Who knew that $5 horse armor DLC for Oblivion in 2006 would grow into a $2000 Horsepower DLC for Mercedes-Benz?
Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month
481–490 of 555 posts
Re: Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do grocery stores and coupons fit into this? Selling a book/media at a lower price in with a poorer populace? A national park charging difference prices based on the visitor’s nationality (by the passport they have)? Haggling in a market in a stereotypically poor country where different buyers get different prices based on their negotiations? A big company sales representative selling software licenses at diffe…
This is exactly why anti-trust exists - ostensibly to prevent any single entity from having a coercive monopoly in any given market. If one company owns all the grocery outlets in a region, they can do this, so that is frowned on by governments. I can't speak to your other examples, they don't seem to apply directly.
All of my examples are the same thing - selling the same thing at different prices, technically referred to as price segmentation or price discrimination.
Re: Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice, an ad hominem attack. We can't all afford to devote our lives to activism. But change starts with education and we can be educators when these topics come up. That's not useless.
It's the old very tiresome, well why don't you devote your life to fixing the problem while I do absolutely nothing. Then get back to me.
What are you doing about it, complaining on the internet? :P
Nobody's asking you to do anything, except maybe stop with the ad-hominem attacks and participate in the conversation in a rational way.
Re: Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month
#484If Mercedes offered an illuminated AMG badge for $1000/mo that did nothing more than flex the cash burn there would be buyers.
The "I am rich" app making a comeback, duly sanctioned ...
Re: Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month
#485I can’t seem to express what’s wrong with this but it just feels very wrong. Anyone know how to succinctly explain why it’s so bad?
You haven't been sufficiently educated in "value received" doctrine.
Please report to a re-education facility, or watch some news.
Re: Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, you do get to know airlines by reputation - generally speaking I expect Ryanair to do all the bullshit dark pattern nickel and diming and not expect it from national airlines like Lufthansa.
I think overall you overestimate the amount most people fly. Generally, many people fly very little or almost never. Sure, there's world travelers that know who are bad airlines, but knowing the 'secrets' to not having a bad flight is assuming a lot of the average occasional flight consumer.
And the people who fly a lot? Almost all of them are flying on business, on somebody else's money.
Which is also why the hotel where people stay when they're visiting friends has free wifi, and the hotel next to the convention center does not.
Re: Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course. It being cheaper is why people like it. Same reason that games are free and offer DLC, or Mercedes offers a car that could go faster if you have extra money laying around this month. I hate the nickel and diming but it does make things more accessible in general.
Just because somebody buys something, that doesn't mean they like it. I don't like my ISP. It's shit service at a ridiculous price. I pay for it because the glorious free market has failed to provide acceptable options. No ISPs provide good service for a reasonable price. Therefore, my choice is to pay for something I don't like, or not have Internet. Every time a company finds a way to make the product worse but inc…
Yeah, it's especially toxic to capitalism when tight oligopolies (like the car industry, telecoms, mobile phone OSs) develop. Barriers to entry are super high, so when one company does a customer-hostile move like this and makes money, the others know everyone else will follow suit too, so rather than advertise how they won't exploit you like the bad guys do, everyone just adopts or "improves on" the d*ck move. Think about it. Some car company was the first to do a Destination Fee. Some ISP invented the bandwidth cap. And somehow these became universal, because who would/could challenge the oligopoly?
Re: Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month
#488Literally everything I buy on the internet has features unlocked by higher payment plans (Netflix, hosting, ahrefs etc). I don't get the big deal about it. For one, I am happy I can upgrade my car without any mechanical interventions. You get what you pay for when you buy your car. It's their business if it's limited down to meet your package or not. Did they deliver anything else from what you paid for? If the answe…
>Literally everything I buy on the internet has features unlocked by higher payment plans Because they told us eliminating the middleman would lead to lower prices. Then they eliminated all the middlemen and started charging more. The fact you're inured to it doesn't make it good.
No middleman was eliminated (at least in the US). Also, the discount would come on the base price, not for an add-on.
Re: Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month
#489I can’t seem to express what’s wrong with this but it just feels very wrong. Anyone know how to succinctly explain why it’s so bad?
It's not really "your car" if the manufacturer can flip some flag remotely that you aren't allowed to touch.
I'm pretty sure most folks cannot modify the firmware of the overwhelming majority of devices they own. This isn't much different.
Re: Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will spell it out for you, since you were so kind to spell it out for me: consumers' power is limited by the interests of corporations. When a corporation can fix what is viewed by the consumer as a mistake without significant financial downsides, they frequently will (if the consensus is strong enough that it really was a mistake). However, they will not fix anything that causes them financial hardship unless forc…
Arguing for the sake of arguing? If you read the article I linked you would have seen that touch screens were used by car manufacturers to lower their cost. Switching from touch screens to buttons causes them some financial hardship (their costs are going up). The article I linked directly refutes your argument.
1. evidence for the cost savings in a single vehicle build is hard to find. The article you linked to cites a cost of $50 for the screen, claiming this is significantly less than tactile controls, but this is contradicted by the actual cost of the typical tactile controls used in mass-market vehicles.
2. design costs with tactile controls maybe a little higher for the first stage of a new design, but its not as if car companies did not have (a) in-house talent for this (b) decades of experience. Contrast with the (amortized) cost of implementing "car OS's" on touchscreens before even getting to "what does the infotainment screen look like".
3. where the screens do potentially save money is in allowing rollouts of new features without requiring new hardware (which in fact would generally be impossible to rely on). Of course, as Tesla found out, this doesn't always go as planned, and the company can incur extra costs because users know the change can be rolled back.
4. as the article you linked to, and dozens of others, makes clear, there is a growing body of both scientific and anecdotal evidence that screens are terrible for safety while driving.
5. whether manufacturers are responding more to consumers' demands for buttons, or the evidence that they are exposing themselves to legal liability for their interface designs is hard to get a handle on at this point, since they notoriously do not speak openly and honestly about such things. Therefore, please do feel free to believe it is an example of corporations responding to consumer demands, while I'll continue to believe that it is corporations covering their collective asses for the design mistakes they've made (preferably before they get sued over a collision on par with the navy vessel one that led to their removal from US navy ships).