Hardware as a Service: Planned Obsolescence

Hardware-as-a-service (HaaS) is a procurement model that is similar to leasing or licensing in which hardware that belongs to a managed service provider (MSP) is installed at a customer's site and a service level agreement (SLA) defines the responsibilities of both parties.

This post has been on the backburner for quite some time.
In fact I had forgotten about it until just now.

you will own nothing; you will be happy

The famous words from the World Economic Forum.
But how would such a thing even be possible?
The answer is that most people would rent everything.
Including their own phones.

I'll have to watch this video again.

It's been months since I watched it the first time.

For context

This Coin Bureau channel is hosted by this guy (literally Guy).
He's clearly a Bitcoin maximalist, but this isn't always obvious.

In the case of newer iPhone models the phone will actually when you've replaced the battery, and will give you all manner of warning messages which push you to go to the Apple store for an extensive repair that could cost as much as a brand new phone.

Critics of this setup have accurately observed that the inability to independently open, modify, or repair a device that you 'own' means that you don't actually own it.

It's also important to note that everyone touts Apple as this bastion of user privacy, when in reality it is simply corporate policy to not share information with other corporations that would profit off of it for free. The completely closed system of Apple and iOS is not something to celebrate, especially as we move into a collaborative open-source future. Crypto models, being the complete opposite of Apple's entire business structure, is going to cut them down at the knees during the mainstream adoption phase.

Transition into planned obsolescence: (3:40)

As is often the case with Big Tech companies, Samsung was issued a fine that amounted to a slap on the wrist... for slowing down phones on purpose.

Planned obsolescence is a blight upon the economy where companies purposefully make their products worse so that buyers are forced to buy replacements. This cancer has spread across the entire world (not just Big Tech).

Even these heavy duty Kitchen Aid mixers that should last basically forever are purposefully gimped by installing a faulty washer or bearing that will slowly loosen over time and require repairs. It's so flagrant that there's a guy out there that built his entire business on fixing the bearing in advance so that the device will last forever. We see this tactic employed across all products. No one wants to create high quality items that can be used for a long time anymore. It's all about cheap materials that will break and need to be replaced down the line.

If this sounds unsustainable, it's because it is. Planned obsolescence shows us just how badly monopolies and branding have taken a turn for the worse. When communities themselves own the means of production, this will no longer be a problem and all the old-school corporations will be put out of business. Until then, this is what we have, and it isn't pretty.

(4:30)

This practice has been around for almost 100 years, and it has a name: planned obsolescence. [Goes on to show the history of the idea.]

Apparently there is even a paper written during the Great Depression that claimed that all products should have a legal expiration date artificially enforced by the government to get us out of the bad economic cycle. Yikes. Thank goodness for World War Two, amirite?

This then led to the Baby Boomer super-cycle, which let to relative economic prosperity until the 70's. These days we can all see that the huge population increase from WW2 is nothing but an economic headwind in terms of demographics and growth. Quite the fishtail indeed.

Now Apple is mulling over the idea that iPhones themselves should be rented out; bundled inside the subscriptions of cell-service in addition to apps.

Hardware as a service isn't a terrible idea.

Even Hive does it. We call it Privex. Contact @someguy123 for more info. You can basically pay Privex to set up a Hive witness node for you if you don't want to figure it out yourself and rent your own server space and all that.

Again, hardware as a service makes perfect sense if you want to rent a variable amount of something that is subject to change. For example, today you might need 32GB of RAM to run a server that does whatever. But what if you plan on needing double that amount six months down the road? In cases like this, it often makes more sense to rent hardware for two reasons:

1. Don't overpay now for where you think you'll be in the future.
2. Don't underpay now and need better hardware later.

Hardware as a service fixes variable scaling costs of this nature. In many cases it is simply cheaper to rent resources from a bigger entity that can match demand dynamically in real time.

It is when we start trying to force people to do this with products they can afford that we start getting into trouble. Most people can afford to own a phone. Why would hardware as a service even be considered? We can see from the video it's because in the long term they'll jack up the prices and squeeze even more out of the users over time.

A phone is not a service; it's a product.

electric vehicles are more easily controlled

Liberal politics makes the claim that electric vehicles are going to save the world with their sustainability. But there is a lot of evidence to suggest that EV aren't that sustainable on a few different levels (batteries, electricity supply, etc). If you'll recall, California said everyone should get an EV a few months back, and then a week later they asked people not to charge their EV because electricity was scarce. Pick a lane, peoples.

So we have to seriously asking ourselves: does the political push for Electric Vehicles stem from something else? Could it be that EVs are simply easier to control because they are connected to two different grids? Both the electric grid and the Internet grid. If tech companies and government agencies can track everyone all the time and turn cars off whenever they want for any reason, that's quite a bit of power. Something to be mindful of, even if it is obvious that pollution is also a big problem worldwide. The best lies are half-truths.

Digital ID

All of these things also feed into this whole concept of a social credit score and a digital ID and whatever else. Big Tech and government agencies want access to all the data and all the power, that much is certain. A lot of people are making a fuss about CBDC as well, but I'll believe it when I see it. Just because the WEF wants to unilaterally control their own crypto doesn't mean people are actually going to use it. There are thousands of billionaires out there that will want nothing to do with CBDC because it only benefits the mega-elite group that controls it. But we'll see, eh? Things can change radically given systemic economic collapse, assuming we are on the brink of one right now.

Speaking of which, the FOMC meeting was today.

I read that unemployment wasn't high enough for the market's liking, which is hilarious. We are still in this "good news is bad news and bad news is good news" cycle. The market wants economic news to be terrible so that the FED is forced to pivot and begin economic easing. Low unemployment means the speculation is that the FED won't pivot, which they haven't. Every month that passes seems to make this situation more comical and ridiculous. I guess we'll see what happens in December.

Conclusion

In 50 years, will 99% of the population be renting everything of value from the elite? That seems to be what the WEF wants. Obviously that gross and people will move against the concept, especially with crypto in play. Then again, it's impossible to own real estate because if you don't pay taxes on it the men with the guns come to take it away. The only way to truly own something in this world is to make it very difficult for people with lethal weapons to steal from you. And even in that case we see that software itself can be coded to the point of not owning the hardware either. Such a weird world we live in.

Crypto is the solution to a lot of these problems. Guns don't have any power within a digital environment. When you die in the Matrix, you don't actually die in real life. We need to build up a new system that actually respects ownership and gives the communities themselves access to the means of production. Until then the institutions of the world will be scrambling for as much power as they can possibly grab.

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