Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.

That is 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!

I suspect Satire is indeed dead.

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.

@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.

Here's the source of that term. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Excellent article.

@wtebbens
hope you're aware that this means to abolish #capitalism!
@ajsadauskas @technology

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.

Its weird how Uber isn't already possible to replicate via blockchain akin to the way cryptocurrencies transact and perpetuate

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.

They're not in the UK, they all have to be registered and lisenced here like any other minicab.

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.

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.

When we aren't drinking craft beer...

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.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/shorts/l1xNBrg2aKc

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

Stavros is the best

The changes should just be highlighted like a fucking git commit.

Seems like a fair description of many who would call themselves "libertarian", even if not the going definition.

There are no "true" libertarians. There are more libertarian denominations than their are people who identify as libertarian. And all denominations are orthodox. A group of libertarians is called an impasse.

It's not an accident that people who identify that way are incapable of getting along: the individual is the weakest political unit. Add in the fact that libertarians will eschew government benefits for themselves just to spite those lower on the ladder, and I can't think of a better friend to the ruling class. What can we say about people who'd rather live in a fiefdom than a democracy? That they all imagine themselves as lords I guess.

(I'm told people in Europe identify as libertarians and oppose government power to hurt people. I'm talking about US libertarians who oppose government power to help)

Liberatianism is all about the Freedom of the Power Of Money from the Power Of The State (which in Democracies is yielded by the elected representatives of all citizens in a system which is way more even in the power each person has than Money).

It was never about Freedom For People, which is why, for example, Libertarians want Private Education (a major gatekeeper into being monetarily better off), they absolutelly do not want communal Land Ownership (as it stands, most people are born landless, so having to pay for a place to sleep in and for food to eat - rather than having the chance to build their own house and grow their own food - so they are forced to work and do so within the constraints of the system, to pay the owners of the land (directly or indirectly) for food and shelter, both essentials, the very opposite of being born Free) and they certainly don't want Money to loose its ability to buy different outcomes in the Justice System being in countries with such systems strong defenders of defunding things like Public Defenders.

Libertarianism is all about freedom for the larges yielders of the Power Of Money from the power of the elected representatives of citizens in a Democracy, not about freedom for the riff-raff.