Does anything, ever, get too cheap to meter? Data transfer has gotten several orders of magnitude cheaper since the days of paying long-distance rates for 300 baud modems, but metered data plans are still very common.
"Too cheap to meter" may depend on the meter costing a lot. Perhaps electric meters were a significant fraction of the expense of a power hookup at some point.
> Does anything, ever, get too cheap to meter? Data transfer has gotten several orders of magnitude cheaper since the days of paying long-distance rates for 300 baud modems, but metered data plans are still very common.
I'm not sure there's still capped broadband anywhere in mainland europe, even the UK mostly stopped doing that.
IIRC some Japanese providers cap upload, in the 100s of GB, that's basically just network maintenance.
Residential bandwidth is effectively too cheap to meter, but US ISPs found they could keep nickel-and-reaming their captive audience, why would they stop?
There's little reason to limit the bandwidth, but at the same time you want to avoid straight abuse (especially when there are connections up to Gbps). So you put on a high cap on upload as that's usually a minor activity for residential users.
Wired residential data tends to be unmetered in many countries in Europe.
Server/commercial data usage is often not metered; bandwidth is charged at a fixed price for the provided line, or e.g. a 95%ile (making off-peak data "free").
Water is not metered individually per household in some houses. There is one meter per house, and the cost is split (equally or according to some formula based on people living there or apartment size).
> Server/commercial data usage is often not metered; bandwidth is charged at a fixed price for the provided line, or e.g. a 95%ile (making off-peak data "free").
That's not so much "unmetered" as it is "metered using a fixed heuristic for expected usage, that results in the supplier still making a profit† even if you're using 100% of what they provide."
† a profit compared to 100% usage with the relative additional costs of metering. (This is why the price is fixed around 95%—that's the break-even where metering the extra usage would cost just as much as taking the hit on the unmetered 5% extra usage.)
And they may even be OK with some of their heaviest customers being money-losers, so long as the marketing/sales advantages of having a fixed rate outweigh pay-as-you-go pricing.
> Server/commercial data usage is often not metered
This is definitely not typical in Europe. Typically you'll get a bandwidth cap and have to pay per gigabyte above that. For home use this is not the norm.
IMHO it’s kinda hard to generalise about the whole of Europe as if all European countries are alike. Where I live (Sweden) ADSL and fiber for home use are generally not capped, AFAIK. Obviously that is not true for all European countries.
You are correct of course, I am talking about the rich parts of Europe. The more to the east (and in some cases the south) you go, the worse the situation can be.
Edit: Though reading this again, I was mostly talking about server usage - in which case I don't know of any country that has unmetered bandwidth in practice (this means no FUP either, which is just a fancy way of saying "there is a cap but we can change it whenever we feel like it") in the EU and I have an above average familiarity with the space.
3D printing in university libraries is my favorite example. Every makerspace in libraries I talked too says they contemplated charging and discarded the idea because filament is so cheap ($10/kg in bulk) that it's not worth the hassle and would dampen the goal of giving students access to the technology
A packet of ketchup at McDonalds in Moscow cost 35 kopecks in the early 2000s. It was only $0.01, but they would still charge you for it.
There was no free toilet paper in China a couple of decades ago — either bring your own, or maybe buy it for inflated prices from a nearby attendant.
If you want to talk about things that actually flow, I'm pretty sure using the sewers free during the Roman era — but you had to pay to get it hooked up. A bit ironic since now many places meter for sewage (using the water bill as a proxy).
Yes, some things have such a low marginal price that metering is pointless, for example unlimited coffee refills at a restaurant. That doesn't mean it's free, you still have to pay for the cup. And that was Rod Adams' take on electricity, too, more than a decade ago:
>pointless, for example unlimited coffee refills at a restaurant
Low marginal cost of drip coffee certainly enables restaurants to offer "unlimited" drip coffee refills. (Quotes because you might get a nudge to buy something else or leave if you hang around all day.) But deciding to do so is driven to a considerable degree by the prevailing customs/practices. You at least partly get free coffee and soda refills because customers generally expect them in the US.
There's definitely an upper limit to the coffee you can drink in one sitting, while the amount of water, data, or electricity you can use is astronomical (I won't say "unlimited", your mains hookups do limit you)
A lot of the time, a big function of metering is to avoid wasteful behaviors that "free" can cause especially when consumption can be more or less open-ended. On the other hand, sometimes selling a service for a fixed monthly fee (e.g. Netflix) is preferred by consumers and the costs of heavier users aren't too high.
When Di Cleverly and Dave Thiery set up Pluspora as a home for for G+ refugees, the costs worked out (at least for direct hosting, ignoring admin costs) to about $0.25 per user.
Not per month.
Per year.
They're hosting 10,000 users (a very considerable chunk of the active English-language G+ user core) out of pocket.
That's literally too cheap to meter. At best you might aggregate service at blocks of 100, and more likely 1,000 - 10,000 users -- large groups or communities.
One reason mass media turn to advertising-based business models, and all the dysfunction and social malfunction that generates, is because adverts are a tractable scaling and grouping mechanism. They're a hack (though not the only one) to the too-cheap-to-meter problem.
Interesting. It's still unclear whether Strauss was assuming Jevon's Paradox would not strike, or whether he was expecting / hoping for our ability to move beyond energy (or at least electricity) scarcity.
Electricity still has limits based on wire gage. If the cost of maintaining the distribution network vastly exceeds the cost of generation, it may not be worth the billing hassle vs simply paying for the size of the pipe.
Arguably it’s simply another case where someone judges a technology by the wrong metrics. If fuel represented a similar relative cost in nuclear and coal power plants, nuclear really would have been vastly cheaper.
> Electricity still has limits based on wire gage. If the cost of maintaining the distribution network vastly exceeds the cost of generation, it may not be worth the billing hassle vs simply paying for the size of the pipe.
Distributing the generation makes this less of an issue, you still need connection between the regions for balancing and load-shedding, but one can imagine that had civilian nuclear been more of a focus local and hyperlocal SMR would be old-hat rather than experiments.
You have to think given the context he believed (or at least claimed to believe) in post-electricity scarcity. It's hard to imagine that anyone would seriously think electricity demand wouldn't rise significantly as the efficiency of producing it grew. In fact, I can imagine a stronger effect with electricity than with many other things.
I would expect the demand for energy to be more insatiable than any other commodity because all commodities require energy to create. The only two end-user forms of energy readily available are electricity and fossil fuels.
I imagine that electricity consumption will rise with supply in the same way any life multiplies up to the capacity of its food source.
The context was « enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter ».
I suppose it's not implausible that household energy use could become so small compared to industrial use that it's not worth metering (so that that there'd be a maximum power deliverable but nobody would care about the household's load profile).
Is the end result life that consumes the majority of the energy produced (dyson spheres come to mind) to create massively more monolithic and efficient economies, converting enormous amounts of raw material into civilization?
What would make this different than the postulated grey goo scenario, whereinstead man and machine are the ultimate exponential replicators?
Furthermore, if you have an essentially unlimited supply of electricity, you immediately start changing processes, materials, etc. to favor electrical assumption over other costs.
Which arena of science hasn’t said something like this.
In the history of computing there were quotes from prominent people such as “there will never be a need for more than five computers in the world” followed about 30 years later by something like “there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home”.
While that's true, neither of these are great examples.
Watson probably never said the former.
And, while Olsen said the latter, it was in the context of a centralized computer turning lights on and off and so forth. To be sure, we're arguably starting to get there today (the many issues with smarthome devices notwithstanding). But it's a very different approach (distributed vs. centralized--for better or worse).
From the field, writing to colleagues, C.G. Suits (GE's director of research at Washington's Hanford site - quoted in 'Power from the Atom - An Appraisal', Nucleonics, Feb. 1951) told a different story:
"At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy which can be extracted much more economically from conventional fuels.… This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe."
Yes, the real purpose at the time was to keep an infrastructure and population of engineers and technicians to draw on for military uses.
Nowadays we use fusion research grants for the same purpose. Unlike fission, though, there will never be a tokamak fusion plant keeping your lights on.
“Transmutation of the elements,–unlimited power, ability to investigate the working of living cells by tracer atoms, the secret of photosynthesis about to be uncovered,–these and a host of other results all in 15 short years. [...]"
This is an interesting quote.
Not sure if all of those things are indeed possible, but it's an interesting quote nonetheless...
"The problem with free money is that it affects all the other money in a bad way. I may be a dreamer, but I do not see the same problem with almost-free energy. I see a revitalized money economy where all things that are technically possible, even fantastic things, become more feasible because human ingenuity is ever-increasing. I see reduction in cost of living, cost of manufacture and cost of fossil fuel extraction that is so pervasive its positive effect may exceed any economic strategy ever devised. And on that day far in the future when the last hydrocarbon is extracted, it will be just cause for a quiet celebration. We'll already be well into the next great thing. What would the future hold, and what wonders could we achieve— if energy was simply not an issue?"
But the question wasn't about getting an answer, it was probably about whether the writer really believes the President reads anything, never mind unsolicited advice.
President Obama is known to have read some items addressed to him, like most previous Presidents. Is there any evidence that the latest has?
"Too cheap to meter" may depend on the meter costing a lot. Perhaps electric meters were a significant fraction of the expense of a power hookup at some point.