urning off GPS and LTE ruins 90% of the features in the car.

The main purpose of a car is “driving”, which you can do. Unless you cannot start a Tesla without LTE, which would be very stupid.

You can also always strip a car for parts. Teslas are not magically safe from that.

I read in another article that it is just supposed to be a first test of the feature before the global rollout.

Big chunk of the funding is from the Saudis though - and they have a very vested interest in trashing twitter.

This does not address any of the points above though. The Saudis could have just bought it for half the money and closed the doors.

It’s also entirely possible the truth is somewhere in between - people who knew he couldn’t manage his way out a paper bag working ego boy into buying twitter and ketting the inevitable happen. He’s not exactly hard to manipulate.

Manipulate into doing what? Buying twitter? I think it is very likely that he just attempted market manipulation and failed. Now he is trying to make the best out of the situation and transform Twitter into the company he actually wants. Except he is absolutely incompetent. I don’t see where anybody manipulated him into doing anything. Everything that happened seems very much like him.

Just today there was a great comment by @Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works on why this does not make any sense.

1. When you factor in the incredible damage done to the Tesla share price by the amount of stock he had to liquidate to finance the deal, and the almost billion a year in interest and operating costs the company is pulling out of him, the deal has, altogether, cost Musk about half of his net worth. No amount of petty childishness is worth that.

2. He literally went to court to try to get out of the deal. What was his play here? To sue with the intention of failing? For what possible reason?
3. If his plan was to kill Twitter, why would he attach his beloved X name to it? Musk has spent his entire life trying to make X happen. It is dearer to him than his own children. Why would he attach that brand to a company he’s intentionally sabotaging?
4. If his goal is to kill Twitter, why is it still here? He owns the company outright. He took it private. There’s no board. There’s no shareholders. He doesn’t have a fiduciary responsibility. If he wanted Twitter dead, all he had to do was shut the doors, turn off the lights, and send everyone home.

Anyone who buys into this “He’s trying to kill Twitter” nonsense, please, I am begging you, try to get your head around the fact that Elon Musk is not a smart man. This isn’t some incredible 4D chess play. Twitter isn’t failing because of intentional sabotage; it’s failing because Musk is genuinely trying his best, and his best absolutely sucks. He’s a bad businessman who lucked into a fortune he never deserved.

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/4855307

AFAIK he just implemented regional pricing. The price is the same in Euro.

My point was also never that it has to be one specific price, but to raise awareness to the fact that the old prices of Sync for Reddit are not actually sustainable anymore for Lemmy.

Of course a single user is irrelevant, but in principle and if it would evolve into a larger trend: yes. At least if the dev wants to keep paying his bills. That is how business works. And with lower user counts at some point the required price per user would be too high to be competitive. Then the dev would have to abandon the project, since it would not be profitable anymore. He is a full-time developer after all.

I literally just explained why the price per person needs to be higher now. It is not about server costs. It is about the cost of app development and maintenance.

That was in response to your comparison with t-shirts.

And yes, scaling does not work in the same way for app development. A large part of the required work for app development stays the same, regardless of how many actual users there are (excluding server costs (-> Sync Ultra) and probably the amount of support tickets). But since Sync has way less users now, there has to be more income per user for it to be profitable.

The price was set many years ago and just never changed.

Also yes, less customers means less income for mostly the same amount of work. That is literally why bigger companies can offer cheaper prices. Scale.

You are comparing the old simple “Remove Ads” option to Sync Ultra features.

The new “Remove Ads” without additional features costs 14,99 €. Which, yes, is more expensive than before, but that was to be expected. The old price would have been way too cheap for today’s pricing situation, especially since he also lost most of his userbase.

It is already implemented in the newest update

One-time payment is already implemented. Update in the Play Store if you cannot see it. The “Remove Ads” button is below the settings.

I don’t think the article is trying to claim that labor exploitation is new.

This part directly admits that it is a very old phenomenon:

It’s been noted, and correctly so, that entertainment industry labor disputes often erupt when there’s a change in technology — from theaters screening projected films to the cathode ray tube of the home television, say, or the rise of YouTube and other online content in the 2000s — and that happens for a reason. Historically, executives and management use a disorienting new technology to try to justify lowering wages of their workers, and they have done so since the days of the Industrial Revolution.

As I understood it, the article just wants to explain why this is happening now, because historically it seems to happen in waves.