In San Francisco, Waymo Has Now Bested Lyft. Uber Is Next
https://underscoresf.com/in-san-francisco-waymo-has-now-bested-lyft-uber-is-next/If a data-backed trend plays out, Waymo could become San Francisco’s biggest ride-hailing service before the year ends. Waymo’s celestial ascent into the cultural zeitgeist — a rise that has been propelled by dystopian memes and sheer, futuristic novelty — has only been matched by how it continues swallowing its competition. The Alphabet-owned autonomous driving company saw explosive exponential growth in ridership in 2024, with driverless rides increasing from 77,000 to more than 312,000 lifts by August of last year alone, according to the California DMV; as of publishing, Waymo asserts that 30% of their rides are to local small businesses. Screenshot: Courtesy of YipitData Independent contractors for Lyft and Uber have been saying they’re “cooked” for a while, citing massive declines in available requests as a result of Waymo’s success. (This, however, is a tandem issue: Waymo’s ride-hailing operations in San Francisco coincided with the increased number of regional rideshare drivers that began working during and after the pandemic.) But now factual data is showing that the aforementioned broiling is, indeed, happening … and at a rate quicker than once thought. According to YipitData, a data and analytics firm based out of New York City, Waymo’s gross bookings from August of 2023 to April of this year have surpassed Lyft’s in market share. The twenty-month data analysis highlighted Uber’s dominance in San Francisco ridership — well over 50% of all trips booked via a ridesharing application were done on Uber throughout the analysis — but showed, perhaps more surprisingly, how quickly Waymo clambered into the commonplace. Waymo is also currently beating Lyft, a company that has operated rides in San Francisco since 2012, in total gross bookings. In a staggeringly short amount of time, Waymo, which is about to celebrate its first anniversary of city-wide ride-hailing operations, has gone from effectively 0% market share of bookings in San Francisco to over 25%. Lyft has continuously gathered fewer bookings than Uber, but still managed to hold onto a roughly 30% market share since 2023. Waymo has now flipped that stake, surpassing Lyft to become San Francisco’s second most-popular ride-hailing service. If the research published by YipitData is extrapolated outwardly, Waymo could easily beat Uber to become SF’s foremost taxi-like service by early next year. Or sooner. What does this mean for San Francisco, the city that launched ridesharing services as we know them today? On the roads, not much; self-driving Jaguar iPaces would become even more prominent. But on an economic level, a subset of blue-collar workers (which numbers in the tens of thousands in San Francisco) would find themselves either regionally displaced or outright vocationally exterminated by a branch of artificial intelligence. We don’t need a graph to tell you how that window into a looming dystopian landscape plays out. But hey, at least you won’t have to surrender to mind-numbing small talk on your way to SFO.
Can someone explain to me like I’m 5 how AI will replace the 30-40% of workers who have fake email jobs? The last time we had a wave of automation in office work (rise of the computer) - we just created a lot of new busywork. How is AI any different? Automating call center work or secretarial functions seems like the most obvious functions for direct role removal. But that’s based on the cultural view that those jobs are “rote”. Lots of fancy fake email jobs are basically glorified secretarial work (“Chief of Staff”) Feels like neither the Silicon Valley autists nor the rational “market believers” actually really understand what work even is. This isn’t some rational economic function for the top two quintiles, this is a cultural ritual. We make presentations and have meetings because our ancestors did that. But now we make much better presentations and have many more meetings (with far less structure and purpose). These are the ritual gestures that define our lives. This is our rain dance. For elite work, the most abstract, immeasurable, and unquantifiable form of output - the big story has been just how comically silly the work has become. Longer and more beautiful PowerPoints. More useless falsely precise detailed models. I just don’t see us letting the computers take that from us. If anything - they’ll enable ppl to engage in ever more comical zero sum games.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1925527153631797521.htmlThe Network State in One Sentence
https://thenetworkstate.com/the-network-state-in-one-sentence"Narrated by Balaji AI."
https://thenetworkstate.com/the-network-state-in-one-sentenceAudiobook narrators are screwed
A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition. OK, that’s a mouthful! It’s lengthy because there are many internet phenomena that share some but not all of the properties of a network state. For example, neither Bitcoin nor Facebook nor a DAO is a network state, because each lacks certain qualities – like diplomatic recognition – which are core to anything we’d think of as the next version of the nation state.
nation-state
https://archive.ph/weQQ0#selection-523.0-526.0nation-state, a territorially bounded sovereign polity—i.e., a state—that is ruled in the name of a community of citizens who identify themselves as a nation. The legitimacy of a nation-state’s rule over a territory and over the population inhabiting it stems from the right of a core national group within the state (which may include all or only some of its citizens) to self-determination. Members of the core national group see the state as belonging to them and consider the approximate territory of the state to be their homeland. Accordingly, they demand that other groups, both within and outside the state, recognize and respect their control over the state. As the American sociologist Rogers Brubaker put it in Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (1996), nation-states are “states of and for particular nations.” As a political model, the nation-state fuses two principles: the principle of state sovereignty, first articulated in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which recognizes the right of states to govern their territories without external interference; and the principle of national sovereignty, which recognizes the right of national communities to govern themselves. National sovereignty in turn is based on the moral-philosophical principle of popular sovereignty, according to which states belong to their peoples. The latter principle implies that legitimate rule of a state requires some sort of consent by the people. That requirement does not mean, however, that all nation-states are democratic. Indeed, many authoritarian rulers have presented themselves—both to the outside world of states and internally to the people under their rule—as ruling in the name of a sovereign nation.
Peace of Westphalia
https://archive.ph/hYiXT#selection-493.0-496.0Peace of Westphalia, European settlements of 1648, which brought to an end the Eighty Years’ War between Spain and the Dutch and the German phase of the Thirty Years’ War. The peace was negotiated, from 1644, in the Westphalian towns of Münster and Osnabrück. The Spanish-Dutch treaty was signed on January 30, 1648. The treaty of October 24, 1648, comprehended the Holy Roman emperor Ferdinand III, the other German princes, France, and Sweden. England, Poland, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire were the only European powers that were not represented at the two assemblies. Some scholars of international relations credit the treaties with providing the foundation of the modern state system and articulating the concept of territorial sovereignty.
End of results