It’s just that, living in that moment, it appears that these companies are so unbelievably large and powerful that they could never be unseated

It’s also that the U.S. has shown repeatedly that it’ll prop up companies with ongoing subsidies, or even bail them out as in the 2008 crisis.

strictly speaking it’s

here’s a gift card so you can give us that money back again we can keep your money but give you something for free later.

it’s hard to know the extent to which the comment represents the marriage. otoh, if one were to read their comment and leave thinking “sounds like a normal, healthy marriage to me”, that imo would be a premium red flag on the reader.

if xkcd was right about jpeggy porn being niche, i’d bank on terrible AI porn becoming a niche in the future too.

Are you expecting 1TB cloud storage for free?

Your point stands, but let me point out that when gmail started their “9GB free” thing way back when, that was an unfathomable amount of storage for some of us. And gmail’s not the only service that’s offered huge amounts of free storage over the years. So yeah, I think it’s probable that a bunch of us have been primed to expect free storage.

edit: Also given how cheap cloud storage is from ie MS Azure…

Depending on storage type you pay $10-$18/mo once you’re using a full TB. If you use less, you pay proportionally less. Dropbox’s 2TB for $10 is a comparatively better deal if you use it all, but if you use 1TB or less it’s not. Which, now that I’m looking at it, probably means their business model is counting on a lot of underutilized storage caps from their subscribers.

I thought Reddit is a slur now?

Why the hell should i do that?

Read any chapter of history, particularly in the last several hundred years, and you’ll find no end of answers to this question.

On the other hand, should the distance a employment candidate lives from work be material to the companies employment decision?

This only seems like a difficult question if it’s one worker having the conversation with their employer. The moment it’s one employer vs. all their workers, the answer is obviously yes, with the employer left footing the bill.

Why would the employer have to foot the bill when they could just fire all their workers and hire people who live closer? Because our housing market is hell and nobody lives closer. Either businesses will have to pay for commutes directly by treating them as hours worked, or they’ll have to pay for them indirectly by relocating their offices to places where workers actually live.

Given how sprawled we all are, the latter will be the more expensive option. At least, until sufficiently large businesses lobby governments to subsidize the costs of relocating their offices… ugh.