Airbnb is great until you get a bad experience. For hotels, there is a floor for bad experiences - it can only get so bad, and the customer service is usually decent. I used airbnb until I had a single terrible experience and worse customer service that did not help me because I had no proof of the incident. Been using hotels ever since.
They will churn through new customers who get bitten by this until they come up with controls/features that prevent it. Instituting those will increase the price making them less competitive and opening the door to others.
Its quite amusing how much the gig economy is hyped up but besides the initial surge of excitement, it just settles down and looks like the industry its trying to replace.
But I'm a pessimist. Maybe they will use the infusion of cash to invest in something truly groundbreaking. But I'm staying far far away from making any investments in them.
It's often worse than what it replaced, too. Uber did well because the Taxi industry already had gone to such low low's, but the gig economy feels synonomous with an excuse to pay less than minimum wage to me.
My fiancee has been looking for a mobile drawing computer. The only thing I could recommend until now was the Surface Book since Apple doesn't make anything mobile that could run the full Adobe suite. If you can sketch with the iPad Photoshop and there is sidecar support for Illustrator and the other apps, it might be a good deal.
I'm currently using my ipad pro as a secondary monitor with full wacom tablet-like functionality using the duet app. it works pretty well and has full support for the apple pencil. I have paperlike as a screen protector which gives a paperlike "resistence" when I'm drawing on it too..
Quantum just means something that can be counted or measured, usually in discrete amounts like whole number. Assuming the audits and entries are discrete and transactional, the word makes sense. But yeah, it just looks like they are trying to go for marketing buzzwords.
In the context of computing technology, “quantum” is not the appropriate term, and I only agree it makes sense with the most generous interpretation of the term, whose meaning you describe finds itself mostly in certain physical theories. They could have used the word “discrete”, which is overwhelmingly more contextually accurate, if that’s what they mean.
I don't see why it wouldn't be appropriate. Within the context of computing, there is no one set meaning of "quantum". In fact, there are at least three:
1. Quantum computing, as in quantum physics.
2. Time quantum, as in the time slices a multitasking scheduler gives to threads.
3. Quantum Corporation, the disk/tape storage company.
Seems like there is room for one more meaning. They probably mean "quantum" as in "quantum leap" since this is a different paradigm for ledgers. It makes sense to me.
Unfortunately I don't foresee it being recognized or fought against. Especially in high turnover work forces such as ride sharing and "part time" low-income jobs. The gamification may engage the employees for just enough time to provide more profit than the turnover would cost.
Coal mines have safety regulations where once they did not. The same is true of logging, construction, manufacturing, child labor, etc. These are safety regulations, which are not the same. It took over 100 years to put those in place. I hope we'll see gamification for the evil that it is in less time than that.
Decent read as the manipulative uses of game design are often overlooked. Think about how "fun" it feels to scan your own items at the checkout and hear those nice tones. Uber and Lyft drivers have Pavlovian response when they hear a new ride beacon ready to accept.
It's bizarre when people suggest it's some sort of capitalist scam that we can check ourselves out at the grocery store.
Surely all of the upsides of self-checkout have a higher weight than the machine beeping at you.
Also, they beep because your attention is spent rotating each product to let the scanner find the barcode, and you might not notice that it scanned otherwise, and accidental multiple scans cost the customer money.
Self-checkout shifts the physical and mental labor traditionally done by a worker onto the consumer to save money. Instead, I'm paying for the product _and_ performing the labor traditionally done by someone else chiefly to save the company money in labor costs. Opinions may vary about the convenience, efficiency or "upsides" of that, but in a sense it is the quintessential capitalist scam.
Standing in line waiting for someone else to scan my groceries is just as much of a waste of time.
The faster I can be out of there, the happier I am. And, less labor spent on scanning items means the store can be open for longer hours, have more organized shelves and be cleaner, etc. All in all, this is automation that increases the efficiency of the operation. Yes, you pay some cost in that you have to place your items into bags (with the current iteration of the technology) but I think you the customer get something out of that work, even if it's just a slightly lower rate of price increases.
It is time to think seriously about how we are going to deal with fewer jobs available. Will the increased corporate profits that result be spent on giving cashiers education to become knowledge workers to further increase these profits and the efficiency of society? Will the money be fed into basic income or public services, so that everyone in society will be taken care of even if there are no low-skill jobs for them to do? We are already seeing what happens when we don't think about these things in certain industries, and it's not great. Someone will have to step up and say, we will be the country that takes care of everyone, because the "work 8 hours a day and you get a house" era is long over.
Employees usually are much faster than customers to scan groceries - thousands hours of practice make perfect. Plus, those anti-theft machines that give you instructions "scan next item, put item in the bag, take the last item out of the bag" - they slow things down considerably.
Also, the number of labor required stays the same, just now it's unpaid labor.
> Opinions may vary about the convenience, efficiency or "upsides" of that
I highly doubt that the savings on labor cost will translate to "longer open hours, more organized shelves and cleaner, etc", I would guess the savings translate to more profit and more concentration of wealth at the top.
Look, I'm not so much of a luddite that I _refuse_ to use self-checkout lines, I'm just realistic about what the motivations are: maximizing profit.
I feel like the motivation of any business is to maximize profit. Even if there is a side goal of improving society, in the end, you can't do that if they turn off your electricity for non-payment.
That was already done with the supermarket in the first place and nobody minded - old school stores had everything grabbed by the clerk from behind the counter and totaled on your bill of goods. It had longer wait times and you couldn't just pick the best apples for your bushel.
Like everything in capitalism it is just a strategy - if shrinkage or other issues are more of a concern they would keep it behind the counter like jewelry stores or if people reacted negatively enough it would fail.
Oh I must be thinking about Target self checkouts specifically. They have a nice ringtone when you use it compared to the normal beep from the cashier.
