What's frustrating is that at the end of an event like a concert, everyone goes outside to catch an Uber/Lyft, but we then have to match driver to passenger, instead of having a line of waiting cars, each group just gets in the next available vehicle, shows the driver a QR code, instead of the mess we currently have. Why can't we do that? Taxi regulatory capture.
I miss being able to reliably hail a taxi A LOT. Uber may be an improvement in smaller towns where cabs didn’t exist, but in bigger cities it is mostly a downgrade. Rather than walking to the curb and immediately getting a car, I’ve got to dick around with my phone and wait for a car to come to me.
Living on the south side of Chicago, it was almost impossible to hail a cab, and often times if you called for one it just wouldn’t show up. Or I’d try to hail one downtown, and be refused once I told them my destination. I’ve not had that problem once with Uber, good fucking riddance to taxis.
Uber has been great, I can get around to almost anywhere with a click of a button and have food delivered from a variety of local restaurants at any time of day.
I'm not sure why you think it was a massive mistake? The taxi industry was awful and unsafe, food delivery for many local places was either not available or poorly implemented.
Also many whole food chains didn't have proper delivery for groceries.
Taxis were terrible and I celebrate their destruction at the hands of the rideshare companies. Even now it’s still cheaper than a cab was (though those early days of VC cheap rides were great).
So many organizations need this. I've watched companies make $100M+ investments basically on group think and no one being willing to say it won't work.
The worst is when everyone privately acknowledges that the idea won't work but because leadership has committed everyone has to march on to the failure point.
I have yet to see one of these Cassandra's to be proven wrong too.
The existence of Palantir is a significant public policy failure. It is a tool for corrupt actors - both private and public - to maximize how much they steal from all of us. Their use of existing tax policy is just an example.
Palantir should be shut down tomorrow; the data it’s collected deleted, its IP destroyed and its executives jailed.
The majority of people opposed AC current, cars, steam engines, rail tracks, airplanes, computers, the internet, and so on. There was always irrational fear present with new tech advances. People opposing data centers will not look any less foolish than those who opposed AC current.
I don't think the people who opposed those things look foolish even today. Most of those things, in their early days, were implemented haphazardly and with an incredible lack of regulatory oversight, and the reason they were not quite as disastrous as they could have been is that people opposed them.
And people opposing data centers today who are opposing unfettered data center creations will not look any *more* foolish than those who opposed the things you cite.
I used the softer word "foolish" - but in reality, they are idiots. Yes, they are, and they will look like idiots in the future when China wins the AI race. In the same way, nuclear opponents are idiots and have contributed to the decline in nuclear research in the West over the past 50 years (looking at you, Europe, especially Germany), while China keeps advancing its nuclear research (fission and fusion as well) and building nuclear plants to ensure its future energy independence and dominance.
What, exactly, are we racing for? Smarter chatboxes?
Nuclear plants are being forced to shut down in this heat wave, due to low river levels, as they don't have enough head pressure to run their cooling pumps and if they had different pumps their waste heat would sterilize the river. I'm sure China has no qualms about sterilising rivers but the next, hotter, heat wave will dry them up anyway, and they'll still have to turn the plants off.
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