• Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • cottonmon@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      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.

      • PeroBasta@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        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.

      • Redredme@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        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.

        • banneryear1868@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          I’ve never really had problems with taxis and hotels from the late 90s-2010s, only if I had a language barrier or a unique circumstance, mostly all my hotel problems involved other guests. Hotels were definitely cheaper I’d prefer to go back to that.

    • rainynight65@feddit.de
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      6 months ago

      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.

    • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      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.

  • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • Aleric@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      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.

    • IMALlama@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      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.

      • TheLowestStone@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I use a AirBnB if:

        1. I’m bringing my dog. A house with a fenced yard beats a hotel for that hands down every time.
        2. 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.
        3. 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:

        1. 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.
        2. 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.
        3. I’m traveling with a group and know I’ll need some personal space.
        • CthuluVoIP@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          This is pretty much my criteria as well. It’s funny, because since vacation rentals became a mainstream thing, my hotel experience has gotten better. I remember a time where booking a Vrbo was a preference because the accommodations would be nicer / better maintained at the same or lower price than a hotel. But these days I haven’t found that to be the case, and as such rely on contextual requirements to determine the best path forward.

      • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        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.

        • ahornsirup@sopuli.xyz
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          6 months ago

          “They make for shit neighbours” not the worst of it. It also significantly contributes to the increase in cost of living in the area because buyers and renters no longer have to compete with just each other but also with investors, and every house or flat that’s off the market only increases that competition further.

      • Airazz@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        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.

    • whofearsthenight@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      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.

  • ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • LaunchesKayaks@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      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

      • ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 months ago

        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.

  • Xanthrax@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Money for criminals*

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

    • Sigh_Bafanada@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      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

      • Xanthrax@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Me too. As long as there’s a demand for services that can’t be paid for in regular currency, crypto will be around.

    • doctorcrimson@lemmy.today
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      7 months ago

      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.

  • Cowbee@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

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

      • Cowbee@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        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!

      • Cowbee@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        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?

        • sweetnumb@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          So you’re saying engineers and scientists aren’t capitalists. That’s pretty dumb of them, then again engineers and scientists aren’t terribly keen on history.

          • Cowbee@lemm.ee
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            6 months ago

            Engineers and Scientists are workers, not Capitalists. Capitalists are owners.

            You’re quite literally on the explicitly leftist, anti-capitalist alternative to Reddit. Instead of a centralized, closed, Capitalist system filled with ads, you’re on a federated, decentralized, openly shared platform that deliberately rejected the profit motive and Capitalistic development for its own innovation.

            Did it legitimately never occur to you that FOSS is a leftist structure? Right now, you’re using an example of anticapitalist innovation.

            • ssboomman@lemm.ee
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              6 months ago

              Also the commentor above probably doesn’t realize that engineers and scientists have all throughout history had a pretty negative take on capital. Academics are generally left leaning

              • Cowbee@lemm.ee
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                6 months ago

                Absolutely. Engineers aren’t the ones that see any of the benefit of the IP they create unless they have the money, connections, resources, and Capital to also manufacture and sell said products. The ones who create what people use every day get to see the IP they designed get resold countless times with no kickback. Same with Scientists, many go uncredited for critical research, especially women, historically.

        • spookedbyroaches@lemm.ee
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          6 months ago

          Show the alternatives then.

          And yeah the capitalists are the ones that drive the innovation since they’re the ones that allocate the capital where it would generate the most return, which sometimes means innovation.

          • Cowbee@lemm.ee
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            6 months ago

            You’re literally on one of the alternatives. FOSS is a rejection of the profit motive, and individual ownership of Capital. It is, quite literally, an anticapitalist statement. Are you under the impression you’re on Reddit?

            Money doesn’t need to come from Capitalists, and again, Capitalists aren’t doing the innovating. That’s like saying the bread baker that fed the Engineer is doing the innovating, because without the bread baker, the Engineer couldn’t innovate. Of course humanity is interlinked, no one man is an island, but that doesn’t mean labor performed by one person is actually labor performed by another.

            I’ll make it simple for you, and give you 2 choices.

            Factory 1: Capitalist owner, non-owner workers. The only voice workers have is to either get a new job, or unionize.

            Factory 2: Workers are the owners, and thus production is democratized. One of the workers is elected as a manager, and may be stripped of power by the rest of the workers at any time.

            Which one is better?

            To circle back: what you listed is a very, very narrow vision of what Socialism can mean. Socialism is Worker Ownership of the Means of Production, and can be just as varied as Capitalist organization. Are you going to say that Sweden is the same as Pinochet’s Chile, just because both were/are Capitalist? Absurd.

            • spookedbyroaches@lemm.ee
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              6 months ago

              FOSS is not necessarily a rejection of the profit motive, it just says that there shouldn’t be restrictions to redistribute work to the masses. Just look at Linux itself. The project is maintained largely by contributions from (big tech)[https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/] even though it’s under the most restrictive copyleft license.

              Also, I’d rather the factory that has the incentive to reduce prices to compete with others instead of the one that has all the incentive to increase costs (wages).

              Besides, you can absolutely create any co-op you want in a capitalists system. If you think it’s just as innovative then just go and start one instead of screeching at people that capitalism bad.

              • ssboomman@lemm.ee
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                6 months ago

                Are you really that dumb? The point of open source software is that anyone can contribute and use. So of course some tech companies are going to contribute to the Linux kernel, why? Because it’s more innovative than the alternatives. The best innovation happens when you let go of the profit motive and just let engineers tinker.

                Buddy look around. We are in a capitalist paradise and what is happening? Oh right, costs are rising! Why are you pretending that capitalism means that companies keep the costs low, when it literally incentivizes monopolies to form, and thus drives UP costs??

                Capitalism is the reason for institutional racism (in the US), for the degregation of the environment, for poverty in first world countries, for so many wars and violent coups, for literal slavery. If you think that billionaires controlling society will create innovation, it might, but for the a cost of exploitation and destruction that 100% isn’t worth it.

                It’s crazy to me that people like you genuinly believe that a worker led society is somehow bad. You do know that you are a worker right?

              • Cowbee@lemm.ee
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                6 months ago
                1. FOSS is undeniably a rejection of the profit motive. People may use something developed as FOSS to make a profit, but FOSS itself is rejecting profit. Linux being used by for-profit companies does not mean it’s suddenly privately owned, a la Capitalism.

                2. You didn’t answer the question, you dodged it entirely. If this is your way of massaging that you think antidemocratic measures to ensure workers have no say other than to unionize or leave is a good system, then it’s a very odd dodge. You can have normal wages and normal sale prices with worker ownership.

                3. Being able to start a co-op within a market based system does not mean co-ops are Capitalist. They are firm rejections of Capitalism. Additionally, if we can agree that democratic control is better than authoritarian, centralized control of Production a la Capitalism, then it makes sense to advocate for a more democratic and horizontal structure.

                Am I not allowed to make my case against Capitalism when clearly relevant? Shutting me down by claiming I’m screeching at others, when you yourself attacked my comment first, is ironic to say the least.