Hi, we’re a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.
We’re not a newspaper, we’re a content portal.
We’re not a taxi service, we’re a ride sharing app.
We’re not a pay TV service, we’re a streaming platform.
We’re not a department store, we’re an e-commerce marketplace.
We’re not a financial services firm, we’re crypto.
We’re not a space agency, we’re a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We’re not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we’re a large language model generative AI platform.
Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.
But we’re totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.
And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don’t apply to us.
Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections… They totally don’t apply to us.
Even copyright laws — as long as we’re talking about everyone else’s intellectual property.
We’re going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.
We’ve also raised several billion in VC funding, and we’ll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.
Once we have a near monopoly, we’ll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.
You won’t believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.
We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.
By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we’re doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.
By the way, don’t forget to check out our latest innovation. It’s the Uber of toothpaste!
Wow. This is a Mastodon account posting to Lemmy and we are getting cross platform engagement and it’s all working pretty seamlessly. This is the first time I’ve seen this kind of thing on Lemmy. The Mastodon users don’t get to see the upvotes though, right? The @ thing when they reply is kind of annoying but it seems like a fairly easy fix to hide those when browsing from Lemmy.
That is so, so cool.
so, sO, SO COOL
It’s pretty awesome, but generally Kbin does it even better in my experience. It’s designed to be able to interact with both. Looking forward to the API!
Wow. You just somehow accurately summed up the modern day result of late stage capitalism in one post. Nicely done
It took longer than I care to admit to realize this was satire.
Which says something about the world and life.
I suspect Satire is indeed dead.
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Trying to make someone crew and also have them pay a quarter million dollars to be crew without any training at all doesn’t seem like the magical loophole they think it would be in contract law. Especially when it’ll be comically easy in court to prove gross negligence with all the videos that doofus made about how much he hates maritime safety regulations and training.
@bnys @ajsadauskas @technology mission specialists are crew, which gets around rules and requirements for passenger carrying vessels, right?
Yooo Mastodon post on Lemmy let’s goooo
@ajsadauskas @technology The one thing I don’t sympathise with in that list is the taxi services — at least here in #Ottawa, they were even more exploitative than Uber or Lyft, with a small number of plate holders acting as feudal lords for the drivers, and extracting rent from their vassals even on a bad shift with few fares.
The city could have fixed that by issuing more plates, but the plate-owner lobby was too powerful.
Exact same system in Paris, with the same issues.
It’s not all black or white, those startups brought some good things like breaking highly profitable monopolies and creating well designed apps that provide a much better service which ended up being picked up by the former monopolies, overall the quality of service often improved and we sometimes have more choice now, like picking the less human exploiting alternative that still has a usable app.
Ah yes, the “local taxi lobby.” Uber helped show a lot of us what a fucking joke that is, not just in Ottawa.
Innovation, choice, quality and freedom are the choice spices for capitalism soup. These shit-cook-legislators kept sprinkling in taint like protectionism, cronyism, extortion and corruption thinking nobody would notice. Well guess what? Now it’s just taint soup.
Why does it matter who’s serving you taint soup? The problem is there’s no other soup and they keep telling you it’s fine.
While we don’t like what these services have become, lots of people forget how bad comparative services were before these came along. Example: bookstores. Everyone dreams up some ideal bookstore that didn’t exist for the majority. Growing up, my local bookstore was run by a religious nut who refused to get Devil literature like Lord of the Rings. The good bookstores were in Ann Arbor, which was a 45 minute drive away. Chains like Borders, B&N, or web stores like Amazon were a huge positive change.
Isn’t LOTR “Christian”, somehow? Maybe I’m thinking of C.S. Lewis 🤔
Yeah Narnia was straight up unmistakable Christian allegory. I believe J.R.R. (C.S.'s drinking buddy) always insisted that LOTR was not meant to be taken in that way, or like when people hypothesized that Sauron was Hitler and so on.
There’s not really anything about Sauron that is a critique of Hitler or fascism specifically. I think Sauron, like Smaug, was a warning against human greed, for money or for power.
See how the hobbits are like the antithesis of Smaug and Sauron, and each time caused their ultimate downfall.
“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
@FaeDrifter @Smatt I read Tolkein’s books more in the light of his experience serving on the front in WW1. There’s this terrible thing that you have to leave your cozy, safe home to do, and it damages you so much that even after “victory”, you can never really go back.
People with strong beliefs are often not exactly rational or analytical.
You’re thinking of CS Lewis. Now imagine if pre-early teen me asking this person about Neuromancer by Gibson. Their head would have exploded. One saving grace about my suburban bedroom town is that we had a good public library. If I wanted the good stuff, they either had it or could get it.
@cheese_greater @Banzai51 LOTR isn’t very Christian; Tolkein was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, at a time when Old English studies were focussing more on the pagan elements that they thought were more “pure” and corrupted by the arrival of Christianity.
C.S. Lewis’s books were allegorical Christian (very high church), but fundamentalists don’t go for that kind of thing; for them, Jesus has to be Jesus, not an anthropomorphic lion inspired by the story of the crucifixion.
Sun of God
“Michael was driving a car from a company that shows every private residence in the country. But it’s also a company that won’t let us show the car that takes those pictures. In fairness to them, it is their property. If you want to know what the company is, all you have to do is ‘something’ it.”
- Arrested Development Narrator
@CannaVet @ajsadauskas I laughed so hard at this, I wanted to thank you. I’ve been with DuckDuckGo for as long as I can remember.
@ajsadauskas @technology “enshitify” is my new favorite word.
Here’s the source of that term. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Excellent article.
Thanks, @ajsadauskas, for summarising extractivist platform capitalism strategies. The patterns are so clear that mainstreet is getting aware these days. At least partially. Time to rebuild the economy and the internet with collective & public interest first.
@wtebbens
hope you’re aware that this means to abolish #capitalism!
@ajsadauskas @technology
“It’s all on the blockchain now, so it’s not even us who’s doing it.
What are you gonna do, arrest me and these 7,000 graphics cards?”
Well, I’m not sure about arresting a bunch of graphics cards, but under American civil forfeiture laws, they could be sued, sort of. “United States vs. Approximately 7000 Computer Graphics Cards” has a certain ring to it.
You just gotta put very tiny handcuffs on the fan blades.
But they might overheat then! And if too many of them die in custody, the public might take notice and turn on the police.
Its weird how Uber isn’t already possible to replicate via blockchain akin to the way cryptocurrencies transact and perpetuate
Had us in the first half not gonna lie
@ajsadauskas @technology One factual point I’m not clear on–how exactly are Lyft/Uber getting away with operating unlicensed taxi services? Are they just ignoring the law but getting away with it because city governments are tech-enthralled? (But could, theoretically, bust every uber driver for operating a taxi without a license)? Or do they actually have some legal basis for not needing medallions?
It totally depends of the jurisdiction. In some parts of the world calling up a ride sharing app with get you a totally normal taxi at normal metered taxi rates. In other parts of the world its pretty much they do it and nobody can stop them. A private citizen can pick up anyone they want and the laws all assumed that a taxi would have to find passengers and handle money in person. By the time politicians get around to doing anything about it they’ve already taken over the market and voters would take it personally if they had to go back to regular cabs.
Because people don’t hail them on the street when they’re passing, they’re not legally a taxi service.
So they don’t need medalions, cab licenses or whatever the system is in that country and, more importantly, don’t need to obbey the rules for taxi services both for the vehicle (most noteable the rules about the colors of the vehicle and in some countries even the kind of vehicle itself), clear transparent predictable upfront pricing, and for the actual cabbies (for example, in London they don’t need to have “The Knowledge” - which is basically having memorized all the streets - which cabbies do have to have before they get a license or obbey any of the other legal requirements for licensing of the actual drivers that cabbies have) so operation is much cheaper.
From what I’ve seen they’re generally operating under the local legislation of “rental driver cars” (i.e. cars rented with a driver) and the arrangement of getting, for example a Uber via their app, is treated in legal terms as a booking not as a hailing, even though it is pretty close in de facto terms to hailing a cab.
It took a decade for states to catch up on this loophole into providing the same service as a taxi services whilst not legally being one (as they’re not hailed, they’re “hired”) made possible by smartphone technology, and by the time they did Uber and similar were so big that most (like Portugal, as mentioned by somebody else) just made those low-regulation quasi-cab services legal without converging the regulations for taxis with theirs (i.e. they simply legalized the competitive advantages that services like Uber got by finding a loophole in the law), and said legalizing of the much (much, MUCH) lower regulatory requirements on them whilst kepting taxi services high-regulation, maintained the uneven market playing field that had allowed the explosive growth of Uber and its ilk.
People don’t hail actual licensed taxis on the street in NYC anymore either. I tried when I was there and the taxi drivers said I needed to schedule with the app. The exception was the taxi stations, where you got in line and waited for your ticket to give to the cabbie.
They’re not in the UK, they all have to be registered and lisenced here like any other minicab.
Portugal has the Uber law, all drivers have to be clearly indicated with a TVDE sticker and they need some basic qualification afaik. Also some taxi services double dip of course.
We are not just a startup. We are a mix of dreams, passions, and a ton of passionate slogans.
When we aren’t drinking craft beer…
@ajsadauskas @technology don’t forget the fact that a good amount never turn a profit
Turning a profit and making a lot of money for yourself are 2 different things.
I was a couple of years in the Tech Startup World not long ago, but at a point when I was already an Old Seadog of a Techie (having crossed a couple of Industries to get there, including Finance, and qualified amonst other things in Business Analysis, so I did saw everything also from a business angle).
People’s motivations are not AT ALL about profits or even creating a legacy in the form of a successful company: Tech Startups are made from the very start to make the Founders and Early Adopter filthy rich via an Exist Strategy (normally IPO or Buyout by a larger company).
This is actually all very open (if there is one thing Founders discuss a lot is Exit Strategies) and Pitching is all about convincing early investors that they’re going to make a lot of money. Sure, the right bollocks is fed to the (almost always young and naive) techies to make them work crazy hours for little more than promisses (usually broken, often quite purposefully using financial mechanisms like stock dillution) of lots of money from stock options, as well as to the small investors who buy the stock at or post IPO (who are seen as marks no just here but by the Finance Industry, of which Startups are nowadays pretty much just another arm, in general), but if you’re actually inside the Industry with enough experience in the right areas, it’s pretty obvious what drives those who control it (which nowadays are people from Finance, Marketing and other Sales-similar areas, seldom Techies)
Unlike in the previous wave of Startups (back in the late 90s, during which I was also in the Industry, but more peripherally) people aren’t out to make great things or create self-sustained companies: it’s all about the big score in the form of a successful IPO or massive buyout.
@ajsadauskas @technology
And we’ll change our TOS and user agreement to our advantage whenever we feel like it but won’t tell you what changed or why or how it’ll effect you. But legally we told you so f*ck off if you have a problem with that.The changes should just be highlighted like a fucking git commit.
