Former Columbia House insiders explain the shady math behind “8 CDs for a penny”

>> “You’re not supposed to be enjoying yourself this much,” even though we were incredibly productive. Is it possible to have fun, go home at 6pm, and still be productive any more?

>> Especially looking at my younger friends in their late 20s, I feel bad for them, because they’re grinding. They’re working their asses off. They’re working so much harder than we did, and they’re barely having time for their own projects. One thing about the fat, Clintonian, CD money years, is that in New York, you could still skim off some of the industry money and be an artist. Is this just an attack of the Good Old Days syndrome or is it evidence of a trend that will eventually cause the ossification of our cities?

PS: UK: Book of the month style 'clubs' had books in 'club edition' bindings to differentiate them. They did that default option is you bought that month's book deal as well. My parents did it for a bit, then stopped it.

Not really. My guess is you're young enough that you never had to deal with AT&T in their prime. Packet prioritization is the very beginning of what carriers would like to happen. But once they get it, each succeeding step gets easier.

The basic view of a dominant carrier is that they should get a piece of everything that passes through their network. Everything. And because they're enormous, they really only want to deal with other enormous entities. It's most convenient for them to skim 30% of everything if they deal with just a few other players who are also monopoly or oligopoly players.

Try to imagine what the Internet would be like if Ticketmaster were in charge. Or if you'd like to read the history, When Wizards Stay Up Late, an origin story of the Internet, gives some of the flavor of how much AT&T squeezed everything.

Or you could look at the history of the answering machine. It was originally invented by AT&T, but they suppressed the invention out of fear that it would cut down on call revenue. [1] They fought tooth and nail against letting other companies sell them; it wasn't until 1956 you were even allowed to strap something to your phone [2], and they prevented people making electrical connections to the telephone network until 1968 [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answering_machine

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone#Landmark_regulatory...