Indeed. I have absolutely no way of knowing anything for certain.

I’m just screaming into the void from this hellscape we call Earth.

I’d bet that channel “members” don’t get ads for that channel regardless of premium status.

IMO, Google made premium, almost nobody bought it. So they went after adblockers, hoping that people would get premium to get rid of the ads. People most just Adblock harder.

While this is happening, one exec is peering over the fence at twitch. Where they only way to get away from ads without a pretty good Adblock, is to subscribe to the individual creator.

So they make “memberships” to channels a thing.

Almost nobody buys that either. So they go… What if, even if someone is premium, we give them ads, unless they’re a channel member.

Genius.

Paying to block ads per creator/channel/whatever, is a special level of bullshit that twitch has always had.

The system is working as expected. The companies are trying to find the best way to extract the most value from you using their platform.

I chalk most of the shit that makes teams horrible, is closely related to electron and their whole web app as a desktop app bullshit.

Buckle up, because they’re doing that same enshittification to outlook next. It’s already begun. There’s a “new” Outlook. FML.

That’s certainly a possibility.

I would argue that we’re both right depending on what the widget is.

(Assuming the price is changed to be proportional and appropriate for the product) Something like a grocery item is more prone to my thought, and something that has generational differences, such as a laptop or something, will likely follow your theory more closely.

I think a lot of this will still be tied to price elasticity. If the price is very elastic then the former system would be more likely. Drop the price so you can push more units (and overall, profit goes up), where things that are far less elastic, say, an iPhone, would tend to simply continue to increase like the latter system you describe.

At the end of the day, both are horrid, terrible, and very very common. So I’ll finish by saying: no matter what happens, people are going to be getting massively fucked, and corporations will post record profits yet again.

Fuck corporations.

I learned all about this in “thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman. He talks about system 1 and system 2, where system 1 is your kind of knee-jerk reaction to a thing (thinking fast), and system 2 is the contemplative and careful consideration of a thing (thinking slow).

I would argue that some people overly leverage system 1 (thinking fast) because it’s generally easier, and takes less time and mental effort to do. Those that either can’t, or are unwilling to engage system 2 in their day to day activities, will 100% fall for these kinds of misleading prices, since system 1 is cutting so many corners so that it can be fast and efficient (mostly on how much energy is used), that it skips a lot of the cognitive steps and goes right to the (often incorrect) conclusion. That $19.99 is $19 (or $10 in some cases).

In the book, they discuss that system 1 often gives the wrong information that is later rejected by system 2 when further consideration is given to a particular input/stimulus.

If someone isn’t engaging system 2 as a check to ensure system 1 isn’t lying to them, then shit like $19.99 seems cheaper than $20. It doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny, but they’re not targeting thoughtful people with these practices. For thoughtful people, there’s functionally no difference between $19.99 and $20.

Yes, the difference is one cent, but given that one cent is so worthless in today’s society, to the point that Canada stopped making one cent coins (and other countries have done so as well), there’s functionally no difference between the prices.

One cent is only worth anything if it is combined with many other cents. The sum of those pennies becomes valuable when you conglomerate enough of them.

I’ll admit, this works on me sometimes.

I hate that it does, but it do.

The science is about how you initially react to the number. Your brain will see $19, and immediately you’ll think it’s $19. Only upon further inspection and processing through your cognition, you recognise that its $19.99, which is basically $20.

It’s that initial reaction they want, to grab your attention. Anyone who is going through life without leveraging their higher thinking will fall for this shit. Anyone who thinks, at all, won’t.

Unfortunately, there’s a nontrivial number of people who fall into that first category. People who were never taught to think. They just do.

The owners of the legislature don’t want that, so it won’t get done.

The government doesn’t work for you, it works at the behest of those that have long since paid for the “elected” representatives.

Those people own companies that profit from all the misleading prices and adverts. They don’t have any interest in changing that.

I appreciate that you recognise the pitfalls here.

In don’t think you’re wrong at all, and I’m sure as shit not putting in the effort to figure out if you’re right or wrong, but if someone comes along with better/newer info, you have already recognized that the info you have might be outdated.

Kudos.

Living in Canada, this shit never worked for me.

Our laws require that pretty much everything is taxed, some more than others, but taxed nonetheless. Despite this, our laws also allow for the tax to be excluded from the price listed for an item, so tax has always been an unpleasant surprise during checkout for me.

I’m sure many other Canadians can echo my sentiment.

The fact is, I’m always expecting to pay between 10 and 15% more on pretty much everything when I get to the checkout, so I tend to do math in my head to figure it out. Let’s just say that when I see $4.99, it’s easier for my brain to figure out 10 (or 13%, or 15%) of $5 than it is to figure out the tax on $4.99, so I err higher rather than lower on everything.

I see $4.99, I think $5 +tax and I figure that will set me back somewhere between $5.50 and $6 at checkout. Doing the math, the current HST tax in Ontario where I am, IIRC is 13%. 13% of $4.99 is $0.6487 (the company will round up to the nearest penny, so 65 cents), which is $5.64. going from $5 at 15% (which is what I’ll do in my head for simplicity), I’d estimate it’s $5.75 at checkout, and get pleasantly surprised when I save 11 cents because the tax was less than I anticipated.

All of this shit is kind of moot IMO, since I think people aren’t looking at prices nearly as much as they used to. When I was young, debit cards didn’t exist, credit cards were a tedious process of filing out paperwork, and so most of the time people carried cash. It was common for people to add up their costs as they went to ensure that the cash they brought would cover the items they’re buying at the grocery. For smaller transactions like convenience stores, you’d just do it in your head, and for big ticket purchases, like appliances, furniture, vehicles, etc, you’d use cheques or credit cards because the hassle of doing that was outweighed by the liability of carrying thousands of dollars to the store to buy a thing.

With debit/interac/whatever, and the chip/sign, or chip/pin process (and/or “tap” to pay), you have convenient, and instant access to your entire life savings on a whim with near zero effort or inconvenience. It’s never been so easy to spend money (especially money you don’t have - eg overdraft or credit cards).

When I started to do my own grocery shopping, sometime after debit/interac/chip&pin was made to be commonplace, I rarely looked at prices. I assumed the price was reasonable for what I was buying, and concerning myself with the nickels and dimes of it all was more effort than I cared to put into buying something I wanted or needed.

With the prices of everything going haywire in the last 5 years or so, I find myself looking at prices a lot more and going for alternatives to my “usual” brands of products simply due to price alone, especially when grocery shopping. If I can kick my grocery bill from $300 to $250 by simply buying smarter, that’s a cheap date I get to go on with my spouse that I otherwise couldn’t afford. That’s more valuable to me than buying name brand cereal or cans of Campbell’s soup over the store brand.

IMO, I’m the problem… or rather, my previous mentality was the problem that in part led to the crazy increase in pricing. I didn’t concern myself if something was a cheaper option and just bought whatever I wanted or whatever I was used to buying. I don’t have brand loyalty beyond “this was good/worked in the past, so I’ll buy it again”. That amount of “loyalty” doesn’t extend to significant increases in the price of things. The prices went up and while my grocery bill went up, I didn’t pay much attention to it. That’s just what it cost me. The cost always changed because I wouldn’t always buy the same things, nor the same quantity of things. So I expected it to be fairly random. That created a false loyalty to products that just kept going up in price. I kept paying that because I wasn’t paying attention. So they kept going up because the company didn’t see a drop in sales because of the increase in price.

Now, I’m much more conscious of what I’m buying. I’ll compare not only the cost, but the quantity of a thing. If I can get 700g of something at $5 but an alternative has 1000g for $6. I’ll get the $6 item, since I’m paying more, for a lot more, therefore I’m paying less per gram. I’ve become the kind of shopper that most companies can’t keep. If prices go up, I’ll jump to another brand that’s cheaper. If the quantity goes down (shrinkflation) I’ll go to a brand that gives me better value for my dollar.

I’m one step away from cutting coupons here. I’ll do it too.

At the end of the day, it’s all about economics for me. If it’s going to take me more time to compare, or find coupons, or whatever than I’m saving by doing that, then I won’t do it. Right now, cutting coupons falls below that value line. I put my time ahead of the proposed savings by cutting coupons. My time saved by not doing it, is simply more valuable to me right now. If/when that changes, I’ll start doing it.

Fuck corporations.

Me? I’m basically driven snow over here. Plenty of people who live here aren’t though. I like those people. They’re different. I like different.

Oh, they’ll go down… But it won’t be nearly as much as it went up to cover the tariff.

What I’m thinking is, let’s say a widget is $100, tariffs go in at, say 5%. So it should cost $105, but the price increases to $110. People cry bloody murder, but ultimately they “need” the widget so they buy it. Tariffs go away, yay, the price is dropped, it’s now $107.99

that’s what I’m thinking.

Let’s be reasonable here.

Won’t work, they yell “fake news” then bury their heads in the sand like they always do.

I don’t mean to imply the US should go back to manufacturing their own goods like they had to before global trade was economical.

I hope the point I’m making is that the people like Trump, mostly aggressive capitalists, are significantly in favor of these trends, and adding tariffs to imported goods will harm the businesses that the tariff is intended to protect.

Sales will drop because most goods are simply more price elastic than that. Cost goes up, sales drop, and overall you lose profits. When costs go up, alternative products are supposed to take up the business you lost by raising prices.

Though, to be fair, that price elasticity model is broken. Most product types have been agglutinated into a couple of large companies in an oligopoly, so all brands of that kind of product raise prices to match all the other brands. With no other competition in the market, consumers have the “choice” of paying more for the same thing, or not buying it.

In any case, the entire economy has been so thoroughly fucked by corporations that is just a money printing machine for the ultra rich to get richer.

I’ve depressed myself now. I’m gonna go.

I’m not American, but tariffs to fix import issues is pretty stupid.

This is the capitalist dream, export all the production of the goods you use daily to third world countries, who will have shit labor practices like the US used to have when slavery was a thing (and bluntly, for quite a while afterwards), so that the boots-on-the-ground laborers that produce everything are either treated like slaves or literally are slaves, then import the raw material to be manufactured into whatever you’re selling in the US, so you can slap a “made in the USA” sticker on your shit to enhance sales and charge more. Meanwhile “made in the USA” doesn’t and shouldn’t imply that there’s no imported goods going into the manufacturing process to make that thing, just that you took raw materials (from wherever) and made this thing in the USA.

Tariffs unduly harm end consumers, pretty much everything we buy and own is, or has components that are, imported shit.

Most microchips, a large amount of the food we eat, most electronics, pretty much everything you’ll find at a dollar general, etc (the list is very very long)… all imported in whole or in part.

Hell, there was a time that it was more economical to have your raw materials, even if they’re mined/harvested/produced in the USA, shipped overseas for assembly by slave labor, then shipped back for sale to the US public, than to have it assembled inside the US. Much of that is still true. The US neither has the manufacturing capacity, nor the desire to build their own shit. The only time that’s not the economical option is for large cost (and scale, either in size or money) items, like housing or vehicles. Assembly generally happens in the country/landmass where the vehicle will be sold and used. Even a company like Toyota, a Japanese brand, will have assembly plants in the USA for cars sold in the USA, because that’s cheaper than importing hundreds of vehicles. For everything else, it’s generally cheaper to assemble it outside of the country and import the final product.

You think process are high now? Wait until the tariff wars really kick off.

No company is going to accept the costs of tariffs and be okay with that eating their profits, they’re passing that cost into consumers, because we’re the saps that are still going to buy it.

When the tariffs come down, and they will eventually, prices will drop, but not to where they were from before the tariffs. Companies will continue to post record profits, justifying not giving raises because tariffs, and wages will remain stagnant. We’ll earn less, while they rob is for more than they already do.

The worst part is that when the tariffs are lifted, we’ll thank them for lowering the prices by buying more of their shit. We’ll be grateful for the opportunity to pay even more into their profit margins.

Congratulations, you’re experiencing late stage capitalism. The system is working as intended. You are poor, you remain poor, barely able to scratch out a living, while your owners profit more and more off of your hard work, and you get to thank them for that opportunity.

I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.

Technically, we don’t need raw sugar for our diet at all. So technically correct?

We also don’t need any sugar substitutes, like HFCS, but you can find that or sugar, in the ingredients list of pretty much all processed foods.

Yay capitalism!

Fact is, HFCS is cheaper. I haven’t checked the entirety of it’s supply chain to figure out why, but it is cheaper.

If sugar was the same cost, they wouldn’t have switched to HFCS in the first place (why mess with your successful product for no gain?). Fact of the matter is that HFCS is saving them money. It might be pennies per bottle, but when you’re moving 10M bottles of soda, those pennies turn into dividends, literally.

You mean, so-called shit hole countries?

As a Canadian, I’m curious if we’re considered a “shit hole country” to these fucks.

Foreign slave plantations.

… Not that slave plantations anywhere makes it better, but the fact that it’s foreign will mean that not only is the labor mainly performed by slaves, but we’re also paying a premium because it’s imported goods. Double jeopardy.

Yay capitalism!