Comment on Peloton announces $95 “used equipment activation fee”
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 4 months agoThe tech world has become and endless conveyor belt of stupid greedy miseries.
Simpler. It’s easy to create artificial maintenance costs there as needed. That, of course, wouldn’t work well without oligopoly.
Government officials are interested in buying such products due to kickbacks, which means that everybody else directly or indirectly needs them for interoperability. Thus oligopoly persists.
It’s as if only radical solutions would work, be it radical authoritarian or radical libertarian.
Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
That reminds me of the bricked polish trains, not only did they create artificial maintenance cost, they also tried to ensure that only they would be able to do that maintenance (unflipping the kill-switch)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrlrbfGZo2k
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 4 months ago
In that particular case it was plain sabotage, I’ve read that article. They also denied knowledge of that kill-switch.
I meant cases where both the vendor and the buyer know how these are formed, but due to kickbacks are fine with it.
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 4 months ago
It’s the McDonald’s ice cream machine fiasco all over again.