Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

All businesses will eventually turn into subscriptions

blog.viveksrinivasan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–78 of 78 posts

Re: All businesses will eventually turn into subscriptions

#71

Post by crocodiletears »

watt wrote: post #59
nbzso wrote: post #16

You will own nothing and you will be happy. I am waiting all this to crumble under its own weight. The concept of ownership will not go away. It takes time the masses to realize, but eventually they will realize the truth. And will buy nothing. This ultimately will bring people down to earth and they will revolt. The picture planned by Davos elites and most powerful corporations has one big flaw. There is no way to s…

Things you own, end up owning you. I can see how the diminishing concept of "ownership" might work out for the good.

I'll feel light as a feather once I upgrade my 5usd/mo toaster package to the 10usd/mo toaster-premium package without ads, additional crispness tiers, and bagel compatibility.

In theory you may be getting at something, I'm a minimalist myself. But despite flowery marketing rhetoric, the driving forces behind this trend are anything but enlightened, libratory, or benign.

Re: All businesses will eventually turn into subscriptions

#72

Post by imtringued »

narrator wrote: post #22
nbzso wrote: post #16

You will own nothing and you will be happy. I am waiting all this to crumble under its own weight. The concept of ownership will not go away. It takes time the masses to realize, but eventually they will realize the truth. And will buy nothing. This ultimately will bring people down to earth and they will revolt. The picture planned by Davos elites and most powerful corporations has one big flaw. There is no way to s…

We'll all just eventually "lay flat" like they do in China now when we figure out that hard work doesn't get one anywhere meaningful. https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/the-lying-flat-movement...

When some people supply work more than they demand work, then others must demand more work than they supply work. That is what it means to lay flat and it explains the whole credit/debt crisis thing.

The problem isn't a mythical fixed demand in the labor market, demand is entirely up to the people making up that economy. The real problem is that people desire to supply more work than they demand, which then inevitably has to be redistributed through income sharing, usually known as charity or welfare.

Supplying more work than we demand has become a cultural phenomenon. People insist on working hard even if they have no use for that hard work themselves. Saving (the act of demanding less than you supply) has become sacred and is considered morally good. It's like people don't believe in the market anymore. The interest rate tells you how much you should save or spend. You are supposed to save and spend according to the interest rate which is determined by the availability of solvent borrowers who need slack capacity in the economy (supplying more than you demand), not according to your morals. For some absurd reason people want the central bank to get out of the way of their manipulative morals that distort the market.

It's not just the government that distorts markets, the entirety of reality distorts them. Getting rid of governments just gives rise to other forms of distortion like outdated moral frameworks.

Re: All businesses will eventually turn into subscriptions

#73

Post by maximus-decimus »

pdonis wrote: post #3

Subscriptions make sense for things that you get a regular recurring supply of, like milk and newspapers. They might make sense for things that you can get regular upgrades for, like software (although often the "upgrades" aren't really worth much). But they make no sense at all for durable goods that can last for years without significant upgrades, like cars. The whole point with such goods is that you pay once and…

I would argue it makes sense in that it creates an incentive to make the product good and durable.

If you pay a one time fee and the product is just not great quality but does technically work, well you're stuck with it until you buy a new one.

If you only pay when you buy something new, the seller has an incentive to make the object not last long because then you'll need to buy a new one. If you keep paying to rent it, they lose money every time they need to give you a new one because the old one breaks.

About the car lease, you're missing the point that you don't pay taxes on the amount of car you're not buying either. It's also offering you a service : you don't have to bother trying to sell the car yourself.

Also I would argue the biggest point is a ton of people live paycheck to paycheck and a small fee every month is a lot easier to do for them than a huge amount of money now.

Re: All businesses will eventually turn into subscriptions

#74

Post by maximus-decimus »

Aeolun wrote: post #20
bullen wrote: post #12

I agree that computer hardware manufacturers need to either build poor quality (selling you a new light bulb every 1000 hours) or rent things out as peak Moores law unfolds, even if some predict the litho to keep getting smaller (EUV) the CPU performance per watt will not increase, mostly because the architecture can't take advantage of the new transistors and random memory speed has been stuck for 20 years.

> random memory speed has been stuck for 20 years Isn’t this just because random memory speed has never really been the limiting factor for a lot of things?

Trying to write fast c++ code is eye opening about how slow ram can be. Adding two number on the cpu is gonna take ~1 ns. Getting the number from ram takes about ~100 ns.

If you store your numbers sequentially in memory, you can bulk download them and it isn't so bad. But let's say you used a linked list where everything is store in a different memory location... you're basically gonna take 100 longer to iterate over a linked list than an array and that's entirely because of ram speed. Same thing if you're storing Integer objects into an arraylist in Java or something similar since your array contains pointers and you have to check a new ram location for every number. Facebook wrote their own version of a C++ string to reduce heap use because of this.

What I'm saying is you can often get around it for stuff that matters, but a lot of code that wasn't written with that in mind is definitely limited by ram speed. And let's be honest, most people who are not programming in C or C++ don't think about RAM data locality.

Re: All businesses will eventually turn into subscriptions

#77

Post by katsuragi »

The first part that then seques into the subscription based economy part is pretty shallow and fails to provide much of an argument for the emergence of subscription based services. Imo, it's not very accurate either. European immigrants didn't conquer the US from native americans primarily because of a higher birthrate, it had more to do with firepower. Japan accepts very few immigrants simply because they don't want to, not because of language barriers or lack of a colonial past. And so on.

Re: All businesses will eventually turn into subscriptions

#78

Post by BizarroLand »

nbzso wrote: post #16

You will own nothing and you will be happy. I am waiting all this to crumble under its own weight. The concept of ownership will not go away. It takes time the masses to realize, but eventually they will realize the truth. And will buy nothing. This ultimately will bring people down to earth and they will revolt. The picture planned by Davos elites and most powerful corporations has one big flaw. There is no way to s…

When I hear things like this, I'm reminded of the Dr. Seuss story, "Yertle the Turtle".

The whole system is built on the lowest rung holding the most stress without so much as a burp. When that burp inevitably comes, the whole thing could come crashing down.

Post reply on HN