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Fucking Factorio engineers everywhere, I swear.

This is unfortunately true... Tho what is driving the rent seeking isnt tech debt its greed

The expensive part of making books is not the paper. My wife is an independent author and between editing, typesetting, cover design, etc. she spent about $1500 to publish each of her books.

While she could price her books at $1, that would present her with a few problems.

Firstly, people often value things based on what they've paid for them, so pricing your book too low makes people assume it is of poor quality.

Secondly, having positive reviews is extremely important for indie authors because the Almighty Algorithm will reward you or punish you based on the book's rating. Other indie authors she has talked to have seen a noticable decline in their book's rating after Amazon put it on sale and a bunch of people who might not have otherwise read it started buying copies. If you've ever worked retail or food service, you probably know that bargain hunters are often the people who are least reasonable and hardest to please. If the book is too cheap, you may attract an audience that harms its reputation.

Finally, trying to sell 2000+ copies of a book is pretty daunting for small authors and that's about what it would take to break even at $1 per copy.

Could big publishers and well known authors sell books for a buck? Probably. But for the majority of authors who aren't making their living by writing and only sell a few hundred copies ever, that's not really realistic.

No, they cost more because of Steve Jobs.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/how-apple-led-an-e-book-price-conspiracy-in-the-judges-words/

This is your reminder that that man was utter trash.

Epub and PDF files are free though. Just gotta look harder.

No, it's monopoly capitalism. A certain Mr. Marx from Germany had a few things to say about it.

Enshittification has nothing to do with pricing.

It's about market capture and the resulting lack of choices allowing market holders to maximize profits by degrading product performance. This can occur even when the product has no price.

... Why would you rent a way heater, in a home you own? Is the house a school or something???

I've read your response to others that you bought the replacement outright, but I wonder if the original renter was about to sell their house and needed a water heater. Saddling the future with this debt could be cheaper than buying it outright.

Get a heat pump water heater and give them back that junk!

Price = Cost of Materials + (Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man + Middle Man) + Cost of Labor.

It's Econ 101

This is actually the reason why taxes don't increase luxury item costs as the cost is set to the market demand rather than from supply. In fact, the benefits from taxes help people afford more products in a virtuous cycle. It's also the reason tariffs or taxes on raw goods are so bad as you actually are creating dead weight loss and driving down demand which can be useful or detrimental depending on why someone needs that product.

~ Gabe Newell

Yeah companies need to stop being allowed to be multiple industries.

Like why does every department store have a credit card now? They should be using their profits to pay their employees, not loaning it out at insane interest rates.

The problem (outside of competence and the fact that most people only really understand one tool) is that they're deliberately architected in ways that make it difficult to operate on them the same way. They're not just different function calls; they want you to make completely different assumptions about how to do things.

Yeah but my boss told me I should use the magic API because it’s a panacea and will solve all of our problems.