We live in the future!

You forgot "cable television, but over the internet and no one has all the channels."

Personally I'm a fan of fake certificate that says you paid money for one of the plagiarism machine's works

You mean the Amazon rain forest destroyer machine?
- Hate this argument. No one ever discusses Fiat currency's environmental impact.
  *Which includes literally, actually destroying the Amazon rainforest.
fake money
- Nahh, NFTs deserve to be their own failure. Cryptobros get two fails for one tech.

I swear that most commenters are young people because back in the 90s-2000s, taxis and hotels were hot fucking garbage.

Taxis would go on joy rides to up the cost or refuse you if you were black.

Hotels would tell you to go suck a dick because their price listed outside is not for you, and if you want a place, they have a room with roaches near the heater.

Uber/Airbnb were gamechangers that broke that monopoly.

Unfortunately, they have gotten to shit. But you know what? Taxis and hotels have cleaned up their act. Because the moment they go to shit again, Uber/Airbnb will come in and eat their lunch.

Taxis in my country would routinely ask for extra (usually 25-30% of the total fare) or have you pay them a fixed amount that's way higher than if only the meter was used (about 2-3x the normal fare) . There are also taxis that have meters that are way too fast. Uber was a godsend when it first came out here.
- In Italy taxis are a monopoly and uber is forbidden. For a 1h ride they ask you 120-150€. Luckily by train you can do the same ride quicker and for 5-10 euro.
When you call a cab it was often a game of 'will the can actually show up?"
- Ah yes, I too remember the good old days of stumbling home drunk in the dark because my cab never came.
- I have fond memories of sitting drunk on a driveway waiting for the promised cab for hours. Because if they drive up and didn't see you, they were gone.
- Don’t forget they take you the long way and go slow
I only know taxis and hotels as normal boring things in this time range.
- They always where. Except in big touristic cities. There everything still is shit.
  So nothing changed. We went from shit taxis and hotels to shit taxis and hotels complemented with shit uber and shit airbnb.
  Ssdd.
Almost as if it’s not the commodities that are the problem, but the economy they operate. 🧐
Where I lived and traveled, hotels never had a monopoly. Small B&Bs and hostels have always existed, it was never a choice between big hotel and staying in a tent. There was no need to wreak havoc on the housing market.
The problem with the gig economy is that these platforms are not content with being what they're advertising themselves as. "Be your own boss". "Make some money in your own time". Guess what, if you drive for Uber, Uber is your boss. You're an employee in anything but name. They penalise you if you reject too many jobs. They penalise you if you go on break too long. They penalise you for all kinds of other things. Here in Australia most rideshare vehicles have at least two badges, because the drivers can't make ends meet driving for just one. And then they've gone and fucked up the delivery market as well. It's an economy of rent-seekers and middlemen.
Uber and Airbnb DID break that monopoly but they got their competative advantage by simply breaking the laws that existing taxis and hotels were required to adhear too. Still do break those laws but weight of cash > law.
- Laws that the taxi and hotel companies lobbied for to stop competition.

Calling AirBnB "a hotel chain" is an insult to hotels.

Hotels don't require you to clean somebody else's house while you are on vacation like a maid, and then charging you a cleaning fee for missing a spot. There isn't even much of a price difference nowadays, so staying at a hotel wins every time.

I would be charged a cleaning fee even though we're asked to clean anyhow, regardless of how well we cleaned. Toward the end, I stopped doing any basic cleaning and disputed additional fees relating to my not doing their job for them. Now I don't use them at all.
I have two younger kids. We can very close to renting a hotel on our last in-state vacation. It would have actually been somewhat cheaper. The reason we still went for the AirBnB was because our kids are asleep by like 7:30 and we didn't want to be 'trapped' in the hotel room and didn't want to rent a second. AirBnB made it significantly easier to find a house to rent.
That said, the number of AirBnBs in that area of the state has really grown. I can't imagine that's doing the people who live there any favors.
- I use a AirBnB if:
  I'm bringing my dog. A house with a fenced yard beats a hotel for that hands down every time.
  Using the house is a major feature of the vacation. We live in an apartment in a city so sometimes it's nice to just spend a week in a cabin in the mountains or a long weekend at a house with a pool.
  I'm traveling with a group and I actually want to spend time with those people. It's nice to have a private social space that isn't someone's bedroom.
  I prefer hotels if:
  I'm traveling solo. If I'm not renting a whole house, I want the hotel amenities. Plusi can pretend to be a bachelor again and act like a slob.
  I have an action packed trip planned. Every time I've been to Vegas I was pretty much only in my room to shower or sleep.
  I'm traveling with a group and know I'll need some personal space.
- It is really terrible for the housing market when real estate investors buy out homes on the market for the sole purpose of renting them out in AirBnBs.
  I doubt that anyone would want to live next to an AirBnB house.
- These days I mostly use Booking, they list hotels as well as private properties which are properly classified and taxed and all that. Haven't had an issue in years.
Oh there is a price difference these days. I used to use AirBnB because it was an actual saving. Now, unless you want to rent an entire cabin or something, you're almost definitely better off with a hotel or specific industry standard business. Also love how they handle pricing, at least when I looked last year:
$99
_$249 _incl _taxes/fees
This isn't even hyperbole, it was entirely common to see a $100+ cleaning fee for a one night stay, and still have a list of more things to clean than I expect actual hotel employees to do.
- They have started including cleaning fees in the posted price.

Where is “social media surveillance apparatus”?

I see no one has mentioned Nazi microblog platform yet.

Hey, Lemmy is a Marxist microbloging platform! The Nazis are mostly ... oh, you were talking about X, weren't you?
- Maybe one of the ones run by right-wing populists. Truth Social or Gab, perhaps?
- OP is just cross posting nazi-microblog posts to Lemmy.

What about hyper-intrusive handheld ad machine?

Doorbell camera surveillance network

Tough question. I'm a big fan of making the plagiarism machine pretend to be a text based adventure game for my amusement, but I also like that the illegal cab company will also deliver food or groceries when I don't feel up to leaving my house.

Yo what do you say to the plagiarism machine to start off an adventure? I've never used it before but now I want to lol
- Try out AI Dungeon which is an app that has it all set up for you. It's free to try, but pay for access to the best model. Last I checked there were some privacy concerns, so assume someone might read your adventure and don't tell it your real name or anything.
  I've personally been tinkering with KoboldAI which is a way to run the models yourself, if you have access to a beefy computer or cloud computing workspace. This has the benefit of being free and controlled entirely by you, but requiring you to choose a model and giving you the opportunity to change your own settings might be a benefit or a drawback depending on how much you enjoy tinkering with your toys before (and while) playing with them. The models that will run on my RTX 3080Ti seem generally not as good as the paid tier of AI Dungeon, but I might also not be doing it right? It's hard to tell. Futzing with parameters and trying to divine what impact they're having on the output is still fun for me, though.

Money for criminals*

Until everybody ruined it. When people started investing instead of spending, we were fucked.

Yeah I still stand by the technology (Eth and other smart coins, not Bitcoin), but there's just so much bullshit surrounding the tech that it makes it really unpalatable and trashy
- Me too. As long as there's a demand for services that can't be paid for in regular currency, crypto will be around.

Hey, its not fake money for criminals! It's barely legal casino, sheesh!

If it was just BTC then there is an argument to make, although there have been many criminal actions involving the manipulation of BTC in the past and also the use of BTC for criminal actions but that's a dumb argument because BTC makes it easier to track funds to their source, the problem arrives when you talk about cryptocurrencies as a whole and especially NFT Crypto. Then, yeah, fake money for criminals 100%. Even the IBM backed crypto was shady AF.
- Man, just wait until this guy hears a out the US dollar!

Trust me bro, Capitalism is necessary for innovation, just trust me bro

- Love em. Peak Capitalist innovation! By shipping a 99% complete product for a low price, you can gain a large user base. Then, you make it addictive as fuck and add pseudo-gambling, to take advantage of people likely to routinely make small purchases. Then, all you need to do is spend a fraction of dev time on new skins or stickers, and make obscene profit!
  What, you don't like living in the modern orphan crushing machine, designed to commodify literally every second of your existence? Are you some kind of radical? Spooky!
Yeah you're right let's follow the great innovations of the USSR, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba
- Those aren't the only alternatives, lmao. Do you think humans stop innovating if they share tools and democratize production, rather than having a bunch of unaccountable mini-dictators?
  Do you think the Capitalists are the ones who innovate, or is it the Engineers and Scientists that do?

We actually experience reality a fraction of a second in the past.

I actually live in the now. It’s just everything else that’s slightly ahead.
- Living it the now is hard work. I live in the when.
Reality/causality also moves at the speed of light, and observations of time and space are relative to the observer. So it's still present reality, for you at least.
- It still takes your brain some time to process everything.
Hey! I have been looking for a source on this. Would you have one?
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light
- If you’re looking for a philosophical viewpoint on this, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” will fuck with your head.

I misread "Illegal crab company" and was so confused.

- Noooo, Ferris don't do it!
- Looks legal to me 👍
We're crab people now, Dee. We live and die by the crab!
- Crabbbb people Crabbbb people. Walk like crab, talk like people.

Self-driving road killer machines.

I just want high speed rail...
- There's always Europe
UGV killer drones
- It's the technological paradise!
We already have those. They are called humans.

User-stocked adictive digital social circle.
Digital news media sources using Pavlovian click-response headlines.
Human subconscious-targetting product promotion systems.
Automated individual tracking and digital-model building systems.

Plagirized reddit

Intellectual property is a figment of our imaginations. So I’m voting for the magical copyright violator box.

all money is fake tho?

Feel free to give me any of your fake money.
- robux is also fake money, but i dont want to give you my robux.
Yesterday I went to a shop and they let me take away some stuff after I handed over some colourful bits of paper. Seems real enough to me.
- by that logic crypto is real too. since you can buy things with it
only relatively recently, since 1971
- Nah money wasn't real before either.
- So how is money based on a gold standard more real than money that isn't? Gold also has only has value because people believe in it.
trueee

I'll take the surveillance cameras strapped to a garbage screen strapped directly to my face with controllers

ChatGPT, I think.
"AI"
- Or as I like to call it: Two sort algorithms and an Eliza in a trenchcoat.
Maths
- Statistics and mathematical optimization

Can we have option 4?

-Love all the disruption and none of the intended product

Edit: or the option where I can count…

No one needs to be able to count any more, because we can just ask the AI to do it. I'm sure there's a counting app on your phone or something.
- Excel? Calculators? An abacus? People not relying solely on their brains for counting has been a thing for a long time.

In case any of you are confused about what these are supposed to be:

Uber/Lyft

AirBnB

Bitcoin

ChatGPT

Cause nobody ever committed crimes for USD?

When you do it with a computer it's patentable and turns into a billion dollar business.
- There's definitely more money to be made from people not having to talk to other people than I thought there would be, tbh
- there's no patent on bitcoin
Committing crime isn’t the primary purpose of USD.
- I don't think it is ihe primary purpose of cryptocoin either. It's just that crime found a great valuable tool in it. Just like nuclear fission is not just for atomic bombs. Or the internet for porn. The most known use case is not always the only or intended one.
  Not defending the money-grabbing, resource-hungry spectacle that it has become, but the original intent was probably a bit nobler than the current results.
  ETA: ah, I see what you mean. Purpose as in current main use, not "intended purpose". I think I picked up the wrong meaning. My mistake.
  Also, nothing wrong with porn, but everyone knows the internet should be about cat pictures.
- Depends who you ask.
- Not unless you count war crimes
That's not the point of that particular claim.
It's actually embarrassing that we live in a world where people don't know crypto is for money laundering, whores, and drugs.

I'll take illegal cab company over shitty actual cab company any day tyvm

"Shitty actual cab company" pays its drivers a fair wage. And they are often unionized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Taxi_Workers%27_Alliance
- I wish "illegal cab company" would too, but I also have no sympathy for shitty actual cab company. It's not even about the money for me, they had many chances to innovate their systems and squash the illegal cab companies before they got started while at the same time generating more fare revenue, but instead tried to use the status quo to smother out the competition.
- They never seem to clean their cars though for some reason. That's one thing I'll give to Uber, the cars are cleaner.
- It's also more expensive where I live ¯(ツ)_/¯
  EDIT: Sorry, my bad. I meant that Uber and Lyft are more expensive than normal cabs in my area.
- Sorry, but Taxis have left me waiting for hours and ripped me off 1 too many times on top of every cab I've been in has been quite dirty. They tried using their near-monopolistic position in most places to ignore basic innovations, like having an app to request a taxi (and having that app not look like it's a time capsule from 2008) or even taking card.
  I have no sympathy for taxis, they're dead to me

Image Transcription: Twitter Poll

Adam Kotsko, @adamkotsko

What's your favorite tech innovation?

Illegal cab company [16%]

Illegal hotel chain [17%]

Fake money for criminals [32%]

Plagiarism machine [35%]

32% voted NASDAQ, huh?

Right... But it's been there since the 1800s.

I'm not getting baited into well akshuallyying any of these, nice try!

This is quite a shitty way of portraying these technologies.

Uber/Grab might be banned by some countries, but I'm sure as hell I'll never take a traditional taxi. They haven't earned my trust, while Uber and such allow reviewing the drivers, and the driver wouldn't think of scamming you. (Generally speaking.)

For longer stays I wouldn't book a hotel room because it lacks basic facilities like microwave, cutleries, washing machine, etc.

Blockchain itself is a great thing, it could be definitely useful for something. Cryptocurrencies, however, are indeed evil. Toy money for criminals.

AI tools are useful for many things. Plagiarism is just one (ab)usecase. There are tons of other things that you can achieve with it while not committing plagiarism.

It's just a me e dude.
- Totally read this in the Mario voice.
You're right in all except crypto. It's not just criminals. It's privacy. I prefer paying cash outside to remain anonymous. Why should i give my data for free to a company just because i needed toilet-paper. And CC is the cash for the internet. Just not as widely accepted as cash is (in most countries)
- It's not even really private unless you're using Monero similar (which you can't buy on most exchanges for that very reason). Most CC blockchains are entirely public ledgers that are very thoroughly mapped out by government agencies and by private companies looking to monetize the data.
- I like privacy too, but currently way too much harm is being made by the fact that people can keep their income private. Think about all the corruption using offshore accounts. It's not even cryptocurrency, just some other solutions. In a world where everyone's income is public, politicians won't be able to explain their financial gains. And you wouldn't have to worry about whether you're underpaid at work compared to your colleagues who do the same job with the same efficiency. And if you receive your income from a legitimate source, you earn that money, then it's nothing to be ashamed of. And nobody gives a damn crap if you use it to buy your toilet paper. On the other hand, if you're buying a HIMARS system on the black market, and then pass it onto the terrorists, you would very well deserve to be caught by the authorities and then rot in jail for decades.
  Of course, this is a very extreme scenario. I'm not saying the ideal world is when everyone's finances are flat out published and advertised like "hey, look, I'm rich and ready to get robbed", but this is definitely an area where total privacy hasn't worked out well.

How about toilet cleaning robots stealing our jobs?

Thaey tuhk meh damn JEB!

My favorite is still "Human Misery Threshold" for businesses

What is "illegal cab company" supposed to represent?

You see Uber and Lyft aren't technically legal taxi services in many places because they don't employ any drivers or own any vehicles. They have "Contracted Individuals."
- They also use private cars for hire service which in may places means that the insurance is invalid (i.e. they are facilitating uninsured drivers)
- Wow, that's new for me, thanks.
Uber/Lyft.

$99