Re:Is Productivity Growth Becoming Irrelevant?
by AstralStorm on Monday July 24, 2017 @04:29AM
(#14836753)
Forgot to factor in management and maintenance. Typically such projects fail because a key manager or maintainer disappears and there are not enough funds to hire a replacement or get good enough training for someone to replace them.
Alternatively key people become overloaded and burn out.
Hardware is the cheap part, people are not. (Until infrastructure becomes really big such as roads, mass transit and big ISPs. Because these utilise economies of scale in workforce.)
Re:Is Productivity Growth Becoming Irrelevant?
by Retric on Monday July 24, 2017 @08:14AM
(#14837774)
Well yea, these things are unstable. But when the break even point is only 3 months or so you don't have to stick with it very long to see a net gain. What seems like a reasonable effort to save money when your a minimum wage collage collage student may not when your making six figures.
My point was most communes are closer to having roommates to collage fraternity side vs soviet worker camp.
Suppose you take a group of 20 people making minimum wage, and rather than buying the cheapest internet possible 1Mbps x 20, they buy a 100Mbps connection and share them. Well there is added HW requirements, but for the cost of 1Mbps everyone is getting 5+Mbps except everyone is not using at the same time so it's closer to 20+Mbps.
There is a lot of things you can buy in bulk and see similar savings. The most obvious being housing. The classic 15 collage students in a house can be a lot cheaper than a dorm room. But, it also applies say vacations with carpooling / car rentals and a beach house, or stables like bulk rice.