A Boring Dystopia

Why the hell do rockers need subscription services? This should be illegal. A rocker, which has absolutely zero maintenance upkeep from the company, should not be gouging their customers for money to use features they’ve already paid for.

No, I get it. CapITaLiSm. That’s why this is posted here. Yes, the above is rhetorical. It still pisses me off. I don’t typically advocate violence, but the people who made this business decision need to go take a very long walk off a short pier, with cinder blocks chained around their throats.

My apologies. I needed to vent. Carry on.

PS. This thing costs almost $1400 on Amazon, which is boasting a 20% discount, and the inventor Harvey Karp is complaining the company is not making enough money. You know who else is not making enough money right now? The Pitchfork and Torches store. That’s who.

Just another company taking part in the worldwide subscription model scam.

Here's another one: LynkD. I have a few of their NFC padlocks. They're not particularly well made, nor are they particularly secure, but they're convenient and I like them to secure low-importance things like my gym locker or the shed at the back of my garden.

I wanted to buy more. LynkD informed me that the padlocks now require a subscription. It's even written at the bottom of the product page:

Membership to these platforms costs $15/Month + $5/Device + $5/User with the first user free. An active membership is required in order to use this device.

Yes, you read that right: a fucking PADLOCK now requires a subscription.

The mind boggles...

at this point, anyone who buys any online "smart" object is in doing so proving that they are not.

Unrelated to the fuckery of this, the only advice I give to expecting parents is, "don't spend a lot of money solving problems you don't know you'll have." Everyone wants to tell you about some product that was super important to their infant, but babies are all different, and your kid might not need what they used. We nearly spent $300 on a fancy bottle warmer, and it turned out our baby liked cold milk. You don't want to spend $1,7000 on a bassinet only to find out your kid is an easy sleeper.

I told you bro. I fuckin' warned you.

People have called me "paranoid" for years for pointing out that this kind of thing was going to happen, and it's so much worse than I thought it would be but at least I'm vindicated.

Tech companies will literally murder or enslave you if they think it would be good for their bottom line. We know that's true because tech companies are murdering and enslaving people in the global south because it's good for their bottom line. Stop giving them money. Stop buying wifi-enabled garbage that spies on you for the police state.

Maybe it's a good thing that people with entirely too much money are being forced to rock their own crying child instead of having a machine do it. Using robots to soothe your child is a Phillip K. Dick-esque dystopia. Obviously a crying child take a huge mental and physical health toll on everyone in a house, but in a country where poor people are being forced to give birth, maybe the rich people should have to suffer a little bit too.

After the recent Disney debacle, I've realized that these subscriptions are a way for companies to limit their liability by making you agree to their terms of use.

Enshittification, once again. Cory Doctorow's latest talk at DefCon about it was pretty good.

locked behind subscription paywalls, the New York Times reports.

And that's irony.

I heard the free version stops rocking after 5 minutes, then plays an ad before it starts to rock again.

Not a parent but outraged it’s called Snoo. Yuck