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Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me

locusmag.com

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Re: Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me

#81

Post by icebraining »

mcv wrote: post #51

I don't see why meta-Uber has to hitch on the backs of Uber and Lyft. Just have an app (I'd suggest "Ride") that knows all these local co-ops and contacts an appropriate one. Ride Austin when you're in Austin, Ride Shanghai when you're there. Make it trivial for anyone to start such a co-op in a new city, and the drivers will come. There's no need to first book on Uber.

The reason why Cory wants to hitch on Uber is because he knows people trust Uber more than a random app they've never heard; he says so himself, when he recounts his Shanghai experience. So you'd find the driver on Uber (borrowing its trust network) before switching to the other app. But that also shows why his argument against Uber is flawed: they can charge more money because they actually provide a better service by being available worldwide, unlike these local apps. If the Meta-Uber were to kill the host, it would destroy itself.

Re: Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me

#82

Post by yipbub »

jelling wrote: post #35

Doctorow, per usual, writes with the certainty of an out of shape sportswriter playing Monday morning quarterback. He just doesn't know what he's talking about. For example, he says "Uber...allows them to illegally discriminate against people with disabilities" Does he really not know the long history of cab drivers not stopping for black passengers? This has been frontpage news on multiple occasions, most famously w…

Most of the people who actually put work into it don't make their money from profits. Their salaries are paid. Plus, these companies basically burn VC money to starve competition.

Re: Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me

#83

Post by gerbilly »

ghaff wrote: post #70
gerbilly wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* An argument against the disneyfication of everyday life where all the risk is taken out of face to face interactions with other people. To me this reduces us all to the level of automatons in a machine controlled by large companies. * An argument that a cashless society will remove all anonymity in financial transactions.

I'm not going to argue for a cashless society. (Which I agree would be bad even though I primarily use credit cards for the convenience.) I actually don't use taxis/Uber/Lyft all that much when I travel. If there are good transit options, I usually do that. Or I just walk around a city. However, when I do need to, making the ride higher friction, requiring me to have local currency, potentially being overcharged, etc…

> But taxi rides seem an odd hill to die on with respect to this question.

You could say that insisting that you have the source code to all the software you use also seems like and 'odd hill to die on' but I think now the general public is just starting to realise that RMS may have been on to something.

Re: Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me

#84

Post by icebraining »

WhiteMonkey wrote: post #56
jawns wrote: post #33

Yes, it's true that by essentially hacking Uber and Lyft's systems, you could create an app that siphons away business from them. But what would happen if such a technique were to become legal and ubiquitous? Suddenly, no one wants to invest in a company that requires significant capital, because they know that as soon as the company becomes successful enough to become a target, there will be other companies that wil…

> Suddenly, no one wants to invest in a company that requires significant capital But this is the point: the reason Uber is successful isn't particularly because of their technical excellence or innovation, it's because they've used massive amounts of capital to very knowingly buy the market. This is an example of one of the nefarious sides of capitalism -- a flaw -- not a celebration of how great it is at solving pr…

> If Uber didn't have as much capital, smaller distributed co-ops may well have prospered.

Then why didn't they until Uber came around?

Re: Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me

#85

Post by leereeves »

dtech wrote: post #37
geofft wrote: post #2

The closest thing we have to a meta-service is Meta-Elsevier, more popularly known as Sci-Hub, which works so well simply because it doesn't care about legality. It's hosted outside the US on a slowly changing list of TLDs, and so it doesn't have to worry about any form of copyright law, not just the DMCA. I think if you wanted to build more services like this, you'd have to go this approach: instead of building an a…

Sci-Hub also works because it is convenient. As Netflix and Spotify have shown, convenience trumps morality and to a lesser extent pricing. Users jailbreaking their device and getting a specific app from a non-official/non-preinstalled app store is not convenient.

> As Netflix and Spotify have shown, convenience trumps morality

I don't understand what you mean. Is there a more moral alternative to Netflix and Spotify?

It seems to me that Netflix and Spotify combine convenience and morality (or at least, legality), showing that the combination trumps free (pirated)?

Re: Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me

#86

Post by PaulHoule »

I find it ironic that the one problem w/ the cooperative model in Austin is that it doesn't serve the fancy shindig (SXSW) that shows up once a year and then blows out of town.

Meeting the needs of Austinites is a more sustainable business because you don't need to handle the burst capacity.

Somehow the market of people who are flying around all the time seems to get a disproportionate amount of attention from marketers who make catalogs full of stuff like:

https://www.coolthings.com/motorized-monocycle-looks-fun/

Fortunately the "yellow cab" model works just fine at the airport where people show up at predictable times. I did not grow up with the habit of taking cabs, and I've never taken one in NYC, but I learned at some point that if I didn't have a better plan to get away from the airport such as

http://web.mta.info/mta/airtrain.htm

I could walk up to the taxi stand and be on my way and yeah it is kindof expensive... But often about the same or less then I'd spend on parking alone for a rental car in a congested city.

On the way back I learned I could go to the front desk of the hotel and have a cab ready for me when I want to go at 4am or whenever I need to catch an early flight.

Re: Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me

#87

Post by icebraining »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #72

probably a dumb question: how does the "unique code" part of his idea work? how could the apps on both the driver's and passenger's phones both reliably generate the same globally unique code?

It could be simply a combination of the specific information of the ride: username of rider + username of driver + origin + destination.

Re: Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me

#88

Post by swiftcoder »

candiodari wrote: post #42
cs702 wrote: post #9

The main challenge to successful (i.e., market-dominating) cooperatively-owned platforms like the ones Cory wants is that usually there are no incentives that motivate individuals to dedicate their lives and souls in the creation, launching, running, and perpetual improvement of such platforms for the benefit of others. The exceptions, including successful projects like GNU and Linux, tend to be led by rather unique…

> no incentives that motivate individuals to dedicate their lives and souls in the creation, launching, running, and perpetual improvement of such platforms for the benefit of others. Except this is not just a problem with the owners (and to some extent you are wrong, there are CEOs motivated by that, they still by and large fail). Because ... There are no workers motivated like that either. People do not want this .…

Particularly in Big Tech™, a lot of engineers tend to be motivated by the company mission. You don't build companies like Facebook without a cadre of true believers.

Re: Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me

#89

Post by csomar »

cs702 wrote: post #9

The main challenge to successful (i.e., market-dominating) cooperatively-owned platforms like the ones Cory wants is that usually there are no incentives that motivate individuals to dedicate their lives and souls in the creation, launching, running, and perpetual improvement of such platforms for the benefit of others. The exceptions, including successful projects like GNU and Linux, tend to be led by rather unique…

Maybe a crypto solution with tokens as fee for manipulating the application.

Re: Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me

#90

Post by HillaryBriss »

icebraining wrote: post #87
HillaryBriss wrote: post #72

probably a dumb question: how does the "unique code" part of his idea work? how could the apps on both the driver's and passenger's phones both reliably generate the same globally unique code?

It could be simply a combination of the specific information of the ride: username of rider + username of driver + origin + destination.

thank you for the response. i'm wondering how my meta-uber app would obtain my origin and destination. is Doctorow proposing that the user manually enter origin and destination into both the actual uber app and the proposed meta-uber app?
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