> I'm finally starting to appreciated the conflict associated with trying to be supportive of morally upstanding leaders versus desiring to deserve your fundamental needs.
Using an app that removes the friction of having to communicate with people whose language you do not speak is certainly nice, but it's not a fundamental need. It's a choice and like all choices you trade one thing for another: convenience vs. supporting a stance that you can align morally with.
Reducing an argument to "needs" or "rights" is circular. Even across well-accepted cultures and moral systems, the lines between "needs" and non-"needs" is diverse (e.g. duty to god(s), duty to family honour, securing one's life, securing one's happiness through artistic expression, et cetera).
"Fundamental" was not an important qualifier in either of your posts. OP did not define what that meant in their context, and therefore it's not fair to nitpick based on that alone. They might as well have said "ticklish" for all the difference it made to their overall point.
If that's really what your whole post is about, why take the take to argue definitions? What does fundamental mean to you exactly?
It's either Uber, a local driver, or a translator. Without one of those three, I literally am unable to go anywhere in locales that don't commonly see english speakers. I'm not sure how much more fundamental than "I'm unable to travel".
Learning a few words in a language spoken locally at your target destination really really goes a long long way. Doesn't need to be the native language spoken, but Spanish and/or Portuguese will get you pretty far in large parts of the world. I'm more the Africa person but quite a few friends of mine travelled china and Nepal without ever resorting to an uber. It's harder, granted, but not fundamentally impossible.
Using an app that removes the friction of having to communicate with people whose language you do not speak is certainly nice, but it's not a fundamental need. It's a choice and like all choices you trade one thing for another: convenience vs. supporting a stance that you can align morally with.