No longer science fiction.
The same reason why the childhood treats like Hostess Twinkies and cakes and candy bars don’t taste good anymore. I originally blamed my tastebuds for the change, but now I believe it’s the enshittification of base ingredients, squeezing as much nostalgic goodwill and basic cravings for sugar/fat as possible out of ever-lower quality, cheaper basic materials in the name of profit margins, donations to conservative super PACs, and executive yachts.
I was just reading an article about how candy companies are trying to make GLP-1 (Ozempic) resistant candy that is effectively hyper-addicting and restarts the cycle of addiction.
Incredible how bad capitalism is for society and it’s affect on food processes in order to drive needless profits.
That should be illegal, wtf. Actually evil shit. No wonder people love Superhero movies when real life is filled with supervillains with no end in sight.
Oh definitely. Have you read In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts? I’m halfway thru it now and it’s been incredibly eye-opening.
Ah, Coffiest is finally here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants
“In a vastly overpopulated world, businesses have taken the place of governments and now hold political power. States exist merely to ensure the survival of huge trans-national corporations. Advertising has become hugely aggressive and by far the best-paid profession. Through advertising, the public is constantly deluded into thinking that the quality of life is improved by all the products placed on the market. Some of the products contain addictive substances designed to make consumers dependent on them. However, the most basic elements of life are incredibly scarce, including water and fuel.” This in 1952. Mad Men indeed.
I’m just sitting here laughing by myself in my miserable densified cardboard shack I live in.
A quote from the book:
“each sample of Coffiest contains three milligrams of a simple alkaloid. Nothing harmful. But definitely habit-forming. After ten weeks the customer is hooked for life. It would cost him at least five thousand dollars for a cure, so it’s simpler for him to go right on drinking Coffiest - three cups with every meal and a pot beside the bed at night, just as it says on the jar.”
Advertising has become hugely aggressive and by far the best-paid profession.
Didn’t see generative AI slop coming I guess. Money in advertising has been shrinking, at least for small and medium firms.
I mean, that’s part of it yes…
…but also overall food has gotten better, more diverse, with better flavorings, especially if you make it yourself.
So on one hand, a modern Twinkie isn’t as good, but on the other hand, there’s far more tasty options than just a Twinkie now. Hell, even those similarly styled and packaged Mexican treats (like a Bimbo Nito for example) appeal to me more than Hostess treats of any kind.
But I’d still rather go for something locally made that isn’t packaged and filled with preservatives. I am lucky to have some nice Mexican bakeries nearby.
George Foreman was the shitty burger guy.
Paz just broke his neck in a car accident, sued his driver for a million bucks, got drunk all the time, and started beating his wife and passing bad checks.
But what George did to burgers is irredeemable.
What’s the problem with burgers done on an electric grill? Or was his grill specifically a piece of shit?
I have no idea what you are talking about about and Googling didn’t help.
Again, we can blame Nixon and Reagan.
One of the things that corporations learned from the Oil Crisis is that the top executives could keep drawing a big salary even if the plants were off shore. Reagan enshrined the idea that as long as there was some guy in a suit pulling the strings, everything was fine and dandy.
It’s because the hot idea in business right now is rental models for everything.
If your business plan doesn’t have a way to lock customers in and force them to keep paying forever, then no investor is going to look at it.
Software is subscription, infrastructure is subscription. Hell, your own data is probably subscription based these days. Buy a car? Bet your ass it has at least 1 subscription service in it.
I understand some of it tbh. Not the cars. A car is one and done, you manufacture it and you don’t NEED to spend much more after the fact to keep the happy new owner happy. There’s no way servers cost as much to run as they want for their cloud services (e.g remote start via app, unlock via app, etc). Sure there are R&D costs and they’re pretty big, but those usually end when a model comes out, so you can divide it by total cars sold to get how much it is per one car. Before Tesla, cars didn’t really get software updates unless there were major issues.
But I’m starting to understand why the software industry adopted the service model. Having worked for multiple companies doing B2B SaaS… The customers just keep asking for new things. Does a meal planning app need to be a subscription service? Probably not. But anything that keeps on adding new features costs a lot of money. Software engineers aren’t cheap.
Of course my view may be skewed because it’s B2B, not software anyone would just download off an app store or website. At my different jobs we’ve had billion dollar companies come and say “we love what you’re doing, we want to keep using it, but you have to do X, Y and Z or our workflow just won’t work and we can’t use it efficiently”.
Also in the world of consumer facing software, nobody wants a big upfront payment, but people are more willing to stomach a small monthly subscription. We could do away with proprietary software altogether, but oftentimes what happens with open source software is that due to lack of funding, devs don’t have enough time to work on things, and they lag behind proprietary offerings. Large software suites like Adobe Premiere are never “finished” and thus neither are the open source alternatives. But Adobe has a ton more engineering resources to throw at improving their product than most open source projects.
TL;DR: Software engineering is expensive. People working open source projects are often doing it in their spare time after the work that actually pays their bills. If you want free and open source software to be competitive to paid subscription software, you gotta set up recurring donations and convince other people to do the same. At least it’ll be forkable, voluntary and democratic, unlike with proprietary software companies.
The problem with the subscription model is that it doesn’t incentivize making improvements. If I buy a piece of software, I’m not going to buy the new version unless they make significant improvements. With a subscription model I have to continue paying for it even if they make no improvements to the software.
The customers just keep asking for new things. Does a meal planning app need to be a subscription service? Probably not. But anything that keeps on adding new features costs a lot of money. Software engineers aren’t cheap.
This is a problem of poor sales and marketing. The sales people should simply charge the customer for the changes that are asked for. Of course neither the sales people nor the customer understand the cost (they think it’s just pushing one button). Sales people tend to have too much influence in a company (like they bring in the money, not the product, and developers are a cost) and they’ll say yes to anything the customer asks for even if the customer may not even care all that much. But hey if this company is offering free software development services, why not take advantage of it?
A service model might make sense in some cases, but oftentimes it does not. Most definitely not in the consumer market, but we see that everywhere now.
Especially with software, it’s a weird world.
Back in the 80’s and 90’s, they were making actual improvements to things like spreadsheets and word processors. Remember when spell check was a separate program you ran after the fact?
I’d say MS Office hit the point of perfectly usable, needs no improvement somewhere around 2003. Even by then, the vast majority of users weren’t aware of or cared about the features they were adding and would soon start strongly wishing Microsoft would quit fucking around with the UI every few years.
Their business model relied on people buying new versions every so often, and then they made a version that was everything anyone would need…so now what? Demand that they just keep paying for it.
Even before subscriptions became normalised cars had a support cost, parts and servicing, especially for genuine or genuine reconditioned parts.
Strictly speaking, you can avoid the dealers and the part costs by working with mechanics, wreckers or aftermarket manufacturers but those have extra costs and voided warranties.
Parts sales are a major income stream for manufacturers, especially as they need to compete on car sales, but once you’re locked in on that car they mark up the prices on the parts long term.
Though admittedly enshittification means worse and more expensive parts and legal threats to aftermarket manufacturers.
also in the world of consumer facing software, nobody wants a big upfront payment
I think this is a much bigger thing than people realize. Like it’s all great to say “I would pay much more for a one time payment”, but when it actually comes down to it most people won’t.
Look at something like Plex, they offer both a subscription as well as a one time purchase. But in 2023 (the newest data I could find) the subscriptions make up 84% of Plex’s entire revenue stream. And the plex lifetime subscription really isn’t that bad either, it’s only $120 and it’s supposed to go up to only (I know how y’all feel about it being “only”, I don’t care) $250 at the end of April. It’s really not that expensive for a lifetime cost.
One of the driving forces behind this phenomena is that business types value having that reoccurring revenue on the books more than “normal” revenue. If you have two companies with identical revenue but one of them gets it from customers locked in on a subscription, that company will be valued significantly higher. If you’re an exec or a big investor who owns a lot of stock in a company then you’re effectively incentivized to push the company towards that subscription based reoccurring revenue model because it will boost the stock price and make you richer.
I was talking about this with my friend the other day. I was looking for car insurance right. I went to Geico and I was just about ready to lock in to a plan for 1000$. I had a question I needed answered so I went to support. What I got was a worthless chatbot that ended up costing Geico my business. I was so displeased I ended up going to progressive.
But that begs the question: do Geico executives make more money off the increased stock valuation that comes from implementing a chatbot despite losing my real, cash business?
Easy to measure (support manpower costs) vs hard to measure (business lost due to bad support).
Good engineering (and old fashioned business practices) would try to better measure the hard to measure stuff (for example using surveys).
Modern MBA business practices just uses the easy to measure stuff as guidelines and doesn’t even try to measure the rest, possibly because “if we don’t officially know it then I can’t be blamed for it”.
Mind you, maybe they’re right since most consumers get shafted and still keep on coming back for more.
Enshittification is the end result of putting profits above everything. There’s a reason why XJ Cherokees are still running today despite being over 40 years old. Their internals were so simple that even the most mechanically illiterate could work on it with basic tools from the hardware store. Something like that wouldn’t be make it past the pitch meeting today.
have you guys seen this crazy movie called idiocracy
That’s not true at all.
In Idiocracy, the president and his cabinet put their smartest people (well, person) in charge with zero pushback and listened to and trusted expert opinion. When a policy failed (Brawndo went out of business and took the economy with it), there was swift punishment for those directly responsible, and when policy succeeded (crops were growing), they quickly pivoted and elevated those responsible. In Idiocracy, the most competent people were put in charge.
What we have is MUCH worse; people stupid and short-sighted enough to destroy everything in the name of ego and greed, and just smart enough to be successful in their destruction of our societies, governments and planet.
I would much rather be in Idiocracy if I’m being honest. At least those people were trying their best; can’t fault them for that.
That’s not true at all.
In Idiocracy, the president and his cabinet put their smartest people (well, person) in charge with zero pushback and listened to and trusted expert opinion. When a policy failed (Brawndo went out of business and took the economy with it), there was swift punishment for those directly responsible, and when policy succeeded (crops were growing), they quickly pivoted and elevated those responsible. In Idiocracy, the most competent people were put in charge.
What we have is MUCH worse; people stupid and short-sighted enough to destroy everything in the name of ego and greed, and just smart enough to be successful in their destruction of our societies, governments and planet.
I would much rather be in Idiocracy if I’m being honest. At least those people were trying their best; can’t fault them for that.
