Strong anti-trust enforcement is the key. As long as the major cloud providers are actually competing, it shouldn’t be an issue.
Price-fixers need to face real consequences, not like the slap on the wrist that they got for fixing the price of ebooks at 10$.
She’s over reached a couple times and shot themselves in the foot, but Lina Khan is a boss.
Demand goes down over time but the board expects increasing results. It’s the capitalism.
This is what I don’t get. Progress and tech are supposed to make things cheaper and more efficient, not more expensive and resource hungry.
We are more efficient. In my work computer automation has saved the equivalent to five thousand workers
Those five thousand workers don’t get to work a fraction of a day for the same pay, the saving is made a level or five above the workers
Some of our savings are hidden by inflation, but many products are far cheaper now
The rebound effect summarised
Absolutely they do, which is why the competition could not compete. Once the whole market is dominated by a few companies, it lets them get a little more creative with how they price things, and a little lazier with their coding practices.
Cloud costs are going down
¿Huh?
Companies often have less new stuff to add
They never run out of stuff to add. Give any company enough resources and you would see weird and completely unrelated stuff attached to their products. I kid you not, I can apparently get a vet appointment in a taxi app, and my bank is now selling clothes and… car parts? While the bank part of the app literally has no option to filter out only incoming transactions. Priorities, I guess…
Yeah companies need to stop being allowed to be multiple industries.
Like why does every department store have a credit card now? They should be using their profits to pay their employees, not loaning it out at insane interest rates.
Usually those cards are serviced by a bank, the department store doesn’t loan its money. I know a lot of stores use Synchrony bank
this is what they do when they run out of stuff to add, yes
In an e-mail to [Steve] Jobs, Cue attributed Random House’s capitulation in part to ‘the fact that I prevented an app from Random House from going live in the app store this week.’"
Well we all knew those things happened but it’s the first time I see proof.
Greedflation is the word you’re looking for.
See also: everything else under capitalism
Disclaimer: I am very drunk
But like idk. I feel like cost going down on physical items makes sense to a point. But I’ve hosted a few services and that shit got harder and more involved the longer it went on. Maybe that’s just a skill issue tho. Love to hear your thoughts
I got server space pretty cheap recently. There’s a lot of competition in that space and they compete on price as well as quality
So whatever performance level you need doesn’t cost a lot more than the fraction of hardware lifetime you’re buying
“Harder” depends on what services you’re offering. Email is hard now; web is no harder (though web sites are as hard as you want them to be), hosting a game server is as easy as it ever has been
Yes it gets harder, but it doesn’t get 10x harder with 10x users. It should scale somewhat logarithmically. With millions of users that makes it still much cheaper to operate per user than with a thousand.
I host an ever growing system in the cloud. Everything you build needs to be maintained and monitored, and the more users you have, the more features they demand.
You can still spread cost out across more users, but it’s not like the software is just “done” and sits there being used
Thought it was interesting that no one mentioned Terraform or OpenTofu. Then checked the community I was in.
Everyone likes to pile on, but do the costs go down? Cloud isn’t run in a vacuum. You’ve got a data center full of employees keeping the place running. The data center has electricity and cooling costs. The company runs an HR department. The electric company raises prices. The hardware the “cloud” lives on wears out and needs to be replaced. All of these costs involve humans and humans demand annual raises to keep up with inflation. Also, investors that gave you the money to build the cloud and keep it running demand a return on their investment. They don’t just give out their money for free. So, I can’t help but feel this is not an accurate view of the world.
You’re “trapped & can’t switch”.
Okay, why are you trapped?
What choices did you make to get yourself into that position?
What choices can you make now that can get you out of that position?
If you cannot answer these questions and effect positive change for yourself, then by all means yes you deserve to be trapped and abused by your overlords. Enjoy.
“If you’re trapped and can’t figure out how to escape the trap by yourself, you deserve to be trapped?”
Is that really what you’re saying here?
I regularly laugh at proprietary software slaves. I almost forgot, which dish is on the table tonight?
checks link
TechAlter. A guy with a name like TechAlter is crying about being trapped and exploited by some software. HAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh, when will they ever learn!
That depends. Do you want them to learn, or do you want to feel superior to them?
Software gets more expensive over time when you write it like spaghetti coded crap in a “move fast and break things” environment where you build so much technical debt that you can’t touch anything without breaking 5 other things, and suddenly even simple changes take hundreds of developer hours, which you don’t have because half your team is fighting bugs.
Luckily all of our most critical services run on well-developed platforms that get the time and resources they need to be durable and maintainable over time. (biggest /s I’ve ever written)
Fucking Factorio engineers everywhere, I swear.
I don’t think a better analogy could possibly be made for this. Congrats, you win
This is unfortunately true… Tho what is driving the rent seeking isnt tech debt its greed
eBooks and digital rentals should cost a fraction of their physical counterparts, but instead they cost more because of
greedconvenience.The expensive part of making books is not the paper. My wife is an independent author and between editing, typesetting, cover design, etc. she spent about $1500 to publish each of her books.
While she could price her books at $1, that would present her with a few problems.
Firstly, people often value things based on what they’ve paid for them, so pricing your book too low makes people assume it is of poor quality.
Secondly, having positive reviews is extremely important for indie authors because the Almighty Algorithm will reward you or punish you based on the book’s rating. Other indie authors she has talked to have seen a noticable decline in their book’s rating after Amazon put it on sale and a bunch of people who might not have otherwise read it started buying copies. If you’ve ever worked retail or food service, you probably know that bargain hunters are often the people who are least reasonable and hardest to please. If the book is too cheap, you may attract an audience that harms its reputation.
Finally, trying to sell 2000+ copies of a book is pretty daunting for small authors and that’s about what it would take to break even at $1 per copy.
Could big publishers and well known authors sell books for a buck? Probably. But for the majority of authors who aren’t making their living by writing and only sell a few hundred copies ever, that’s not really realistic.
Those are reasonable statements, but it doesn’t explain why the digital equivalents cost MORE than their physical counterparts. Especially considering there’s no manufacturing, distribution, shipping, storage, etc… Sure, servers and bandwidth cost money, but nowhere near what an entire physical distribution chain costs. It’s pennies on the dollar.
I can’t think of a recent time where I’ve seen an eBook that cost more than the paperback but I haven’t been looking specifically. In my experience, the eBook is usually a buck or two cheaper than the print version.
I’m open to being wrong about this.
All the books I’ve seen in Amazon are like this
I don’t buy at Amazon, usually when I do is Google or Kobo, and the prices are similar to Amazons sometimes slightly cheaper.
Especially since the marginal cost of information goods is zero
That assumes the work of creating or collating the information has been fully amortized. The cost of information should tend toward zero, but it should start high enough to fairly reward its creators and those who made it visible
No, they cost more because of Steve Jobs.
This is your reminder that that man was utter trash.
I don’t need reminders but I love thorough paper trails.
I also read manuals if you’re wondering. No sarcasm.
Manuals are cool though.
Epub and PDF files are free though. Just gotta look harder.
Everything digital is free if you look hard enough, and are comfortable with piracy, but I’m talking about retail transactions.
Everything retail is free if you want it hard enough and are comfortable with theft.
Or permanently borrowing like that old lady in Titanic
Ebooks are less convenient because once you buy and read it you’re stuck with it and can’t resell.
Books can be had second hand for dirt cheap, too. For ebook you’re paying full price.
I have lots of books in paper. I have dozens electronically
The paper ones are good. I can lend them to friends, smell them, have them looking good on a shelf, can read while I’m doing something else on my phone
The electronic ones are with me. I can read them when I find myself surprisingly with nothing better to do.
True, but I can’t get a paperback at midnight, while laying in bed, and have it in my hands 10 seconds later.
Printing a book on paper and distributing physical books isn’t the majority of the cost of a book. Should ebooks be cheaper? Yes should they cost a fraction of a paper book? No since most of the cost in publishing does not depend on the medium of distribution. Most of the cost is basically the salaries of the people they have to pay to get the book onto the market (the writer, editor, marketing, etc) it doesn’t matter if it’s digital or physical these costs stay the same. Publishers basically lose money with the majority of the books they publish and make most of their money with the few hits they release each year.
Great argument for piracy, thanks
The word he’s describing is called “enshittification”.
Going to stroke this image for the next time I see some dumb cunt using the term enshitification unironically.
No, it’s monopoly capitalism. A certain Mr. Marx from Germany had a few things to say about it.
id argue enshittification is a consequence of monopoly capitalism, and not a separate thing.
One consequence of monopoly capitalism is businesses pursuing growth in revenue more aggressively than growth in user base.
When the market is saturated, all you can do to pursue growth is to increase unit margin. This eventually leads to production of “fictitious capital” as a stand in for real capital (as paper assets cost virtually nothing to produce).
Das Kapital goes into lengthy detail about this process. Specifically, the “how much does it cost to make a coat” chapter gets into it in (exhaustive) detail.
Enshittification is a feature of capitalism, smartass.
Sure. But it’s a consequence of monopolisation. Once you break up the monopolies, enshittification will no longer be economically viable.
Monopolization becomes inevitable in a capitalist economy since the wealthy are still the ones with power, and they will always seek to increase their wealth by any means necessary.
Even in a heavilly regulated form of capitalism, the wealthy will do everything in their power to slowly strip regulations over a period of time where they think people won’t notice and attempt to move public opinion towards the wealthy class’s benefit via propaganda.
“You’re not talking about Sprite, but about sugary soft drinks” <- that’s you
I have no idea what you’re trying to say here.
I was giving a name to a specific feature of capitalism and you were all “umm actually”-ing me that I’m talking about capitalism.
That’s like:
Me: “I really like this chocolate croissant” You: “Actually, you’re talking about a pastry 🤓”
My point is that you were mixing up cause and effect.
Enshittification has nothing to do with pricing.
It’s about market capture and the resulting lack of choices allowing market holders to maximize profits by degrading product performance. This can occur even when the product has no price.
That’s part of enshittification. Step 2 of enshittification is to entice in business buyers with low prices and changes that meet their needs. Step 3 is to cut costs and start price gouging to maximize profits.
Google is free to use. It still is. There is no price.
Facrbook, fee to use. Still is.
Both have been enshittified. There is no price being gouged.
The services they do sell are to advertisers, those costs are not being cut, they are focused on improving their targeting to attract more revenue.
Enshittification is a very simply concept; only product quality is measured. There might be price gouging but turn doesn’t have to be.
You’re missing half the point of enshittification. I’m just going to quote Doctorow directly:
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”
Counterexamples: Netflix without ads, Gamepass, Tinder.
I think the price being gouged by Google and Facebook enshittification is your time being wasted for their own benefit. Your time and attention is what they sell after all.
I’d say that pricing is part of the deal which can get worse. Claiming that it’s not enshittification is useless nitpicking, IMHO.
I was renting a water heater. It had been installed in my house in the early 1980s. And the rental contract had been handed down from home owner to home owner.
But there was never an attempt at maintenance, even upon request I got told “there’s no need, there’s nothing to maintain on it.” but they kept increasing the rental cost year over year “because of inflation”. It had been paid off for decades! What do you mean you need to charge more? What exactly am I paying for? My water heater is just a number in your books. You have zero costs for it!
… Why would you rent a way heater, in a home you own? Is the house a school or something???
I’ve since replaced it with a water heater I bought outright. For a while I wasn’t aware that you could just buy a heater. So I just gritted my teeth and paid up.
But my point was the weird and pointless increase of fees.
I’ve read your response to others that you bought the replacement outright, but I wonder if the original renter was about to sell their house and needed a water heater. Saddling the future with this debt could be cheaper than buying it outright.
I don’t know. It might be that it was usual at that time to rent those things than to buy them. My parents also had a rented water heater when they owned a home, which is why I didn’t even think twice about it.
I don’t know how expensive those boilers were in the 80s.
Probably this… if you’re not going to benefit from the new water heater, you’d probably be tempted to pass it off to the next owner. Renting is a way to do that.
Get a heat pump water heater and give them back that junk!
I have since replaced it with a water heater I bought outright. Sadly a heat pump isn’t an option in my home. So it’s a simple electric 80liter water heater.
