- Google being evil aside, I still think about how great google maps is and how it seemed to come out of nowhere.
- Paypal is straight up evil, no redeeming value for the past decade. Use something else. They also own Venmo.
- Battery packs and cell phones are great in that general sense.
Out of nowhere? MapQuest and printed out directions were a thing for many years.
Mapquest was no google maps. Google had you in real time recommending restaurants and giving you directions with voice. You could see a streetview. It felt like a huge leap at the time to me. You may have a different viewpoint.
Google Maps in the era before smartphones really pulled ahead with Street View. That might’ve been their first real game-changing innovation.
Oh man, I remember getting lost with those so many times.
Was PayPal always evil, though? The concept of it wasn’t. People wanted an easier way to conduct transactions electronically. Something faster and more convenient than, say, a Western Union money transfer order.
Almost every country around the world has a free way of moving money between people without using an app or third party website. It’s just a standard part of banking. I haven’t looked into it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Paypal has bribed and lobbied to keep that kind of functionality out of the US. So, the US has a shittier, more expensive, less convenient, more privacy-invasive version of what everybody else takes for granted. Just like with medical care, taxes, etc.
To be fair, moving money between countries was not trivial before PayPal.
To use Europe as an example, SEPA became operative in 2008, about six years after PayPal first became available in Europe. Before that, all international money transfers had to go through SWIFT and the easiest way was probably to use a credit card (and good luck trying to send money to a someone who isn’t a company with that).
Even with SEPA (or for domestic transfers), PayPal offered superior comfort over entering the recipient’s IBAN into a homebanking software. Processing was faster, too.
Of course these days banks in Europe have to offer instant transfers, there’s a QR code standard to read invoice data into banking apps, and they’re working on a full-blown PayPal replacement to get the last comfort bits down as well. It’ll be interesting to see how that works out.
I mean, revolut is still a thing despite instant transfers, because being able to just send money to a phone number from your contact list is still hella more convenient than sharing QR codes or IBANs.
I would expect the American credit card companies and banks lobby just as hard if not harder to prevent that from being a free service in the US. Electronic Funds Transfers are an option at every bank in the US, but they’re not very easy for individuals and seem to always charge a fee to either the sender or receiver.
Yes, just like how tax preparation companies lobby to keep the IRS from just telling people what they owe in taxes. It keeps the tax prep companies in business.
We have Zelle in the US, but it’s not the same as PayPal. At its simplest PayPal is just a way to send money from one entity to another, but it does a lot more than that. It has escrow and fraud protection (debatable if they do a good job at it). With Zelle it’s much more like handing someone cash. There have been some instances of fraud resulting in reversed transactions but those are big deals not your everyday scams or unreliable sellers.
Because PayPal and Venmo has been shitty a lot, Zelle is gaining a lot of use. I pay my rent with Zelle. Buying or selling stuff on craigslist or marketplace I’ll use Zelle if it’s more than like 40 bucks. It’s nice as a seller because there is no way to reverse the transaction after the fact.
I think they had a couple of years where they weren’t evil, but pretty close to always. They own Ebay too, and they’re also evil.
I think other countries have payment systems where they’re not evil. It’s ran by the government I think? There are no fees and it just comes out of your account. I guess payment systems in the general sense would be a better mention.
I can already see Kramer running NFT scams… or crypto rug pull xD
Kramer would spend all his money on NFTs and then freak out trying to flip them. He would enlist George as a fictional investor who would try to inflate the value of the NFTs by offering exorbitant amounts for them in front of potential buyers.
Jerry would riff on the copyability of NFTs and try to talk Kramer out of it, but would secretly sell an NFT of himself for a low amount of money.Elaine would secretly purchase the Jerry NFT and hold it over him forever.
In the end, Newman would buy all of Kramer’s NFTs and think he was getting a steal. George, who was promised 50% of the profits would be aghast when he learns Kramer lost a thousand bucks in the transaction, even more so when Kramer requests $500 from George for his share of the negative profits.
Newman would then flip the NFTs for a genuine profit.
Giddy up!
I could see george having FOMO and doing most of this shit. Kramer would fall for the AI chatbot.
*The AI chatbot would fall for Kramer.
America’s screen writers adopted the Seinfeld paradigm years ago:
No hugging, no learning.
Apple Maps, on the other hand, is fully worthy of an episode.
To go a little more in-depth, if a product would simplify certain aspects of life, make them more straightforward and less prone to a chain of comedic errors, then it’s a good product.
If a product makes things more complex, has more things to go wrong, and more corners and edge cases for some weirdo like Kramer or George to think they’ve spotted a killer side hustle, then it’s a bad product.
Now, I’m not saying that smartphones and computers and the Internet aren’t complicated, but they are far simpler to how things were done before. Read old hobbyist magazines to get a sense of the complex system of self-addressed stamped envelopes and hand-compiled mailing lists it used to take to get info on your hobby. Meeting a friend in a nearby town to go see a movie at a theater you haven’t been to before required a shocking number of cross-referenced paper resources.
Something something Seinfeld something something Epstein island lemonade
Kramer would go the Epstein Island literally for the snorkeling.
Oh, it’s got gorgeous water.
And the rich people dont care if you sneak on, they just write it off, Jerry.
Ironically, there are companies that put rubber bladders in shipping vessels to prevent leaks. I got in early at Kramerica, but sold before Darren joined the Nazi party.
As far as I can tell, your entire enterprise is no more than a solitary man with a messy apartment which may or may not contain a chicken.
I guess it’s a good thing that I don’t know a couple of the “Bad tech” ideas. I can figure out the metaverse land sales but have no idea what a blind box is.
“Blind box” in the tech context is an algorithm that hides its operations from everyone, even its own creators. You give it an input, and then it produces an output, without showing you how it arrived to that output.
Nah, that’s a black box algorithm. Blind boxes are like loot boxes, but for irl stuff. Like labubus. Basically gachapon machines without the machine. But that’s not exactly tech, so I assume the op means loot boxes.
Do you mean AI?
Loot/Blind boxes are like a random pack of baseball cards that you can only show to other owners of baseball cards, or someone who is baseball-card adjacent.
Some of them are “rare” in the sense that the card printing company refuses to make more, despite it costing them nothing after the initial card is made.
What’s more is that the printing compamy has decades of psycologic practices to use on their card pack purchasers. For Example:
- Casino-esque animations, enticing younger collectors before that aren’t even allowed to gamble legally, in person.
- Rarity manipulation, making things rarer than listed. If they list anything more than ‘trust me bro.’
- Making sure that purchasers are surrounded by pack buyers who have already got the rarer cards, generating card envy.
- Removing entire card sets from purchase wirh the whole purpose of making purchasers feel like they will miss out, right now and forever, if they do not buy more packs of cards.
Finally, there is also the fact that all of these cards are entirely digital, so the existance of the cards depend almost entirely on the whims of the printers.
Hmm. Do we want good tech, or do we want to inspire new Seinfeld episodes? This is a tough one.
Well, the show has been off the air for a long time, but I absolutely could see Kramer having an AI chatbot girlfriend, or George Costanza trying to get people suckered into an NFT grift/cryptocurrency side hustle.
The People Coin. Money for people.
Yeah, George would think he’s spotted some slick NFT grift or crypto rug pull that it turns out he was the one getting rug pulled, by Newman.
MADOFF!
Or — just hear me out, I’m going to say something crazy — simply consider: will it draw criticism?
This way, you don’t have to use any of your attention span on Seinfeld or his shitty show.
Literally everything should draw criticism. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Arizona Iced Tea draw criticism.
But if you’re going to be a lemming about it, you could use basically any sitcom set in the 90’s or 2000’s. I remember reading once that the writers of Buffy The Vampire Slayer deliberately avoided giving the characters cell phones because the characters having reliable, cheap instant communication at a distance eliminates a lot of plots.
Use Saved By The Bell if you have to. Screech, the nerd, is blathering about <newfangled tech> in the first act. The gang gets into a scrape in the second act. Does Screech:
- fail to use <newfangled tech> correctly as you would in the real world, because if he did the plot wouldn’t happen at all? – Great tech.
- Use <newfangled tech> realistically to solve the problem, and Zach has a little moment where he admits Screech was right about it? – Good tech.
- Cause, instigate or worsen the scrape the gang is in with <newfangled tech> which has to be solved by some other means especially deus ex machina by adult characters? – Bad tech.
- Play the main role in this, a Very Special Episode? – Bad Bad Very Bad Epstein Bad tech.
“I was in Bitcoin! THERE WAS SHRINKAGE!”
“So what’s the deal with inflation? Whenever I just make more dollars, I get in trouble.”
In “The Checks” they get a bunch of tiny payments from Japan.
