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Markets are not even the thing. Nerds need to get to grips with ethics or at least social signaling. E.g. how much of an burden is a service allowed to be on s
by atoav 3y ago
Markets are not even the thing. Nerds need to get to grips with ethics or at least social signaling.
E.g. how much of an burden is a service allowed to be on society at large? Most of the "disruption"-based startup models are based around exploiting some rule that societies had before that. If you have to trick society into using your service, consider you just might be on the wrong side of history.
Without knowing the details, when a nerd friend talks to me about a fictional self driving taxi start up, the first thing they would need to convince me of is that such a thing is even benefitial given the fact that it is space that is limited on city streets. Then I would have worries a out how that corp is socializing part of it's costs (by using public roads, by usings ways of attracting particular workers etc).
Don't get me wrong, those might all be ways to make good money, I don't dispute that. But as someone living in a city my stakes are different. I want to be able to get from A to B without being stuck in traffic with 100 empty cars, where the workers receive low pay and the road wear costs are paid by my taxes.
Sure, it is harder to find a way to earn money from which all people profit, but it is not impossible. If your corp is acting like a leech on society, don't be surprised if it is treated as such.
- ponderings 3y agoLet me explain why you are completely wrong.... Playing video games I use to joke about people getting angry about cheats, I argued the game must be really important to them if they get so emotional. A thing I keep thinking: A culture isn't weird until compared or confronted with a different one. You got the impression that people don't like nerds building ridiculous things but nothing could be further from the truth. Normals absolutely love these things, they define their being more than anything. They love to see nerds fool around AND FAIL. It's the same with investors (who are grouped along with get rich quick schemes) they love to see investors lose everything. Bitcoin is twice as exciting! Cant wait to see the pyramid implode. I see a picture one time of a street in China and mistakenly thought it was my city in the Netherlands. It was just the context that gave it away. All the houses in those streets are different they have tiles with round holes in the side walk, the same trees and even people cycling wearing the usual... the usual cloths everyone else around the world is wearing. This is why people take vacations far away, if you don't go far enough everything looks exactly the same, an endless regurgitation of the same mindless replication. The answer is to do public transport with rollercoasters or turn all streets into half pipes, replace the main road with 2 looooong wave pools, use the AI to make self driving pony carts, busses with 10 floors. I know, I know, people didn't want running water or a sewage system. Sadly for them it didn't fail but there are plenty of failures for them to laugh at, get them though their day at their useless job.
- atoav 3y agoSo much text and you didn't give me one substantial argument why I should change my mind. Space is a concern in cities. It is one of the concerns. If you have the same roads-to-building-ratio public transport will always beat individual transport, because that is just basic geometry. You like to frame this as progress, but being able to transport less people while using more resources and space isn't progress.