I can choose Hetzner, which is a high quality low cost provider of basic cloud services. I can deploy open source options onto their cloud and push costs quite low.
The cost of cloud services has not soared. And companies like Cloudflare have continued to undercut AWS at every opportunity.
Oracle, Microsoft and Google all have strong incentive to hold AWS in check on what they can charge, and they do exactly that through rampant competition.
As opposed to the traditional astronomically expensive public launches which haven’t had any real innovation since the 1960s?
The cloud services analogy isn’t a good one because it wasn’t mainly about cost. It’s about not having to deal with the logistics of a commodity layer.
Isn’t the root of the problem Canadian protectionism? By law, it’s near impossible to have new (foreign) competitors in the Canadian market. Same for industries like telecom.
I believe one of the key issues is anaemic anti-monopoly laws and enforcement. The grocery sector in Canada is very healthy and innovative, even without foreign entrants.
It's just that any successful small chains get eaten up by the giants - "Adonis" got bought by Metro, "Farm Boy" got bought by Sobeys and "T&T" got bought by Loblaws. Any new threat gets eaten up by the big players.
From what I remember of my occasional pre-acquisition visits to those chains, they certainly weren't competing on price.
Their drawing power was due to offering ethnic and/or specialty foods (Middle Eastern and Mediterranean products for Adonis, Asian products for T&T, fresh products for Farm Boy) that weren't as common at the more established supermarkets.
I remember being surprised at how expensive items generally were at those chains compared to the more established chains I tended to shop at at the time.
For a customer like me seeking low prices, those smaller chains weren't viable or practical competitors to the larger chains. I'd only end up there as a last resort, typically while travelling and facing time constraints.
No laws against foreign grocers. Has been like shooting fish in a barrel for Wal-Mart and Costco.
But we do protect certain specific industries to our own detriment (e.g. we’ve knee-capped dairy to the point that we hardly export any, while in the free(r)-market, we export 80% of our pulse crops, 90% of our canola crop, 3rd largest wheat exporter in the world).
As with oil, we like to export raw resources and let someone else do all the value-add elsewhere. But hey, dairy is very water intensive and it’s not like we enough of that to go around.
Wow, didn't know this. I have a friend from Indonesia, who is of Chinese descent. They were forced to take Indonesian names and ditch their Chinese names.
I don't know the veracity, but according to Wikipedia the British encouraged the system. So while the British may not have directly caused it they let it fester while they controlled Malaysia.
Regardless, when I look up the definition of apartheid it doesn't seem to require the non-natives being the ones to implement it.
Do city planners and leaders have comparable commercial simulations? If not, I’m always surprised why they don’t use games like City Skylines especially cities much smaller than Columbo.
There’s a common reason for that: overworked, over stressed, and underpaid. Eventually the exhaustion will turn you into a numb zombie clocking in and out. There’s no easy solution since healthcare is already expensive.
The music industry has been the one making the pots and pans.
But it is also the one that has been making it possible for creatives to become obscenely rich. It's actually only fairly recently, in history, that creatives could become independently successful, without having patrons. I don't know of anyone that has become rich, using Patreon (I could be wrong, though, as it has never really been something that I've paid attention to).
Not sure if the patronage model works for creatives.
It's fascinating to see folks in tech, who are obsessed with becoming rich robber barons, get upset at the prospect of other people getting rich, doing non-tech stuff.
A few people becoming obscenely rich is not a good in itself. That is to say, it's not a reason that justifies the music industry existing as it does today. That would be like arguing that it's good (just in general) that smoking is banned because I specifically don't like smoking. A good reason could be that it causes more music to be made, or better music, or it lets more people make music. I honestly have no idea if that's true. Certainly the last one isn't; what lets more people make music is access to technology, not the possibility of getting rich.
This isn’t a good argument since extremely few creatives get obscenely rich and few creatives are even able to generate a decent income to do things like being able to buy a home.
At least in tech, the pot is more evenly distributed and for more types of people. It even contributes to the broader economy as a whole with genuine innovation as opposed to just collecting rent on IP.
Because you’re not the one doing it. It’s the music labels that are doing it. You’d also be lucky to get fair compensation for your work. Even superstars get cheated.
The behavior of music labels is far worse and less valuable to society than the tech industry
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