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.
Left to its own ends it seems it will cost the same but have better margins concentrated into greater wealth for fewer people.
We need UBI, like, 5 centuries ago.
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Exactly. Until we put either the heaviest lid on capitalism (never going to happen) or upend the system entirely, UBI will “drive inflation,” meaning we’ll still make the same (or probably somehow less) at our jobs while the UBI money literally just keeps everything at the same affordability. There is no world in which business doesn’t just go after that money. We saw very recently, with the flimsiest of excuses, capitalists will claim “inflation” while pocketing record profits. They’ll do the exact same if UBI is implemented without some massive changes to capitalism.
Burn it all down. Anyone that still has hopes for fixes that maintain the capitalist system are fooling themselves. We have no other options at this point. It’s either we do it now, or wait until capitalism and the devastating effects of climate change force our hand. At least if we do it now, at our own discretion, we might be able to throw the emergency-emergency brakes on climate change. Otherwise, companies and the capitalists that run them will absolutely watch us all fry from their self-sustaining pod homes that are built in the upper atmosphere to keep the temperature bearable and to stay above the devastating weather events. And they’ll do it without thinking twice.
The best solution would be to raise taxes for the richest, but considering the fact, that bullshit like big corps being allowed to lobby in the US is a thing, well… It is not going to be easy.
But raising taxes for the richest is a small band aid on a massively flawed system. It’d be like getting a second, even smaller bucket to bail water out of the titanic. After it’s broken in half.
There are so many incredibly serious problems that higher taxes for the wealthy wouldn’t fix. Liberals tend to cling to this option because it worked back in the 20th century. But capitalism has kept getting more and more “streamlined,” fucking over the working class more and more. Because the concept of endless growth has continued through multiple decades of massive changes to the game that only favored the wealthy, changes to the tax code being one that happened so long ago that it’s an entirely different concept at this point. Outsourcing, vertical integration, the explosion of invasive advertising, data mining, the explosion of privatization, the infestation of private money dictating policy, the infestation of private interests writing policy…this is a small list of the most visible things that have become so entrenched that a wealth tax would almost be nothing.
That money would get funneled right back into their pockets, even if they somehow let a wealth tax bill through—yeah, they LET a bill through. As you said, a massive stumbling block that only goes to show how deep this problem is.
Wealth tax. 0.1%. The rich will see it as adding a .1 onto all of their investment expense ratios, and I don’t give a shit.
Nope. People will focus on life hacking their way through surviving of fractions of UBI.
UBI is a freedom.
To dismiss it as something that will be immediately taken is how one finds themselves clinging to their shackles from comfort; pearl clutching them over the uncertainty of freedom.
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What do you think the majority of people are doing now?
I do agree with the previous comments though that UBI can’t successfully exist by itself. Heavy regulations and consumer protections will have to be revamped but that needs done regardless of UBI or not. It’s the same vein as the loan forgiveness program the Democrats tried to implement in the US, they never actually addressed or promoted any policy change that was needed in higher education costs.
The mental gymnastics are interesting though. The same people who scream to vote for the “lesser of two evils” will not use that premise for actual policy. Inflation will go up regardless of UBI (as we’ve seen from corporate greed), any type of shelter during record making climate dangers is better than homelessness.
Also, I take offense to the drinking pasta water comment (not really offended but it’s funny you commented that). It’s literally how ramen is suppose to be consumed.
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Ah yes, as opposed to my dream of entirely depending upon wealthy people to employ me so I can survive.
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Great! sounds better than my cardboard box on the sidewalk.
I mean, how do you know, how does anyone know? We’ve never had UBI. It’s silly that people are acting like little know-it-all’s about this when they’ve never even experienced what UBI is like.
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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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One question, where was UBI 5 centuries ago?