On 05/06/2017 06:21 PM, Shawn K. Quinn wrote:

On 05/06/2017 08:11 PM, Razer wrote:

...

It gave spotters for regulators in Portland 'false screens', essentially blackballing the uber user.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-tech-crime-exclusive-idUSKBN1802U1

In other news Uber's billionaire owners are running beg ads in the app for users to donate to a medical insurance fund for drivers (b/c they don't think it's their job... Like WalMart). Is Lyft any better? Is zTrip any better? If not, what should we use instead?

A taxi? You can call them. Most will deliver a car at an appointed time if you want. (I used to go grocery shopping for less-than-ambulatory senior citizens with the meter running regularly and pick up whiskey for housebound drunks) If you use the same company often most DO allow "Personals"... driver of your choice, if available. Don't know about ztrip, but here's a good writeup on Lyft, and the whole "Sharing" biz in general by Marxist sociologist Darwin Bond-Graham Sharing Rides, Hoarding Profits How the SF Bay area's technology elite are destroying poor & people of color's incomes by 'Disruptive Innovation' The winners and losers in many cases of disruption are split along existing racial and class lines of inequality. Those with little economic or political power to defend themselves from the disruptors are seeing their livelihoods and communities turned upside down. Their small businesses are being destroyed. Their communities are becoming unaffordable… … “Disruption” is the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley’s tech industry, especially in the realm of startups. The mythos goes like this: small scrappy hackers with very little capital and a few computers can create new business models that will topple older fossilized companies, even whole industries. In the process the economy will become more efficient and everyone will have more choices. We all win thanks to the new Internet-enabled economy. That’s not at all what is happening in reality, however. The ideology of disruption goes back a long way in the annals theorizing capitalism, but the current ideology really owes more to Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor and devout Mormon who has built his academic career on case studies of disruptors. Christensen’s seminal 1998 article in the Harvard Business Review on disruption tells a story about dominant companies atop their industries —Firestone, Xerox, IBM— that were caught flat footed, and in several cases destroyed, by their smaller creative competitors. They failed to innovate and grow beyond their core markets. They failed to recognize the potential of a new technology that would make their existing products and services obsolete. This has fidelity with the actual history of American business. Christensen, along with his son Matthew, manages a hedge fund that purports to bet on disruptors and short the stock of bumbling giants. Christensen also sponsors a think tank he named after himself, the Christensen Institute, which, according to its web site is, “dedicated to improving the world through disruptive innovation.” California’s tech entrepreneurs have embraced Christensenian disruption. The big case studies in tech that seem to confirm Christensen’s theory are well known. Digital cameras destroyed film. Personal computers displaced mainframes as the core hardware business, and laptops have since eaten into a huge share of the personal computer market. Now mobile devices are eroding PC sales. None was ever seen as a threat to the existing dominant product and producer, but displacement happened nonetheless. Tapes replaced vinyl, CDs replaced tapes, but MP3s and iTunes-like services have replaced CDs. Cloud is displacing both the idea of storing your data on physical drives you own. Software as a service is chipping away at the idea of buying and owning software. And so on… In a lot of cases disruption ends up being a battle of big corporations for market share. Consumers and employees within the industry aren’t necessarily better or worse off when the smoke clears and a winner emerges with a new technology and business model. But the tech boom today is characterized by a another kind of disruption. It’s social disruption. New technologies and business models don’t just attack the existing dominant corporations; they attack social relations and transform non-business spheres of life into methodical instances of economic exchange from which the new tech innovators extract revenue. The tech boom is also characterized by disruption of smaller competitive markets by emergent tech monopolists backed ultimately by huge pools of private equity and giant, monopoly-seeking corporations. The winners and losers in many cases of disruption are split along existing racial and class lines of inequality. Those with little economic or political power to defend themselves from the disruptors are seeing their livelihoods and communities turned upside down. Their small businesses are being destroyed. Their communities are becoming unaffordable. Those with cultural capital, and access to economic capital have a shot at being disruptive, at skimming some wealth off of deregulated industry and precarious labor. And the wealthy individuals and companies that should be disrupted by a clever tech startup —the tax dodging banks, the Fortune 500, the health care companies and insurance giants— have the resources to defend themselves, fend off the geeks, deploy an equally clever response to retain market share, or to just buyout the scrappy competitor and fold it into their existing empire. The ridesharing phenomenon reflects all of this and more. Ridesharing companies like Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar use the ubiquitous ownership of smartphones to connect casual drivers and passenger clients through their proprietary applications. Like any broker they take... More: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/18/sharing-rides-hording-profits/

On 05/07/2017 02:12 AM, Vasily Kolobkov wrote:

[2017-05-06 20:21] "Shawn K. Quinn" <skquinn@rushpost.com>

...

Is Lyft any better? Is zTrip any better? If not, what should we use instead?

I bet on classical p2p systems. These have quite some road to walk and definitely need all the help you can give.

Humans being humans, this ain't a magic pill, though the core principles leave much less for them to slide back into a usual corporatism/enslavement/etc.

I would certainly prefer open-source P2P ride-sharing apps, which simply coordinate drivers and riders, with no central profit-stealing corporations. However, I don't believe that Uber or Lyft are profiting yet. They're relying on venture capital to build demand. They also provide legal assistance to drivers, and pay fines. I'm not sure how they deal with vehicles taken through civil forfeiture. So how would a pure P2P system deal that those issues? As long as hitchhiking is legal, one could argue that ride sharing is just a technological improvement. Back in the day, I recall ride boards, where you could arrange long-distance trips. And isn't an app equivalent to a bulletin board?

p.s. Not a taxi you where looking for, though should you be into selling/buying stuff - why not give OpenBazaar a try? This one seems to be pretty usable and with no central authority.

On 05/07/2017 08:31 PM, Mirimir wrote:

I don't believe that Uber or Lyft are profiting yet. They're relying on venture capital to build demand.

Three of the six BODs ARE venture capitalists. Other than that the sentence above is about the most bizarre thing I've read so far this week. The capitalists we're discussing ARE NOT interested in long term returns. They want their money back fast, and the residuals can roll in as they occur. While the drivers sleep in their leased SUVs. At least OTR trucks have pretty comfortable sleeping accommodations. Garrett Camp 7 Relationships Founder and Chairman -- Net worth $6.3 BILLION https://www.forbes.com/profile/garrett-camp/ Travis Kalanick 6 Relationships Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Director -- Net worth $6.3 BILLION https://www.forbes.com/profile/travis-kalanick/ Ryan Graves 5 Relationships Head of Global Operations and Director -- Net worth $1.58 BILLION https://www.forbes.com/profile/ryan-graves/ Other Board Members: Name (Connections) Relationships Type of Board Members Primary Company Age John Gurley CFA 156 Relationships Member of the Board of Directors Benchmark 49 David Bonderman J.D. 191 Relationships Member of the Board of Directors TPG Capital, L.P. 73 Arianna Huffington 44 Relationships Member of the Board of Directors Thrive Global Holdings, Inc. 65 Betcha didn't know that 'progressive liberal' Ariana was a big time crapitalist... No wonder there's no real Left in the US. They read her digital birdcage liner. Rr

On 05/08/2017 04:26 AM, Steven Schear wrote:

Mirimir,

This is what https://swarm.city/ is trying to bootstrap. Also, https://twitter.com/SwarmCityDApp

The site isn't clear. But I finally found the Boardwalk page at https://press.swarm.city/swarm-city-boardwalk-overview-9a362f19411f So yes, "#Needaride", paid in tokens. The process of negotiating a ride sounds rather complex, however. I like the reputation-based trust aspect. Reminds me of SR, of course. That would arguably protect against malicious parties on both sides, in that cops, rapists, etc wouldn't get good ratings. But it'd be gameable, through building reputation in a closed malicious group, unless there were checks for reputation between the group and players overall. It is cool, though :)

Steve

On Sun, May 7, 2017 at 8:31 PM, Mirimir <mirimir@riseup.net> wrote:

...

On 05/07/2017 02:12 AM, Vasily Kolobkov wrote:

...

[2017-05-06 20:21] "Shawn K. Quinn" <skquinn@rushpost.com>

...

Is Lyft any better? Is zTrip any better? If not, what should we use instead?

I bet on classical p2p systems. These have quite some road to walk and definitely need all the help you can give.

Humans being humans, this ain't a magic pill, though the core principles leave much less for them to slide back into a usual corporatism/enslavement/etc.

I would certainly prefer open-source P2P ride-sharing apps, which simply coordinate drivers and riders, with no central profit-stealing corporations. However, I don't believe that Uber or Lyft are profiting yet. They're relying on venture capital to build demand. They also provide legal assistance to drivers, and pay fines. I'm not sure how they deal with vehicles taken through civil forfeiture. So how would a pure P2P system deal that those issues?

As long as hitchhiking is legal, one could argue that ride sharing is just a technological improvement. Back in the day, I recall ride boards, where you could arrange long-distance trips. And isn't an app equivalent to a bulletin board?

...

p.s. Not a taxi you where looking for, though should you be into selling/buying stuff - why not give OpenBazaar a try? This one seems to be pretty usable and with no central authority.