frat parties, that sounds horrible.

Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

• The Bearded One

I interpreted your original comment to mean “the journalist made up the leak.” I’m guessing from your response that you meant the insider source pulled it out of their ass.

Wow that is a tier of “missing the point the movie was making” previously thought only theoretically possible.

Not necessarily. Often it’s coming from a real source, it’s that if the source was known it’d be blatantly obvious the “leak” isn’t juicy truths TPTB are trying to keep from us but rather blatant propaganda from TPTB are pushing to manufacture consent.

I hadn’t put it together before but it completely makes sense that singularity believers would easily fall for AI hype.

A lot of people do that with cell phone providers, they switch to a different one every time their introductory price ends and then they start a new introductory price.

Oh yeah apps make things more convenient for sure. But functionally the app is just pre-populating ride request information in the system for dispatch instead of taking it down over the phone like in ye olden days. Nothing of the economics of fleet management changed, in fact if anything Uber’s decentralized system is less efficient, the costs from the inefficiency just get pushed to the gig worker drivers.

A lot of taxis now use similar apps for requests and dispatches; NYC has been using Arro for years for yellow cabs, and you can request accessible taxis to boot. There wasn’t anything particularly proprietary in the app, which meant the established industry would pick it up sooner or later.

I think this is why Uber has been pushing Uber Eats as of late, as there they’re just competing with Seamless/Grubhub, who also employ gig worker drivers for restaurants that don’t have delivery drivers.

Uber was only ever cheap because the rides were being subsidized with VC money in order to try to run the competition out of business. It was the Walmart model, the “tech” element was puffery, novelty pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes.

It’s gonna be the porn subreddits, isn’t it?

Inshallah

Yeah that’s why I bought Beyerdynamic blue byrds. The style may be a decade old but no earbud bullshit.

There was that plane that crashed in the Far Rockaways like a month after 9/11. If the circumstances of that crash had been slightly different, veered more towards a denser neighborhood, yeah it would’ve a 9/11 of negligence.

Completely unnecessary passive voice

This is some shit straight out of Brazil

Yeah there was this weird shift where the cyberpunk attitude of “all big tech/corporations should not be trusted” got displaced by “we can’t stand in the way of the corporatinos that will only hinder Progress^TM.”

Well except for Apple. Now don’t get me wrong, Apple deserves a lot of shit for their practices, but it became a blame dump wherein all the problems with the tech industry were Apple problems and everyone else was fine; Bill Gates is getting ice cream! Elon posts le epic memes! I think we’re getting a shift though, with Musk running Twitter into the ground and fewer people buying the tech innovation narrative and seeing that the new tech media boss is the same as the old media boss. Things like the fediverse, Blue Sky, Mastadon gaining traction, hell the rise of VPNs into the mainstream signal that people have figured out, oh wait I’m the product.

I’ve heard a compelling counter argument that Napster was more a convenient scapegoat for the music industry than the actual root cause of its downfall. That the popularity of the CD format caused a mini-boom of sales in the late 80’s and 90’s as the convenience factor brought in new customers and existing music fans replaced their scratched up cassettes and vinyls with CD versions of those albums. Similar to the DVD boom of the late 90’s through late aughts.

But any boom has to come down at some point, the sales will return to earth. The decline just happened to coincide with file sharing and enough critical mass of high speed internet (so much of file sharing in the early days was kids tapping into their university’s high speed connection). So it gave the music industry an excuse to the public (and more importantly, investors) that, no, it’s not that those sales numbers were unsustainable, it’s those ne’r do well brats stealing our songs. If the authorities just cracked down on those criminals, sales would go back up.

You know the only people who are going to sign up for this thing are going to be the straight, Japanese equivalent of

Which is ironic as it sounds like they had an opportunity to make the supercharger units an industry standard, which would’ve created a captured market/rentier income situation for Tesla. But no, Musk thought building a truck from an 80’s cyberpunk b-movie was the better move.