Oh my god, I fought the urge to stop reading when I read Blockchain and read further and it kept getting worse.

Uber takes over some tasks that a distributed system cannot easily do:

• Handle disputes between driver and customer
• Vetting drivers
• Monitoring cars so that if a driver abducts you authorities can find you
• Taking over development and maintenance of the system
• Marketing

The article shows no practical solution for any of these problems. Many of the so-called solutions are down-right comical. For example:

As soon as the driver adds the basic information, the legal authorities are notified through smart contracts to perform background checks on the created profile.

So vetting shall be done by the state instead of a company. So instead of customers, tax payers should pay for it. I’m sure governments will be lining up to take on the responsibility and for me as a tax payer: hell no! I want my taxes to go into public transport and not into this bullshit.

Also, let’s be gracious and assume that blockchains and smart contracts in general solve a problem that actually exists, you would need smart contracts in case there is no neutral third party that can verify the validity of something. Why would you need that for a process where legal authorities are already involved? If you have an actual authority involved there’s an easier and faster solution: a database. Doesn’t sound as sexy does it?

Similarly, the legal authorities would conduct the same due diligence checks for the riders to ensure the safety of drivers as well.

Lol, sure they will.

When the rider reaches the desired destination, the ride will end automatically. The payment from the rider’s wallet will be deducted automatically through smart contracts and transferred to the driver’s wallet.

GPS locations can be forged easily. How would such a system reliably without a third party authority determine whether the ride ended? Scams in this system from both parties would be rampant.

And from a customer perspective: why would I need a crypto wallet for this shit? I want to use my credit card! So I need a third party to handle the payment and I sure as hell am not trusting a random driver with no oversight with my credit card information.

So to sum it up: that system solves actually none of the problems. You still need third parties involved such as payment providers and authorities, stuff Uber handles for you. You still need a third party handling disputes, which is unsolved in this article and you still need massive investment in R&D (more than a classical system) and marketing but now without a business model as an incentive for anyone to actually do this. Then you get even more problems because now you need to get government authorities involved. As you have no company with resources backing this, there is nobody capable of negotiating with these governments. Not to mention tech support to actually set up the system.

Uber was bleeding money for years, they were not profitable until very recently. How would a competitor be profitable if they exploit their drivers less? Especially because Uber only had to fight Taxis, a competitor would have to fight Taxis and Uber

It’s also not as if the pound is a particularly weak currency like the French Frank or the German Deutsche Mark was.

The Deutsche Mark was famously stable and the biggest official foreign exchange reserves after the dollar, it was much stronger than the pound sterling.

And the only reason Hamas doesn’t do what IDF does is because they are incapable of doing it not because of any moral superiority

Not every Hamas victim does either, doesn’t change the fact that Hamas did exactly what IDF does here

Are you fucking kidding me?

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At least on Android, there is a save function in the menu. Doesn’t that exist on Desktop as well?

They were kicked out just before the election

Yeah, it’s short for National Socialism which was just a rebranding of Fascism in Germany to get Workers on board. So I guess Fascism is the better term to use in any case but seriously, it’s just different flavours of the same shit so I think it’s a mood point to differentiate. They all support the same ideology and policies

Giving weapons to Ukraine was not popular back then, on the contrary. Habeck got a lot of shit for his statements, not only from his own party but all the other ones including conservatives.

I agree that he is much better rhetorically than Baerbock but I don’t think he would have made Chancellor or even if he made Chancellor, green-red would not have made it, they would have needed the FDP anyway.

It’s only Nationalsozialismus if it’s from the Nationalsozialismusregion, otherwise it’s just sparkling fascism

Greens and SPD never had a majority in any poll at the time and they weren’t even close to it. Greens might have been stronger but probably SPD weaker in turn. We might have ended up with Jamaika in the end. Don’t forget that a conservative anti-Habeck campaign would’ve also been possible. He had some unpopular positions back then, too, like giving weapons to Ukraine. What kind of insane warmonger amirite?

I think they mainly lost votes because of BSW. Putin dick-riders can now choose, their scandals usually don’t matter to their voters

They kicked out the German Nazis because they celebrated the SS, which is a no-go for French Nazis. Doesn’t make them less Nazi, just the French kind that doesn’t like to be killed by German Nazis

Different fractions, some of them are not aligned yet because they are new. However, for the biggest groups: 17 MEPs are the German AfD that was kicked out of the right-most group for being too Nazi, 11 MEPs are Fidesz (Orban) which is right-wing and the list goes on, so for the most part the position is mostly correct.

A-Team the movie is bad in many aspects but what really sticks out for Germans is that while the movie played in Frankfurt (and was shot in Vancouver), they showed aerial shots from Cologne. Which is especially weird because I don’t think aerial shots of Frankfurt should be hard to come by (they are used extensively in Arrow for example) and Cologne is probably one of the most recognizable cities in Germany

It’s frustrating that the only thing unrealistic about this episode is that a riot would actually change anything

CDU-Kreischef Andreas Nowak zufolge mache das die CDU nicht, um arabischsprachige Wähler zu finden. “Die gibt es nämlich de facto nicht.” Wer hier wahlberechtigt ist, sei auch in der Lage, ein deutsches Wahlplakat zu lesen. “Wir adressieren damit auch die Arabisch und Türkisch sprechenden Bewohner des Viertels und sagen klar, was wir erwarten.”

Okay, die ganze Aktion ist also Rage-bait. Typischer CDU-Wahlkampf.

Are you serious?

Corey Harris, 44, ended up in jail through no fault of his own