AI could upend food delivery
The Verge – no paywall: “Delivery apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats have changed how diners eat and how restaurants operate. AI could force a new kind of reckoning for the industry. DoorDash, the leading food delivery app, processed 970 million orders in its second quarter this year and generated $4.5 billion in revenue. A 10-person startup called Bites is a blip in comparison: It has just around 300 restaurants signed up in the Bay Area, where it’s operating as a pre-seed startup.
But this summer, Bites caught DoorDash’s attention. In August, a slew of restaurants in the Bay Area received a strange email from DoorDash, warning businesses that they may be listed without their consent on Bites. The form letter, copies of which were seen by The Verge, said that DoorDash had heard from “several partners” that were added to the third-party platform without their knowledge.
DoorDash warned restaurants that they may not have agreed to Bites’ “terms, pricing structures, or service standards”; that they may not have control over the accuracy of their menu or hours of operation on Bites; and that, depending on the state, “such practices could be illegal.” The email included instructions on how to contact Bites to request removal. One way to look at the warning is DoorDash proactively alerting its restaurant partners. But DoorDash going on the offense over a relatively small peer hints at a battle taking shape between established apps and newer, leaner startups looking to upend business in the age of AI.
Tech companies have promised that the future of AI is that ordinary people will have “agents” completing tasks: scheduling meetings, looking for deals on socks, sifting through their inbox and replying to emails, and yes, ordering food on their behalf. If this really does come to bear — if billions of people shift to interact with the internet not through search engines, webpages, and apps, but through large language models — those websites and services will lose control of the relationship with consumers as they stop visiting webpages and apps. What happens to Amazon when it can’t show shoppers boosted item listings because they don’t come to the site? What happens when Uber can’t entice riders with a free subscription trial? What happens when a food delivery service can upsell you to throw in a bottle of wine with dinner? The Verge has coined this brewing fight “the DoorDash problem.” Bites is now the literal embodiment of the term…”
SPRINGTIME FOR TUCKER: Tucker Carlson Is Now a World War II Revisionist.
Tucker Carlson makes a great deal of Hitler’s insistence that he “did not want to go to war with the U.K.” But Carlson steadfastly ignores that not wanting to go to war was the pose that Hitler struck at every step of his journey across Europe. In September 1938, he promised in writing that acquiring the Sudetenland would satisfy Germany’s territorial ambitions in Europe and then made a speech in which he declared that once that issue was settled — an issue, you will note, that was only an issue because he had made it one — “there will be no more territorial problems for Germany in Europe.” Six months later, in flagrant violation of his vow, he invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia. Six months after that, Hitler invaded Poland — a country with which he had until recently had a peace deal. This was a pattern. Nine days before his invasion of Poland, Hitler had struck a ten-year non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union — a pact that, like all the others, was broken just two years later when, to the great surprise of Joseph Stalin, he invaded the Soviet Union with 3.8 million troops. Narrowly, it is accurate to suppose that, during this period, Hitler did “not want to go to war with the U.K.” But it was also true that, at various points in the past, Hitler had not wanted to go to war with Czechoslovakia, Poland, or Russia — or, for that matter, with Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. It is fair to say, I’d venture, that in the realm of not wanting to go to war, Hitler lacked aptitude.
And apparently, lacked skill in planning as well. Darryl Cooper, Tucker’s favorite “historian,” who kicked off Tucker’s then-newly pro-Axis worldview claimed in September of 2024. Or as Steve asked back then: Seriously, What the Hell Is Wrong With Tucker Carlson?
“We can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people,” Cooper imagined the Germans thinking after fighting on the Eastern Front accidentallycreated more prisoners and refugees than Germany could cope with. “And one of them actually says, ‘Rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?’”
At the Daily Wire today, James Price explains: How Tucker Carlson Was Rees-Mogged By Conservatism.
Carlson conservatism seems to share the same outlook regardless of where it goes, a habit of the Left. Socialism is the same in every country, because it is an internationalist credo. But classical conservatives are trying to conserve different things in different places: an American his written Constitution, an Englishman his King.
In the end, Carlson conservatism doesn’t seem interested in conserving very much, which leaves American conservatives with a choice about who will speak for them. They could do worse than the Honorable Member for the 18th century. America has taken its conservatism from 18th-century Englishmen before, and it worked out rather well, gifting the world the likes of Jefferson and Madison.
It is not just a theoretical question. There is a time for choosing, to paraphrase another classical American conservative, and that will be asked more earnestly after the U.S. midterms. Will they embrace Carlson conservatism, or is there life in the time-honored traditions of old?
Defending Putin, attacking Churchill, defending radical Islam, and defending the fella with the tiny toothbrush mustache – that doesn’t sound like any recognizable form of conservatism to me.
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