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Comment by klipklop | Hacker News Reader

The solution is to vote with your wallet. These days consumers are pretty weak willed though and are willing to put up with almost any level of abuse for their shiny new toy. Look at what consumers are willing to (overpay) for during the pandemic as an example of that. $500 NVIDIA graphics cards going for $2000...

Eventually people fed up with it will "jailbreak" their cars like the farmers did with John Deere tractors. Then people might face legal action or maybe even jail just to drive their cars as intended. Fun future.

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Actually it isn't. There are tons of examples of whole industries just switching to user-/customer-hostile practices/products, meaning there's simply no more way to vote with your wallet. Happened like that with even trivial things like the milk market in Germany. Within a year or two, fresh milk had suddenly all but vanished from the shelves.

Once pay-for-fob becomes the norm, good luck trying to enter that market with the pitch "well we give you the fob for free". It's hard enough for a venture like Tesla, which has some serious technological upside. This? Not so much.

Edit: another nice example would be news. Good luck finding a news outlet that's willing to let you pay a moderate fee in exchange for a truly ad & tracking free experience that actually covers your reading needs. Seems like a market gap, no?

> Seems like a market gap, no?

The problem is that the backend analytics they're collecting are worth so much that they would either have to lose a ton of money with subscriptions, or admit just how much they're making from your "free" eyeballs.

I digress but what happend to the milk market? Could you post a reference?

I can't find a good reference for the German market specifically, but in some countries/regions most milk is ultra-pasteurised and unrefridgerated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-temperature_process...

Wild.

Here I am thankful that Montana recently reduced regulations and made it so small dairies can supply raw milk directly to customers without any inspection from a state or federal agency, so now my family drinks local, fresh, raw milk for the same price as organic UHT crap.

Germans can't get anything but this UHT stuff?

Non-UHT is widely available.

What has become a lot more common (and is often not clearly labeled) are stronger pasteurization levels that make unopened milk stable for a few weeks refrigerated (it's also sometimes micro-filtrated).

Before, softer pasteurization was the more common variant, which then has unopened ~1 week of refrigerated stability. Less offered now, although a good supermarket has it.

(These two categories are not fixed standards, so within them there's also variations in how processing is done exactly)

Raw milk (i.e. never heated >40°C, unfiltered) is also available, but with stronger requirements on how it's handled before sale and thus often hard to get, especially if you're not local to a farm producing it - obviously transport has to be quick.

What do you mean fresh milk has vanished?

It’s now all hyper-pasteurized and shelf stable. Not even refrigerated.

The two glass liter bottles of fresh milk min my fridge beg to differ - though they are proudly branded “Frankenmilch”… which just means that it’s produced in Franken (Franconia), the region I live in.

Sure, but try finding that in Berlin. I think the point here is that availability has dropped for many/most people.

Good lord, this is true dystopia. I drink fresh milk every damn day.

It's also not true at all. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29548136 for what the original complaint is probably about.

It is true. It’s very hard to find now, and it was not hard to find in the past.

> Not even refrigerated.

That was the point where you lost me. Even ALDI doesn't just have non-refrigerated milk.

I find the shift annoying too, but it's not as bad as that.

The Aldi next to me only had room temp last time I looked. I’m going in the morning, maybe I’m wrong! I’ll look and report back.

WaPo has an ad-free version for a reasonable fee.

WaPo is also toilet paper, which is useless if it's digital.

My local news used to offer an ad-free experience for about $10/mo. I happily paid it. One day they updated their site and starting nagging me to turn off my ad blocker. Wouldn't let me read anything. I canceled that day and told them why.

Now they get $0 a month from me. They keep begging me back with $5/mo offers. Nope. That bridge has been burned.

Similar experience with my local newspaper also. They don't get it. We don't want ads and their content is not worth the slap in the face of paying for and then getting shown ads in return.

It is the solution, just the consumers don't have the guts to go through with not buying. The average buyer now seems to have little self control. The companies as you pointed out take advantage of it and work together to screw everyone.

I do recall the non-fresh milk in Germany. Shelf stable ultra pasteurized milk tastes terrible. In the US you can still get even raw milk.

Where in the US are you referring to? I know it's available, but I can't say I've ever seen it for sale in a large grocery store. I've only seen it at farmers markets or similar small farm ventures.

It's only legal in 13 states that way. It's actually illegal in 20 states to sell raw milk at all (as of 2017, I don't think this has changed recently).

https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/rawmilk/nonpasteurized-outbre...

Actually, are technica does offer an ad and tracking free subscription option

True. Sometimes you gotta vote with the pen (legislation).

Your example was true in the 2010s, but I don’t think it’s true in all industries anymore. For example, when the Denver post and other newspapers were gutted by private equity and turned to crazy bad tracking, it took a couple years but a local alternative with a subscription only/ad free model popped up.

Can you explain what you mean with the German milk market? You can't buy fresh milk anymore?

>"The solution is to vote with your wallet."

I don't think it is. I sense this might play out the same way it did with all the intrusive spyware on SmartTV's. Sure, I could try to vote with my wallet and find a TV that doesn't have all that bloat, but they are becoming vanishingly rare. The market has 'decided' that this is a standard feature now.

Get a RokuTV. There's ONE ad on part of the home screen, and it's not animated. The OS doesn't feel bloated or slow at all. It ain't perfect, of course, but I'd never get a Vizio, Samsung, or LG anymore.

“I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it further”

A single ad now on a network connected device is no guarantee that it will remain that way. Especially as it becomes "optimized" for revenue from all possible sources.

It is unfortunate that the rest of this stuff is so infested that a single ad (for now) seems reasonable.

Yes and Roku used to have zero ads, so...

Like in politics, voting with your wallet only works if alternatives are available.

It also implies that money is worth more above all else. What happens when every car company decides to follow this model because it looks great on the short term? Am I suppose to vote with my wallet and start a new car company single handedly? Well no.

This is why we need to legislate these issues and concerns. Saying vote with your wallet is already a losing position, the corporations already have a much larger wallet better to act collectively and enforce legislation.

And, a lot of these consumer hostile moves are death by a thousand cuts rather than line-in-the-sand deal breakers. There are plenty of people who will not buy a Toyota specifically because of this, but I assume most people would be upset but still make the purchase, knowing they're getting a Toyota and all that comes with it.

> Am I suppose to vote with my wallet and start a new car company single handedly? Well no.

That's exactly what you're supposed to do, except probably not single-handedly. You're supposed to find investors with cash to burn, engineers who are frustrated with their big corp wage-slave jobs, and frustrated consumers and bring them together.

There's about 4300 EV startups funded in the last 15 years [1], and 27 have gone public or are in the process of going public via SPAC in the last year [2]. Some of them (eg. Nikola) don't even have the "hire qualified engineers" and "build a working product" part down and still managed to raise billions.

[1] https://tracxn.com/d/emerging-startups/electric-vehicles-sta...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-07-06/hyperd...

Are you suggesting there are no car makers without monthly key fees?

Vote with your wallet never worked, and is never going to work if your wallet is empty in the first place. Why do you think people don't all buy free range eggs and organic produce? Because it's out of their reach, even if they care.

They don't vote with their wallet because they don't care.

Read my comment again. A lot of them don't have anything in their wallet, so they have nothing to vote with. They buy the cheapest food because that's the only option. And yes, food poverty is still around despite food banks.

My point isn't that everyone in the country is in a position where they can afford luxury eggs, but that that very few care to.

The idea of voting with your wallet does not mean that there are no costs to doing so. Eggs are a good example because the cost is very small to upgrade. Yet, the vast majority of consumers, who could easily spend $1 more per carton, do not.

The security preventing unlocking of devices is pretty sturdy these days. You can't root a lot of phones these days without signing keys that are kept very secure by the manufacturers, similar things are starting to happen with all these other machines that don't really need all these electronics.

Voting with your wallet only works when they're not behaving like a cartel. Every major phone manufacturer dropped the headphone jack all at once. Every TV manufacturer is including "smart" dumb shit in their TVs. Every car manufacturer makes a car that requires the factory entertainment head unit just to run.

At this point, voting with your wallet is almost synonymous with building your own stuff. The reality is, most people are trapped in this distopia.

> Eventually people fed up with it will "jailbreak" their cars like the farmers did with John Deere tractors

This wouldn't be new. People have been "jailbreaking" their cars since the 80s. We had a BMW in 1990 that we replaced the transmission chip on with a 3rd party chip so that we could unlock extra functionality that they only had in Europe.

Even if this is fully legitimate everywhere else, in Texas it might trigger support for refunds on purchases according to the Deceptive Trade Practices Act

You would need a lawyer but you would not have to be defrauded, merely "deceived".

And it might make a difference when you realized you were deceived.

I'm not so sure about the whole "conscious capitalism" approach these days. Subscription economies have basically killed that complicated form of activism.... https://bobdoto.computer/Conscious-Capitalism

>The solution is to vote with your wallet.

Right on. In 99% of cases, your choice of vehicle brand is fungible. Corolla's are good, cheap cars, but so are Accords, Mazda 3s, Focus', Altimas, Imprezas...

Buy something else.

>"your choice of vehicle brand is fungible"

I disagree wholeheartedly. One of the things Toyota has done is to establish itself as a reliable automaker of quality. People specifically think of Toyota/Honda as the vehicle makes which are most likely to last a long time and put up with abuse. Contrast this to the reputation of GM or Daewoo.

You also have the human element, where people are attracted to brand marketing and how certain models make them feel.

Yeah, brand absolutely matters unless you're in the cycle of never ending car leases. Then I suppose it doesn't really matter since you're likely to get a new car again before longterm maintenance ever becomes a problem.

For those who buy CPO's or with cash, longevity and maintenance are the prime factors for budget car purchasers.

> One of the things Toyota has done is to establish itself as a reliable automaker of quality. People specifically think of Toyota/Honda as the vehicle makes which are most likely to last a long time and put up with abuse.

I find these and Apple "apologies" funny: "Fucking Apple and their monopolistic practices!!! ... but they are so pretty, there's nothing as pretty in the market". Well, having bad market practices is part of the product feature, so you can vote with your wallet for a product with less bells and whistles but better business practices. People using Open Source have done it for a long time.

>"I find these and Apple "apologies" funny"

In what way is it an apology? People will continue to buy [product] despite the producer utilizing some bad market practices if they feel like they are still getting something valuable from the exchange. I am still angry about losing the audio jack on my iPhone but not enough switch platforms.

>"Well, having bad market practices is part of the product feature, so you can vote with your wallet for a product with less bells and whistles but better business practices."

Of course, I wasn't claiming otherwise. And, I wasn't talking about bells and whistles, I was talking about build quality and reliability. It's not a stretch to say that a Toyota will probably hold up better to wear and tear than a Ford would. That's a big factor in many people's choice of vehicles. I can easily see a person grudgingly accepting an $8/mo keyfob because they think the Corolla won't suffer from transmission issues the same way a Fiesta would.

consumers aren't 'weak-willed' there are simply not the vast amount of choices that capitalism promised, instead we have huge conglomerates that care more about continuous leeching off your wallet.

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