Instead of building our own clouds, I want us to own the cloud. Keep all of the great parts about this feat of technical infrastructure, but put it in the hands of the people rather than corporations. I’m talking publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services.

I worry that quickly this will follow this path:

• Someone has to pay for it, so it becomes like an HOA of compute. (A Compute Owners Association, perhaps) Everyone contributes, everyone pays their shares
• Now there’s a group making decisions… and they can impose rules voted upon by the group. Not everyone will like that, causing schisms.
• Economies of scale: COA’s get large enough to be more mini-corps and less communal. Now you’re starting to see “subscription fees” no differently than many cloud providers, just with more “ownership and self regulation”
• The people running these find that it takes a lot of work and need a salary. They also want to get hosted somewhere better than someone’s house, so they look for colocation facilities and worry about HA and DR.
• They keep growing and draw the ire of companies for hosting copies of licensed resources. Ownership (which this article says we don’t have anyway) is hard to prove, and lawsuits start flying. The COA has to protect itself, so it starts having to police what’s stored on it. And now it’s no better than what it replaced.

Honestly, this isn’t a surprise or really a big surprise. Gamification like this has been a thing since the 90’s or earlier. As soon as the web became ad revenue driven, sites figured how to drive clicks and keep people on them. More engagement == more page views == more revenue. Video games have done achievements for decades. AOL even did this in the 90’s. More “you got mail”, more AIM messages, more things available, more engagement, more likely you’re going to pay that hourly charge for access. It’s the same reason there’s clickbait everywhere and everyone has a newsletter the automatically sign you up for. Here Facebook does it… everyone’s slightly different, but all have the same premise. Gotta keep you hooked, give you that dopamine hit and make you keep coming back.

This goes back to the age old “if we could make the internet monetarily self sufficient without ads, how would that work?”

Over my 25 yrs driving and getting inspected here, I’ve found a mix of issues… I always inspect my car before dropping it off, most times in their own parking lot.

• good old boys that don’t care and pass it without obviously checking because they know they won’t make money on it anyway.
• ones that talk down to my wife because she must just believe any BS they make up (until I get involved, call them out, the apologize and I don’t go back)
• dealers that make problems for you to have to fix (had two places… one obviously shoved a screwdriver through my CV boot that was fine when I drove it in and wanted $989 to fix. The other said I was missing lug nuts that I know were there when I dropped it off and wanted to charge me $5/each plus $100 installation.)
• places that are actually good and fair.

One issue with the first is that the state doesn’t actually pay them enough per hour that it makes sense to take their time and do it right… they just crank them through finding obviously high money making issues and skipping the rest.

A law not saying you need to, is not the same as a law saying you need not to.

Mine has been arguing this point for a while. Apparently there wasn’t really a drop of issues here when they went into place, so they question the usefulness.

That said, they’re just done incorrectly in the first place. They are done by dealers/shops that lose money in doing them and are instead banking on charging you lots of money for problems they find and hope you get fixed with them. They need be done at an independent run spot with no interest in anything but safety and no way to be bought out.