Paessler were purchased in May 2024, and by July 2024 they were moving to a subscription, rather than perpetual licensing model, which came with a 100%-ish price increase.
Start the process for a SolarWinds alternative now.
Australia is increasingly conservative when it comes to politics. We've had it too good for too long and so have lost the pioneering spirit.
Solar panels on homes are so popular that energy providers struggle to deal with the output during sunny days, whilst on the other hand solar and wind energy generation plants are looked at with suspicion and are politically unpopular.
Just look at the political reaction to the installation of the "biggest battery in the southern hemisphere" at the time. You'd expect politics to jump on it as advertising how progressive and advanced the country is. Nope, the prime Minister at the time mocked it (the same party proposing nine nuclear reactors): https://www.9news.com.au/national/sa-s-big-battery-just-anot...
It's definitely rewriting of history / priorities based on the current political climate.
30 years ago the opposite was celebrated as the saviour of American capitalism (by short term thinking people who are probably billionaires now, and therefore, as individuals, insulated against any of the '30 years later' repercussions).
The US is going to need to naturalise all of its illegal immigrants to have a chance at ramping up local manufacturing.
Strong disagree, this was obvious if not from the very start, then as soon as the first company that relocated manufacturing started making ridiculous profits.
Keeping the retail prices the same whilst more-than-decimating the manufacturing cost? How could it not be obvious that anyone and everyone would follow once there was a proof of concept.
When capitalism is measured on incredibly short term performance, with no consideration of long term sustainability or national interest or maintenance of national skills and capabilities. This has been going on since well before the world wide web became accessible to most Western households.
Nike started doing it in the 70s and they weren't the first.
I've long been confused* to why there was no legislation to prevent "local" companies from giving away the keys to their kingdoms to foreign countries.
*Not really, politicians are just as short-term motivated as business owners.
It made sense. But the chickens are now coming home to roost, and they're shitting all over the place and the unprecedented profits have been spent on fancy plastic toys (that are now mostly landfill) instead of any kind of preparation for the inevitable tsunami of chicken shit.
> I've long been confused to why there was no legislation to prevent "local" companies from giving away the keys to their kingdoms to foreign countries.
For a long time this seemed like an exceptionally good deal for the US.
Other countries dig up their rare natural resources, send them to us, and in exchange we send them intangible products like Microsoft Office licenses? That's a great deal. You're literally getting something for nothing.
Other countries' workers make refrigerators for us, sell them to us really cheaply, then they also send a load of the profits back to us because they licensed an American-owned design and brand? You cannot lose.
Meanwhile, supposedly the skilled, high-added-value manufacturing would stay in the West with our educated workforce. And to top it all off, this was supposedly making the poor countries less poor and more democratic as you can't trade without free-flowing communication and a prosperous middle class.
Of course in practice this has gone badly in the long term. The current generations are certainly feeling the consequences. But for the previous generations? They got the highest standard of living in the world!
> Of course in practice this has gone badly in the long term. The current generations are certainly feeling the consequences.
Has it though? Because I think preventing lower-skill industry from migrating to lower-wage countries would have been a MASSIVE intervention into market dynamics with extremely unclear outcome, and it is very easy to be dishonest about its price and possible consequences.
An example: If we had wanted to prevent consumer electronics industry to shift abroad, we would have needed to massively intervene starting in the 1970s (!!). Products like radios, TVs, etc. would have been significantly more expensive, and a lot of that generations talent that made Intel, NVidia, Microsoft etc. happen might have stayed in those sectors instead, thanks to cushy subsidies.
Its quite possible that as a result, countries that did not waste so much effort on fighting market dynamics would have just pulled ahead. Comparing with a hypothetical timeline where there's a "healthy" (subsidised) US steel industry, lots of domestic electronics assembly and every other screen is "made in USA"-- BUT Microsoft is a European company instead, and Apple is Japanese-- that is a bad tradeoff in my view and entirely plausible.
Well, the hope that trade with China would lead to them becoming more democratic doesn't seem to have come through.
And there was a hope the West would keep doing the design work, and high-tech manufacturing. There isn't much Silicon being produced in Silicon Valley these days.
I'm not saying there's an alternative - I can't take a time machine back to the 1980s and explore a different timeline. I'm just saying that many of the purported long-term benefits of globalisation haven't really come about.
I fully agree with you that effecting "better"/more democratic politics abroad via trade has a poor track record (EU buying Russian gas would be another example).
But answer honestly: Do you think that the US/Europe shaped their trade policies in a way that maximized foreign political improvement (especially pre-Crimea)? Because to me, that sounds almost comically self-delusional: We did not try to foster democracy when trading with Russia/China-- we traded to get stuff for cheap.
Looking at GDP development, this was very effective: Yes China grew more wealthy as well, but current trends are not looking like Chinese real wages will ever catch up to US levels, even in the next several decades...
I honestly believe that the US has profitted immensely from trade with China-- it would be insane to try to avoid this (and hold on to domestic industry) from a perspective of how it affected the average American citizen.
Well the idea was those manufacturing countries would also transition to consumption based economies, paving the way for the next generation of manufacturers to then rise up the value chain. Once everyone was rich then I guess we would start relying on automation.
People forget that the flipside of keeping manufacturing in America is that it would have denied the ability for the global poor to rise up. And they should, they deserve that right too. What the neoliberals underestimated was the extent of how nationalistic these rising countries could become, as they instead not to transition but to instead keep on their low end manufacturing while simultaneously competing in the high end. Namely, it wasn't about improving the lives of their citizens, it was about achieving total control over the supply chain.
The sad part of this situation is that for all the global south cheers the "decline of the west", with the closing of the American market and the utter dominance of China, the economic ladders up may have been forever broken.
> What the neoliberals underestimated was the extent of how nationalistic these rising countries could become
Yeah that was totally unprecedented.. If you ignore examples of exactly that happening at other times in history, like Japan. They went from a very poor feudal society where most people lived as peasants society to an industrial society able to seriously challenge America in less than a century. Violent rabid nationalism came with and facilitated that transition.
> I've long been confused* to why there was no legislation to prevent "local" companies from giving away the keys to their kingdoms to foreign countries.
>*Not really, politicians are just as short-term motivated as business owners.
Voters also like lower prices today in exchange for higher volatility tomorrow. No one was forced to shop at national businesses rather than local businesses, but people like the lower prices of larger businesses.
I was taught during grade school that capitalism drives lower prices, and since capitalism is good, it's alluded that paying less money for a product of similar value is almost a moral obligation. That company selling the "same thing" for more is obviously fleecing people and should go bankrupt.
That model may have worked hundreds of years ago when comparing horseshoes made by local blacksmiths, and possibly still held up when comparing mousetraps made in the same state / country. But it has issues when applied globally, and we have not adopted fast enough.
It's better for you individually-immediately, but on the larger scale the government policy is that average prices cannot go down. So then the government created enough new money to make the lower priced item cost $10. And due to kayfabe "fiscal responsibility", the government couldn't even spend that new money (representing shared surplus from tech/market progress) on useful things, and instead just dumped it into the housing bubble.
> I've long been confused* to why there was no legislation to prevent "local" companies from giving away the keys to their kingdoms to foreign countries
Sounds like you dont want freedom and capitalism anymore.
Because the advertising industry is somehow even more gross and pervasive than advertising itself.
Those on the inside see it as a right to impinge psychological manipulation on the rest of the world and any alternate opinion is some kind of restriction of free speech.
Like thinking they have a right to blow cigarette smoke into society's face.
The thing is, society has let them get away with it for so long that it appears that they're right.
As an extreme and memorable example: "$x million was spent on condoms for Hamas"
In my experience of the world, therefore through my personal filter, most of the justifications and reasoning I hear out of Trump's mouth are massive simplifications at best and outright untruths at worst.
Regarding rooting out corruption: $TRUMP coin. So they're replacing perceived corruption with outright scams in order to profit from their position?
Amazing book. Made me entirely reconsider how I think about human behaviour and "how they got like they did".
Should be required reading for being a human living in a society.
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