#uber a

[catchymemes]

#tweet #twitter #uber #funny #lol #haha #humor #meme #memes #introverts

[mugentakeda]

I feel like modern au zuko can drive, is very good at it, has his license, and will get you where you need to go but like. with very dangerous efficiency. he drives like Evel Knievel. he drives like a bat out of hell. he whips the wheel hard as fuck and you will see Jesus even if the drive is from your house to the corner store. his car is used and like 10 years old but she is strong and loyal just like her master and wont break down for anything. she'll tear over anything in her path. zuko has given iroh so many mini heart attacks while driving him around (<- because iroh does NOT have his license). worst of all is that zuko does NOT talk or road rage ever when he drives he's DEAD SILENT and simply blasts the radio. and its always either terrifying Chinese opera or crazy shit like Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd

#zuko is the gaangs free of charge Uber driver but he's not gonna do it without making them suffer a little bit. #he drives a dinky cigarette car but like I said she is strong and he also cleans her regularly so theres that. #and he's silent like I said so whenever the gaang is screeching at him that they're gonna crash he simply does not react. Its an experience #atla

[pangur-and-grim]

I’m too gullible with people. I’ll have encounters and be like “aw they seemed nice ☺️” and then everyone around me will be like NONONONONO THAT WAS THE DEVIL!!!!!!!

[retrogamingblog2]

#pokemon #nintendo #anime #gaming #video games #funny #lol #humor #meme #drake #hoppip #drones #ai #tech #technology #door dash #uber eats #anipoke #pokeani #retro #gameboy #retrogaming

[katsuma6]

Hi, your Uber is here.

#cats #cats of tumblr #uber driver

[sinlizards]

Witch of Miracles

#umineko #bernkastel #umineko when they cry #my art #fan art #undescribed #been DEAD just uber busy and also kinda lost my drive for art but im working my way back

[sah-ruh]

#drunk uber selfie #✨

[crawley-fell]

Crowley, you can't do 90 miles per hour in Central London.

#getting out of your uber at 3am after trying not to throw up for the past 45 minutes #good omens #aziraphale #gomens #good omens gifs #michael sheen #good omens 2 #usersugar #userlorelei #tsusermels #dailyineffablehusbands #my gifs

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Lies, damned lies, and Uber

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in PHOENIX (Changing Hands, Feb 29) then Tucson (Mar 10-11), San Francisco (Mar 13), and more!

Uber lies about everything, especially money. Oh, and labour. Especially labour. And geometry. Especially geometry! But especially especially money. They constantly lie about money.

Uber are virtuosos of mendacity, but in Toronto, the company has attained a heretofore unseen hat-trick: they told a single lie that is dramatically, materially untruthful about money, labour and geometry! It's an achievement for the ages.

Here's how they did it.

For several decades, Toronto has been clobbered by the misrule of a series of far-right, clownish mayors. This was the result of former Ontario Premier Mike Harris's great gerrymander of 1998, when the city of Toronto was amalgamated with its car-dependent suburbs. This set the tone for the next quarter-century, as these outlying regions – utterly dependent on Toronto for core economic activity and massive subsidies to pay the unsustainable utility and infrastructure bills for sprawling neighborhoods of single-family homes – proceeded to gut the city they relied on.

These "conservative" mayors – the philanderer, the crackhead, the sexual predator – turned the city into a corporate playground, swapping public housing and rent controls for out-of-control real-estate speculation and trading out some of the world's best transit for total car-dependency. As part of that decay, the city rolled out the red carpet for Uber, allowing the company to put as many unlicensed taxis as they wanted on the city's streets.

Now, it's hard to overstate the dire traffic situation in Toronto. Years of neglect and underinvestment in both the roads and the transit system have left both in a state of near collapse and it's not uncommon for multiple, consecutive main arteries to shut down without notice for weeks, months, or, in a few cases, years. The proliferation of Ubers on the road – driven by desperate people trying to survive the city's cost-of-living catastrophe – has only exacerbated this problem.

Uber, of course, would dispute this. The company insists – despite all common sense and peer-reviewed research – that adding more cars to the streets alleviates traffic. This is easily disproved: there just isn't any way to swap buses, streetcars, and subways for cars. The road space needed for all those single-occupancy cars pushes everything further apart, which means we need more cars, which means more roads, which means more distance between things, and so on.

It is an undeniable fact that geometry hates cars. But geometry loathes Uber. Because Ubers have all the problems of single-occupancy vehicles, and then they have the separate problem that they just end up circling idly around the city's streets, waiting for a rider. The more Ubers there are on the road, the longer each car ends up waiting for a passenger:

https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Uber-Lyft-San-Francisco-pros-cons-ride-hailing-13841277.php

Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After years of bumbling-to-sinister municipal rule, Toronto finally reclaimed its political power and voted in a new mayor, Olivia Chow, a progressive of long tenure and great standing (I used to ring doorbells for her when she was campaigning for her city council seat). Mayor Chow announced that she was going to reclaim the city's prerogative to limit the number of Ubers on the road, ending the period of Uber's "self-regulation."

Uber, naturally, lost its shit. The company claims to be more than a (geometrically impossible) provider of convenient transportation for Torontonians, but also a provider of good jobs for working people. And to prove it, the company has promised to pay its drivers "120% of minimum wage." As I write for Ricochet, that's a whopper, even by Uber's standards:

https://ricochet.media/en/4039/uber-is-lying-again-the-company-has-no-intention-of-paying-drivers-a-living-wage

Here's the thing: Uber is only proposing to pay 120% of the minimum wage while drivers have a passenger in the vehicle. And with the number of vehicles Uber wants on the road, most drivers will be earning nothing most of the time. Factor in that unpaid time, as well as expenses for vehicles, and the average Toronto Uber driver stands to make $2.50 per hour (Canadian):

https://ridefair.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Legislated-Poverty.pdf

Now, Uber's told a lot of lies over the years. Right from the start, the company implicitly lied about what it cost to provide an Uber. For its first 12 years, Uber lost $0.41 on every dollar it brought in, lighting tens of billions in investment capital provided by the Saudi royals on fire in an effort to bankrupt rival transportation firms and disinvestment in municipal transit.

Uber then lied to retail investors about the business-case for buying its stock so that the House of Saud and other early investors could unload their stock. Uber claimed that they were on the verge of producing a self-driving car that would allow them to get rid of drivers, zero out their wage bill, and finally turn a profit. The company spent $2.5b on this, making it the most expensive Big Store in the history of cons:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/infighting-busywork-missed-warnings-how-uber-wasted-2-5-billion-on-self-driving-cars

After years, Uber produced a "self-driving car" that could travel one half of one American mile before experiencing a potentially lethal collision. Uber quietly paid another company $400m to take this disaster off its hands:

https://www.economist.com/business/2020/12/10/why-is-uber-selling-its-autonomous-vehicle-division

The self-driving car lie was tied up in another lie – that somehow, automation could triumph over geometry. Robocabs, we were told, would travel in formations so tight that they would finally end the Red Queen's Race of more cars – more roads – more distance – more cars. That lie wormed its way into the company's IPO prospectus, which promised retail investors that profitability lay in replacing every journey – by car, cab, bike, bus, tram or train – with an Uber ride:

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1RN2SK/

The company has been bleeding out money ever since – though you wouldn't know it by looking at its investor disclosures. Every quarter, Uber trumpets that it has finally become profitable, and every quarter, Hubert Horan dissects its balance sheets to find the accounting trick the company thought of this time. There was one quarter where Uber declared profitability by marking up the value of stock it held in Uber-like companies in other countries.

How did it get this stock? Well, Uber tried to run a business in those countries and it was such a total disaster that they had to flee the country, selling their business to a failing domestic competitor in exchange for stock in its collapsing business. Naturally, there's no market for this stock, which, in Uber-land, means you can assign any value you want to it. So that one quarter, Uber just asserted that the stock had shot up in value and voila, profit!

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/02/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-twenty-nine-despite-massive-price-increases-uber-losses-top-31-billion.html

But all of those lies are as nothing to the whopper that Uber is trying to sell to Torontonians by blanketing the city in ads: the lie that by paying drivers $2.50/hour to fill the streets with more single-occupancy cars, they will turn a profit, reduce the city's traffic, and provide good jobs. Uber says it can vanquish geometry, economics and working poverty with the awesome power of narrative.

In other words, it's taking Toronto for a bunch of suckers.

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/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

Image: Rob Sinclair (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Night_skyline_of_Toronto_May_2009.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #uber #hubert horan #fraud #toronto #geometry hates cars #urbanism #ontpoli #olivia chow #self-regulation #transport #urban planning #taxis #transit #urban theory #labor #algorithmic wage discrimination #veena dubal

[whirlybirbs]

please god give me "[ CLING ]: having finally been reunited, the sender pulls the receiver into a tight, overwhelmingly relieved embrace, clinging to them and burying their face in their shoulder" with astarion and gale.

┊ astarion ancunín + f!tav!reader┊ CLING

His voice is a near shriek — full of irritation.

"What is wrong with you, hm?!"

"Astarion, I am not in the mood—"

"Oh, well pardon me, my dear lady," comes the snarl of a snarked jest as he follows hot on your trail, "Had I known you weren't in the mood, I would simply have kept my mouth shut and let you die!"

"I had it handled!" you fire back, throwing your hands in the starry, night air and very much ignoring the inquisitive looks from the rest of camp. Astarion does not let up, in fact he jogs to follow more closely than before — right on your boot heels.

"He had a knife to your throat!"

"Wouldn't be the first time that's happened!"

"God, you are the most stubborn woman I have ever met—"

You finally reach your tent and slam your pack down on your makeshift vanity. Inside, the stolen wares rattle amongst pinched gold and silver. A few scrolls, a few potions; enough to get you and your rag-tag team through the next few days on the road.

You'd embarked into the town at sundown, with Astarion by your side, to pull a few old tricks. You're not a stranger to the silver-tongued methods of a thief. A few plucked lute strings, a few batted eyes. Usually, it's quick work. But, tonight you'd met a bit of resistance behind the town's tavern.

At the edge of camp, it's darker. The moon is hung half-full in the sky, and you gather your matches lighter to ignite your trusty lamp. However, the moment you move to flick the ignition, there's a hand on yours.

"Will you listen to me?"

"I told you," you huff haughtily, "I'm not in the mood, Astarion—"

Suddenly, he slaps the pack of matches from your hands.

It hits the ground a few feet away.

You look up at him, brow wrinkled in shock and confusion.

"...Rude..."

His face is set in a firm frown. And then, suddenly, he's pulling you into an embrace that is as unpracticed as it is rough. Your arms are cramped to your sides as the vampire presses his face hard into the crook of your shoulder. You can feel him huff, and then soften slightly.

Your attitude melts away.

"Don't do that again," comes a quiet, desperate utterance. You swear it will cling to your throat forever more; the sound of his true intentions, "As much as I hate to admit it, you've grown on me."

Your eyes slip shut. "...I'm sorry."

He scoffs. His nose, cold and delicate, brushes the skin of your throat.

Astarion can feel the thrum of life beneath your skin there; a familiar feeling. His heart pangs in want. He knows your scent best — comforting. Home. Even if you aren't entirely aware of it.

...But, he'll keep that to himself for now.

And maybe forever.

┊ gale dekarios + tav!reader ┊ CLING

It's a long trek back to camp — and by morning, you've never been happier to smell the last embers of a fire that's burnt noon and night.

Morning rays, fresh from the dawn, spill over the horizon as you meander into the camp. There's dew on your boots and blood in your hair. The gash along your side has long since coagulated into a sticky, cold mess; your leathers are drenched in all sorts of gore. Not all your own. Most belonging to the three Gnolls who had attempted to take you along with your hunted prey for the camp's dinner.

You lost the boar, your favorite bow, and a good amount of pride in the scuffle.

The moment you cross the threshold of camp, you can taste the tang of magic in the air.

You know, immediately, that it's Gale.

Perhaps it's your own awareness of the Weave, or a particular tenderness for the Wizard himself, but you feel him before you see him.

And then, it's a crushing embrace.

His toiling is long forgotten the moment he lays eyes on you, in all your brutality, and he can't help but surge forward with enough momentum to nearly knock you both breathless.

"Where the hell have you been? Avernus?" he mutters, one hand moving to gently cradle the back of your head. His palm is warm, radiating already with a healing magic that alights the air with the smell of lavender.

"Met a bit of trouble fetching us dinner—"

"Karlach will have your head," Gale says, leaning back to eye you up and down as a warm sweep of light graces your edges. You feel it, like a touch white-hot against bare skin. Intimate. Caring. Different entirely from Shadowheart's healing entirely, "She has been out all night searching for you — Astarion, too."

"I'm fine," you mutter — pointedly keeping the fact you had been chased up a tree by the aforementioned Gnolls to yourself — hands falling to his waist, "And I'm ruining your robes."

"Hush."

The magic pulses hotly, and you slip your eyes shut at the intrusion. His sternness comes robed in warmth. A safe sort of thing.

Gale pulls away only long enough to plant a kiss on your brow.

AS ALWAYS: prompts are here, the ask box is here.

#astarion x reader #astarion ancunin x reader #astarion bg3 #astarion imagine #gales dekarios imagine #gale dekarios x reader #gale x reader #gale x tav #astarion x tav #uber rare birbs formatted post #like #a super shiny pokemon card #baldurs gate imagine

[yrdnzz]

did this for the unofficial blue lock zine on twitter, which you can look at here !! my prompt was "sleepover" :]

some thoughts/headcanons i had while drawing this:

since snuffy treats football as a job, i thought it would be in character (and very cute) if he gave his players mandatory rest days

these rest days aren't only when they dyed barou's hair but also when they have sleepovers n hang out!!

sleepover nights are arranged by aryu and sendou-- aryu does the decorating while sendou gets the snacks, chooses the movies, etc.

niko and aryu are watching puella magi madoka magica on niko's laptop. so far, mami is aryu's fav

niko's laptop has a sayaka miki sticker and a very off brand banana fish sticker that someone got him

sendou is always the first to fall asleep and every time the other members stuff a pillow under his head & throw a blanket on him. he's a heavy sleeper so once he's out, he's OUT

the plushies niko and aryu are holding belong to sendou

aiku looks like he's texting a girl & everyone assumes so but rly he's just watching baby animal tiktoks (usually baby chicks). sometimes niko gets nosy to see what he's doing and every time he gets whiplash

aryu painted everyone's nails black !!! though he made his own nails look a lil fancier because its ~osha~

barou is invited to everyone of these sleepovers but he rarely comes willingly, aiku and lorenzo usually drag him into this mess

in the drawing, barou's returning from a quick bathroom break or smth and while he was gone, lorenzo took his chances and brought out the popcorn

lorenzo is a messy eater so popcorn crumbs r everywhere..... barou hates it sooooooooooo much

HOWEVER in the drawing the popcorn mess isnt entirely from messy eating!! the real reason is lorenzo got bored and started bouncing popcorn off of sendou's forehead (his ass is NAWT waking up)

after having enough sleepovers, everyone kinda has their own spots & usually when barou is there, he's between aiku and niko-- he's cool being around them bc they usually just keep to their phones/laptops

^^ this doesnt stop lorenzo from throwing popcorn at him tho LMFAO and that's when aiku becomes not only the final wall for blue lock but the only wall between barou (becoming a murderer) and don "ace eater" lorenzo

and i think that's everything........ !!! if u read all this. Damn ur kinda my goat (THANK U)

#yrdnzz art #bllk #blue lock #blue lock fanart #barou shoei #niko ikki #don lorenzo #aryu jyubei #sendou shuto #oliver aiku #aiku oliver #blue lock ubers #ubers #I LOVEEEEE UBERSSSSSS #i wanna draw aryu painting everyone's nails ESPECIALLY snuffy's #i love snuffy............ #this took me 5ever but i genuinely enjoyed drawing it #no more lineart 4 me tho IM DONE W LINEARTTTTT FAWKKKK THAT

[butchosprey]

Hey, 'Rina! Yo, can she even hear me?!

#side order #side order spoilers #marina #pearl #pearlina #agent 8 #esther (oc) #splatoon #banned from ubers

[zarla-s]

I love it when a group of Heavies being silly has a few Medics hanging around healing them, like they're just enjoying their husbands' antics (when they aren't being silly themselves). It's cute!

[patreon]

#team fortress 2 #heavy #medic #heavymedic #red oktoberfest #well it's implied what #z art #the rare horizontally long pic #love seeing a friendly heavy running around with a lone medic pocketing him as well for similar reasons #just like oh this is what we're doing now alright then #have i pocketed people just goofing off? yes #did i uber a battle spy multiple times because i thought it was funny? yes #it was totally worth it

[parisoonic]

everytime i play medic i rally the troops with this message

#team fortress 2 #tf2 fanart #tf2 #tf2 medic #jokes on you heavy players #you get crit heals and then im off with my boys demo scout and soldier #sometimes i 'ironically' uber the battle engies #they're good shots ok

[frownyalfred]

The Batfamily all have “go” bags hidden around Gotham. Just in case things go south and they need to bail. Or resupply.

The contents range from “incredibly sensible” (Bruce, Alfred, Duke and Barbara) to “weird but useful” (Damian and Cass) to “why the fuck would you bring that to the zombie apocalypse?” (Dick, Jason and Tim)

#I have thoughts about what those items are but #I am hopping to my Uber so #hopefully someone will reblog this and add their thoughts #go bags #doomsday preppers #aka batfamily is your ticket to surviving an apocalypse event #bruce wayne #batman #dc #batfamily #jason todd #batdad #batfam #dc comics #dick grayson #nightwing #red hood #Robin #Red Robin #Tim Drake #Damian wayne #cassandra cain #barbara gordon #duke thomas #alfred pennyworth

[nerdpoe]

Jason, freshly returned to Gotham from Nanda Parbat, has a cover for finding out who the Big Players are.

His cover is being a prostitute.

He was not aware of Oracles facial recognition rogram also running for grown up versions of missing kids.

He was not aware that she put Jason's 15 year old face in there out of grief and forgot to remove it.

Now the Bats think that Jason's had amnesia this whole time and really IS a prostitute, and Bruce is trying so hard to be supportive its painfully awkward, and Jason is ready to just say "fuck it surprise im red hood" but like...also it's funny to watch Bruce squirm.

Second thought, it's hilarious.

So Jason commits to the bit in between his Red Hood runs, recording and laughing over how fucking awkward Bruce and Dick and Tim are.

#batman #red hood #robin #nightwing #tim drake #jason todd #dick grayson #bruce wayne #story prompt #misunderstandings #jasons need for revenge slowly gets fed by his familys embarrassment rather than uber murder