The tragic attempt by this food delivery worker to take his own life has not only revealed his desperate plight, but also the broader exploitation of workers in China.

See https://chuangcn.org/2020/11/delivery-renwu-translation/ for another expose on the brutality of working conditions imposed on delivery workers in China, by a Marxist collective

    • fuckhaha [any,none/use name]
      ·
      4 years ago

      I don't care about being able to get a taxi 5-10 minutes faster or being able to order packaged food from 20 mid-tier restaurants within the hour, and I think these things have other less savoury effects that outweight the marginal time saving they offer. My ideal socialist utopia is not one where everyone rides taxis everywhere and orders Panda Express to their door every night

      Also the Luddites were good

            • fuckhaha [any,none/use name]
              ·
              4 years ago

              The former is a marketing gimmick that hasn't turned out to be backed up by data. Not to downplay the benefit of feeling safer, but the actual incidence rate is not meaningfully different (especially if you consider traffic accidents a threat to safety: in this regard app taxis are worse). The latter is true if you have location services on (although in places with taxi ranks or hailable cabs that's much faster still), but anyway as I said, getting a taxi 5-10 minutes faster is something I don't care about or think is worth caring about, and in the case of it being easier, the time saving isn't even in that range, its closer to seconds. Silicon valley is good at making you think a thing that isn't really much better is '100x better' because that is the main thing they do: sell mundane marginal improvements as revolutions and hide the downsides.

                • fuckhaha [any,none/use name]
                  ·
                  4 years ago

                  There are advantages to both. For example its more convenient still to simply walk up to a car, or hail one, and get in. You don't need a functional phone or a bank account. You don't need to make any account at all. You don't have a predatory system tracking and keeping forever a record of every ride you take. You don't have a homogenous experience everywhere on earth you go.

                  But in any case, my point is it may be a little easier, but I don't care. Its only marginally easier (although people insist it is revolutionary) and I am not obsessive about using slick interfaces to shave literal seconds off minor tasks, nor do I think it is a good thing to be.

            • Sealand_macronation [none/use name]
              ·
              4 years ago

              improves safety for the passengers

              :porky-happy:

              way easier to call

              "My ideal socialist utopia is not one where everyone rides taxis everywhere and orders Panda Express to their door every night"

              • crime [she/her, any]
                ·
                4 years ago

                I'm a pretty small and visibly queer woman, I wouldn't do any kind of taxi service alone (especially not drunk or stoned) without having some info on who's picking me up and where I am the whole ride, as a safety concern.

                Train stops running at midnight where I live and at that hour it can take an hour and a half to get home with a couple station changes thrown in there. I can want the trains to be better and also acknowledge the material reality that taxi services fill a need until the trains are fixed and more efficient routes are added.

                • fuckhaha [any,none/use name]
                  ·
                  4 years ago

                  I see both of those things as downsides, although I'll admit the GPS thing is just me being silly. Picking and choosing drivers seems very anti-worker to me and promotes discrimination.

              • SteveHasBunker [he/him]
                ·
                4 years ago

                and orders Panda Express to their door every night”

                That sounds pretty tight actually

          • JamesConnollysStache [any]
            ·
            4 years ago

            Better accessibility for disabled passengers. You can request a car to fit your needs. You might not always get it, but at least it's a thing.

            • fuckhaha [any,none/use name]
              ·
              4 years ago

              I believe this is equally true of taxis most places but tbf I don't really know. Do you mean how Uber has different sizes of car, or do they specifically have wheelchair taxis? Medical taxis used to be a thing, and I have seen wheelchair taxi services before, but I have no guess as to how common those are or were. If its only a matter of size however, places I've lived you could get any size taxi from the same taxi company

              • JamesConnollysStache [any]
                ·
                4 years ago

                Yes, primarily vehicle size requests (some disabled people need a larger or higher vehicle). Many local taxis companies (if they exist where you are) are not so flexible. Somewhere like New York, disabled friendly services are hard to come by. There are things like the city's access-a-ride, but disabled people shouldn't have to go through such bureaucracy just to pop down to the shops when they feel like it. I've lived in more civilized countries where taxi apps allow you to order specifically wheelchair friendly taxis etc. that will arrive in moments. Of course, none of these are the actual solution to the problem of accessible transport, but there are some advantages to the apps over the existing taxi system in this regard.

    • Sealand_macronation [none/use name]
      ·
      4 years ago

      which always rubbed me the wrong way.

      technocrat redditor moment

      that’s not inherently baked into the app itself

      google neoliberal capitalism

        • hagensfohawk [none/use name]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Let's be honest. The big reason Uber took off was because it was cheaper than taxis. Why was it cheaper? Because taxi cabs were a regulated market with fixed pricing to ensure:

          1. the vehicles were safe to drive and didn't need a swaybar replaced or anything

          2. the drivers had good records and didn't run into a median last week

          3. the drivers were payed enough to cover the costs of fuel, maintenance, insurance, and also had enough left over to take home decent pay

          Uber came in to this market and undercut the fixed price. Drivers make less and have less to pay for regular maintenance, etc.

          You're giving too much credit to the app itself. There were already ride hailing apps in cities, even if a bit clunky. The big driver of Ubers growth was the price of the service.

          • grisbajskulor [he/him]
            ·
            4 years ago

            I'd say you're both correct. The app-based ride hailing system is much much more convenient, which definitely played a role in its success. But the most important ingredient was definitely the exploitation of laborers. A "fair" ride sharing system (fair in the confines of capitalism) would be an 'app' with protected & salaried drivers at the expense of higher customer costs.

            There are important "innovations" that take place in global capitalism that do have certain apolitical value, like the internet for example. The problem isn't so much the tools, it's that these tools are currently under the direct control of capitalists, who by nature are exploiters, and the trend seems to be towards even more technocratic capitalist control over these tools.

            So in other words, it's a fair position to not be against 'apps' as a whole. But to your point, almost all app-based service companies are successful mainly because of the ease of exploitation they provide.