601–610 of 916 posts
Wow, USD 8 to 11 per km. Hong Kong taxis cost USD 3.5 for the first 2 km, then USD 1.4/km, and less than a dollar per km above USD 13. https://www.td.gov.hk/en/transport_in_hong_kong/public_trans...
Another thing that is odd for me is that for all 3 companies in the article, the average trip seems to be less than 2 km. I'm slightly more "walkey" than the average person for sure, but that is a leisurely 15 minute walk, and on the threshold of the distance I would start considering public transport for. With bags to the airport, sure, I'd take a taxi. But I find it hard to believe that the average person is ~2 km from the airport, so the median trip is likely done without extensive luggage at an _even shorter_ distance. I find this kind of absurd.
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Isolationism progresses.
1950: cars give you the freedom to go anywhere you want. Artificial fertilizer puts an end to hunger in industrialized world. Yeehaw! 2000: you are a second class citizen who can’t even get a job in many places if you do not have a car. Also the median person is overweight. But here is this new internet thing that lets you get everything you need in life sorted out with no need for human interactions. Yeehaw! 2025: t…
> “How dare you!” exclaimed the passenger. “You forget yourself!”
> The woman was confused, and apologized for not having let her fall. People never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine
The Machine Stops (1909)
https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...
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The point is a bad one that should be missed. $3 isn't negligible. It isn't usually [0] worth spending $4 to recover, but it is nonetheless money. People can't just arbitrarily charge each other $3 for nothing. [0] Game theory says sometimes it makes sense to be unreasonable.
It's not arbitrary. It's part of an ongoing relationship that is worth significantly more. That $3 came out of the trust they have with the company. But even though they're wary now, they still have some trust and want to use the service in the future. Some random guy asking for $3 is a wildly different situation. It's not about the $3, it's about the relationship. A close analogy would be Netflix going up $2. If you…
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Charges for goods not delivered as agreed falls under the protection of the Fair Credit Billing Act. If you made a good faith attempt to resolve with the merchant (which you did) you should use your credit card to charge back the amount (some let you request a partial charge back, but if not you can request a full one and explain in the extra info that you want a partial one). This might not seem worth it for $3, but…
And then you're forever barred from using the service.
My account was soft banned - everything I own
It should be illegal to allow services to ban you for a chargeback
Those don’t happen just willy nilly - it means your credit card reviewed your dispute and you won
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People are excited by driverless cars but it also means a car with no social barriers and no person who considers the cars condition important. For now they’re well surveilled and a premium vehicle. Soon they will be filthy pods in a race to the bottom with all the charm of a public bathroom. They’ll be cheap, but you’ll get what you pay for. Private driverless cars will be the premium alternative.
People adapt. Hopefully it will be more like elevators and less like public toilets. And then there will be cameras
People will adapt to the level of cleanliness in the car the get into, so it's a slippery slope. Users will behave respectfully in the early days (maybe because they are first-movers), and then it deteriorates long term.
My own experience is that people used to not even leave an empty soda bottle in the cars and now I see remains from take-out in the floor, coffee cups, chewing gum left around the dashboard etc. You can report this to the car service, but they won't be able to take any meaningful action on it.
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This seems... interesting, legally speaking. I imagine the idea is that you're implicitly accepting alterations to the previous contract by opting to take the car? Would that argument hold water, legally?
Especially since you may have no time to wait for another car. There’s an element of “duress” here
You paid a premium for promised X, specifically. Y showed up. This is the equivalent of buying a first class ticket, and getting put in economy.
Someone should class action this bs.
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That's must be annoying to say the least. In India drivers require an OTP to start a ride. The OTP is the same for a user across rides, so I have mine memorised which is nifty. No fiddling with the phone during boarding. On security: exploiting this would require the driver to stay in my vicinity the next time I book a ride, and also get the ride assigned to them. In a high population density area, it's rare - I've n…
An OTP that's reused?
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Why do you assume the surveillance will go away as they become cheaper? The taxi company know who is in their car and they have access to interior cameras if something happens. In many respects, it is going to be even more difficult to take a dump in one and get away with it than if a human was driving it. They have your credit card number and visual evidence of what you did, they will just charge your card automatic…
Because if they ever become super popular, it will be prohibitively expensive to actually police all the surveillance. Likely to store / process it all. AI does an alright job summarizing videos today (Gemini Flash) but it has to get a lot better if they're going to actually police at scale.