I will never be as big a hero as the uploaders. I humbly thank them by downloading and seeding for months on end. It's small but I do what I can!
Won't find many people shedding tears for the legacy cable companies or the legacy taxi industry. Two of the most hated industries before they got disrupted.
I may be an outlier, but I liked old taxis you order by a phonecall more than drivers juggling five different apps and coming to your place with an according delay for they try to be a delivery guy and a taxist for many companies just to keep a positive balance; cable was great in Russia too, for one Discovery channel alone could completely capture the day of a young teen like me, unlike what it is now. YMMV.
Did your phone call taxis actually show up close to on time? Almost every person I've talked to about them had the same experience of them often being hours late if they came at all with no notification of the delay. Any time you called dispatch they'd say they're on their way.
Yeah i remember tacos well. On hold, then a 40 minute Wait, no guarantee they'd call you when they arrive, so lots of waiting outside.
I did befriend a cabbie eventually who gave me her personal number to avoid that shit, but that's just a personal story i included for no reason other than I'm high
Although it's anecdotal and can't act like statistics, mostly, yes. In rush hours or in the night I called different operators to get the better deal, but I do so too with apps. The weirdest time happened when apps just started to come and drivers halved between two, so both was undermanned. Now, suddenly, the problem is tech, because it enables drivers out of here navigate the streets by GPS, so they can work without any experience on our streets unlike phone-taxi guys who seemingly did. Another, and more dangerous problem is that apps pay even less to their drivers or even lend them cars for a high price, so they work much more, and I have at least three drivers visibly fall asleep behind the wheel. Gig-app economy feels even worse than shitty practices that were before.
and this is why we should push for taxis to be replaced by public transport and carshare services.
If you can drive, carshares are just better than taxis in every single way unless you specifically need to not drive yourself for some reason, and good public transport is just always better.
There was nothing more anxiety inducing than waiting for a cab you scheduled when you have a flight to make, because about half the time they just wouldn't show up.
It's so baffling that even american cities often don't make it feasible to get to and from the airport by public transport, that's the one destination where no one in their right mind is ever going to drive themselves to.
In an even slightly sane world all american cities would at the very least have usable bus services for getting to and from the airport, if nothing else.
It's worse where I live. Our (VERY major) airport was designed deliberately to prevent any public transit, and fought legislation to build public transit access for decades.
Taxis did have a big potential of being rip-offy though in Russia as I recall my dad telling young me and my mom to get out before he tore a Moscow cabbie a new asshole for trying to outright scam us lol
Especailly when you have one point at an airport or train station. The thing is, automation didn't do it more fair.
This is absolutely true. But Uber and lime etc also directly undermine useful mass transit. Over the years I’ve found myself in situations where I’ve gone to a place thinking that I will easily be able to get back via Uber, and then found that there are no drivers, or no drivers that want my fare for the return trip. So far after some time I’ve been able to finally find someone, but it’s become more frequent and I’ve been concerned I wouldn’t be able to get home.
A more amusing anecdote: my brother was in a Midwestern small city for a conference. His flight out was at 8am, airport serving the town was about 20mins away by car. He woke up and tried to get an Uber, Lyft. No dice, no one out driving. Tried calling the one remaining cab company, but they didn’t have any drivers out. There was no airport shuttle, or mass transit. Freaking out a bit, he finally spotted one of those electric scooters, and sighing, he signed it out. He was dressed in his conference gear, and had his bag. The city was very hilly, and he found that with the extra weight of the bag, the scooter didn’t have the power to get up hills, so he had to kick push to augment it. An hour later he gets to the airport, soaked in sweat, to see multiple scooters discarded along the road, others had clearly used the same method recently. The cost for the scooter was close to 40 bucks, 2.5 times his Uber fare in from the airport. Anyhow, an isolated incident, but sort of funny depiction of how the transit landscape has degraded a bit over time, and how Uber etc is not as instant and reliable as it sells itself to be.
Cancled my prime because of this.
I don't even watch their stuff, it was just the principal of the thing. I'm not really missing prime even for shipping because it's caused me to shop less and only buy if I really really need it.
I recommend also not shopping with a company that actively blocks unionization efforts and has a nightmarish track record with climate policy.
I stopped shopping with amazon in 2012 and, yes, it takes a bit of time to find what you're looking for at a more local retailler, and it might cost a tiny bit more, but again.. Jeff Bezos man
At this point it doesn't take longer because you get a fake or broken product so often from Amazon once you complete the return process and get the new one you would have been better off going to the store anyway
I was watching fallout when it released, and out of 8 episodes only 4 had ads, and the ads were 30 seconds long before the episode started, and then nothing after that.
I'm not excusing them injecting ads, but at least it's not like YouTube where it's completely random
I will simply never pay + ads. Free and ads... Ok. I'll fight you if your ads are obnoxious.
But, as soon as I'm paying for a service I will never accept even a 1sec ad.
Just fyi, you can pay for ad free prime video. What is bundled with the rest of prime at no extra cost includes ads.
No. I had prime. Then they raised the price. I was like ok... THEN they were like we need an extra 1.99 or you'll have to watch ads on top of the prime price.
That was the end of prime for me.
If you can't figure out their fairly obvious point maybe they're not the "idiotic" one champ.
People here seem brainwashed and only up vote whatever the community says they should agree with and downvote everything else, without even thinking about a different point of view.
Don't bother pointing out stuff to them, but thanks for the reinforcement
When this announcement was made, I canceled prime. I don't even use Prime video. It's the principle.
I did use it, and the music service. They destroyed both in less than a year, so I cancelled it the same day they announced ads in video. They already had an ad tier, called FreeVee and it was insufferable.
As a bonus, I now don't buy anything off Amazon, since I no longer get the delivery benefits. Fuck that company.
At least 20% of my orders end up being fucked up anyway. It's either counterfeit products an entirely wrong product with the UPC of what I ordered taped onto the box.
I ordered a Spyder Color calibrator last year (about 200 bucks), and got an iPhone 4 screen protector with the barcide of a Spyder printed on the box.
I ordered a laptop and it arrived gutted.
Amazon died for me when they changed from a retailer to a drop-shipper.
Similar experiences. I dropped Amazon at renewal in January after the ad announcement. The items I ordered went from two days to four days to several weeks to never existing and the products were more and more "fell off a truck" crappy knockoffs - the same reason I stopped using eBay in the 2000s.
Bonus, like you, I find myself making next to no impulse purchases anymore since I can't just fire up Amazon on a whim.
Don’t stop there. Don’t shop there anymore.
It’s harder to find certain things, but sleep is easier knowing you’re doing what you can by not contributing.
This original announcement was the final straw to push me back into piracy and I couldn't be happier a few months later.
That's the whole point of the post. They're making things shit again, just like cable and taxis.
But were they more worker friendly than the current models? Because the new things are getting just as consumer hostile.
They're still lightyears more consumer friendly than the old model. I remember hostile drivers, vehicles that were falling apart, praying you wouldn't go bankrupt when the bill was issued, etc etc.
It's like people forgot how scary taxis were. Like you would legitimately get into a car you weren't sure had seatbelts
Oh fuck off with this. Don't victimize cable companies. They charged an insane amount and offered no innovation. $100+ a month for live TV that had more commercials than actual content is still a shit deal.
Streaming was great until everyone decided they wanted a piece of it. Fragmentation of the market drove enshitification.
They aren’t victimizing them, they are saying streaming companies are turning into them
Stream is still way better than old TV, specifically streaming from your local jellyfin or Plex server ;)
Fragmentation is certainly accelerating things. One company tries something like price hikes, ad tiers, password sharing prevention, bundling, etc and sees no consumer pushback, then they all do it.
I don't think the OP is victimizing cable. They are just saying that these companies swooped in with something better that was cheaper to disrupt the industry only to end up rebuilding said shitty industry. Different players, same game.
Just gotta ride the blitzscaling wave. Take advantage of all cheap shit and move when it isnt a good deal anymore.
I'm part of an FB (yes, I know) group named "Did Silicon Valley reinvent the bus again?", and it's hilarious and sometimes frightening the things the technology sector comes up with.