secured. In a traditional bank your savings are only secure up to a specific limit which is $250k in the US and less everywhere else in the world (e.g. $6,600 USD in Ukraine). Also in a bank your savings are not secure against inflation which is currently -7.5% in the US and as high as -54% in Turkey.
In other words, for a US resident, putting money in the bank is currently virtually guaranteed to lose at least 7.5% of it’s purchasing power per year. It brings new meaning to the expression “safe as money in the bank.”
Here is an example:
1. Purchase UST on an exchange on a 1:1 basis with USD
2. Send it to the Terra Station self-custody wallet on your phone
3. Deposit the UST into a decentralized app (dApp) at www.anchorprotocol.com to earn 19.53% APY accruing every 6 seconds
4. Purchase the equivalent of FDIC insurance for ~2.5% APY from any of Nexus Mutual, InsurAce or Bridge Mutual
5. Enjoy a nice safe net ~17% APY on a USD stable deposit
* Bonus: Because of the payout mechanism this fixed APY yield is considered a capital gain and not interest income so it is taxed more favorably than a traditional savings account and you don’t trigger a taxable event until you sell.
I would suggest it is worth investigating and maybe trying it out with a small amount to see for yourself.
Nexus Mutual InsurAce is a small insurance, which isn't backed by a bigger insurance. Traditional insurances can cross protect the risks e.g. fire & water, europe & asia or sell some risks to a reinsurance company. Maybe there is no regulation on how much reserves in fiat they have to keep. So no not the same protection.
Nexus Mutual and InsureAce are two independent entities but still those are fair points.
However did you know that FDIC insurance only requires 1.35% reserves? Of course they can also have the FED print money which drives further inflation for everyone.
Net, net, no the guarantees are not the same but government-backed insurance isn’t as safe as we would like to assume.
Also, outside the US, deposits are only 100% insured up to very modest limits. Banks offer no insurance above these modest limits.
As a timely example in Ukraine only deposits up to 200,000 UAH are insured. At the current UAH:USD conversion rate, that means only up to $6,600USD of deposits are protected. Anything over that amount has zero coverage.
Crypto stablecoins can provide options for those in need. Please don’t immediately dismiss them simply because you personally may not see the use-case.
It sounds like those insurers are offering insurance that's way too cheap for the risks of a deal purporting to give you 20% APY in free money. That, or the insurers are planning to run off with the cash too...
Yeah, they are basically just currently picking the pennies in front of the soon to come steamroller. Though in this case, the "insurer" has basically no regulatory obligations so the owners are probably making out like bandits. If the insurer has no money and no FDIC like scheme to back up any insurer failure, then it's just going to be the "investors" who will get wrecked.
As I mentioned in a sister comment, I don’t endorse any of these insurance products as I personally haven’t done the research. Also, as with any insurance product the devil is in the fine print and it pays to understand their ability to payout in a crisis.
That said, this is a fast-moving space with new entrants coming online all the time.
For example I just Learned about Ozone Insurance which claims to be a 100% trustless on-chain insurance plan [0]
Three separate insurance companies offer similar rates to protect stablecoin savings so the market seems to disagree. These are all well capitalized insurance programs run by well-known entities so - not fly by night outfits. That said none have been stress tested in a market crisis as yet.
My only argument is that anyone dismissing crypto as a scam with no use case who hasn’t taken the time to investigate is doing themselves a disservice.
This is a rapidly evolving field with lots of innovation and while it pays to be skeptical, it also pays to be curious.
Read my response to user SketchySeaBeast below. The 19.53% APY payout rate is not fixed and not guaranteed, just as the interest rate paid in bank savings is not fixed nor guaranteed.
The principle and any interest earned to date is insured if you purchase the insurance. Again, I don’t endorse the insurance products as I haven’t done the research, but elsewhere on this thread I mention Ozone Insurance which claims to be a trustless on-chain stablecoin insurance protocol.
The current payout rate is 19.53%, so nets to 17% after paying for insurance to a 3rd party.
The accounting is transparent and on the Terra blockchain so it certainly isn’t a Ponzi scheme. However the payout rate is not guaranteed or constant and does fluctuate from time to time. The UST/Anchor Protocol payout is likely not sustainable and should come down overtime. That said the Terra Foundation recently put an additional billion dollars into the incentive pool so the rates should continue for at least another year.
I would never advocate putting money into anything without investigating the risks for oneself. That said, even money in the bank isn’t always safe as savers in Cyprus learned the hard way after the GFC when their government decided the banks needed a bailout more than depositors needed their savings.
I took a look at Nexus mutual - where do they claim they'll pay out 17% guaranteed if the investment fails? It looks like it requires a loss of at least 20% of the cover amount to make a claim, and that's due to either a network failure or a theft of some sort.
They claim they payout if the stablecoin:USD peg is broken by x% for more then y days OR if the smart contracts are expoited in unintended ways (read hacked) The other insurance products provide similar payout policies.
The Anchor Protocol offers the accrual of UST at a specified rate (currently 19.53%) but just like your bank does not guarantee the interest rate paid in savings deposits for any fixed period of time, the payout rates on Anchor and other similar protocols can and does vary over time, though Anchor Protocol has paid just shy of 20% APY for over a year and the fund has been backstopped with an extra billion dollars so should be stable for at least another year.
Notably due to the mechanics of the Terra blockchain recording these transaction, you deposited UST balance (which is protected by insurance if purchased) is updated every 6 seconds.
Therefore, while the payout rate varies (like a bank) and is not guaranteed over time (like a bank), you can move your funds if it ever drops below an acceptable level for you and you would only be out the interest on a few seconds to a day - depending on how closely you watch it.
Since this is all on-chain via smart contracts it is transparent to monitor or move programmatically
for the paranoid.
> Everyone should do their own research of course, but crypto can be compelling in that at the very least it can allow your savings to preserve their purchasing power net of inflation, something that isn’t possible with a traditional bank savings account.
This is not possible unless there's production available denominated in the stablecoin, you have to buy whatever currency they'll accept first.
Even then it's not possible to "preserve purchasing power" by keeping a currency, because that's not what currencies do - they're a medium of exchange not a store of value. Imagine if everyone held a stable currency, but one day got tired of going to McDonald's and stopped trading with them. Eventually they go out of business; now you can't buy it anymore. You have failed to store value measured in McDonald's purchases. If you want to invest to rebuild it, then it's more expensive and that's supply shock inflation. This is more or less why central banks target 2% and not 0% inflation, to encourage occasional maintenance spending.
There isn't really much that can actually store value. Gold and bitcoin obviously rely on bagholders. But in general "storing value" means compelling other people to do work for you, and they're not always going to be there to do that.
> On the other hand, there are now decentralized insurance protocols available on stablecoin yields which cover risks of a stablecoin or an unintended behavior in a smart contract for ~2% APY.
I hadn't heard of this, how would someone get set up with something like this?
I worked at Uber corporate for a year and this is how I kind of see things too. The medallion system is ridiculous when you dig into it, the taxi lobbies are toxic and anti-capitalist and wrong really no matter how you look at it (aside from the union aspect I suppose, but they definitely use it as a weapon, not as a tool). I'm happy to see Uber and Lyft and whatnot upend them. Not so happy it had to be done through shady practices.
That may be the case. But my country doesn't have a medallion system or (effective) taxi lobbyists. It does have a licence system where a taxi company that covers an area needs to supply coverage 24/7 so people can get home when they are drunk, or otherwise unsafe, at 3 am on a Tuesday.
Uber ignored all that and just took the profitable peek times. Plus they ignored employment law and paid drivers less than minimum wage.
They "disrupted" our taxi industry by illegally taking the easy profit and ignoring the costs of being a business.
I hate that it seems like every government in the world treats companies that blatantly break the law with kid gloves instead of coming down on them like a ton of bricks.
The government likes giving people benefits via mandates for businesses in order to obfuscate costs. Transparent and accurate pricing for a driver at 2AM results in a better allocation of resources. If the government wants to give people access to drivers at 2AM, then the government should either give people enough cash to pay the price of a driver willing to be available at 2AM, or run the service themselves.
These things have all kinds of social implications.
In the capital of Turkey, Ankara, the islamist mayor cut all the public transport after 00:00, making late evening events(concerts or simply socializing in bars and clubs) inaccessible to younger people from poorer backgrounds because the taxis were expensive and abusive(the taxi lobby was protected by the same government).
This caused divides between the youth and hindered the arts and entertainment scene for many many years.
Some stuff is essential services. Like the airlines, they must be available and accessible even when it’s not profitable. It often needs to be subsidized, the subsidy can come from the central government or the users of the service can share the cost of the unprofitable operations.
When you fail in that, the whole society and economy crumbles.
The government is not some magic money source. Saying the government should pay for something is saying the everyone should share the cost.
By mandating that taxis are available we are saying that the cost of off peek taxis should be paid by people that use taxis. If I never go to a town big enough to have a taxi service, or if I drive my own car everywhere, then I never share the cost for subsidising off peek taxis.
Which is more fair, everyone pays or only taxi uses pay?
I contend that is unfair to levy a societal benefit solely on customers of taxis during the hours at which taxis would be available anyway without government mandates.
I would even go so far as to say if the government is mandating something, then the costs should be distributed amongst that government’s tax base (can be progressively distributed, but across the whole tax base nonetheless).
There are many cases in which we might want the government to mandate something and direct the cost towards a particular group. For example, when a societal cost is caused by the choices of a particular group. Distributing this cost equally or progressively may be a less fair way to do it. And in some cases, distributing this cost to society as a whole may remove an important financial disincentive for bad behavior.
e.g.:
* making polluters responsible for cleanup costs
* making investors responsible for the costs of overseeing the markets they profit from
* making bad drivers responsible for paying for the consequences of their actions
I'd say it's more fair to say that we could distribute costs to society when it's a public service that generally benefits everyone, or the disadvantaged. But I don't think we would want to distribute societal costs incurred by the rich or reckless.
Your first and third examples are punishments for violating the law (or harming society), not societal benefits. Hence not applicable to what we are talking about here, in my opinion.
The second example I see no problem distributing amongst society, if functioning markets are providing a benefit to society.
There are corruption risks with making government functions dependent upon the thing they are policing.
To what degree to you believe that should be the case? There are multiple political interpretations of that sentiment throughout history with widely varying implementations and downstream consequences.
Is it just public transportation? Are airlines and trains public transportation? Is it other critical infrastructure? Utilities? Energy? Healthcare? Communication? Other societal necessities like food/housing/shelter?
It sounds like a line of reasoning that programmers fall into.
"This code is so stupid! Shouldn't it be like blah!?"
And then a more senior person tells you a story and yeah, you couldn't have found a better solution given the circumstances.
Whatever the population feels like should not be subject to market pricing.
Also, whatever is prohibitively expensive to duplicate, such as water/sewage/gas pipes, electrical/fiber wires, etc. Or public transport like underground train systems.
"not subject to market pricing" is quite a spectrum of practices, and depending on how you define it, it could be almost nothing, or almost everything in the US.
Taxes, tariffs, subsidies, affect market pricing quite a bit and are extremely common. Some consumer protection laws place very loose pricing rules on businesses that are literally price controls, but in practice allow pricing to fluctuate with market rates. Some other industries have segments which are price controlled, and other segments that are not, i.e. healthcare, insurance.
I mean that the market price should not be obfuscated. I have no qualms about society choosing to subsidize certain things, but the costs should be explicitly recognized.
For example, give people access to higher education. Okay, have the government operate the higher education institutions. Or give the students cash to pay for the higher education institutions.
But do not obfuscate costs by guaranteeing all student loans with zero underwriting. (The more politically popular method since it keeps taxes low now and lets politicians say they helped people). Of course, this price obfuscation rears its ugly head in 20 to 30 years once tuition is now $50k+ per year.
3/4 of post-secondary students in the US do go to schools operated by the government, that doesn't preclude those institutions from charging tuition.
Do you mean 'obfuscated' or 'inflated'?
I'm not sure how prices are obfuscated in US higher education... prices are published and you sign several pieces of paper with the price on it before you walk into class for the first time. Guaranteed loans don't obfuscate prices (in fact, DoE loans have more paperwork than private loans), they enable schools to inflate prices because it gives more buying power to their students. This isn't something that would be fixed by handing out cash instead, in fact, grants/scholarships are another factor that have enabled schools to inflate costs. If you shift the demand curve up and to the right, the equilibrium price goes up -- it doesn't really matter what shifted it.
The lack of underwriting is what obfuscated the prices (along with non dischargability of loans in bankruptcy).
A prudent lender would not lend a teenager tens of thousands of dollars to study something the society does not want (indicated by high probability of low paying careers as a result of that education).
Grants/scholarships/subsidized tuition might push demand and hence prices higher, but because grants impact taxpayers’ wallets today, there would be a built in check on spending. Not so with lending the money to teenagers.
The government can defect spend, and raise taxes later. That's even more of an obfuscated price than an ill-advised loan. Either mechanism of surprise costs is a bad thing.
The root of the higher-ed problem is social. We're forcing kids to make career decisions before they're ready, and we're forcing them into paths based upon 1970s stereotypes about the workplace. 50% of counselors and secondary-teachers are clueless about the broader workplace, and the other 50% would be politically chastised by parents if they told the truth.
We'd solve 80% of our student loan crisis if it was politically okay to tell kids:
1. If you don't have an interest in higher learning, don't want to go to college, or "just want a job" you shouldn't go to college. Don't go to college because your mother is pressuring you to do it, because she finds it 'unfashionable' or 'embarrassing' if you don't.
2. Just because you can do something doesn't mean someone will pay you to do it. How many job openings are in that career path, how many people are competing for that job, and how do you rank against them?
3. Academic talent is 50% of what employers care about. Nobody is going to care about your GPA if you don't have social, professional, and self-marketing skills.
That's one way to do it, as I said. The other way is to share the burden of the service by all of its users.
In the case of Taxi service, I find to be more appropriate users of the local service sharing the cost of the low hours. Central government paying for local services tends to be very inefficient.
The question is does society benefit from taxis being available all night long? If that is the correct question, and the answer is yes, then society should be paying for it.
By restricting the distribution of costs over only people who use taxis, then people who use taxis are unfairly shouldering a burden that society benefits from as a whole.
People who use taxis also get an unfair benefit by making a disproportionate use of publicly-funded roads which they don't pay for. Very few things are 100% private or 100% public. Most large organisations necessarily exist in a space of negotiation and compromise with the rest of society - you can use this public resource, but you have this public obligation. We'll reduce your taxes by this if you agree to provide that. We'll build this for you if you pay that. And why should the world work any differently?
I definitely sympathise with your main point - there's a tendency to see a problem and go looking for a nearby business to soak rather than funding it through general taxation. But assuming we accept that there should be a fleet of taxis that operate overnight to provide this socially-mandated service (and whether that fleet is directly owned and operated by the government or is something that private operators provide as part of a mutually agreed bundle of rights and obligations is immaterial IMO), for private industry to undercut the profitable segment of that service would be a both direct social loss (money out of the government's account) and a waste of real value (those expensive taxis sitting in the daytime).
Another way to think about it is the taxi companies enjoy slightly/moderately less profits than they could maximally get in exchange for a safer and better society (eg 24/7 taxi coverage). The same can be said for drivers licenses, car insurance, employee benefits, etc.
Instead of the government acting as either entirely public or entirely private, why shouldn’t it act instead as a mediator between the public and the private? This seems to be the most logical decision for me compared to either full socialism or full libertarianism.
> enjoy slightly/moderately less profits than they could maximally get in exchange for a safer and better society
This is an enormous assumption (frequently wrong), and precisely why the costs of a government mandate should not be implicitly laid on a select population.
It actually results in attempts to cheat and incentivize corruption. For example, NYC had or has a problem with cabs not taking people to poorer neighborhoods. The government can mandate it all day long, but they did not stop cab drivers from discriminating. The correct solution in this case, would be to pay the cab drivers the market price for going to the poorer neighborhoods.
The payment obviously would have to come from the government, either given directly to the poorer person or can be given directly to the cab driver. But either way the incentivizes would be properly aligned, increasing supply of cab drivers willing to drive to the poorer neighborhoods.
Where this falls apart is that it requires increase in government spending, meaning increase in taxes for rich people. And obviously, they are going to oppose this wealth transfer. It is much easier and cheaper to simply require cab drivers to go to poorer neighborhoods under threat of fines or whatnot, and sit back and let the status quo continue.
Interesting. I suppose if the mandates cannot or will not be enforced then it presents a problem, although I don’t know how well the incentive system works with say, clean air/water acts, which seem to be both mandated and incentivized.
>Instead of the government acting as either entirely public or entirely private, why shouldn’t it act instead as a mediator between the public and the private? This seems to be the most logical decision for me compared to either full socialism or full libertarianism.
It depends on the context of mediation. In one sense, government-as-mediator is completely compatible with a libertarian nightwatchman state so long as such mediation is impartial and does not infringe on public and private rights of either party.
But I don't think such a distinction helps here, as the functional differences between taxis and Uber amount to little more than legal fiction.
Why should hospitals be forced to provide care to sick people? I mean this 100% seriously, what would you do if hospitals just straight up refused patients that were expensive or annoying to treat focusing entirely on “profitable medicine?”
“Oooo sorry Jim, there’s no money to be made in cancer patients.
The government has an interest in people having access taxi services 24/7 because it prevents DUIs and licensure/regulations is the means to ensure that.
“Well the government should provide that transportation then.” — They are via this regulation.
>Why should hospitals be forced to provide care to sick people? I mean this 100% seriously, what would you do if hospitals just straight up refused patients that were expensive or annoying to treat focusing entirely on “profitable medicine?”
They should not, unless hospitals have the power to tax. Or the hospital is getting reimbursed by the government.
>“Well the government should provide that transportation then.” — They are via this regulation.
Politicians like to do it via mandates for businesses because they can avoid being responsible for problems and have a convenient third party to blame. It also avoids them having to increase taxes.
That is exactly why most hospitals are required to take sick patients. The Emergency Medical Treatment And Labor Act requires hospitals that accept Medicare (most of them) to provide (minimal) treatment to any patient that shows up.
That works, since the hospital is getting paid for it by society (although via health insurance companies via the now neutered individual mandate to purchase health insurance).
The important thing is the price for a hospital being able to provide highly qualified team of workers and equipment 24/7 to treat patients should not be obfuscated. It is valuable information for how many more hospitals/doctors/research/ whatever is needed and which kind of work society should incentivize people to do.
Why should their licensing be different than for pilots?
With a private pilots license you can't fly for money, but you can take your friends and family with you.
With a commercial pilots license you can fly for money.
Neither of these are capped, a commercial pilots license just requires slightly more education and experience. Why should licensing for taxis be any different?
For commercial airliners carrying hundreds of passengers, yeah.
For small private planes? Slots are hardly ever the limiting factor.
Taxis are more like private jets than Airbuses carrying hundreds of pax.
While taxis aren't as good for society as buses, they still reduce the total amount of car infrastructure required. The slot comparison doesn't seem apt.
Less so than people actually driving themselves around the centres of cities.
If I drive myself to somewhere in the centre, my car will sit there using up space while I'm doing my thing. If I use a taxi, the same car that delivered me will serve other people while I'm doing my thing.
Of course it would be even better if I used public transport, but I'm not going to do that because public transport is uncomfortable at best.
> If I drive myself to somewhere in the centre, my car will sit there using up space while I'm doing my thing.
In the absence of terrible laws, it'll be stored somewhere that's more space-efficient (e.g. in a multistory car-park) compared to a taxi cruising around the main streets looking for fares.
On the contrary, America tends to waste a lot of city space with surface parking and wide roads, so taxis don't make it appreciably worse, whereas the old cities of Europe are where we really don't have space for them.
FYI in my country, at the top of this thread, that is how it works. Drivers need a "P" licence and the taxi companies need to register and follow some rules. But apart from that there are no limits or artificial restrictions.
That is one of the things that passes me off about all this. The enforcement agency did go after a bunch of drivers that were driving passengers for money without a "P" licence. Now, IIRC, Uber does require drivers to have a "P" licence.
But that same agency didn't do shit to Uber for operation of a taxi service without meeting the requirements.
Going after the little people is easy, but give up when the target has a bunch of VC money and lawyers.
We have a similar problem with our courier drivers. Everyone is "totally not an employee, they run their own independent business".
There should be no need to go after Uber, they probably shouldn't have to be the ones enforcing this. Uber can't verify if the driving license you've provided them is fake or not, at least the cops can do that.
Why should this enforcement be outsourced to Uber?
So Uber unbundled expensive edge cases from typical usage. Seems like a win for most people. They can always pay the real price in those edge cases, not socializing it on everyone else.
Not to mention that the smartphone online model plus flexible work is inherently more efficient.
I was in Milwaukee once, and needed to get to the airport. I don't use Uber or Lyft, but I asked the hotel what they recommended. They said Lyft. So I signed up, and put out a request for a ride.
Nobody responded. The app helpfully showed me all the Lyft drivers nearby that were ignoring me, which was really awesome.
At some point, it became clear that I was not going to get to the airport in time unless I left really soon. So I called Yellow Cab (or whatever the taxi service is called in Milwaukee). Five minutes later, the guy showed up and I was on my way.
I get that, as a brand new user, the drivers may have been cautious or wary of a gumper with no ratings, but WTF. I'm at a hotel going to the airport. I deleted the app from my phone, and would now rather take a pogo stick than Uber or Lyft.
Airports and pricy hotels are literally the only places in SF that cab service is dependable.
Prior to Uber, cab dispatch outside of airports and the hotel were nearly impossible. Getting somebody to come pick you up was a disaster of unreliability, particularly at times when transit had stopped, and cabs were the only option.
Uber/Lyft have huge problems, but the medallion system is even worse, IMHO. Ideally we'd have functioning transit and enough housing served by that transit that the housing becomes affordable. But without that, I'm glad that Uber/Lyft are there as an alternative to the horribleness of cabs.
The first time I used Uber was about 6 or 7 years ago. I was living in the DC Suburbs and I had a plane to catch. The night before my flight I called and booked a cab for 6 am. At 6 am there was no cab so I called the dispatcher and asked when they'd be there, they said the cab was on its way and would be there in ten minutes. At 6:15 I called again and they admitted there had never been a cab on the way, there were none available, and they cancelled on me.
I downloaded Uber, signed up for an account, and had a ride by 6:25.
And hence the root problem is exposed: people are generally not able or willing to pay enough to incentivize someone to reliably drive them at odd hours. The problem is people expecting something they cannot afford.
I scheduled a pickup with Uber for my family to get to the airport for a holiday trip. It never showed, there was no feedback on the app and no way to know/resolve the issue. I only use Lyft now.
Yup, pricey hotels to be clear. I stayed at a motel and the cabbies kept cancelling on me until I gave up and booked a Uber black. This was before UberX launched. The experience was so much better I took the car to the airport instead of the Bart station I had planned. Back in the day getting a cab in SF was next to impossible.
To add, I’ve also had to walk 3 miles in frigid SF fog and sleep in the office because I couldn’t find transportation back home.
Like their housing, this artificial scarcity ruined SF for me. On the flip side most Uber/Lyft drivers drive like maniacs now. So I guess there’s a line to be drawn somewhere in between the two craziness.
I used to travel to the Bay Area for work all the time, and the taxis were a nightmare EVERY TIME. Before I got in a cab at SJC I'd look the driver in the eyes and ask if his credit card reader "is working". He'd say "Yes, no problem! Hop in!"
Then we get to the hotel 15 minutes away, he wants $40 cash. Turns out his credit card reader is broken. I argue with him for a while, and he decides he can write my fucking card number down on a piece of paper. Asks me what the tip will be. It's zero, asshole.
Nowadays I have to walk farther to the rideshare pickup area, but the ride is cheap, the service is good, and I don't have to have an argument at the end of it. I tip in cash so that Uber/Lyft can't steal it.
I wish there were a version of this where the driver would get 90% of the fare, nobody gets discriminatory pricing, and nobody has to deal with gamified BS, but oh well. I will NEVER ride in another taxi or take any action to help taxi drivers. They had their chance and they blew it.
> I will NEVER ride in another taxi or take any action to help taxi drivers. They had their chance and they blew it.
Do as you like but keep in mind there are some decent taxi companies. Up here there's a driver owned co-op cab that is reliable and reasonable. No nice app but if you schedule a trip to the airport they show up on time.
Yep the card trick seem to be universal. It happened to me so often here in Montréal that at the end I would just say "I only have 20$ cash does that get me there? Otherwise I have my credit card" so that if they were to have a "broken" machine they'd know how much I would be able to pay in cash from the get go. Sometimes the machine magically worked when the meter got way beyond whatever I had in cash. I get the hustle of not paying taxes or credit card fees but damn if it didn't make for a weird and pushy experience
I remember coming to San Francisco on business trips 11-12 years ago. Cabs were impossible to find - one of the selling points of our office building was that it had a cab stand, so it was a bit easier. We'd walk blocks to find hotels so we could get a cab. We'd call and they'd show up 30+ minutes later, if we were lucky. It was really really frustrating. It made experiencing the city without a car really challenging.
Uber was an incredible breath of fresh air. It just worked. It's more expensive now, but it still just works. And it's probably still cheaper than taxis were.
Best and worst taxi rides I've had were out of SFO about 15 years ago.
Best was in the evening. Went to the cab queue and the guy that pulled up for me had the windows down and was blasting techno from that university station that was around back then. He practically catapulted my gear in the back and off we went. Traffic was light enough he could weave through it doing about 30 over the limit, windows down and techno blaring the whole way. Got to my hotel quite fast.
The worst was mid day, and was a guy that was starting to nod off to sleep at red lights. I nearly got out of the cab but was already late to a big deal meeting, so just stuck it out despite how sketch it was.
This just isn't true. There's still tons of yellow cabs in NYC. And you know what had the most terrible taxi experience, yellow cabs. I've never been unable to pay via card in an uber/lyft. I've never had my driver pull the emergency brake and tell me his car is broken because I said I lived in Brooklyn and they didn't want to drive there in a uber/lyft. I never had the AC be not working or refused to be used in an uber/lyft.
And yet all of those things happened in yellow cabs and much more. Yellow cabs are truly terrible experience. And they were never far cheaper.
They are far cheaper right now. I promise you. It's also been this way for a while. And yes, yellow cabs still exist, but you will not see a sea of yellow down Broadway like has historically been the case. Even before covid.
My recent survey of Uber/Lyft cars is they're absolutely every bit as shitty as some of the Yellows out there.
No cabby objects to going to Brooklyn and hasn't for almost 10 years.
Uber/Lyfts at JFK constantly call and try to ask where I'm going before they pick me up.
The Curb app is fine.
The problem is not the medallions but the centralization of medallions. Owner/operators are usually much better than the dude renting the cab and medallion from some shady ass company.
The TLC should do more to fix the cabs - and we should support them fixing cabs and owner/operators at the expense of Uber/Lyft. The competition is good, but Uber/Lyft are no better than the medallion squatters.
When Uber started, this was true. Uber has gotten, pardon the pun, uber expensive in most places I go.
I now take a cab from the airport because a) it's easier, and b) it's cheaper. I'm not sure I'd say 'far cheaper', but that probably depends on locales.
Or that they used VC money to outcompete companies using artificially low prices, and then raised the prices to make some profit once they got a hold on the market
That, plus willingness to take you to a destination outside of Manhattan. Yellow cabs would often refuse to go to an outer borough. Refusing a destination within NYC was actually against the law, but the law basically wasn't enforced.
I don’t think the situation has stabilized, either for NYC or for Uber. Too many variables. It’s also possible a stable equilibrium doesn’t emerge and it’s just a pendulum that swings between upstarts and incumbents, regulated and deregulated, apps, cabs and dollar vans…
The drivers who were 'wiped out' are the ones that bought a medallion at the peak of a bubble. They were victims of predatory lenders as much or more than Uber or Lyft.
Most drivers rent cabs and medallions for a fixed price and then keep whatever fares they earn. Even drivers who own medallions would typically let them out to other drivers so the cab could be on the streets for as close to 24 hours as possible.
Rideshare services have made the medallions less valuable because drivers for them don't need to rent a cab and medallion, and so the owners can demand less for renting them out. In other words, it has given labor _more_ power, and the typical cab driver is doing better.
If you've been noticing less cabs lately, it's probably Covid related, as the pandemic has diminished the demand for all types of travel, particularly in Manhattan.
Taxi lobbies wouldnt exist w/o the transferability and leasing of medallions. The idea that a "permit" can be transferrable is ridiculous. This is the structure that caused one of the the problems. Taking a non-cab on Manhattan proper is usually a waste of time. To take a cab in NYC, you walk out to street that has a place to pull over. Form the "I need a ride pose", or raise your hand and look the cabbie in the eye and boom, you are off to your destination in seconds. I don't think I have ever waited over a minute for a cab in NYC. If you need to get to the airport, call for a black car.
It broke my heart listening to my cab driver talk about how much he paid for his medallion.
Knowing the city is no longer relevant in the age of Navigation apps with live traffic data.
Microscopic knowledge of every corner of the city won't help you predict a traffic accident blocking your most efficient route, or a crazy homeless guy pushing a dumpster onto the road.
Not to mention but even if the p50 or p99 driver has amazing knowledge, as a customer, it frustrates me to no end to have to explain to a taxi driver where I'm trying to go because they happen to not know MY location, and are too proud to just punch it into Google Maps.
This doesn't happen with Uber/Lyft.
And we haven't even gotten to the "My credit card machine isn't broken" scenario. Being able to walk out of the car at your destination and just take off is worth it for that alone.
Even having a credit card reader isn't as convenient as knowing the price in advance before you get in and then having that price automatically charged, without having to do anything when you arrive except get out of the car.
London largely solved this by making it a violation of rules to have the car on the road with a broken card reader. Suddenly card readers got a whole lot more reliable. I haven't had an issue with a driver refusing to take a card since that started (but I have run into several with non-regulation card readers; clearly still trying to avoid paying taxes...)
Once they were established in a different country, yeah. But would they have been able to start and secure their business in those countries? That’s less certain, imo. Part of the real value prop of Uber was that taxis were expensive and clunky, and they made it faster and cheaper.
People keep saying this but everywhere I go I still see city taxis operating with radio/telephone systems that plus the usual black car airport/limo services. They still have their piece of the market where they still provide value. The death of the incumbents seems to be a bit oversold but regardless competition is not the problem here.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30615191. I realize you were responding to the parent's point, but the subthread unfortunately became a generic behemoth about Uber. Almost like it was 2016 again, or something!
Not GP, but IMHO it's neither. This is the wrong category. But if we're going to try and cram "capitalism in there, "crony capitalism" (abusing government structures to change the rules of the game in favor of one party) is probably most appropriate.
I'm not a fan of Uber's more toxic leadership personalities and behavior, but I do think it's fair to give them credit: they completely changed what it's like to get around places like Mexico City as a tourist. The licensed cabs are a crap shoot, and particularly late at night you'll get price gouged. Unlicensed cabs can be quite sketch. The existing private car services were all insanely flakey. Now it's low stress and reliable.
Well, considering that capitalism has been the biggest source of good in the world, lifting untold numbers out of poverty and raising the standard of living across the globe… I’d say anything that gets in the way of that for protectionist reasons needs to go.
OK, but what if applying ”capitalism” to a service industry pushes workers towards poverty and lowers their standards of living?
That’s what has happened in Finland. Established, trained and taxpaying cab drivers had to compete against untrained drivers who haven’t got a business license or pay taxes.
This triggered a race to the bottom and drove many into unemployment, poverty and bankruptcy.
Literally no one gained anything from this other than foreign-based ride-hailing apps: remaining drivers (many of them immigrants) barely get paid due to the price race to the bottom, customers get worse service and worse ride comfort and slower drives due to independent drivers not even going through a basic city knowledge test. Government loses tax money and much of the revenue is siphoned to foreign countries.
You can definitely find instances where it has failed some workers, overall though the tide has lifted everyone’s boats. This is where a limited social safety net is warranted.
In contrast, the presence of Uber in London gave Black Cab drivers a well-deserved kick. Before they were expensive, refused to accept card payments and often would refuse to drive you somewhere that wasn't convenient for them.
The mayor actually tried to ban Uber but the public backlash was so great that they panned that move.
Capitalism has only done all the good things it's credited with if you ignore the externalities starting to come due in the last decade. There's a cost, and capitalism only works by socializing it. Even the good stuff is built on publicly funded research and projects.
The externalities are definitely an issue, and some will need to be addressed, however I’d argue those would exist regardless of the economic system in place. Humans tend to be a bit rapacious in the context of any economic frameworks.
I am not against forms of socializing aspects of society. Fire service works wonderfully, universities are fantastic, etc.
Capitalism is a word, at best a euphemism for moral relativism, and clinging to it is succumbing to sunk cost fallacy.
It prescribes billions must kowtow to a minority who are average people granted political and education advantage.
Read the well curated history; capitalism came about when some rich educated guys in the 1800s realized religion was dying, and needed a new social control scheme and decided a few slogans about honest work being worth a buck would be easily understood by the lesser educated laborers.
Human ingenuity and engineering existed for hundreds of thousands of years before capitalism.
I'm immediately suspicious of anyone I meet in the tech industry who doesn't think Steve Jobs was a raging asshole. The number of people who've given first hand accounts of him screaming in meetings or going into full rage meltdown mode at the slightest provocation is in the hundreds. Any time from 1977 up until very near his death.
I'm literally typing this on a late model macbook air right now, and I use MacOS because of its NeXT and BSD-like heritage, but he was not not a nice person.
These are the people in power - the people with influence. They're for the most part assholes. You simply don't get to these positions being a good human (yes, there are outliers) - it's a fundamentally broken cultural system of reward. I don't know how or why it works, but it seems that's the way it is.
That's an eternal conundrum, and one that eats away at me on a regular basis.
Long story short:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” ― George Bernard Shaw
Long story long:
I'm a nice person, I'm passive, I like letting people do their thing and letting them learn on their own timeline because, in my experience, 'forcing it' can result in an opposite reaction. I'm happy to provide guidance when asked and gentle suggestions and nudges in the right direction, delivered non-threateningly.
On the flipside, my opinions are relatively strongly held because I 'do the work' to research and understand the issues that I either care about, or am tasked to solve in my work.
I get internally "Jobsian" at the dismissal of my solution for another, but rarely let my internal "Jobs" out of his box. In my earlier years I've been told (by my wife) that I'm scary when in disagreement; my voice, tone, and body language is apparently threatening. I don't want to impose this beast, I don't want my influence to be threatening, I want it to be intellectual; the actual right answer or best path forwards.
Quiet intellectualism, however, appears to be the easiest thing in the world to ignore and / or dismiss.
Or maybe I'm just wrong, and living in my own reality distortion field.
Your self-reflection is commendable. After self-awareness indicates opportunities for tone improvement in conversation, finding the balance between effective and "socially acceptable" is a persistent challenge.
I think socially and culturally a recalibration is happening and the answer may end up being there are plenty of smart, creative, people who aren't assholes but haven't been heard in the past. Or, in a decade we may find out that assholes have a purpose other than shitting on people.
It sounds like an early example social network oversharing thing, like how some people needed to record and post everything trivial they or their kids did onto facebook, or people to post their breakfast onto instagram, or nowadays everyone's brainfart / shower thought / hot take onto twitter.
Being "responsible" folks (and also having no choice in the matter) AT&T bent over backward to accommodate the labels. Half the product was proprietary DRM that made everything constantly unusable. Despite this, the labels still strangled us by limiting what we could sell. Apple quite correctly ignored all of this and solved the problem by first launching the iPod, waiting until it had critical mass (much of which involved tons of unpaid MP3 downloading) and then launching the iTunes Store in 2003 when they had an installed base full of piracy - and the major labels had no choice but to join on their terms. (Obviously I pity the small labels who got screwed in the dynamic.)
I think about this a lot when people complain about cryptocurrency or Uber/Lyft evading regulations or destroying legacy businesses. Often this kind of behavior is bad, often the little guy gets crushed. But at the end of the day, legacy businesses really are poison and much of the awfulness could be avoided if they weren't trying to hold on to things so tightly.