If someone can charge you for using things you already bought and 'own', then average man has no property rights. The fee could be increased at any time, or new fees could be introduced.
As the housing crysis deepens, average person will never own a home either.
So average person will be in the same position as a medieval serf, conpletely dependand on the whims of the lord, probably living in debt starting from the student loan and dying in debt.
I cited an auto start feature o VOLVO cars that required a siriusXM membership.
It's unfathomable that we reached this point of monthly subscriptions being implemented on things that we've already paid for. It's the first sign that we're in for a wave of not feudalism, but outright economic slavery. There is no rational consumer protection against many predatory business practices, and many are eager to be a part of monthly subscriptions for useless services for lord knows what motivational reason.
Mike Judge was a genius for making the movie Idiocracy, it's our future. No way around it now. :[
As much as I dislike that kind of fee, it at least makes sense. The remote communication support isn't free.
99.9% of the time this feature is used to start the car when the driver is within 50 feet. There's no need for it to be relayed through the Internet.
what they really want is install a bunch of these leeching monthly subscriptions on your credit card that you forget about and they keep billing you for almost no marginal value.
$300 a year is crazy. I never even turned that feature on.
If we reach a point where we can't even restate what our Founders said, we're already in our twilight as any kind of civilized liberal society.
Now we can argue about what constitutes an "essential liberty". I'm not sure I'd put, "Heated seats in my BMW" in that category.
I hate when people say that. This has literally nothing to do with the historic institution of feudalism. Its is the opposite of actually educating people on actual feudalism.
Its just using historical terms that people call not to be 'bad' so you don't actually have to explain the problem.
We are literally talking about people who can buy a BMW. Did BMW promise them heated seats when they sold it to you? Would you feel better if the service worker at the dealer would rip out 5mm of tubes to 'break' the heated seat? Would that make it Ok?
Also, this is the extreme, extreme minority of features from an extreme minority of cars, by the extreme of car manufactures. Calling this 'rapidly moving to Feudalism' is way overly dramatic.
> As the housing crysis deepens, average person will never own a home either.
High amount of home ownership is not the same as having a high quality of live. And its also not really accurate.
> So average person will be in the same position as a medieval serf, conpletely dependand on the whims of the lord,
The lord who sold the serf a BMW?
> probably living in debt starting from the student loan and dying in debt.
Many people manage to pay of their student loans and don't have to live in debt if they don't want to.
Many people want to take on debt in order to consume now rather then later, being in debt is not actually necessary bad.
yikes... this strikes me as quite similar to this line of reasoning: "poor people are poor because they just don't want to work"
Tuition has been frozen at my university since I left so the kids there now have the same exact choices I had
The big difference between me and my peers was that I did poorly academically my first year and it forced me to enter the work force and learn the value of the money I was borrowing, and after that I borrowed the minimum I could to remain in school, for the minimum time, as it was so expensive.
I'm supposed to believe that it's impossible to avoid... When I avoided it?
I even got screwed by federal assistance because my parents seemed financially healthier than they were. I paid for 90% of my own educational costs, by working part time. And like I said this was the late 00s, early 10s, I'm not telling a tale from the 70s
My wife has a similar story, but started out much poorer. Now we're both professionals sans degrees making over six figures, no debt. But that's impossible.
I get it, these are anecdotes. But student loan debt is a choice, and it's one we both avoided, so it's definitely possible to do.
Being possible isn't the same as being scalable, for the vast majority of people debt is extremely difficult to get out of, and it's in the interest of the creditors (quite literally) to encourage lending to people who are likely to find it difficult to break free of the compounding interest, because it maximises their return.
Even assuming everyone was individually instantly capable of recognise and managing the risks of their debt, there would be massive reduced opportunity for ways to escape it, and the interest might be higher in order to satisfy the creditors who would otherwise not get as much return... it would be much harder to escape in that situation - From that perspective you should count yourself lucky, had everyone been as "smart" you might still be in debt.
I know a lot of people who were, frankly, railroaded into college. Middle class kids who never had to worry about money, did good to excellent in school, never worked a serious job, were told by their schools, parents, teachers, television and the internet that any degree was a path to success. Then the clock strikes midnight on their 18th birthday and they have no idea how to make informed decisions, so they just do what they've been told by everyone they've trusted for their entire lives.
They mostly ended up with history, sociology or some other useless undergraduate degrees and working at Starbucks if they're lucky and five to six figures of student loan debt with no way to pay it off. And by the time they're wise enough to actually handle money responsibly they're already trapped.
Also most universities are not freezing tuition, and I'm wondering where you went to college and what your part time job was, and how much assistance you got. You're not paying college tuition by working the counter at California Pizza Kitchen part-time. Plus Tuition has continued to inflate every year even since the early tens, although the rate of inflation has decreased in recent years. https://www.in2013dollars.com/College-tuition-and-fees/price...
You are like gone be working for 40 years, to spend some of that paying back university is not a horrible deal. People here act like you get absolutely nothing for student loans as if you were born a debt slave.
One can make an argument of course that another system is better, a system where everybody (including people who don't go to university) pay more taxes and you pay more taxes in order to pay for higher education. That argument can be made.
There are many improvements that could be made, less people should do formal education and more people should be doing apprenticeships and then part time further education. That would produce much less debt without actually fundamentally changing the system.
However to act like this is some draconian feudalism is crazy.
yes, things could be better. (yes, a lot better if people suddenly were suprarational.) yes, there are metrics that regressed in the US, or even in the world in general (civil liberties for example)
but it's quite possible to look at each issue in context, and this approach is a lot healthier and more useful than adopting either extreme. (student debt is basically the perfect issue for this, because without context we can just throw anecdotes or useless overly general statements at each other. there's not even consensus about what's the problem. yes, tuition costs are high, and rising. yes, many people have trouble servicing their debt. and so on. but these are different - though of course interconnected - problems. nor is there consensus about who is most affected. should society instead focus on those who did not even have the opportunity to apply to collage? should we focus on those who dropped out due to financial hardship yet ended up with debt? both? neither? and so on.)
The analogy to feudalism might be stretched in the literal sense, but most people use the term as a substitute for "you own nothing and are subject to the whims of the owner".
And there's a lot of truth to that for the average person, compared to conditions even 20 years ago. With regard to heated seats, my 22 year old car has heated seats. They have never required a subscription, and they are mine for as long as they function/are repairable. Now you can argue that, theoretically, car companies could charge less for the car up front and make it up on the subscriptions, so the consumer will see increased customization and savings, and the car company will make the same amount of money instead of more money! If you believe that I have a subscription to a bridge to sell you for $19.99 a month.
Economically things look rather grim. Goods will get more and more expensive. People will have less money to spend on frivolous items. Before they'd ignore minor expenses, now they will look for the best possible deals.
Subscriptions only work when people don't pay attention. BMW will be OK because it's just a rich person's toy anyway. I don't see it working for mass-market cars.
the problem is you don't see the big picture: all modern tractors are internet connected and farmers are not allowed to repair them.
all TVs are smart, you cant't buy a new 'dumb' TV. Philips recently added adslvertisements to TVs people bought years ago.
This isn't some niche thing that won't affect you, this is a paradigme shift like we haven't seen in a century.
if you rent an apartment in 2050, it will come with a smart oven, frisge and toilet. The oven will be brans-locked to wallmart and if you buy food somewhere else it will refuse to turn on with the warning "unauthorised substance detected"
Heated seats is a luxury, sure. But what about music? Kitchen appliances? Movies and TV? Productivity software? Transportation?
All these things are things we own much less of (or "own," as it were, since we got to keep physical custody of the bits, and they didn't try to authenticate against a web service)
The situation is positively feudal, people are sharecropping increasingly large parts of their lives. And the lords sit in their castles, surrounded by yes-men, pushing the limits of legality and ignoring the cries of the people that make their businesses happen.
I implied nothing about myself. I myself did not go to university.
> Heated seats is a luxury, sure. But what about music? Kitchen appliances? Movies and TV? Productivity software? Transportation?
Subscription is just one way to pay for things, sometimes it makes sense sometimes it doesn't. Public transport have been using subscription for decades and people somehow don't think that's a bad thing.
For cars people usually use loans, and that ends up being just another form of monthly payment.
They have advantages and disadvantages depending on many factors. To have moral outrage because something in particular uses subscription makes no sense.
The waste majority of the things you named the waste majority of the time don't need subscription. And the reality is that while you don't need a subscription for music for example, people do actually prefer it in some cases and that is fine.
> people are sharecropping increasingly large parts of their lives
Comparing digital goods to land ownership is a terrible analogy.
> And the lords sit in their castles, surrounded by yes-men
You have a real flair for storytelling, next you will add some more fantasy element and you will tell me they have 'greedy grins' or whatever. Makes for good drama I guess.
Probably varies a lot by location. IIRC, the UK government's own report on their current university fee/loan structure anticipates a large number of people paying off their loans so slowly that they will end up being written off.
I think this counts as both a stealth tax and stealth government borrowing.
The housing crisis is definitely a tougher nut to crack, but I don’t believe the auto manufacturers have quite the same leverage over the American population long term, especially if gas prices and electric vehicle prices keep skyrocketing significantly faster then inflation.
I love electric bikes and want to install the bafang kit myself, but lets keep things in perspective - it's not gonna get my pregnant wife to the hospital.
Hypothermically cold/wet days, if you suffer a physical injury, going anywhere with friends, trips to IKEA, groceries that last more than a week, vacations, or the reason I stopped cycling:
a car driver randomly forces you to pay for a new bike while also giving you a concussion and 7 stitches to your face then drives away.
Happier now with my 'cage' than with the ego I used to have.
I got through a full year before giving up and buying another car. I have never been motivated to repeat the experience, though I still love city life and try to keep car usage to a minimum, getting around primarily by motorcycle.
And obviously there are tremendous use cases to enjoy weekends, do groceries/other shopping, helping friends and family and so on and on...
I come from Europe, currently living in Switzerland which has best rail system in the world and general decent public transport... but still owning a car is a must for 4 of us, travelling anywhere with kids is a chore and amount of stuff for weekend is impossible to carry in public transport (stroller(s), child bed, all clothing, food equipment etc. and thats just kids).
Sure you can spend all weekends in the same place if thats your thing, but it certainly ain't ours, not when we have alps just in the backyard.
When the weather's sufficiently bad, we take the BMW with heated seats instead =)
I don’t think this happens before mom and baby are discharged from the hospital, so it is not relevant to the discussion.
That said: my wife and her mother _did_ ride home on the back of her father's bicycle after she was born (in 1980s China).
Better tell the people in the Netherlands they can't ride bikes then!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_rickshaw
Some modern takes:
https://www.vanraam.com/en-gb/advice-inspiration/news/van-ra...
More people than ever maybe, but that is a tiny fraction of the number of cars, at least in the U.S. It is like saying more people than ever are turning vegetarian/vegan. Yes, it is true, but it is still a miniscule number in the grand scheme of things, and the the change is way too slow/small to have any real impact, at least in my life time.
I love Jetbrains products, it was irritating when they went subscription model. Tableau did the same. I guess it is just a matter of time before everyone started doing it, both in digital and real world. Next would be what? 10 bucks for my washing machine that I own, $10 for my fridge, $10 for my air conditioning, stove, vacuum cleaner...
I don't know how we can fight back. They will keep pushing and pushing trying to eek out every possible cent. There are products we can simply stop using, but cars (at least in the U.S) are much difficult to avoid, outside of cities like NYC. Much of the country is built for cars
Isn't that basically a traditional (90's style) software purchase?
But not only that, they went through a couple revisions with the customer to determine what the right model is.
The software that JB produces as has massive value, but it is also fragile in that it needs to be kept up to date as the ecosystem evolves. That value is fragile in the face of constant change unless you pin yourself to a snapshot of the language and all its dependencies. The JB subscription model allows for this while also enabling constant upgrades.
The way that JB handled the outcry about the original subscription model is the real innovation.
This was already happening with planned obsolescence. The EU fought that by implementing a new law that requires big home electronics to have a 10year warrant. I guess the next step for vendors is bundling “service” features for subs
Basically the difference to buying every year is that you don’t keep old versions. You still get to keep/own the version of your last paying day. And you get discounts…
Unless there are really bad feature changes, there is really no reason to prefer the old model
That seems like a pretty spiteful thing to do for a (F|f)ree Software.
I see this argument a ton, people complain that new cars are too expensive, super high monthly payments and subscription features. Yes these are all problems but they are only problems if you choose to buy a new car. Seems that folks forget in these arguments that there is a sea of affordable, reliable used cars without any of the bullshit they add to new cars these days, at a fraction of the cost of a new car.
And this is an industry where starting a competitor is simply not feasible without incomprehensible amounts of capital.
This isn't a guaranteed thing.
Toyota makes money hand over fist selling decade behind the competition vehicles for high prices based on a premise of reliability that the overwhelming majority of buyers will not keep the car long enough to take advantage of and HN never misses an opportunity to praise them for it.
I feel very confident saying that the market for cars that don't include SAAS-esque BS subscriptions will be large enough to sustain a decent number of offerings in the same way that the sedan market is still healthy despite the crossover-ification of everything and the hatch market is stronger than it's been since the 90s.
My suspicion is this will become a lot more pervasive & render every auto purchase to choke full of these under the surface sour decisions.
There should be absolutely no reason to buy a used car anymore.
I feel like I'm living in a bizarro world b/c everyone seems to claim buying a used car is the much better financial decision. It isn't for me, by a long margin.
I feel like most used car buyers look at inflated MSRP and judge the "discount" for the used car based on that. They don't factor in the sometimes massive discounts (pre COVID, of course) that practically every new car would have. So a used 2018 model looks $3k cheaper than an identical new 2019, but the 2019 has $4k on the hood, plus better financing, lower miles, and better legal protections (lemon law). Granted, "certified pre-owned" cars often come with better sounding warranties than new ones, but I'm sure there are some fine print details that make them worse than the factory one.
Granted, the post-covid market is all kinds of skewed.
e.g. you used to own your music and movie collection but now you rent access to it via Spotify, Amazon Music, Netflix etc
Even games: it used to be it was YOUR game but now you pay a subscription.
Even if you cart around audio files on 5TB portable drives, or have a drive per key location (home, office, etc) there are advantages to streaming. One less drive I need to maintain.
Losing everything when you unsubscribe is shitty though. I guess that's the choice made.
Yes. There's nothing keeping anyone from buying the music they like even if it's just digital. Music is probably the thing that there's there's the greatest choice between renting and very reasonably buying.
I have a big library which I got in order a couple years ago. But I made the decision that there was no need--at this point--to buy any gaps. I'd just stream and could always buy pretty much anything I wanted at some point if I wanted to. (My interests are mostly very mainstream.)
Unfortunately this isn't true anymore. If you want to buy a song there's beatport and bandcamp but they're missing a ton of music, Amazon Music is only available in a few countries and Google Music doesn't exist anymore. That leaves just iTunes which is a terrible experience and only available on macOS and Windows.
But then I don’t seem to stop myself from using Netflix.
You can still purchase all of that media if you want
> If someone can charge you for using things you already bought and 'own', then average man has no property rights.
"Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better"
Example: Manual transmissions available for sale in the United States vs Europe. Europe has many more available to be sold new than the United States at maybe 3% and dwindling.
I see the only reason that smart-TVs are some prominent now is that the market for those eclipsed the market for dumb-TVs. While there are individuals that would like a dumb-TV, I've seen them post on HN, outliers don't make a sustainable market for revenue.
If individuals don't purchase the subscription, it won't be a revenue stream and then decision-making individuals should make decisions to change it.
The housing market is another conversation altogether.
HN frowns upon trolling.
That said, if you're asking that kind of question, I just assume you're trolling but then I thought about it and realized it was an earnest inquiry.
But I don't mind it for some things. I have no interest in owning a pile of movies, music and etc.
Started with WoW and getting kicked for "using" exploits which are ultimately just faults in a product that I purchased - why should I as a customer know and care for what an exploit is and what not?
There are real problems with housing affordability but a subscription to heated seats in a luxury car is not indicative of a bigger issue.
You still have to pay property tax against the "property value" which is a completely arbitrary number set by an outsider. If you don't pay, you lose your home - that is not my definition of ownership.
If you wanted an argument for not owning housing, a better argument would be something like zoning restrictions.
Property taxes in the US predate the US as an independent country. Do you think the owner should be able to set the value? Should anyone be able to declare that their property is worth $0 and therefore no tax is owed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax_in_the_United_Sta...
If you won't or can't pay your tax then you have to sell your property to someone who can. This is what the community that lives in an area agreed on. You can take your house with you though. It's totally up to you to lift it, put it on a truck and put it on a different piece of land, considering the bank doesn't own it. Feel free to find land with no taxes and put your home there.
Consumer finance is a real thing.
Before these financial innovations - people could not by homes, or ironically cars. They could not 'insure' themselves against fire etc..
Being able to 'buy a feature' on a monthly basis, instead of paying up front for it, actually may have some benefits.
That said, obviously if people just want to buy it they can/should do that.