Simplicity is certainly a thing, but you shouldn’t forget that there’s quite a bit of survivor’s bias in that statement

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 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.

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.

Thats a documentary. Not a movie.

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.

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.

Everything. Even pet food, I can see the changes, the canned paté my cat enjoyed used to be like a terrine in the can, now it’s a loose watery mess.

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.

Line must go up

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.

Tastykake’s Butterscotch Krimpets changed overnight when they got bought. They’re mealy and don’t have enough butterscotch flavor.

I blame Paz and his burgers.

“You complain about the price of groceries yet you continue to buy them. How interesting 🙏🏼”

You joke, but staring at the shitty LG LED TV I bought a year ago, I get mad at how much research we have to do these days just to make sure we get the best <PRODUCT> possible for the budget we have.

Not that long ago you could walk into a TV show room, pick the best one they had that you could afford and that was that. We’d have our brand preferences, but by and large we could buy a TV that would last us ten years.

Now, in order to stand a chance of getting five years out of a product we have to do weeks of research, scour a bunch of forums, mentally having to vet out replies that feel like they’re shill accounts. We have to become miniature experts in every field where we need to spend money, and it’s just fucking exhausting.

In my case, I was labouring under the belief that LG make really good TVs. Turns out they make really good OLED TVs, but their LED panels suck balls. So within nine months of buying this panel, the backlight has become patchy as shit, and now I’m having to go through the bullshit of returning it in order to get a better one.

Yes, by staying privately funded and not throwing everything away chasing quarterly profits

Basically, it’s about the leadership.

Boeing leadership used to be exclusively the engineers who have worked their way up. They knew the ins and outs of every step, what works and what doesn’t work, and therefore had a huge focus on safety because they weren’t profit driven.

Then they brought in someone who wasn’t an engineer and things immediately went south. I want to be cheeky and say that MBAs ruin everything because that way of management takes everything human out of management. Making that line constantly go up forever is the issue.

So, for a company to produce products that actually work, you need leadership who isn’t profit driven and who actually has experience at all levels of production.

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.

going by the cover from top to bottom: spaceX, tesla, DOGE. hmm…

His editor was Gil O’tine.