Automating jobs away is a good thing

I remember seeing someone post this comic a while back, thought it was a pithy explanation.

https://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/TheWealthofDragons.png

If you’d ask an average American to name a European tech company

You’re probably right for the typical American, but I could do Skype (Estonia), Spotify (Sweden), and SAP (Germany).

Many business-to-consumer tech companies – like, online services and such – have relatively high fixed costs and low variable costs. That is, you pay about the same to develop software whether you have one customer or a billion customers, and the cost of adding servers to add capacity for more customers isn’t all that high.

But your revenue grows linearly with the number of customers that you have.

As a result, it is really, really bad to be small if you are in that category. So it is very important to scale up quickly, so that you get as far away from that “one customer” area as quickly as possible. Lose money while you’re small, okay, but become large as soon as possible.

It’s easier to scale if there are few barriers to expansion.

My bet is that the major issue here is that compared to the US internal market, the EU’s internal market is relatively-fragmented. There are different languages – yeah, there are some interchange languages, but not everyone can speak them and certainly not everyone prefers them. There are greater legal differences among member states. I would give good odds that there are larger cultural preference differences, which will affect things like branding. So for a B2C company trying to rapidly expand from Finland to Germany and Greece and Ireland and Spain, you’ve got a lot of hurdles that a similar company trying to expand from California to Texas and New York and Virginia and Florida don’t face. And that tends to keep them small longer, which is really bad for companies with that high-fixed-cost, low-variable-cost structure. If you’re an investor, safer to invest in a US company that will probably grow and get big easily. Of course, you could start an Estonian company and then grow in something like the US market…but then you have to deal with the complexities of spanning markets from the get-go. I’d expect that the barriers there are substantial, or you’d expect to see things like companies starting up in, say, Uruguay and then growing in the US domestic market, and we don’t see that.

There are tech companies that originated in the EU. But it’s rare for them to be the big business-to-consumer sort. So I don’t think the issue is – for example – excessive regulation or some other things I’ve seen blamed (I mean, it might not help, but I don’t think that that’s the dominant factor). That should affect all tech companies, not just the big business-to-consumer variety. I think that market fragmentation is the big factor here.

Brussels is working on some of that, like legal differences across member states. Some will just naturally tend to smooth out. But some are just not going to go away in the near future; French consumers are probably going to want stuff in French, for example, and Italians in Italian.

There was some recent report I remember seeing from Mario Draghi floating around on either here or !EuropeanFederalists@lemmy.world that spent some time talking about market fragmentation as an issue for competitiveness.

EDIT: Oh, and OnlyFans (UK).

I mean, some of those EOLed nearly a decade ago.

You can argue over what a reasonable EOL is, but all hardware is going to EOL at some point, and at that point, it isn’t going to keep getting updates.

Throw enough money at a vendor, and I’m sure that you can get extended support contracts that will keep it going for however long people are willing to keep chucking money at a vendor – some businesses pay for support on truly ancient hardware – but this is a consumer broadband router. It’s unlikely to make a lot of sense to do so on this – the hardware isn’t worth much, nor is it going to be terribly expensive to replace, and especially if you’re using the wireless functionality, you probably want support for newer WiFi standards anyway that updated hardware will bring.

I do think that there’s maybe a good argument that EOLing hardware should be handled in a better way. Like, maybe hardware should ship with an EOL sticker, so that someone can glance at hardware and see if it’s “expired”. Or maybe network hardware should have some sort of way of reporting EOL in response to a network query, so that someone can audit a network for EOLed hardware.

But EOLing hardware is gonna happen.

which of course doesn’t then require you to pay monthly to actually use the stupid thing.

I think the idea here is that the businesses can lay off some of their in-house IT staff and pay Microsoft a lesser amount instead; the in-house IT staff does get paid monthly.

kagis

It sounds like they did. Just took some months to get them set up.

https://www.businessinsider.com/notre-dame-fire-one-year-reparations-billionaire-donations-progress-2020-3

In the 72 hours after the fire, a clutch of wealthy French magnates clamored to pledge a total of 850 million euros, worth about $954 million at the time, to restore the cathedral.

But it took six months for the first billionaires to put pen to paper and make good on their promises, with the intervening repairs funded by small donations.

As the first anniversary of the fire approaches, the official charity for the cathedral has received all its major donations, while the coronavirus pandemic has delayed vital work to save the remaining structure from collapsing.

The Link device is designed to be a compact, fanless, and easy-to-use cloud PC for your local monitors and peripherals. It’s meant to be the ideal companion to Microsoft’s Windows 365 service, which lets businesses transition employees over to virtual machines that exist in the cloud and can be streamed securely to multiple devices.

It sounds like it’s part of a broader strategy to have companies outsource their IT to Microsoft.

What I can’t figure out is who is giving all these guys a shit-ton of ERA.

I guess maybe they’re stripping knocked-out tanks of any remaining ERA.

If they’re removable, could just put actual floppy drives in.

EDIT: Oh, they’re flip-down drawer covers rather than fixed panels. Well, still might be removable.

It looks like the $75/mo rate is for their “premium” package. Their standard one is $39/mo.

It looks like that’s on the high side, but not radically so compared to typical American newspapers.

https://www.thepricer.org/newspaper-subscriptions-cost/

Digital Pass Subscriptions

• Local/regional papers – $10 to $30 per month

  Example: Seattle Times Digital – $7.99 per month

• National publications – $15 to $50 per month

  Example: The Washington Post Digital – $39.99 per month

Also, note that FT is British, not American.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Times

I’d assume that at a minimum, someone in the EU somewhere is at least looking into how they compromised the satellite network and re-securing it.

Nah, the Reddit-alike thread-based intercompatable forum systems on the Fediverse. Lemmy. Kbin. Mbin. Piefed. Sublinks.

I kind of wish that they’d unify some of their features.

For example, I use the “Fediverse Forums” search lens to search the Threadiverse only. That’s a drop-down menu.

Then there are those Duck Duck Go-style alias things that start with an exclamation mark.

kagis

Bangs.

And now the snaps.

Like, is it necessary to have all these as separate, segregated features? They all kind of do the same thing, are a way to ask the search engine to interpret the query differently.

EDIT: Also, I don’t know if there’s a Kagi lemmy community, but if so, that might be a better place than !technology@lemmy.world, since most folks won’t be using Kagi. Doesn’t matter much for communities that are desperate for traffic – like, for games, I’d rather talk on a general games forum until traffic hits some point, rather than having a lot of game-specific communities that are ghost towns. But !technology@lemmy.world is one of the largest Lemmy communities, probably has enough post throughput.

I’m not a mod, not saying that it’s community policy, just thinking about where it might best make sense.

EDIT2: Looking at lemmyverse.net, there is, but it’s on lemmy.ml, and I’d really rather not subscribe to .ml communities. Doesn’t appear to be any other Kagi communities at the moment.

Well, I don’t really want to mod one myself, but if anyone wants to run a Kagi community somewhere off .ml, I’ll subscribe.