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It's not the cloud cost that is stopping people from doing this. It is the installation and administration cost. That requires time and expertise that most eith

• mindslight 2y ago
  "Poor" on its own generally refers to monetary cost, which is what I responding to. I agree with you. Time poor is a definite problem, even (or especially) among people that aren't money poor, and it comes with its own Vimes's Boots analogy. For example, the many articles we read here about the centralized service of the week creating some kind of problem for their users, which could have been dodged with a little outlay of time to make better tech choices in the first place.
  • kbenson 2y ago
    Poor, as I intended it, was meant to encompass many things. Working poor people have less money, but they also often have less free time because they have less money. If you have plenty of money you can shop around for jobs that fit your schedule better, or if your job allows for it take time off, or outsource some work you would have to do yourselves (housecleaning, maintenance, landscaping, child care when you're unavailable, cooking, etc). Additionally, if you're in a family, there's a higher chance that both parents will need to work full time, meaning there's less free time for all those things mentioned above, which if one parent worked part time or not at all could allow for a lot of those things to be done while one is working, leading to more free time in the evening for both. Given that, who's more likely to look into free alternatives to apparently free services online? The middle-class person with a spouse that works part time and takes care of many of the chores and that pays for a handyman or contractor or repair man to fix appliances and household problems or the poor person that works full time, their spouse works full time, and when they're done working they're busy doing the chores that life requires because paying someone else is not feasible for them? Time is money, and the working poor have neither.
    • mindslight 2y ago
      It feels like you're stretching to fit this into some memetic narrative of "poor" when most people are time poor until you get to the upper class. While middle class people are more likely to pay for things that need skilled repair (due to knowing fewer people who can do such work informally), they're not paying for things they can do themselves like housecleaning, landscaping, etc - paying someone else for ongoing large chunks of time is an indicator of being an upper class. The point isn't to discount anyone's struggle, but rather to look at the actual mechanisms that hinder adoption of libre software. And apart from some relatively affordable table stakes, I don't think the financial cost is really one of those. The attention cost of self-actualizing and the ambiguity of using a non-advertised solution are though.
      • kbenson 2y ago
        > While middle class people are more likely to pay for things that need skilled repair (due to knowing fewer people who can do such work informally), they're not paying for things they can do themselves like housecleaning, landscaping, etc It's not that they're paying for all of them, but that they have the option of paying for them and I would hazard that a good portion of middle class families with both parents fully employed opt for offloading at least some of that some of the time if they live in a portion of the country where middle class means you actually have disposable income. E.g. many people pay for larger landscaping projects, or hire a handyman to do cleanup around the outside of the house or even might have a maid come in once a month. This might be less common now that the middle class has eroded to some degree, but I think that's a problem of a shrinking middle class, not of those being things the middle class doesn't do. > And apart from some relatively affordable table stakes, I don't think the financial cost is really one of those. I'm not sure I agree with that. Having spare hardware to run something, a stable place to put it, and paying the power for it (a minor but increasing cost) all play a part. > The attention cost of self-actualizing and the ambiguity of using a non-advertised solution are though. I agree, and I think the working poor have less attention to spare because of less free time, but also that they generally have more and larger worries that make this problem seem insignificant by comparison. If your major worried are making rent, having enough money for food, repairing your car so you can effectively get to work and take kids to school, spend quality time with your family, and set up a solution so that your privacy is protected from companies that want to monetize you, which one will get the least attention? Middle class families probably have at least one less of those concerns, and every major concern that's more important than using free software to avoid a small but persistent exploitation is something that competes for attention.