No longer science fiction.
You fuckers thought capitalism was innovation. Enjoy your capitalism while you eat 30 dollar burgers on your 2000 dollar phones made in china that you watch shit tier cult programming on social media with.
Gotta toss your Galaxy Brain T89 next year for the Ultra version with 2000mp selfie cam
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.
Oh definitely. Have you read In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts? I’m halfway thru it now and it’s been incredibly eye-opening.
I will now; thankfully friend Anna has it in her archive.
finally, candy companies fighting drug companies
Holy shit, what? You got an article on that?
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.
Back in the late 20th century, Alton Brown mentioned how it might be hard to find things like soy sauce or ginger at grocery stores.
Tastykake’s Butterscotch Krimpets changed overnight when they got bought. They’re mealy and don’t have enough butterscotch flavor.
I am sure that most of the cereals I’ve tried in recent years have changed since I was a child. Not for the better.
I blame Paz and his burgers.
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?
Yeah I really feel like I’m missing something here. I really like doing steaks on a George Foreman grill. Not sure about the rest of his life or career. But the grill (which presumably he just paid to put his name on) is decent.
His grill. It drained out all the flavor.
How hard are you strangling that grill?
I have no idea what you are talking about about and Googling didn’t help.
Vinny Pazienza, aka The Pazmanian Devil, aka Vinny Paz, aka Paz. Was another boxer.
George Foreman grills suck.
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.
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) $250 at the end of April. It’s really not that expensive for a lifetime cost.
Even before subscriptions became normalised cars had a support cost, parts and servicing, especially for genuine or genuine reconditioned parts.
Strictly speaking, you can avoid the dealers and the part costs by working with mechanics, wreckers or aftermarket manufacturers but those have extra costs and voided warranties.
Parts sales are a major income stream for manufacturers, especially as they need to compete on car sales, but once you’re locked in on that car they mark up the prices on the parts long term.
Though admittedly enshittification means worse and more expensive parts and legal threats to aftermarket manufacturers.
One of the driving forces behind this phenomena is that business types value having that reoccurring revenue on the books more than “normal” revenue. If you have two companies with identical revenue but one of them gets it from customers locked in on a subscription, that company will be valued significantly higher. If you’re an exec or a big investor who owns a lot of stock in a company then you’re effectively incentivized to push the company towards that subscription based reoccurring revenue model because it will boost the stock price and make you richer.
I was talking about this with my friend the other day. I was looking for car insurance right. I went to Geico and I was just about ready to lock in to a plan for 1000$. 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?
have you guys seen this crazy movie called idiocracy
Thats a documentary. Not a movie.
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.
At this point it’s more of an overly optimistic look to our future.
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.
Lol but dude, the people in our world are trying their best. The problem is that their best is done at the expense of the general population.
they were trying to get out of the Find Out part of the timeline, i think the suggestion is that we’re in the prequel movie where we are Fucking Around.
The main thing about the prevailing circumstances is that it showed idiocracy was way too optimistic. Their eugenics-ish narrative happened over way too long a period of time. We just needed a bunch of billionaires to poison the information supply.
X. E. Cution lol
His editor was Gil O’tine.
Because they are all businessmen. We have made a system where there are no more craftsmen. The car companies are more financial institutions that want their monthly fee, just like your doctor wants it, your washing machine manufacturer wants it.
Actually it’s your own fault for buying Superproductname. You should have bought Supererproductname. You’d have known this is you’d put in two hours of research only to find out that Supererproductname was discontinued in 1919.
“You complain about the price of groceries yet you continue to buy them. How interesting 🙏🏼”
An ice cream maker (I got at Sam’s club) had plastic gears. Thing sucked. The gears would break every third batch of ice cream (I make thick custardy ice cream). My grandmother gave me the best gift, which was her ice cream maker from the 70s. Metal gears. Now I’ll blow through motors instead of gears hooray.
Its almost like low taxes and loose monetary policy leads to share buybacks and shittier products as the CPI reports rapid deflation and more share buybacks with debt accrual.
Real question here: is it possible to walk all this back from the edge with more ethical companies? I’m thinking co-ops, Mondragon corps, union shops, etc. Basically build businesses that have motivations other than deepening the pockets of VC’s and the like, yet have some kind of growth trajectory (or federate with other corps) to gradually subsume the market.
I get that massive funding makes certain things possible, like disrupting the market, or aggressively buying your competitors. And yes, the company charter would have to be bulletproof against hostile takeover, buyouts, and enshitification, in order to go the distance. But is that really all it takes, or am I missing something huge here?
Yes, by staying privately funded and not throwing everything away chasing quarterly profits
Problem with a lot of those companies is how long they can remain privately funded and stay in business. The modern capitalistic markets inherently select for short term thinking. Think about this. Does it make any sense to destroy 90% of your profitability in 5 years to get a 20% boost in profits next quarter? In modern capitalistic markets it does, because that’s 20% more profit with which to capture more market share. That’s where the competition is.
As someone else said, you have to remain 100% private. The second you become publicly traded, that’s it.
Even then, if you want to make a difference in an established industry, you all but require preexisting deep pockets or some extremely disruptive technology that can’t be easily copied.
You then have to remain steadfast in the face of the ridiculous money that will be dangled in front of you to be bought out.
There’s a lot of stars that need to align.
I agree. The environment in which this must function is corrosive to the very idea, hence why I’m asking it openly here. It’s a pretty dense minefield.
I’m no lawyer, but I’ve mused a lot about some kind of legal “dead man switch” that somehow renders the company value-less if it deviated from the intended path. Something built into the company’s charter and founding documents, not unlike some kind of constitution.
I really don’t know if you could.
Having seen OpenAI’s trajectory of becoming a for-profit and not being “Open” in any serious sense of the word, I genuinely think market forces can absolutely pry open any chest they perceive as containing gold.
My personal conclusion is that you genuinely have to deal with human beings. Take federation for instance: we can try to decentralize these things and make an incredibly solid system, but we still depend on people coming to the realization that this is a good idea and adopting it for their personal/professional internet use.
Now I’m wondering if there such a thing as a decentralized private company? I can’t think of anything beyond having subsidiaries in different countries, but that still requires a parent or at least a main point of contact in the form of the owner. So we’re back to humans.
Now I’m wondering if there such a thing as a decentralized private company?
I’ve been thinking about this all week. I have no idea if that exists or not. A few things sprang to mind though:
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It might be possible to have lightweight companies that all adopt the same incorporation boilerplate, not unlike a computer operating system. That, in turn, would be developed by a distinct entity and would publish updates to improve said OS over time. So, open-source but for legal docs that matter. This would make companies unified in principle, but ultimately, distinct.
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It’s possible for companies to operate “at arm’s length” but still share useful information or coordinate towards similar goals. One must be well-versed in anti-trust law to do this though.
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A franchise is the only existing model I can think of that comes even close. But that’s still centralized. I suppose a non-profit parent company and for/non-profit franchise operations might come closer.
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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.
Simplicity is certainly a thing, but you shouldn’t forget that there’s quite a bit of survivor’s bias in that statement
