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A gas or electric bill works a bit like this... if you have some appliance that fails in a way that suddenly starts consuming much more than usual you can end u
by bstpierre 5y ago
A gas or electric bill works a bit like this... if you have some appliance that fails in a way that suddenly starts consuming much more than usual you can end up with a fairly large bill at the end of the month. Same for old school landlines or cell phones, before flat rate billing became ubiquitous.
Though in those cases the billing isn't really complex or opaque, and you _can_ monitor it if you care to check your meter regularly throughout the month. But, for the electrical case anyway, you can't drill into what exactly is consuming watts without either fancy monitoring equipment or potentially tedious investigation.
- macintux 5y ago> A gas or electric bill works a bit like this Just ask Texans.
- Nextgrid 5y agoThe big difference in case of gas or electric (or even telephone) is that you and only you are in control. Someone would have to physically break into your house or steal your phone to rack up a huge bill. In contrast, with the cloud the bill is directly proportional to the amount of inbound requests from the Internet, with no out of the box way to implement a limit (I guess you could install Apache/Nginx and enforce a limit there, but doesn't that kinda defeat the whole point of the cloud?).
- bstpierre 5y agoSome cell plans have a charge for incoming texts, roughly like the cloud bill you’re talking about. And (as sibling comment points out) if you’ve got critical household infrastructure that needs gas/electric, you’re not always in control. An unexpected hard freeze could provide you with a big bill next month and you can’t fully control it. I agree with you that there’s definitely a difference of scale and asymmetry but the concept of unpredictable postpaid bills is not a new thing.