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sticky-sugar · 10 months ago

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try it. (matsukawa issei x reader)

tags/cw: roommates to lovers, somnophilia, fingering, mattsun sends porn as a coping mechanism, size kink if you really squint

word count: 3.1k

“i’ve always wanted to try that.”

issei chokes on his beer when you speak. you point at the tv in explanation, as though he needs one. the scene playing has just started out with a couple in bed, spooning while they fuck. everything’s covered, but it’s easy to tell through the blanket that the woman’s leg is lifted, her back arching against the man’s chest while she cries out lewdly.

“never been fucked in the morning?” he jokes, keeping his eyes trained on the screen so he doesn’t have to look at you. his laugh sounds awkward even to him.

“mm-mm.” you shake your head, draining your wine glass, and he can’t tell if that’s a confirmation or a rejection of his guess. but he can tell that that wine bottle on the coffee table is empty, because you would never say these things to him sober.

“not that part,” you explain. frowning when you realize there’s no wine left, you rise from the couch, disappearing from the room and padding down the hall. issei sighs in relief at the moment alone, running his fingers through his hair and tugging hard.

“she’s drunk,” he whispers to himself, a reminder. “she’s drunk, and she’s your friend. and you can’t afford rent anywhere else, you stupid fuck.” that’ll do it. he’s broke as shit, and you’re a good friend. he can steel his nerves with those facts.

“she was asleep when he started,” you call from the kitchen.

fuck.

issei drops his head back, hitting it on the wall a few times with purpose. fuck, fuck, fuck.

you come back in, and he straightens, yanking the throw blanket over his lap. you’re too drunk to notice.

you’re too drunk to notice much of anything, really — including your own running mouth.

“she was asleep,” you say again. “and he fucked her anyway—“ you rush to explain yourself, holding a hand out when his eyes find yours, wide and uncertain. “consensually, obviously.”

that doesn’t help. he’d been assuming that, but you confirming it makes it worse.

somnophilia, his mind whispers, the word latching itself to you.

“i dunno,” you shrug, your refilled wine glass brought to your lips. “i think it’s hot, i guess. i’d try it.”

he really can’t afford rent anywhere else.

—

you’re scouring roommate ads in a hungover daze the next morning.

what is your problem?, you think, rolling over to groan into your pillow. you open your bank app, staring at the number in your checking account and wondering uselessly if it’s enough to afford a place on your own. one where you’ll never have to look mattsun in the face again.

why did you tell him that?

your brain flashes through two bottles of wine and drunk admissions, and you switch over to uber eats, deciding that cooking is simply not an option today. standing in that kitchen for more then four seconds and risking running into him is not an option.

you know why you told him that. you know exactly why you told him.

you told him because, despite every coping mechanism you’ve tried over the years of living with him, matsukawa issei persists in being the most attractive man you’ve ever met.

you told him because you wanted to test the waters. why you would ever test the waters with somnophilia, of all things, and not something standard and vanilla like ‘making out with a friend just happens sometimes’ or ‘drunk hookups aren’t so bad’, you will never know.

but you’d told him because you think about it. you think about him, doing things like that. things that aren’t standard or vanilla or easily explained or plausibly deniable.

you think about matsukawa issei fucking you while you sleep. and maybe it’s happened one too many times. maybe now it’s all you think about, enough that it comes up in your stupid, drunk admissions.

maybe — just maybe — you hope he might take you up on it, now that it’s out there in the open like that.

but that’s just a maybe. so you’re looking for another apartment, on the very real chance that he’s going to call you a freak and never speak to you again.

your phone buzzes in your hand.

it’s a text from him.

[10:17 AM]

mattsun: [link attached]

your face crumples into a frown. “what?” you murmur, jabbing a thumb on the link and hoping it’s not a virus.

your phone starts moaning at max volume.

you scream, slamming down on the side button to lower the volume as the video intro plays through. your eyes fly to the title.

milf fucked by son’s friend while she’s sleeping

there’s no fucking way he just did that.

[10:19 AM]

mattsun: smth like that?

“matsukawa!” you scream, rolling out of bed and storming out into the hall. he’s laughing loudly from his room, and you all but kick his door down. “what the fuck is your problem?!”

he’s in bed, cackling gleefully and covering his face with his blanket — but his eyes are anything but shy when he looks at you.

“just trying to ease the tension-“

“by sending me porn?!”

he shrugs and gestures to his phone. “im just saying, you’re not alone! at least—“ he glances down at the screen “—3.8 million other people are into it, too-“

you scream in frustration, turning and stomping back to your room. his laughter follows, echoing through your door even when you slam it.

he does it for two weeks straight. every few days, you wake up to a new link, each video titled something more obnoxious than the last.

guy takes step-sister while she takes a nap

mom wakes step-son up with a special surprise on his birthday

repairman finds sleeping beauty home alone

each one draws an irritated screech of his name and the echoing giggles of satisfaction from his room.

you could stop it. in fact, he’s asked you more than once if you want him to.

‘if you really want me to stop, i’ll stop, he’d said in your kitchen last week.

‘just say the word,’ he’d reminded you on his way out one morning.

‘i think you and i both know how important consent is,’ he’d murmured just two nights ago, leaning on your doorframe, his eyes hot on yours.

you’d shivered under his gaze and pretended to be engrossed in something on your phone. you’d hoped he couldn’t see the way you’d pressed your thighs together, but when you looked up, he was already staring down at them.

he’d met your eyes again and just hummed, flicking his dark eyebrows up at you before turning away. your phone had buzzed with a new link only seconds after his bedroom door had clicked shut.

you’re certain he knows why you haven’t told him to stop. that the truth is that you don’t want him to stop. you’re certain he’s testing the waters now, too.

because each video he sends you gets closer and closer to being about roommates.

your phone buzzes in your hands. you wonder if he knows that you watch each one, waiting for him to pull the trigger on the one that sits unspoken in the space between you.

he does, a week later.

—

you’ve caught him, issei realizes belatedly.

maybe he should have noticed after you started sitting closer to him on the couch. or maybe after you’d refused to tell him to stop sending you porn. or maybe even after he’d sent you something titled ‘roommate can’t help himself while she sleeps’ at 4 in the morning and you hadn’t called the cops on him.

maybe he should have realized you’d caught him after any one of those. but he doesn’t. he doesn’t realize it, not until this very moment, as you’re standing from the couch and bending over to clean the table of empty beer bottles before bed.

he doesn’t realize it until he realizes you’re not wearing any underwear.

he glances at you shamefully when you bend at the waist, hoping you don’t look back and catch him. and then he coughs violently, choking on his own spit and drawing your attention.

he waves you off, blushing furiously and not even bothering to stop his eyes from flying to your ass when you just shrug and bend over again. your pajama shorts have ridden up, but there’s no lacy edge on pink panties where there should be.

yes, he’d noticed years ago that these shorts tend to ride up and not mentioned it. yes, he knows what kind of panties you wear. yes, he has a favorite pair.

what are you gonna do if you find out, call him a pervert? he’d sent you roommate somnophilia porn and you’d made him coffee in the morning.

“‘kay, goodnight,” you mumble, and issei wonders if you’re shy about it or if he’s just hoping you are.

“g’night,” he breathes, eyes finding yours. you keep eye contact all the way out of the living room. your eyes drop to his lap at the last second, and he watches a grin stretch across your face just before you disappear from the room.

he looks down at his lap, and then he swears under his breath. he’s visibly hard in his sweatpants.

—

he feels like a pervert. he really feels like a pervert.

he stands in the hall outside your bedroom, one hand on the knob, feeling like a pervert. it’s 2 in the morning, and he feels like a pervert.

he sighs to himself and turns the knob slowly — ever so slowly, because he knows how it creaks, and he doesn’t want to wake you. he pushes the door open carefully, and then he finds you in the dark, moonlight spilling over your body.

you’re completely naked.

you’re on your stomach, blankets draped over your lower half and one knee bent out toward the wall. issei can see the expanse of your bare skin and the swell of your breast, but you’ve got your back slightly to him, so he can’t see everything.

but it’s enough.

he breathes hard, stepping into the room and shutting the door silently behind him. he runs his fingers through his hair, tugging hard and giving a soft sigh as he pads over to you.

when he lowers his knees to your mattress, it’s with his heart in his throat and his cock straining against his pants. you look so innocent, so sweet like this, even while he’s sliding the blankets off of your skin and exposing you in the moonlight.

is he really allowed to want this as badly as he does?

your breath is steady, only changing slightly when he braces himself behind you, propped up on one elbow. he scoots toward you, breath caught in his throat, and then slides his hand under the back of your knee. you shiver, probably because his fingers are ice cold, and he keeps his eyes locked on the side of your face.

when you don’t give any other sign of waking, he lifts your leg and hooks it backward over his knee, opening your body up for him.

he swears under his breath, staring down at you in the moonlight.

you shift, adjusting to the new angle of your body with a sigh. your back presses to his chest, and issei has to press his lips together so he doesn’t moan at the sight of you.

he keeps his eyes on your face when he slides his fingers along your inner thigh, watching you intensely as his icy fingertips dance close to the spot between your thighs that’s radiating heat.

when he cups your bare cunt, your skin breaks out in goosebumps, but you don’t move otherwise. issei moans now, because your body knows what he’s doing, but you don’t.

he’d had a feeling before — in the weeks between that moment on the couch and this moment right here — that he’d unlocked a new, previously untouched fantasy. that his reaction to your drunken admission might have been about more than just being attracted to you.

he sees it now. now, as he’s sliding two fingers between your folds and watching as you remain completely unaware, he realizes that you’ve done something to him. that you’ve made him want to do this to you, tonight and every night after.

it takes every ounce of his self-control not to shudder and moan in your ear when your pussy twitches under his fingers, reacting to him even when you don’t.

he drops his head to your chest, eyes locked on your face as he takes one of your nipples in his mouth. your lips part, and he freezes, but the sigh that falls out is nowhere near conscious, so he keeps going, sucking and licking and grazing his teeth over the bud while he massages your cunt with his now-warm fingers.

the first sign that you’re reacting is the growing ease with which he’s able to push his fingers against you. your entrance becomes slick, and he can’t help that he pushes his hips against your ass in response, seeking relief. he drops his touch lower and swipes the pads of his fingers through the mess there, spreading it all over your cunt.

when he circles your clit, slippery and warm now, your breathing changes, harder and rougher. the rise and fall of your chest pushes at his mouth, and he latches on with fresh fervor, watching your brows furrow and your lips twitch at the onslaught of sensations.

it shouldn’t be as easy as it is for him to push his middle finger past your entrance.

“fuck”, he whispers despite himself, mouth slipping off of you with a gentle pop and eyes rolling back in his head. your walls pulse around his finger, warm and velvety and wet beyond belief. his cock twitches hard in his pants as he slides his finger in and out of you, searching for that spongy spot that’ll wake you up.

he knows you might have wanted him to fuck you like this, but he can’t help himself anymore. he doesn’t have it in him to be careful anymore.

when his ring finger joins his middle, it’s with intent. the push is rough, bullying your cunt open with the size of his fingers, no doubt longer and fuller than you can get on your own.

you shift under him, a quiet noise of question leaving you, and he lifts his head, attaching his lips to the crook of your neck.

“y/n,” he whispers, more a moan than anything else. “need you.”

he sucks on the column of your throat while you come to, his fingers curling and spreading inside of you — his sloppy attempt to prepare you for him.

“h-huh-“ your head lifts slightly, and then you’re slamming it back against the pillow, your back arching. “oh, my god, mattsun-“

he almost comes in his pants when you say his name like that.

“couldn’t help myself,“ he starts, shaking his head and pushing his body against yours almost desperately. “you were so pretty.“ your cunt tightens around his fingers in response, and he files that away for later. keeps it in mind, the things that make you react like this. “need you so bad, y/n-“

“yes, god yes,” you breathe, a whine trapped in your throat. you turn your head, back still pressed against his chest, and drop your still-sleepy eyes to his lips.

the coil under issei’s navel tugs hard when he realizes how well he can read you.

he pushes his mouth against yours eagerly, moan unrestrained when your tongue slides against his. he wonders if you know how often he’s thought of this moment, years of wanting you and craving the feeling of you coming undone under his fingers.

“please,” you whisper against his lips, back arching when he pushes the pads of his fingers against that spongy spot that makes you whine. “more, mattsun.”

he groans, shivering when you pull his bottom lip between your teeth. “not yet — it’ll hurt,” he murmurs, leaning on every molecule of self-control.

“i can take it,” you just say, pushing your ass back against his aching cock. “promise.”

he never had that much self-control to begin with.

his moan comes out in a shuddered breath, overpowered by the sound of you whining when he slips his fingers out of you. he shoves his sweats down to his knees, meeting your eyes and seeing the urgency he feels reflected in your eyes.

when he slides his cock between your folds, it’s with a choked groan and a heaving pant in your ear.

“can i- are you sure-“ he stutters, already lining himself up at your entrance.

“please, please, please,” you babble, arching your back to make the angle easier on him.

you come around his cock before he’s even halfway in.

there are stars in his eyes by the time you’re done.

you cry out for him, shaking and clenching down hard, and he can’t do anything except bury his face in your hair and keep your leg lifted high with a trembling hand.

“fuck,” he breathes, voice tight. “fuck, y/n-“

“more, mattsun,” you sob. he thinks you might be the girl of his dreams.

pushing the rest of the way in, he shoves down his own orgasm, fighting and kicking and forcing it away so he can last more than thirty seconds inside of you.

he only manages a minute before he’s spilling into you with a stuttered moan of your name, face buried in your neck and head full of static.

you’re just slumped against him by the time he comes to his senses, breathing hard and synced with his.

“sorry,” he mumbles into your hair, ears burning with embarrassment. “i swear i usually last longer than that-“

you laugh, tired and still weak but bright all the same. “yeah — so do i.”

he snorts, pulling out slowly and letting your leg drop closed, trying his best not to moan at the feeling.

“are you sure that was okay?” he asks, a tiny inkling of doubt still seeded in his veins. you just giggle, whispering his name in fond exasperation.

“sorry, which part of me sleeping naked was a warning sign?”

“shut up,” he mutters, curling himself around you and feeling the beginnings of exhaustion start to drain his energy. “i’m staying here tonight. i don’t do one-night stands.”

you just turn in his arms and wrap your arms around his neck. “was i that good, mattsun? i was asleep for half of it.”

you’re gonna be the thing that kills him, he just knows it.

#banner by @/cafekitsune !!#matsukawa x reader #matsukawa issei #matsukawa smut #haikyuu smut #hq smut #hq x reader #haikyuu x reader

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naileadevoras · 6 months ago

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* taps mic * is this thing on ? hi pookies ! it's the week before christmas & today , i'm presenting to you all a list of different occupations for your muses . i've categorized them based on alphabetical order for a neater look & it'll be easier for you all to read / browse through . i hope you find this masterlist helpful !

a like + reblog would be greatly appreciated . happy holidays !

🎱 𝑨 - 𝑯 .

accountant

activist

actor / actress

aesthetician

animator

apartment flipper

art critique

artist

author

babysitter

baker

bank teller

barista

bartender

bellhop

bike messenger

body builder

body guard

book keeper

bookstore owner

bouncer

cake decorator

camp counselor

cars salesman

casino manager

casting director

chef

civic planner

comedian

computer engineer

concert promoter

construction worker

dentist

dermatologist

dietitian

doctor

disk jockey

diver

driver [ uber , lyft , private ]

emergency medical technician

entrepreneur

etsy shop owner

fast food employee

figure skater

firefighter

financial analyst

fisherman

florist

food deliverer [ postmates , uber eats , etc ]

food critic

former child star

former miss universe

funeral director

game developer

guidance counselor

hair dresser

hair stylist

high school teacher

🎱 𝑰 - 𝑸 .

influencer

interior decorator

investor

janitor

journalist

judge

kindergarten teacher

lab assistant [ biology / chemistry lab ]

lifeguard

line cook

maid

make up artist

manager

marine biologist

marriage / family therapist

massage therapist

matchmaker

mechanical engineer

mobile app developer

mortician

motorcycle mechanic

nail technician

nurse practitioner

nursing professor

obstetrician

pageant queen

physiotherapist

piercer

pilot for commercial airlines

plastic surgeon

police officer

personal stylist

private attorney

private chef

professional athlete [ football , basketball , soccer ]

professional boxer

professional chess player

professional esports player

professional mermaid

professional photographer

professor

programmer

public relations

quality control inspector

🎱 𝑹 - 𝒁 .

real estate agent

receptionist

relationship counselor

respiratory therapist

retail employee

sales person

set designer / illustrator

singer

small business owner

socialite

social media curator

social media intern

song - writer

sports agent

stunt double

tattoo artist

teacher's assistant

tour guide

tour manager

translator

travel writer [ journalist ]

twitch streamer

ultrasound technologist

veterinarian / vet assistant

waiter / waitress

web art director

yoga instructor

zoologist

#masterlist #rph #job masterlist #rpt #roleplay help #indie rp #roleplay resources #mine

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technofeudalism · 4 months ago

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Taller Nepantla: "So where do art and artists stand within this new techno-feudal political landscape?"

1) Artists don’t own anything.

We don’t own the studios. We don’t own the galleries. We don’t own the production of materials. We don’t own the newspapers. We don’t own the art schools and universities. We don’t own the mechanisms of art distribution. We don’t own our work. We don’t even own our own art. Artists have no labor protections and are content to work individually to perpetuate their own myth or pray to the sacred algorithm to go viral. By being atomized we are exactly like a feudal peasant of the Middle Ages, who lives in extreme precariousness giving away part of his crops to his local king. The art world, its industry, its weight, its impact, its trend, everything belongs to other people. Did you know 80% of the art-market is own by a small group of Mega Collectors? Those who control the means of artistic production control the artists.

2) By not owning anything, artists and cultural workers only rent.

We no longer sell handmade works, but instead we sell our hands for work. More and more the creative and artistic sector sells services rather than art. Artists need multiple jobs in order to invest in their art practice. Even more, just as in the feudal stage of history, we work the land in a territory that does not belong to us, the land belongs to the landowner. In this land artists will always pay rent, a tax, to the feudal lord. We use GOOGLE to send emails We upload our art to INSTAGRAM We educate ourselves through YOUTUBE We communicate through TIKTOK We pay to use ADOBE SUIT We buy materials through AMAZON We move through UBER We send files through WETRANSFER Every time we use these platforms, we generate money for the feudal lords.

The art world depends on these platforms, which collect our information and our data, to sell.

When a service is free, our attention is the product. That is, it is impossible for an artist to establish himself as an artist without generating money for the landowners who own the technological platforms. That is, the art world depends on these products. It is impossible to be an artist without using these technologies. Techno-feudalism keeps artists in a situation of -permanent-precariousness dependence on technological platforms. Just like in medieval times, peasants live off the crumbs offered by the crown, living in a house, working on land, and eating food that does not belong to them. Technocapitalists don’t want artists to own the means of artistic reproduction. Technocapitalist instead build a world where everything is rented. Every stage of artistic production from how you imagine an artwork, how you study an artwork, how you draft and artwork, how you build an artwork, how you show an artwork, how you distribute an artwork, how you perceive an artwork, and how you think about an artwork, is all determined by apps and tools which you rented from a tech corporation.

3) Artists SUBSIDIZE the profits of technological platforms.

That is, we pay an inflated price for these services directly from our pockets. The art world depends on the underpaid work of our services. If there were fair wages in the art world, then the entire pyramid wuld be destroyed precisely because it depends on the fact that most artists do not earn a fair wage. All the art we produce and share is being used to train algorithms to better sell us products. When a platform is free, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, we are the product that is sold. Even more, artists subsidize the entire artworld. We work for free. We work for low wages. We work for exposure. We are the “volunteer army” Jerry Saltz brags about. The artworld benefits from not paying us what we deserve.

4) The entire art world depends on the platforms of the Clouds.

All museums, galleries, fairs, biennials, and auctions depend on the technological infrastructure dominated by feudal landowners. In other words, there is a dependence on these technologies in order to promise an interconnected, cosmopolitan, and immediate “art world.” The feudal landowners who own the technological platforms, having no competition, can impose whatever price they want, and the art world must obey. They can raise prices without losing customers. The price we pay to use TechnoCapitalist services is completely arbitrary. It does not correspond with the quality of the service but rather to the whims of the landlords. One day, black ink for printing is free, the next day it costs $5.99 a month as a part of a subscription package. We are looking at you Anish Kapoor.

5) The algorithm decides what counts as talent as long as it can generate profits.

Algorithms are increasingly deciding what counts as “value.” Major collectors will be able to systematize the works on the market in order to deduce, through algorithms, the value of a work and whether it is a good investment. The algorithm has more power than art critics and art historians. An artist will then adapt to the algorithmic trends of his time, in order to go viral. A work of art that goes viral can change the artist’s life. NFT’s are just one example of techno-feudal experiments in the arts. NFT’s promise decentralization and transparency, but end up replicating the worst aspects of capitalism, feudalism, and what new technologies can do.

In short, the art world is interconnected with techno-feudalism. We artists are technologically and socially dependent on a system that exploits us. It is important to increase media literacy so that artists can build alternative technological systems to cut dependence on monopolistic companies. A king’s mindset is always to grown and conquer. In the end, the artworld’s investment in techno-feudalism will actively bring the destruction of other smaller artworlds in the global south. Techno-feudalism will produce a homogenized, sanitized, apolitical universal art, that privileges creations that protect the artworlds overlords."

#technofeudalism #late stage capitalism #media #internet #art #anti capitalism

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

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Meatspace twiddling

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me next weekend (Mar 30/31) in ANAHEIM at WONDERCON, then in Boston with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then Providence (Apr 12), and beyond!

"Enshittification" isn't just a way of describing the symptoms of platform decay: it's also a theory of the mechanism of decay – the means by which platforms get shittier and shittier until they are a giant pile of shit.

I call that mechanism "twiddling": this is the ability of digital services to alter their business-logic – the prices they charge, the payouts they offer, the particulars of the deal – from instant to instant, for each user, continuously:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Contrary to Big Tech's own boasting about its operations, the tricks that tech firms play to siphon value away from business customers and end-users aren't very sophisticated. They're crude gimmicks, like offering a higher per-hour wage to Uber drivers whom the algorithm judges to be picky about which rides they'll clock in for, and then lowering the wage by small increments as a way of lulling the driver into gradually accepting a permanent lower rate:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

This is a simple trick. The difference is that tech platforms like Uber can play it over and over, and very quickly. There's plenty of wage-stealing scumbag bosses who'd have loved to have shaved pennies off their workers' paychecks, then added a few cents back in if a worker cried foul, then started shaving the pennies again. The thing that stopped those bosses was the bottleneck of payroll clerks, who couldn't make the changes fast enough.

Uber plays crude tricks – like claiming that a driver isn't an employee because the control is mediated through an app – and then piles more crude tricks on top – this algorithmic wage discrimination gambit.

Have you ever watched a shell-game performed very slowly?

https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-do-penn-tellers-famous-cups-and-balls-trick-in-12-steps

It's a series of very simple gimmicks, performed very quickly and smoothly. Computers are very quick and very smooth. The quickness of the hand deceives the eye: do crude tricks with superhuman speed and they'll seem sophisticated.

The one bright spot in the Great Enshittening that we're living through is that many firms are not sufficiently digitized to to these crude tricks very quickly. Take grocery stores: they can get up to a lot of the same tricks as Amazon – for example, they can charge suppliers for placement on the most prominent, easiest-to-reach shelves, reorganizing your shopping based on which companies pay the biggest bribes, rather than offering the best products and prices.

But Amazon takes this to a whole different level – beyond simply organizing their product pages based on payola, they do this for search. You ask Amazon, "What's your cheapest batteries?" and it lies to you. If you click the first link in a search-results page, you'll pay 29% more than you would if you got the best product – a product that is, on average, 17 places down on the results page. Amazon makes $38b/year taking bribes to lie to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

Amazon can do more than that. Thanks to its digital nature, it can continuously reprice its offerings – indeed, it can simply make up each price displayed on every product at the instant you look at it – based on its surveillance data about you, estimating your willingness to pay. For sellers, Amazon can continuously re-weight the likelihood that a given product will be shown to a customer based on the seller's willingness to discount their products, even to the point where they go out of business:

https://www.businessinsider.com/sadistic-amazon-treated-book-sellers-the-way-a-cheetah-would-pursue-a-sickly-gazelle-2013-10

Twiddling, in other words, lets digital services honeycomb their servers with sneaky wormholes that let them siphon value away from one kind of platform user and give it to another (as when Apple silently began spying on Iphone owners to create profiles for advertisers), or to themselves.

But hard-goods businesses struggle to do this kind of twiddling. Not for lack of desire – but for lack of capacity. Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon Fresh – an online grocery store – can change prices and layout millions of times per day, at effectively zero cost. Jeff Bezos, owner of Whole Foods – a brick-and-mortar grocer – needs a army of teenagers on rollerskates with pricing guns to achieve a fraction of this agility.

So hard-goods businesses are somewhat enshittification-resistant. It's not that their owners are more interested in the welfare of their customers, workers and suppliers – they merely lack the capacity to continuously rejigger the way their business runs.

Well, about that.

Grocers have been experimenting with "electronic shelf labels" in order to do "dynamic pricing" – that means that prices change quickly, in response to circumstances:

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1197958433/dynamic-pricing-grocery-supermarkets

This doesn't have to be bad! As @planetmoney points out, it's a little weird that grocers don't discount milk whose sell-by date is drawing near. That milk is worth less to shoppers, because they have to use it more quickly lest it expire. Instead of marking down the price of perishable goods – day-old lettuce, yesterday's bread, etc – grocers put them on the shelves next to fresher, more valuable products, leading to billions of dollars' worth of food-waste and and unimaginable quantities of methane-producing, planet-cooking landfill.

In Norway, ESLs are pretty well established and – at least according to Planet Money's reporting – they are used exclusively to offer discounts in order to reduce waste. They make everyone better off.

But towards the end of the story, they note that Norway's grocery sector – which alters prices up to 2,000 times per day – has been accused of using ESLs to rig prices, hiking them and blaming them on pandemic supply-chain problems and loose monetary policy. Greedflation, in other words.

Greedflation is rampant in the grocery sector, all around the world. Remember when the price of eggs doubled and they blamed in on bird-flu, even as the CEO of the one company that owns every egg brand you've ever heard of boasted about how he could hike prices and suckers would just pay it?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on

In Canada, grocers rigged the price of bread, the most Les-Mis-ass form of corporate crime you can imagine (do you want guillotines, Galen Weston? Because this is how you get guillotines):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada

EU grocers – another highly concentrated industry – also collude to rig prices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

Which is all to say that while these companies don't have to use the twiddling capabilities that come with ESLs to enshittify their stores, we'd be pretty fucking naive to assume that they won't.

And here's the bad news: US grocers like Whole Foods (owned by Amazon, the company that wrote the enshittification playbook) are already experimenting with ESLs. So is Alberstons/Safeway, the massive, inbred conglomerate that has already demonstrated its passion for using twiddling to fuck over their workers:

https://knock-la.com/vons-fires-delivery-drivers-prop-22-e899ee24ffd0/

Economists love "price discrimination" – where prices change based on circumstance, trying to match the perfect price with the perfect customer. On paper, that sounds plausible: if I need a quart of milk for a recipe I'm making tonight and I get a 50% discount on some about-to-expire 2%, then everyone's better off. I get a discount and the grocer gets some money for milk they'd have to throw away at the end of the day.

But these elegant, self-licking ice-cream cones only emerge if the corporation offering the deal is constrained. Perhaps they're constrained by competition – the fear that you'll go elsewhere. Or perhaps they're constrained by regulation – the fear that they'll be punished if they use twiddling-tech to cheat you.

The grocery sector, dominated by a cartel of massive companies that routinely collude to rip us off, is not constrained by competition. And for years, regulators let them get away with ripping us off (though finally that might be changing):

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/us/politics/grocery-prices-pandemic-ftc.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ek0.t2Pr.g4n2usbxEcoa

For neoclassical economists, the answer to all this is "caveat emptor" – let the buyer beware. If you want to make sure that ESLs are only used to offer you discounts and not to gouge prices, all you need to do is note the price of everything you buy, every time you buy it, and triple-check it every time you go back to the grocery store. Just be eternally vigilant!

Thing is, the one thing computers are much better at than humans is vigilance. With ESLs and other twiddling mechanisms, you're a fish on a hook, and the seller is tireless in giving you a little more slack, then a little less, until you finally drop your guard.

Economists desperately want these elegant models to work, but "efficient market hypothesis" is a brain-worm that always turns into apologetics for fraud. Dynamic markets sound like a good idea, but they are catnip for cheaters. "Just be eternally vigilant" is miserable advice, and no way to live your life:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

In his brilliant novel Spook Country, @GreatDismal describes augmented reality as "cyberspace everting" – that is, turning inside-out:

https://memex.craphound.com/2007/07/31/william-gibsons-spook-country/

The extrusion of twiddling technology from digital platforms into the physical world isn't cyberspace everting so much as it is cyberspace prolapsing.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

#pluralistic #fraud apologetics #caveat emptor #twiddling #competition #groceries #price discrimination #norway #electronic shelf tags #planet money #enshittification #constraints #greedflation #efficient market hypothesis brain-worms

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cigarettesandcommunism · 2 years ago

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Thanks to everyone who helped my last post, I was able to get my car checked out.

Unfortunately, she's so old and broken down that the mechanic really wasn't sure how she was still... together.

I can take public transportation for most of my shifts, bit in order to get to work at 5am ill need a car or Uber.

So once again I gotta ask for help. And literally anything helps.

My $app and Ppal are both TransManDragQueen

I keep having really bad luck, but at least I'm not homeless anymore! So thats good!

Many thanks in advance. Sharing this post will also help a lot.

#mutual aid #car help #financial help #money help #please help #please share #please rb #my post

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grawlix-ness · 10 months ago

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The Big Sleet and Dingo Headcanon Post V2!

Bear in mind this is largely a collection of subconscious Notes app ramblings I’ve patched together so I may have made a few grammatical boo-boos or repeated myself here and there. It’s almost 4AM, I’m sure I’ve missed things. I’ll continue to add and edit this post should more ideas come to mind. Questions encouraged!

Cw: light implications of child neglect, mentions of drinking and mutant body horror

🔫 Sleet 🔪

Sleet was raised in the gutter. He knows a fair bit more than the average Lower Mobotropolis street urchin because his mom was an aristocrat until she was slandered by her peers and booted from high society. She taught him the essentials, and he learned everything else from scavenging library books. Presently, his education has all but fallen through the cracks. He tries to avoid reading most of the time. What will Dingo think if he learns he’s not the uber-genius he makes himself out to be? Why does he care what Dingo thinks? When such thoughts arise, they are pushed away and buried.

He has cybernetic implants to aid with frequent aches and muscle strain. In the winter, he struggles due to a lower cold threshold, the result of a fur and skin condition. Dingo knits sweaters for him. They’re oversized and kind of a mess. On particularly glacial nights, Sleet isn't averse to sharing warmth, willing to cuddle up and be the little spoon, so long as Dingo promises not to tell anyone.

He had no friends growing up and was often picked on. His ailments and interest in science made him an easy target. Some of his peers disliked him on the very principle of him having an ex-aristocrat mother. This made him prickly and distant. While others played kickball or tag, he was tinkering with junkyard machinery or eavesdropping around spacer hangouts, dreaming of someday getting off planet and flying to a world that’d understand him.

He’s quite good with a needle and thread and tailors his and Dingo’s ball outfits himself. Sleet gets his sewing skills from his mother. She was the personal outfitter and trusted right hand of an important noblewoman. As a pup, he adored listening to his mother’s stories of galas and masquerades. During such fleeting moments of peace, she’d also make costumes for him. He still heavily enjoys fashion, having a closet dedicated to fancy capes.

Sometime in his tumultuous childhood, Sleet discovered there was an Honor Guard. He admired their outfits and swordsmanship. Most of all he wanted to join so he and his mother could live in the warmth and safety of a castle. He even fashioned a costume out of his mother’s fabric scraps, complete with a sword made from a rusted metal pipe. She was quick to dash those dreams and didn’t take kindly to him borrowing her things, especially not for such a “ridiculous” project. During lonesome, existential nights he wonders how differently things could have turned out if he had become a member of the guard after all.

When his mother was absent or too volatile to be around, Sleet found company in local mechanics. He learned how to swindle and cheat with the best of them. One shop owner actually took him under her wing, viewing his perceived weaknesses as strengths.

Sleet first developed the transmogrifier as a kid. He used it not only to defend himself against the local rabble rousers and humiliate them. It wasn’t a complete success, only partially transforming targets, giving them wings or eyestalks and other unwieldy appendages. Transformations were temporary. No less horrifying however.

He calls himself a jack of all trades. This title is dubious. Thanks to an enriching education from the school of hard knocks, he does have an approximate knowledge regarding a variety of things, though it’s usually limited to topics relating to self-preservation and chicanery.

Animals don’t like Sleet and aren’t afraid to let him know. It’s become a standing joke. Dingo teases him for it, despite the fact that, because of his stature, toothy countenance, and tendency to squeeze or pet too hard, he isn’t the best with animals either.

Sleet is a skilled marksman. He prefers distance, specializing in both handguns and long guns. If the weight class is right and the odds are in his favor, he can hold his own in close quarters using an array of hidden fighting knives and some rudimentary martial arts. Sleet simply won’t hear that his cape is a hindrance, even when this has been proven multiple times. All that being said, Sleet is more of a fleer than a fighter. He is an unabashed coward, not opposed to unning away screaming with his tail between his legs.

While preferring motorcycles, he’s not half bad at riding animal mounts, thanks to the teachings of cowboy bounty hunter and old flame Fleabyte. It is serendipitous that he’s acquired this ability, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to stay on as well after zapping Dingo into a beast of burden. The poor brute has heard a lifetime’s worth of ass jokes from his rider.

He enjoys strategizing and has free time stored away solely for scheming purposes. These lovingly-crafted plans generally go awry due to Dingo’s haphazard, devil-may-care nature and forgetfulness. That’s not to say Sleet would do better in the bounty hunting business on his own. He has the upper body strength of a wet noodle and a predilection for monologues and theatrics. He needs someone to shake him out of these ego trances.

Sleet uses his hands often when talking. Lots of flourishes and waves, tapping his chin as he feigns uncertainty, balling his fists and involuntarily shaking them when incensed. Little itchy, twitchy movements. Dingo finds it most endearing.

Though tech-savvy and clever, his anger and pride sometimes get the best of him, leading him to make less than wise decisions, such as forcing machines past their breaking points or abandoning plans the moment his buttons are pushed.

Sleet is not good at maintaining his hygiene, hence the hedgehogs’ odor-themed jabs. He'll polish and shine his armor until it glistens, yet giving the suit an interior deep clean is far from his mind. He's become so dependent on the power high and protection the suit gives him that he rarely takes it off. Dingo found this strange and a little concerning at first, but Sleet has convinced him that a good bounty hunter is always prepared in case of ambush. The thick polluted air of Robotropolis doesn't do any favors for his mangy fur coat either. So if anyone's a flea hotel, it's Sleet, though you’d be hard-pressed to find any fleas that’d give his scrawny hide the time of day.

Underneath that armor, he wears a black one-piece bodysuit made of a silky, breathable material, more resilient than it appears. Sleet is skin and bones. It’s why he prefers working with a partner. He went through—or rather left for dead—dozens of other partners before finding a suitable match. Dingo’s hardy. Sturdy. Loyal. Revoltingly sweet. He’s an intriguing oddity to him. Dingo could easily kill him and yet he doesn’t. For a time Sleet wondered if he was just too dim to ever consider betrayal.

He’s not big on displays of affection or people entering his personal bubble. However, when traversing through big crowds, he always presses close to Dingo, sometimes even reaches for his hand.

Considers himself sophisticated. He’ll generally greet with a low bow and flourish, allies and enemies alike. Has neat freak tendencies, despite the fact he’s a hot mess himself. In short, rules for thee, but not for me. There’s often a mental tug of war between his debonair self and the mouth-frothing sewer rat that lies deeper beneath.

Sleet has a bad habit of late night tinkering. He isn’t actively trying to be a night owl, time gets away from him. If Dingo doesn’t carry him off to bed beforehand, he ends up hunched over and asleep at his study. It does no favors for his already poor posture and eye bags.

His reputation precedes him. When he freelanced, many bounty hunters steered clear of him because he was a noted cheat that backstabbed his partners. Despite these unsavory exploits, he manages to reel in even the most disconcerting of clients via ingratiation, boasting a nigh supernatural silver tongue. Those who’ve been tricked by him before cite his wordsmithing as being almost hypnotic.

He tries his damndest not to acknowledge Dingo’s gaga eyes and honey glow cheeks. More times than one would deem platonic, he’s gotten distracted by Dingo’s chest. Though, to his credit, it’s hard not to when your co-pilot’s almost always shirtless and idly flexing his muscles. Even harder when you’re pinned beneath his chest—Dingo could make tripping over his feet a professional sport.

💪 Dingo 🧬

Dingo has a sizable extended family, a horde of siblings and cousins back home. His destructive tendencies came as no shock to his aunts who raised him, since the family business used to be organized crime. The syndicate disintegrated long before Dingo was born, other groups like the Toad Warriors and Bear Pack Bikers quickly outcompeting them.

Has no memory of his mother or father and holds no ill-will towards them. He has plenty of wild theories about their disappearance though. Everything from being lost at sea to being flattened by an asteroid. Whatever it was, he’s convinced it must have been legendary.

Of his litter he is the eldest brother. Barring fur color, none of his family look quite like him. His spots and flopped ear are noted recessive traits. His more dramatic features are the result of an understudied mutant gene. Nobody’s sure where in the family tree it came from. So far as Sleet can glean, it’s one in a billion, a title Dingo wears proudly. He isn’t interested in making connections with any long lost relatives, fearing there could be someone out there better than him at all things mutant.

Dingo grew up in the outback of Tralius, quite some distance away from the hustle and bustle of Mobotropolis. He was a rambunctious, often rude and aggressive child. A typical schoolyard bully. Sometimes he would lament over his appearance and wish other kids invited him to play, but those moments were short-lived. Fortunately for his peers he could be easily tricked or bribed with sweets.

Whereas Sleet took up inventing and sewing, Dingo loved throwing his weight around and exploring the great outdoors, wrestling every beast he came across and scaring vacationing campers late at night by pretending to be a Mobian-eating monster.

In pursuit on foot, Dingo is bad at maneuvering sharp turns. His topheaviness and clumsy feet have cost a number of hunts.

He has a sweet tooth. One thing he appreciates about the aristocracy is their love of extravagant desserts.

He is very naïve and trusting. It was worse when Sleet wasn’t in the picture to talk him out of things. A country boy in the big city, Dingo was scammed out of a lot of his Mobium when he first arrived in Lower Mobotropolis. The shell game was just too alluring.

Dingo is not so oblivious that he can’t rebuke Sleet’s gratuitous blaming. He can be sassy. Those who’ve had the displeasure of working with them can attest that, when tensions are high, they have the propensity to bicker like an old married couple.

For someone who was raised in Tralius, he is unusually afraid of spiders and other crawly arachnids. He doesn’t enjoy turning into insects either, finding the overall sensation, in his words, icky.

Transformation is typically painless. He tends to be sore after taking on the more abstract forms. If the strain is really bad, he will go to Sleet and ask to be massaged. Sleet used to refuse, but he has since humored him, asserting that he’s only doing it to check for signs of molecular decay.

Dingo can morph without the assistance of the transmogrifier, though the process is slower. It depends on how distant taxonomically-speaking the chosen form is from his mammalian base. These transformations are not too pleasant visually or audially, so the remote is preferred.

Dingo’s mutant abilities have some drawbacks. Because of his rapid healing, his body will try to stop him from getting tipsy and keep him on his A-game. He has to drink by the barrel to feel even the slightest buzz. Additionally, being stuck in one form for too long can leave him achy and disoriented, and if he changes too frequently his molecules buckle and unravel. It’s not a pretty sight. Sleet even theorizes that if he’s in a form for over two hours, he will get stuck that way. They have had close calls before, where after finally being turned back from a Mobini, some behavioral traits of the animal lingered.

Before meeting Sleet, Dingo could only morph if he remained focused, and those transformations were generally simple, such as limb multiplication or extension. The transmogrifier effectively glues his molecules together, meaning he doesn’t have to exert his concentration anymore. Colors are still somewhat of a challenge, tinted with his default orange. Nevertheless, he fools the untrained eye. When tasked with disguising as another Mobian, Sleet coaches him and will always supply him with a hidden microphone.

After an especially big transformation, Dingo becomes so drowsy he can hardly stand. All that molecular stretching and rearranging, it’s draining. When he wakes, he is insatiably hungry. Which is saying a lot because Dingo already packs food away like it’s nothing due to his bulking regime.

His accelerated metabolism often manifests in odd cravings, such as tuna and peanut butter sandwiches or pickle and pineapple ice cream sundaes. Sleet wishes he’d partake in his experimental cuisine somewhere else. Preferably out of the Red Whiptail’s cockpit—he gets crumbs everywhere. Despite being an extreme omnivore, Dingo cannot handle spicy food.

When he’s not making unusual combinations, and in turn making Sleet’s stomach churn, Dingo’s a decent chef. Messy, but decent. He’s the more culinarily adept of the two and makes dinner when time allows.

He likes scrapbooking. Dingo has more stationary and cute pens than he knows what to do with. Unfortunately he’s heavy-handed, so many of his supplies are worn with love. He keeps mementos of every successful hunt. Little knick knacks and trinkets, maybe the occasional tooth from a beaten adversary.

Not necessarily a couch potato, though does spend most of his downtime lounging in front of the TV. He enjoys playing video games, although he’s not very good at them on account of his itchy trigger finger skipping past tutorial levels. As long as he can shoot or smash things or toss chubby penguins off cliffs, he’s happy. He watches mainly big loud action movies, corny rom-coms, and slapstick cartoons. Sleet believes his screen time will rot the little left of his brain, though he has shown some interest in the historical Delmontian dramas Dingo skips past while channel surfing.

Has been known to boast quite the sailor mouth. It doesn’t happen often, the most foul only invoked for particularly painful offenses like stubbing a toe. Sleet doesn’t know what half the Trailian swears mean and at this point he’s afraid to ask.

Dingo does not like shirts. He especially hates the tuxedos and dresses Sleet makes him wear whenever there’s a bounty on an aristocrat. He tries to keep his grumbling to a minimum because dressing up makes Sleet happy. In casual settings, if more than his shorts is outright necessary, he’ll wear a quippy graphic tank top.

When they go out of town, Dingo always hits up a tourist trap or two, no matter how blatantly overpriced or mind-numbing. He’s a big fan of carnivals and amusement parks. Dingo’s demolished many strength tester games and would most assuredly be banned if he wasn't one of Robotnik's hirelings.

Not the sharpest tool in the shed, true, but he is definitely the more emotionally aware of the duo. When it comes to personal matters, he’s a good listener.

He has a twinge of separation anxiety. It’s not super debilitating, he just gets restless if Sleet is away for long. He can be possessive. This proves a problem whenever Sleet goes Casanova Mode to retrieve information from targets. It’s worth noting Sleet has moments of jealousy too when Dingo manages to hit it off with others, though he’d never admit it.

The hedgehog triplets are aware of Dingo’s crush on Sleet. To catch him off guard, they’ll sometimes slyly allude to it, much to a flustered Dingo’s chagrin.

Finds Sleet’s voice very soothing. It’s so soft and muted. He could listen to it all day. Often he does since, while certainly less exuberant than Dingo, Sleet can be a chatterbox when it comes to aristocratic gossip and comparing blaster models.

Despite being certifiably canine, Dingo makes all manner of noises. He snorts and huffs like a bull when upset and can unleash fearsome, leonine roars. When happy, he rumbles.

Excitable. Liable to break the nearest object in vicinity from pure exuberation.

Dingo can’t see well without his glasses. Despite the swanky look, they are in fact prescription. If they’re misplaced or knocked off by a meddlesome hedgehog, his clumsiness is increased tenfold. He is gentle when handling them.

Dingo wears a bracer on his right leg. In a comedy of errors, he injured his leg as a pup while playing with a slingshot. For reasons unknown, his healing factor neglected to kick in. His knee aches at times. Dingo mostly wears it because he finds it cool and fashionable.

His fighting knowledge is limited to the concept of hitting, hitting hard, and hitting dirty. He has no formal training, relying on instinct and what he’s seen on television to best enemies. His moves are sloppy and unrefined, but no less formidable. As a mutant shapeshifter, he’s also granted a number of potential forms. Even without Sleet’s transmogrifier, his elasticity allows him to grow in size and turn his arms into whipping tentacles or his hands into mallets. He could finish fights before they even start with this power, however Dingo prefers to milk his battles for all their worth. Some Freedom Fighters have reported seeing him actually play with the battered and unconscious like they’re dolls.

He is actually well-kempt all things considered. Dingo enjoys bubble baths and singing—or caterwauling, as Sleet calls it—in the shower. His fur coat is soft and surprisingly dense, especially in the winter when it grows out. He sheds and has to brush himself fairly often. If he’s in a good mood, Sleet will help. The mastiff-like skin folds around his neck also have to be cleaned regularly. His mane is naturally bristly, akin to that of a wild boar. It softens somewhat after a good shampoo.

Dingo makes the first moves. He is usually the one who initiates. Trouble is, if it doesn’t involve flexing his guns or pulling a smoldering expression, Dingo’s bad at flirting. His word choice is . . . unique. Lummox that he is, his compliments come across more like threats. Turns out Sleet does not in fact appreciate being called small, fragile, and edible among other things. He’s since tried to alleviate this by writing down pick-up lines on his hand.

Dingo’s definitely the more doggish of the two. He wags his tail, something seen as uncouth in aristocratic social circles and immature in most other places. He’s wounded himself on occasions by wagging so hard. Dingo also barks when he gets too excited or surprised and, due to his muzzle structure, is predisposed to drooling. If Dingo is proving particularly stubborn about going into a death trap or being used as bait, Sleet can convince him with a scritch between the ears.

Additional Information

Their partnership was bumpy at first. Their differing personalities clashed and sometimes led to physical altercations. Nothing too dramatic of course, they are still cartoon animals after all. Dingo pulled his punches. Sleet might have been a nag, but he didn’t want to see him hurt.

Sleet and Dingo are both bisexual. Dingo has a slight preference towards men and masc folks. Sleet is trans. He performed his top surgery himself. Despite the quality of the tools he had at the time, his scars have healed remarkably well.

The two are very competitive. Before being hired by Robotnik, on particularly uneventful nights they played board games. They’re both cheaters so they went around in circles for hours. Lots of yelling, finger pointing, and eventually falling into a heap on the floor because they stayed awake all night trying to psyche each other out.

When they manage to squeeze any free time out of their schedule, they enjoy going to arcades and stealing prizes from kids. They also like to take potshots at the irradiated wildlife on the outskirts of Robotropolis and do prank calls—the Robotnik Intelligence Agency being a favorite victim.

Dingo believes that Sleet’s love language is mockery. That might not be too far from the truth. Sleet genuinely doesn’t know how to express himself. He doesn’t altogether know if he wants to. Sleet’s trained himself to think the worst of everyone so he’s not disappointed or hurt in the long run. In truth, Sleet appreciates acts of service. Dingo’s love language is considerably more simple, as things regarding Dingo so often are. Dingo’s huggy, nuzzly, altogether physically affectionate.

Sleet snores terribly. It’s not so much the volume as it is the whistling his nose makes. He’ll never admit to it, and gets flustered whenever Dingo tells him. Fortunately the walls of Robotnik’s fortress are thicker than those of their previous abodes, giving Dingo the chance to rest easy.

Dingo doesn’t understand mirrors. Sleet, egotist that he is, rather likes mirrors. He hasn’t owned any since the incident. It’d be a hassle to clean up glass and find a replacement everytime Dingo popped his head into Sleet’s quarters. Sleet has explained how reflections work to him several times before, yet it never seems to stick.

In his default state, Dingo has a strongman build. Sleet is a beanpole. Without his boots and shoulderpads, he’s slightly shorter than Dingo.

As far as affairs of the heart go, their relationship is unspoken. Dingo’s doing all he can, Sleet pretends he doesn’t see it, as on principle he believes love is for fools. There may or may not have been some wild nights where he had too much wine and slurred a few things suggesting otherwise however. He’s softening up to the idea, even if he doesn’t know it yet. In essence, he’s perpetually stuck in a “I Won’t Say (I’m In Love)” loop.

#sonic headcanons #sonic underground #sleet sonic underground #dingo sonic underground #sleengo #slingo

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scipunk · 1 year ago

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Hackers (1995)

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Dade Murphy hacks into a local television station… infiltrates the station's broadcasting system… and he manipulates a robotic mechanism responsible for changing video cassettes used to air programs… then another mysterious hacker enters the scene and Dade and the unknown hacker engage in a virtual battle for dominance.

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Dueling HACKERS 🔐�� IS OUR Digital LIFE on the LINE? 🚨👁️

Yes it could very well be...

Our digital lives, often entrusted to large corporations, may face significant risks… in a recent cyber incident in 2023, two hacker groups claimed responsibility for an alleged attack on a major corporation. One hacker group asserted that they successfully compromised the target's systems and offered stolen data for sale.

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The movie presents a stylized and exaggerated portrayal of hacking culture, where the young hackers manipulate technology to outsmart and outmaneuver law enforcement officials. The film showcases a perception that law enforcement, at least in the context of the movie, is often portrayed as being behind or clueless in understanding the world of hacking.

And let's remember the Greyball incident: Uber developed the Greyball software to determine if a user requesting an Uber ride was a potential law enforcement officer or regulator. The program used various data points, such as location information, device data, credit card details, and social media profiles, to identify individuals who might pose a threat to Uber's operations. When the program identified a potential threat, it would show a different version of the Uber app to that user. This altered version of the app would display fake cars on the map, making it difficult for the user to locate a real Uber driver.

Additionally... Greyball would provide false information about the location of Uber vehicles or show no cars available at all.

The intention behind Greyball was to obstruct and evade regulators and law enforcement officials who were attempting to enforce taxi and transportation regulations in cities where Uber faced legal challenges.

So, the Greyball incident, which occurred in the real world, involved Uber using technology to identify and circumvent law enforcement officials and regulators actively trying to enforce transportation regulations… it's a real-world application of tactics that mirror the fictional portrayal we see in the 1995 movie Hackers.

#cyberpunk #cyberpunk aesthetic #cyberpunk movies #hackers #cyber security #coding #programming #cyberpunk film #funny #tech fantasy #retrotech #vhs #vhs tapes #vhs aesthetic #video cassette #cyberpunkedit #90s

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mariacallous · 4 months ago

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Access is an illusion. Or, really, what I mean to say is: access, filtered through social media, is an illusion. In 2016, no one understood that better than Timothy Stokely, who launched an adult subscription site called OnlyFans that summer. He knew that access—the selling of it, and what buyers believed it opened up—could be quite lucrative.

I interviewed Stokely in 2019. His background was in soft-core camming; he ran, with mild success, the sites Customs4U and GlamWorship. But Stokely wanted OnlyFans to be different. He believed if he could get people to buy into the platform’s promise he could stand to make a lot of money. At the time, he explained his utopian vision to me in blunt terms. “The way that Uber enabled anyone to monetize their own car, OnlyFans allows anyone to monetize their own content and following,” he said. “Influencers are the new celebrities.”

Like the generation of tech industrialists before him, Stokely was driven by questions of volume, ambition, and impact. Just how big could OnlyFans be?

Almost a decade later, we have an answer: really fucking big.

Impact is more than numbers, of course. OnlyFans’ core influence is perhaps best measured by what it culturally shifted. It is one of the platforms that has changed, in part, how we think about social media. What OnlyFans reaffirmed, more than anything, was a culture increasingly built around and addicted to fandom.

OnlyFans sold “access.” It made middle-of-nowhere users into influencers. It dangled the carrot of micro-fame and easy money. Like clockwork, many people—millions per month—bought into the illusion.

“What providers are largely selling isn’t the mechanics of intercourse but an authentic connection,” says Kurt Fowler, an assistant professor at Penn State Abington and author of The Rise of Digital Sex Work. “The idea of making clients feel unique and special has always been part of the equation.”

In the US, we like to say American culture is celebrity culture. And, sure, some of that is true. We’re fame whores. But, really, what American society is built around more than anything is fan culture. Fandom infects everything we do.

The nature of relationships has changed as a result, and especially online. The language of social media is the language of obsession. We like. We subscribe. We don’t dare look away. We crave unlimited access to one another. It’s gotten so bad that last year the US surgeon general, Vivek H. Murthy, called for a warning label on platforms that have had a role in the mental health crisis among young people, of which “social media has emerged as an important contributor.” Apps like Fansly and Fambase have cashed in on the trend; by 2030 the global creator economy is projected to pull in $528 billion.

Only, access is a mirage. Fowler was right about one thing. Creators are in the business of selling connection. How genuine that connection is, however, is not always clear. In the the age of social media, access has become fantasy. The many ways we connect, communicate, and come together are now infused with the stink of artificiality.

ChatGPT wants to dictate language. Generative AI is eager to warp the images that make us true and human, exploiting your race, gender, or sexuality (and sometimes all three at once). Disinformation floats from platform to platform with the poison of make-believe. Dating apps have become the place where people turn for love and partnership, only the industry is betting big on AI. Rizz, Grindr, and Elate are offering AI “wingman” features that help singles maneuver awkward text exchanges that happen in the early stages of getting to know someone.

What’s more, the veil of OnlyFans has since been lifted. Many creators employ low-wage workers to communicate with followers horny for connection. And those workers now run the risk of being replaced by AI impersonators. In every way, artificial media is on the rise.

To consider AI is to question the future of authenticity and its place in society.

Some might say we are losing what German media theorist Walter Benjamin referred to as “aura.” Writing in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in 1935, Benjamin expressed concern that photography and film, new technologies that were being used to mass-produce artwork, did more to reduce value than add it. In a world of intensifying deceptions, aura was the essence; it was the real thing. Imitations of the original just wouldn’t cut it. Aura, as Benjamin saw it, was the authentic truth.

Some believe AI works in the same mode. Others have warned that without proper regulations, AI will scrub the soul of humankind. The technology is rewiring the very basis of connection, restructuring the how, who, and what of digital communication. Google Gemini’s pitch is to literally “supercharge your ideas” (whatever that means). These evolutions are meant to remove human error. They promise to make us smarter, more productive, and curious people, but it is still too early to say whether AI is taking more than it is offering in return.

One outcome is that authenticity—that intangible, essential truth—will rise in value, says Eric Waldstein, cofounder and CEO of Beyond, a social club built around modern relationships that facilitates both online and IRL interactions among members. “Authenticity is an increasingly scarce currency,” he says. “As the world becomes increasingly artificial, demand for it will soar.”

Beyond, which launched this month, believes it can preserve the aura of what’s being lost in the machine race. If the innocence of connection was the first wave of the social media revolution and fandom defined its second, Waldstein is hopeful for a return to something realer. He says he is already seeing a U-turn in relationship habits.

“Fandom fills a void that’s been left by the disappearance of third spaces and spending time with friends,” he says. Similar to Blacksky and Geneva, Beyond is part of a shift toward what Waldstein calls purpose-driven communities. “We’re not looking for our person anymore, we’re looking for our people, and that’s really where the magic is. For years, platforms have optimized for engagement at all costs. But as we become more aware of how these systems manipulate our attention, we’re seeing a shift toward more intentional, curated experiences.”

Waldstein wants to provide singles a new texture of access; the kind of access—to community, to potential love and something real—that isn’t bound by the trends of yesterday. “The platforms that win in the next era of social media will be the ones that give people something they can’t get from an algorithm,” he says.

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mudaship39 · 1 year ago

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Character bio of the Asian Pasifika demigod and Afro Latine Native alien hybrid superhero main character part 9

Citizenship:

Kingdom of Hawaii. Kingdom of Tonga. Citizen of mythical Mu and Hawaiki as an Oceanic demigod and alien hybrid. Earth. Europa. Titan. Sol System. Milky Way Galaxy. Intergalactic Federation of Ethanxiia. Planetary Confederacy of Iuyumania. Polaris System. Andromeda Galaxy.

Marital Status: Married.

Education:

High school grad

Principal's Honor Roll

High school Salutatorian

College dropout because of work conflict and taking care of their biological and adoptive kids. Later went back to school to complete their degrees.

College graduate.

College Valedictorian

Science major who graduated from a four year university with an Associate’s Degree of Science in Xeno Zoology with a minor in Magi Paleontology.

Bachelor’s degree in Magi Marine Biology and Xeno Anthropology

Graduated from the Earth Naval Academy. Master’s Degree of Science in Oceanography with a minor in Ocean Engineering.

Science major who graduated from Sol System Ivy League University with a Doctorate in Science. Dual Major in Xeno Biology and Magi Archeology.

High school sports:

Swimming, Golf, Volleyball, Baseball, Tennis, Water Polo, Track, Wrestling, Basketball, Soccer.

College Sports:

Cross country, Volleyball, Ice hockey, Skiing, Baseball, Snowboarding, Basketball, Lacrosse, Soccer.

Club:

Fencing, Kendo, Archery, Kickboxing, Equestrian, Fishing, Judo, Shooting (pistol and rifle), Weightlifting, Rock climbing, Taekwondo, Karate, Sailing, Mixed martial arts

Occupation:

College:

A Administrative assistant. App Designer. App Tester. Babysitter. Bank teller. Barber. Bar Bartender. Beach Lifeguard. Blogger. Bookkeeper. Bookstore Owner. Bus driver. Cab Driver. Camp Counselor. Car Wash Attendant. Cashier. Coffee shop barista. College tutor. Commercial actor. Concierge. Content Creator. Customer service representative. Dance Instructor. Delivery Driver. Dental Assistant. Dishwasher. Dog Walker. Electrician. Fan artist. Fanwriter. Fast food line cook. Fast food cashier. Freelancer. Freelance Writer. Firefighter. Fitness Instructor. Former child actor. Former Teen Star. Gardener. Gas Station Attendant. Golf Caddie. Grocery Store Clerk. Hairdresser. Host. Hover Car mechanic. Independent Contractor Driver (Hover Car Uber). Influencer. IT Support. Janitor. Journalist. Librarian. Mall security guard. Manual Laborer. Mover. Movie Theater Projectionist. Movie Theater Usher. Nail Technician. Nanny. Newspaper Delivery. Office receptionist. Pet Sitter (Specializing in birds, cats, spiders, lizards, & dogs). Pest Control. Pharmacy Technician. Photographer. Podcaster. Pool Lifeguard. Post office worker. Referee. Reporter. Research Assistant. Resident Advisor. Retail Sales Associate. Restaurant server. Roadie. Secretary. Social media assistant. Social Media Community Manager. Social media influencer. Sport team brand ambassador. Swim Instructor. Tattoo Artist. Television actor. Umpire. Valet. Waiter/Waitress. Web Designer. Video game streamer. Video Blogging/Vlogger. Virtual Assistant.

Sciences: He/she/they are a life scientist who studies anthropology, anatomy, archeology, biology, botany, conservation, ecology, genetics, linguistics, marine biology, paleontology, psychology, physiology, sociology, and zoology

He/she/they are a physical scientists who studies astronomy, astrophysics, chemistry, cosmology, earth sciences, engineering, geology, geography, oceanography, meteorology, nanotechnology, planetary sciences, and physics

Mom and dad of the Asian Pasifika and native Afro Latine Native superhero are native of color scientists in stem

Mom is a physical scientist who studies astronomy, chemistry, cosmology, engineering, geology, oceanography meteorology, nanotechnology, and physics

Dad is a life scientist so anthropology, anatomy, archeology, biology, botany, ecology, genetics, marine biology, paleontology, and zoology

Their child, the main character, is a life and physical scientists but on other alien planets of xeno sciences and other magical realms of magi sciences

He/she/they are a life scientist who studies on alien worlds

He/she/they are also a scientist who studies magical worlds

He/she/they study life across the planets, star systems, & galaxies across the universe, multiverse, & omniverse.

Gym Rat. Street Fighter. Pit Fighter. Underground Fighter. Martial Artist. Mixed Martial Artist. Athlete. Sports Coach. Team manager. Celebrity.

Supermodel. Fashion Designer.

Singer. Rapper. Musician. DJ. Spoken word poet. Songwriter. Actor.

Verified Video Game Streamer. Pro Gamer. Video game Voice Actor/actress. Game Designer. Podcaster. Influencer. Content Creator.

Stage Actor. Animator. Director. Producer. Set Designer. Costume Designer. Screenwriter.

Playwright. Author. Illustrator. Literary Agent. Editor. Publisher.

Business person. Mogul. Grill Chef. Fry Chef. Pastry Chef. Fish Chef. Junior Chef. Station Chef. Deputy Chef. Head Chef. Executive Chef. Master Chef. Gourmet Chef. 5 Star Restaurant Owner. Mixologist. High End Bar Owner. Proprietor.

Civilian (Colonist). Exterminator (Extradimensional Fauna).

Agent (Intelligence). Intelligence Officer. Intergalactic Law Enforcement, Intergalactic Intelligence Officer, Intergalactic Secret Agent,

Assassin. Professional Assassin. Militant Assassin. Contract Assassin. Master Assassin. Hired Killer. Hitman. Contract Killer. Ninja. Shinobi/Kunoichi Ninja Assassin Recruit (C- rank). Genin (B+ rank). Chunin (A+ rank). Jonin (S+ rank). Spy. Informant. Double Agent. Triple Agent.

Child soldier. Enlisted Soldier. Dauntless. Soldier. Academic Soldier. Conscript. Military Conscript. Recruit. Grunt. Infantry. Rifleman. Private. Corporal. Lance Corporal. Cook (Mess Hall). Field Cook. Mechanic. Medic. Field Medic. Combat Medic. Nurse. Surgeon. Doctor Scientist. Field Scientist. Sergeant. Drill Sergeant. Commissioned Officer. Second Lieutenant. First Lieutenant. Captain. Support. Machine Gunner. Sharpshooter. Marksman. Sniper. Scout. Recon. Demolitions. Grenadier. Disciplined Soldier. Combat Engineer. Intelligence. Military Asset. Spy. Double Agent. Assassin. Militant Assassin (Spy, Saboteur, Double Agent, & Contract Assassin). Assault. Heavy Weapons. Squad Leader. Officer. Military Officer. Intelligence Officer. Specialist. Commando. Airborne. Paratrooper. Pilot (Captain). Military Pilot (Spy). Exploration. Military. Military Officer. Intergalactic Paramilitary Operative, Intergalactic Supersoldier, Intergalactic Private Soldier. Black Ops. Special Ops. Covert Ops. Spec Ops Officer. Paramilitary. Major. Colonel. Field Marshal. General. Veteran. War Veteran. War Hero. Decorated. Disabled Veteran. War Hero. Honorably Discharged. Retired Soldier. Veteran Who Can’t Let Go. Haunted Veteran. Officer Who Came Out of Retirement.

Science Officer. Geneticist. Xenologist. Xenobiologist Consultant. Ancient Texts Interpreter. Xeno-anthropologist, Mutation Expert. Planetologist. Xenoecologist. Xenolinguist. Cryogenics Laboratory Assistant. Laser Beam Operator. Hologram Designer.

Communications Officer. Cultural Facilitator. Cultural Integrationist. Cultural Interpreter.

Doctor. Nurse. Medical Officer. Medical Officer.

Administrative Officer. Diplomat. Political Officer. Ambassador. Customs Official. Station Admin (Space Traffic Controller). Dock Worker (). Station master. Traffic control. Gate control. Supply Officer.

Asteroid Prospector. Deep space construction. Exo Suit Welder. Orbital Junkyard Worker. Hazardous Materials Handler.

Broker. Free Trader. Merchant Marine.

Scout. Helmsman. Navigation Systems Expert. Navigator. Space fighter Pilot. Space craft pilot.

Technician. Engineer. Droid mechanic. Ship mechanic. Armorer, Cyberneticist. Robotics Officer. Simulations Specialist. Robot Design Repair. Artificial Intelligence Scientist. Biotechnology Specialist. Nanotech Engineer. Robot Supervisor. Terraforming Engineer.

Customs Security. Station Security. Private Security. Tactical Officer. Weapons System Expert. Security Officer. Weapons Specialist. Ordinance Officer. Ground Support Specialist. Starship weapons officer.

Smuggler. Scrapper/Junker. Scavenger. Space pirate. Space pirate captain. Space pirate fleet admiral.

Federation Academy Teacher. Federation Military Academy Teacher.

Hacker.

Nanotech Printing Engineer.

Simulation Designer.

Used Spaceship Salesman. Licensed SpaceShip Rental Agent. Starship Insurance Company Agent.

Space Traffic Controller

Ship Interior Designer/Decorator

Biotechnology Specialist.

Nanotech Engineer. Nanotech Ethicist

Professional Psion. Combat Psion.

FTL Drive Engineer

High King/High Queen of the Principality of Federation of Kingdoms of Ethanxiia of an alien planet Ethanxiia

Paramount Chieftain and Warchief of the Confederacy of Nations of Iuyumania on the planet of Iuyamania

High King/High Queen of Mu or Hawaiki. Imagine Mount Olympus, Asgard, or Themyscira but for Indigenous Pasifika demigod metahumans and Indigenous Pasifika alien hybrid superhumans. A series of floating, terrestrial, & underwater kingdoms that was a federation or empire. It was created because of strong mystical, esoteric, arcane energies intrinsically tied to the sea, air, & land. It was built with the help of alien technology, divine help from polytheistic pagan pantheons, and arcane human magic. It was a magical focal point and is the strongest in power. It is an utopia dedicated to the free exchange of information and ideas of diverse and inclusive communities.

Through the influence of the government, military, scholars, & monarchs the empire or federation flourished and grew into an advanced realm unlike any other on the planet. Science, technology, & magic were the dominant means of power throughout the aquatic, terrestrial, & air supercontinent. They were already developing highly advanced technological wonders even in antiquity. Since its inception technology and magic were in sync and made the empire or federation both magically, scientifically, and technologically advanced. A terrestrial federation of kingdoms similar to its rival Hyperborea.

An underwater federation of kingdoms similar to its rival the technologically advanced Atlantean empire. A floating empire of kingdoms similar to its rival Asgard. Actually the size of a supercontinent. It is one of the earliest and most highly advanced cultural, technological, scientific, and magical societies on Earth.

It is an empire or federation that is further divided into kingdoms with each its own settlements, villages, towns, cities, counties, states. It is an oasis of civilization in prehistory, modern day, & the future. Although the arial, terrestrial, & aquatic federation or empire grew and prospered.

The civilizations of the outside world remained largely ignorant of Mu or Hawaiki for many decades, centuries, & millennia. In recent years however, it has found itself pushed to the forefront of public awareness. They are now considered the most technologically advanced federation of the planet.

The underwater throne room defended by sea elves riding dolphins, palace defended by merfolk and tritons riding sea unicorn, capital defended by weresharks riding (tiger, mako, & great white) sharks, & kingdoms are defended by Atlanteans riding whales (beluga, narwhals, & orcas). Their throne room is decorated with the skeletons of a megalodon, a mosasaurus, a plesiosaurus, a basilosaurus, & a livyatan. For Hawaiki the federation of kingdoms of Pasifika alien hybrids and demigods there were several kingdoms on land hidden by magic, several kingdoms floating in the air hidden by magic and technology, as well as several kingdoms underwater hidden by technology.

Their scientists develop a means so that their people could survive underwater, in the air, & on land. The experiment was a success and the serum transformed the citizens from normal human beings into a metahuman and superhuman species who could survive anywhere in the empire. The denizens of the empire or federation were changing to evolve new biological, emotional , intellectual, spiritual, and magical functions in order to better thrive. They altered differently from baseline homo sapiens due the high concentration of magic, technology, & science flowing throughout its vast territory. It's people gaining the ability to survive anywhere on land, sea, & air. Due to this habitual alternation all Hawaiki'an citizens of every nation of the empire or federation of demigods and alien hybrids are physically superior to baseline humans. As a result of being stronger, faster, tougher, smarter, and longer lived.

Chairman and CEO of Dynamic Sciences, Research, Development, Engineering, & Technology. It is a research organization, charity/philanthropy organization, and business corporation. It is the world's largest and most diversified multinational corporation. Complemented with a national and international chain of research laboratories. That is unconnected to the government or the military. It specializes in A.I., genetics, disease control, medicine, research and technology, nanotechnology, bionics, bio-engineering, pharmaceuticals, security, paramilitary weaponry, defense, aerospace, computer hardware and software, robotics, and metahuman and superhuman studies.

It was officially created in the 16th century. It is one of the oldest companies in the world. It began as a merchant business, an artisan guild, and trading company. As the company became more successful more branches were opened. Soon other companies were bought and absorbed. This was when expansion of the company turned into a global conglomerate with numerous headquarters, branches, & businesses in different countries. This turned it into a business conglomerate and corporation. It is a high-rise building as its own corporate headquarters.

It soon became a green company under new regulations and reforms and became environmentally conscious. It is known for its accessibility for disabled staff, employees, consumers, & visitors. It has been a forerunner in many fields of science, engineering, inventions, research, development, & technology. Its main headquarters are in California, Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina, & New York in America.

The tower was designed by its founder with the intention to serve as a beacon of modern human architecture. It was completed after a few years of excavation and construction. The tower itself cost several hundred million to build, update, & maintain. It was later redesigned by the current chairman and CEO to be a beacon of futuristic alien and human architecture.

It employs hundreds of thousands of people both human and alien of base human, superhuman, & metahuman origin with hundreds of buildings around the world. It employs hundreds of thousands of people of different diverse backgrounds. There are branch offices and headquarters all over the world. More than simply a superhero lair.

It is officially an advanced research, development, inventing, technology, science, engineering facility, a philanthropic/charity organization, and international business corporation. It is a multibillion research organization and business corporation. It is an advanced sciences, inventing, engineering, research, development, & technologies company with worldwide interests.

There are several lead scientists that work at the organization and corporation. They each have their own individual labs. The labs are equipped with the best and most advanced scientific equipment. Each of them are allowed to create whatever they think will help the company and technology advance. In the future it is a leading company in creating the most advanced technology in the world, star system, galaxy, & universe. He/she/they is their chief scientist. He/she/they are a life scientist who studies anthropology, anatomy, archeology, biology, botany, conservation, ecology, genetics, linguistics, marine biology, paleontology, psychology, physiology, sociology, and zoology. He/she/they are a physical scientist who studies astronomy, astrophysics, chemistry, cosmology, earth sciences, engineering, geology, geography, oceanography, meteorology, nanotechnology, planetary sciences, physics, & robotics.

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notreallyagoddess · 1 year ago

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Sometimes I get really angry about buying things. Like money is hard to get (wow genius, no shit) and things like home appliances or eletronics even if you are conscious that manufactures make them hard to fix and define a mechanically defined lifespan (at least expected) to them, you cant escape, not totally.

No company (or almost none) will make a product that will be made of good materials and with a good lifespan. And even if they do they will just go bankrupt or it will cost a lot.

(Well there is exceptions, I remember a company in Brazil that had an "car APP" (like Uber) that was maintaned by only taking 1/100 of the travel cost from the driver and offered cheaper travels to users. But in a small scale and Im not sure how well it is going)

#late capitalism #i hate it here #industry #leftism

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developersforhire · 11 days ago

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Top Challenges Developers Face in Taxi App Development

The global demand for taxi booking apps has increased in recent years. With services like Uber, Lyft, and Ola redefining urban mobility, many startups and transport businesses are eager to launch their own taxi apps. However, developing a taxi booking app is not as simple as it may seem.

In this article, we’ll explore the top challenges developers and businesses face while taxi app development and how to address them effectively.

1. Real-Time GPS Tracking and Navigation

Challenge: Accurate location tracking is critical for both drivers and passengers. GPS glitches, incorrect routing, or slow updates can lead to poor user experience.

Solution: Use reliable mapping APIs like Google Maps, Mapbox, or HERE, and implement fallback mechanisms in case of location loss. Optimize background location tracking for minimal battery drain.

2. Handling Real-Time Requests and Matching Algorithms

Challenge: Managing hundreds or thousands of users requesting rides simultaneously requires an efficient matching algorithm that pairs drivers and riders in real-time.

Solution: Leverage robust backend technologies like Node.js, Redis, and socket-based communication. Implement load balancing and use location clustering to improve request distribution.

3. Secure and Seamless Payments

Challenge: Integrating secure payment methods, supporting various currencies, and offering multiple payment options (card, wallet, UPI, etc.) can be complex and regulated.

Solution: Use PCI-DSS-compliant gateways like Stripe, Razorpay, or Braintree. Enable tokenization for user data security and offer localized payment solutions for different markets.

4. Multi-Platform Compatibility (iOS & Android)

Challenge: Ensuring consistent performance and user experience across both Android and iOS devices, while keeping taxi booking app development cost-efficient, is a major challenge.

Solution: Consider cross-platform frameworks like Flutter or React Native to reduce development time while maintaining quality. For larger enterprises, native development might be preferred.

5. Scalability and Performance

Challenge: Taxi apps must be ready to scale as user demand grows—especially during peak times or geographic expansion.

Solution: Use a microservices architecture, cloud hosting (AWS, GCP, Azure), and scalable databases like MongoDB or PostgreSQL. Regularly stress-test your infrastructure.

6. Data Privacy and Compliance

Challenge: Handling user data, real-time locations, and payment information requires strict adherence to privacy regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, or local laws.

Solution: Implement end-to-end encryption, anonymize location data where needed, and maintain transparency with users about data usage. Always comply with region-specific legal standards.

7. Managing Driver and Rider Behavior

Challenge: Ensuring reliable service means managing unpredictable human behavior, cancellations, fraud, late arrivals, or disputes.

Solution: Build features like ratings, feedback, SOS buttons, cancellation policies, and in-app support. Use AI or pattern recognition to detect suspicious activity.

8. Localization and Market Adaptation

Challenge: If you're targeting multiple regions or countries, your app must adapt to different languages, currencies, traffic laws, and cultural expectations.

Solution: Design your app with multi-language support, real-time currency conversions, and local holiday/surge pricing logic. Understand the local ecosystem before launching.

9. Integrating Advanced Features

Challenge: Modern users expect more than just booking. Features like ride scheduling, fare splitting, loyalty programs, or AI-based ETA predictions can be hard to implement well.

Solution: Start with an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), then gradually introduce features. Use AI and machine learning for predictive analytics and route optimization.

Final Thoughts

Building a successful taxi app requires more than just sleek design and smooth booking flows. It demands technical expertise, infrastructure planning, regulatory compliance, and a deep understanding of user behavior. By being aware of these challenges upfront, you can develop more robust, user-friendly, and scalable on-demand taxi booking apps.

#taxi #taxiappdevelopment #taxibookingapp

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ondemandcloneappcompany · 2 months ago

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Cloning Success: Launch Your Business with Uber, Airbnb, and Uber Eats Clone Apps.

In today's fast-paced digital world, launching a successful business often means having a powerful mobile presence. But building an app from scratch can be time-consuming and expensive. That's where clone apps come in. By leveraging proven business models, you can rapidly deploy your own version of successful platforms like Uber, Airbnb, and Uber Eats.

Why Choose a Clone App?

Clone apps offer several key advantages for entrepreneurs:

Reduced Development Time: Skip the lengthy initial development phase. Clone apps provide a pre-built foundation, significantly cutting down on time to market.

Cost-Effectiveness: Development costs are substantially lower compared to building an app from the ground up.

Proven Business Model: You're basing your business on a model that's already proven successful, reducing the risk of failure.

Customization Options: Modern clone apps are highly customizable, allowing you to tailor the platform to your specific needs and target market.

The Power of the Uber Clone App

The demand for on-demand transportation isn't slowing down. An Uber clone app provides a ready-made solution for launching your own ride-hailing service. Key features typically include:

Real-time tracking

Driver and passenger profiles

Secure payment gateways

Rating and review systems

With the right customizations, you can create a ride-hailing app that rivals the biggest players in the industry.

Expanding Horizons with an Airbnb Clone App

The vacation rental market is booming, and an Airbnb clone app offers a fantastic opportunity to tap into this growing industry. Offer users a seamless platform to list and book properties, complete with features like:

Property listings with photos and descriptions

Secure booking and payment processing

Communication tools for hosts and guests

Review and rating system

Savor Success with an Uber Eats Clone

The food delivery market is hotter than ever. An Uber Eats clone allows you to quickly launch your own online food ordering and delivery platform. Essential features include:

Restaurant listings with menus

Order management system

Real-time delivery tracking

Payment gateway integration

Taxi App Development: Beyond the Clone

While clone apps offer a head start, successful taxi app development also requires careful consideration of customization. Think about features that will differentiate your app, such as:

Advanced booking options

Loyalty programs

Integration with local businesses

Multi-language support

Choosing the Right Development Partner

Selecting the right development partner is crucial for the success of your clone app project. Look for a company with:

Proven experience in clone app development

A strong portfolio of successful projects

Customization expertise

Ongoing support and maintenance

By strategically leveraging clone apps and focusing on customization and user experience, you can launch a thriving business in the on-demand economy. Consider the possibilities of Uber, Airbnb, and Uber Eats clones to kickstart your entrepreneurial journey!

rv rental app development boat rental app development car rental app development space booking app development vacation rental marketplace car rental website development activities booking app development items rental app development white label uber clone app uber for mechanics clone app cab booking app development on demand taxi booking app development taxi booking app development company grab clone uber for trucking app development taxi booking app development taxi app development uber for services app development delivery app development uber like app development transport booking app development booking app development

#clone app #uber clone app #marketing #taxi app development #app development company

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one-directory · 3 months ago

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How Uber Changed Urban Transportation Globally

The Rise of Uber and Its Impact

Uber began as a straightforward concept. Its goal was to make booking rides easier. It has transformed towns all over the world today. People now rely on Uber in crowded cities. They book rides in a matter of minutes using only a phone. Wait times and travel anxiety are decreased with this app. Long taxi lines and packed buses are avoided by commuters. Uber operates in more than 70 nations. It is more prevalent than taxis in many cities. For instance, Uber rides are less expensive than black taxis in London. It saves the trouble of locating yellow cabs in New York City. Both big cities and even smaller towns can use this service. Riders benefit from trip tracking tools and set rates. Additionally, the app provides customizable choices. Uber Pool is an option for users who want to share rides. This lowers traffic and saves money. UberX or Uber Black can be reserved by those who would rather be anonymous. Due to these qualities, Uber is well-liked all across the world.

How Uber Helps Urban Economies

Local businesses are also impacted by Uber. It gives a lot of drivers jobs. Anyone with a license and a car is welcome to participate. Drivers make extra money and choose their own schedules. Uber has aided jobless individuals in nations like India. They secure stable employment as Uber drivers. Small enterprises are also promoted by this platform. Local eateries can reach a wider audience thanks to Uber Eats. This service has helped a lot of small restaurants expand. For example, a Bangkok bakery used Uber Eats to increase its orders. Uber meets consumer requirements while boosting economies. Another victory is Uber's cashless payment mechanism. Card or wallet payments are simple for users. Drivers are less likely to handle cash as a result. The app is more appealing when payments are made quickly and safely.

Challenges and Future Innovations

The experience with Uber has not been easy. In certain nations, it has encountered legal problems. Because it reduced fares, taxi unions protested. However, Uber keeps enhancing its offerings. It makes investments in eco-friendly transportation and electric cars. Uber Green exclusively provides electric vehicles in locations like Amsterdam. Another area of interest is autonomous vehicles. In certain places, Uber is testing autonomous vehicles. This may alter urban transportation once more. It could lead to cheaper prices and safer rides. Cities adjust to these changes as Uber develops.

Conclusion: A New Era of Travel

Uber has permanently changed how people move around cities. It provides flexible, rapid, and reasonably priced rides. It creates jobs and helps local companies. Uber continues to innovate despite obstacles. It still has a big effect on cities. The future of travel will be shaped by businesses like Uber as cities expand.

#uber

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freelancingbyfarah · 3 months ago

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Regulatory Changes Impacting Gig Workers

Introduction

The gig economy has transformed the global workforce, offering flexible employment opportunities to millions of workers. However, this rapid expansion has also raised concerns regarding worker rights, fair wages, job security, and taxation. Governments worldwide are implementing regulatory changes to address these issues, ensuring fair treatment while balancing the interests of businesses and freelancers. This article explores the most significant regulatory changes impacting gig workers and their implications.

1. Classification of Gig Workers

One of the most debated topics in the gig economy is the classification of workers. Traditionally, gig workers have been considered independent contractors, which exempts companies from providing employee benefits such as health insurance, paid leave, and retirement plans. However, several countries are introducing new laws to reclassify gig workers.

A. United States: The Employee vs. Independent Contractor Debate

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) introduced new guidelines in 2024, making it harder for companies to classify gig workers as independent contractors. The new rules emphasize an “economic reality test,” focusing on the worker’s dependence on the employer. States like California have already implemented Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), which presumes workers are employees unless businesses can prove otherwise.

B. European Union: The Platform Work Directive

The European Union proposed the Platform Work Directive to ensure fair working conditions for gig workers. This directive introduces a legal presumption of employment, requiring platforms like Uber and Deliveroo to classify certain workers as employees, thereby granting them social security benefits.

C. United Kingdom: Supreme Court Ruling on Uber

In 2021, the UK Supreme Court ruled that Uber drivers must be classified as “workers” rather than independent contractors, entitling them to minimum wage and paid leave. This precedent continues to shape gig work regulations across the UK.

2. Minimum Wage and Payment Regulations

Governments are implementing minimum wage laws to protect gig workers from unfair compensation practices.

A. United States: Local and State-Level Wage Protections

Several U.S. cities, including New York and Seattle, have introduced minimum pay standards for gig workers. For example, New York set a minimum pay rate for app-based delivery workers to ensure fair wages.

B. European Union: Minimum Pay Transparency

The EU has pushed for greater pay transparency for gig workers, requiring platforms to disclose payment structures and prevent hidden fees.

C. India: Gig Workers’ Social Security Code

India’s new Social Security Code includes provisions for minimum wages and social security contributions for gig workers, addressing concerns about financial stability in the growing freelance market.

3. Benefits and Social Security Contributions

Many gig workers lack access to traditional employee benefits such as health insurance and pensions. Governments are introducing policies to address this gap.

A. United States: Affordable Care Act (ACA) and Freelancers

Freelancers in the U.S. rely on the ACA for health insurance, but recent proposals suggest expanding employer contributions for gig workers.

B. France: Gig Worker Social Security Fund

France has established a social security fund for gig workers, requiring platforms to contribute a percentage of their revenue to support workers’ health and retirement benefits.

C. Australia: Superannuation for Gig Workers

The Australian government is considering mandatory superannuation contributions for gig workers, ensuring retirement security similar to traditional employees.

4. Job Security and Labor Rights

Many gig workers face job instability, with platforms retaining the right to terminate contracts without notice. New regulations seek to provide job security and dispute resolution mechanisms.

A. Spain: The ‘Rider Law’

Spain’s Rider Law mandates that food delivery workers be classified as employees, providing them with job security, paid leave, and protection from unfair termination.

B. Canada: Worker Protection Legislation

Ontario introduced the Working for Workers Act, which grants gig workers greater job security by ensuring fair contract terms and protection from sudden deactivation.

5. Taxation and Financial Regulations

Tax compliance remains a challenge for gig workers, as many operate as independent contractors with no employer withholding taxes. Governments are introducing measures to ensure proper tax collection.

A. United States: IRS Crackdown on Gig Income Reporting

The IRS has lowered the reporting threshold for gig workers from $20,000 to $600 annually, ensuring greater tax compliance.

B. United Kingdom: VAT and Gig Work

The UK government has introduced VAT obligations for gig platforms, making them responsible for collecting and remitting taxes on freelancer earnings.

Conclusion

Regulatory changes in the gig economy are reshaping how freelance workers operate worldwide. While these reforms aim to improve worker protections, they also pose challenges for gig platforms, potentially increasing operational costs and reducing job flexibility. As governments continue refining policies, businesses and freelancers must adapt to this evolving landscape.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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How Amazon transformed the EU into a planned economy

Amazon is a perfect parable of enshittification, the process by which platforms first offer subsidies to end users until they’re locked in, then make life good for business customers at users’ expense, until they’re locked in, then claw back all the value they can for themselves, leaving just enough behind to keep the lock-in going.

In a new report for SOMO, Margarida Silva describes how the end-stage enshittification of Amazon is playing out in the EU, with Amazon repeating its US playbook of gouging the small businesses who have no choice but to use the platform in order to reach its locked-in customers, making European customers and European sellers poorer:

https://www.somo.nl/amazons-european-chokehold/

The mechanism for this isn’t a mystery. Amazon boasts about it! They call it their flywheel: first, customers are lured into the platform with low prices, especially through Prime, which requires pre-payment for a year’s shipping, which virtually guarantees that customers will start their shopping on Amazon. Because customers now start their buying on Amazon, sellers have to be there. The increased range of goods for sale on Amazon lures in more buyers, who lure in more sellers, with both sides holding each other hostage:

https://vimeo.com/739486256/00a0a7379a

This flywheel creates a vicious cycle, starving local retail so that customers can’t get what they need from brick-and-mortar shops, which funnels sellers into offering their goods for sale on Amazon. The less choice customers and sellers have about where they shop, the more Amazon can abuse both to pad its own bottom line.

There are 800,000 EU-based sellers on Amazon, and they have seen the junk-fees that Amazon charges them skyrocket, to the point where they have to raise prices or lose money on each sale. Amazon uses both tacit and explicit “Most Favored Nation” deals to hide these price-hikes. Under an MFN deal, sellers must not allow their goods to be sold at a lower price than Amazon’s — so when they raise prices to cover Amazon’s increasing fees, they raise them everywhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/

It’s not hard to understand why Amazon would raise its fees: the company has an effective e-commerce monopoly. Like Ozymandias, they have run out of worlds to conquer, and so their growth has to come from squeezing suppliers and/or raising prices, not from bringing in new customers. This is likewise true of mobile companies like Apple and Google, who have run out of people who are so excited about incremental mobile hardware gains that they’ll buy a new phone every year, which means that growth has to come from squeezing app vendors:

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2023/06/09/Pixel-4-to-7

This is likewise true of the streaming companies, which is why Netflix is cracking down on “password sharing”:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes

It’s true of the movie studios, which is why they want to zero out their wage bills by replacing writers with automatic plausible sentence generators that will write stupid movies that they think we’ll still pay to see because there won’t be anything else:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/06/people-are-not-disposable/#union-strong

It’s certainly true of Uber, which is why they’ve double the cost of a taxi ride and halved the wages they pay drivers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Monopolies “grow” by making their customers and suppliers worse off. But they have to be careful about this: if it’s obvious that you’re using your market power to screw buyers, you can get in trouble with competition regulators. That’s because the only part of antitrust law that the neoliberal project left intact is “consumer welfare” — the idea that monopolies should only face enforcement when they raise prices and/or lower quality:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/10/play-fair/#bedoya

This focus on price-hikes has given monopolists a free hand to squeeze suppliers and workers, because a monopolist — from Walmart to Amazon — can claim that squeezing your workers and suppliers is necessary to enhancing consumer welfare. The less you pay to produce a product, the cheaper you can price it.

When a company has a lot of seller power, we call it a monopolist. When it has a lot of buying power, we call it a monopsonist. No one ever made a bestselling, family-destroying board game called “Monopsony” so most people haven’t heard of the concept. But monopsony is every bit as dangerous as monopoly, and monopsonists find it far easier to acquire market power than monopolists. Few suppliers can afford to have even 10% of their sales disappear overnight, so a buyer who accounts for 10% of your sales can demand deep discounts and other favorable terms.

Amazon is a monopolist, but it’s also a very powerful and ruthless monopsonist. For example, its audiobook division, Audible, has a 90+% market-share, and it used that market-power to steal at least $100m from audiobook creators, in a scandal dubbed Audiblegate:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate

For Europe’s 800k sellers who rely on Amazon to reach their customers, the monoposony conditions are blatant and shameless. Take listing fees: Amazon’s “flywheel” pitch claims that as the company grows, it achieves “economies of scale” that can lower its cost basis. But Amazon’s listing fees haven’t changed, even as the company experienced explosive growth in the EU (remember, sellers whose Amazon fees exceed their margins have to pass those fees onto buyers, and also raise their prices everywhere else to satisfy the Most Favored Nation requirement).

Amazon books the revenues from these fees — and other junk-fees it extracts from sellers — in Luxembourg, an EU member nation that provides a tax haven to multinational businesses that want to maintain the fiction that they operate their businesses out of the tiny kingdom. There is sharp competition in the EU to offer the most servile, corrupt environment for multinationals, and Luxembourg is a leader, along with Cyprus, Malta and, of course, Ireland:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

But at least listing fees haven’t gone up, unlike other fees, which have climbed sharply. Amazon falsely claimed that its additional revenues from fees were the result of growth by independent sellers, which Amazon pegged at 65%. Later, the company admitted that the true growth figure was 22%. Meanwhile, fees are up 85%.

The true growth figure might be lower still. Amazon refuses to show the math behind its growth figures, or even say which sellers and sales are included in the figure.

The SOMO report cites research by Juozas Kaziukėnas of the e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, who finds that sellers are now giving 50% of their gross revenues to Amazon, an increase of 10% over the past five years across the whole EU. However, different EU (and ex-EU) countries have experienced much steeper increases in fees — in the UK, fees have nearly doubled (up 98%), and in France, fees more than doubled (up 115%).

Many of these increases come from the Fulfilment By Amazon (FBA) program, which is promoted as an optional service, but which is really obligatory — careful research shows that sellers who warehouse, pack and ship their own goods get banished to the depths of search results, even if they have ratings, costs and times that are competitive with FBA. This is especially true of the “buy box” that lands at the top of most searches. The company refuses to disclose how buy box positioning is determined, but 90% of products in the buy box pay for FBA.

Amazon has used excuseflation to hike its FBA prices, blaming higher energy prices for price hikes that predated the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and blaming covid for price hikes that predated the pandemic.

Italy’s competition authority did yeoman service in uncovering the sleaze of FBA, publishing an investigation that showed that Prime and buy box made the notionally “optional” FBA into a must-have for merchants, meaning that Amazon could jack up FBA prices without losing business.

Another notable source of gouging came in response to the UK and France adopting digital services taxes, which were meant to make up for the tax-base erosion enabled by Luxembourg’s flouting of EU tax law. Amazon passed these taxes straight through to its merchants, without seeing a comparable decrease in the number of sellers using its platforms — an unmistakable sign of market power. If you can raise prices without losing customers, then, by definition, your customers have nowhere else to go.

I’ve previously written about how Amazon’s $31b/year “advertising” market isn’t really advertising — rather, it’s a payola scheme that auctions off the top of a search-listing to the merchant with the most to spend:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is how you get a simple search like “cat beds” returning results whose first screen is 100% ads, and whose next five screens are 50% ads, many of them for dog products:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2022/amazon-shopping-ads/

Auctioning off search results means that every time you search for something you want, you have to wade through screen after screen of listings for products whose vendors spent more on advertising, leaving less to spend on making quality goods.

This is as true in the EU as it is in the USA. The SOMO report shows that European merchants are required to spend ever-larger sums to show up in results for the exact products they sell, leaving them with a choice between making less money, raising prices, or skimping on quality.

But even the “winners” of Amazon’s gladiatorial combat among vendors can still lose. Amazon uses an automated product removal process that can delete some or all of a merchant’s products, without warning or explanation, and no one at Amazon will explain what a merchant did wrong. That remains true even if a vendor pays for Amazon’s “marketplace consultant” service — ask these paid Virgils why you’ve been cast into Amazon’s pit, and they’ll shrug their shoulders (and bill you for it).

And even if you can navigate the junk fees, the Kafka-as-a-service removals, the war of all sellers against all sellers for search primacy…you still lose. Merchants told SOMO that a product that survives Amazon’s gauntlet is likely to be cloned by Amazon and sold as an Amazon Basic or other house-brand product. Amazon doesn’t charge itself 50% junk fees, so it can always underprice the vendors it knocks off, and give its own products permanent top-of-search placement.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once testified under oath before Congress that this doesn’t happen — and then refused to return to Congress when multiple vendors showed evidence that he’d lied:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/18/amazon-congress-letter-third-party-data/

He definitely lied:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-india-rigging/

Amazon has faced investigations and enforcement in the EU over this, and settled a claim with a promise to “not use non-public seller data to compete with sellers,” but given the company’s record of broken promises on this score and the difficulty of catching them cheating, it’s pretty naive to think they’ll stick to this.

The report quotes Thomas Höppner, a lawyer who has represented small businesses that Amazon screwed over. Höppner says the problem is that the EU evaluates Amazon’s bad deeds on a “case-by-case” basis, missing the big picture: “By the time one identified problem was seemingly solved, Amazon had long made amendments elsewhere with the same effect. We require a more holistic approach that considers the entire Amazon ecosystem and the various interdependencies within.”

But the EU’s enforcement approach is about to change significantly. The EU just passed the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which imposes a bunch of obligations on Amazon:

allowing sellers to offer their products on other marketplaces at different prices (Article 5.3),

not obliging business users to pay for one of its services in order to use its platform (Article 5.8),

limiting the way Amazon uses non-public seller data to compete with them (Article 6.2)

preventing Amazon from giving top billing in search results to its own products or sellers that have acquired extra Amazon services (Article 6.5)

The report concludes with a suite of recommendations for improving EU enforcement. First, they argue for a return to traditional competition law, abandoning the “consumer welfare standard” that is so friendly to monopsonies and their abuses of suppliers and workers.

They call for a probe into Amazon’s Most Favored Nation deals (“fair pricing policy”), the practice of sponsoring search results, and spiraling fees. They want the EU to adequately fund DMA enforcement, with “measures to prevent regulatory capture.” And they want Amazon to publish clear explanations for how search results, buy box placement, and other practices hidden behind a veil of secrecy.

Amazon will doubtless claim that disclosing how those systems work will make it easier for spammers and scammers to game their way to the top of search results. We should be skeptical of this claim — content moderation is the last domain where anyone takes the bankrupt idea of security through obscurity seriously:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

Finally, the report calls for breaking up Amazon, forcing it to choose between being a platform seller or a platform user, calling this the only way to “prevent the conflicts of interest between its role as a platform intermediary, seller, and service provider.”

The technical term for this measure is “structural separation” — a rule that bans platform companies from competing with their business customers. This is the principle at work in the US bipartisan AMERICA Act, which would force Google and Meta to spin off the parts of their ad-tech business that put them in a conflict of interest. Right now, Googbook represents both publishers and advertisers, while operating the marketplace where ad sales take place, and they take 51% out of every ad dollar:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

Structural separation hasn’t really been applied in the US for a generation, but it’s gained currency in recent years, for the obvious reason that the referee can’t also own one of the teams. I was in Germany last week speaking to regulators and politicians, and they espoused skepticism that the EU would embrace structural separation anytime soon.

But they were wrong! Today, the European Commission announced plans to force Google and Meta to sell off their conflict-of-interest ad-tech lines of business, mirroring the provisions of the US AMERICA Act:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/google-may-soon-be-ordered-to-break-up-its-lucrative-ad-business-eu-warns/

Structural separation really is the policy we should be demanding. It’s amazing that lawyers who would never argue a case in front of a judge who was married to the plaintiff will turn around and defend the idea that Amazon can fairly operate a marketplace where they compete with other sellers.

With Amazon dominating online sales, and with in-person retail cratering, Amazon’s decisions have the power to determine the outcome of whole swathes of Europe’s economy. This is the “planned economy” that the EU claims it detests and seeks to prevent — but it’s an economy planned by distant autocrats in a Seattle boardroom, for the purpose of extracting the surpluses needed to launch an endless procession of penis-rockets.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this postto read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/14/flywheel-shyster-and-flywheel/#unfulfilled-by-amazon

[Image ID: A desert ruin. In the foreground is a huge Amazon box, with an EU flag in place of its shipping label. Atop the box are the feet and partial legs of an Oxymandias figure.]

Image: Rama (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gladiator_with_sword-Louis_Ernest_Meissonnier-MG_1216-IMG_1223-white.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/fr/deed.en

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