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.
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.
If you destroy all of things things, then why does the idea of income still exist? It seems UBI is born out of the need for money in the current system. If you eliminate the system, what’s the point of UBI?
And what is this new box you’re proposing that doesn’t have things like inflation or supply and demand? I can think outside the box, but if you want people to get behind what you’re talking about you need to explain it and it needs to be possible, and not “wouldn’t it be great if we could all fly around on luck dragons and eat the nutritionally perfect donut holes which rain from the sky 3 times per day.” We can just all make up our own thing, never tell anyone exactly what it is, and expect anything to happen. If we’re doing that, I’m taking luck dragons and donut holes.
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.
People didn’t make up economics and decree it over people, it’s just how things work when there is trade (either via money or trading chickens for barely).
We don’t have unlimited supplies of stuff. If there are 10 eggs, and 20 people with UBI money in hand that want them, how do you decide who gets one? A raffle? These are the real-world things that need to be solved for if a new system is going to work.
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.
I said it existed in any system with trade. If cavemen were simply living off the land around them, then they didn’t have to worry about it. Of course at the same time, if there was something they couldn’t provide for that was required for life, they’d just die… so there is some give and take there. There are people today who live off the land and on their own, they don’t really have to worry about the economy.
It was “created” like gravity was “created”. Markets naturally worked in a certain way, and then someone recognized it and defined it.
I don’t. Today we use money to determine who wants something the most… basically, who is willing to give up the most for an egg. I’m curious what the solution would be in the system you’re thinking of, as this is a situation which will come up very quickly. Ignoring it and wishing supply constraints exist isn’t an option, unless we’re simply dreaming of a utopia that can’t actually exist.
I really can’t agree with that. I also found this: https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/history_e/history_e.htm
So, 3rd century BC seems to be when that was started. There was definitely time before than and on a funny side note, I took a peak at the wiki article and there’s a ton of “trade was used in prehistoric times” followed by [citation needed] and then a [who?] for another one that claims trade was the start of transactions. So wikipedia is useless here lol.
But it seems like people want to believe that it just always existed? It’s a concept, so that can’t be true. Like you even said, if people were just living and being, they weren’t needing to trade. So at some point, it had to come into being when people finally started to decide that they should trade. Sounds like maaaaybe it was during the early BC times but who would really know. Maybe historians and even historians can be wrong.
Instead of who wants it most which I think is shitty and greedy - how about “hey who doesn’t want these?” Like the example of eggs was brought up. Vegans and vegetarians don’t really want eggs. Therefor, those eggs can go to someone who does want or need them.
Same for other things. I never want or need beans. That means they can go to people who want them.