Fraud is a tiny sliver and it would be unfair to judge crypto on that alone. There's also ransomware, extortion, payments for drugs and theft by North Korea hackers.
You missed arms dealing, human trafficking and sanctions avoidance, but then there seems to be a lot of cryptobros who would think those are features not bugs.
As if the banking system is any better. How can any legitimate payment system which has no cryptographic operations, is highly centralized, where the money can be printed out of thin air and way too many other reasons, be taken seriously?
Because it works, and we've developed massive institutions (the federal reserve, FDIC, SWIFT, credit rating agencies, and other financial market utilities) to keep it working in a way that benefits the vast majority of people that use money
Because of their behavior? Violence was one of the main ways actors resolved conflicts in this period. Didn't like a new tax or that the King appointed his cousin or not your cousin Bishop? Revolt! Have a battle, whoever wins the fight gets his way.
Clovis I the would have absolutely used centralizing tools like railways and the telegraph to enforce his rule more uniformly and ensure his dynasty's success. He only reason why he didn't was because he couldn't.
Dark ages monarchs spent all their time trying to stabilize their regime and enforce their will on the society. We know this because we know how much time they spent marching around their areas putting down revolts and fighting off invasions.
> Violence was one of the main ways actors resolved conflicts in this period
Violence or threat of violence are still powerful tools.
> because we know how much time they spent marching around their areas putting down revolts and fighting off invasion
Medieval war was mostly seasonal. Also, war was mostly fought against neighbors or sometimes in the holy land. as far as revolts go, post-enlightenment slave revolts were much more common than revolts in the middle ages, though they're often not well-taught in schools. In today's world, my country is involved in hot and cold conflicts all over the world. I'd claim we're more warlike now because we can be.
Tough to know where to start. Pretty much every fact asserted in this piece is without any real evidence.
Starting at the end
>This change occurred as a result of William the Conqueror’s defeat of Harold Godwinsson at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. As a result of this, William claimed that he had won the whole country by right of conquest. Every inch of land was to be his, and he would dispose of it as he thought fit.
>All land was thereafter owned by the crown. Perhaps in this can be found the seeds of the desire by the lords for the Magna Carta
This is simply not true that William claiming this was somehow new or novel. Lots of kings did this at the time. The Anglo-Saxons by Marc Morris illustrates this well.
Further, yes the dark ages were decentralized, but not at all because of the reasons in the piece. They were decentralized because the was an era of incredibly high friction. It took forever to get anywhere, to tell anything to anyone, to trade, to make deals, collaborate, to organize people. A bad harvest could wipe out a decade of hard labour building up a community. In that context there were just very few centriphical forces pulling things to the center.
It's even worse than this. One of the articles main sources is a Hans-Hermann Hoppe, an Economics Professor, not a historian who is at best cherry picking scholarship from 1914. At worst a bigot who has a history of making ignorant racial and homophobic comments and has a dedicated section in wikipedia just to this. Even worse his anti democratic, neo-feudal beliefs were influential to clowns like Curtis Yarvin and Javier Millei
> Hans-Hermann Hoppe (/ˈhɒpə/;[5] German: [ˈhɔpə]; born 2 September 1949) is a German-American academic associated with Austrian School economics, anarcho-capitalism, right-wing libertarianism, and opposition to democracy.[6][7][8][9][10] He is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), senior fellow of the Mises Institute think tank, and the founder and president of the Property and Freedom Society.[11][12]
Why would I ever search on a ChatGPT - thats not what they are for. They are for helping summarize things, writing copy, designing excel. Making silly images.
Search is for finding specific websites and products. Totally different things.
But does anyone use them? Everyone org I've worked for and with - large government departments, publicly traded entities, small PE owned entities use excel.
As others say in this thread, the world runs on Excel.
There's no workplace to speak in hushed tones. There's no manager or de facto leader to make first contact with union representatives. There's no way to know when you've reached a quorum of local drivers.
Make no mistake, I sympathize with you. Rideshare/third-party delivery drivers have become America's new techno-feudalist underclass.
“It’s not unusual, except that Manna is telling you exactly what to do every second of every day. If it asks you to go to the back and get merchandise, it tells you exactly where to walk to go get it. And here is the weirdest part — I never see another employee the entire day. The way it makes me walk, I never run into anyone else. I can go for a full shift and never see another employee. Even our breaks are staggered. Everyone takes their breaks alone. We all arrive at staggered times. It’s like Manna is trying to totally eliminate human interaction on the job.”
The reality is that a large proportion of app workers are undocumented. Worker accounts are rented or sold to people who do not have the legal right to work. We can't reasonably address the issue of working conditions on these platforms if we don't acknowledge that fact.
Exactly - anywhere you have undocumented or unregistered or undereducated workers you have exploitation. I don't know why this isn't discussed more widely as being a core element of the gig economy.
There isn't a technology or unionization fix for this as it's a social and polite problem. I've looked into cooperative worker-owned solutions but for certain strata of society there are more gaping problems than the algorithm.
There's no way to know when you've reached a quorum of local drivers.
SMS. When I drove for Uber, there were massive group chats amongst the drivers. They even organized planned shortages in certain parts of the city when rates got too low.
I’ve often felt like there would be a lot of value for an app that’d simply let gig workers in an area find each other to talk and actually create a “workplace”.
But I’m not sure how you’d fund its creation. No VC would want it and there’s not a wealthy user base to bootstrap it.
Typically such things are bootstrapped not by a wealthy user base but by a talented user base who write the code and set up the organization themselves.
However, if you do need some money for boostrapping, there are likely unions out there that would be willing to grant/lend the sums needed, which should be five figures.
Taking VC money would be counter-productive, making you beholden to conflicting interests.
P.S. The motivation for setting something like this up doesn't necessarily need to be purely selfless. It's not going to make you a billionaire, but if successful a non-profit or co-op you set up to do this can pay you a six figure salary for a job that has significant meaningfulness and significant agency (aka control over your own work). And by being a non-profit or co-op the lack of conflict of interest should make it more likely to be successful.
That's a smart idea. It seems like it shouldn't be too expensive to get something like this up and running, but scalability once it's available will be an issue.
Estimates for how many gig workers there are in the US vary between "over 20 million" and "about 60 million." They're already tech-literate, they probably talk to each other, so there's a chance that an app like this would experience very quick growth.
I wonder how gig services would react to something like this. They'd probably try to identify users and deplatform them, so in addition to the financial aspects, one difficult part would be how to protect and anonymize such a platform's users.
yeah, i think that the value proposition for a platform like this over just setting up some sort of discord/message board would be based having a central trusted entity that's able to provide user accounts that are verified AND anonymous.
you'd want to know that the people you're talking to are actually your coworkers and not corporate plants, but you also want to be sufficiently anonymous to avoid workplace retaliation OR weird stalkers.
> I’ve often felt like there would be a lot of value for an app that’d simply let gig workers in an area find each other to talk and actually create a “workplace”.
it could be anything that just allows social connection between people that are doing the same job in the same geographic region but are largely invisible to one another.
i'd try not to be prescriptive about it, but it could cover anything from a light 'random chat' channel to vent about petty workplace annoyances, 'tips and tricks' for success, or more serious channels to talk about workplace safety/conditions/unionization
But if it's a gig, where's the workplace? E.g. if all the domestic builders in my town got together, who would they unionise against? They're not employed; that's not a gig.
The much greater problem is that they are not employed. They are just self employed people, who take on gigs from various platforms.
They can, by definition, not unionize. Even striking is basically out of the question, as organization is near impossible and most of these people could not sustain months with zero pay.
This needs to be just made illegal, it is just a subversion of labor laws.
In the UK you can (and usually do) unionize without a workplace.
Many are industry-specific such as the "Communications wokers' union", but there are also general workers' unions such as GMB [1] or Unite.
It would be possible, indeed probably preferable, to form a "Delivery workers' union". It would be a union of delivery drivers who would pool resources to fight for common rights.
That's true, but the delivery people do not work for McD's. They do not legally work for the delivery companies (although practically they do). People that pay for delivery will not pay very much for delivery, generally less than minimum wage. They'll instead get the food themselves.
I don't know how this actually works, but this can't _always_ be the case if they run national ad campaigns [1] for $5 meal deals, right? Unless they're baking a lot into "pricing and participation may vary"
That said, McDonalds corporate isn't running promotions unilaterally. Instead, promotions are proposed by committees elected by franchisees and voted on by franchisees themselves, so participation rates tend to be high.
And it gets those without having to pay drivers (and technically even workers in most McDonalds’ restaurants since they are franchised), so why would they start?
Delivery and final assembly of food is not McDonald’s’ business.
McDonald’s sells their marketing and logistics, and rents real estate, to franchisors. The franchisors’ business is the one that employs people who do final assembly of the food.
The franchisors’ profits and profit margins are nowhere near McDonalds’.
Fraud?