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“Unlimited & More” just makes me laugh so cynically. It reminds me of a time I saw an Olive Garden food truck offering unlimited soup, salad and breadsticks.

by mlthoughts2018 7y ago

“Unlimited & More” just makes me laugh so cynically. It reminds me of a time I saw an Olive Garden food truck offering unlimited soup, salad and breadsticks. Do the people in line understand conservation of mass? What must be happening inside that truck to support “unlimited” food.

Johnny555 7y ago
It reminds me of a time I saw an Olive Garden food truck offering unlimited soup, salad and breadsticks.... Do the people in line understand conservation of mass? What must be happening inside that truck to support “unlimited” food. I think in this case, the offer is well understood. "Unlimited" means as much as you can consume during one seating, without limit. If you can eat 5 orders of pasta by yourself, they should serve you 5 orders, they shouldn't serve 3, then make you wait 30 minutes between orders after that. If you only get 2 orders of pasta before they run out, then you should expect a refund since that's not "unlimited". No one thinks that the single food truck can feed the entire world, but I do expect it to feed me as much as I can eat. When a cellular company advertises "unlimited data", that's similarly understood to mean as much data as you can consume in one billing period, without limit or throttling. It doesn't mean that I should be able to run my server farm over it and transfer petabytes of data every month, but if I'm a heavy Netflix user and want to transfer 100GB or more of data, I should be able to, if you can't support that use, then don't sell an "unlimited" plan.
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  I more mean if any big corp is offering “unlimited,” it’s a good indication of some version of a ripoff / unfair terms of use. The added humor in the food truck case is that you can visually see both the extent of the physical supply and the queue of consumers rendering that physical supply incapable of supporting the “unlimited” offer all in one single field of view, leaving you to surmise the only possibility has to do with outrageous food engineering to reduce resource usage and leading to questionable end product (thus undermining the “unlimited” offer’s intended effect to draw customers).
  - Johnny555 7y ago
    I more mean if any big corp is offering “unlimited,” it’s a good indication of some version of a ripoff / unfair terms of use. Consumers should stop accepting that as the status quo. My ISP (Sonic.net) offers "unlimited internet", and they deliver, they have no bandwidth or download caps at all. https://www.sonic.com/transparency#ii-b https://www.sonic.com/transparency#ii-b Throttling: Sonic does not engage in any practice that degrades or impairs access to lawful internet traffic based on content, application, service, user, or use of a non-harmful device.
    - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
      Your situation seems so exceedingly rare that it is inapplicable for the vast majority.

Johnny555 7y ago

It reminds me of a time I saw an Olive Garden food truck offering unlimited soup, salad and breadsticks.... Do the people in line understand conservation of mass? What must be happening inside that truck to support “unlimited” food. I think in this case, the offer is well understood. "Unlimited" means as much as you can consume during one seating, without limit. If you can eat 5 orders of pasta by yourself, they should serve you 5 orders, they shouldn't serve 3, then make you wait 30 minutes between orders after that. If you only get 2 orders of pasta before they run out, then you should expect a refund since that's not "unlimited". No one thinks that the single food truck can feed the entire world, but I do expect it to feed me as much as I can eat. When a cellular company advertises "unlimited data", that's similarly understood to mean as much data as you can consume in one billing period, without limit or throttling. It doesn't mean that I should be able to run my server farm over it and transfer petabytes of data every month, but if I'm a heavy Netflix user and want to transfer 100GB or more of data, I should be able to, if you can't support that use, then don't sell an "unlimited" plan.

mlthoughts2018 7y ago
I more mean if any big corp is offering “unlimited,” it’s a good indication of some version of a ripoff / unfair terms of use. The added humor in the food truck case is that you can visually see both the extent of the physical supply and the queue of consumers rendering that physical supply incapable of supporting the “unlimited” offer all in one single field of view, leaving you to surmise the only possibility has to do with outrageous food engineering to reduce resource usage and leading to questionable end product (thus undermining the “unlimited” offer’s intended effect to draw customers).
- Johnny555 7y ago
  I more mean if any big corp is offering “unlimited,” it’s a good indication of some version of a ripoff / unfair terms of use. Consumers should stop accepting that as the status quo. My ISP (Sonic.net) offers "unlimited internet", and they deliver, they have no bandwidth or download caps at all. https://www.sonic.com/transparency#ii-b https://www.sonic.com/transparency#ii-b Throttling: Sonic does not engage in any practice that degrades or impairs access to lawful internet traffic based on content, application, service, user, or use of a non-harmful device.
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    Your situation seems so exceedingly rare that it is inapplicable for the vast majority.