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Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

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Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#321

Post by thfuran »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #208
wongarsu wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is exactly why they should be banned to keep the market overall healthy. Preventing deceptive practices in a market economy this is a prime example of useful government "intervention", just like supporting contract enforcement or preventing theft

They can always justify it as not knowing the price. The sales tax rate is different in different places. It costs a different amount to ship to Florida than Alaska and picking it up at the factory is free (even if nobody does). The advertised price is if you have your own modem, renting one from the cable company is more. None of these are inherently wrong. You should be paying more if you're having it shipped to a…

>They can always justify it as not knowing the price.

You could as easily say that the marketing department not knowing the features of the product justifies them making whatever claim they want in an advertisement. Why should a company be permitted to advertise something they don't know to be true, let alone something they know to be false?

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#322

Post by yolovoe »

StackRanker3000 wrote: post #305
yolovoe wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect they're not getting a dedicated server from Amazon. If it's literally called a dedicated server, why would you suspect otherwise? Source: I worked in the core EC2 dataplane for a couple years. PEs and leadership there would not be happy with misleading customers. We constantly thought of the customer experience there.

I think you misread the comment you responded to. It didn’t mean ”I suspect that what they are getting from Amazon isn’t a dedicated server”. Rather it meant ”I suspect that they’re getting a dedicated server from somewhere else that isn’t Amazon”. The original comment was talking about a dedicated machine for personal projects with a fixed cost of $40/month.

Ah, this makes sense. Thanks for clarifying!

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#323

Post by theoldlove »

jonahhorowitz wrote: post #181
doctorpangloss wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People complain about this relentlessly, but never change. Additionally, every single business owner I know complains that whatever it is they're selling, (1) it isn't worth the brain damage to sell to customers looking for the lowest price, (2) as long as people comparison shop in a harebrained way, hook pricing (aka up front pricing that looks low and turns out high) is only rational. It's not like they're providin…

California gets a lot of flack for having too much regulation, but this change is very welcome for consumers. No more junk fees in CA. - https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/sf-restaurants-junk-fees...

Too bad DoorDash is exempt

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#324

Post by AnthonyMouse »

withinboredom wrote: post #316
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sales tax isn’t THAT different between jurisdictions, so we are talking about the seller having to lose a small percentage of margin. California has a 7.25% sales tax. Oregon has a 0% sales tax. A 7.25% difference is larger than the entire net margin on many products. > Sales are mostly about moving items, so they are already losing huge margins at that point anyway. It seems like we've now gone from "there is no r…

Don’t advertise California prices in Oregon? I was referring to city/county taxes, not state taxes. Tor example, a local city to me in the US had a total of 14% sales tax, while outside the city was 10%. Anyway, a sale’s motivation is to move products off the shelf and make room for more profitable products; they’re already losing money.

> Don’t advertise California prices in Oregon?

California borders with Oregon. Radio waves cross state lines. People see highway billboards and then drive into another state. People use the internet and you don't know where they are.

> Anyway, a sale’s motivation is to move products off the shelf and make room for more profitable products; they’re already losing money.

A sale's purpose is frequently to bring customers into the store to buy other products, or get customers to try a product for the first time to drive repeat business.

There is also plenty of advertising that isn't discounts. Maybe your product is great and you want to inform the customer that they can get something better than the competition for the same price. Maybe you're just publishing a comprehensive price list for all your products.

And in all cases, "losing money" is not a binary result. Losing a small amount, or not making as much as you wanted to, is very different from losing so much that you go out of business.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#325

Post by withinboredom »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #324
withinboredom wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t advertise California prices in Oregon? I was referring to city/county taxes, not state taxes. Tor example, a local city to me in the US had a total of 14% sales tax, while outside the city was 10%. Anyway, a sale’s motivation is to move products off the shelf and make room for more profitable products; they’re already losing money.

> Don’t advertise California prices in Oregon? California borders with Oregon. Radio waves cross state lines. People see highway billboards and then drive into another state. People use the internet and you don't know where they are. > Anyway, a sale’s motivation is to move products off the shelf and make room for more profitable products; they’re already losing money. A sale's purpose is frequently to bring customer…

If businesses go out of business from paying taxes, maybe they shouldn’t be in business. This isn’t a problem in the EU where countries border other countries and sales tax varies from 6-19-24%… so clearly this is a delusional problem that doesn’t actually exist.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#326

Post by surgical_fire »

withinboredom wrote: post #302
ikiris wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, go build your own less reliable cloud. But don't pretend that single box pricing is comparable to single cloud service as a result.

I don’t know why you are suggesting that people will build unreliable things. My company’s first day of AWS was the first time AWS had a major outage. We were sold on more reliable, but I can tell you AWS is just as reliable as home grown BS, if not less reliable. The biggest difference is what you do during downtime: in AWS, you refresh status pages. In your actual hardware, you’re actually problem solving and able…

Having worked for one of the major cloud providers in the past, I second this.

In fact, I have no idea why people go for those. You pay a massive premium for the "privilege" of not owning the infrastructure, and being subject to opaque pricing and outages that are completely beyond your control.

And in terms of actually managing the stuff, now you have to pay staff to manage your cloud things too.

It makes no sense to me.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#327

Post by grepfru_it »

silverquiet wrote: post #214
pjlegato wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said giving a fake name at the ER was the only option for poor AMERICANS to obtain healthcare. That is categorically false, and testifes to some sort of deep seated bias against our own country profoundly embedded in your worldview -- one which extends all the way to glib counterfactual promotion of verifiably false information about the country and its supposed moral shortcomings. 2) Texas has a much larger popu…

Pretty sure my buddy is an American - I've known him almost all my life. I'm quite sure he's poor - he asks me for money a bit more than I'd like. The fake name thing was just a strategy he developed after going to the ER due to a blow to the head which caused him to forget his name; I'm sure there are many creative ways to get healthcare, but most of the of poor Texans (whom I'm also pretty sure are Americans consid…

Well hi, also fellow Texan here. State law requires hospitals to take in and treat any patient with injuries “incompatible with life”. This means a fake name is unnecessary, you can give the same name. You may be asked about a previous bill but that will in no way preclude you from getting treatment.

I’m pretty sure there is a moral to this story..

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#328

Post by AnthonyMouse »

withinboredom wrote: post #325
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don’t advertise California prices in Oregon? California borders with Oregon. Radio waves cross state lines. People see highway billboards and then drive into another state. People use the internet and you don't know where they are. > Anyway, a sale’s motivation is to move products off the shelf and make room for more profitable products; they’re already losing money. A sale's purpose is frequently to bring customer…

If businesses go out of business from paying taxes, maybe they shouldn’t be in business. This isn’t a problem in the EU where countries border other countries and sales tax varies from 6-19-24%… so clearly this is a delusional problem that doesn’t actually exist.

> If businesses go out of business from paying taxes, maybe they shouldn’t be in business.

This statement has always been BS. If you set the tax rate to a percentage of revenue which exceeds the business's margins, all businesses go out of business. "Maybe grocery stores shouldn't be in business" is so absurd that the statement seems designed to deliberately shut down reasoned debate by stunning people into silence or making them so angry they respond rashly.

And in this context it doesn't even apply. The issue here is that customers in Oregon are going to pay a lower price than customers in California because Oregon has lower sales tax and the tax is part of the price they pay. The business can't eat the tax in California so their only alternative would be to advertise the higher price. But if they have to advertise the higher price then many of them will just charge the higher price everywhere so all you're doing is screwing customers in the jurisdiction with lower taxes out of paying lower prices. This also reduces competition by making it harder for customers to compare prices, because a store that only operates in a state with lower taxes would then seem to have lower prices than one that operates in multiple states and has to advertise the highest price, even if it didn't charge you the highest price where you actually are.

> This isn’t a problem in the EU where countries border other countries and sales tax varies from 6-19-24%

Or it is a problem and you're just eating the cost of getting screwed by the law while defending it.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#329

Post by AnthonyMouse »

thfuran wrote: post #321
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can always justify it as not knowing the price. The sales tax rate is different in different places. It costs a different amount to ship to Florida than Alaska and picking it up at the factory is free (even if nobody does). The advertised price is if you have your own modem, renting one from the cable company is more. None of these are inherently wrong. You should be paying more if you're having it shipped to a…

>They can always justify it as not knowing the price. You could as easily say that the marketing department not knowing the features of the product justifies them making whatever claim they want in an advertisement. Why should a company be permitted to advertise something they don't know to be true, let alone something they know to be false?

It's not that they don't know what the price is, it's that the price is differs based on factors that aren't the same for every person viewing the advertisement. Meanwhile most of these factors (like the local sales tax rate) are known by the customer, so they already know what the final price will be given the base price on the ad.
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