mountainofdeath

Raw cloud computing costs have a fairly small margin over what they could be. Nobody with real purchasing power is paying anywhere near the listed retail rates. It's part of the reason smaller providers e.g. OVH, can remain quite competitive.

The other items have very strong lock-in and capture ecosytems. Microsoft Office is the first and only office suite anyone uses and its cheap enough for nobody to consider a real alternative. Microsoft could attempt to charge $10,000 a seat and while some will certainly stay, others would look for an alternative. But for just $10 a month, its a fair price to pay.

History is littered with the corpses of companies that had exceptional but expensive products that were replaced with cheap, good enough products.

Of course they would. Private equity looks for the following things 1. Things with an inelastic market and fixed demand. 2. Many overlapping small time competitors. 3. Steady cash flow, preferably with low capital costs though not always

You can take the cash flow, take debt against the companies own cash flow to buy it, pay yourself back, consolidate, then raise the prices on a captive market.

The same thing was said about the crazy build-out of fiber and telecommunications infrastructure. That infrastructure did prove useful but it took about 10-20 years before that was the case. It took 4G becoming broadly available and the ensuing increase of mobile devices to use at least of the overbuilt network capacity.

The implicit assumption in libertarian perspectives is that all parties are rational and have similar levels of information. In healthcare, this is simply not true. The average person isn't capable to judge what is and isn't necessary for them (outside of the small amount of very routine and elective care).

Likewise, if a hospital hands you a bill for 30k and you need help, are you really going to be able to negotiate and find a better price?

Healthcare is fundamentally an in-elastic good.

To add even more noise, there is a similar service from Samsung called Samsung Cash which lets you transfer cash between other Samsung Cash users using a prepaid Visa debit card on the backend. It

The unbanked in the USA don't have a bank account for a variety of reasons. Typically 1. Mistrust and fear of "being in the system" 2. Having a legal judgment against them e.g. child support, fines, overdue rent 3. Avoiding showing income to not lose income-defined government benefits 4. Hiding income from tax authorities

When I was in China, the government issued an edict that basically said "merchants of a certain size must accept AliPay/WeChat Pay/UnionPay CloudPay universally". All of the above are almost identical "Scan my QR code" to pay.

It would be nice to have such an edict, forcing compatibility outside of the ACH system but it will never happen.

Yes and no. It's still a cash-equivalent transaction, requiring you to either have an Apple Cash balance and/or an attached checking account or debit card (in the USA at least).

To my knowledge, zero. If you really mean Jews, I think there are roughly 40 between both houses of Congress. None of them are Israeli citizens. Jews are not automatically citizens of Israel though they do have dedicated pathway to obtaining it, but it's not as simple as merely showing up and claim you are Jewish.

Also, cats. I now have two cats and now I average 1-2 American roach sightings a year.

Coffee makers. I once picked up a nice, high-end Keuring machine for free from a neighbor. Later than evening, I noticed something moving around it. It was full of roaches. I put it in a trash bag and ran to put it in the garbage outside. The exterminator and landlord both said the warmth and moisture of coffee machines is a magnet for roaches and coffee is their favorite snack.

Indeed. In my time, it wasn't uncommon to have 6 AP classes a semester along with at least one time-intensive extracurricular. Assuming each class is the equivalent of 3 credit hours, it's the equivalent of an above average number of classes in college (15 being the expected amount, 12 being the minimum to be a full-time student, and 18 considered intensive) while playing a competitive sport.

The best part: Even a decade ago, the above was considered neccesary but not sufficient for admission to a top school. Plenty of people with perfect to near-perfect college entrance exams, Intel International Science and Engineering Fair finalists, etc didn't make the cut. Of the few that did, the majority were the lower Ivy's (Dartmouth and Brown).

FWIW, I have Verizon FiOS in NYC at a reasonable price. The city of NY and the state do their best to keep Verizon and Spectrum at arms length.

By way of contrast, my parents live in the mid-west and were plagued between a choice of slow AT&T DSL or expensive but slightly faster Comcast/Spectrum/Consolidated (A terrible overbuild provider) cable internet.

The game changed entirely when Google Fiber started rolling out. First in the inner city, then to inner suburbs and just recently to the outer suburbs after spending the better part of decade fighting city councils that obviously preferred Spectrum and AT&T.

Since then 1. Prices have stabilized and declined somewhat from the incumbent carriers. 2. Spectrum did an in-place upgrade and now 500 Mbps down is standard for a reasonable price. AT&T turned around and built it's own GPON network ahead of Google fiber in areas where Google didn't have service.

Isn't competition wonderful?