On the other hand, I found that sometimes I run out of plastic bags when I need them at home.
In some situations, a plastic bag is super useful: store a wet paintbrush overnight, wrap something that needs to retain moisture, lock up some smelly stuff, etc.
In those cases, I go to a store that still has plastic bags, then buy some stuff there and generously pack them into plastic bags.
> Those reusable shopping bags [...] How many times have you used your last one?
This reply blew my mind ... when you realize someone must have the exact opposite experience ...
of course I use the reusable bags,
they are in the trunk, and first step after pulling into the parking spot is to take these out the trunk and head into the store
in the last 5 years used only my reusable shopping bag every time except in a few cases when I forgot to put the bags back in the trunk for some reason (usually, I needed to transport bigger things)
I don't think the GP is making any comment on whether there is or isn't a genocide, nor trying to be convinced either way. It seems they are saying - and I agree - that there is a difference between an article accusing someone of committing genocide and an article which is critical of someone.
I think what triggers most of us to complain is the fact that the price goes up while the value goes down.
Spotify is actually a great value, but they keep making it worse and worse. If they had announced a price increase along side of an announcement of "we're doing this to compensate for the expected loss of income that will occur when we remove podcasts from the UI as we refocus on our core competency of delivering you amazing music and helping you discover amazing new music" we'd be cheering the price increase.
But no, the price will go up, and they'll F-up the UI even further to make it even harder to actually find music in it, and they still won't offer high quality streams.
"Get what you pay for" is fine, but what they're giving me is getting closer and closer to what I'd expect to get for free.
You can migrate off Spotify right now with an app like Songshift - try out other music apps like Apple Music and see they work for your collection/playlists.
I have both an Apple Music family plan as well as Spotify individual for several years, but will probably migrate off Spotify (if only to send a pricing signal to them). My kids have an iPad set up with my apple account, so I'll have to migrate them off to their own account first.
Spotify won't lose their core listeners, but folks like me who were probably already spending too much will realize they've wasted years of sparse usage.
If I find Apple Music isn't working I can always migrate back.
The number of people spending five or more dollars on a single cup of coffee can't possibly be so high that it brings the overall average to five dollars, could it?? That would make me sick.
This is why time matters. Society has generational amnesia. New generations will think of this as normal, and will even call you weird for thinking it could ever work differently. There will be an equilibrium, but it will be much farther than you consider reasonable.
You can see this dilemma on YouTube. Videos with highly exaggerated facial expressions, arrows, and sensationalized titles full of exclamation marks tend to attract far more clicks (and therefore more revenue) than those with honest titles and straightforward thumbnails. This trend has forced even high-quality content creators to adopt these tactics to remain financially viable. Despite the misleading titles and thumbnails, their actual content often maintains the same high standards once the video begins.
If you are watching from the browser I can recommend Clickbait Remover for Youtube. It replaces the title image with a frame from the video itself. It also changes the case of titles for them not to scream at you.
it is not about explicitly voting down a Youtube channel to punish the creator for making exaggerated claims,
that type of action does not scale
what will happen instead is that people will develop an immunity to these types of thumbnails and you will visit less - behaviors are the main driving mechanisms
it will be boring like exaggerated burlesque facial expressions in the early movies
Why would they stop working when everyone does it?
The methods described might be new, but the underlying principle is simple and fundamental - charge customers based on their willingness-to-pay. If customers are willing to pay $10 for your product, as opposed to $20, almost all businesses would take that into account when setting their prices.
In a low-tech world, you can only price stuff using one-size-fits-all. So you would price stuff based on something like median-willingness-to-pay. This puts your product out-of-reach for half its potential customers, while giving a big discount to the other half. The techniques described in the article are designed to "fix" the above - sell the product to as many people as possible, and give everyone a more even discount compared to their willingness-to-pay.
There is no reason for this strategy to stop working just because other companies are also doing it. In fact, it will only snowball once this practice becomes more commonly accepted.
In a macro sense, fine-grain-price-differentiation is undoubtedly in the best interests of all corporations. Whether they are in the best interests of consumers is more debatable. I'm guessing the answer is no. In theory, the best possible outcome is perfect price differentiation, coupled with increased corporate tax rates (or capital gains tax rates) that are used to lower income tax rates. I doubt this will happen anytime soon.
> Once you know the prices are jacked up just for "you", and once you know you are being "played," you behave differently and resist.
This isn't true. If you find out that only Tesla is customizing their car-price for you personally, you may decide to boycott Tesla. But what are you going to do if every single car company does the same thing? Boycott all cars and take the bus? Hence my point that price-personalization works even better when more companies do it, not less.
Yes, but that just changes your price sensitivity (potentially all the way to 0 if you refuse). There might be some ringing or chaotic dynamics in the price discovery dynamic system but a sufficiently advanced algorithm could take that into account. Still dystopian depending on your perspective.
> Why would they stop working when everyone does it?
If everyone does it, it's a de facto cartel.
Cartels generally end when one of the members breaks ranks and starts selling the product for less than the agreed-upon cartel price and vacuuming up all the customers. The result is often a price war.
I read it a bit, but it seems the article is little more than a single person's anecdotal observations.
I tuned out after reading about 40% ... there is no conclusive evidence presented, just one person's observations over their career ... then you get things like:
> The older I get, the more I understand what's been broken
One of the common misdirections propagated by these articles is arguing that inflation dropped from 10% to 4%, so things must be better, why aren't people happy about that?
but wait that 4% is on top of the 10%,
the thing that matters is whether the income went up 10% before hitting the 4% inflation, only then would the 4% be a positive number.
the inflation does indeed slow when people run out of money, but that's not going to make put them in good mood
This point is really irritating. When pundits complain about the public being wrong on the economy, they constantly ignore the fact that inflation has been very high for many months, prices went up, so even if inflation is lower now - the prices are still up. I can see the impact of it every time I go to the grocery store.
Wage growth data is showing that the US wages grew by 10% over the same period we experienced the 10% inflation? Highly doubt it but would be happy to be proven wrong.
Yes, the word "inflation" is pretty much propaganda. Especially when you start talking about rates of change of rates of change. People are concerned when they discover that they are now poorer than they were just a handful of years ago and now a box of Cheerios costs $7.
Any sources that you can provide which integrate both of those measures (so that we are comparing prices to salary)? (and of course even if inflation and wage growth were always identical, people would be worse off as they get pushed in to higher tax brackets)
Correct, it's higher than 2019. Do you think Q1 2020 was a time of mass affluence? You remember the food lines and 15% unemployment, right? It's composition effects.
On the other hand, I found that sometimes I run out of plastic bags when I need them at home.
In some situations, a plastic bag is super useful: store a wet paintbrush overnight, wrap something that needs to retain moisture, lock up some smelly stuff, etc.
In those cases, I go to a store that still has plastic bags, then buy some stuff there and generously pack them into plastic bags.