ShadowPouncer

Well… No. It’s complicated, but there are several ways in which Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have both directly and indirectly increased gas prices. Some of them most definitely are part of ‘simply because they can’, but the invasion has given people more handles to do that as well.

If there is a significant drop in available supply, prices go up. There are not that many suppliers in the world who can do this all on their own without causing themselves very significant financial harm.

This is why OPEC, when it has it’s act together enough for everyone to go along with it, has been such a thing, and holds so much power. If almost every supplier is part of OPEC, and OPEC decides to decrease supply, well, prices go up, and none of the suppliers take a hit.

In a very similar manner, if people think or expect that supply will decrease, you get a very similar effect, despite there being just as much supply as there was 5 minutes before the news or rumor went out.

And, of course, it is perfectly possible for suppliers to sell their product outside of the global commodity markets. It’s rare, because it’s almost always going to be selling it for less than the current market prices, but today we have some good examples of this.

Russia was a huge supplier of various petroleum products, and even though the oil you use to make gas and natural gas are rather different products, to a limited extent they are just barely interchangeable enough on the usage end that a significant shortfall in natural gas can be partially made up by increasing usage of gas, at least in some places.

(See Europe going through an exceptionally cold winter while not having enough of a natural gas supply to be confident in even normal usage.)

At the moment, you have Russia almost entirely excluded from the global commodity markets. Russia choosing to sell outside of those markets at a significant discount, to evade sanctions. Which gives other oil producers just a hair more leverage in continued price control.

All of this is the backdrop for the international companies that do most of the oil prospecting, drilling, etc, who have all decided to almost entirely stop bothering to continue investments in opening up new oil deposits. These most definitely impact pricing as well, though on a longer time scale.

It’s a complex mess, with quite a lot of gambling, and actors who have a vested interest in screwing with the system, and entities with enough control to not only gamble, but to tilt the result to avoid losing those gambles if they really need to.

And given that everyone involved wants to make as much money as possible, only the fact that it is a global market keeps prices even remotely sane. Any excuse to hike prices will be taken.

Every now and then, I try to browser without an ad blocker.

That generally lasts until I encounter something that’s bad enough that I don’t really have a choice, and then I turn it back on.

The page needs to actually function. It needs to be possible to click on something and actually be clicking on the thing that you’re intending to.

And it can not have stuff that blinks in a manner that causes a segment of the population (which includes me at times, but not 100% of the time) significant neurological problems.

That last one has been the driving force behind stuff getting reenabled a fair bit.

Oh, and if it’s ads on video content, they need to be at least vaguely reasonable in regards to interruptions and length. Youtube is way past that at this point.

To be real clear, the only thing this does is screw over the hourly employees trying to survive on tips.

It does absolutely nothing to the business, they don’t care, at all. It doesn’t impact them in the slightest.

Yes, by law, if someone makes so little in tips that they would be getting paid below minimum wage the business is supposed to make up the difference.

Assuming that happens for the entire shift.

In practice, by all accounts… That pretty much never happens.

From the comments, I think that the general answer is: We all recognize it, because a lot of different places used a logo sorta like this in the 90s.

And we can’t pin it down exactly, because a lot of different places used a logo sorta like this in the 90s.

And being the 90s, a lot of that was never on the internet in the first place.

It rings very strong bells for me, and I don’t think the reason is one that (at the time of this comment) has already been posted… But I can’t for the life of me remember what it was for.

The big cost to doing it yourself is maintenance.

There is, for a lot of people, a fairly large amount of value in never having to worry about hardware dying. If it does, that’s someone else’s problem, and it will be fixed, as far as you are concerned, rapidly and without any interaction with you.

How much any given person values that is going to vary wildly, but it means that you don’t risk having stuff go down at a moment when you can’t do anything about it. Maybe you’re on vacation, and you don’t have any hands that can do anything. Maybe you’re sick, or just extremely busy that week.

You’re not wrong that this comes at a fairly substantial monetary cost, but it is wrong to say that this isn’t, in many cases, a cost that people are more than willing to pay in exchange for the benefit.

Mastodon absolutely does have a weakness of making it more difficult to find people that you want to follow based on what you have already engaged with.

And from a purely user perspective, that is a weakness.

But it’s also a very distinct choice. Because having enough data to be able to meaningfully make such recommendations means having a central database of every user interaction by every user.

And it also means making choices and value judgements which, almost by definition, can not be value neutral.

If the creators of the algorithm are good, they will actually be aware of the choices and value judgements being made, if not, well… They will still be making them, just not in nearly as educated of a way.

On the whole, I really hope that we eventually come up with answers to these problems that make it possible for a user to make those choices, and to have the amount of recommendations that they want, while somehow not having anyone have the huge database of user interactions. I’m not sure if that’s even possible, most especially if you assume that there will be entities on the fediverse that are fudging their data to get recommended in ways that other users don’t want.

But it sure would be interesting to try.

The really really sad thing is, Reddit could have done a half decent job and made a fair bit of money, but they decided on stupidity instead.

Sure, it would have upset some people a bit, but… Not by anywhere close to the same degree.

Alright, we’re sorry, but use of the API is going to have to start costing money for some kinds of uses.

First off, people that just want to scrape everything get the following access, and a much higher rate limit, but it’s going to cost $x.

Moderator tools will always be free, but the API will require that the tool be associated with a moderator, and it will only permit access to subs that the user is a moderator for.

Community bots will generally be free, subject to the following restrictions.

And 3rd party clients will be charged a minimal amount, calculated to be roughly equal to what we are making from similar users on the official clients, to make up for lost ad revenue. Alternate options involving profit sharing may be viable, contact X for details.

By accepting the API agreement, you agree that use of the wrong class of API usage (for example, using the community bot or 3rd party client classes for data scraping) will be billed, retroactively, at $X * 10.

There. That’s really not that hard. And people would have been much less upset at that, at least as long as the fees were actually as described, and not based on, say, how much they would like to make per user.

You’d probably want a free tier for 3rd party clients for users of specific account types. If the user is paying for Reddit Premium, maybe 3rd party clients don’t get charged for API usage for that user account. Or if the user is a moderator for a given subreddit, API usage for that user on that subreddit is also free. With an API that the client can use to check the status of such things. If they were smart, they would also have a process for users with disabilities to have their accounts exempted from fees. That last one is hard, because you need a verification process, but it would get them a lot of good will.

Again… This shouldn’t be hard. And it would have turned into a viable revenue stream!

Hell, flatly disclose that the 3rd party cost is 30% more than the average cost of using the standard client, to support the effort required to maintain the API. (Largely bullshit, but it makes those users more valuable than those that use the official client, while not being expensive enough to make it impossible for anyone to offer a 3rd party client at an even remotely sane cost.)

Yes, this would have very sadly been the end of free 3rd party clients… But I for one would have been… Okay with paying a small amount per month/year through the app store for a client that didn’t suck.

Instead, Reddit decided that committing suicide was the better path forward.

The other big problem is that if it’s big enough, it may be uncomfortable or down right painful for any partner.

Again, that’s usually more of a girth than a length problem, though too much length can also result in pain. (Bumping into the cervix is, for most women, a rather painful experience.)