The demonization of China is politically advantageous. Publicizing incursions like this assists in the demonization (to be clear, it is think it’s warranted — the amount is espionage perpetrated by China on the US, corporate and cyber and governmental, Is insane)
Forced labour camps, genocide, authoritarian, cyber warfare against other nations, salami slicing neighbours, purposefully violating air space over other nations. I don't think China needs any demonisation. This is just showing its reality.
If anything both sides of the political spectrum doesn't want to get into showing China as the demon because unlike the previous cold war, they are not sure if they can win it or even force a draw. China is too powerful as it stands and getting more powerful as years pass while the current superpower is busy fighting it self with culture wars.
China is weakening. Centralization of power is making the government brittle. The government is deeply unpopular domestically, and there is no outlet for this resentment so it's continually building. China has no real allies; most countries, especially their neighbours, deeply distrust them. China's demographic outlook is terrible; the population has peaked and they've transitioned directly from enforced one-child to hardly anyone wanting more than one child.
China is indeed extremely powerful but it has peaked.
Its basically a pressure cooker. It's strong but there are no relief valves (apart from nationalistic saber rattling on various internal social media). When the pressure is sufficiently built up and the valves aren't sufficient they will blow but that is also why they keep taking provocative measures. To keep the valves working.
China has been providing military support to Russia. With a certain lens, you can see the proxy war growing from Russia and Ukraine to Russia-China and Ukraine-NATO.
>So yeah, why is that? And is anyone else tired of the constant barrage of subscriptions for things that should be one off purchases?
It's extremely tiresome. And surely the only motives are profit and control.
It's gotten so bad that now auto manufacturers are charging monthly subscriptions to use features that are built into the car that you have already purchased.[0] It's a disturbing trend that will eventually have to fall short somewhere down the line.
Cars are funny. The automakers pretend they are simply selling an object for a pile of money, but in the real world of the dealership & lending ecosystem it's all 60-72 month loans and service contracts and warranties. And it's all pretty smarmy compared to what people would accept from a reputable national brand. If cars are subscription products anyway, then having the automakers internalize & centralize that part isn't the worst thing.
On that note, perhaps banks should be the middlemen between companies seeking recurring revenue and people seeking one-off purchases? Have the company charge $X, the bank turns that into $X/24 + interest - this already exists, but it's too tied into the credit system. Perhaps there's a space for innovation there, to make a product specialized for mediating between subscriptions and one-off purchases.
That's all of finance, translating from one to the other. At the consumer level, Klarna seems to offer to go from lump sum to subscription. Or just using a credit card, really.
Not accurate exactly. The bank finances the loan, the dealership gets the money right away. The dealership gets a small commission from the bank for being the sole proprietor of the financing. The warranties are the dealership though
If you look in the fine print, the warranties are often third party insurance companies. And the financing bank is often the OEM! And the dealer also has its inventory on credit, and the creditor is also often the OEM. Yes, there's a web of entities and transactions going on, but at some level that's accounting. You pay a monthly fee in exchange for use of the car. Making this deal with a whole ecosystem may or may not be better than making it directly with the OEM.
Charging a sub for things like heated seats is obviously broken, but I also don't know if people have an appetite for what the upfront costs would be for many pieces of software that are currently subscription based, in order to provide support for any length of time. Look at the pricing for IDA, which tries to balance having an astonishingly good product, but very limited market, for how this can end up distorted without being because the company is trying to make money hand over fist.
It seems similar, to my eye, to a problem with video game development - the total cost of development continues to grow as expectations for many games do, faster than we make production costs cheaper, but consumers are very sensitive to prices upfront, so we end up with many alternate revenue streams to try and make up the gap, to say nothing of the continuous revenue needs for anything ongoing.
And people lament companies being greedy, which is sometimes the case, but ultimately, if your game costs over 45 million euros to produce, retail price is $50, and you get perhaps 50% of that (to be generous), you need to sell 1.9 million copies to break even, let alone earn anything back. [1] But revenue streams like in-game cosmetic stores may get you a very different profit cut, even if they're only a few dollars each. [2]
The same logic holds for things like recurring subscriptions or ad-supported content - much smaller amounts, but many more sources, adding up to mitigate this problem.
I don't like it any more than anyone else does, but it's not just naked profit seeking, it's often that development and maintenance are expensive, and more people would pay $20/mo for Photoshop when they need it than would pay $500 or more upfront, and I don't see a good alternate model that works in the majority of cases.
[1] - yes I'm eliding the complications of other companies putting up the upfront costs in exchange for all the money until their costs plus are made back.
[2] - Also not touching the economics of gambling in-game and the long tail and whale economies.
At least my lament is not so much that it is naked profit seeking, but that it is naked profit seeking that warps the product.
In the example of games, that additional revenue stream of day 1 DLC means content being arbitrarily cut off from the game before it's even released. That premium subscription with a +30% XP bonus is often a -30% XP loss for normal players in disguise. Those loot boxes and battle passes are holding hostage rewards that would be given out naturally through gameplay in another time. Those energy and gacha systems are preying on whales and gamblers.
In the case of software, at the same time the subscription model got popular, every application has also been reimagined as a "service, not a product". Maybe the death of local desktop apps would have happened anyway. I don't know.
Sure, it's quite possible and often happens that you do day 1 on-disc DLC and other such nonsense based on the warped incentives (though usually, I would say, the specific example of a large XP bonus isn't that they balanced around that and gave everyone -30% afterward, because that leads to horrible backlash like...I think it was Battlefront 2 where the XP system very clearly was not balanced for you not paying, and people threw a huge fit?).
As I said, I'm no more of a fan than anyone else of this, but I don't know what a better alternative here would be. The gap in cost versus upfront price is pretty large, and I doubt many developers could charge $300 or something like that and get a net gain in income.
> The same logic holds for things like recurring subscriptions or ad-supported content - much smaller amounts, but many more sources, adding up to mitigate this problem.
And at some point your customers are saturated. How many subscriptions before they can't afford another subscription? After all, if they're subscribed to the max, it's not as if their budget will have room for another one next month, or even next year. It's fully allocated, and will likely remain so.
Indeed; from my perspective, from the people I know who regularly use enough subscription services that they're close to or saturated, they will drop something they're not using as much if they need e.g. Photoshop for just one month, or the like, so even that mixed subscription revenue of only getting a month every so often is a win for them in that case...
Not sure if I understand, but the article gives a number of examples, such as:
> Mary knows that she could control her pain if she could take vitamin pills, eat a special diet, and go to physiotherapy. She can’t afford it. “Mary identifies poverty as the driver of her MAID request,” Gibb-Carsley writes on a slide accompanying her talk, emphasizing the. “She does not want to die, but she’s suffering terribly and she’s been maxing out her credit cards. She has no other options.”
I'm wondering, does this example work as anti-euthanasia instead of pro-UBI to anyone reading it (or the rest of the article)?
It seems excessively cruel to me to try and force people to live in misery big enough to make the want to kill themselves instead of alleviating the misery. Like, the article seems to frame the argument that MAID can be used to lobby for better welfare as a ridiculous idea, but that's really it: if the only thing keeping people in your society from killing themselves that it's hard and scary, what the fuck is your society doing to these people.
I'm wondering, does this example work as anti-euthanasia instead of pro-UBI to anyone reading it (or the rest of the article)?
This is a perverse sort of argument. I'm in favor of social services (UBI or otherwise) sufficient to prevent homelessness. There are a lot problematic things situations in this society. But these aren't going away tomorrow - in our world homeless will be with us for a while and you shouldn't add to the problem of homelessness the problem of social services making it easy to just end your life if you're threatened with homelessness.
So what is the benefit of making it painful to end your life? They'll drown themselves out of sight and hopefully wash into the ocean? What is the solution to the suffering that making killing yourself harder brings?
Extreme poverty is a chronic condition for the vast majority of people and is a undisputed cause of suffering. It's curable, theoretically, but not in practice.
I'm only asking because I have a domain that also uses a certificate from Let's Encrypt / R3 / ISRG Root X1 and I've never had to renew it. (It seems like they auto-renew every 90 days?)
>The size of the fine likely is somewhat revenue based
What? Says who? It's just a number that the ACCC and Google both agreed upon. FTA: The ACCC and Google jointly submitted to the Court that a penalty of $60 million against Google LLC was appropriate, and that no separate penalty against Google Australia Pty Ltd was necessary, in circumstances where the Australian company was not responsible for the preparation of the screens which the Court found were misleading.
>It's just a number that the ACCC and Google both agreed upon.
Both groups agreed on it being fully aware of Google's revenue, and if Google had the revenue of an average company it's likely neither side would have suggested the amount. Somewhat revenue based.
>Both groups agreed on it being fully aware of Google's revenue, and if Google had the revenue of an average company it's likely neither side would have suggested the amount. Somewhat revenue based.
It says absolutely nothing of the sort in the article. Seems like yet another assumption you are making.
By the same logic, both groups are fully aware that Google starts with the letter G, therefore the size of the fine is based on the fact that Google starts with the letter G.
I'm really not trying to be an asshole here, but please don't go around saying things that you don't know to be true.
>It says absolutely nothing of the sort in the article. Seems like yet another assumption you are making.
Google's revenue is public knowledge, surely the ACCC is capable of using a search engine to find it.
>but please don't go around saying things that you don't know to be true.
I can't prove it, or perhaps I could if the ACCC has fined others for the same offense, but even without proof I'm not making an extraordinary claim. If a local delivery place had two separate toggles needed to stop them from tracking your order history, they'd be guilty of the same thing yet people would find a $60M fine ridiculous.
Could even take it one step further and say that Google is flaunting bad behavior to put regulator eyes on it on purpose. Since Google controls the market anyway it would actually help to discourage competitors.
Noam Chomsky would probably agree as he says large companies love regulation because it locks out competitors.
Noam or no Noam this is pretty well known. Enterprise Risk and Compliance departments for major banks and financial institutions are a a revolving door of lobbyists, regulators, and executives, and they all participate in the draft process of the legislation.
It's about time Big Tech caught up to what the rest of what large corporations in America do. Gotta start paying off those politicians and drafting regulation to lock out all those pesky startups.
I assume this data collection law does not onlu apply to phone operating systems, but any such service that collects data and could hide disabling it in multiple places.
FTA: The ACCC’s best estimate, based on available data, is that the users of 1.3 million Google accounts in Australia may have viewed a screen found by the Court to have breached the Australian Consumer Law.
Splitting hairs but by the time I noticed you'd done a currency conversion (which had made me think your number was way off) I figured might as well be accurate.
Edit: while being pedantic, I'll also point out that halving for a "per annum" amount doesn't really make sense considering the estimate of 1.3M users is ones who "may have viewed a screen found by the Court to have breached the Australian Consumer Law" during the two years, not who were exposed to two years worth of anything.
This occurred in Australia, Australia uses Australian Dollars. Thus they are not being fined USD, they are being fined AUD. USD does not have anything to do with this discussion whatsoever.
