Here in tech bro world we have so many innovations for you! Why not try our:
- Imaginary scam money (in 17,382 flavors, including eyeballs)!
- Expensive unregulated taxi!
- Expensive unregulated hotel!
- Picture of monkey (formerly valuable)!
- Imaginary restaurant that serves bad food!
- Expensive unregulated television!
- Another picture of monkey (never valuable)!
- Twitter but it sucks now!
- The news but it also sucks and steals your personal information!
Plus, try our greatest achievement yet:
- Expensive unregulated scam concert tickets!
EDIT: the real trend with Silly-Con Valley is that every major venture is an adventure in removing regulations that We (collectively) bought with 10's of thousands of lives. And these VCs come through, and seek to destroy regulation for a pound of profit, and some scraps to others.
These services always start cheap since they are subsidized by VCs to buy growth and scale. It soon will change, and get worse and cost more, if not outright re-regulated out of existence.... For the same reasons why the regulation was there in the first place.
There's a few companies working on true innovations. But most SV is just remixes on "deregulation and illegality as a service"
People forget how terrible the experience was prior to these companies, and when the industry changes, they point to incumbents forced to innovate as a way to say the tech companies were unnecessary.
Taxis is the low hanging fruit, non-hotellike rentals is another, cable TV/DVD rentals is a third.
Simple. A multi-level-marketing scheme build on the free money/web3/crypto trend, successfully taking the existing art market speculative practices into the digital realm.
I feel like the people who complain about Uber/Lyft from a service perspective never used taxis extensively. Living in Chicago (Lakeview) for years while traveling for work made me absolutely hate taxis. When scheduling, they would no-show at 5 in the morning causing missed flights. Rides from the airport would require standing in line many times over an hour, especially on a Thursday night. They all absolutely reeked of body odor. The drivers would consistently scam “card machine broken, cash only” or “I forgot to turn on the meter” and unless you threatened to report them, they would take advantage of passengers. Drivers were sketchy and rarely matched the credentials on the taxi medallion.
I’ve also lived in areas where taxi service was essentially nonexistent. I wonder how many DUIs and related accidents have been prevented by ride share apps.
Traveling abroad in Europe the apps work simply regardless of my command of the local language to explain my destination and keeps the drivers honest so they aren’t taking “the long way”.
How is anyone supporting taxis as superior to this? There was absolutely no accountability.
From an business model perspective, I would wager that eventually you could get this to a point of sustainability that doesn’t require armies of engineers and various support staff, a la Twitter.
Living in Chicago (Lakeview) for years while traveling for work made me absolutely hate taxis.
Hello from up here in Edgewater.
I realize there are huge problems with the finances and liabilities of Uber…but taxis before ride shares were a pure nightmare, from a UX perspective.
Uber brought us…
* Deterministic pricing (for the most part)
* Flawless ubiquitous credit card transactions
* The ability to point to a random location on a map and just magically have a car take you there
I know Uber’s finances are shit…but you know what? I would gladly pay more, because you get a car right to your door that delivers you to an arbitrary location with nobody extorting you for extra physical cash.
I used taxis in LA plenty of times and in general it was nothing like what you're describing.
I only ever had one no show and that was because a lot of us ordered taxis from the same place around the same time so dispatch though it was some sort of prank.
Getting a taxi from LAX was as easy as grabbing my stuff from baggage claim and strolling out the door directly into the first taxi waiting at the curb. Usually there was a person there on the sidewalk directing the taxis too.
When I was new at this, I just gave the driver the address I wanted. One of the first taxi rides I took, the driver handed me a book of paper maps and asked me to find the place for him, lol. After that I learned to say "take me to (address), it's by (street) and (cross street). It's not far from (big street) and (other big street)" Worked 100% of the time.
On arrival I'd pay in my preferred method (cash) and tip the driver knowing he would get the entire tip.
Nowadays, I've had at least 5 lyf/ber cancel on me. Getting one out of SFO involves dragging my bags all the way out to the top floor of the parking structure where I get to wait around for 45 minutes in the rain while other people's rides arrive in random order. The rating system is useless because if I rate anything other than 5 stars it's the same as asking for the driver to be fired. Any tip I leave in the app is getting a sizable chunk shaved off the top by the company. At least my destination is automatically in the driver's GPS. Unless I'm going to Stanford which is notoriously hostile to cars and GPS often directs the driver to the wrong place...
Agreed. I take taxis now in many places because they're now better than uber, but pre-uber they were not. What I used to like best about taking uber was sticking it to the taxi industry. They were a textbook "disruptor". I'm glad there's a credible threat to taxis that means they had to improve and look over their shoulder. In the markets I travel frequently, uber sucks now though, and I've gone back to taxis, which also suck, just less, and are way better than the pre-uber days.
But while rideshares can be better for me than listening to some taxi driver go off on some misogynist rant, that doesn't mean that they're better once you start taking into account wage problems, increase in CO2 production, etc.
But seriously, taxis in Chicago can get fucked. They were so terrible.
I don’t buy wage problems because my estimate on Chicago taxis was most medallions were held by investors who were not drivers and most drivers were undocumented with less protection than Uber provides.
I buy the CO2 aspect. Many cases where Uber is now more convenient than public transport vs. El is better than a taxi
Anecdotally, ive personally lived in areas (california central valley, rural new england) where lyft and uber were virtually nonexistent and local taxi companies were the only option. ive had horrible experiences "reserving" rides with uber and lyft only to have nobody show up at the designated time, leading to missed trains. Taxis have always been far more reliable for me in rural areas, provided I call in advance and within their hours of operation. when i'm in cities, I find public transit to be more sensible terms of cost and reliability than any other option. I don't mind paying cash, I prefer it.
I cant help but feel as though a lot of the people defending these 'rideshare' companies on HN are living in coastal city bubbles. It's simply not an option in many places, and the apps will outright lie to you that they're able to get you a ride.
I live in a rural area, where the taxis, Uber, and lyft compete. The taxi companies don't offer calls in advance, or reserved rides, not one or four companies that could cover my area. You would have to hire a limosouine driver. Lyft is by far cheaper on average, but consistently fewer drivers. Hilariously, Uber is the reliable service for reservations.
Given that Uber's only quarter in the black was the most recent, AND most of it was from capitalized assets, well, it's just a failing business, but scaled big!
It's a common trope for VC's to fund, fund, fund for that sweet hockey stick growth. And they know that it takes money to make money.
So yeah, the fact that these businesses have been better is because they were subsidized by VC'e to get you as a customer. Enshittification process is already well full in effect, and will get more expensive and worse
But hey, Uber cashed out for the early Ponzi investors. Probably won't pan out past this point.
Anecdotally, amongst my peer group AirBnBing is waaaay down. Pricing is out of control (even more than hotels), and there's usually a long chore list AND expensive cleaning fee on top.
True, but I buy AirBnB specifically for things that you can’t get in a hotel.
An entire villa with pool in Tuscany. An apartment with a kitchen. A flat with the view of Acropolis in Athens (maybe you can get that in a hotel, but you can never be sure lest they rebook you to a different room.)
At least in the US, those sort of places don't really exist, or if they do the pricing is outrageous (like $1000+/night).
Not true in the slightest. This place ( https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/48299044 ) was an incredible bargain the last time I was in Scottsdale for a couple of weeks, even at $220/night + fees.
I saw $220/night for that place plus fees on the listing, but the moment I selected any non weekday it jumped to $402/night + fees. Fees which amount to an additional $507 for a 3 night stay ($295 cleaning, $212 for AirBnB).
All in, my stay is $1,900 for 3 night. $633/night. Might not be $1,000 a night, but definitely not as bargain-ish as you make it out to be.
For stays of a couple of days, I'll generally stick with hotels, but for anything longer than a week hotels are pointlessly expensive for what you get.
That's not a great argument. They may be different in some ways, but that doesn't mean better.
I recently looked for airbnb in Cardiff for pycon UK. Many of them are more expensive than a hotel, with fewer facilities and less guarantee of service.
Uber has never been better than cabs where I live.
YT may offer more choice than the TV, but there's an awful lot of race to the bottom junk and VPN shilling on there.
They may have been better at one point, but at least in my social circle pretty much everybody has given up on AirBnB due to numerous bad experiences and constantly complains about content now being spread across a dozen streaming services.
Uber is fantastic, much better than some street taxi you have to find and hail. AirBnB is the only way I can realistically find multi room houses to stay in on vacations, hotels don’t offer that and there aren’t resorts everywhere. Not sure what you’re referring to with the imaginary restaurant and unregulated television.
Our industry rewards grifters and/or rent seekers much more than it does true innovation.
The worthwhile innovation that does happen skirts all the rules and guns for illegal monopoly, wearing it as a badge of honor. Too twisted for my taste.
They sell a subscription to shows, and then remove or enshittify their service. It's the equivalent of shrinkflation, where you buy 10$ of something, and it's 80% the size of last week.
The law is not for tech bros, they just see it as a signpost that you can pretend not to have read or be aware of. It invariably ends badly in the long run and in the short term everybody else suffers. Highly annoying.
I'm very happy that Uber broke the law that protected the cab cartel. Now I can conveniently get a ride wherever I want and never have to deal with a sleazy incompetent cab company ever again. When I travel to other countries I never have to deal with their shitty taxi scams.
I would absolutely prefer a cab to Uber now. The pricing was better, the service was better, we weren't expected to mutually review each other, and I could flag one down on the street. If I walked to a taxi stand, it was instant satisfaction.
The only things that improved with Uber were price and coverage, and they tried to fool us into seeing other improvements that didn't exist, largely by painting cab drivers as scary, stinky, subhuman swindlers and implying people that drove Uber were all part timers who usually worked at real jobs. Now the prices are sky high and the things take as long or longer as cabs did to show up.
Maybe there's room for an Uber in tiny places that don't need cab companies or even full time cabbies, but everywhere else, they've just added another layer of rentseeking over a familiar experience. We could have gotten rid of the medallion system without replacing it with this thing. Let's make gigwork illegal so Uber will have to contract with local companies, or reduce themselves to people they're willing to employ.
Middlemen will always try to extract maximum profits, and even if they look better in the short term in the longer term they'll be just as bad or worse, but more entrenched.
I don't think "the ends justify the means" arguments are terribly persuasive, personally. And any company or person who is willing to break the law to succeed is not trustworthy enough to be comfortable doing business with.
They may be good now, but the instant that they see a method of increasing their profit by screwing someone, including customers, over then that's what they'll do.
You will never fix self centered or low empathy people, but have a chance with the systems we must all participate in. Choose how you spend your time accordingly. Talk is cheap, all that matters is outcomes.
It certainly seemed that way at first, now I'm not convinced. They seem to be recapitulating most or all of the bad behaviors. And more expensive often enough I have to check, used to just assume it would be comparable or better unless obvious reason for shortage.
Depends on the area, but qualified yes - many local cab companies now have apps (in response to uber) and some of those will give decently accurate quotes. In some places e.g. airport fares are fixed rate anyway, so you can just check.
Unfortunately. Uber has made it normal for people to work for poverty wages to make their asset depreciate even faster, all because they managed to pump a shitload of money into a money losing proposition. Getting a personalized driver right now should be a luxury expense - Uber dumping money that they will never make back into it doesn't change that. Uber drivers should be paid fairly, like employees, and not as independent contractors.
"Uber reported a net income of $394 million in the second quarter. That number includes a $386 million unrealized gain from equity investments, so it's not quite as good as it looks. "
It will be interesting to see if they manage to close at least one bookyear in the black. If with a windfall like that they can't manage then they likely never will.
It really bugs me that this ever passed in any country that has the concept. Companies are technically immortal and if they are given similar rights to people it is unavoidable that they will become superior to people on account of their life span.
The law is not for entrepreneurs, they just see it as a signpost that you have to be aware of. It invariably ends ok in the long run and in the short term everybody calls them tech bros.
Raise your hands if you’d rather go back to a world without Airbnb. Yes, there’s a negative externality aspect — if your neighbors are suddenly renting out their place to random people, that can get painfully annoying for you. But I bet if you did a methodical poll, most people would choose not to un-invent Airbnb.
Self driving cars, ditto. Cruise’s fleet is finally deployed all around SF, according to pg. It’s about to become as ubiquitous as electricity. And in the beginning, so many people argued that it’s against the law and therefore shouldn’t be developed. Then it quietly shifted to well, maybe the law should change.
It’s good to obey the law. I certainly try. But treating it as some kind of holy grail of ethics is fraught with peril. You’re outsourcing your thinking to the lowest common denominator: it’s what people in positions of power feel is justice. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. And when it isn’t, do you really want to be the kind of person that believes it should be obeyed no matter the tradeoffs?
This isn’t a hypothetical for me. People have asked many times if I was worried that someone will try to come after me for making books3 available. Till one week ago, I wasn’t. But if the world really wants to say that I’m causing suffering by making books available to machine learning researchers, I have very little leverage to argue that I am not in fact doing that… except ethics. Because without books3, only OpenAI is able to train powerful large models, because they’re the only ones that can get away with it. Is that justice?
You’re an inspiration to me in many ways. I still remember you showing me your workshop, and how friggin cool it was. I’ve tried to channel your maker spirit over the years to be even half as talented. But I just don’t understand where this bitterness comes from against “tech bros”; it’s a fairly common theme in your writing. Sweeping generalizations are such dangerous territory, in terms of history proving that you were mistaken.
Now, maybe this Kenya business is terrible. I think it’s pretty dystopian. But that’s a separate question: evaluate each startup on its merits, and crucify the Theranos frauds. This can be done on an individual basis.
That's pretty simple: I can't stand it that people with such an opportunity for improving the world around them would squander it and wreck it. That makes me bitter.
As for whether if you invert it it becomes true: there are exceptions but for the most part the lawbreakers sooner or later end up running into the limits, be they SBF, Thiel, Musk or any other of the ethically challenged individuals that the tech world puts on a pedestal. Money seems to have structurally perverted our world and the rule of law is just about the last barrier that helps keep society functioning.
Tear that down and you lose a lot more than just some 'minor inconveniences'. The law is the ultimate representation of the rules by which we play. Starting off by throwing out the rulebook in a way that will result in net negatives is a clear example of externalization: profits for the owners and investors and the damage for everybody else.
That is not how we're going to get to a nicer and more sustainable future. There is a lot of fuss about the kleptocrats in Russia and how they rape their country and their fellow men. Rightly so. But the tech bros aren't that much better, they just sell it better.
As for AirBnB disappearing: yes, please.
> Now, maybe this Kenya business is terrible.
Maybe?
No, seriously: it is terrible, there is absolutely no way in hell that this is justifiable, it is with distance the worst thing Sam Altman has ever done and that plus OpenAi's blatant attempts at regulatory capture are enough to make me regret ever defending him on HN before because I thought that he was different.
So, that leaves pc and his brother for now, the rest of the tech bro billionaires can go jump in a lake.
> the lawbreakers sooner or later end up running into the limits, be they SBF, Thiel, Musk or any other of the ethically challenged individuals that the tech world puts on a pedestal.
That's quite the accusation. What laws have Musk and Thiel broken?
And no, Thiel wasn't convicted of anything. But in my view this was a complete perversion of the law. And that's taking into account that I think everybody associated with Gawker is scum.
Billionaires should pay their taxes rather than avoid them (what a term, it's just a spin on having enough money to be able to buy your way out of paying tax like everybody else) and they should not be able to use the law as their personal attack dog.
According to the article, not only was Thiel not convicted of anything, he wasn’t guilty of anything. Florida had already changed their laws.
I’m at a doctor’s appointment, but I wanted to quickly thank you for explaining your side. I disagree with some of it — perhaps even most - but the underlying motive is a good one. I just worry that you throw too many of us into the lake.
Thiel, for example. Your possibly justified outrage against a few have made it more likely for you to argue that some of them are terrible when they don’t seem to be.
I noted that Thiel wasn't convicted, but that does not mean that what he did was right or that it was legal, merely that he may well be insulated enough that he can get away with such stuff where you and I could not. And that in itself is a perversion of the law in its own right.
Thiel and Musk lack ethics, they see the world as their property and carve it up with the same ease as the rulers of old did and never mind the consequences. With such power there should be a matching sense of responsibility.
This lack of ethics seems to be the default for billionaires, it is very rare to see people that wealthy that use their wealth in a positive sense, more often than not it is used as a weapon and to acquire even more wealth at a cost to society and the environment in general.
The part I don’t understand is that you feel Gawker was scum. Thiel removed Gawker’s ability to be scum. Thus, by logic, the world was improved.
Isn’t that the core of what you’re saying you wish billionaires did? Improve the world?
Quoting you:
> I can't stand it that people with such an opportunity for improving the world around them would squander it and wreck it.
This seems like the crux of our disagreement. I feel the law is a means to an end. Is it correct that you feel the law is the end of the debate? Or that people who can afford to accept the penalties under the law are scum for choosing to accept such penalties?
I’m trying to make your worldview consistent and complete, but there might be a Gödel problem here.
It is possible to believe that both parties in a lawsuit are scum.
Gawker was scum because of what they did to Hogan.
Thiel was scum because of what he did to Gawker.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Thiel used Hogan in much the same way that Hogan was used by Gawker: to further their own goals.
> I feel the law is a means to an end.
It is a reasonably practical approach to a - hopefully - minimal set of rules that society needs to make it all work. Having parties that perform in extra-legal ways breaks that principle and (1) requires the continued expansion of the volume of law to close the holes and (2) creates a non-level playingfield where the rich get to use their money to improve their own station at the expense of everybody else. Nobody should have that kind of power.
> Is it correct that you feel the law is the end of the debate?
No, I think it is very well possible that you find the need to change laws, amend them or remove them based on evaluation by the various legislative bodies, judges and advocates. But once something is written into law things bifurcate considerably compared between say the USA and the EU: in the USA the letter of the law is what drives the process, in the EU it is the spirit of the law that drives the process. This isn't as clear cut as I would like it to be, there are examples of the reverse on both sides but it serves as a useful shortcut. And, incidentally, it is also why US companies tend to have a hard time in Europe when faced with lawsuits that they think they can escape on a technicality: such tricks rarely work here and can easily make your problems worse.
> Or that people who can afford to accept the penalties under the law are scum for choosing to accept such penalties?
I'm not sure I can follow you there. What do you mean exactly?
> I’m trying to make your worldview consistent and complete, but there might be a Gödel problem here.
Or it may simply be that to fully understand someone's worldview you'd have to be that person and that anything else is just an approximation.
I've met > 5 and < 10 billionaires in person. Some of them were the most humble and incredible people I have ever met, you wouldn't know their names and you would never realize that they did what they did because they do so quietly and effectively.
And some are utter jerks that see this world as their personal playground where the rules are for suckers and their money insulates them from the consequences of their actions.
The latter group is over-represented in the SV eco system, and it is something that we will all end up regretting, these people have a lot of power but not a gram of responsibility or ethics. You are not a person to them, you are a disposable unit that either serves to further their interests, can be discarded, ignored or destroyed at a whim.
> I've met > 5 and < 10 billionaires in person. Some of them were the most humble and incredible people I have ever met, you wouldn't know their names and you would never realize that they did what they did because they do so quietly and effectively.
I realize this is a tangent, but I'm pleasantly surprised you've met billionaires you consider good people. I was actually about to post a comment saying all the billionaires I've met (about the same number as you) are horrible people. If you're willing to share - what was the approximate ratio of good to bad amongst the billionaires you've met?
Interesting question. So, for context: I meet a lot of people from the investment world and within that world there are many strata, former and current entrepreneurs, media people, heirs and bankers. Some of those have made it very big, their successes are quite visible but it isn't always immediately obvious who the people behind the successes are. But in my line of business that veil gets pulled up on occasion and then you can get a closer view of what that world looks like and how it works.
I just did a tally of the ones I'm sure are well above $1B, and I would say the ratio is about 3:1 for jerks vs really, really good people. I really don't want to drop names and it is one of the reasons why my company website does not list our clients. But my exposure is mostly to EU parties (though I know a very small number in the USA as well and one in Canada).
Though we can appreciate the intense faith of Silicon Valley lore, this interpretation of the law is bizarrely narrow. The somewhat religious belief in progress is non-representative of the human experience. The function of the human race isn't to secure commercial services of convenience at any cost. It is possible that your beliefs don't correspond to the goals of local or global communities. For instance all you have to do is actually use a self-driving, slow/jerky/annoying Cruise car to know it'll be about as ubiquitous as a Segway, uses way more resources than is justifiable and that more public transit would do a better, and more environmental friendly job of getting people places. In summary, we have laws because other people exist and we live in a modern economy. Syria/Iraq/Russia operate more in line with your thinking and bend the laws for the rich (you know, for "progress").
> The somewhat religious belief in progress is non-representative of the human experience.
It seems the other way around. You'd have to be willfully blind to ignore that the human experience consists of technological progress.
> The function of the human race isn't to secure commercial services of convenience at any cost.
Who can say what the function of the human race is? I worry that we in software are becoming detached from reality in a strange way. I suspect your sentiment is common among the tech industry, and yet it seems the opposite of empirical observation -- the basis of science.
> It is possible that your beliefs don't correspond to the goals of local or global communities.
Sodomy, for example. To ram the point home, suppose you were born a few hundred years prior. Are you sure it would be unethical to engage in buttsex in the privacy of your own home with a consenting adult? Everyone's fine with that now, but it would quite literally get you executed not so long ago:
> This meant that a convicted sodomite’s possessions could be confiscated by the government, rather than going to their next of kin, and that even priests and monks could be executed for the offence—even though they could not be executed for murder. In moving what had previously been an offence tried by ecclesiastical courts into the secular ones, Henry may have intended it as a simple expression of political power along with other contemporary acts such as Submission of the Clergy Act 1533 and one year before the Act of Supremacy 1534. However Henry later used the law to execute monks and nuns (thanks to information his spies had gathered) and take their monastery lands—the same tactics had been used 200 years before by Philip IV of France against the Knights Templar.
The Knights Templar were a powerful organization, yet many of them were sentenced to death on the basis of buttsex being unjust.
I fear we live in an era where, metaphorically speaking, the buttsex corporations engage in is being framed as unjust, even though it seems pretty fair to me. Coinbase, Uber, Airbnb... It's hard to find anyone here that actually thinks startups are a good idea anymore. Or at least, if people speak up and say that they're fine, they tend to be shouted down.
> In summary, we have laws because other people exist and we live in a modern economy.
Our views don't seem so modern. I think history may look back on us the way we look at the people in the 1500s.
> Raise your hands if you’d rather go back to a world without Airbnb
Step outside of the software bubble we’re in and I’d guess 80% or more people would prefer a world without Airbnb. A significant part of the population does not use Airbnb and is also experiencing negative impacts of a housing shortage and affordability problems.
>Step outside of the software bubble we’re in and I’d guess 80% or more people would prefer a world without Airbnb.
I have, and the ability to travel (affordably) seems fairly important to working class folks. The people I've seen complain about AirBnb are the same sort of people who sneer at Ryanair - definitely not "the masses".
Then again, things may be different in the USA. I've always assumed the 40 year old man who has never seen the ocean is some sort of a ridiculous stereotype, but who knows.
I live in a pretty typical American middle class neighborhood far from any tech centers and Airbnb is almost universally hated around here, for pretty much the usual reasons you hear (disruptive guests, housing availability, etc). Airbnb clientele is heavily skewed towards techies and upper-middle class in my experience. Folks traveling on a limited budget either can't afford Airbnb or can't spare the extra time they take compared to a hotel.
Is that also true if you are (or are traveling with) a woman? I'm not much of a motel person and am mostly working with stereotypes here[1], but a cheap motel does not strike me as the place where a woman can safely return home by herself late in the evening.
I guess, cheap AirBnbs may be at similar locations, but that doesn't seem to be necessarily (or usually) true. And often you can't quite figure out how unsafe the place is ahead of time, so you rent something and roll with it, but that's a discussion for another time.
[1] Then again, so is everyone else. A guy a few comments down presented statistics, which were somehow refuted trough the careful deployment of a stereotype.
> Is that also true if you are (or are traveling with) a woman?
I don't think gender is a factor here. But it depends on the neighborhood you're in, not whether or not it's a motel.
However, that's not pertinent to the point that I was making, which is that Airbnbs are more of a luxury option, not a cost-saving option. The comment I was replying to appears to be asserting that being opposed to Airbnbs is elitist because it's being opposed to affordable options. In my experience in the US, that doesn't track. Airbnbs tend to be more expensive than someone who runs lean is likely to choose.
Sure, there’s no bias whatsoever in that survey, surely the old grandma living on an unspecified european city center that is against airbnb is as likely to respond as the young FAANG-salaried international US traveller that wants to travel cheap and authentic.
On the one hand, we have survey data, with which we can quibble on methodology. On the other hand, we have an HN poster who just really doesn't like Airbnb and pulls a number from his nether regions guessing that everyone actually agrees with him. Truly a conundrum as to which might be closer to the truth.
No need to hide the information on the methodology of the survey:
"YouGov Ratings
YouGov Ratings measures Airbnb’s popularity and fame every quarter. The latest data is based on 1532 nationally representative interviews of the US population, collected during Q2 2023."
> Raise your hands if you’d rather go back to a world without Airbnb.
I'm here, raising my hand!
Zoning requirements exist for a reason. In this AirBNB hellscape, we now have entirely unregulated hotels in my nominally residential neighborhood. I live in a tourist town and it gets the worst kind of tourists, there to drink and play loud music to all hours of the morning.
These companies can fuck right off. Sometimes they accidentally improve things on one axis by ignoring regulations that are no longer relevant or overly burdensome, only to make something much worse on another. They're blunt instruments of criminality - they indiscriminately tear through both the useless red tape as well as the proper regulations that exist for entirely good reasons.
> It’s good to obey the law. I certainly try. But treating it as some kind of holy grail of ethics is fraught with peril. You’re outsourcing your thinking to the lowest common denominator: it’s what people in positions of power feel is justice. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. And when it isn’t, do you really want to be the kind of person that believes it should be obeyed no matter the tradeoffs?
Nice, so we should be allowed to break the law if we feel that something is not right?
Yes, laws may be unethical or immoral. There is a system in place to change them, though, at least in a democratic government. Self-driving cars are allowed to be in the streets because laws have changed. AirBnB is allowed to operate because the laws have changed. And I would rather have that, a slow process of adaptation, than a random guy letting their crazy inventions roam free just because he feels like he's "right".
> Nice, so we should be allowed to break the law if we feel that something is not right?
I mean... yes? That's the whole point of things like jury nullification and giving judges leeway in their sentencing. The law is not ethics. There's some correlation, but it's up to us as a society to apply it in an ethical way, and try to keep them aligned as much as possible.
Breaking the law as a means of agitating for change isn't necessarily unethical. But an important part of that is accepting the legal consequences for the lawbreaking -- that's the part that accelerates change.
Breaking the law in order to enhance your profit is an entirely different thing, and there is no high ground there.
So, breaking the law in and of itself doesn't accelerate change? I guess the corn laws are still a thing, alcohol is still illegal in America as is marijuana.
A few years back the United states had the highest corporate taxes in the OECD, yet nobody was actually paying them in full. What happened? Congress lowered taxes.
I have a question. Are you an altruist? If so, how can you square that with obeying laws that bring misery to others? Aren't others entitled to joy and happiness?
> So, breaking the law in and of itself doesn't accelerate change?
Not really, no. The part of civil disobedience that accelerates change is when people are seen to be punished for the laws.
I don't know about the history of corn laws, but with both alcohol and marijuana, it wasn't the breaking of the laws itself that caused the laws to be changed, it was people getting punished for engaging in activities that others thought should not be illegal. If nobody is seen as being punished by the law, then most people won't be energized to change them because it looks like nobody's being unjustly harmed.
> how can you square that with obeying laws that bring misery to others?
I don't know that I bring misery to others in the laws that I follow. But your question is impossible to answer as stated -- what about laws that bring misery to some but justice to others? The world isn't usually black and white, and that includes laws.
My only point in this discussion is that there may be a moral high ground in breaking some laws under some circumstances. But making a profit is never such a moral high ground.
Companies that break laws to increase their profits are simply criminals, not bringers of justice.
What kind of false equivalence is this? It's Uber or drunk driving, literally no other option?
There is no Uber in my country (nor Lyft, nor anything similar), yet I always make it back home when I'm drunk, alive and without a need to sit behind the wheel. So does everyone else.
Yes, absolutely. Uber poured a shitload of money they will never make back and now convince people that they should be able to get a driver on demand for cheap. If you need a ride, call a friend/family member/anyone who can trust you to spot them for gas.
The 'gig economy' has eroded about 100 years of progress in workers rights. The price of that erosion will not be visible for another 30 years or so, but when the bill is presented I suspect it won't be pretty.
That question is so loaded because it begs for a loss of knowledge about Airbnb, and that’s not something I would not want to lose. However, do I think Airbnb is a net gain for humans? No. But I wouldn’t “uninvent it”, in the literal sense.
Disrupting the law as an ideal is not the same as "It’s good to obey the law. I certainly try. But treating it as some kind of holy grail of ethics is fraught with peril"
Idealizing being indifferent to the law is pulling the rug under the whole idea of democracy and rule of law. It has dire consequences. Much dire than a less than perfect taxi cab experience.
Well, if the law would deal with people the way they do with companies, you would never be convicted of any crime. It would be the shirt you wore at the day of the crime that would be sent to the cleaners, and you could choose to pay the bill for getting it back or not.
Yes. People also voluntarily give up their civil rights and are duped into unreasonable debts. How often do you read the ToS for most of the services you consume? Consumer protections operate in the understanding that people cannot be expected to know the intricacies of all the various laws and agreements that may negatively impact them should they agree to terms when consuming a good or service.
To be clear, I don't personally endorse Worldcoin and am not an investor, nor do I have particular admiration for Sam Altman. I just fundamentally question the notion of "victimless" crimes. In my view, consensual transactions between adults shouldn't be illegal and it seems to me that this is what is occurring here. As to why this is happening in Kenya, I wouldn't be surprised if they failed to "persuade" the right bureaucrats (a problem that many African entrepreneurs face[0]). According to Reuters, Worldcoin is currently "orbing" in 20 countries by the way[1].
At one point in the 70s, the Indian government started offering people money to voluntarily get sterilized. These people didn’t have a free choice in the matter, their situation in life compelled them, in this particular case financially. It’s not an infringement of someone’s freedom, rather an exploitation of the poor situation that individual is already in.
Why call this situation an "exploitation" when all parties involved are better off from the transaction? And if it is truly a "life or death" situation, how is it moral to ban a life saving option?
If Kenyans are getting life-saving money in exchange for their iris scan, how is banning this arrangement helping them? Aren't they in a better position than you, or government bureaucrats, to judge what is best for them?
I believe Worldcoin is live in Germany. Also, it’s kind of unreasonable to expect a startup to pull off a global launch without a hitch. Assuming good faith, I suspect issues will be resolved over time.
Yes, that's entirely why they've gone into mostly developing countries (I'd think it'd be easier for a startup to pull of a global launch focusing on more developed countries, for a variety of reasons) offering people almost a week's salary to have their eyeball scanned (Kenya's average monthly salary is USD$420, and Worldcoin was offering effectively $70 to sign up).
The tech industry in general lost the "benefit of the doubt" years ago. That's not WC's fault, but WC could have mitigated some of that if they at least put some effort into not appearing shady.
Particularly since they're connected to cryptocurrency, which is one of the scummier segments of the industry to begin with.
I think it's entirely possible that the random opinion of a person who is not involved, nor a resident of the country in question may not need to supersede what is possibly an informed decision on the part of Kenyan officials. While it's fashionable to assume non-Anglo countries operate exclusively within the context of corruption and ignorance, Kenya has the right to secure its own values over the hopes and dreams of Silicon Valley.
If WeChat required iris scans to work, would the Chinese "voluntarily" be doing it?
I'm specifically making this example about WeChat because it's basically impossible to exist in China without it and has the power imbalances inherent in dealing with the CCP that make it "voluntary" the same way donating money to someone with a gun pointed at your chest is "voluntary", since libertarians have a deliberately extremely warped view of that word.
Is "a comparable 'gun pointed at their chest'" your minimum required threshold for conceding that when people are tricked into an arrangement that harms them long-term, they consented without all relevant information to make a decision? (Libertarians also have this thing where they think obscuring information and getting what they want out of someone counts as informed consent because it absolves them of guilt later when their 'business partners' find themselves in financial ruin 'of their own accord'....)
Because as I understand it, they were offered a carrot of $70USD for signing up.
I don't know why WorldCoin specifically wanted specifically iris scans, but I know that companies frequently toe the line when it comes to the law, and step over it if the fines are small enough, and that they're data-hungry. Facebook + Cambridge Analytica + election eruption. Github + Copilot. Stable Diffusion + "AI art". LLM + Reddit and other websites making moves towards a closed internet to avoid scraping. Just because the data collection wasn't valuable at the time it was collected, doesn't mean it didn't become so after a critical threshold. These trends monetarily benefit a few people, and the rest of us get enshittification.
Just because iris data may not be valuable today, doesn't mean it won't be insanely valuable in the future, but it does practically guarantee that benefits won't be shared equitably. Remember Henrietta Lacks? Her family only just reached a settlement with Thermo Fisher this month. How much money does TFS make, how much are HeLa cells worth, and how much did the Lacks estate end up getting?
If iris scans are so irrelevant, then why did WorldCoin flat out ignore Kenya's order to stop collecting that information for months? Shouldn't a bunch of geniuses work there - they could make their code compliant if they wanted to. So why did they keep collecting?
I’m having a hard time not being snarky and sarcastic about this. Worldcoin is a solution to no particular problem, designed to replace government functions with their own profit-driven replacements. I’m not the slightest surprised they’re ignoring those same governments telling them not to do something.
I deeply disagree. While Worldcoin's execution seems questionable at best, the idea seems like a solution to a problem that we (society) definitely have, namely the real-people problem. Worldcoin or something like it, if properly implemented, makes it possible to distinguish between real people and bots. This is a real problem that we have today, is getting rapidly worse, and till now this problem has only been solved in shitty ways by governments.
Worldcoin is just a centralized / privately owned database of iris scans and issued user IDs that integrates with the blockchain.
> solution to a problem that we (society) definitely have, namely the real-people problem
> till now this problem has only been solved in shitty ways by governments
The solution Worldcoin provides is "trust us for knowing who is real-people". I fail to see how that's better than the way governments solve the problem.
Governments regularly do terrible things in the banking system: Printing money, capital controls and mind boggling amount of red tape. With this red tape they can punish anyone who disagrees with them.
Oh yeah, all that abhorrent red tape like "If you are a bank you have to prove you aren't doing funny things with people's money" and "if you provide financial services you need to make an honest effort to not fund like, actual terrorists, or north korea" and "We thought we learned our lesson about unregulated stocks back when it caused the great depression"
Eh, we could kinda resolve the problem by having a government auth system, and you can get some OpenID like response from it. Then private companies could just use that for identification (like in Sweden, a lot of apps have that BankID or whatever its called). We have something similar in Canada in a couple of provinces, but they’re exposed to government portals only.
However bringing that theme into US is a no-brainer because of the distrust in the government or some other issues.
I would very strongly prefer the government do this over a private company. The government already knows my identity anyway, so I lose nothing. Plus, I think that the greatest threats to our freedom and liberty in the US comes from corporations rather than the government.
I am very far from convinced that this is a problem that needs to be solved so badly that we should sacrifice any amount of privacy for it. Especially to a corporation.
And despite WC's claims, their scheme does involve sacrificing some privacy.
> I am very far from convinced that this is a problem that needs to be solved so badly
How much front line experience do you have fighting organized false engagement campaigns, fraud, and other botting? Sprawling amounts of activity you see online is not genuine. I would not be surprised if 50% or more of the comments on Reddit and HN are not by sincere users given their complete lack of identity verification.
Businesses offer discounts through ID.me because they know it comes from a real buyer and doesn't have the 1-10% chance of being a fraud bot. Running your own email server and assuring your emails actually make to a user's inbox is nigh impossible, for a reason. More and more of the internet disappears behind the Cloudflare wall, for a reason.
Public facing services are under a relentless assault by organized, meticulous, and resourceful actors. That was before advanced AI that can read images better than some humans and large language models that destroyed the Turing test. SOTA abilities are fortunately expensive to build and run and kept close to the chest by OpenAI, Microsoft, and others, but that defensive wall will one day fall and the internet will need infrastructure and systems in place ready for it.
I read a paper that looked at Sybil attacks in the age of modern generative AI. In short, the internet is unviable without a clear human-or-bot signal. Until now that signal was inherent: most things a human can easily do a bot cannot; captchas, targeted cyberhacks, interactive realistic phone calls.
There is zero chance Worldcoin will not be shut down in any country the second they reach significant volume above what they get now with the PR hype and free money customer attraction scheme with a touch of anachronistic crypto hype.
It's so terribly out of touch with the real world in a way not even the most die hard crypto bro's could dream up a dystopian scenario where this would fly.
And what's with that terribly photoshopped picture of the 2; as if to double down on how fake the motives behind this scheme are.
No, the average crypto bro doesn't care about crypto, privacy or anything like that. The average crypto bro only cares about the opportunity to profit, and will gladly let the devil himself scan their iris as long as they get some digital tokens they can dump to someone else.
Truly unfortunate, because what Worldcoin is doing is completely opposite of the original cryptocurrency ideal.
for every 1 dreamy utopian hacker crypto bro you have 99 running a get rich quick scheme, if they can pump and dump the worldcoin, they will, even if it would include ripping the eyeballs off the customers
I think it's more of a tongue in cheek joke about the fact the US will undoubtedly refuse to extradite until legal proceedings against him in the US (and his probable prison sentence) concludes.
At least he won't have to be afraid of Kenyan cruise missiles or rockets.
But it may well end up in the Hague because of the callous way that this has been done and the amount of sympathy it has gathered all over the world and that would curb Altman's ability to travel considerably.
At this point, why do we even bother pretending to be dismayed that techbros and their vanity projects have no respect for anything? If you just assume that they're doing something harmful that enriches themselves (and I mean literally enriches) and we just haven't had a news cycle about it yet, we could save so much time giving them the benefit of the doubt and just go straight to handing out fines in the nine-digit range to make them cut their shit out.
It's not clear to me from this article whether ignoring a demand from Kenya's ODPC was a crime. The article says nothing about it. Is it? It's conceivable that it's the equivalent of a cease and desist letter, if the ODPC has no specific authority. That would explain why a company with a lot of lawyers would just ignore it, and why it was escalated to another group as a response.
this company is trafficking in identity. it is trying to build the ultimate human tracking system where every human's transaction is logged and tied to his biometrical properties. it's the antithesis of freedom. and the fact sam altman has no moral issues with doing this to Africans is telling. I think he's close to achieving his transition ... to a villain
It's not that bad really. I got scanned and they don't take any ID and you can call yourself what you want. They just basically give you a crypto wallet with some worldcoins in. It's linked to a hash of your iris scan to stop you repeating that multiple time. It's less intrusive than normal financial services and no hit to my freedom as I have no need to use the thing - it's just another option.
I don’t think exploiting lax regulation, ineffective law enforcement, and financial hardship to scoop up biometric data for cheap has anything to do with “savior”.
They tend to justify it, both themselves and to the world, by claiming the product is here lift people in the global south out of poverty and bring them into the modern world. That's textbook white saviorism.
That's how they handwave away the fact that their actual goal is exploiting lax regulation, ineffective law enforcement, and financial hardship to scoop up biometric data for cheap.
I think 'Tony Stark complex' would be more appropriate. Feels like these people watched Ironman 2 and imagine themselves in Tony's shoes as he address congress.
No such thing as white savior complex. White savior complex is mislabeled white exploitation complex. Nobody is a saint. Everyone acts in accordance to their own selfish interests. Even white people. Altman is doing this not to save or benefit kenyans but for his own selfish interests.
- Imaginary scam money (in 17,382 flavors, including eyeballs)!
- Expensive unregulated taxi!
- Expensive unregulated hotel!
- Picture of monkey (formerly valuable)!
- Imaginary restaurant that serves bad food!
- Expensive unregulated television!
- Another picture of monkey (never valuable)!
- Twitter but it sucks now!
- The news but it also sucks and steals your personal information!
Plus, try our greatest achievement yet:
- Expensive unregulated scam concert tickets!
EDIT: the real trend with Silly-Con Valley is that every major venture is an adventure in removing regulations that We (collectively) bought with 10's of thousands of lives. And these VCs come through, and seek to destroy regulation for a pound of profit, and some scraps to others.
These services always start cheap since they are subsidized by VCs to buy growth and scale. It soon will change, and get worse and cost more, if not outright re-regulated out of existence.... For the same reasons why the regulation was there in the first place.
There's a few companies working on true innovations. But most SV is just remixes on "deregulation and illegality as a service"