I'm doubtful it can happen, but it is more than fair of the author to point out the multiple labor wins over the last year as evidence that maybe it isn't a pipe dream.
All the pieces exist.... GPS location, mapping, money transfer e-commerce software, the fediverse social platform. What is missing is the social platform integration of all those separate pieces.
This is the part of the decentralized "Gig economy" model that no one seems to have a good answer for, how do you filter out bad actors or even known threats without an organization calling the shots?
I think the answer is pretty simple, honestly. Have an organization whose purpose is just to filter out bad actors and maintain the technology. Just don't be greedy or heirarchal about it. The tech staff gets paid from a small percentage from the providers.
Kind of a dumb point. I suspect you didn't really have much experience using taxis pre-uber. This is all about trying to replace the uber/lyft model with a similar thing, but where most of the profits go to the drivers and not uber/lyft.
Idk, considering everyone's parents said never to get into a car with a stranger and they have like somewhere close to fifth sigma error levels in safety, it seems more safe than people would assume. Considering the rumor is you need almost no background check to do it.
Generally speaking, ridesharing is more than 99.99 percent safe whether you’re using Uber or Lyft. However, issues do occur. In 2019 and 2020, for example, there were over 4,800 safety incidents during U.S. Lyft and Uber rides.1 But out of billions of trips total, these companies have safety incident rates of 0.0005 percent and 0.0003 percent...
Anything is bad. Just like how Uber is shit today, P2P won't be any different.
A system where everyone can advertise themselves as a taxi is unnecessarily dangerous. Just use regular normal taxi. Anyone can become a taxi in that system, and that's bad.
Am I crazy or is everyone just describing car service? Lots of major cities have private storefronts with a group of drivers and a single person that answers the phones.
The only thing those businesses were ever missing was a good online presence and/or a smartphone app.
I disagree with this. Uber and Lyft just did it at scale. My local car service can make a website with payment processing without knowing any coding. They don't need a full service app with a global presence. It's not trivial but totally doable.
How old are you? Did you spend any time in the pre Uber days trying to get a cab? Wrong part of NYC? Good luck. Out in the suburbs and you don't know a local cab company's number? Lol never going to happen.
The electronic payment system is not what made it such a big improvement. It's the ability to instantly call a cab almost anywhere, at any time, with no knowledge of anything local. It's the connection between the drivers and the passengers that was the big leap.
In my suburbs, if there were enough of us around, there was someone who knew the local cab company's number too. Although that was also not great late at night. The issue is that when you are not from the area and don't have someone who knows the number. This is what Uber (mostly) fixed.
All you need to do is find a way of getting people in touch with you for your service. Mainly the reason I hate these companies is because they do provide a valuable service for the drivers in that they have a system to get the people who need a ride connected with the people who give rides; but they demand too much of the profit for what work they actually provide. The ones doing the real work get peanuts and the tool provider is taking in the big bucks.
I mean, I’m sure we could get a non-profit started that offers the exact same service. Just get drivers to take on the responsibility of covering any accidents, etc. It could run on donations like Wikipedia. The drivers get 100% of the profits…I’m sure there’s be unforeseen snags, but I really wish we could start “disrupting” industries by literally taking these tech fucks’ share of the market and redistribute that shit to drivers.
Rides would probably be cheaper, no surge pricing, and a good ol’ stick in the eye of the tech industry.
The insurance is part of why it works. I looked up commercial insurance rates for a taxi and it's like $2,000 every six months. And while that's doable if rates are the same or only a little lower it's still one hell of a gut check. Because you don't know if you're going to get customers. Uber and Lyft absorbed that risk.
So what's likely to happen in the near future is uninsured or under insured open source ride-sharing that will need to crown a winning app or two before it gets predictable enough for people to pay that.
And that means it also needs to survive that stage with Uber and Lyft strongly messaging normal people about safety and quality concerns.
Going to free up so much labour. Although I haven't had too many issues with Uber, taxi drivers can be an absolute disgrace can't wait for a few of those people to be out of a job where they exploit people.
Cities should socialize ride shares, delivery shares, bike/scooter shares.
Sure some guy invented an app to make them all slightly easier, and he made a ton a money. Cool. Good for him. Time to make the technology work for people.
It's true in essentially all industries, but it's especially obvious in rideshare that there's a layer of parasites who get paid far too much money for nothing beyond the fact that they won the fight for the position of "parasite who gets paid far too much money for doing nothing."
Anything that might even just decrease the number of overpaid parasites would be a benefit not just to the concerned industry, but to society as a whole.
Currently based in NYC, but getting ready for a big launch in Minneapolis in response to the incumbent rideshare companies pulling out of the city in protest of increased rideshare regulation. Big opportunity to seize some marketshare without needing that much startup capital if your better financed competitors are removing themselves from that part of the market.
Nah it's just that it uses blockchain technology for some reason (hype I guess), but it's not coin related. (Blockchains can be used for other purposes than money).
not necessarily, but it can be a good idea to have a distributed, tamper proof ledger of transactions.
that way anyone can provide proof for basically anything to do with the service: payment, drive, location, etc.
it might also have advantages from a security perspective for riders and drivers.
there are advantages, they're not entirely necessary, but they may well be the best option for a distributed network (i.e.: no central server infrastructure, at least not beyond some simple software repository for downloads/updates)
It's the cryptocurrency that keeps it tamper proof.
Any blockchain can be altered they aren't immutable by nature.
What keeps it immutable is the incentive provided and to not cheat so you can get that incentive.
The whole thing is trustless and everyone is working together aligned on the incentive.
If it doesn't cost resources to secure the chain (which get recouped by the reward) anyone could just spin up a bazillion nodes and take control of the chain and alter the records. And anyone could collide to do so with others to benefit themselves by altering it if they aren't risking a reward, or in PoS, their stake.
If it's a small private blockchain to just keep track of data, people could collude and alter it and it could just be a write only dB with a few admins
What Satoshi did, was invent a way to make a digital item immutable, that was the invention. There were no immutable digital items prior to that. A blockchain isn't just immutable because it's a blockchain.
This interview brings up a number of points about the gulf between how a newsroom works and how bean-counters would like a newsroom to work. Unfortunately, it also shows that the latter has been working well enough for 17 months to keep getting the paper out.
I don't envy younger journalists for whom this is the introduction to the industry, but the time to get out of corporate journalism is now. Yes, it's a career that is an identity, and it's fucking crushing to have it in the rear view, but today's job market favours those just out of college across industries, so clinging on without adequate pay only makes getting out of the field worse when you've crossed the Rubicon and have extensive experience doing things no other industry wants.
Obviously, this is ultimately a story about the lack of labour protections from the government. Crucially, though, individual strikes are not moving the needle on that front. Some publishers have negotiated new contracts, but the ones that haven't -- and this is an excellent example -- are not going to change what they're doing: delay after delay until someone tells them they can't.
That day coming is an "if," not a "when."
Most journalists want to do the right thing and see the work as crucial to societal function. However, losing years that one can never get back, either from an income standpoint or just health and energy is the wrong call.
hamiltonnolan.com
Hot