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Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

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Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#91
The entire fiat economy is a Ponzi scheme

Previous generations bought in only to have their pensions legislated and gambled away.

Oops!

Trump was making moves to enable the same gambling with 401k’s earlier this year (easily Googled).

Ephemeral value can be wiped away with legislative overhauls. We’ve done this over and over, by bailing on every ephemeral value store, from Greek and Pagan gods, and eventually stocks and Wall Street (barely a couple hundred years old, I’m sure it’ll stand the test of time, ok, sure).

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#92
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that they did not pay for their fair share of a limited resource but for an unlimited amount of it.

Can we please dispel this notion that “unlimited” means literally unbounded to the point of absurdity. Seemingly everyone understands that bottomless breadsticks doesn’t mean that Olive Garden literally has infinite breadsticks and that you’re not allow to show up with a semi and tell them to fill it up. Unlimited means that you don’t have a set quota and as long as your usage doesn’t cross over into genuine abuse of…

No... Because that isn't unlimited. Period. The limit in your case is when you decide "usage crosses into abuse of the service". Which means there is no communication ahead of time to the user what behavior to avoid.

Just admit all people want is to be able to ride the gullibility of people who aren't as picky about language as the people who actually give a crap about clear communication. What businesses want to sell is a conditionally vague statistically multiplexed service level, and I'm willing to bet most don't even go out of the way to let the User know what they're overall footprint within the scope of the entire system is, which is info they'd need to manage usage patterns themselves. It's the hallmark of manipulative language.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#93
How is it a Ponzi scheme if any photo uploaded before July 2021 will still be stored for free? In such a scheme the last N people to join lose their "investment". In this case any new user could easily upload their entire library before then and have it hosted on Google's infrastructure (theoretically) forever, for free.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#94
post #41

There are several things that compound that - Storage price decreases near exponentially, while data usage also increases near exponentially, meaning that new data will always make the majority of your usage, no matter how long you and your users have been in place. - On Google scale, your are bound to have a lot of redundancy in data. Chances are that what you have in your Google drive, someone else has it. And larg…

>> 100 GB is actually an awful lot of data, Absolutely not. It's about 10-15 average photoshoots (for arbitrary RAW image size of 25Mb) and no place for processed images or anything else.

Yes but that’s not typical. What’s typical is grandmas shitty jpegs

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#95
post #81

Does anyone have any good suggestion on an automated way to back up my entire google photos collection? Currently I use Google Takeout and then upload a ton of zip files to a backup like Backblaze. But it's tedious as heck and has me maintaining scripts to manage it. Which is the worst because I touch it once a year so I forget everything. I'd pay money for a business that handles this. I just want my photos safe fro…

I use Microsoft OneDrive to instantly upload my photos to the Camera Roll, and then I use a rclone daemon to move the images to 2 backup locations (after applying encryption). I tried the way of uploading directly to my target backup locations from my phone using RCX (rclone for Android), but uploading camera roll at convenient times, automatic retry, and features like automatic albums and such are nice to have and h…

I second rclone. It's rock-solid (at least until Google changes their Photos API), and should be fine to automate via cron: https://rclone.org/googlephotos/

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#96

Does anyone have any good suggestion on an automated way to back up my entire google photos collection? Currently I use Google Takeout and then upload a ton of zip files to a backup like Backblaze. But it's tedious as heck and has me maintaining scripts to manage it. Which is the worst because I touch it once a year so I forget everything. I'd pay money for a business that handles this. I just want my photos safe fro…

'rclone' is built into the rsync.net platform which means that you can do your google takeout and then directly back it up to your rsync.net account:

  ssh user@rsync.net rclone gdrive:/blah /rsync/account
No download/upload over your home connection and no intermediate transfer required.

There is special pricing for this kind of 'expert' account:

https://www.rsync.net/products/rclone.html

... and we are all very enthusiastic about supporting and documenting workflows like this so please come try this and show us how you want it to work.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#97
post #81

Does anyone have any good suggestion on an automated way to back up my entire google photos collection? Currently I use Google Takeout and then upload a ton of zip files to a backup like Backblaze. But it's tedious as heck and has me maintaining scripts to manage it. Which is the worst because I touch it once a year so I forget everything. I'd pay money for a business that handles this. I just want my photos safe fro…

I use Microsoft OneDrive to instantly upload my photos to the Camera Roll, and then I use a rclone daemon to move the images to 2 backup locations (after applying encryption). I tried the way of uploading directly to my target backup locations from my phone using RCX (rclone for Android), but uploading camera roll at convenient times, automatic retry, and features like automatic albums and such are nice to have and h…

OneDrive backup unfortunately is very buggy on iOS

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#98
post #96

Does anyone have any good suggestion on an automated way to back up my entire google photos collection? Currently I use Google Takeout and then upload a ton of zip files to a backup like Backblaze. But it's tedious as heck and has me maintaining scripts to manage it. Which is the worst because I touch it once a year so I forget everything. I'd pay money for a business that handles this. I just want my photos safe fro…

'rclone' is built into the rsync.net platform which means that you can do your google takeout and then directly back it up to your rsync.net account: ssh user@rsync.net rclone gdrive:/blah /rsync/account No download/upload over your home connection and no intermediate transfer required. There is special pricing for this kind of 'expert' account: https://www.rsync.net/products/rclone.html ... and we are all very enthu…

... oh and now that I think about it, rclone connects directly to google photos so I think you can skip the google takeout and just:

  ssh user@rsync.net rclone gphotos:/what/ever /rsync/account

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#99
post #67

Missing one fundamental feature of a ponzi scheme: the transfer of value from the victims to the entity running the scheme. Folks have occasionally claimed without evidence that photos are being used to train nefarious machine learning models. But in fact the free tier of storage has simply been that: an entirely free halo product.

At least for internet bandwidth, it is more like an insurance scheme. You pay more than you probably need/use. Such that the seller gets to price in the risk for them that you will actually be a heavy user. And, like insurance, if you are actually a high cost user, you are probably SOoL. :(

I think all these analogies are quite leaky. There is a very simple rule that can be used to explain situations like this, without any awkward analogies: don't expect to be able to indefinitely cost a company much more money than they make from you.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#100
post #98
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'rclone' is built into the rsync.net platform which means that you can do your google takeout and then directly back it up to your rsync.net account: ssh user@rsync.net rclone gdrive:/blah /rsync/account No download/upload over your home connection and no intermediate transfer required. There is special pricing for this kind of 'expert' account: https://www.rsync.net/products/rclone.html ... and we are all very enthu…

... oh and now that I think about it, rclone connects directly to google photos so I think you can skip the google takeout and just: ssh user@rsync.net rclone gphotos:/what/ever /rsync/account

This sounds wonderful. I'll try the gphotos (or maybe both) route and write about my experince.

Thanks!

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