11–20 of 267 posts
Products or services are only free either because - you are the product or - temporarily to kill any other competitors, become a monopole and start charging a lot
Because, you know... money has to get in...
If I want to cook at home and have to order everything, I assume it won't just be there in 5 minutes. And then what? If everything is shared does someone come pick it up when someone else needs it? Do I take it somewhere?
Also, are people delivering these things? Or robots? And how can this be free? He also mentions that most work can be done at anytime. Well, if the premisse is order everything I need, even for cooking, that has to be done right away, no?
I might be totally off, but this doesn't make any sense to me.
This reads like a description of a pretty awful dystopia. Or at least one where everything might seem great, until it isn't. And when it turns, turning it back is HARD / near impossible. Do people read this and think that is the sort of life they would want in the future?
Something that rings very true for me: Sharing is amazingly underutilized (unfortunately I feel it's a deeply cultural problem right now, but oh well, over time things change): I have absolutely no inherent need to own a car. I don't need to own a Hammer. I don't need to own a bicycle pump. Actually, it's intensely inefficient how many things I do have to own and store right now, to be able to only use 5 Minutes every other week or maybe even only half a year.
What I instead need is convenient access to these things. If you can show me a model where I can have that without the burden and cost of solo-owning it – something the author is implying will be a solved problem – I am all for that.
I am unclear as to the author's intent. I expect most people here would find such ideas offensive. And yet so many things seem on the right track. It's the polar opposite of the outrageously inefficient model where everything you use, you own, and for 99.9% of the time, the thing just sits there depreciating or taking up space. Regarding cars, as a city liver who needs a car (but has no driveway or garage), I certain…
I can't see why this necessitates me not owning clothes, or allowing random strangers to use my living room while I'm out, though. I don't even really see the economic utility in either of those cases.
All that becoming "free" (here meaning "at no cost") will never happen in a capitalistic society such as many of ours. So from that point on it is pure fiction.
I am unclear as to the author's intent. I expect most people here would find such ideas offensive. And yet so many things seem on the right track. It's the polar opposite of the outrageously inefficient model where everything you use, you own, and for 99.9% of the time, the thing just sits there depreciating or taking up space. Regarding cars, as a city liver who needs a car (but has no driveway or garage), I certain…
Owning my things provides value even when I’m not using them, because I benefit from excluding other people (my competition) from using them.
Example: The sports car locked in my garage helps keep sports cars away from other people, which maintains their benefit of conferring status. It provides utility even if I basically never drive it.
This side of human nature is forgotten at our peril.
This reads like a description of a pretty awful dystopia. Or at least one where everything might seem great, until it isn't. And when it turns, turning it back is HARD / near impossible. Do people read this and think that is the sort of life they would want in the future?
It's like all of those breathless journo articles about insect protein: they sound fine until the word "replace" comes in. Maybe some folks are jazzed about eating bugs, but I am not, and would prefer not to have my meat replaced by insect protein to keep someone else's utopia going, but someone is going to have the bright idea to make the choice for me.