If there is a tech backlash, I don't see how more tech is the solution.
I downloaded WeCroak, after reading an Atlantic article about it being an anti-app to remind you about your impending death, and it works as advertised. By which I mean, after reading a quote about death, I feel less inclined to pick up my phone for a couple hours!
Be warned of the time sink that is trying to get mods running on desktop Minecraft.
Each version update breaks compatibility and your kids have a hard time understanding why they can’t use that cool mod their friend told them about at school where they portal to the moon!
But 'buying up used Teslas' is not some dodgy scheme, only to be considered by sketch operations. Buying used stuff is actually pretty common as a strategy for many businesses. It allows them to obtain things they need, but minimise capital costs.
In this (hypothetical) case it'd also be giving a saving on operating expenses, which would be attractive - but I can see why Tesla would be worried about their costs rising from the superchargers being used by taxis.
In general it seems fair not to allow businesses to abuse them since the pattern of use would be much more frequent and probably drawing more power. They're a perk for everyday drivers, not a way for Tesla to subsidise the operating costs of small businesses for free.
You can purchase a three-phase 230V / 80A wall charging station from Tesla.
If you are running a fleet and need a lot of capacity, then you can throw money at Tesla and get a private supercharging deployment (they've done it before).
But if car is resource not to be wasted it would be driving Uber pax 24/7 minus charging and maintenance. Maybe 3 drivers per car. Sure, fewer pax at 5am but probably dependent on what city/market.
I don't think that was the point of the post you're replying to. The point was that you might be annoyed that an invisible hand reached out and plucked away part of the value of the thing you owned and were about to sell to someone.
This is a lesson we seem to be learning over an over: Don't rely on services provided by others continuing to exist indefinitely. Whether it's your social media account or free charging for your car, if you aren't prepared for losing access to that service, you are guaranteed to have a bad experience somewhere down the line.
Which is why I'm not terribly sanguine about the current everything-as-a-service model. Going off a bit here, but aren't we kind of becoming serfs again, with ownership and power flowing into the hands of the corporations renting us their services?
No, we're not becoming serfs, we're riding the tip of the wave, where more things are tried out and thus more things fail. There can be no progress without failure.
The gas for your not-Tesla has been provided as-a-service since the first internal combustion engine was invented, and gas has occasionally been unavailable for periods of time (and the price has risen to levels unimaginable just a few decades ago). You're not a serf because you don't stick to a horse and buggy (and keep a workshop for the buggy and a paddock for the horse on your own, private, non-mortgaged property), you're a citizen in a modern economy. Let's not even speak of how you get food.
All these things need to be worked out and be reliable and eventually they will be. Today, alas, was not that day.
I think the issue is of product vs. service. Most of the things you deal with still function as products - you pay for your food / car / gasoline up front, and you consume it when and how you wish. The gasoline you bought won't magically disappear from your car because its provider decided to change the mixture or update their TOS. You don't have to worry that your supermarket prohibits you from making french fries from potatoes, because your tier only allows boiling them. You don't need to enter into long-term relationships with businesses to access basic consumables; a purchase is a one-time operation, no strings attached.
I don't see it as an issue of reliability - which will always be a problem, because it's only natural for a business to eventually screw you over in the process of wringing out more profits from you. I see replacing products with services as something that limits your ability to live the way you'd like. It forces you to have a stable cashflow to support those services, since you no longer have a product that you can use until it wears out. It forces you to treat physical objects as black boxes - not tools that manipulate reality, but only tokens of services you subscribe to that you cannot open, cannot control, and cannot use beyond what's outlined in TOS. It forces you to engage in unnecessary business relationships with other people. All of that makes your life much more fragile.
Maybe this is a good fit for average middle/upper-class, healthy and mentally stable consumers, especially those without any curiosity and creativity to use items beyond their designated purpose. But it's not a good fit for everyone.
Now, if that was just an option, it'll be great - one could choose the ratio of products to services in their lives. But the market doesn't ask you what you'd like; you choose from what's available. Services are better than products from businesses' point of view, and therefore that's what's being offered (and with extra profit margins over products, services can dupe people into them by the virtue of being cheaper at the moment of signing a contract). I fear that eventually, we'll be left with pretty much everything delivered as a service, with companies dictating how you need to live your life (and screwing you over with impunity).
I see replacing products with services as something that limits your ability to live the way you'd like.
Good phrasing. Although I do see it as a reliability problem (it is more so if you live in a less technically developed country with not-that-good foreign relation), the inability to have it my way has more immediate impact. The most visible thing is software UIs. If I had bought a product for a precise combination of its hardware and software features, it should be possible to keep away any cardinal redesigns. I still remember the auto-update from Android 2.7 to 3.x (or was it 4?) on my Samsung Galaxy SII, which totally broke the user experience.
Same with websites: nowadays you just can't buy a desktop version of anything, that not only limits the possibility of offline use, but also forces you to deal with unwanted updates. The solution seems to be to use stuff made for boring business customers. Ironically, that makes Apple a viable choice — business customers use them too, around the world, and they cannot ignore them.
I don't agree that the situation is all that different. Early grocery stores represented a significant loss of control from growing your own. Early supermarkets represented a significant loss of control from the personal, local service of the grocery store. Early automobiles represented a loss of control from having horses in your own stable. And yes, all of those losses were to ever more distant and powerful commercial entities.
But they also brought significant benefits (things got a lot cheaper, especially in terms of time and effort), and it took a while for the loss-of-control/benefit balance to get worked out, but today nobody is seriously arguing that we're serfs because we write software for cash and then spend some of that on food and cars and gas (and a myriad of other things that we probably don't 'control' as such) instead of working the land.
To riff on your concept, I met a woman in SF who was signing up for a lease at an apartment building. Knowing that she'd just moved from the midwest, and therefore not used to living in a big city, I asked her how parking was. "Oh, I don't have a spot", she said, "but the apartment comes with a subscription to Luxe (the on-demand valet service)". A year later, Luxe went out of business - now I wonder how her parking situation is.
I was thinking that too, then I realized he was wrapping the code in `DB.transaction` blocks, which rollback on any type of exception, so that all those staged/checkpoint entries only persistent if the block cleanly executes.
Really, the iPhone 7 was just the 6SS. The 'S' revision was spec and camera bumps, but no major case changes and the 7 made no case differences over the 6S.
But probably a 6SS or whatever wouldn't have sold as well, so they shipped a 7, and now the 8 actually does change the case significantly (glass back) and so thats not a 'S' revision.
No product cycle will play out perfectly in a versioning scheme, and your only surprised about the missing 'S' because they have had a naming scheme that has been surprisingly consistent for this long!
The 7 dropped the headphone jack, changed from physical to "virtual" home button and added water resistance so there were more structural changes than just spec and camera bumps.
I'm more curious to why they skipped 9 (or maybe that is still coming...)
There is definitely a changing Rust definition of good code hygiene in terms of how to write code in the most "Rustic" way, but in terms of code formatting, there is already rustfmt[0]
My first thought is are they adding enough value to take a 30% cut off a digital subscription service?
But then I flipped the question to whether as a consumer, I would be more likely to be a digital subscription with a "Subscribe with Amazon" button.
Hell yes!
I just logged into my Economist account to try and cancel my subscription and failed to find any way to do that. Emailed support, they said "we would be happy to help you, call us during business hours...".
I would love all my subscriptions to be managed by Amazon under a single interface.
I would also be more likely to "try out a subscription" knowing I could easily get out of it without dancing through hoops.
Subscription providers shoot themselves in the foot when they do unethical practices like forcing people to call in and sit on hold to cancel. Its even a violation of Visa's rules to not provide digital way to unsubscribe.
A standard perk of credit cards is you can end recurring payments. Just file a dispute on the last charge and indicate you want to end the recurring charge. Sometimes the merchant is able to reverse the dispute, but most often times decisions go in consumer's favor (particularly when you provide proof that you took reasonable steps to try to cancel before disputing).
I've gone as far as getting months of gym memberships over turned after they told me one thing in person and then told me another thing a few months later when I started getting billed again. Charge backs and the point systems are the best things about credit cards.
If there is a tech backlash, I don't see how more tech is the solution.
I downloaded WeCroak, after reading an Atlantic article about it being an anti-app to remind you about your impending death, and it works as advertised. By which I mean, after reading a quote about death, I feel less inclined to pick up my phone for a couple hours!