people treat it like a blackpill - younger people especially - but it's a sign of maturity that sometimes things that seem "worse" are better because they are not mortgaging short term frictionlessness for the cost of long term stability
Thomas Midgley Jr invented a lot of fantastic products that solved a lot of problems and unfortunately those inventions were dangerous. the alternative to chemicals like Freon are a little bit shittier for the end user but are better in the long run
Uber/Lyft/Doordash/etc were dirt cheap for the first couple of years of their existence because the companies were actively losing money on the service. they were being kept alive by constant infusion of venture capital during zero interest rate periods because the idea was if they obtained total market domination, they could then safely raise prices. which is, indeed, what happened.
TVs have become so stupid cheap because all your user data is being sold by the manufacturer, which allows them to sell the TV to you at or even below cost. a TV that does not sell user data will necessarily be more expensive than one that does, because you will not be benefiting from the subsidy.
apps are free because you are not a customer, you are the product: the customer is advertising platforms and data brokers. if you want an app that is free, where you are the customer, your options are 1) paid service where the costs of building and running the app are funded directly by you, the user, or 2) completely free software run by unpaid volunteers in their spare time where new features are limited to how much free time Anders or Lunameow0 have that month. you can complain about how much those alternatives suck compared to Profit-Driven Platform but hosting 4k video for all of your friends gets really expensive fast. part of the cause of the data center explosion is due to the significant storage+delivery demands of 4k video lol
part of the reason modern society is so [gestures] is because frictionlessness is like the One Ring and humans will absolutely sell out their privacy, safety, health, and the environment to have as little friction in their lives as possible
It would do all of us a lot of good to actually ask the question, "How can they afford to do this?"
Because as we're seeing now with, say, Youtube and its onslaught of ads, it's exactly as above. And the moment they no longer can afford it, the moment they need to actually start making money, everyone else gets it in the shorts.
