“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.
“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.
Greed.
Yup. And collusion.
Yes, and monopolistic collusion … if not absolute monopolies in some sectors of tech.
I remember when they started coming out with ULTRA dish soap. They sold it in smaller bottles, as you were only supposed to need 1/2 as much, and it was just as expensive as the regular soap.
Now the bottles are back to the original size and other than ULTRA on the label it’s like nothing happened.
the more things change, the more they stay the same. There’s nothing new under the sun.
I refuse to pay $15.00 for a bottle of dish soap … but that’s what my favorite BLUE dish soap costs at COSTCO now.
Palmolive in a 1.13 gal refill jug is $15 cad at costco, which is what we use to refill the smaller bottles at the sink
The big thing now is “foaming” dish soap. 1/6th the soap mixed with water in a patented plastic sprayer.
I have some dawn for dishes from when it was on sale but i mostly buy bar soap. Don’t need to pay for water when I have a a sink/shower right there.
Have to pay executive bonuses.
But the solution is simple: don’t buy the product.
I gave up cable when Shaw raised their rates and shortly thereafter gave their executives huge bonuses.
And now I don’t miss it.
There was a brief period of time where it felt like I was suffering from withdrawal, but now, I am quite over it. As a result, I have become far more productive with my time.
To look at it from afar, those that thought that things are free were not fooled, they swallowed the meme whold.
As anyone living real self-supporting life knows, there is no free lunch.
Only that there is a sucker born every hour.
So one can surmise that this is not really revelation, though it may be good for the media cartel to stir curiosity in the sleeping population.
Gotta add, your correspondent does not subscribe to one of the channels.
Subscribe to Fox News by paying for it.
The closest thing to a free lunch is those born suckers.
Watch out for that “promotional pricing” traps. Particularly from Bell. (and Rogers, and Shaw, and…)
Blame John Tory for that, he came up with negative billing or the “free promotion and you’ll forget to cancel it after the free” plans when he was at Rogers
To look at it from afar, those that thought that things are free were not fooled, they swallowed the meme whole.
As anyone living real self-supporting life knows, there is no free lunch.
Only that there is a sucker born every hour.
So one can surmise that this is not really revelation, though it may be good for the media cartel to stir curiosity in the sleeping population.
Gotta add, your correspondent does not subscribe to one of the channels.
Subscribe to Fox News by paying for it.
Don’t know how this happened.
Squirrels.
On a similar note…our rotary phone was nailed to our home’s wall for 20 years until mom got all fancy and had Bell change the colour where it stayed for another 15.
My son is now working on his fifth Iphone. SMH.
We’re consumer cows getting milked by corporations.
After I walked home uphill in a snow storm from school, I’d try to call my buddies to see if they were up to some road hockey before dinner, but had to wait until the girl next door got off the party line we shared. Good thing for her she was cute.
My mom would put the phone up to the blender when the neighbours used the party line for too long. Worked like a charm.
I also remember how hard it was to talk to your friends about sneaking out at night when the phone was fixed to the kitchen wall and the best you could do to get away from your parental overlords was about 10 feet, around the corner in the hall, and then talk in what we thought was a smart and invincible code. Once I had girlfriends, and we both had to talk on fixed to the wall phones… with both sets of parents listening… well, I’m amazed the human race has even been able to reproduce!
As Ann Landers used to say, “If it sounds too good to be true, it is.” Plus ca change and all that.
L – I thought hi-tech was supposed to eliminate auto theft?
Not force you to buy a old fashioned, low-tech steering lock bar.
————————————————————————————————————
“June 6, 2023, Toronto, Ont. – Équité Association has released its 2022 Vehicle Theft Trend Report, and for the first time in history, insurers lost over one billion dollars in stolen vehicles,…”
https://www.blueline.ca/vehicle-theft-reaches-a-crisis-level-as-canada-becomes-a-source-nation-for-illegal-trade/
E´quite´ 2022 Vehicle Theft Trend Report…
“Layer 2: Install visible or audible anti-
theft devices
Audible alarms
Steering column collars
Steering wheel/brake pedal lock
On board diagnostic (OBD) port lock
Brake and/or wheel locks”
What’s hilarious is they have both “Smart Keys” and “wireless ignition authentication” in layer 3, which is one of the most popular forms of attack right now. So much so that Stephen Del Doofus, Mayor of Vaughan (named after a racist slaveholder, don’t you know) is giving out Faraday Cage bags for “free” (i.e. paid for by taxpayers of Vaughan)
Gell-Mann amnesia. I do this for a living, and the section on cloud costs is so clangingly wrong-headed that I discount the rest of the article.
Here’s where I stopped:
The ability to “switch your rented computing power on and off quickly, depending on your needs” is what you are paying for in a cloud. Of course that’s going to be more expensive than traditional datacenter hosting. The only other price advantage comes from economy of scale, and there are lots of tier 1 datacenter providers out there that can match AWS Azure and GCP’s price on that dimension.
I won’t criticize the author for this because I expect journalists to be stupid, but all these articles about large cloud service providers repatriating hide two salient facts: one, these places are run by developers, who know jack about how to optimize hosting costs. Every org I’ve walked into I’ve been able to cut their cloud spend by 50%+ within a month by doing the most trivial things. Two, they’re repatriating stable, often legacy workloads that have consistent and predictable computing demands. If you don’t need the flexibility of a cloud hosting service, there’s no need to pay for it.
As for most of the rest, it’s just 1999 all over again. Most of these tech businesses were selling at or below cost to begin with, burning through investor capital rather than making a profit. Now that the investor capital has dried up they’re having to properly price their offerings.
I try to look at prices per day and then see if I’m getting value.
Obviously everybody’s going to have a different perspective based on income and usage.
I think Uber is great…
For moving my bowels.
Back in the Taxis only days there were always flat rate free lancers out there – tax and regulation free.
Another example: Touchscreens in cars–notably for HVAC and/or audio adjustments. A typical 1977 dashboard allowed a driver (without looking) to adjust temperature in under a second. Now? Ridiculous. Likewise audio system ‘stuff’. In many cars it take several seconds to boot up, so these functions aren’t even available to you immediately when you turn the car on. We are training a generation to accept lower-performing usability (never mind reliability–esp w home appliances) than my generation (born mid-1960s) grew up experiencing. It’s bullsh_t.
In an article about training for very low level flying in WW2 it mentioned that the first requirement was to be able to find every cockpit control by feel alone.
Try that with a touch screen
On my particular vehicle, the only control for the heated seats is on the touchscreen, and not accessible if you run either of the carplay apps
LOL.
Everybody wants connectivity in a car, right?
God knows ya can’t get from point A to point B without the &*%*^&*(^)(^& internet looking up yer arse!
At this point, Cuba has better cars than we do.
Upgrades to enhance your life?.. Its more like planned obsolesces to enrich their lives.. Sadly, our rights are directly proportional to their ability to take them away.. They didn’t give us freedom of speech.. It just wasn’t possible to take it away because of the printing press.. So why not turn this weakness (yes weakness) into a LOL right.. In essence undermining the message with your ability to speak the message.. Awash in BS with little islands of truth popping up now and again.. Manageable..
Then social media came along.. A firehose of BS and the truth.. Not manageable, so they need to change the rules to make it manageable.. Redefine everything, put it all to sleep in a never ending war we call WOKEISM..
We were all better off when the truth was stuck on a island or a dusty book.. Their only defense is force feed us BS and call us criminals if we don’t like it.. Ugly stuff..
Co-op taxi never sent me an email supporting blm. Cancelled my Uber account and paypal.
Cancelled cable years ago. Now I’m looking at a backup vehicle from the 90s before “tech” over complicated them. Maybe Ned Ludd was onto something after all.
I’m thinking with push to ban ICE vehicles, about those old-timers who made moonshine and would sometimes use high alcohol content hooch in their tanks.
Potatoes and corn can be used to make moonshine.
The first question is, can our fuel injected cars take the hooch? What’s up with leaded versus unleaded? Do I need a car from the 70’s to burn the hooch?
The second question is, how many acres of potatoes or corn do I need to drive my poluting ICE car for a year?
The third and fourth questions are, where can I buy a 69 Dodge Charger painted like the General Lee, complete with horn, and how many woke people’s heads will explode as I sail past their line up at the 45 min charging station?