What can stop Silicon Valley companies from making things worse?

Let me begin with an example. Uber/Lyft/etc make taxi service worse. Before "ride sharing" I walk to the sidewalk, wave my hand at yellow cars, and within minutes, I have transportation for a fee. After Uber/Lyft, I cannot hail a cab with a wave. I cannot pay in cash. I must buy and carry a smartphone and have an internet service. I must install a separate application for each and every cab service. All the applications spy on me and my personal location. The drivers make less money as there are more of them, thus they race to the bottom of the pay scale and clog already jammed roads. Examples like this are abundant in tech. Eventually someone will try to make a SuperCabbie app that works with all different services. Someone else will come along and try to build federated taxis. Richard Stallman will tell the world to boycott it. No approach solves the problem. Everything is getting worse for the benefit of a handful of Silicon Valley bros and the surveillance state. What can be done to reverse this?

>>15965 >>15965 >What can be done to reverse this? we can only accelerate the degradation of the system by contributing to it MAKE A NEW KILLER APP MY DUDE, help with destruction of this society

>>15966 >MAKE A NEW KILLER APP MY DUDE I don't want to BE the brogrammer. I want a better future, not a worse one.

>>15965 >What can be done to reverse this? Society is dictated by group sentiment, crystalized in social norms and 'common knowledge', forged by trial and error. Change is a product of stability but change in change is strictly a product of chaos, it takes a catastrophe to change the way things are becoming, to 'buck the trend' so to speak. Individuals are rarely capable of creating the necessary catastrophe, nor would it necessarily be moral to do so. The best most of us can do is prepare, establish structures and tools that can be used to manipulate the reaction to the next catastrophe, and then use them when the time comes.

>>15966 >we can only accelerate the degradation of the system by contributing to it This is a foolish perspective, it's exceedingly unlikely that 'contributing' would lead to the catastrophe necessary to change the trend.

I'm familiar with this service, LibreTaxi: https://libretaxi.org It seems to address many of your concerns. I don't use any of these services, though. I'd think this is just a symptom of the real issue of transportation in the US, made worse on purpose by automobile companies. The Unabomber was right about cars and their awful influence on society.

>>15970 accelerationism my dude, look it up

>>15973 That sounds like rioting over economic inequality >We don't have much >Let's destroy what little we do have >Surely that will help Which is to say, it sounds unintelligent

>>15974 has nothing to do with economy actually, just plain >this system is faulty the way it works >if we don't change it or adjust it then it will crash upon its weight >if we add fuel to the fire then it will get faster to instability It says nothing about economy or politics even though it is usually connected with anarchist, anti capitalist ideas. What I would say is that accelerationism is correct in that sense that current capitalist system couldn't stay alive if there aren't interventions every couple of years with government loans and whatnot, so in that sense.... But to be a real accelerationist you don't just have to be 9 to 5 slave but actually speed things up either by scientific innovation, contributing massive loans to economy or simple cultural and political struggles

>>15973 >accelerationism my dude, look it up I'm aware of what accelerationism is. I think it's a foolish perspective as I mentioned. >>15974 >That sounds like rioting over economic inequality Most accelerationists are just looking to rationalize continuing their lifestyle while still pretending to stand for something. Most aren't `active accelerationists' like lain is suggesting. It's more of a self destruction through complacency like not breaking a smoking habit or getting a better diet or exercising, which you then start to say is actually good for you because that way you die sooner and everything will automatically be great once you're dead.

It's inevitable that quick and easy apps are going to replace everything. The powers that be want this because it's easy to control and monitor, big corporations want this because they can pool in tons of money, and the average guy wants this because they want something that just werks™ everywhere they go. You only really have a few options: >Fulfill the Unabomber's dream and dismantle the techno dictatorship by force (never gonna happen) >Convince Silicon Valley to become more ethical with their monetization schemes and also make all their releases FOSS (also not happening) >Create your own FOSS and ethical alternative and get people to adopt it >Move to a very authoritarian country where the government refuse to allow things like Uber to exist >Move to a village in the middle of nowhere in some forgotten country where you never have to leave and everything is within walking distance The third is probably the most practical, but it will be difficult to get people to change to a new service. Most people don't care if things respect their freedom. They just want it to do what they want and then forget about it. They're happy with DRM and proprietary and dehumanizing software because it reduces the amount of thinking they have to do when working with technology.

>>15975 >this system is faulty the way it works That's not what is happening though. The previous systems worked better. Cab drivers made living wages. Rides required no portable tracking devices that took a cut of the sale. Twenty years ago I could buy music and play it on any device I owned. Now I would need a specific app to download from a specific artist which I can only play on specific devices. The apps/services/stores actively sabotage each other. Amazon devices actively break Google services and vice versa. If you're in the wrong "ecosystem" then certain content just doesn't exist for you.

>>15979 Even pizza places are doing this. What happened to calling in your pie and having it delivered? No, sorry, you need grubhub. The other place uses doordash. Or was that uber eats. Now I have to install three fuarrrking apps just to get my pie.

>>15979 >>15981 >If you're in the wrong "ecosystem" then certain content just doesn't exist for you. >Now I have to install three fuarrrking apps just to get my pie. The reason this is happening is due to what's called `rent-seeking' it's where firms attempt to increase their wealth without contributing anything, often due to intellectual property, natural monopolies, or market dominance. In this case firms wall off their platform so they can extract a fee per transaction from smaller firms who gladly accept so they can have access to the platform. It's a small but noticeable part of the phenomenon. The `what you can do' part of the problem remains the same as I mentioned in >>15969 this could be started by establishing open tooling as others have mentioned. >The previous systems worked better. Yes, rent-seeking produces inequity and inefficiency in economies.

>>15984 I'm less worried about what it's called, and more concerned about how we can stop them. Who decided tech bros should be given unlimited latitude to destroy everything that worked just fine without them? I don't think open tooling solves this. There's mountains of open everything on github, yet this phenomenon is only expanding and getting worse. Everything is being trapped in silos and it seems like the tech bros are instigating it. Look at the music example. They simultaneously break the old model, napster/limewire, then offered up proprietary new models, youtube/itunes/spotify. Shawn Fanning of Napster didn't even try to hide what he was doing. He released Napster, then turned around and tried to foist Snocap on the industry as the new legitimate marketplace for digital media. He's now a rich "angel investor" when he should be a prison bitch.

>>15971 Papa Ted was right about many things. Tech corps are merely the new industrial society. Post-industrial, if you will. The more things change the more they stay the same. >>15985 >Who decided tech bros should be given unlimited latitude to destroy everything that worked just fine without them? Venture capitalists. The solution? Steal soykaf.

>>15986 How does stealing solve the pizza problem?

the way i see silicon valley/FAANG is a libertarian experiment being enabled and played out by capitalists at the top of the pyramid. the infantile networked automation capabilities we now have has given them their first good chance to fully atomize society, to turn every person into their own sovereign atomic entity who competes with others in their class for the "privilege" of survival. in this competition that privilege of paying their rent and bills for another month is auctioned off to the lowest bidder, who is awarded some brain-breakingly stupid service work for a short amount of time. it kills the creative spirit in people, and it makes every human endeavor in science and technology slower and worse. i think people who have libertarian views yet also are troubled by how silicon valley/tech startup capitalism is playing out owe it to themselves to connect the dots there. centrist liberals and right conservatives should just choke for a wide variety of reasons but first and foremost for viewing this as an opportunity to freeze the power hierarchy in its current place while they ride out the next medieval period (not to say that they see it coming, or care). leftists are probably the closest to having the best ideas to deal with this in the short term since they have at least a concept of class, but it's simply too late for them, and they will never get past the part of their transitional period to communism where they have to leave behind incremental electoral politics and step into uncharted territory. im sorry lainon i don't have any suggestions reversing silicon valley's real-life cyberpunk because frankly coming to terms with exactly how bad things are right now is just completely enervating on its own.

>>15985 >Who decided tech bros should be given unlimited latitude to destroy everything that worked just fine without them? Cronyism. >I'm less worried about what it's called, and more concerned about how we can stop them. I don't think open tooling solves this. There's mountains of open everything on github, yet this phenomenon is only expanding and getting worse. Everything is being trapped in silos and it seems like the tech bros are instigating it. That's what I was trying to say in >>15969 you can't solve it directly and immediatly by doing anything because people are reactionary and irrational, you can only prepare for a catastrophy and attempt to direct the responce. >Shawn Fanning of Napster didn't even try to hide what he was doing. He released Napster, then turned around and tried to foist Snocap on the industry as the new legitimate marketplace for digital media. He's now a rich "angel investor" when he should be a prison bitch. I can't comment on this.

>>15973 >accelerationism my dude, look it up if we had such control over power's use of technology to accelerate its demise, we'd have the necessary control over it to just make it work correctly without making people suffer and die. accelerationism is just a variety of neoliberalism with edgelord cyberpunk aesthetics.

>>15991 I guess your point isn't so clear to me. Suggest a catastrophe that might change the course we're on. Your suggestion need not be bulletproof logic, I'm just trying to get an idea of what you mean by catastrophe.

>>15993 >I guess your point isn't so clear to me. Suggest a catastrophe that might change the course we're on. Your suggestion need not be bulletproof logic, I'm just trying to get an idea of what you mean by catastrophe. Catastrophe is a relative term, it depends on what you're used to. A good recent example would be the 2008 financial crisis which lead to political undercurrents rising to the surface in western democracies. The truth is I'm not sure what the relevant catastrophe for our use of technology might be, but just about everything breaks at some point, and if the ground work is layed it can be exploited to make social change.

>>15992 Siegeculture and AWD disagree. Its not even that original, if you can not see anything you want happen with the way things are, then why would you continue in it? There is no political solution, an observation of the current news cycle betrays that. If the country is being flooded with immigrants and the politicians even if they get a mandate for a half-hearted measure and the will to do it, don't, as was the case in 2016, then why should anyone believe anything they say? Or if in the case of France the government in face of violent opposition not only ignores the people, but doubles down on the offending policy, why should the people even care what its cronies want? They should care that the Starbucks can't get its coffee truck in because they've locked down the gas stations? What's Starbucks going to do for them? The arguments against Accelerationism always comes from people trying to keep what they have. Look at the news, who is always asking for cooler heads? Someone who has something to lose, the people who don't want to see things thrown in the air in a free for all know they'd lose. In other words, the only people who are afraid of it, are afraid of fighting. Take these products even if they fail get absorbed into something worse for everyone as a whole. The infrastructure of Silicon Valley is so sound that its not going anywhere for a long time. The things they make are designed to reduce you to numbers to be sold for a dollar amount so that you can have decisions made about you before you're even capable of defending yourself. They want us all to live in an ant colony so they can get rich quick, then sit on their ass jerking off and drinking all day. fuarrrk them. The only answer is the only thing you want it fed is poison. If you can take, take from it, if you have to give, give it crap. The architecture of this system is against you.

>>15991 Napster changed the world more than the products of most angel investors.

>>16025 >Napster changed the world 20 years ago: Buy music. Play it on any device. Back it up on multiple mediums. Make a mix tape for your qt3.14. Today: Rent music stream. Lose all music when you stop paying. Only allowed to play on limited number of devices. Different services required for different artists. Cloud company disappears taking music catalog with it. qt3.14 needs to pay for an account on specific service so you can share incomplete playlist, because her favorite artists are on different platforms. Indeed. World changed.

>>16029 Today TPB is always up and running.

>>15971 >Based on the Telegram messaging app. It glows in the dark for sure.

>>16030 >using public trackers

>>16024 accelerationism isn't fighting against anything except the shifting of the existing power structure from a wealthy few to the greater population. i'll very tersely explain why. the only survivors of resetting the state will be the few wealthy and powerful ones who have captured the resources needed to ride it out. they, in fact, have the most to gain from a state reset because they will instantiate the new state on their terms with absolute control of all the resources. neoliberalism is currently on course for this outcome. what is not accelerationist about freezing the current power structure in its place and racing to consume everything before your competition does? does it really seem plausible that after the planet has flooded with irradiated seawater/oil/sewage and the surviving global population has migrated to inland city-states owned by the billionaires of the old world, this is by any means the conditions under which a more egalitarian society will emerge? even though your post was a word salad i sympathize with the anxieties you expressed in it. you clearly want something to be done about it, which is fully rational for anyone who isn't currently a billionaire. accelerationism is accepting this outcome. it is the current course.

>>16036 I'll disagree. This era of civilization is coming to a close and we're moving into the Dark Age before the next one. You're on a sinking ship and first class is locking the exits to keep the ship from taking any more water. Accelerationism is breaking the door of the room you're locked in. there's only so many lifeboats and the people up top can't decide what to do. Ride the ship for a few more leagues or get in the boat now and find shore; that's what you're locked in for. Not because they hate you, but because its going to be a problem if you take one of the lifeboats and get to the best spot on the shore. I hold no fantasy of there being an egalitarian society at the end of this, no fantasy of getting to be some comfy billionaire. I anticipate castles of rubble, an end to mundane materialism, and a Dark Age to last another few hundred years before Civilization resumes its 1000 year course. Nothing good is in the future, these men in Silicon Valley are parasites, who in any sensible time in History would be stripped naked and left to the elements for their greed. Not because they're a part of the problem I mentioned, but because they're a parasite who breaks down the good lives of simple people. Everything is done with an app, everything is removed from the simplest form of communication with the possibility for meaningful complexity, to a pre-packaged sterile box you agree to let invade your person for a few cents off a purchase. Grinding people down into a number for the creation of money. Then spending it on ugly whores, pot, beer, and video games while mocking the simple people and despising those who see this for what it is. Its not enough you're going to die in this rusty iron whale of rubbish, its that you're going to pay for the insults while you drown. Get off the ship.

>>16218 Accelerationism is more like breaking your door down and inciting a riot to make everyone break down their doors and start making holes in the boat because you believe it will inevitably get sunk and hate the people who are in charge that are letting some people get drowned in lower decks of the ship. You don't get a lifeboat, but they won't get to their lifeboats either, that's accelerationism. There is no lifeboat for you either way, but in this situation at least you have satisfaction knowing that they will go down with you.

I'm going to throw out an idea here and maybe it will be interesting (or not). I had a coworker at an old job with whom I discussed abstract things(life, trends and so forth.) He pointed out that the quality of life in human history could be mapped on a graph. The graph would show that there was a rough cycle that operated as follows: when some invention or change occurred, there was a corresponding spike in life quality. After the spike, the line would level off and even drop a little. Then another event would occur and there would be another spike. The cycle would start over. Exqmples he cited were Penicillin, the Industrial Revolution, the Internet, etc. So, given all that, maybe we're in the darkness before the dawn: a sort of in-between time between quality of life spikes

To be fair, it's not that damaging. And since some countries began to block uber/lift, it's easily reversible.

We're in the midst of a substantial bubble in the techbros world. When this bubble bursts, we're in for a rough ride. Look at the general consequences of a capitalist-driven automation, Uber/Lyft/etc. have usurped the taxi profession in such a way it is no longer viable to be "a taxi driver", they keep the majority of the income for themselves and keep drivers desparate. In the long run this will lead to a collapse of the market segment, drivers will eventually opt-out of the losing deal. Arguably, some might remain due to the effect of having "some" income where none existed previously, but ultimately I don't believe the number of people will be able to make the market sustainable. Even today, these companies aren't profitable, but survive purely on investments with the promise of future riches. Developed, profitable companies like Facebook and Google are on borrowed time with respect to the Ad market, which is itself a massive bubble. Companies cannot provide realistic figures of eyeballs-per-impression, compounded by people's propensity to use ad-blocking tech. Ad targeting tech is highly questionable, to date no company has released A/B results showing that targeted ads are, in fact, effective. Ad buyers are wising up to the false promises of these companies. This is already taking place on Youtube where calamity after calamity has added a slow leak on ad-purchases - while disproportionately affecting small-time youtube creators - and created an environment of suspicion about where ads will end up, who's messages will be tied to them and what those messages are. This isn't an isolated event, more will follow as people begin asking more and more, "what eyeballs are seeing these?", "what messages are alongside these?", "am I reaching who I intend to?", etc. What can stop this then? First and foremost, be ready for our collective quality-of-life to take a hit. The rest is waiting, the outcome is inevitable and the productive approach to solving this problem is preparedness. This means creating our own communities outside these walled gardens - safe from their eventual collapse. Second is to realize our over-inflated salaries are going to go away, we will eventually be paid what we're actually worth. Third is to focus on developing technologies that advance the human condition in tangibly positive ways. Technology is a beautiful thing that will help us weather the next millennium; unfortunately the holders of the keys at this moment are more interested in enriching themselves than improving our collective condition. The only way out is for it to collapse under the dead weight that it ultimately is. What might happen next is much more interesting, since we might stand a chance to influence it from our more humble positions.

They're trashing our rights man, they're trashing the flow of data.

This thread reminds me of the notion that people whose interests and studies lie in economy, politics and law are prone to thinking they are close to the fire in which society is forged and shaped, but are in truth just pawns for people coming from the tech industry who actually rule these domains, inside and outside of governments.

>>15965 I like cabs. I like being able to hail a cab curbside and pay cash. I dont like cabs in my city that charge 3x as much as uber or lyft. $50 for a 20 min ride to airport? Go fuarrrk yourself

A hugely altruistic effort, to the scale that it has never happened in the evolution of IT, is needed to make a solution both convenient and free of the whims of a company. Once that happens people will see the obvious benefit and will treat the Uber/Lyft business in the exact same way they treated cabs when those apps started to gain a space.

The good thing is that next recession all those tech companies will be hit hard. The bad news is they'll probably get bailed out like the banks. I share your disgust and concern OP, i love tech and playing around with it but i hate this consumerist look-my-shoes-have-lights aspect of it. The problem is, the giants are just too big now, how would one go on stopping google or amazon? They pretty much hijacked the whole infrastructure while claiming they developed it in their basement. Rich people ruin everything all the time, they're the source of misery throughout the ages.

>whining about symptoms look like, listen here, look 90% of us are trash and are unfit for survival what you're talking about are symptoms of this the cause is that the masses are getting desperate in a realization that they won't survive so we're spiraling down a worth scale that's why the economy's so bad i might be wrong

>>17594 this doesn't mean it's all so dark and gloomy btw well, maybe for some

Sorry guys but all of this is simply thermodynamics. The entropy can only grow. There's no way to reverse it unless we get some influence from outer space. That way our systems will merge and what we call our world today, will be able to achieve lower entropy at the expense of the outer space civilization's system's entropy growth. But to be honest move to Hungary, we derezzed uber and all things like this. They are fuarrrked because politicians have taxi companies and they said fuarrrk Uber get your hands off my money. So no Uber, but you can ride with very polite romanian gipsy taxi drivers who fistfight and kinfe-wield with each other at the taxi stops and drive 40km through the city to reach your destination 5km away. Taxi driver is the most untermensch profession, absolutely no wonder merging it with the second most untermensch (IT) leads to something like what OP described

One way is to try to do more by yourself or by hand. I suggest, if financially possible, to purchase or rent a car yourself and rely less on "smart technology" in a general sense. Another way which is more extreme is to take out electrical transformers to cause trouble for these companies and the governments that back them. Worst case scenario for cases of extreme control such as censorship, send in a swarm of pissed off Turkic-Iranian vegan THOTs to YT HQ with shotguns. Hopefully they will have consumed supplements despite being insufficiently vegan to help the parts of their brains that regulate aiming.

>applying thermodynamics to particular structures thermodynamics is a statistical science, there is no reason why a particular structure can't arise for some time. Also, "the entropy of the world" is not well defined whatsoever.

>>17582 you know that uber/lyft prices are heavily subsidized. those companies are losing piles of money. the plan is to run the competition out by undercutting prices with investment capital. when the taxis are all gone, you will see the end of that generosity, but by then it's too late.

This whole thread is full of fuarrrking loons. Things are fine.The situation may be sub-optimal, but our sub-optimal world is still miles better than what came before and what will likely come after if we destroy it. Nobody's able to appreciate what they have anymore. Stop whining you fuarrrking babies

>>15971 wtf is this soykaf, requires telegram? lol, k

>>16219 >but they won't get to their lifeboats either thats were you are terribly wrong the have lifeboats,liferafts,lifejackets,lifebuoys,a standby yacht and a hot air balloon waiting for them. Its you and i that will go down as it is clearly demonstrated countless times in history-it will not be different now no matter how hard you want to believe that this time "it will be total"

>>18097 not necessarily. After the bubonic plague wiped out most of the peasant population of Europe, peasants found that their labor was in much higher demand, and the social standing of peasants rose considerably. In some places they stormed castles, killed beaurocrats, and burned debts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasants%27_Revolt

Supporting unionization and forcing gig companies to move to hourly/salary work instead of contract labor. Or rewriting the laws for contractors.

>>15966 >>15973 Accelerationism is dogshit, it's never worked. You'd have to be a fool to think it was a valid and effective strategy. Most people who advocate it don't actually think it'll help, they're just frustrated and have surrendered to their death drive. >>15984 Exactly. Every single silicon valley "unicorn" company is a blatant scheme to capture enough market dominance to effect at least a partial monopoly so they can rentseek and jack up prices and pay back their investors for the many years they operated under MASSIVELY negative revenue. Unicorn startups hemorrhage cash at the outset because their business model doesn't make sense until they utterly own the entire market, which requires them to be stimulated with boatloads of VC money and basically kept on life support for the better part of a decade as part of their bid for world domination. It's not how a corporation or venture capital should work, but it is basically how it was always doomed to pan out. All these companies exist to trick people into thinking their way is cheaper or more convenient because THEY ARE LEAKING MONEY LIKE A SIEVE and thus capture such a huge userbase that they basically have no competition left, then start extracting rent. It's ridiculous. The bay area should be totally vitrified with an H-bomb; the world would be so much better off.

>>18101 Uber is about to be publicly traded

>>18101 It's got nothing to do with the physical location. If the silicon valley or even all of california got nuked, these practices would start up again because human beings are self-serving scumbags

>>18102 Yeah, because they're at the end game. They have run through their runway and successfully captured a large enough portion of the market to start extracting rent, and most of their value is now coming from driving down their worker's wages as low as humanly possible and playing funny games with the definitions of employees to avoid having to offer benefits. >>18103 Yeah you're right, that was mostly hyperbole just to express how much I hate that culture. But there will always be a silicon valley somewhere as long as our civilization works this way and rewards this kind of sociopathy because they're all starry-eyed about silly internet- and phone-based technological progress that doesn't actually advance us at all as a species.

>>18104 see >>18099 Uber, DoorDash and many others are being sued in many states for mis-classification.

>>18104 >But there will always be a silicon valley somewhere as long as our civilization >our civilization >neurosuggesting No matter what another silicon valley will start up. Even if we destroy everything and start over, people are going to start taking advantage of others so they can have more for themselves and their friends. We evolved to form packs, not colonies. We're hardwired to only care about ourselves and our pack members. Everyone else might as well not even be human

>>18106 this is why civics matters and why you should pay attention, inform yourself, and vote in your local, state, and federal elections.

>>18106 It's a matter of degree. Our specific model allows and indeed incentivizes firms to become extremely large. We ought to have a way higher tax on these things and we ought to routinely and aggressively break them up when they get so big. But yeah I get that it's human nature to have self-interest, you're not gonna blow any minds there.

>>18108 idk if breaking them up will do anything but but I agree that tax reform is a top priority. Plus also reforming employee classification. Amazon being the #1 offender in exploiting our weak tax system.

>>18106 >biological determinism >"le human nature" wew

>>18108 It's already the case that looking at a market you find 20 different firms on paper but checking the connections they are in reality owned by the same family. Artificially simulating competition is basic merchant shenanigans to keep real competition out. Can't let anybody know you're alone and there's a huge profit margin left to steal. So giving further incentive to kill monopoly corps wouldn't do that much unless you can prevent people collaborating. The underlying problem is however much simpler - as long as cheating with bribery&co is cheaper it's not sensible to play fair in a profit-driven system. Part of the reason this is true is consumers don't care and don't punish companies engaging in it.

The only way to fix it is cybernetic communism.

>>17596 I don't think you know what entropy is.

>cybernetic communism so your solution to the silicon valley malefactoricals is the worst silicon valley malefactorical google?

>>18210 hmm yes, because google is communist. Very smort of you.

>>18211 seen you google system? providant to serfs all but sleep (all your feed, all your gym, all your self internet, all your phone, all your all), and quite some to chattel (all your edifiction). corporate, cybernetically enhanced, (somewhat pernixius), communism. >>18210 poignancy true. >>18106 >We're hardwired to only care about ourselves and our pack members. Everyone else might as well not even be human you, like too many (non-?) people (1 is too many, in my haute opinion), confuse humanity and personhood. you meant 'everyone else' is not person. by denying someone's personhood that ostensibly moral justify violence. this confusion froms from errant thoughts of humanity necessiting personhood. this (errant) assumption lets contraposition that, not person is not human. ostensible moralists, justifying violence, could deny of personhood. if human, they'd need reject humanity. when do, claim absurd that that hominid sapient is not hominid sapient. there maybe some school letting ∃x:x≠x. which? might resolve this. some absolvants intentionally confuse human and person, letting 'no' raccord repudition of ∃x:x≠x and necessary x≠x, 1stly claiming hominid/person, letting 2nd, (privately) adjust homo sapiens, exclusing depersonate. violing on human≠human, justizing on hominid sapient ≠ person. these all, naturally, merely sentences whose, irregarding acquaintence, incorrelate bestay, plagiarists arife.

>>18213 What is this?

>>18109 Breaking them up supposedly allows other competitors to enter the market, since the market dominator isn't so huge that their power is out of reach of any new player. But even more importantly, breaking them up helps to prevent them from accumulating so much momentum and influence that they can easily capture regulation and government, or influence popular opinion so much that they basically break democracy. We have enormous problems with industries basically putting on a mask of government agency and regulating themselves to their own benefit; then, when horrible things happen, they point and scream about the government being terrible and how they should be reduced and weakened even more relative to business. Which allows more regulatory capture. It's frustratingly deceptive.

>>18213 You have some weird idea on what communism is, pal.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 i dunno, i kinda agree with >>18213. in a famous russian children's story which soviet government meant for communist (in the soviet sense, which is to say, it's only called ``communist'') propaganda, there's a scene which elucidates precisely the pernacity of communism (in the real sense). the story is great, i recommend the whole series. Николая Носова «Незнайка на Луне». the propoganda is mainly of the capitalist-strawman variety. there's a scene in which a rich local fetishizes his pear on his pear tree, which Незнайка eats on arrival, causing this rich pear-fetishist to flip out and chase off Незнайка with a shotgun. Пончик, on arrival, though, discovers salt, which is not known as a food additive in the local society (some locals, upon seeing him sprinkle the unknown-to-them substance on his food, surmise that it's some new drug). his entrepreneurial spirit (and some suggestion from the locals) shows him an opportunity to work hard mining and selling salt, organizing the labor of other locals for this purpose, and get rich, meanwhile. (also ` `communism' saves the day'). it's not even anti-capitalism, but anti-asshole, which is a position universally accepted as proper by any consistent self-respecting person, and anti-monopoly, which is a position accepted as proper by any decent person. the part to which i refer is wherein Спрутс advertises (and creates, and `operates') a fun-island in which one can do nothing but play, all needs met. no work, no money, all fun all time. this is suspiciously similar to a great deal of utopian-communist propoganda. this fun-island powers factories Спрутса. the only catch is that, if you don't `play' (on the various power-generators), you become a goat. exactly as the soviet union. There's a place for communism in the world, but we must always remain careful, as many uncommunistics resemble communism. This is why, when someone say's something to the effect of communism solving some problem, the statement is useless without specifying what, exactly? they propose to solve the problem. which conception of 'communism'? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIzBAEBCAAdFiEEwHIbnaLmuYWft9NWBScbdKpag5wFAl04bF8ACgkQBScbdKpa g5zBDBAAvDz/Fh8TQ3Ft5dph8TxCy7v6GEzcJAjnlFML+PZXPUjq0OKnyo5ea1ED FIxABlzaAVhlws7PWJtX1XikfxifPUWCTnSIR02UYHcUnezBmPo/npc0OASqyIEt /as/GATBhyFnbHX1Hvsyxn4nnYw2S9KDHefRm+eDtMLe9e/2NTg5RR8SppyFYoku XuHh2jtEUrrN2UIJx0GHh4a/Gc2+iDNbXpxNklJHhcrwxhTsiNYuRDI6+I0Af91n aw3WGlFPYdmETyI3Ep776TRCEM5d+fRSSjO7nYKNh72ISJBdb7fAO9KvaO10eLZX VKIH0EymBCoxC/5HJQYPmv2mfNKeGNfXRUzmJka7awEKHFLa88UCCvHt5Iymy6wV em+kJouTZ/qKEMD2odGECbzYJ4j5AZEMDT4cJ79sPP75TyXYOmjcKwm0eb1vZpKz NiiT/ueu9Ipr/RGXWlHvGUIGD0RgPK/n0M4SafVr4fDh5Y5/2fCOS0bpqywRqxn3 fKWMdfylIeW3wvCXFVnFmjyG2MlKPFQvz654AeA+t6aaC29m/16bayXP63roaQLY REDCDOr+Ivth8MrwyzdMBf5MC1Y/H7DtywOiIJvd9yiXTm8KjGZS9qu3ThA3bgXl Cs1txZua/5dnczltOJfbBdzOV4OpyE6c7C0hWjmdUfJp5nSn+0E= =ipKU -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

>>17617 ...and then hail-able cabs will make a comeback, as the competition is no longer pricing them out of the market and people appreciate the convenience

>>18252 Don't the use of spoiler tags and >>quotes break the PGP thing? What's the point of this level of tripfagging anyway?

>Before "ride sharing" I walk to the sidewalk, wave my hand at yellow cars, and within minutes, I have transportation for a fee. Maybe if you live in the 1% of the world that is a major metropolitan area. What stupid flawed premise. For the rest of the world that isn't your entitled ass, services like Uber/Lyft are about a thousand times better than traditional taxi services, especially in areas where it's a complete hassle to find a real yellow taxi Listening to the 1% whine about their lives being hard is fuarrrking hilarious

>>18255 checked

>>15981 Dunno. You all sound so grim. I put big ass motor on my longboard and get soykaf myself. Way more practical and faster than a bicycle in our current society, at least where I live. Silicon valley has it's perks.

>After Uber/Lyft, I cannot hail a cab with a wave boo hoo ;;___;;; I weep for you anon, what a burden

>>18266 This. In my town you're lucky if they even know where the fuarrrk they're supposed to go, assuming you can get your message through to whatever trash is handling the phone that day, and then half the time they take the scenic route to inflate the price. That's all assuming they even show up in the first place. I'd kill for competition in the taxi industry and maybe Uber isn't the answer but this monopoly I'm dealing with needs something to threaten it if it's ever going to get its soykaf together.

>>17582 Yeah those prices are coming back as soon as the sleazy new gig-cab companies are able to get away with it. Their model isn't sustainable at these prices and they know it perfectly well. They won't have labor forever if they continue to pay so low. They also won't be able to pay their investors as much as they'd like. It's always been a bid for market share so they could jack those prices right back up. Did you think they wanted to save you money? It's not magic, it's textbook predatory pricing. They also have a side strategy of developing self-driving cabs that totally obviate the need for any driver to be paid, but that's total hogwash. Not gonna happen any time soon. Self-driving cars were basically the result of journalistic fraud. It's a dumb veneer of big tech innovaty-ness to cover up the fact that they're just a nakedly predatory monopoly bid.

On the other hand, Ride-sharing has enabled mobility and commute for those who did not have it before. It has greatly lowered the cost of transportation in many areas as well, where dedicated taxi services were not economically feasible. It is actually feasible and convenient to use ridesharing for a commute to a job you couldn't otherwise get to, or to take a "taxi" home when drunk when you live in an area that doesn't normally have them. In truth, the vast majority of people are happy with ridesharing. Of course, there are extremely significant negatives as Uber and Lyft further centralize control over taxi services, popularize energy inefficient transporation, and essentially undermine the drivers, most of whom are not capable of calculating the cost of wear on their car vs their return and the opportunity cost of spending time in an an ecosystem that continually dilutes your value. But thats just capitalism