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.
People living off UBI alone won’t be in mansions drinking champagne and eating caviar. They’ll be in a little shoebox apartment eating ramen and drinking the pasta water.
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.
Wealthy people or wealthy government… dependence is dependence.
Right now people have the option to start their own business and work for themselves if they don’t like the idea of working for someone else.
I don’t want to jump in on @zeppo@lemmy.world 's chance to reply but he stated basically what I would’ve replied with above. I believe that UBI wouldn’t change how things work, it would reset it to a previous economic time but with more equity since everyone would get it (getting back to livable wages because it’s supplemented by the UBI). The government’s have shown a failure of holding capitalism responsible for distribution of wealth (stagnant Fed minimum wage, forcing unions to accept terms/not strike) so subsidizing wages seems more of a greener pasture than our current trajectory.
You would still be able to start your own business, I don’t think anyone is calling for UBI mixed with communism (government owning all production). Rather, some breathing room to return to more prosperous times where you have more options.
I agree the “freedom” some would experience would be hardships trying to live off of it. It’s hard and mentally draining work to be more self sufficient as humble homesteaders will attest to(it’s a rather well put together video from a contestant on the “Alone” series). But, atm most people can’t afford to start their own business or even realistically consider leaving their current workplace. Dropping into higher education for a career change without incurring enormous interest is near impossible without support (as climate regulations are needed, some jobs will have to be lost and those people need reassurances they can find a new path). Hell, use your UBI supplement to help take a vacation more than once a decade if it helps with mental health, fix a car instead of purchasing a new one (lower climate impact), etc etc.
There’s just a plethora of problems atm that constantly get politicized or fail to have common sense policies implemented to help the situation. UBI would be a catch-all for a lot of those programs. Instead of battling it out on each front constantly (lobbyists, activists, personal conflicting interests from those elected), this would be a nuclear option to end the war (feels insensitive with the current Oppenheimer/Japan stance, but was the best metaphor I could come up with atm).
I do agree that UBI could probably be used to replace a lot of existing programs to eliminate a lot of waste in the administration of said programs and the time wasted with Washington fighting over them. Although, I do have to wonder if they would be spread too thin if the money is given to everyone, to the point of being almost meaningless. One might say a solution for that is to have a cap, like they did for the stimulus checks. If you make over $X, then you don’t get any UBI, but then it isn’t exactly universal, and it will lead to a bunch of red tape a person needs to jump through if/when they fall on hard times.
I think a lot of the UBI discussions also assume prices will remain constant. I think that remains to be seen. If everyone is getting $X/year, does $X basically become the new 0? I hope not, but do think it’s a real possibility.
UBI isn’t a silver bullet though, and shouldn’t compensate for the failures of other systems, such as education. Student loans are broken and universities have gotten out of control with their spending. UBI would simply be a bandaid on the problem to kick the can down the road (much like all this student loan forgiveness stuff) and does nothing to solve the predatory loans, backed up the government of all things, which allow the universities to essentially ask students to hand over a blank check.
UBI would be a nice value add on top of an already solid system. The current system is anything but solid. Systems are fundamentally broken and debt is out of control. I can only assume UBI would be funded with more government debt, which we can’t afford. If people want to talk about UBI, I think step 1 is getting our house in order financially.
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.
Someone in a nice big house, with nice new cars, and eating fancy dinners is probably making what, $300k/year? The current US budget currently is currently $19.5k per person. That’s a big gap to close. Where is it coming to come from?
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.
So…. Just print more money, really?
They tried that during the pandemic, look at how that’s going with inflation. Ever heard of hyperinflation? That’s where blindly printing money will lead. Not to mention the dollar being removed as the world’s reserve currency almost immediately, which has various ramifications.
This isn’t fear mongering, it’s basic economics. What is this financial system you’re thinking of that will support such a thing?
there is a quote which is (probably apocryphally) attributed to keynes that goes “if you line up all the economists end to end, they wouldn’t reach a conclusion”.
in other words, those people all made that up.
Yes, I am aware of economics. I was never talking about economics and this is exactly what I’m talking about. You don’t know how to think outside of that. You think inflation has to exist. You can’t seem to wrap your head around that not existing.
If you destroy all of things things, then why does the idea of income still exist? It seems UBI is born out of the need for money in the current system. If you eliminate the system, what’s the point of UBI?
And what is this new box you’re proposing that doesn’t have things like inflation or supply and demand? I can think outside the box, but if you want people to get behind what you’re talking about you need to explain it and it needs to be possible, and not “wouldn’t it be great if we could all fly around on luck dragons and eat the nutritionally perfect donut holes which rain from the sky 3 times per day.” We can just all make up our own thing, never tell anyone exactly what it is, and expect anything to happen. If we’re doing that, I’m taking luck dragons and donut holes.
Cause I’m not really in favor of going back to the trade days.
I’m really into ideas that play into where we currently sit. There’s money around. We just aren’t allowed to have it cause other people do. All I want is for people who can’t easily have funds, to have them. Why is that wrong or bad or why does it need to cause inflation?
Outside of “WELL ECONOMICS” like save it, Reagan. Been there, done that. Economics seem to be effectively fucking people like me over. And people who have it worse than me… jesus H.
I’m not talking about fantasy shit. What I am talking about is completely possible. Just because people have more money doesn’t mean they suddenly need to pay more for shit too. In fact, lets do away with raising prices.
Again, we have NEVER had UBI before. Temp hand outs are not UBI either. Universal Basic Income would be just that. It’s right there on the damn labe. You give people a decent allotment so they can fucking live without needing to fucking bust their ass for money until they die.
Sorry but I think life should be more than working 40 hours a damn week so I can have a place to live so I don’t have to have mental breakdowns in public where everyone can see it.
People didn’t make up economics and decree it over people, it’s just how things work when there is trade (either via money or trading chickens for barely).
We don’t have unlimited supplies of stuff. If there are 10 eggs, and 20 people with UBI money in hand that want them, how do you decide who gets one? A raffle? These are the real-world things that need to be solved for if a new system is going to work.
Great! sounds better than my cardboard box on the sidewalk.