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?
Now they get $0 a month from me. They keep begging me back with $5/mo offers. Nope. That bridge has been burned.
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 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.
https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/rawmilk/nonpasteurized-outbre...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For those who buy CPO's or with cash, longevity and maintenance are the prime factors for budget car purchasers.
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.
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.
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.