More Website Tweaking, and Pre-Stupid O'Clock Rant

Hmmm. In case there's been any doubt, I'm still on a sabbatical.

Not sure why I felt this sudden need to make this declaration, but here it is.

It was a slow day today. I finished the remaining pages of Animorphs Series: The Invasion, and watched some more Linus Tech Tips, and that's basically it. I aim to at least complete the Quadtrees and Octrees chapter/article in Handbook of Data Structures before I turn in for the night.

I did spend some time tweaking a bit more on the presentation on my personal domain, adjusting the way paragraphs show (paragraphs following other paragraphs are indented), and added more subtle line-based separations per year in my read-list page.

I saw this article today and reflected a little upon my experiences with taxis in Singapore. There was a time where they were quite reliable, in the sense that it was possible to hail one as and when one needed one, to get to the place that one wanted to go.

They are still rather useful to getting to and fro the airport from home (to requires an advance booking which can be easily done over the phone, while from is settled through the dedicated taxi stands at the airport itself), but other than that, their reliability has gone down to the point that I would not willingly take one unless I really have to.

And I still refuse to take so-called ``private-hire cars'' if I am on my own, but that's a rant for a little later.

I want to support the taxi drivers, I really do. But they are making it hard for me to support them. For some reason, they have started to demonstrate extreme pickiness from street hails. Previously, I would expect no more than 2 failures after flagging before I could get on a taxi to where I wanted to. Now, I would be damn lucky if I can get less than 5 failures from flagging. To be precise, when I say ``failures after flagging'', I mean that the taxi must first stop after my flagging of one, and then refusing to take me to my destination after ``demanding'' to know where I was heading before I boarded.

If I wanted to include the number of failed flags, then the numbers are much worse: previously, it would take on average of 5 cabs passing by before one would stop. Now, the number is closer to 15, with at least 2 that would suddenly switch from the green ``TAXI'' to the red ``BUSY'' when they saw that I was flagging for one on the roadside.

To be fair, I do have slightly better luck at designated taxi stands, but even in those cases the pickiness is definitely on the up-tick.

Taxis as a mode of public transport was traditionally the fall-back for when one screwed up the timing and cannot hope to reach one's destination in time with the mass public transport modes of the buses and/or MRT (subway). It was reliable for that then, but now, it is not reliable enough for that.

In fact, the time taken from starting to hail a cab to actually arriving at the destination nowadays is almost the same as if I just took the mass public transport modes and suffered the delay from my own doing, while simultaneously over-paying by at least 10×. So, I get to be late, and pay much more, with even greater stress.

All in all, a lose-lose-lose situation.

Because of that, I have not really put taxis in my list of viable transport options for quite a while already. I would rather take the extra time for the regular mass public transport modes, or walk than to rely on the taxi. It's a good thing because it forces me to be much more disciplined in planning my travel. It reminds me of the times that I was studying/living in the US, where there was basically no such thing as a taxi anyway, mostly because they cost at least 35× that of the bus, and are very hard to flag too.

And now, on ``private-hire cars''. Man... I don't know where to start on my dislike of these services. Maybe I'll start with the most selfish reason: I really don't like it when my money gets trapped in an app on my cellphone. Heck, I am still very angry with DBS for forcing everyone to use the digital token on the cellphone. I can go on an angry spiel on the privacy angle, but I will do a much simpler one.

It fucking gives Google/Apple too much damn power, because it is completely reliant on these third party infrastructure providers. If for any reason one gets banned from these platforms, either because of an automated false positive flag or through real mischief, things get locked out hard. At least for banks, it is still somewhat possible to talk to a human at one of their branches armed with nothing more than oneself, one's NRIC, and one's bank card.

But third-party ``private-hire car'' platforms like Grab and all? Money that goes in stays in there for as long as they can make one do so, and even if there are ways to extract one's fiat money out of that system, it is likely to require many hoops to be jumped to make it technically possible but practically improbable.

The other reason why I don't like ``private-hire car'' platforms is their inherently exploitative nature. I'm pretty sure that I had mentioned it at some point that such platforms that support the so-called ``gig-based economy'' is just the capitalist way of side-stepping all the labour protections that had been navigated through blood and sweat over the past century and change. In the original incarnation of actually acting as a ``side-hustle'', it is still tolerable with a strong sense of personal choice---one is expected to only take up gigs during one's ``free'' time to generate some income from some ``free'' resources that one might have (like time, and a vehicle that would otherwise be depreciating normally with no supplementary income to defray its depreciation).

But these platforms have reached the point where they are fast becoming an alternative source of actual ``full-time'' income for many people, and the regulations for these are still vague and unenforced, which allows the fairness of the underlying match-making inherent in the successes of these platforms' operation to remain opaque, and thus susceptible for abuse/exploitative practices that cannot be proven/disproven.

Since the money in these platforms are still great, there is little incentive to actually reign in on errant players who are actually exploitative. I cannot even say with certain if any platform is not exploitative, since what ``exploitative'' means is never really well-defined in the legal sense.

Despite all the corruption that we see in many governments, I still believe that one of the roles of the government is to protect its human citizens to ensure that the intangible concept of human dignity is respected. For many of us, this means the proper regulation and enforcement of said regulations for any activity that involves humans, especially when economic success [of the corporations] are concerned. Corporations retain lawyers to defend their rights, but the man-on-the-street has no one other than regulation on their side to protect them from abuse.

If only people were to repent from their sin of covetousness... then perhaps I don't even need to have such a rant in the first place.

Ah well. I think that's about it for now. Till the next update then.