#jevonsparadox — Public Fediverse posts

@alcinnz I've been coming back to this article for the past couple of days, there's a lot of good in it. The idea that financial price is only a subset of total price or cost is excellent.

The essay also anticipates a point I'd considered, though that can be extended:

[W]e reflexively overindulge in entertainment and other low-second-price pleasures –- phone apps, streaming services, and processed food — even though their rewards are often only marginally better than doing nothing.

I'd argue that this isn't just demand side (that is, personal behaviour), but very consciously and deliberately supply-side: commercial interests try to line up "consumption opportunities" where the public has low costs for additional consumption. There's "junk food" entertainment, literal junk food (food being something that's consumed on an ongoing basis), broadcast and streaming markets, endless scroll, captive markets (travelers, tours, students, patients, inmates, ...), etc., etc. The sell / buy / consume dynamic just keeps on keeping on.

There's also a great line by wilderness-travel writer Joseph Wood Krutch: ""bad roads act as filters... bad roads bring good people, good roads bring bad people".

Sometimes simplified to "A bad road is a good filter."

#JosephWoodKrutch http://www.escapist.com/baja/books.htm

That is, raise the 2nd price, or other associated prices, with a destination, experience, or product, and you'll find that those who find their way there or seek out that experience tend to be a useful social filter. It's something of a melding of #GreshamsLaw and the #JevonsParadox.

Edit: #MoarHashtags

#TheSecondPrice

@rysiek There's a flavour of argument over packaging systems and formats which runs:

• X package format is difficult for software developers to use.
• Y package format is easy for software developers to use.
• Therefore Y package format is better than X.

What's not realised is that the fundamental value and benefit to package management is to systems administrators / owners / users, and integrated distributions of packages. And that the major costs of operation and maintenance are not installation, but *operations and maintenance.

"Easy for sofware developers" typically translates to "encourages sloppy and difficult-to-maintain processes and practices". Not only this, but by lowering up-front costs at the expense of long-term costs, the practice further encourages poor practices (from an O&M perspective), and puts well-behaved software at a disadvantage.

See the Debian Project's explicit focus on user benefit, a long-term value benefit.

This is a Jevons Paradox / Gresham's Law crowding out of well-behaved software and a race-to-the-bottom of poor long-term O&M behaviour.

#Linux #PackageManagement #OperationsAndMaintenance #JevonsParadox #GreshamsLaw #Flatpak #snap