Sooner or later, everything old is new again.
We may be at this point in tech, where supposedly revolutionary products are becoming eerily similar to the previous offerings they were supposed to beat.
Take video streaming. In search of better profitability, Netflix, Disney, and other providers have been raising prices. The various bundles are now as annoyingly confusing as cable, and cost basically the same. Somehow, we’re also paying to watch ads. How did that happen?
Amazon Prime Video costs $9 a month and there are no ads. Oh, except when Thursday Night Football is on. Then there are loads of ads. And Amazon is discussing an ad-supported version of the Prime Video service, according to The Wall Street Journal. That won’t be free, I can assure you.
Paramount+ with Showtime costs $12 a month and the live TV part has commercials and a few other shows include “brief promotional interruptions,” according to the company. Translation: ads.
Streaming was supposed to be better and cheaper. I’m not sure that’s the case anymore. This NFL season, like previous years, I will record games on OTA linear TV using a TiVo box from about 2014. I’ll watch hours of action every weekend for free and I’ll watch no ads. Streaming can’t match that.
You can still stream without ads, but the cost of this is getting so high, and the bundling is so complex, that it’s getting as bad as cable — the technology that streaming was supposed to radically improve upon.
The Financial Times recently reported that a basket of the top US streaming services will cost $87 this fall, compared with $73 a year ago. The average cable TV package costs $83 a month, it noted. A 3-mile Uber ride that cost $51.69
A similar shift is happening in ride-hailing. Uber has been on a quest to become profitable, and it achieved that, based on one measure, in the most-recent quarter. Lyft is desperately trying to keep up. How are they doing this? Raising prices is one way.
Wired’s editor at large, Steven Levy, recently took a 2.95-mile Uber ride from downtown New York City to the West Side to meet Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. When asked to estimate the cost of the ride, Khosrowshahi put it at $20. That turned out to be less than half the actual price of $51.69, including a tip for the driver.
“Oh my God. Wow,” the CEO said upon learning the cost.
I recently took a Lyft from Seattle-Tacoma International airport to a home in the city. It cost $66.69 with driver tip. As a test, I ordered a taxi for the return journey. Exact same distance, and the cab was stuck in traffic longer. The cost was $70 with a tip. So basically the same.
And the cab can be ordered with an app now that shows its location, just like Uber and Lyft. So what’s the revolutionary benefit here? The original vision was car sharing where anyone could pick anyone else up. Those disruptive benefits have steadily ebbed away through regulation, disputes with drivers over pay, and the recent push for profitability. Cloud promises are being broken
Finally, there’s the cloud, which promised cheaper and more secure computing for companies. There are massive benefits from flexibility here: You can switch your rented computing power on and off quickly depending on your needs. That’s a real advance.
The other main benefits — price and security — are looking shakier lately.
Salesforce, the leading provider of cloud marketing software, is increasing prices this month. The cost of the Microsoft 365 cloud productivity suite is rising, too, along with some Slack and Adobe cloud offerings, according to CIO magazine.
AWS is going to start charging customers for an IPv4 address, a crucial internet protocol. Even before this decision, AWS costs had become a major issue in corporate board rooms.
As a fast-growing startup, Snap bought into the cloud and decided not to build it’s own infrastructure. In the roughly five years since going public, the company has spent about $3 billion on cloud services from Google and AWS. These costs have been the second-biggest expense at Snap, behind employees.
“While cloud clearly delivers on its promise early on in a company’s journey, the pressure it puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits, as a company scales and growth slows,” VC firm Andreessen Horowitz wrote in a blog. “There is a growing awareness of the long-term cost implications of cloud.”
Some companies, such as Dropbox, have even repatriated most of their IT workloads from the public cloud, saving millions of dollars, the VC firm noted.
What about security? Last month, Google, the third-largest cloud provider, started a pilot program where thousands of its employees are limited to using work computers that are not connected to the internet, according to CNBC.
The reason: Google is trying to reduce the risk of cyberattacks. If staff have computers disconnected from the internet, hackers can’t compromise these devices and gain access to sensitive user data and software code, CNBC reported.
So, cloud services connected to the internet are great for everyone, except Google? Not a great cloud sales pitch.
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This is the issue I have with these discussion. UBI would be a new idea all together. “Where is going to come from” is irrelevant, because this is a new made up thing.
We don’t have any history of doing UBI as far as I know, the way its currently envisioned: where everyone is getting some kind of livable income every month or two weeks or whatever.
Whenever I see people attempt to discuss this, they keep trying to figure out how it would work with the system we currently have, because they can’t envision anything outside of that. So they default to bullshit like “whos gonna pay for this”
Like obviously we already know who we want to pay for it. We also know that isn’t gonna fucking happen. No one is breaking out guns for the revolution to do that and even if they did - well we already saw some idiots attempt a revolution in recent years and how bad it backfired on them.
No. This would have to be a HUGE change of everything. The money isn’t going to “come” from somewhere. We’re just gonna have it cause this could be a mind over matter issue, but people aren’t treating it that way. Like they can’t comprehend how to get something new by just creating it. What has to happen is, we change how our system works.
and yes, I’m aware that people have been fearmongered into thinking that if money doesn’t have value, then it will be meaningless. No one seems to realize that money is pretty much already meaningless as its needed to live and causes people to fucking die because they don’t have it. So its more like a crutch to lean on that you need to stand up. When in reality we could all just be standing.
And we all know why this barrier hasn’t been broken even though people are aware we could switch to this (obviously people are talking about it) - its because some people enjoy being better than others. And more than anything else, if people could get past needing to feel better than others - we could probably make a lot more progress.
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there is a quote which is (probably apocryphally) attributed to keynes that goes “if you line up all the economists end to end, they wouldn’t reach a conclusion”.
in other words, those people all made that up.
Yes, I am aware of economics. I was never talking about economics and this is exactly what I’m talking about. You don’t know how to think outside of that. You think inflation has to exist. You can’t seem to wrap your head around that not existing.
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Cause I’m not really in favor of going back to the trade days.
I’m really into ideas that play into where we currently sit. There’s money around. We just aren’t allowed to have it cause other people do. All I want is for people who can’t easily have funds, to have them. Why is that wrong or bad or why does it need to cause inflation?
Outside of “WELL ECONOMICS” like save it, Reagan. Been there, done that. Economics seem to be effectively fucking people like me over. And people who have it worse than me… jesus H.
I’m not talking about fantasy shit. What I am talking about is completely possible. Just because people have more money doesn’t mean they suddenly need to pay more for shit too. In fact, lets do away with raising prices.
Again, we have NEVER had UBI before. Temp hand outs are not UBI either. Universal Basic Income would be just that. It’s right there on the damn labe. You give people a decent allotment so they can fucking live without needing to fucking bust their ass for money until they die.
Sorry but I think life should be more than working 40 hours a damn week so I can have a place to live so I don’t have to have mental breakdowns in public where everyone can see it.
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Economics is the most inane snake oil of sciences or studies. It is interesting to consider, but in practice means almost nothing at all.
haha totally agree!
I really don’t think that existed in caveman times. If it did, what kind of proof would we even have at this point? At some point it was created.
I’m aware that we don’t have endless supplies of things but that concept alone, of like who gets what - why do you think someone should be determining that?
I don’t like that way of thinking at all. That someone is more worthy of getting their needs met than someone else and that some authority figure would be deciding that. Sounds like what we’re already doing - which already has a lot of problems.
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