• 0 Posts
  • 94 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: December 1st, 2023
  • Meron35@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•What are your technology mispredictions?English
    21·
    1 day ago

    I never thought tablet computers would become popular among the mainstream public.

    When the iPad first came out, it was functionally worse than even the cheap netbooks, and I didn’t see much purpose in the larger screen with phones getting bigger and bigger every year. Wireless display was also already available, so I envisioned people would just cast content to a TV if they really wanted a bigger screen. Even reading articles etc seemed to be already covered by eReaders, which were already available for half a decade by the time the iPad released.

    Little did I know how brain rotted people would become.

    Tbh I personally still don’t see the utility in most tablets, except in specific niches like in digital note taking/drawing, or industrial cases where it becomes a glorified HUD.

  • Meron35@lemmy.worldtoWorld News@lemmy.world•India overtakes Japan as 4th-largest economy, report saysEnglish
    4·
    12 days ago

    The Japanese public are definitely not willing to lend to the government at such low interest rates. The majority holder of Japanese bonds is the Bank of Japan, who needs to purchase large amounts of bonds to conduct its monetary policy. This has lead to some accusations of the two having an incestuous relationship, when central banks are supposed to be independent.

    Before the Bank of Japan started hiking interest rates, most Japanese people were stuck in a liquidity trap, where they had to pay to store money in the bank. This was due to a combination of low/negative interest rates, and lots of banking fees due to the oligopolistic banking sector. 7-eleven (the convenience store) bank is unironically the fastest growing bank there, in no small part because they were the only bank with a wide ATM network which didn’t charge fees during business hours.

    It is certainly… interesting that the Japanese government, with access to such cheap credit, decides to invest it abroad for higher returns, rather than invest it domestically and pursuing structural reforms to improve its own growth, and in doing so perpetuating the spread between government assets and liabilities.

    FYI there are a lot of investors who do this exact trade, i.e. borrow cheap money from Japan, and invest it abroad.

  • Meron35@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.ml•Random idea: a federated alternative to Amazon Prime built from independent shops?
    6·
    18 days ago

    This already exists, albeit not in federated form. It fundamentally doesn’t work because the market players have an incentive to withhold as much information as possible, because any mistakes consumers make from not comparing prices is direct profit surplus.

    Collecting the information in the first place is also difficult, because it would essentially require getting the consent of most sellers (which they are disincentivised to provide), or just scraping it (often illegally).

    Thus, such an aggregator requires too much work/risk, which needs to be compensated for. Consumers generally don’t like the idea of simply paying for independent advice/brokers, so we are stuck paying in other ways, such as via personal data and behavioural surplus for commercial tech sites, of which numerous exist.

    Most search engines such as Google (eww I know) already have a shopping specific search page. eBay and Gumtree also have existed for decades.

    eCommerce platforms like AliExpress and Amazon also already do this, if you set the filters to only be third party sellers.

    There’s also category specific aggregators such as PCPartPicker/Newegg.