8 ms·

Please read it from a consumer perspective about consumer topics: (of course B2B is very different, where other things matter) * products/software without DRM,

by frik 10y ago

Please read it from a consumer perspective about consumer topics: (of course B2B is very different, where other things matter) * products/software without DRM, always-online, analytics, tracking and spy "features" - bad for consumer personal privacy, and prevents second hand market, products cannot be owned anymore, try buying Windows 10, John Deer tractor, Tesla S without that crap * Cash money: those Davos attendees started a war against consumers - electronic money transfer is useful, yes, but without cash money everything in daily life can be tracked and you can loose everything over night it's just a digital number after all, state wants negative interest rates ... just a matter of a mouse click, a normal consumer would get a kind of a slave, as we learned from cases like "1984" or various real cases like former state East Germany, while wealthy folks have numerous companies in various countries. Some states already started to limit the amount of cash money one is allowed to carry and eliminated entire cash notes like the 500 EURO note. Some probably fall for the propaganda that it's a way to limit criminals - as if those wouldn't use shell companies and electronic money transfer. * Erosion of the idea of ownership: some like renting things and consume services, fine, but others prefer owning things like a house, a car, a computer device. And with ownership I mean also the possibility to sell the stuff to someone else and using it without an artificial time limit.

fauigerzigerk 10y ago
Cash was never a good store of value. You could easily lose everything to fire or theft over night. And governments can create inflation to erode the value of cash pretty quickly if they really want to. There is no erosion of the idea of ownership. As someone who is renting in London I can assure you that quarterly inspections and thick, dirty carpets are an effective reminder of the fact that you are either an owner or something between a child and a criminal.
- frik 10y ago
  You missed the point. Sure, there is a risk of inflation, but you can act immediately for your own good if there a slight warnings on the horizon. You can't do anything if it's out of reach like in recent history as the banks closed all ATMs like they did in Cyprus and Greece. But I wrote about daily usage of money, and not be limited or tracked in any way, like you are with non-cash money. About ownership, you missed the point, London is a bad example, as it's very expensive own a house there - we know that. But outside of that bubble, a house on the country side is still affordable but new regulations and taxes may get a burden. As well as several products come with licenses and software which limits its usage making it virtually more like renting a service instead of owing the product and being able to do what you want with it - like the mentioned Windows 10 with its tracking/spying/hardware-dongle, John Deer tractors and Tesla S with its user account dongle which prevents third party service, after market and selling your own stuff, etc. Or electric cars where the car manufacturer owns the battery, and you can only rent it. Or autonomous cars that you may only lease and not be able to buy and own yourself in near future, as some CEOs mentioned.
  - fauigerzigerk 10y ago
    >You missed the point. Sure, there is a risk of inflation, but you can act immediately for your own good if there a slight warnings on the horizon. [...] About ownership, you missed the point, London is a bad example, as it's very expensive own a house there I think you are missing the point, because you're not seeing the connection between these symptoms. Property in London is so expensive because our culture values ownership more than ever and because property is used as a store of value by those who already see the warning signs on the horizon (in various countries around the world). I do agree to some extent with your tracking concerns when it comes to electronic payments. But we have to realize that tracking is not an inherent flaw/feature of electronic payments. It is the result of laws and regulations created by the governments we elected. The point you are making about software licenses has very little to do with a shift away from ownership in my view. We never owned software, even when it was distributed on floppy disks. We never owned music even when it was distributed on vinyl. Tracking and onerous usage restrictions are a feature of the networked nature of modern software and of the distribution channels we use. Ownership rights that make these things possible have always been in place.
    - frik 10y ago
      You wrote about the housing bubble, I wrote about cash money. You wrote about theoretical licenses, I wrote about that you practically own something. Example: I buy a DVD, I can play the DVD as many times I want until it physically breaks. I some states it's also allowed by law to create a backup copy in case it breaks. And while you are allowed by law to do things, it's not possible with new paradigm like used in Win10, John Deer traktor or Tesla S car - so even if you are by law allowed to do things like sell your own stuff, you simply can't do that with such dongled stuff that also tracks you all the time as extra bonus. And it's not about electronic cash per se, it's about centralized systems. I am unsure about Bitcoin but it sounds at least better than a system controlled by the state. Anyway cash money is still the way to go. It's like electronic voting, at the moment there is no realistic way to build a system that is secure and also don't record who voted what and making it easier to mass-manipulate votings - that's why still many states disallow electronic voting or reverted back to voting on paper. Of course many lobbyists from voting machine manufacturers would say the opposite.
- SilasX 10y ago
  Out of curiousity, why don't they allow inflation protected cash? It's certainly physically possible through some kind of bearer bond system.
  - tim333 10y ago
    I'm not sure it's not allowed. I can make a bit of paper saying "I, Tim will pay the bearer on demand US$1 * the current CPI / 238" and sell it to you for a dollar. Some reasons why inflation free currencies don't work very well in practice are if there is a lot of debt in society and the economy turns down it can be useful to inflate the debt away a bit. Otherwise you get Greece. If they were still on the Drachma with debts in that they could just print a bunch more and have the economy back to normal. Instead they owe Euros which have about zero inflation and are basically bankrupt.
    - SilasX 10y ago
      Yeah, I know there are benefits to the government if it can expropriate people's liquidity; I'm wondering why there aren't mechanisms to fight that.
      - tim333 10y ago
        It's not really about benefits to the government - they can grab what they want as taxes. It's about bailing out the over indebted. Sure you could let them go bust and let the banks that lent to them go bust etc. like they used to in the gold standard days but the majority of people don't want to go back to that.
  - hammock 10y ago
    Buy TIPS and use the bond certificates as cash
kome 10y ago
> and eliminated entire cash notes like the 500 EURO note Good fucking riddance. It just was a gift to criminals.
- frik 10y ago
  Explain me more. You fall for the propaganda without background knowledge. The statistics says otherwise. Fake money is mostly smaller notes (like 20, 50, 100 notes). Higher value notes like 1000 francs note won't get eliminated anytime soon. Criminals already use electronic money, real estate, fake companies, etc.
  - Chickenosaurus 10y ago
    500 € Notes are a gift to criminals because they allow large amounts of money to be smuggled easily - e.g. to a country where no questions are asked when you deposit large amounts of money with your fake company.
    - frik 10y ago
      Your rhetoric is off, "smuggle" is the term for illegal stuff. Don't use it for legal stuff. And don't make cash money look like it's bad - that's just the propaganda that started after the Davos conference to bad mouth cash money in the interest of a small elite. We all know better: You transfer legal stuff. Cash money is valid money form, you just carry money around in your wallet. While it's already true, some state limited the amount of cash one is allowed to cross the border, another artificial limitation imposed.
      - op00to 10y ago
        You're free to transfer value anonymously. Purchase gold.
        donatj 10y ago
        You get to a border with a bunch of gold and I promise there will be more than questions.
otakucode 10y ago
I don't think I would classify the problems with "licensing" of digital property as an erosion of the idea of ownership necessarily, though I can see how you got there. Personally I think that the destruction of consumer protections when it comes to digital property is a temporary situation. EVERY industry has tried this. Out of sheer stupidity, producers think that if they can destroy aftermarket and secondhand market dealings, they will somehow improve their business. They're dead wrong, and history backs me up on that. History also shows that they will fail. Along with every single industry previously trying to destroy or severely restrict the property rights of consumers, every single one of them has failed. The automobile industry tried to make aftermarket car parts illegal and the courts said no. The movie industry tried to make secondhand markets for DVDs illegal and the courts said no. We do have a slightly dicey situation with digital content in the US (which like it or not sets the standards for more than its own shores) due to the DMCA. It is used in many areas to facilitate all of the things that courts forbade in other industries. It should have been overturned back when Streambox VCR was on the chopping block... if only they hadn't run out of money fighting their court case. They won every single case, and every appeal, up until the point where they had to give up as they couldn't afford to keep fighting against RealNetworks. The only good bit of that situation was the fact that RealNetworks themselves got nailed by the EXACT same law a few years later for permitting users to create backup copies of their DVDs (which involved circumventing DeCSS). Right now, if you read a "license agreement" for digital property, software moreso than music, books, video, etc, and games especially, it's pretty ludicrous what they try to get away with. Many of the licenses I read would have to get rejected by any court if ever challenged. They exempt the seller from ALL responsibilities, and do nothing but outline a litany of rights which are DENIED to the purchaser. Nowhere do they mention obligations on the part of the licensor to the licensee. When people buy much software, and basically any videogame, legally speaking, all they are doing is throwing money in the publishers direction and hoping they'll get access to the content. The license doesn't actually guarantee them access to it. It doesn't guarantee anything at all, in fact, except that the purchaser will not be allowed to do X, Y, or Z. A license agreement is supposed to actually place obligations upon the party granting it, and provide guarantees to the licensee. That has been abandoned when it comes to software licenses. But like I said, this is old ground. We've been here before. When someone pushes it too far, and they will, and it goes to the courts and gets heard properly, the world will change for all of these companies who think they can continue to have complete control over things they sell even after a customer makes a purchase. And the stupidly frustrating thing is that it will be the best thing that could possibly happen for their business. The emergence of robust secondhand markets (as will happen when licenses to digital property are legally required to be transferrable and re-saleable) will, as it has countless times in the past, provide an explosion of business. Things which are now-and-then luxury purchases will transform into habitual purchases, and the overall number of sales of new products will grow even faster than the sale of secondhand licenses. Look at the home movie market, for example. It wasn't until DVDs came around, with their ability to survive without any quality degradation for years and through thousands of uses, and their secondhand market, that it became normal and expected that people would own a large number of movies, and regularly purchase new ones for a personal collection. That never happened with VHS. The secondhand market was handicapped by tapes which degraded on each play. One day, millions of people will wake up and find themselves locked out of access to a large amount of digital content that they "bought" with the original licensor demanding some additional money to re-unlock access to that material. And those people will quickly discover that they do not have a legal leg to stand on in terms of complaint. The license agreement they "agreed" to provides them no guarantee of continued access to the content, and explicitly reserves the right to revoke access at any time for any, or no, reason at all. Their only option will be to pony up more money or kiss that media goodbye. It will probably happen to gamers first, and though they will whine about it online, they'll just open their wallets and pay. So it'll work for awhile. But then someone will try it in an industry with customers who have a spine and actually expect property rights. There'll be a class action lawsuit, courts will re-evaluate the condition of digital property and realize that it bears no remarkable dissimilarities to audio CDs, video DVDs, etc, and will extend the First Sale Doctine and other consumer protection laws to cover all digital property. The publishers will wail and gnash their teeth. Gamers will come to their defense. But it will rapidly be revealed that sales spiked, and remained high, the day after, and the publishers will quiet down.
tajen 10y ago
Like, you miss when you could configure a Cisco router without using the cloud sysadmin console? I miss when I owned my Mac OS X. I'd use Linux just for the sake of having a non-cloud system. Concerning money, I don't understand why we wouldn't track criminals when using banknotes. There are only 15bn Euro banknotes, all numbered. You could track them easily in Postgres. 90% banknotes change hands only once before going through a bank again. It is certainly easy to watch the banknotes' travel patterns, and they'd be stupid not to do it: If a dealer cashes in banknotes which were withdrawn from your account, it's a big arrow pointing towards you. It's even worse in bulk: If a few dozen banknotes are withdrawn together, go unused for a few months, then all get exchanged in Moscow, it's a smoking trail. Cash management for mafias is certainly a a job, and banknotes don't always have the same value, depending on how clean they are (e.g. the 500EUR is worth 520€ on the legal second-hand market in Paris).
- SixSigma 10y ago
  I like the idea of perpetual leases for some items E.g. Washing machine, fridge etc. I would take solid construction and reliability of those over planned obsolescence.
- SixSigma 10y ago
  I like the idea of perpetual leases for some items E.g. Washing machine, fridge etc. I would take solid construction and reliability of those over planned obsolescence.
- tripzilch 10y ago
  interesting! how did you arrive at the ~15bn number? I like it as an argument against cashless payment.
dorfuss 10y ago
I'm not sure Germany is a good example. I am now living in west Germany, people simply prefer using cash. Unlike in Sweden, where I also lived, where they want to get rid of it soon. Many services are simply not available without a credit card (eg.: at T-Mobile store). But I second you on the cloud computing and SaaS - I want the programs to run on my machine. And off-line.
- iofj 10y ago
  In most countries there is a legal rule that establishes cash, which says something along the lines of : Currency notes must be accepted as payment for all debts, public and private. This means not accepting cash is actually illegal. This has been relaxed a bit, in that refusing to take a 500 euro note for a .5 euro purchase is permitted, but either refusing to sell to someone who wants to pay cash or not accepting cash after the sale is not legal.

by frik 10y ago

fauigerzigerk 10y ago

Cash was never a good store of value. You could easily lose everything to fire or theft over night. And governments can create inflation to erode the value of cash pretty quickly if they really want to. There is no erosion of the idea of ownership. As someone who is renting in London I can assure you that quarterly inspections and thick, dirty carpets are an effective reminder of the fact that you are either an owner or something between a child and a criminal.

frik 10y ago
You missed the point. Sure, there is a risk of inflation, but you can act immediately for your own good if there a slight warnings on the horizon. You can't do anything if it's out of reach like in recent history as the banks closed all ATMs like they did in Cyprus and Greece. But I wrote about daily usage of money, and not be limited or tracked in any way, like you are with non-cash money. About ownership, you missed the point, London is a bad example, as it's very expensive own a house there - we know that. But outside of that bubble, a house on the country side is still affordable but new regulations and taxes may get a burden. As well as several products come with licenses and software which limits its usage making it virtually more like renting a service instead of owing the product and being able to do what you want with it - like the mentioned Windows 10 with its tracking/spying/hardware-dongle, John Deer tractors and Tesla S with its user account dongle which prevents third party service, after market and selling your own stuff, etc. Or electric cars where the car manufacturer owns the battery, and you can only rent it. Or autonomous cars that you may only lease and not be able to buy and own yourself in near future, as some CEOs mentioned.
- fauigerzigerk 10y ago
  >You missed the point. Sure, there is a risk of inflation, but you can act immediately for your own good if there a slight warnings on the horizon. [...] About ownership, you missed the point, London is a bad example, as it's very expensive own a house there I think you are missing the point, because you're not seeing the connection between these symptoms. Property in London is so expensive because our culture values ownership more than ever and because property is used as a store of value by those who already see the warning signs on the horizon (in various countries around the world). I do agree to some extent with your tracking concerns when it comes to electronic payments. But we have to realize that tracking is not an inherent flaw/feature of electronic payments. It is the result of laws and regulations created by the governments we elected. The point you are making about software licenses has very little to do with a shift away from ownership in my view. We never owned software, even when it was distributed on floppy disks. We never owned music even when it was distributed on vinyl. Tracking and onerous usage restrictions are a feature of the networked nature of modern software and of the distribution channels we use. Ownership rights that make these things possible have always been in place.
  - frik 10y ago
    You wrote about the housing bubble, I wrote about cash money. You wrote about theoretical licenses, I wrote about that you practically own something. Example: I buy a DVD, I can play the DVD as many times I want until it physically breaks. I some states it's also allowed by law to create a backup copy in case it breaks. And while you are allowed by law to do things, it's not possible with new paradigm like used in Win10, John Deer traktor or Tesla S car - so even if you are by law allowed to do things like sell your own stuff, you simply can't do that with such dongled stuff that also tracks you all the time as extra bonus. And it's not about electronic cash per se, it's about centralized systems. I am unsure about Bitcoin but it sounds at least better than a system controlled by the state. Anyway cash money is still the way to go. It's like electronic voting, at the moment there is no realistic way to build a system that is secure and also don't record who voted what and making it easier to mass-manipulate votings - that's why still many states disallow electronic voting or reverted back to voting on paper. Of course many lobbyists from voting machine manufacturers would say the opposite.
SilasX 10y ago
Out of curiousity, why don't they allow inflation protected cash? It's certainly physically possible through some kind of bearer bond system.
- tim333 10y ago
  I'm not sure it's not allowed. I can make a bit of paper saying "I, Tim will pay the bearer on demand US$1 * the current CPI / 238" and sell it to you for a dollar. Some reasons why inflation free currencies don't work very well in practice are if there is a lot of debt in society and the economy turns down it can be useful to inflate the debt away a bit. Otherwise you get Greece. If they were still on the Drachma with debts in that they could just print a bunch more and have the economy back to normal. Instead they owe Euros which have about zero inflation and are basically bankrupt.
  - SilasX 10y ago
    Yeah, I know there are benefits to the government if it can expropriate people's liquidity; I'm wondering why there aren't mechanisms to fight that.
    - tim333 10y ago
      It's not really about benefits to the government - they can grab what they want as taxes. It's about bailing out the over indebted. Sure you could let them go bust and let the banks that lent to them go bust etc. like they used to in the gold standard days but the majority of people don't want to go back to that.
- hammock 10y ago
  Buy TIPS and use the bond certificates as cash

kome 10y ago

> and eliminated entire cash notes like the 500 EURO note Good fucking riddance. It just was a gift to criminals.

frik 10y ago
Explain me more. You fall for the propaganda without background knowledge. The statistics says otherwise. Fake money is mostly smaller notes (like 20, 50, 100 notes). Higher value notes like 1000 francs note won't get eliminated anytime soon. Criminals already use electronic money, real estate, fake companies, etc.
- Chickenosaurus 10y ago
  500 € Notes are a gift to criminals because they allow large amounts of money to be smuggled easily - e.g. to a country where no questions are asked when you deposit large amounts of money with your fake company.
  - frik 10y ago
    Your rhetoric is off, "smuggle" is the term for illegal stuff. Don't use it for legal stuff. And don't make cash money look like it's bad - that's just the propaganda that started after the Davos conference to bad mouth cash money in the interest of a small elite. We all know better: You transfer legal stuff. Cash money is valid money form, you just carry money around in your wallet. While it's already true, some state limited the amount of cash one is allowed to cross the border, another artificial limitation imposed.
    - op00to 10y ago
      You're free to transfer value anonymously. Purchase gold.
      - donatj 10y ago
        You get to a border with a bunch of gold and I promise there will be more than questions.

otakucode 10y ago

I don't think I would classify the problems with "licensing" of digital property as an erosion of the idea of ownership necessarily, though I can see how you got there. Personally I think that the destruction of consumer protections when it comes to digital property is a temporary situation. EVERY industry has tried this. Out of sheer stupidity, producers think that if they can destroy aftermarket and secondhand market dealings, they will somehow improve their business. They're dead wrong, and history backs me up on that. History also shows that they will fail. Along with every single industry previously trying to destroy or severely restrict the property rights of consumers, every single one of them has failed. The automobile industry tried to make aftermarket car parts illegal and the courts said no. The movie industry tried to make secondhand markets for DVDs illegal and the courts said no. We do have a slightly dicey situation with digital content in the US (which like it or not sets the standards for more than its own shores) due to the DMCA. It is used in many areas to facilitate all of the things that courts forbade in other industries. It should have been overturned back when Streambox VCR was on the chopping block... if only they hadn't run out of money fighting their court case. They won every single case, and every appeal, up until the point where they had to give up as they couldn't afford to keep fighting against RealNetworks. The only good bit of that situation was the fact that RealNetworks themselves got nailed by the EXACT same law a few years later for permitting users to create backup copies of their DVDs (which involved circumventing DeCSS). Right now, if you read a "license agreement" for digital property, software moreso than music, books, video, etc, and games especially, it's pretty ludicrous what they try to get away with. Many of the licenses I read would have to get rejected by any court if ever challenged. They exempt the seller from ALL responsibilities, and do nothing but outline a litany of rights which are DENIED to the purchaser. Nowhere do they mention obligations on the part of the licensor to the licensee. When people buy much software, and basically any videogame, legally speaking, all they are doing is throwing money in the publishers direction and hoping they'll get access to the content. The license doesn't actually guarantee them access to it. It doesn't guarantee anything at all, in fact, except that the purchaser will not be allowed to do X, Y, or Z. A license agreement is supposed to actually place obligations upon the party granting it, and provide guarantees to the licensee. That has been abandoned when it comes to software licenses. But like I said, this is old ground. We've been here before. When someone pushes it too far, and they will, and it goes to the courts and gets heard properly, the world will change for all of these companies who think they can continue to have complete control over things they sell even after a customer makes a purchase. And the stupidly frustrating thing is that it will be the best thing that could possibly happen for their business. The emergence of robust secondhand markets (as will happen when licenses to digital property are legally required to be transferrable and re-saleable) will, as it has countless times in the past, provide an explosion of business. Things which are now-and-then luxury purchases will transform into habitual purchases, and the overall number of sales of new products will grow even faster than the sale of secondhand licenses. Look at the home movie market, for example. It wasn't until DVDs came around, with their ability to survive without any quality degradation for years and through thousands of uses, and their secondhand market, that it became normal and expected that people would own a large number of movies, and regularly purchase new ones for a personal collection. That never happened with VHS. The secondhand market was handicapped by tapes which degraded on each play. One day, millions of people will wake up and find themselves locked out of access to a large amount of digital content that they "bought" with the original licensor demanding some additional money to re-unlock access to that material. And those people will quickly discover that they do not have a legal leg to stand on in terms of complaint. The license agreement they "agreed" to provides them no guarantee of continued access to the content, and explicitly reserves the right to revoke access at any time for any, or no, reason at all. Their only option will be to pony up more money or kiss that media goodbye. It will probably happen to gamers first, and though they will whine about it online, they'll just open their wallets and pay. So it'll work for awhile. But then someone will try it in an industry with customers who have a spine and actually expect property rights. There'll be a class action lawsuit, courts will re-evaluate the condition of digital property and realize that it bears no remarkable dissimilarities to audio CDs, video DVDs, etc, and will extend the First Sale Doctine and other consumer protection laws to cover all digital property. The publishers will wail and gnash their teeth. Gamers will come to their defense. But it will rapidly be revealed that sales spiked, and remained high, the day after, and the publishers will quiet down.

tajen 10y ago

Like, you miss when you could configure a Cisco router without using the cloud sysadmin console? I miss when I owned my Mac OS X. I'd use Linux just for the sake of having a non-cloud system. Concerning money, I don't understand why we wouldn't track criminals when using banknotes. There are only 15bn Euro banknotes, all numbered. You could track them easily in Postgres. 90% banknotes change hands only once before going through a bank again. It is certainly easy to watch the banknotes' travel patterns, and they'd be stupid not to do it: If a dealer cashes in banknotes which were withdrawn from your account, it's a big arrow pointing towards you. It's even worse in bulk: If a few dozen banknotes are withdrawn together, go unused for a few months, then all get exchanged in Moscow, it's a smoking trail. Cash management for mafias is certainly a a job, and banknotes don't always have the same value, depending on how clean they are (e.g. the 500EUR is worth 520€ on the legal second-hand market in Paris).

SixSigma 10y ago
I like the idea of perpetual leases for some items E.g. Washing machine, fridge etc. I would take solid construction and reliability of those over planned obsolescence.
SixSigma 10y ago
I like the idea of perpetual leases for some items E.g. Washing machine, fridge etc. I would take solid construction and reliability of those over planned obsolescence.
tripzilch 10y ago
interesting! how did you arrive at the ~15bn number? I like it as an argument against cashless payment.

dorfuss 10y ago

I'm not sure Germany is a good example. I am now living in west Germany, people simply prefer using cash. Unlike in Sweden, where I also lived, where they want to get rid of it soon. Many services are simply not available without a credit card (eg.: at T-Mobile store). But I second you on the cloud computing and SaaS - I want the programs to run on my machine. And off-line.

iofj 10y ago
In most countries there is a legal rule that establishes cash, which says something along the lines of : Currency notes must be accepted as payment for all debts, public and private. This means not accepting cash is actually illegal. This has been relaxed a bit, in that refusing to take a 500 euro note for a .5 euro purchase is permitted, but either refusing to sell to someone who wants to pay cash or not accepting cash after the sale is not legal.