211–220 of 225 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The storage costs to google are also asymptotically approaching zero, too, no? Last year I was using $1 of storage, this year it's 0.50, ...
Cost per GB of hard disk has not dropped much in the past few years, the money has to come from somewhere.
I mean, they do have billions in profits so...
I'm seeing a lot of criticism here in the comments, but what's the alternative for free accounts? If you're not using it, how long is Google (a for-profit company) supposed to hold onto your data for free? 100 years? 50 years? 15 years? 2 years seems pretty reasonable to me for something provided by a for-profit corporation. And as other reporting has noted, they're not deleting YouTube videos (makes sense, since whi…
I vaguely remember Google promise not to delete your account in the era when they said they do no evil. That was before smartphone era and probably before their IPO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Storage units are a strange business. Most of them are just ways to hold property long term while extracting value from it, the same as if you just grew hay on your farmland. Auctioning off unpaid units is both a liability thing (there is a clear process for the eviction so units can be turned over) and a bonus revenue source. Literally every storage place has it buried in their terms somewhere.
When I had a unit in Paris I was really impressed with their efforts to contact me for small things, I feel they'd have tried every last resort if I was at risk of losing my things but I can't be sure. (Like for freaks sake at least one notification to my postal address I think should be a professional minimum for these types of businesses. It would have worked since I have mail scanning at my postal address)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is far too simplistic. Some businesses don’t even really want to make money; some intentionally lose it for tax purposes. :) But seriously… in the course of doing business, businesses affect the world, which can indirectly lead to various impacts, some of which are good.
Sure, and some of which are bad. If you want to do something unambiguously good, do it, don't start a business.
> If you want to do something unambiguously good, do it, don’t start a business.
Oh? And what is unambiguously good? This seems like a rhetorical question, but it isn’t. Try to answer it.
## Ethics
It can be quite hard to know what is unambiguously good, depending on your ethics.
- If you are a consequentialist, you’d have to pick a time frame, and even then you won’t really know until that time comes.
- Other moral philosophies might focus only on intentions, but these are not plausible, because good intentions are easily derailed by ignorance.
- I don’t have a clear answer for myself, so I can be confident that some particular idea of “unambiguous good” will not hold water for N > 1.
## Opportunity Cost
Next topic… even if we agree on an act being “unambiguously good”, that isn’t enough. Even the most “obvious” selfless acts might not be the best considering the other options available. To phrase it as a question: considering your opportunity cost, is a small scale good action really worth it?
## Life has Tradeoffs
The phrase “don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good” is apropos here.
If you want to solve a particular disease with high likelihood, you could well find it demands collaboration with flawed pharmaceutical companies.
Is it worth it? Weigh it.
But to dismiss such an idea solely because it is “impure” —- without some meaningful metric that trades off pros and cons —- is foolish and unmoored from reality.
Hello over-the-top idealist, meet entropy. Time to talk about acceptance. Do what you can with what is available. Are you trying to make change or are you more interested in trying to look like a saint?
## Organizational Structure
Practically, if your desired good thing is attainable without using a for-profit business structure, great, consider that. It can work.
Personal actions matter. By all means, give smiles, encouragement, constructive criticism, love, advice, and so on. Beware: not all kindness (such as advice) will be taken as you intended! (Whoops. Maybe not unambiguously good anymore.)
Community organizing matters. Volunteers can go a long way. (But they aren’t perfect!)
When you want to scale up your impact, you have to accept real world tradeoffs. Not all are clear at the outset.
For-profit or not, you want a plan. Often that plan demands longevity and thus some kind of sustainability. Even if you are happy to spend your capital without an eye towards building an endowment, you’ll want to think about effectiveness.
Even if you are a charity, you might face some trade-offs about what donors you want to let in your tent. Very little money comes without any kind of expectation. The expectations might be clear and totally fair such as: transparency as to how your organization spends the money. Other expectations might less savory: donors wanting to prop up their image.
## A Footgun Named Naïveté
All in all, the comment above strikes me as naive to the point of undermining one’s own goals.
## Efficiency, Corruption, Impact
It is my view that:
- maximizing impact is hard to do without trading off some efficiency
- reducing corruption is non-linear. Rooting out the big offenders is essential to keeping an organization’s mission intact. From there, fighting corruption will be beneficial but often with diminishing returns.
- At some point, trust and acceptance of human weakness may actually be more cost effective than fighting the lingering forms of corruption; e.g. personal networks having some influence over a process that is supposed to be completely blind
- In many cases, people breaking the rules based on good information and intentions isn’t corruption at all. Sometimes the system is flawed and people work around it. Figuring out which is which costs time and resources.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is far too simplistic. Some businesses don’t even really want to make money; some intentionally lose it for tax purposes. :) But seriously… in the course of doing business, businesses affect the world, which can indirectly lead to various impacts, some of which are good.
Sure, and some of which are bad. If you want to do something unambiguously good, do it, don't start a business.
> Businesses solve one problem, and one problem only: how to get money into the business owner's pockets.
I rebutted that by pointing out that businesses can and do solve other problems.
Are you changing your claim?
related question: given plummeting prices per GB for raw storage, I'd have expected the cost of hosting storage to drop per GB as well, and yet we haven't seen a commensurate drop, even given competitive pressure. What gives? Yes, I know there's many other costs but I'm talking about * PER GB * and just for storage not access. A disk drive roughly takes the same amount of space/power/cooling regardless of capacity, s…
No, storage costs aren't plummeting. They've been largely stagnant the past 3-4 years. I don't think the reduction in the number of drives for the same amount of storage is as significant as the cost of the drives themselves. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/2....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Find a different storage provider. Seizing possessions is a pain in the ass and only shady ones would try to make that the business model.
Storage units are a strange business. Most of them are just ways to hold property long term while extracting value from it, the same as if you just grew hay on your farmland. Auctioning off unpaid units is both a liability thing (there is a clear process for the eviction so units can be turned over) and a bonus revenue source. Literally every storage place has it buried in their terms somewhere.
Decent places allow you to prepay, have multiple payment options, etc because they also don’t want to deal with auctioning.
I'm seeing a lot of criticism here in the comments, but what's the alternative for free accounts? If you're not using it, how long is Google (a for-profit company) supposed to hold onto your data for free? 100 years? 50 years? 15 years? 2 years seems pretty reasonable to me for something provided by a for-profit corporation. And as other reporting has noted, they're not deleting YouTube videos (makes sense, since whi…
At least for the first case, that assumes a lot of leeway in the justice system of a given country. Not everyone gets the SBF/Elizabeth Holmes treatment.
To say nothing of other risks, and the layering of other provider's kafka-esque policies. As an example, I have a few service accounts tied to a barely used gmail address. -Primarily- because those services [0] don't have a good/any way to move accounts between e-mails or merge accounts between two separate emails.
[0] - One of which is Sony, not exactly a bit player
related question: given plummeting prices per GB for raw storage, I'd have expected the cost of hosting storage to drop per GB as well, and yet we haven't seen a commensurate drop, even given competitive pressure. What gives? Yes, I know there's many other costs but I'm talking about * PER GB * and just for storage not access. A disk drive roughly takes the same amount of space/power/cooling regardless of capacity, s…
No, storage costs aren't plummeting. They've been largely stagnant the past 3-4 years. I don't think the reduction in the number of drives for the same amount of storage is as significant as the cost of the drives themselves. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/2....
https://blocksandfiles.com/2021/01/25/wikibon-ssds-vs-hard-d...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cost per GB of hard disk has not dropped much in the past few years, the money has to come from somewhere.
They make more than 50 cents per year of off people’s info, even from inactive accounts I’d reckon.