I will absolutely give you that transitioning an established mature product to the subscription model is usually a terrible idea. Plenty of examples of that going horribly wrong.

As for subscriptions being a “blatant money grab” that definitely happens sometimes… notably when there’s a mature product with a dominating market share. The company already captured most of the market share, so they can’t get much more revenue from new customers, existing customers are satisfied with the version they have so they’re not buying any updates. Sales go down and someone comes along say just make it a subscription and keep milking the cash cow forever…. Yep, I admit it, that totally happens. The enshitification ensues.

But none of that’s the fault of the subscription model per se.

The same subscription model that becomes the incumbent’s downfall, is what creates a market opportunity for a new competitor.

A new competitor can coming in with a new product that was built with a subscription model from the start. The competitors product is cheap to try for a month, cheap to switch to with no big upfront costs. The newcomers can generally react much faster to customers needs than the incumbent. (Not because of the model, they can because they’re smaller)

Established software companies doing blatant money grabs happen all the time. Hell most of us are here using Lemmy because Spez attempted a blatant money grab on Reddit. Had nothing to do with the model.

Subscription model gets a lot of hate because greedy companies tried to use it as a blatant money grab exactly as you described. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Subscription models make it easier for newcomers entering a space, which is good for consumers. It’s more compatible with agile development methodologies because you don’t need wait until you’ve bundled enough features together to market it as a new version worth upgrading to. It’s in your best interest to ship new features immediately as they’re developed.

It’s totally fair of you don’t like the model.

But the model itself isn’t the problem.

Shitty companies being greedy will always happen.

Totally fair if you don’t like the subscription model.

But I am genuinely curious what you think I’m making assumptions about.

Data on a HDD that’s been overwritten with zeros or random data is unrecoverable with all known current technology.

In theory it might be possible to recover something with some future tech that hasn’t been invented yet, which is why the DOD standard requires erasing with multiple passes, but there isn’t currently a (publicly known) way of doing it.

SSDs are a bit tricky because of wear levelling, but usually two full overwrites of a SSD makes it just as unrecoverable.

Wow… lots of people in here bashing the subscription model, but let me point out it’s maybe not as bad as you think…

If you sell a product under a perpetual license model (I.e the one-time purchase model). Once you’ve sold the product, the manufacturer has almost no incentive to offering any support or updates to the product. At best it’s a marketing ploy, you offer support only to get word of mouth advertising of your product which is generally a losing proposition.

Since there’s little incentive to improve the experience for existing customers. Your main income comes from if you can increase your market share which generally means making products bloated often leading to a worse experience for everyone.

If the customer wants support, you need to sell them a support contract. If they want updates you have to make a new version and hope the customer sees enough additional value to be worth upgrading. Either way we’re back to a subscription model with more steps, more risk, and less upside than market expansion so it takes a backseat.

If you want to make a great product without some variation on a subscription. You need to invest heavily upfront in development (which most companies don’t have the capital to do, and investors generally won’t invest in unproven software)

From a product perspective, you don’t know if you’ve hit the mark until people start using your product. The first versions of anything but the most trivial of products is usually terrible, because no matter how good you are, half to three quarters of the ideas you build are going to be crap and not going to be what the customers need.

Perpetual licensing works for a small single purpose application with no expectation of support or updates.

It works for applications with broad market needs like office software.

For most niche applications, subscription models offer a better experience for both the customer and the manufacturer.

The customer isn’t facing a large transition cost to switch to a competitor’s product like they would if they had to buy a perpetual license of it, so you have a lot more incentive to support and improve your product. You also don’t see significant revenue if the customer that drops your service a couple months in… even more reason to focus on improving the product for existing customers.

People ought hate the idea of paying small reoccurring fees for software instead of a few big upfront costs. But from a business model perspective, businesses are way more incentivized to focus on making their products better for you under that model.

It’s helpful to remember too that the problem isn’t using petroleum, the problem is burning it.

As long as it’s properly disposed of using petroleum based lubricant doesn’t cause climate change.

‘cause if there’s one demographic that couldn’t possibly have the aptitude, resourcefulness or motivation needed to defeat a scheme like this it’s horny teenagers.

The exhaust from a typical ICE wouldn’t have enough pressure to inflate a tire, so you’d need a compressor. Of course if you had a compressor you’d just use clean air.

If for some reason you used a compressor to compress exhaust gases to fill a tire, it would mostly be the same as filling with air at first.

Exhaust gas is mostly a mix of carbon dioxide and and water vapour, with small amounts of oil residue, and other organic compounds. The water vapour will condense as it cools likely leaving some liquid water in the tire, which won’t cause immediate issues but will cause vibrations which will accelerate wear not just on the tire but possibly the entire suspension.

The organic compounds will cause the rubber to break down over time and the tire will wear out sooner.

Even if it built with the same disregard as the Chernobyl plant, and there’s “an occasional meltdown”… it’s still actually better than building coal power plant in terms of lives lost per TWh of power generated.

It’s ridiculously unusual for a board to actually fire a CEO. Usually if the board thinks a new CEO is needed, even if the CEO doesn’t agree with the decision, there’s a transition plan announced the CEO “stepping down”, or “steps aside”, of the “next phase of growth” or whatever. It has a massive positive spin on it and the departing CEO is paid a ridiculous severance to go along with the plan publicly.

It’s very negative press to have to outright fire a CEO. Especially in a case like this when the CEO saw the company through the kind of growth that every startup has wet dreams about.

Something huge happened, and the world is speculating rampantly about what that was.

We don’t know what Owen’s relationship with Shmi was. Maybe he left home before Cliegg remarried, and was only there when we see him in episode 2 because he came when his dad contacted him in a panic after discovering Tuscan raiders had taken step-mom captive.

I disagree with your interpretation that Cliegg “technically” bought 3PO.

We don’t know the legal rights of slaves in that universe, but presuming this is like slaves in ancient Roman times and they can own property, then 3PO was Shmi’s from the beginning. Buying a slave wouldn’t automatically give you possession of the slave’s property, therefore it was always Shmi’s droid and Cliegg never owned it.

It’s possible that in this universe, slaves can’t own property and Cliegg bought 3PO from Watto in addition to Shmi. But I think it unlikely that Anakin would have built 3PO “to help his mom” if Watto automatically owned it. If Watto owned 3PO he would’ve sold it long before Cliegg bought Shmi.

We also don’t know that Anakin stole 3PO. If it belonged to his mom, he could have simply inherited it when she died.

One could also make the argument that 3PO was always Anakin’s property, and he just left it behind when he left Tattooine.

Owen didn’t pay for C3PO twice.

Anakin built 3PO for his mom Shmi, who was a slave to Watto. Cliegg (not Owen) bought Shmi out of slavery. C3PO was already Shmi’s.

Where’s the option for: “I don’t want to use edge because it shoves polls in my face”

All the AI we have today is, at its core, just pattern recognition.

ChatGPT can answer questions because it’s been shown a VERY large list of questions and their right answers. ChatGPT has no idea what the question is or what the answer means. It just has an algorithm that knows that a particular answer fits the pattern of “a correct answer” for that question better than any other answer.

It can’t “reason“ or “think” in any way. It’s not going to become self aware or set its own objectives. And so far we don’t have anything close to true general AI, we don’t even know if it’s possible.

There’re still risks from the current AI though. AI will sometimes find unanticipated and undesirable solutions that technically meet the goal it was given. A “Terminator” style future is unlikely without artificial general intelligence, but it’s not completely unreasonable to think of a scenario like “I, Robot” where a “dumb” AI subjugates humanity as a solution to a more altruistic goal like ending war or famine, because it’s a solution that matches the pattern it was told to look for.

Climate change isn’t caused by just using fossil fuels to make a product, it’s caused by burning fossil fuels releasing greenhouse gasses, (primarily carbon dioxide and methane), into the environment.

Asphalt is a problematic material, but not so much because it’s made from oil. It’s problematic because we burn fossil fuels to harvest the raw crude and to generate the energy needed to refine crude into asphalt. The carbon in the asphalt itself remains sequestered there and doesn’t contribute to the greenhouse effect as long as it isn’t burned later.

If we figured out how to extract crude and generate the vast amount of energy needed to manufacture asphalt without actually burning fossil fuels we’d eliminate the vast majority of asphalt’s impact on climate change.

In fact it’s been shown in a lab that it’s possible to make asphalt from CO2. It’s currently cost prohibitive to do so, but in theory asphalt could be part of the solution to climate change.

Now Asphalt does have other environmental issues, like leaching toxic chemicals into the soil and water table and the fact that it’s usually black which absorbs more the sun’s radiation than almost anything else which would reflect more of the sun’s energy back out into space. But those problems aren’t necessarily solved by using non-petroleum based bioasphault, nor are they unsolvable with bitumen based asphalt.

About 20% of a barrel of oil gets made into products like plastics or foam, that’s not what’s causing climate change. What causing climate change is the 80% that gets refined and burned for cheep energy. So it’s less “Just stop oil” and more “Just stop burning oil”

I don’t think it’s going to matter much.

Pretty soon the AIs will be generating extras that aren’t based on anyone’s likeness.

There’s a very wide range of things that could happen when you mix anti-depressants and alcohol. The drug, the dose, the amount of alcohol, the person, what else they did that day, and about 100 other factors would all be relevant in the likelihood of that happening.

Is that outcome possible? definitely.

Realistic is more of a subjective bar. But people get blackout drunk all the time without antidepressants, I would think most readers would treat it as realistic. Particularly if you have her drinks a lot of alcohol, and wake up with symptoms of a hangover.

That looks more like a hippopotamus to me.