Free money and universal healthcare thanks to the abundance of Ai is where "they," say we are headed. Thanks to Ai ravaging our civil society we are use to.
Interesting how the folk they're showing actually have the money to burn currently/previously - it avoids reporting some of the problems you'd have impacting someone who is struggling economically.
Profit comes from addicts, not casual players. Gambling is a parasitic practice that harms communitites[1]. The bookmakers all know this, but obviously pretend otherwise.
Whilst you can argue that services may have improved in some respects, the action towards resolution to problems is carefully monitored to help as least as possible and insulate accountability within a blanket of 'help' agents.
Infuriating as it is, this is still better than with the bad old days of taxis, which usually had even worse resolution and accountability. It sounds like people don't quite grasp just how bad the taxi experience was.
I can share an example of a trip we just did to South America to two countries. Four out of four taxi rides were scams. Things are better to the extent there were controls in place, like taxi meters and an app. There the scam was less but still involved scams. Too long to detail in a comment here.
I should also mention we tried to use their version of Uber (DiDi), but I suspect there was some kind of price-fixing attempt there because no taxis would come for the price that they suggested. We had the option of upping our price until someone came and then I gave up on the service.
My other experiences were some years back in upstate New York, where there were also questionable practices, and you really had to look over the driver’s shoulder. They tried to control scams with payments based on zones, and the drivers would bend the rules when possible.
To be clear the happy path for taxis for me was fine. When things worked things were quite smooth. But this thread is primarily about when things went off the happy path. If a taxi didn't show up, I'd usually have a disinterested dispatcher to talk with who might be able to send another in a half hour. If a taxi intentionally went the long way around to charge more, I'd have to have an argument with the cabbie about this and maybe things would go well maybe they wouldn't. While I didn't personally experience harassment from cabbies I definitely know people who have. So on and so forth. In all of these cases off the happy path the usual recourse back then was worse than the recourse today with e.g. Uber.
Again the overwhelming majority of my taxi rides were fine. The overwhelming majority of my Uber rides are also fine. But when things go wrong they definitely went wrong worse with taxis than Uber rides for me.
I feel these tools are destined to be mostly used as content generators - I'm happy to be proven otherwise but they've been around a while now and aside from a few pop videos I've not seen stuff that seems to be infused with the outer edge of quality art direction - perhaps because the model data limits it or perhaps it's the way they're used.
