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.
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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Greedflation is the word you're looking for.
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
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 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
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.
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.
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.
eBooks and digital rentals should cost a fraction of their physical counterparts, but instead they cost more because of ~~greed~~ convenience.
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.
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Especially since the marginal cost of information goods is zero
No, they cost more because of Steve Jobs.
This is your reminder that that man was utter trash.
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.
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Thought it was interesting that no one mentioned Terraform or OpenTofu. Then checked the community I was in.
There was another thread recently about what happened in your life that made you no longer feel like a child. I think for me one of those things was realizing that the price of things has very little to do at all with the cost of creating that thing.
This is actually the reason why taxes don't increase luxury item costs as the cost is set to the market demand rather than from supply. In fact, the benefits from taxes help people afford more products in a virtuous cycle. It's also the reason tariffs or taxes on raw goods are so bad as you actually are creating dead weight loss and driving down demand which can be useful or detrimental depending on why someone needs that product.
Price = Cost of Materials + (Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man) + Cost of Labor.
It's Econ 101
Nah, the cost of labor + materials + distribution is the minimum price of an item. The actual price in practice will be that price + whatever the manufacturer can get away with charging.
What determines the premium they can get away with is whether or not alternative goods exist and whether or not the consumers are informed of them, motivated to seek them out, and capable of making the switch.
Macroecnomics is just all the different ways we ruin microeconomics
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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)
This is unfortunately true... Tho what is driving the rent seeking isnt tech debt its greed
Fucking Factorio engineers everywhere, I swear.
I don’t think a better analogy could possibly be made for this. Congrats, you win
"But but but, my yacht collection? 😟"
~ Gabe Newell
My criticism of capitalism disappearing the moment I see steam sale.
Modern opiate dealer
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The word he's describing is called "enshittification".
No, it's monopoly capitalism. A certain Mr. Marx from Germany had a few things to say about it.
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.
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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.
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