Some More News - Some More News: The High Cost of Convenience

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

Hi. Today we're looking at modern conveniences that have a higher cost than we'd like to admit. Amazon, Netflix, Airbnb, Doordash – all require exploiting labor, screwing over customers, and making parts of our society just a little bit worse. Is there a better way?Hosted by Cody JohnstonExecutive Producer - Katy StollDirected by Will GordhWritten by Shawn DepasqualeProduced by Jonathan HarrisEdited by Gregg MellerPost-Production Supervisor / Motion Graphics & VFX - John ConwayResearcher - Marco Siler-GonzalesGraphics by Clint DeNiscoHead Writer - David Christopher BellPATREON: https://patreon.com/somemorenewsMERCH: https://shop.somemorenews.comYOUTUBE MEMBERSHIP: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvlj0IzjSnNoduQF0l3VGng/join#somemorenews #Amazon #UberCalm your mind, change your life. Calm has an exclusive offer just for listeners of our show–get 40% off a Calm Premium Subscription at http://calm.com/MORENEWS. This is an amazingvalue.Upgrade your wallet today! Get 10% Off @Ridge with code SMN at https://www.Ridge.com/SMN #RidgepodPluto TV. Stream Now. Pay Never.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Oh, hi again. Welcome back from the ads and things. Cody, news guy. Ties, beards.

Did we do this part already? Sorry, I'm a little distracted because I ordered something I really, really need, and it says it's nine stops away, but it said that for the last, like, three hours. Whatever, it's still fine. I can't complain, right? Everything is so convenient these days. Thank you, capitalist Mr. Clean.

Hot dog! It is now eight stops away. Cool, we really are finally living in the rad future that we were promised, a world where we can get anything we want with a touch of a button, groceries, rides, late-night booze, laundry detergent, a Super Mario DVD I'm not sure which one, and a guy who will pay cash for your old lottery tickets.

I don't know why it was an intriguing ad, and he responded very quickly. Pretty soon, you won't even have to press a button anymore. You will press a button to press the button for you. Oh wait, we did that too. It truly is a time of wonders. But hey, here's some news. Hold on.

Nine stops away. Again? Well, while we're waiting, there's really nothing else to do. But like this video and subscribe to our channel, please. Anyway, look, I'm not against convenience. I love convenience. Some of my best friends are extremely convenient. But in the wacky world of corporations, convenience always comes at a price.

And we know it. Workers get exploited, companies dodge responsibility, and customers get fleeced, if not put in harm's way. And that's what today. is about. There is an arms race of various tech companies pushing to disrupt every industry in the name of convenience, which we've allowed to thrive because, for the most part, they do seem really convenient. You know, as long as we don't mind, the occasional burst of terror and pain. Like, wow, an app that sends a taxi right to your door, that's really

convenient. Will those drivers occasionally assault people? Yeah. Both Uber and Lyft have dealt with this issue, which is ongoing. For example, last year on what was supposed to be a routine trip home from a Denver co-working space, Colorado State Representative Jenny Wilford was picked up by a Lyft driver who wasn't the man in the driver's profile. During that ride, Wilford says she was sexually assaulted. Eventually she got out of the car and walked to a different locations so the driver wouldn't know where she lived. All of Lyft's drivers are supposed to be vetted, but sometimes they super are not. According to the details of the lawsuit, a company called Shanu Transportation created a Lyft account for one of its cars, then handed access to that account

to other drivers, who never went through Lyft's background checks or the driver qualification process. So a middleman to a middleman was added to the process. resulting in an unvetted driver behind the wheel when Wilford stepped into her lift ride. And again, this is one of way too many examples of this. Surely the company is aware of this issue and working diligently on a fix, you might be saying. And let me assure you who might be saying that,

the answer is a firm, sort of. Lyft's big fix for this extremely ongoing problem was the Women Plus Connect feature. More stuff. I love it when they plus a thing. It's a toggle that lets women and non-binary riders match with women and non-binary drivers. And sure, that sounds like a step in the right direction.

Men are statistically the problem with this kind of stuff. And Lyft's CEO even pitched it as empowerment. Now, women can earn money on their terms. Problem is, Lyft doesn't have to give you a driver if none are available. So even if you use this feature, there's a good chance you'll end up with a male driver anyway. Plus, both passengers and drivers are pointing out that this solution

might actually make things less safe for them. See, because Lyft and Uber don't verify anyone's identities when you sign in, a female driver might get matched with a female passenger who is actually just a guy using his girlfriend's account, possibly with worse intentions than just avoiding surge pricing, and vice versa. I mean, I just pointed out that a person was a source. by someone using another person's account, which is the actual problem.

So it's essentially a placebo button, and not one that gets you a ride with the band, which is probably good, who wants that? But also, this is worse, because it's basically a big sign that says, here be all the women. And while Lyft's PR says, Women Plus Connect will give riders and drivers more choice,

longtime drivers point out that female riders were already doing this on their own by canceling trips until a female driver showed up. And all of this is layered on top of a reality where, as one Chicago driver bluntly put it, people doing ride share have no presumption of safety. Hey, that could be their new slogan. Lift the ride scare app.

Obviously, it's not just ride shares. The same issues are present in every popular convenience service. Airbnb, to name one, is the crown jewel of the convenience. economy, millions of listings, 275 million users, and over $11 billion in revenue last year. But of course, they're able to do that by sidestepping all the regulations that make hotels safe and accountable. No front desk, no security, no housekeeping staff. Accountability is essentially replaced with vibe checks and crossing your fingers that the owner isn't a barbarian, like the barbarian from barbarian. And sex pests abound. Airbus.

has spent an average of $50 million a year to settle claims ranging from wrecked homes to sexual assaults, including one case where a man used a copied house key to enter a rented unit and attack the guest inside. In Fort Lauderdale, a woman hired to clean an Airbnb was violently attacked by an intruder while she was on the job. She filed a lawsuit against the company and the hosts for failing to implement basic security, arguing that the owners were aware of of previous break-ins and that the platform left her exposed to violence just by showing up to work. I'm no lawyer, despite what my Trump University degree says.

Law-knower guy. But it seems like she has a pretty strong case. Airbnb is also jacking up local economies and not in a good way like wheeljack, in a bad way, like gunjack. Short-term rentals have hammered local housing markets around the world, causing many places to enact to protect citizens and communities. Dallas is trying to block short-term rentals

in some neighborhoods. San Francisco and Seattle capped listings per host. And cities like London and Paris limit how many nights a property can be rented out. Barcelona even went so far as to ban private room rentals entirely after years of climbing rents, anti-tourism protests, and neighborhoods getting hollowed out

into de-list celebrity birthday parties for the weekend. See, because cities zone for hotels. They are a commercial property. But Airbnb breaks that and turns what should be housing into unofficial unsanctioned businesses. And that's, you know, confusing on top of hurting the rental market. In fact, the Economic Policy Institute found that Airbnb's economic downsides often far exceed its supposed perks. Sure, it boosts short-term lodging supply and may slightly lower prices. But housing prices skyrocket as the housing supply drops because units that used to be long-term rentals are changed to short-term Airbnb listings. Researchers looked at what

actually happens when Airbnb activity doubles in a neighborhood and found it increases housing prices by 6 to 11%. That's your rent eating another whole paycheck to finance the passive income of a digital landlord, which is nowhere near as cool a phrase as it should have been. Digital landlord should have been what the lawnmower man forced us all to call him in his server churches. Instead, it's some Yahoo rolling Bitcoin dice on a neighborhood to the immediate detriment of everyone living there. A study of New York City found that from 2015 to 2017, rents went up 1.4% citywide just because of Airbnb expansion. That's about $384 a year extra for the average renter, money that could have gone to food, bills, medication, or literally anything besides helping some aspiring real estate mogul buy another ringlight for his podcast.

You could buy a really convincing fake degree from the president's fake university, a degree that I now realize should have said law knower man for the reference, reference synergy. And beyond the economic effects, neighborhoods shift from being communities to totally. tourist traps. Again, they weren't zoned for that. In Miami Beach, over a thousand police calls in one year connected to Airbnb addresses, including several related to violent crimes. Because people on vacation are different from people who live in a place, right? Have you seen yourself on vacation? You are a fucking monster. That's the entire point of being on vacation after all. You didn't cash in your sick days to not drink tequila at 10 a.m. on a Monday. right? You can rim the glass with cocaine. You sure can. You can rim anything. In theory.

This rental increase and commercialization creates something called a doom loop, like a Latvian real estate scam. Basically, it's when renters get financially locked into using Airbnb. During the height of the pandemic, amateur investors flooded into the Airbnb game, especially in small towns and rural areas, Snatching up cheap properties like a kid in a candy store, except the candy is overpriced real estate and the kid has access to predatory lending. Between mid-2021 and mid-2020, the number of new hosts jumped by more than 50 percent. Now, the market's oversaturated. We've got too many Airbnbs and not enough guests,

but prices haven't dropped because hosts are trying to cover fees and inflated mortgages. The end result is the doom! Loop, Richards. Independent hosts can't cut prices without losing money, so guests gravitate back to the hotels that can. It's a groundhog day of financial ruin. Everyone's miserable except Airbnb, which in 2023 earned nearly $5 billion its biggest profit ever. Boy, seems like we really nailed it that first time with hotels, right? You know how hotels were kind of the ideal version of this and then we disrupted it to end up back where we started, but worse? And that reminds me, streaming sure sucks these days, doesn't it? Over at Amazon, you can purchase

all the digital movies and music your swollen heart desires, but everything in your library is fair game for predatory and misleading practices that hide what you're actually spending money on. There's currently a lawsuit arguing that Prime Video misleads customers, when it says you can buy a movie because you're not buying Jack Booty, which is worse than Wheeljack, but better than Gunjack, because at least Jack Booty can't clobber you with its powerful arms. When you buy something on Prime Video, you're just licensing it. It's Jeff Bezos subletting you a DVD.

The second of the licensing deal changes, poof, your purchase is gone. It's the same for any streaming purchase. Last year, anime streaming service Funimation shut down and shoved everyone over to Crunchyroll. But in the process, they also nuked the digital copies of Blu-Rays and DVDs customers thought they owned. So at any moment, your precious library of hentai research could suddenly vanish. And that's the through line with all of these platforms. They give you less ownership while charging you for things you can't even hold in your hand. And when you try to complain, your only recourse in most situations is frustrating interactions with chatbot support that end with us yelling, talk to a human, into the void.

Because that's the punctuation to all of these, something we've all dealt with more and more. Fucking bots. We're told automated support is more efficient, but what they've actually built is a recursive maze where a chat bot apologizes three. hundred times without ever solving your problem like the worst Alice in Wonderland character, ironically, turning you into a mad chatter. Again, I don't need to tell you how frustrating this is. But unsurprisingly, studies have shown people negatively review bots more than humans, even when the service provided was identical. A whopping 70% of users still say they'd pick a human over a chat bot, which makes sense when 60% of users

say bots don't even understand what they're asking to begin with. 65% of consumers think humans are better at understanding complex problems, and 54% said humans were better at solving their problems in a single call or support session. It's just better to talk to a human being, who you know understands the situation and will at least give a polite chuckle

when you crack a lukewarm joke. Both options guaranteed to be done. to be dead inside. Of course, food delivery apps are among the worst of all these, and not just because of poorly automated customer service for my misdelivered ham fries. DoorDash and Grubhub have more hidden fees than a Faustian bargain. In 2024, the FTC hit Grubhub for running what a former executive had called a pricing shell game, hiding delivery charges behind misleading labels like service fee or small order fee. These were junk fees in disguise, and Grubhub had to cough up $25 million to settle

that case. And they're not alone. Uber Eats was found to have quietly marked up menu prices above what the restaurant actually charges, pocketing the difference for themselves while still charging restaurants high commissions. And in June, DoorDash got slapped by Canada's antitrust watchdog for luring customers with low prices, then slamming them with surprise. fees at checkout. On top of all that, like a thin slice of tomato I absolutely did not ask for. These apps bundle fees into vague line items you have to carefully read to make sure you're not getting hit with a bag fee or something. Even when you demand a refund, which is supposed to be one of the easier processes in customer service, these apps find a way to make it everyone

else's problem. Sure, you might get your money back if something goes wrong. However, the platform usually makes the restaurant pay the refund instead of covering it themselves. And in some cases, the place you thought you ordered from had no idea you were ordering. Grubhub at one point listed over 300,000 restaurants without their consent, resulting in customers ordering items that were out of stock or no longer even on the menu. And the restaurants getting blamed for Grubhubhub's kichanery, that's chicanery in the kitchen, Much like the hidden fees, these companies will routinely hide legalese that absolves them from all responsibility within lengthy terms of service documents that every single person on planet Earth scrolls through without reading. And it's not just because we're lazy, even though this entire video is about how we're carving ourselves up like the greed, murder, and seven, for the sake of not having to drive all the way to publics for my mic's hard.

We're not lazy. We all know the deal here. We've all accepted it blindly, and for some reason, terms of services are everywhere and impossibly long. And because no one actually reads those things, companies sneak in bizarre clauses. To prove that point, one study found that students who signed up for a fake social network with a long TOS had to agree to give the company their future firstborn children, and only a quarter of them even read it.

Real-world TOS agreements haven't become that egregious yet, but they're routinely used to trick customers into granting companies' privileges they are not entitled to in any way. The on-demand service handy, which I was disappointed to learn is only a house cleaning service, once tried to make its customers pay for future tax bills if their workers were ever legally reclassified from independent contractors to employees. So if you don't read carefully, you might find yourself as a tax co-signer on a bunch of labor disputes, which reminds me, while these apps are a nightmare for us,

the customer, they are even more of a nightmare for the worker. It's their nightmare after all. We're just guest starring in them. So that's the next thing we're going to talk about. Oh, snap! Speaking of entitlement, a drone just dropped the guy in here, he tossed a package at me, and the drone grab the guy and left. Oh, the future is amazing. But hey, it's finally here. This is not what I ordered. But it could be what you ordered.

Enjoy even more commercials. While I yell at a chatbot or something, I don't know. Friends and well-wishers, welcome to Katie's Corner. It's the part of the show where we take a deep breath. Slow down. maybe eat some string cheese and almonds and think about how we can bring some mindfulness and quietude into our lives. For me, that is with the Calm app. It helps me center myself after a long day in the news field and get back in touch with my breath. Their guided meditations

help me work through anxiety and stress and boost focus. Plus, their sleep stories are exactly what I need when I need to clear my head of the news and get to snoozing. Seriously, though, I've been using the call map for a very long time. One of my favorite sleep stories is the Matthew McConaughey one. I'm like, hey, Matthew, want to read me a bedtime story? And he's like, all right, all right, all right. Okay. Anyway, plus, I need a distraction so I don't eat any more string cheese and almonds.

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Just head to ridge.com and use code SMN, and you're all set. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support our shell and tell them we sent you! You find out in the fourth season finale that Jerry's dad's wallet was just in Jerry's couch the whole time. Sitcoms, you know? Talk to a person, human. Cody want human. Hi, hey, okay.

Welcome back from those ads. I hope they showed you all kinds of ways. you can torment your fellow man by smashing that next day delivery button. Speaking of which, it's time to talk about the other side of the equation. The workers. Forced henchmen, you could say. Here in America, we don't really have any choice except to work for the bad guys. But somehow, with worse benefits than in the movies,

Lafou would have presumably been invited to Gaston's forced marriage wedding, but not a single Amazon driver was granted access to Jeff Bezos's Oceanside Nupsuit. Curious, companies treat the humans doing the actual work behind all this convenience worse than carnival goldfish. I at least had the decency to cry when my carnie fish died. RIP, Cody, too. So just to start, many DoorDash drivers are lured in by earnings estimates that are about as honest as Elon Musk's robot demonstration. robot demonstrations. DoorDash recently paid a $16 million settlement after the company was caught misappropriating tips, specifically by using them to subsidize base pay instead of actually

giving them to the drivers. So if a driver was guaranteed $10 for a delivery and you tip $3, DoorDash would pay the driver $7 plus your $3, meaning your tip covered part of DoorDash's contribution. You were actually tipping DoorDash the corporation. And of course, most drivers are labeled independent contractors, which means they receive no benefits, no protections, no health care, and no guaranteed income. What might you need protections for? I don't know, the occasional attack by an angry customer

wielding a tire iron because their chicken wings didn't derive. That actually happened. Specifically, a Milwaukee driver had to cancel a delivery because her phone lost service, which angered the customer who could still see her car on the app. And so that customer used the app to follow her home and smash up her car, resulting in $10,000 in damages and one imagines no vehicle to do her job with.

Just call a lift! Seven stops away. Supposedly! Anyway, this dehumanizing system plays perfectly into these companies' promise, of an inhuman delivery speed. We're in an on-demand economy now, baby, and we want our shit today!

Between 2015 and 2017, Google searches for same-day shipping jumped 120%. But promises of speedy same-day delivery don't happen by magic. They're built on exploiting human workers, which is a kind of magic, I guess. A New York Times investigation shows that brands farm out hiring to staffing agencies, to fulfill same-day shipping demands.

Those agencies often recruit undocumented migrants desperate for work, but these workers are routinely abused with long hours and unsafe working conditions. Then the staffing agencies cut corners, shorting wages, skipping payroll taxes, and writing paychecks that bounce because the agency's accounts don't have the funds. And because the warehouse labor is technically being performed by employees

on the staffing agency's books, the name brand companies get to do that, get to dodge direct legal responsibility for any of the, ah, let's call them, employer shenanigans. Or you know what? Crimes. When workers for style companies, Allo Yoga, and Bella Plus Canvas organized to demand fair pay and treatment, the brands simply switched to using a different staffing agency, leaving the original workers without a job entirely. So just zero power to the worker, opposite of power, middlemen, hiring middlemen, hiring middlemen.

Everyone laundering human suffering so the end user can shelter themselves in plausible deniability. So the customers are frustrated and the workers are frustrated. In other words, it's miserable people interacting with other miserable people, all trapped in an economy where every transaction has a middleman skimming off the top like a digital parasite. It's what economists call neo-feudalism. Tech platform lords collecting rent while delivery driver's serfs break their backs hauling your pad tie through traffic But at least in old tiny feudalism the serfs got to keep the land they lived on

Yes, that's right. I'm being nostalgic for regular feudalism Cody Dearest Newspapa, you're probably saying in that weird voice of your Dearest Newspapa, there it is, that's what you sound like Why don't workers just sue these companies into oblivion? Well, my love, A lawsuit in this space is like a coyote on rocket skates, doomed to fail, and infested with desert fleas. Convenience apps like Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash collect legal troubles like their Laboo Boo Boo Dolls. They're constantly getting hit with lawsuits over stolen tips, wage theft,

or unsafe conditions. For example, that $16 million door dash stolen tips settlement was split between 60,000 drivers. And while the payouts varied based on how many deliveries each one made, that's an average of $279 per worker. Uber and Lyft have thrown billions at avoiding liability, because they have billions to spare. In 2024, both companies settled a lawsuit for a total of $328 million over misclassification and wage theft claims in New York. But nothing about the work conditions that resulted in those payouts actually changed. Employees are still classified as independent contractors, even when states like California try to sue on behalf of drivers. As of the writing of this episode, Smiling Gavin Newsom signed a bill giving California's gig drivers

the right to collectively bargain, meaning Uber and Lyft drivers can now negotiate wages and benefits as a group. But companies like Uber and Lyft drag out these court battles, like your one weird friend who insists on finishing monopoly. The point is, as we've discussed in the past, lawsuits are just another cost of doing business. Like, people should still try. But it's factored into their budgets, doesn't really translate into much money for the worker, and doesn't seem to change much of anything. Lawsuits! The other, other gig economy!

It's weird, because we used to know how to deal with situations like this. Lawsuits and regulations used to actually matter. Back in the early 20th century, new industries held a tremendous power. Railroads dictated shipping terms. Alexander Graham Bell wanted to own every phone call in America, and RCA tried to hog the radio waves. The government actually stepped in to break up monopolies and regulate rates to make sure consumers had at least some protection

against the rise of corporate America. For a while, the balance kind of worked, We had strong unions, robust public agencies, and most conflicts played out in actual courts instead of arbitrations in corporate back rooms. But then, well, the 1980s rolled around. Oh, God, it's him again, the freaking Kimmy Gibbler of Presidents. Ronald Reagan showed up and spun the very idea of government regulation as a bad thing. Public services got sold off to the private sector.

prisons, schools, even some of the damn firefighters, and along with that came the spread of arbitration as a liability loophole. Arbitration is when a matter gets settled outside of the courtroom. This allows corporations to avoid public scrutiny and class action lawsuits and implement other tactics that give them the upper hand. In 1995, the Supreme Court decided that arbitration requirements could be stuck into consumer contracts like terms of service. Even if a company was breaking the law like Johnny Cage testing his might, you might still end up in arbitration instead of a courtroom. And in the decades since, the court has doubled and tripled down on arbitration as though the very concept of corporate accountability shot its parents in crime alley, the worst alley, unless you need money. Or drugs. Buried arbitration clauses hidden within those boring walls of text you never read before hitting I agree, became corporate superweapons.

A few elite lawyers rewrote the rules so that what started as a statute to resolve contract disputes between companies is now a national policy stripping rights from workers and consumers, all with zero public oversight. Corporations like Amazon, Apple, and Google effectively write their own laws via terms of service. Amazon alone has 2.5 million,

third-party sellers who must play by its rules, pay a laundry list of fees to compete against Amazon's own products, and agree to arbitration if they want to complain. So Amazon gets to be both the referee and the player, while everyone else fights over scraps. Lyft's own 2019 public safety report admitted there were over 4,000 sexual assaults reported on its platform in just three years. And that's only the reported cases. A lot of those victims were forced into arbitration before they could even file a lawsuit demanding changes that should have been built into the system from the start. Thankfully, they have since ended forced arbitration agreements for sexual assault, probably because that pissed everybody off. You got terms of served. So yeah, it's all bad,

seemingly evil at times. But I guess the reason we put up with all of this and why we all haven't deleted Amazon, DoorDash, and Lyft several Lichen moon cycles ago is because they are really convenient, right? I think most people would agree that it's easier this way and hard to think about going back. We can get Taco Bell delivered now. That never used to be the case. People used to have to have to drunk drive for that. So I guess that's, that is one good thing that we got rid of. And I think the big transition point was, of course, the height of the pandemic. During that time, these companies weren't just desired, but necessary, and for some, life-saving.

Even now, there are people with disabilities that rely on this stuff. For the elderly, people with chronic health or mobility issues, or anyone without reliable transportation, visiting a food pantry can be very difficult. At the beginning of COVID, anti-hunger organizations worked quickly to tackle this issue, and companies like DoorDash stepped up with programs like Project Dash. By the end of 2022, more than 300 nonprofit partners were using it to deliver food to people who couldn't get it on their own. That makes a measurable difference. For instance, in Detroit, about a third of people live more than a mile from an actual grocery store.

A University of Michigan study found that these grocery delivery services actually helped people who've had the hardest time getting food, especially those relying on nutrition assistance or dealing with mobility issues. The point is that I don't think we should, like, abolish these things, but try to make them better, especially for people who actually need them beyond just the convenience aspects of them. And not every convenience business is a soulless cash grab. Some of them actually solve real problems, like Go Go Grandparent, which is an on-demand service for people who can't or don't want to, fiddle with a multitude of apps on a smartphone. You just call a number, on a phone, which for our younger viewers is what your phone used to be for, and they will handle rides, groceries, even meals, all without downloading a single app,

which is helpful if you're a senior, if you're blind, or if you just drop your phone in an icy machine. But you may notice that even that service only exists to ease the burden of navigating all the apps. It adds a middleman to the mass of middlemen, or maybe a collection of middlemen is called a murder. Again, not saying we should abolish all of these, but I can argue that these convenience apps aren't actually that much more convenient or cheap. I mean, we all know this, right? Having Taco Bell delivered while saving you and pedestrians a highly irresponsible and a legal drunk drive, it's going to triple what you pay, assuming you tip well, which you fucking should. Going back to that study around Detroit, the more transportation challenges their residents faced, the more likely they were to see the cost of online grocery delivery as a barrier.

This was particularly true for those with significant transportation issues, as 69% of them cited cost as a major obstacle, compared to 50% of people with fewer issues and only 37% of those with no challenges. So the people who need it most can afford it the least, which is basically the American healthcare system, but for groceries. I could also argue that food is a part of health care, actually. Water too, but that's another episode. And a survey by the American Foundation for the Blind found that many blind or low vision users were locked out of these benefits because the apps themselves weren't accessible, thanks to design choices that didn't account for disabilities.

In other words, these apps would be good for people with disabilities or a lack of transportation if they were actually made for those people. But they aren't. There's a fundamental problem with all these so-called convenience apps. You can never get something cheap, fast, and good. You only ever get maybe, too. Food delivery apps, fast and decent,

but outrageously expensive. Amazon is fast and cheap, but there's no oversight, so you could end up with something wildly different than what you thought you ordered. Also, its very existence is a blight on the human world, which is a bit of a setback. Not that it stopped us before. That's the dirty secret. Convenience always starts great until reality sets in. For instance, let's go back to streaming. Netflix was once The Golden Child, no doubt offering The Golden Child.

In 2008, it cost a few bucks a month. for no commercials and deals with all the big studios. So you had brand new blockbusters right next to old classics. They didn't even care if you shared your password. Over time, people cut cable for Netflix, which inspired 10 more streaming apps to sprout up. Amazon threw in Prime Video as a free bonus, and suddenly, every company was clawing for screen space. Studios wanted their own slice of streaming pie, which is how we got Peacock, Disney Plus, HBO, Max Max HBO, Paramount Plus, and so on.

Quivvy was there, briefly. And throughout all this time, Netflix kept changing the deal. 2011 saw them change pricing, so streaming and getting physical DVDs were separate tiers. In 2014, they raised the price by another $2 a month. After all, since everyone was competing, holding on to their IP, Netflix has to start making original shows too. Fast forward to 2025 and Netflix's basic plan has been completely phased out. Their standard plan that started in 2013 at 999 is now 1799. Their premium plan also climbed from 1199 to 2499.

Or if you'd like, you can pay 799 for the pleasure of their standard with ads, which comes to around five minutes of ads per hour. Prime video is still technically included with Prime, but now you get ads unless you cough up extra for ad-free viewing. Hulu, Disney Plus, and HBO have all implemented similar tiers where the privilege of not watching commercials costs more collectively than Cable ever did. Because movies and TV costs money to make!

These companies promised way more than they could deliver. You simply can't offer people hundreds of movies for a few bucks. That was never gonna happen. They basically lied to disrupt an entire functioning industry and replaced it with something worse. And the illusions are only getting bolder. The next frontier of easy and convenient is AI. Pitched by every tech company as the ultimate time saver.

We got an AI actress now! Entire movies will be AI and it won't cost a thing, except for all the money it'll cost. if only in the lawsuit. It's just unsustainable. We have companies who want to cut out workers entirely, and customers who want really, really convenient services for cheap and also good.

You see how none of that really meshes? You know, at least until robots, I guess. And then we won't have to pay them, which will be good because no one will have money because the robots took the jobs. Again, none of it really meshes. meshes. The pieces don't really fit together. It's weird to just say, we shouldn't do a lot of this, but we shouldn't do a lot of this because there are consequences beyond what we've already

talked about. Consequences to our society that are perhaps negative. Hold that thought. Finally, a person. Oh my God. Hell hi. Hi. Hi, this is Cody, the man. I'm the human man. I need to, I'm just going to take this. Who knows? When I'll get. to talk to another person again. I'm so glad you're a person. I'm yelling, but please stay on the line. Enjoy these ads, which are also automated. I have no idea what they're going to be. Did you, no, you didn't hang up. Okay, I'm sorry. I'm still speaking very loudly. I'm so excited. If you've ever been in the market for a new home, you know home shopping can be a lot. There's so much you don't know and so much you need to know. What are the neighborhoods like?

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It's October, and you know what that means? Vigo Mortensen's birthday. And once you're done celebrating that, Pluto TV has all the scares. All for free, with ghoulish horror movies, some of which are Vigo-related, like paranormal activity, the ring, scream, Vigo the Carpathian does Dallas, a perfect mortar. You know he actually broke two toes kicking the orc helmet, the movie. 28 days later, not 28 days, starring Sandra Bullock and Vigo Mortensen.

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Woo-hoo! Pluto TV! Stream now. Pay never? That's weird. Someone must have thrown my phone on the floor and stepped on her a bunch of times. Hi again!

Just got off the phone with the customer service person who assured me that they do not care whether I live or die, which I totally get. So we've been talking about the convenience app industry, like ubers and lifts and Netsflicks and Amazon's and the others, and how they aren't really very cheap or really that convenient. Like, do we really need to pay double to have a miserable person bring us the wrong order from Chili's? I mean, I do, but does everybody, I don't know.

The point here isn't to abolish this stuff or refuse technological progress. But if we're paying a lot for all of it, can't that money go to the workers? Or to make them good? Ultimately, that's the problem. These apps, which, as we keep saying, are middlemen with zero oversight or accountability, they simply don't deserve to take the majority of the money we're paying them. Jeff Bezos should not be a zillionaire for simply hosting other people's stores on his web page. He runs a shipping logistics company, and that's not nothing.

But it's not going to space money. The creator of those squid games should not be struggling to get paid. Why does Netflix need that money? So they can afford to put out six episodes of Stranger Things every four years? There's clearly an imbalance between the workers and the corporations and the customers, where these services only really serve the executives. And that's a whole other thing I can't really solve here, at least not without renting a bunch of pitchforks.

I hear there's a good app for that, though. It's called fork. Like a four and then a K. Fork! We round up the mob. before you. But even if we did solve all the legal and ethical problems with these apps, we really need to ask ourselves if these conveniences are something we actually should have and use all the time.

I don't want to sound like an old guy because I'm very young and spry, but we're so goddamn isolated from each other. And one of the things these apps do that we don't really think about enough is create this weird digital wall between workers and customers. more than the wall we already had. Like fast food joints figured out decades ago that they could shove a speaker box between you and the cashier,

both for the sake of efficiency and so you don't have to look them in the eye while you order the family bundle with extra slop for just yourself. But the apps have perfected it so that the dehumanization is now total. Your delivery driver is just a dot on a map. If your order's wrong, you don't talk to a person.

You tap a little report button in the app. You don't even have to see the human being you are complaining about. You go to an Airbnb, and most of the time, the owner isn't even there. You just open a lockbox. It's class isolation, right? These apps don't just offer convenience, but an isolation from workers. You can have someone buy your groceries and leave them at your door without ever speaking to them. Tip them a few measly bucks without seeing the sadness on their face.

If you think they did something wrong, well, you can use your ring camera to spy on and report them or turn them into content. Get a person fired without them ever seeing your face, without exchanging a single word with them. Miserable people interacting with other miserable people with the added bonus of total dehumanization thanks to never having to see or speak to them. All in the name of this futurist convenience that isn't really that convenient and most importantly, not really that futuristic either. You ever hear of an automat? It was a wall of doors where you'd put in coins and could take out a meal. It was in the movie Dark City. You love that movie. You love, you love Dark City. They sort of died out in part because the technology at the time couldn't adjust to price changes. But now that everything is digital, some people are bringing it back.

But this new version doesn't take coins. Your order is placed and paid for on your smartphone. A text when it's ready. Scan your phone. Scan it right there. Yeah, it'll tell you which locker to go to. And then the door open. The thing about the automat is that it was always a gimmick to create the illusion of the future, when the reality is that there were a bunch of people behind that wall constantly stalking those cubbies.

And that is exactly what these new automats are, too. Just three employees can serve 300 people. Wow, just three employees to serve 300 people. 300 people. I wonder who's benefiting from that. See, that's the thing. It's all just an automat. Everything we've talked about. It's the illusion of an advanced Jetson's future. It's actually just a bunch of low-paid people behind the scenes. Fewer workers handling more people at the cost of the worker. And it's all being spearheaded by people like Elon Musk, a guy who compares human beings to NPCs in a video game.

You know, they're all the people you run over with minivans in GTA. And if Musk sees people as empty shells programmed to populate a world built for him, how do you think he views the workers making it all run? At a Wii robot event, Musk showed off his Tesla Optimus robots supposedly demonstrating advanced AI capabilities like chatting with guests, pouring drinks, and dancing. But the robots were being remotely controlled by Musk's employees the entire time. In one video, the guy behind an optimist robot humorously admitted it was assisted by a human and not fully autonomous. But Tesla didn't openly disclose this

during Musk's presentation. Again, automats. The human workers were effectively invisible, serving as the engine under the hood of Musk's self-driving robot. They weren't even worth a because again, to him, they're just NPCs. Grand Theft Automat! Like most things, Musk invents, he didn't actually come up with this grift. He can't even grift originally. It's basically a version of the mechanical Turk. Back in the 1770s, Wolfgang von Kempelan made a splash

with a chess automaton that could play an entire game of chess while dressed like a German maniac. He'd even pop it open to show off its mechanical innards. The only thing was, the Mechanical Turk was just a guy in a robot costume. Cut to now, and that hasn't really changed. Amazon actually runs a platform with the same name. Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which launched in 2005 and lets people and companies farm out tiny online tasks that actually require human judgment. And the whole system is designed to mimic artificial intelligence so you don't have to think about the human workers you are exploiting. Early on, Jeff Bezos even referred

to the dehumanized workers behind the scenes as artificial artificial intelligence. The basic idea is that a user can post a task to M-Turk and then set a price for that task, sometimes as low as one cent. Then workers get to decide which tasks to accept, many of which are incredibly fucked up. Five years ago, Gizmodo surveyed over a thousand workers about being paid less than a dollar to watch videos of botched surgeries, mail their underwear, take photos of their feet, or even draw pictures of their genitals. One worker claimed they were paid 50 cents to remember the most painful memory of their lives, adding, it fucked me up for the entire day. In some cases, the workers don't get paid at all. Requestors can reject work for basically no reason and still

keep the data, leaving workers screwed. One person said they completed 200 microjobs on M-Turk, only to have them all mass-rejected, tanking their approval rating and future potential earnings. Some of the Gizmodo survey respondents called M-Turk a godsend because they were disabled or laid off and couldn't hold a traditional job. But even the positive stories came with qualifiers. As one worker said, I know I'm not making a livable wage doing this, but that's okay. It's a heck of a lot better than nothing. All right, that's another great company slogan. Amazon, better than Eternal Darkness. And of course, the AI era is no different. Now, instead of paying people pennies to draw dicks for research, Silicon Valley is hiring armies of invisible

workers to make their AIs look like magic. Google has been quite hiring thousands of people to moderate and correct its AI output, which often involves drinking the worst swill the internet has to offer. This includes reviewing medical misinformation hallucinated by Google's Gemini or prompts for hardcore porn. All of this, so you never see a Lovecraftian star spawn when you ask Gemini about pizza toppings. The deadlines are brutal, the pay is low, and the workers themselves say the pressure leaves them anxious and disillusioned at best and downright traumatized at worst. And as you may have guessed,

if you've been following along at home with your decode rings, these workers aren't Google employees reaping the benefits that come with employment at a giant tech company. They're independent contractors employed through product engineering firms whose entire job is to make sure stuff like Google's AI chat bot work as intended. Open AI does a similar thing with chat GPT,

using workers in Kenya who get $2 an hour to make sure the AI doesn't make you a cursed greeting card like the absolutely real Batman and Robin rape fantasy that some unfortunate person was paid far too little to grade. In other words, much of the learning these programs do is actually performed by underpaid humans. It's all still a guy dressed like a chess robot. As one researcher put it, AI isn't magic,

It's a pyramid scheme of human labor. At the top, you have billionaires boasting about their robots. At the bottom, you have an underpaid workforce getting PTSD from dealing with images of torture, hate speech, and sexual violence, until the output looks good enough for a Coke commercial. Side note, Coca-Cola's current slogan is literally

real magic. Real tragic. Got them. In other words, it's spoilers, snowpiercer. Little hands in the machine. Congratulations, society, you did a snowpiercer. What we're actually talking about in all of this is an industry that's automated humans

like they were cogs. That's actually it. All these apps serve the same way as an automat, a wall between the customer and the scores of miserable people being put on these forced loops of labor. It's that tweet about a Rube Goldberg of human suffering. That's really what we've created. People in warehouses running around to pack boxes

to get on a truck where a driver speeds off among the many other drivers all getting your shit to you while you watch on a little screen as if it's all happening in this magical, contrapulous Willy Wonka world. Except it's not. The robots and drones that were supposed to be doing this stuff haven't been invented yet.

So in the meantime, we're just using poor people as a placeholder, or oompa-lumpas actually, I guess it is just like Willy Wonka. The point is, what? The fuck. Just a suggestion, but maybe we don't get to pretend the world is automated until we actually automate it. Again, not saying we have to abolish all this stuff, but people aren't robots. So let's not treat them that way, no matter how convenient it feels to us.

The cost is not worth it. Oh, hell yeah! It was all worth it! It's finally arrived! It's a guitar pick. For those of you listening, it's a large box with a tiny guitar. My gosh, look at that! Oh! Maybe the future is so bright we gotta be wearing shades.

You know what? I'm actually feeling pretty inspired. I think this calls for a shoddy tune. Hey, Spotify, write an inspirational song about my misdelivered ham fries. A good song. Prompt equals... Ham fries. Good song. Best song. Not too long. King Friday. Yeah. King Friday.

King Friday with large breasts and Darth Vader as a bird. Can you even if imagine that world? He'd say things like, Mallard Finch speak with you. Or, uh, I'm altering the deal. Osprey, I don't falterkey it any feather. Yeah. Uh, I find your lack of feather dis-cherpwing? No, I'm your feather. It sure seems like there's a lot of feather stuff that's easy, I guess.

Okay, here's some tune. Okay, well, just roll the prompter back. to where it says song about my misdelivered ham fries a good song prompt equals ham fries good song

best song not too long King Friday yeah King Friday King Friday with large breasts and Darth Vader as a bird. Can you even imagine that world? He'd say things like Mallard,

Finch, beak with you, ah, or uh. I'm altering the deal, Osprey, I don't Don't falter key at any feather, yeah. Oh, I find your lack of feather. This chirp wing, no, I am your feather. It sure seems like there's a lot of feather stuff that's easy, I guess. Okay, here's some twos.

Some to Ooh. Take that you a piece of Take that you, piece of shit. Well, that was weird. Thanks for watching. Not the whole episode.

The whole episode was like, it was coherent and stuff. But thanks for sticking around for that. Look at you watching this and liking and subscribing. So thank you so much for doing that. And check out our podcast, even more news. It's on this channel twice a week. It's out there on podcast land twice a week. You can listen to this show, Some More News, as a podcast.

You can do so many things. Oh, you can do so much with your time. But most importantly, you can go to patreon.com. That's some more news. That's where a Patreon is. We've also got merch. You saw it in the episode. Oh my God, you can see it even more now.

It's the shirt from the episode. It's not the only shirt we have. So. And if it were, well, that would be a problem, actually. We would want to get more stuff. I think this is it.