Tfw I paid for a subscription to access my textbook this semester.
Granted, it’s not just a textbook. My Spanish classes use VHL Central, which includes a textbook with videos, audio files, virtually endless practice assignments, and pretty much all of our assignments and course material.
It’s a really great tool, I guess I just wish I could keep access to it after I graduated. (I think you can purchase a textbook, but definitely not the full program.) Ah, well. ¯\(ツ)/¯
That kind of model is unfortunately common for university courses. I had it for my language courses, and a couple of the core maths courses.
The online platform justifies a subscription by providing additional resources, homework grading, etc. Fair enough, honestly, if they want to charge you $15 or something reasonable. But when textbook access gets rolled into the bundle, it tends to inflate the subscription cost and also have the convenient-for-the-publisher side effect of temporary access to the text. Lose-lose, from a student perspective.
I had a course that required we buy a license to Pearson’s service in order to submit homework. $100+ to view a pdf for a semester and submit homework through a buggy form interface. I still hold a grudge against everyone in the department for that decision.
With that model the company can afford to offer far more content than with a pay-once model. With a pay-once model they only generate enough income to be able to offer a book, and maybe a smattering of supplementary material. Go subscription-based however, revenue increases, so output increases and now they can afford to create and maintain a whole lot more while keeping the price affordable to those who need it during the period that they need it.
It’s a similar principle to renting vs buying. If they were to offer all of those materials as a one-off purchase at a price that would allow their business to be sustainable, it would cost more than most are able to afford.
If we go back to one-off purchases, we go back to getting less for life as opposed to a lot for a limited period of time. It’s a trade off, and clearly one that most people are willing to make.
People get so angry (OP) about the way things are just because they’re unhappy in general and looking for something to blame. Not all companies are fair with their subscription models, but most are. Not every company cares about their customers, but most do. Some companies are run by sociopaths, but most are run by normal, nice people.
I hate people defending subscriptions. They are not required for anything other than insurance or something you guaranteed will keep, like phone contracts. If they need more money for content, release content packs and dlc. Online should not cost, especially if someone like Nintendo is using peer2peer or will shut down the online servers anyways at some point.
Paying with your money and your data is more likely. The issue is not subscriptions imo either. It is getting sucked into megacorp schemes that will destroy competition with cheap prices and then enshittify and or raise prises once there is no alternative. Oh, and influence legislators to make competition illegal (youtube got big on copyright infringement).
Therefore I reduce megacorp stuff. I shop local, watch my dvds and started buying music again.
They can fuck off. So can everyone who has this neat reason why resistance to mehacorps is futile.
Subscription based service makes data harvesting much easier. Spotify can force you to connect to their server even if you downloaded your song, in the name of “verifying your subscription”.
Buy the songs, buy the movie, take them offline.
That being said there are good subscription based service, like home assistant cloud, where all your communications are always E2E encrypted and cannot be seen by their server. Their subscription model is justified, as they rent their servers.
Sure, I too would prefer to pay with money instead of data. But that’s a false dichotomy. Many of the services that require subscription also collect your data. Whereas offline local solutions do not collect your data. There are things were you pay with money and data, there are things where you pay with just money, or just data, and there are things where you don’t pay at all. So it isn’t really a ‘both sides’ issue.
Thats true, and as it is, its impossible to be completely rid of data harvesting services. I made the switch to proton to get out of googles mail, drive and photo solutions, the have a vpn included aswell. but yeah, I would never trust Google, Microsoft, meta or any of those to not collect data, no matter what they promise.
Phone bill - no choice
Internet bill - no choice
Insurance - no choice
World of Warcraft - sue me
Costco membership - worth it
VPN - worth it
I don’t pay for any others. Paid for lifetime Plex for the convenience of not needing to pay for a website domain like I would for jellyfin, and self host my own music, tv, and movies
Furthermore, Costco employees will never push you to get the executive membership, if your previous year did not have enough spending on it to at least pay back the difference.
We actually had the Costco customer service Tell us to cancel our executive membership, because we didn’t earn enough over the year
That’s kind of what we were thinking, too, which is why we went with it. We are a family of six, which means that we’re always going to buy big quantities of stuff somewhere; might as well be at Costco.
3 of those are services. Most subscription shit we see these days are products that they want us to treat like services even though there is no on going consumption. All of these software subscription services are just grifts.
I think it is because the EU listened to the people. This is what you get when elected representatives are not bankrolled by big business, and are allowed to enact legislation that doesn’t only benefit one side.
The EU has politicians that manage to legislate against the interests of gigantic tech corporations because European tech corporations are far smaller, and thus have much less leverage. Even if the US political system was significantly less corrupt, they’d probably still have issues to legislate against them.
It lacks the cornucopia now, and from what I’ve gathered it is allegedly due to a sale and rebrand to distance the company from an ecological disaster.
It’s pretty common for people’s brains to want one to be there for some reason though. My guess is because we’ve seen so many similar pictures of fruit or vegetables spilling out of a cornucopia that we misremember and merge similar pictures.
When I searched duck duck go image search for Fruit of the Loom, the cached image for their official website includes the cornucopia. When you click into it though it’s not there. WHAT ARE THEY HIDING!
Recently switched from a certain predatory fruity phone to a phone from a certain Dutch manufacturer that has removable battery and replaceable parts. At some point, it got water damaged, and the charging circuit stopped working. While I’m waiting for the replacement part to arrive, I can continue using it by charging the battery with a bench power supply. Feels good man!
Apparently a internet web series named Battle for Dream Island suffered from this right around the second half of its fourth season. Let’s just say that this is when it has hit its lowest point ever.
a subscription to a service X is O(n), where n is for how long you keep that service.
instead purchasing the content provided by X individually, is O(m), where m is how much content you buy.
if in one subscription term, you would spend more purchasing individual content than one subscription fee to X, it is financially more efficient to use X.
however, this assumes you will only consume a piece of content once, and dont care about having a physical/true copy of it.
a O(1) scenario would be like a lifetime subscription to X.
ps: i am fully on the side of owning media, and i have no idea if this comment is actually true, it just sounds smart :-)
Fuck Amazon but it is not like the others in the meme
Amazon lets you acquire physical items, of insane variety, delivered to your door, often for a price lower than you can find it in physical stores. Often delivered same day and almost certainly same week.
That’s an insane value compared to something like a game company that’s like “teehee you can pretend to own this until we get bored of hosting it and then poof fuck you!”
I did the math for me and even with the Amazon credit card the service wasn’t worth the price. It’s free shipping over ~$25(?) dollars anyway. “Prime shipping” hasn’t meant anything significant since at least 2020. It’s often the same as non-prime, maybe a day earlier.
If you care about the shows that maybe changes, but they have about 5 and anytime you search for something it’s a tossup whether it will be included with your subscription or only available for buy/rent or on some other platform. It’s even more fun when there’s ‘copy’ of a movie included with Prime, and another available for buy/rent and and buy/rent version is at the top of the search results and the one you already paid for access to you have to scroll to see.
Amazon is probably the worst of all of these. The only reason prime exists is to lock you into their store for all your purchases, when shipping orders should be a discrete charge for each shipment. At least the rest of these (except for Adobe and Nintendo, who suck about as hard) give you access to their infrastructure that lets you access the entirety of the product they offer instantly, whenever you have an internet connection.
No. You get to buy a shovel with faster delivery. You get the shovel, forever. Nintendo let’s you “buy” a game they could sunset at any moment. You possess nothing.
The songs you listen to when you are listening on random are often ads. Record companies will do “pay for placement” deals to get songs and artists they promote out there.
They used to call it payola when it was on the radio and it was illegal.
It’s a pain. I love replaceable batteries too. It took me hours to change mine on my pixel. But why is it hard to get out: phones are slimmer and processor more. So you need to get the battery wedged in there and properly thermally insulated. It’s a lot harder to do that while also making it easily field replaceable
Biography Not even the oldest or wisest of the gods knows Thoth’s true origin. Thoth can not remember the earlier part of his existence. He knows that he was very different and there is something in the back of his mind, but he just can’t remember. Thoth symbolizes wisdom, knowledge, and invention. Yet, despite his learning and knowledge, there is a bit of larceny in his heart, for he admires cunning, deception and people who use their wits and a quick tongue. Thus, he is the patron of magic, and of all fast speaking, thieving, quick-witted creatures. Thoth himself is a great orator, scholar, and author of many books about magic and history. Books about magic circles, symbols, wards, magic spells, a study of alchemy, an alchemy recipe book, and many others are among his credits. He writes all of his books in a secret code (hieroglyph and runes), although a few have been stolen and translated. Legend attributes Thoth as the inventor of rune magic, the runic alphabet, Diabolism and wards, pyramid magic, and all the sciences. He is cursed with eternal curiosity and cannot remember the days of his youth. Thoth is one of the few beings who has a complete knowledge of rune magic and it is he who has constructed many of the greatest rune weapons in the possession of the gods of Ma’ip, both good and evil. He is constantly experimenting, exploring or investigating something. Just about any magic device or component, herb, potion, magic component and the exotic are available to Thoth. He has dozens of magic wands, staves, enchanted cauldrons, manacles, amulets, books, and many other things of magic in his massive personal collection. Thoth also has a small zoo, and books and artifacts from dozens of different civilizations.
Take away user choice, use really bad excuses like water proofing and space saving, and you can be sure consumers will iteratively buy more frequently and spend more for cloud services.
Bye battery Bye bye headphone jack Bye bye user expandable storage.
Capitalism has steered us to this as the preferable product.
I ended up buying a Motorola razr because at least the fucking thing fits in my pocket for once. That’s honestly the biggest tangible benefit I’ve gotten out of a phone purchase in a while.
Each iteration of phone seems more like something I don’t want to even be involved with. Maybe I’ll just buy a light phone next time.
I remember when I could do everything with my phone using a single hand. I never grabbed my phone with two hands. Now I need two hands much more than before.
I don’t know why phablets are a thing. Phones are too big imo.
I had a Motorola g power from 2020? I think? That’s about the right size. I actually wish they could make a usable phone that’s about the size of the bottom half of this one I’m using right now, but it would take some UI innovation which nobody is interested in. It’s funny too because the bigger flagship phones are more expensive, but I’d never pay for that.
They’ve got some really tiny ones and some with physical keyboards even. I like the designs but dunno about their update commitment or hardware specs much.
It really sucks that they charge so much money for the storage difference. Why are the pricing tiers based on the storage? It’s so strange.
Anyways, I recall having a lot of issues with external storage in the past. Like Android just didn’t integrate that shit properly. It was kinda painful having the phone data and photos in separate places. Don’t remember specifics, I just know I constantly wished they were a single location.
So you’re telling me that capitalism works, and that it’s working as intended.
I agree that this is a result of capitalism. But I would surmise that this is exactly the standard by which capitalism is based. Reduce complexity, reduce operating costs. That generally means that whatever you’re making is going to be generic with no customizability and no ability to be repaired or changed by the end user. Complete vertical integration with optimizations in productivity, materials cost, and other operating expenses, all while charging “as much as the market will bear”
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