Not saying Jevon's Paradox wouldn't kick in, but the friction of convincing businesses to work on tools to allow their customers to spend _less_ money is high.
Not saying Jevon's Paradox wouldn't kick in, but the friction of convincing businesses to work on tools to allow their customers to spend _less_ money is high.
This is one of the fundamental things that make any sort of market work. If it's not safe to participate, people won't.
One of the most amazing feats Amazon has pulled off is to convince people that AWS is cheap. They're cheap in the way that Apple are: Only if you need a feature-set (or name recognition..) that excludes the vast majority of the competitors from consideration. If/when you truly need that, then they're the right choice. There are plenty of valid reason to pick AWS.
But they're very rarely the cheap choice.
Yes, but that's a false comparison. It's cheaper to rent dedicated servers at any of several dozens large hosting providers than it is to use EC2 or S3, for example. For most people it's cheaper to rent racks and lease servers too (but depending on your location, renting dedicated servers somewhere else might be cheaper - e.g. racks in London are too expensive to compete with renting servers from Hetzner most of the time, for example).
It's extremely rare, and generally requires very specific needs, that AWS comes out cheap enough to even be witting batting range of dedicates solutions when I price out systems.
When clients pick AWS, it's so far never been because it's been cheap, but because they sometimes value the reputation or value the feature set, and that's a perfectly fine reason to pick AWS.
The point isn't that people shouldn't use AWS, but that if people thing AWS is cheap, in my experience it means they usually haven't costed out alternatives.
It's an amazing testament to the brand building and marketing department of Amazon more than anything else.
E.g. my object storage costs are 1/3 of AWS. My bandwidth costs are 1/50th or so of AWS prices.
There are valid reasons to use AWS depending on what exactly you do, but it's extremely rare for price to be one of them.
The real economic term for this is elastic demand (specifically, relatively elastic demand). For example, microprocessor cost reductions make new applications possible, thus demand increased so much that the total amount spent on microprocessors went up for decades. Example of inelastic demand is radial tires. They last four times as long as bias ply tires. But since this didn't cause people to drive four times further, the tire industry collapsed on the introduction of radial tires.
Does anyone know an example of an actual paradox? I've never found one, and I'm curious if they really exist.
Jevons's Paradox is about demand increasing for a resource when it becomes more efficient to use, e.g., someone invents an engine which can go twice as far with the same amount of fuel but instead of halving the demand for fuel the demand actually increases.
If I recall, elasticity of demand has to do with the relationship to supply. A very inelastic demand will cause people to consume the same rate no matter how much _supply_ is available. It doesn't have to do with the efficiency at which the resource is consumed like stated above. It's a subtle difference but I think they're actually quite distinct concepts.
Actual paradoxes are common. Just consider the classic: "This sentence is false".
As for your example, most sentences are neither true nor false. Nothing interesting has a probability of 0.000 or 1.000.
"This sentence is false" is clever use of language, may be interesting to sophomore philosophy students while smoking weed, but its not useful and there's nothing paradoxical about it.
> most sentences are neither true nor false. Nothing interesting has a probability of 0.000 or 1.000.
I'll start by observing that surely you're talking about propositions, not sentences, nor utterances. Or at least you ought to be.
But more significantly, I'll note that most propositions are either true or false (under a given interpretive framework), but that as epistemologically-unprivileged observers, we must assign empirical propositions probabilities that are higher than 0 and lower than 1. Propositions like "I am a fish" or "You hate meat" or "If Rosa hates meat then Alexis is a fish" are either true or false, under any given set of meanings for the constituent words (objects, predicates, etc). I'm curious what probability you think applies to propositions like "2 + 2 = 4" and "All triangles have 3 sides" and "All triangles have less than 11 sides". I think there are very many interesting propositions that differ from these only in degree of complexity (e.g. propositions about whether or not certain code, run on certain hardware, under certain enumerable assumptions about the runtime, will do certain things).
Based on your very strange claim that all interesting sentences have non-zero non-unity probability, perhaps you're saying that you find theorems uninteresting, and moreover are only interested in statements of empirical belief, such as "I put the odds of the sun failing to rise tomorrow lower than one in a billion." In that case, I cannot imagine what statement interest would qualify as a paradox, except perhaps insofar as some empirical statements of belief are "beyond strange".
"This sentence is false" is a paradox under pretty much everyone's notion of a paradox.
Those are great examples, thanks. All true, and there's nothing interesting about them.
And these things are exactly the sort of thing that "differ from [trivialities about triangles] only in degree of complexity".
Note that "all triangles have 3 sides" is probably an axiom, but "all triangles have less than 11 sides" is a trivial theorem.
If you need to dig this hard to find something interesting with a probability of 1, that's pretty good evidence that the vast majority of interesting statements are not of the true/false variety.
Although I don't find it interesting, I am open-minded enough to ... embrace.. the .. uh.. diversity of the world, that allows some people, to find that interesting.
The language that contains all Turing Machines that halt on all inputs is not decidable.
Or
e^(iy) = sin(y) + i * cos(y)
Are those uninteresting trivialities to you?