I wish they would spend some of that on the help/support function within their apps. Whenever I have a problem on Uber, it feels like a never-ending maze to figure out how to get any support, and I consider myself versed in navigating unseemly UI, I can only imagine how much it might frustrate people who struggle navigating apps.
Any idea why their help function seems to impenetrable and if AI might help with it?
It might be. It also lets my loyalty go slowly by slowly. Monopolies work until they collapse.
If you can't tell, it frustrates me so much. I wonder how the internal culture of Uber changed when it went from almost zero interest rates to now trying to make lots of profit.
My friend said he realized Uber can just rely on a steady stream of people either growing up or getting laid off and trying to make a quick buck, so they can treat their drivers poorly as well.
I'm not sure what's happening, just know support may be a lot simpler and cheaper to address than nothing, or at least in the medium to long term, but maybe not?
I think it's more like: the US is the most generous country in the world regarding immigration, funding global health, funding global defence, funding global aid, but Europeans and others (including a lot of the young American left) talk about it as though it's the worst country in the world. So why bother, when you can just spend your money on your own citizens the way most countries do and fund loads of internal benefits?
Because I think we've been generous because we recognize the benefits that come to us for being so generous. Proper generosity recognizes that the other's well-being relates to our well-being.
For example, giving funding to USAID to try to stop the spread of Ebola helps people in DRC, Uganda, and other countries directly affected, but can also help the US not have Ebola spread here.
Helping Mexico improve their economy can help people in Mexico not immigrate to the US.
I believe our generosity also benefits us much more than we can see when our perspective collapses and we see life from fewer and fewer dimensions. And I think we can collapse into the "us vs them" mindset that so many others have collapsed into or we can go the other direction and realize it's "us with them" and then we look at generosity differently.
It's unfortunate, by and large the republican voters seem to have looked at the wreckage of the USSR and the continual looting and decline in quality of life that countries like Russia are enjoying under a kleptocratic regime, and they took their fingers out of their collective noses for just long enough to say "yeah I want that for here!".
Not really, voters didn't want this, and they hate it when they are told what's happening. The media silently accepted Trump's lie at face value when he said he knew nothing about Project 2025, despite anybody with half a brain realizing it was a lie. Reporters acted like they had less than half a brain, so that they wouldn't get bopped on their nose by their editors, who in turn were already bowing down to Trump.
The "faction" lied about their intentions in order to be elected. That in itself isn't uncommon, but what is uncommon is the degree to which it lied. Most Republican voters, when told about the actual policies being implemented by elected Republicans, don't believe the reports, and assume that nobody would be enacting such stupid policy. Yet the voters keep voting for them.
"1. SEAL THE BORDER, AND STOP THE MIGRANT INVASION"
"2. CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY"
You're acting like Trump's immigration policy was buried in some "Project 2025" whitepaper nobody has ever read.
Also, his immigration policy remains popular. According to Harvard-Harris, "Deporting all immigrants who are here illegally" remains above water at 55% support (including 33% of Democrats), 45% oppose: https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/HHP... (p. 26)
The implication for Trump and his constituency is that this only applies to brown people. White people are, naturally, not immigrants, even when they are. That's why 100% of the examples Trump would use would be of brown people.
Yes they did. Of course they didn't want to be targeted themselves, but the rhetoric was very explicit about what would happen, and they already had a preview of it in 2016 and voted even more favorably for this regime this time around.
> The media silently accepted Trump's lie at face value when he said he knew nothing about Project 2025
Not true. The media was very vocal about it, and it was obvious that he was on board with it.
> Most Republican voters, when told about the actual policies being implemented by elected Republicans, don't believe the reports, and assume that nobody would be enacting such stupid policy.
This isn't true. The recent ouster of Thomas Massie is a clear example of this. However, even if that were true, Republican voters still overwhelmingly prefer this to the alternative (Democrats), and polls show this today.
> Yet the voters keep voting for them.
Indeed. Not sure how you can acknowledge this but somehow believe it's not what the voters want.
There is no contradiction between the points made so far. His base loves it and the majority of americans do not. He won by a marginal victory just like in 2016. The current system favors the Rs and the Rs have worked to gerrymander every state they've controlled since 2010, and they've used everything in their power since the obama years to make sure they control the courts. Poll after poll shows americans don't like Trump (or Biden for that matter or the Democrats) but because of the moment in 2024, Trump took a marginal victory and consolidated power, which Democrats never could do and never wanted to do.
The simple statement that none of this is what voters want if we're talking about a majority of them is just true. To say otherwise is to be ignorant of history since the 90s and the Rs under Newt Gingrich to this day, and how effectively as a party they've consolidated power in America. I'm not really saying it's evil or smart or anything (I do think it was smart and bold). But, polls do consistently show a majority of Americans have never been so pessimistic about the country and their leadership in both parties.
I don’t agree that even engaged republicans actually know what’s going on. In my experience some of them are the most hoodwinked - they literally believe that all the immigrants being detained are criminals, that everyone sent to CECOT was a terrorist, that DACA recipients have all been allowed to get green cards and just not bothered to, etc.
First, you're making a big logical error by replacing "voters" with "Republican voters" or the even more narrow, extreme, and unrepresentative group of "Republican primary voters".
If people knew they were voting for Project 2025, why would Trump disavow any connection to it during the campaign? It doesn't make any sense.
> Republican voters still overwhelmingly prefer this to the alternative (Democrats), and polls show this today.
Republican voters care less about policy than about the team. Take key Democratic policies, and present them in polls without the Democratic label, and Republicans support them. Add in the label and they don't support them.
It's not hard to understand that politics is mostly treated as sports-team affiliation these days.
Republicans don't vote for Republicans because of policies, they vote for Republicans because they identify as Republicans.
And, claiming that the Massie vote, of just the extreme primary voters, represents the public's will? That's ridiculous. Massie still got something like 45% of the vote, among that extreme and unrepresentative bloc of voters, after Trump going hard after Massie for trying to release the Epstein files.
The Massie vote is about extremist Republican's subservience to Trump, not about whether anybody actually likes policies. People despise Trump's Epstein coverup.
Because the industrialization of America is over, and has been for decades. USA doesn't need low-wage, immigrant workers anymore. The railroads have already been built, the fields have been plowed, and now that's all done by big automated machines. Everything that cheap workers used to do that was valuable is now automated.
Who does the farming? Who does the cleaning? Who builds the buildings? Who are the line cooks? That should be obvious.
But it should be just as obvious that there are plenty of immigrants who are also necessary because they bring new ideas, their education, their incredible work ethic, to fill in the gaps that the US clearly has.
There is one thing that unites all of us (and I do mean us, as I am one of them). We all dream of a society where our hard work can become prosperity for ourselves and for everyone else, a plot of fertile soil that is worth sowing. We all come here with a dream.
And I personally don't mind so much that I'm uplifting people that don't agree with my existence. I just wish that they could stay out of our way so we could all benefit.
I think there are many jobs Americans have decided the just don’t want to do - at a large scale. That said many do.
There is a completely different dynamic with job shops like wipro and others sponsoring “high skilled visas” which are only used to undercut certain labor markets.
I'm not against tightening up the constraints to prevent what becomes indentured servitude dressed up in red, white, and blue. That doesn't help the American people or those who carry within them the American dream. But fixing that is not everyone's actual intent, and that does really bother me.
And your point? The US has an issue where at a certain price point labor has no interest. Reality is that is multiplied if it actually requires real work in a field, rudimentary construction, etc.
This is not a visa issue, but one we solve with illegal labor and visas.
The real solution is visas and making those that done want to work and sponge off social services, actually work.
My kiddo graduates soon, her baby daddy owes $75k in back child support - say 7 years. He’s talented enough to make $150+ wood working. Refuses to do anything because the man/etc. Branch not far from tree.
I’d love to turn a POS like him in such that someone equally talented and wants to contribute can, take a percentage. The person gets a visa, the dead beat gets servitude. No take on the servitude just taxes maybe going off to pay the debt.
The US is a land of opportunity, but also a land of a bunch of idiots that are entitled.
I don't know anything about that situation, but it sounds difficult and I'm sorry that it's happening to your loved ones. I'm not sure you can make someone work if they don't care to, though. Like, take the common example of debtors having their driver's licenses suspended for their debt. Is that really helping anyone? They certainly won't be any closer to paying it off.
I can't disagree with your final assertion there, but there's really very little you can do besides offer greater incentives that get people to genuinely want to work. And I know there's not a market for that and that the rich are keeping the purse strings tight. So it goes.
Whoa there. What's wrong with "undercutting labor markets"? Last I heard, when a profession (e.g. doctors) decides to limit the number of practicioners in order to charge a higher price to the public, that's a bad thing. It benefits the people currently employed in that profession now, but it hurts others who wants to join, and it hurts the public who wants to get the service (e.g. healthcare). The sum of hurt is greater than the sum of help. Cartels are harmful; they don't stop being harmful just because there are borders involved.
I mean, it's one thing if you think immigrants commit more crimes or use more taxpayer money. These are both false, but at least the argument could hypothetically work. But if you say that even perfectly law-abiding, non-welfare-using, good-work-performing hypothetical immigrants shouldn't be allowed in because they would "undercut labor markets", that's plain nonsense. Such nice hypothetical immigrants should be invited in large numbers and everyone would win from it.
If someone has no specials skills beyond what a current citizen college grad has, why is there a need for that individual to have an H1 or related visa? Many visas get issued to people that take the equivalent of a University of Phoenix degree.
Without immigration an imminent depopulation crisis is on its way to America.
We are actually blessed to be in demand as an immigration destination as well as a culture and infrastructure uniquely set up for it.
Squandering that advantage to satisfy xenophobic ideology is yet another demonstration of the Republican Party’s lack of fiscal responsibility. See also: completely random war in Iran, ICE budget increases spent on kicking out taxpayers/customers, tax cuts for billionaires, the current record high budget deficit, $1.8 billion fund for Trump brownshirts, etc.
To be honest, the depopulation crisis is not something we are likely to be able to stop in the long term. But curtailing immigration certainly won't help, and the US would be uniquely positioned as an immigration destination to weather the storm of rapid depopulation better than other countries if it continued its status as an immigration center.
Recommended reading:
After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People
Or really any other book on the subject, I'm not married to that one, it's not a perfect book it's just one that's easy to find because of the distinctive cover.
I don't care to get into talking about Israel. It's a country with the population of Ohio, so if it's an anomaly, it's an anomaly. The only discussion I can get into that country is going to get distasteful.
You're putting the cart in front of the horse. If the US economy didn't need low-wage immigrant workers, we wouldn't be complaining about them in the first place, because they would've gone somewhere else where the jobs are.
The fact they're coming the US literally means its economy needs them.
Of course we could all wax philosophical and say "Nobody needs a Frappuccino every other day, we just want it," but then nobody needs to live in a prosperous economy anyway.
There's always work available if someone is asking for a low enough wage, that should be self-evident. How does this prove that the population at large benefits from more people being willing to work for low wages?
Classical economics would argue that higher population tends to increase productivity (economies of scale and specialization) while lowering wages, increasing land value, and improving returns on capital. Free trade has a very similar effect. You can find this analysis in all standard texts (Smith, Riccardo, etc) and even progressive works such as Progress and Poverty by Henry George.
Different groups are free to have different opinions of this tradeoff. Big landowners benefit immensely while working class renters only suffer.
> The fact they're coming the US literally means its economy needs them.
Not necessarily. As just one example, it could mean one of their family immigrated for a well paying job, and now they want their parents, or other family, to join them and they don’t have skills in a high paying industry.
The presence of low income wage earners does not, by force of nature nor economics, require them.
Having said that, I tend to against minimum wage policy.
I wish i could ill find the video, the farms in CA certainly do need labor. In the 90s when there was another - people south of the border are taking jobs bs - an interview er asked people waiting for for support at a welfare office in Salinas (lots of farms) offering jobs in the fields. Unanimous nope.
They are needed and often do more than those that are citizens.
Remove, or at least tighten the requirements, for welfare.
Your argument seems to be the equivalent of: if the (illegal? surely some of them) immigrants could get welfare they also wouldn’t do those jobs.
As welfare increases to the point where it starts to competes with jobs, it seems sensible to expect welfare will compete with jobs. Especially when you take in to consideration the expenses welfare recipients don’t incur as a result of not having to attend the workplace nor dress for such.
Low quality bait comment, cherry picking a few kids of well educated well-off immigrants who turned out to be rockstars growing up under the exceptional US economic conditions. It's called the exception, not the rule. If those kids were to grow up in some underdeveloped country, none of them would have achieved anything noteworthy which proves the US itself and the conditions it offers is the secret sauce, not immigrants alone by themselves.
Also, some people on your list are absolute red flags I would rather not have in my country, which is proving my point that good border controls and strict visas are essential.
It’s amazing how close and how far you are at understanding my point simultaneously.
Without committing to some wildly contradictory logic, the xenophobic political party in charge of this country cannot be simultaneously in favor of mass deportations, denaturalization, and generally closing the borders while being against denaturalizing and deporting Melania Trump and Elon Musk for obvious visa violations. There is also contradiction in the way the right wing has gotten cozy with big tech companies run by immigrants who entered the country on the H1B visa they demonize so fervently.
Just imagine the outcry if Obama was from South Africa and was standing behind the president's desk talking about how he's running a new illegal government agency.
Nah, there was just more economic activity to draw people in. By every other measure it’s been more hostile than average.
But you are right that it is ending, just wrong about what: it’s the high economic activity that attracted people which is disappearing thanks to the same people that hate migrants.
> By every other measure it’s been more hostile than average.
I'm not sure there's a "just" here: compared to peer countries, the US is either middle-of-the-pack[1] or significantly more accepting of immigrants[2] depending on which number you pick.
(This isn't to somehow imply that the US isn't hostile to its immigrants, because it is. But the question is whether it's more hostile.)
The parent post says it’s the high economic activity that attracted people even though the US has been more hostile than average by every other measure.
So it's as if the US was a honeypot with a flyswatter.
By the way, your [2] is useless to prove your point: you can't compare absolute numbers (for instance Iceland vs the US).
I don’t think I agree that it’s hostile by every other measure. The US’s immigration system is cruel and capricious, but assimilating into the US seems to be a lot easier than, for example, France or Germany. The US is unusual among its peer countries in not requiring immigrants to speak the “official” language fluently, in accepting public displays of ethnic or religious background that aren’t ambiently European Christian, etc.
(Again, I must emphasize that this does not make the US good. Only that the bar is perhaps lower than people who are assimilated into any particular country may realize.)
I would suggest that the proper metric is not the number of immigrants, which after all the parent commentator implied would be the case because of higher economics drawing them in, but a combination of the following
1. the amount of violence directed against immigrants legally allowed in by governmental forces.
2. the chance of legally allowed in immigrants will have immigration status changed without due process.
3. what percentage of Immigrants fear that 1 or 2 will happen to them.
I believe these two conditions seem to exist in the United States currently, although not sure how many immigrants it affects.
I am unsure if there are other countries that have a similar situation, I would expect if there are they must be relatively few in number.
The closest type of situation would be, I suppose, racial oppression focused on particular groups that have become undesirable according to a country's government.
I wish governments would realize that the more barriers and friction they put between their citizens and good tools, the worse their economy will probably be.
The average citizen does not have the income to even afford stuff like that. Anyone who is able buy a laptop like that is wealthy by local standards. And in particular anyone importing stuff from outside. And that wealth is being taxed. If they didn't do that then there wouldn't be may people left to tax at all.
Sure, Django here is the exception, but not taxing imports would generally not benefit people like him, but the actually wealthy people who can otherwise afford the tax.
> Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi have adopted a three-tiered duty structure for imports from outside the East Africa Customs Union under the terms of the Protocol on the Establishment of the East Africa Customs Union, which became fully operational in January 2010. Most finished products are subject to a 25% duty, while intermediate products face a 10% levy. Raw materials (excluding foodstuffs) and capital goods may still enter duty free. Imported goods are charged a value added tax (VAT) of 18% and a 15% withholding tax, which is not reclaimable. Combined, these taxes effectively charge a 33% tax on all foreign goods and services. Imports are also charged a 1.5% infrastructure tax to finance railway infrastructure development. [0]
"Effectively charge a 33% tax on all foreign goods and services." Not just Macbooks. I don't know if this is the final definitive tally of the tariffs but I believe almost everything has a high tariff, so people effectively pay 33% more for the same goods plus shipping. Fair, can't really get rid of shipping, but a 33% or even a 15% penalty on tools means people get worse tools. Computers, mobile phones, cars, motorcycle helmets, medicines (if imported perhaps?), hammers, fans, showers, whatever tool you might use that is a finished good coming from another country, you pay 15-33% or whatever more, so you get a lower quality product for the money you have. I just would prefer my people get the best deal on the best tools (that we as a country don't think we need to make for security reasons) so people can improve faster. Less smog, better roads, fewer things that break...would be quite nice at all levels.
Yes, but it has nothing to do with tax in this case, but bribe. I guess you could say it's still a good thing because if it wasn't for the bribe you simply have no option of getting your goods. But maybe if the bribe didn't exist the network wasn't down for so long in the first place
You're right, of course, but "those in government" aren't a single entity. There's always an incentive for one corrupt part of government to take more than their fair share of the loot, and then for the next part to take more, and so on... until their combined cut is over the revenue-maximizing percentage, and they make less than they could have if they had coordinated better.
(I want to call this "the tragedy of the commons," but that phrase doesn't sound quite dark enough.)
its usually those with financial interests and objectives simply corrupt politicians to legislate their way into reality. politicians serve the highest bidder
It's much easier to steal from a small, weak, and inefficient economy. Therefore, the incentives are usually exactly the opposite: to make the economy worse so that it would be easier and safer to engage in corruption.
For so long, people, especially politicians, have said that companies want to create jobs. But I think most companies want to create profit.
And for so long, I've had people tell me to just get a job. But I tell them that I don't want a job: I want money and I want something to do. Those two things don't have to be together.
I think this is the hard part: philosophically so many of us have learned we need jobs and don't realize a job can be decomposed into money and something to do.
So I think we need to start looking more creatively at 1) how people receive money from others and 2) how people give services to others.
You’re trying to create nuance where there is none. Creating jobs exactly means “I want to pay someone less than the value they bring in to my company” and this has been true since forever.
Nobody cares that you want money and you want something to do that you enjoy. Nobody ever will.
If you actually dig into all the social programs that exist at least in the US, they’re just a massive payday for a small group of people under the guise of bettering humanity.
College/education is a fantastic example. Education as it has been established today is a joke. The humanities were originally established for rich bored wives to have something to do. They were never meant to create value. Colleges hang anvils around the necks of naive children via loans telling them “yes if you major in history you’ll have a job!” This is a joke, and a bad one.
Huxley was on to something. If everyone is educated, nobody collects trash, or chops lumber, mines minerals and metals, etc. it’s a big fucking not-talked-about open secret.
Nobody cares, either you bring something to the table someone else can exploit for money, or you lean into “I’m helpless and the government owes it to me to take care of me because I’ve been indoctrinated into learned helplessness.”
“AI” will at best lead to anarchy at this point, if all the grand visions of the billionaires comes to fruition. People have already tried to kill sama and burn his house down. Wait until armed humvees are driving around data centers. It’s coming.
Fair, I never said there wasn't risk involved with ownership. I even made sure to qualify when I said that people who own don't do labor, because often there is labor involved in ownership.
So I don't think it's a free lunch, it's more risk-for-lunch than labor-for-lunch. Maybe you could argue laborers are still risking their body or something, but I think the point might stand.
> Nobody cares, either you bring something to the table someone else can exploit for money, or you lean into “I’m helpless and the government owes it to me to take care of me because I’ve been indoctrinated into learned helplessness.”
You paint the economic model as a false dichotomy, and the main point of my posting was that it is not a false dichotomy. It is not either have a job (and be exploited by someone else) or be helpless and rely on government handouts.
For example, what if people who got laid off from companies were given significant stock in the company, so that they might partake in the potential savings and gains from replacing the workers with AI or other tools?
The whole conversation seemed to be about the economic model, so I'm not sure how it is a distraction, a boogeyman, or inconsequential.
> For example, what if people who got laid off from companies were given significant stock in the company, so that they might partake in the potential savings and gains from replacing the workers with AI or other tools?
You have described less than 0.1% of the US population, not to mention the rest of the world.
I get it, you have an idea in your head and you're struggling to see past it. Read Brave New World.
It seems that you may not want to actually have a discussion, rather just reinforce the idea that we're either screwed by employers or screwed by helplessness.
Fair, my one example on layoffs may not land with you.
But do you want us to just sink into the helplessness of us all being screwed or do you want to try to find solutions that might allow us to feel some sense of agency and hope?
I've often wanted real name policies for writing and anonymity for reading. And I don't think bans are the way to go, I think one should just shift the norms on this so that it becomes easy to verify an identity and therefore easy to see which ones are anonymous. The problem right now is that real identity and anonymous blend together, so anonymous can pretend to be real, which might seem even more so in the age of AI.
I wonder if there are different levels to this: 1) real identity/name 2) humanness 3) completely anonymous.
(definitely open to other suggested levels)
For example, if someone is posting on the internet with a real name, I want them to actually be that person. If they're posting with a username, I mostly just want them to be a human. I don't know how much I'd be open to it being hard to know whether it was a human or bot.
With regards to reading stats, public or private, I'd still like to know whether human vs bot. I think YouTube and Twitter/X and IG and all these platforms have been gamed by lots of bots pretending to be unique humans and those stats get wildly out of touch with how many humans actually interact (which I think matters for true popularity and advertising and basic understanding of social interactions).
I think the challenge is if it's real identity, often it doesn't split between real identity and simple proof of humanity. Maybe it's not that easy from a tech standpoint, and maybe it's because companies would want to track every move and people want privacy, but maybe it'd be easier if more people wanted it.
A lot of the local newspapers have abandoned third party comments systems and gone for only allowing comments under full verified name (often using the national id system). The result is that only the trolls and and generic perspectives anyone could have reasoned their way to possibly existing in less than 5 minutes remain. The ones willing to provide entertainment in the form of vigorously refuting the more extreme viewpoints are gone, because who wants to needlessly antagonize the likely crazy, and the interesting tangents are also mostly gone.
If you want to use social media to chill out with your friends, real name mandates for writing can work, at least as long as the content is not too publicly accessible. But if you want to have more interesting conversations than the ones you can have in the local park where you need to watch out for not publicly denouncing the sport favoured by your peers and neighbours in favour of something locally exotic, real name by default will more or less wipe them out.
As for proof of humanness it sounds interesting, but I think it's insufficient. Much like I dislike promotions of interests which are not my own as much when they are done by a human handing out fliers vs a poster showing the same advertisement, I don't think that the sender of the message being a paid or otherwise recruited human is going to make the desirable difference on social media either, even if they're known to be human.
What's really needed is a signal that the content is the persons genuine personal input, and comes without an ulterior agenda. And if such a signal can exist I'd very much like to be able to use it when navigating the physical world as well.
I might be willing to pay more, maybe a lot more, for a higher subscription than claude max 20x, but the only thing higher is pay per token and i really dont like products that make me have to be that minutely aware of my usage, especially when it has unpredictability to it. I think there's a reason most telecoms went away from per minute or especially per MB charging. Even per GB, as they often now offer X GB, and im ok with that on phone but much less so on computer because of the unpredictability of a software update size.
Kinda like when restaurants make me pay for ketchup or a takeaway box, i get annoyed, just increase the compiled price.
For sure, I agree with that sentiment. It's interesting to consider the psychological component of that, like how "free shipping" is not really free, it's oftentimes just packaged into the price of the product but somehow it feels like we're getting a better deal.
I would not be surprised to see Anthropic, OpenAI etc head in the direction you mention as they mature and all of these datacenters currently undergoing construction come online in the next few years and drive down costs.
I tried to hack the statusline to show this but when i tried, i don't think the api gave that info. I'd love if they let us have more variables to access in the statusline.
You just gave me the idea to 1) photo a cluttered drawer and have AI identify all the things, 2) it'd be nice if it could take that output and structure it (eg, items A, B, and C are in drawer 1) and 3) maybe even have a cheap cameras in the important places that update periodically. I dunno. Also maybe have it connect to this home memory system, ill check it out more. Thank you both!
Any idea why their help function seems to impenetrable and if AI might help with it?
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