Technology

You say "broken promises" I say "the plan all along" and "bait and switch".

This has nothing to do with tech and EVERYTHING to do with FUCKING CAPITALISM.

What a dumb fucking post, tech didn’t promise us shit were still living in a capitalist nightmare where quarterly earnings are far and above the primary value, over any and all people.

What the fuck is this waaaa tech didn’t usher in an age of utopia!!! It’s almost like we have to solve other problems first. Fucks sake

Yarrrrr...shiver me timbers. Fly the Jolly Roger high matey, there be booty ta plunder!

Don’t blame tech, blame the bait-and-switch business model of loss leading products.

Uber never made money because they chose to undercut prices of all competitors and bleed them out.

I’d argue that newer streaming companies (those founded by studios, such as Disney +) did the same thing by roping in customers before jacking up prices.

It may be the “fault” of capitalism, but consider it was capitalism that birthed streaming in the first place. In the long term, the expectation would be a better solution will surface in reference to streaming.. the same way streaming was a solution to cable. Thus is the business cycle.

Is this surprising? The prices were always going to adjust to the market. Any new cheap thing that undercuts the market will eventually become the market as it becomes mainstream, and prices will be increased to what the market will bear to maximize profits.

Remember when we could only watch what had recently been on TV and cable companies were trying to lock people in to specific cable boxes that couldn't skip ads and we paid $120 per month for ad supported content and cable companies would attach random fees and everyone had to buy hundreds of channels to only watch 4?

And we'd build movie and music collections of physical media we had to keep in our homes and cars and we'd listen to the same three albums for months and if we were lucky enough to get a TV series box set, it'd set us back many hundreds of dollars and we'd have to remember which disc we were on and navigate arcane and slow menus?

And when we had questions, we had to find the answers ourselves by reading long form content and just be satisfied that there were many questions we couldn't answer at all because the information wasn't available?

Or when we wanted cabs, we'd not know how much a ride would cost until after we got to our destinations and they smelled like rotten farts and were covered in boogers and our only goal was to not touch anything and look out the window because what's a smartphone?

And when we wanted to go somewhere, we had to ask for directions and use atlases to figure out how to get to the general area of the destination, then drive in circles, accidentally drive past a turn 5 times because the street we were supposed to turn onto had two different names and we had been given the wrong one?

I was there and anyone who pines for the old days can just go there. We have cable and encyclopedias and taxis and atlases. Go nuts.

Take video streaming. In search of better profitability, Netflix, Disney, and other providers have been raising prices

Piracy and buying/ripping physical media is back on the table bois. Been running my own personal media server secured with a VPN to access it. Costs are the symmetric gigabit connection, a simple raspberry pi for WireGuard, and old computer for media server. Plus some technical knowledge.

Any physical media I have has been ripped to digital form (4K where possible).

A 3-mile Uber ride that cost $51.69

Yet another reason why we need to have more diverse options in transportation. Public transportation is dismal in the USA due to suburban sprawl and car centric society. Alternative forms of transportation such as bikes or even walking is not accessible to a large portion of people.

Took a bus the other day and the total cost for 24 hrs was exactly $2.50. Don’t have to worry about psychos on the road driving to and from their deadass suburban home and deadend job.

Cloud promises are being broken

Fuck the “cloud”. It’s just another persons/companies server. Switched off major cloud platforms long ago.

Have off site backups take place nightly. No middleman scanning my stuff. No more upselling. Besides ISP costs, everything else is static or one time setup.

Tech never promised anything. They cut the price for people to be dependent to them and then rise the price.

It's just basic capitalism.

On the flip side, piracy has never been easier.

Time to disrupt the disruptions.

But I can binge streaming services and then cancel without multiple hundred dollar fees. And I can use the same app for Uber no matter what city I’m in.

So… I get things aren’t paradise but let’s be clear they’re still largely covering a lot of folks needs.

We should have seen this coming. I remember the early 80s when cable was the new hotness, and it was cheap, with no ads unlike broadcast television. That was its major selling point.

Then over the next decade the ads crept in, and we were all paying for cable with ads, even though the whole point had been no ads. Then the price skyrocketed and the ads remained.

Steaming was always going to follow the same path. Cheap with no ads at first, then adding ads, then skyrocketing prices, then crazy prices with ads too.

They know as long as all of them raise their prices, where are we gonna go? They have exclusives. We can’t just take our money elsewhere.

This is all by design. Once they have you/us/them captured again, we're going to take another trip around the "raise prices and squeeze services until it's unsustainable, because shareholder and CEO profit". It has all happened before and it will all happen again.

The cloud is just someone else's computer. The uber is just someone else's car. Streaming is just someone else's media library. They have you right where they want you, dependent on them.

Uber was never a tech proposition, it was a predatory disruptor.

The streaming fiasco is sad but inevitable as greed does what greed does.

Cloud was never primarily about price, the big cost save initially was to get rid of purchased or rented iron and locations but the main reason of the Big Switch was the scaleability and opportunities for quick deployment of new technologies and methodologies.

The thing about unregulated capitalism is it will always fuck over society in favour of sociopaths. Unregulated capitalism rewards sociopaths because it focusses on profits above all else – shareholders get stupidly rich only if they don’t care about the damage done to workers and the public, sociopaths who don’t care about such damage can promise the highest profits, and that’s rewarded by a hyper-focus on the bottom line.

Unregulated capitalism rewards ruthless cost-cutting, treating people like robotic assets, slash-and-burn corporate policies, and a culture of near-slavery.

Adding new tech only makes inhumane policies easier to implement. It’s why people like Musk have more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes. When the goal is to maximise profits at all costs, of course the consumer will get fucked. That’s rather the point.

E: in short, prices will continue to increase as these people try to find the ceiling. Ps: there is no real ceiling.

The enshitification of capitalism? Color me shocked!

So stop using that shit, problem solved

The cloud was never cheap.

Where did you get such a weird idea?

The pattern is: Offer something really cool for cheap or even free, then once people are hooked slowly reduce service while increasing price. It's a giant bait and switch.

I'm the only person who goes to the library for movies?

I don't use Uber because it is cheaper, I use it because I know the fare ahead of time, I don't need to dial a dozen different cab companies, and the vehicles are generally nicer. I don't use streaming because it is cheaper, I use it because I don't need to worry about time shifting, and can access much higher quality content than on cable. As for the cloud? You can pry my big iron from my cold, dead hands.

The goal is surely to capture every human need and package them as obnoxious subscriptions.

Streaming is still cheaper unless you get absolutely everything. It is also straightforward billing. The advertised price is the price you pay. I checked Comcast a week ago and they quote $70 with no contract. And then if you read the fine print, there is also a $25 broadcasting fee and a $10 sports fee. I am going to guess you also have a fee to rent the cable box for $10-15/month. They can still fuck themselves.

Agreed on Uber and Lyft.

Cloud was never cheaper.

Has "cloud computing" ever been cheaper for most kinds of established businesses? Other than for some specific workflows, or very unpredictable workloads, the only cost-saving I've ever seen is avoiding the initial costs and avoiding the need for a real ops/obs team.

Remember that all that “disrupting the market” ever meant was undercutting competitors. Everything else was window dressing.

Hotels >>>>> Airb&Bs

Yea, it’s “tech’s fault.” Not the self-imploding economic system known as capitalism. It’s definitely not the fault of giant tech corporations that have a hand in the government. It’s the streaming, Uber, and the cloud that’s bad.

I think we've started to discover what the ???? steps before profit were.

The model was:

• Start streaming service
• ????
• Profit

It's now:

• Start streaming service
• Subsidise it heavily creating premium content whilst undercutting competition.
• keep doing it until competitors go broke
• Raise prices to an actually sustainable level
• Profit (although we've lost a ton of capital)

This is a form of market manipulation which is outright illegal in some countries (e.g. Australia) and can be illegal in the US and EU if it meets certain criteria. It falls under anti-trust and monopoly prevention laws.

Basically our regulators aren't doing their job well enough, but what's new?

Enshittification!

I don't know Google Drive options are pretty fucking cheap.

Bullshit this is the fault of “Tech”. Every last greedy tech company, every last penny pinching pig that seeks to maximize profit without any concern for anything, literally anything else. Every last piece of shit corpo pig in govt too

Fuck Ajit Pai , I hope his stupid mug sucks ass