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by wbronitsky 2439 days ago
I assume you mean that these companies are in the business of renting hardware, not that they themselves rent the hardware they are using.

I believe the virtualization they are offering allows the service to scale a bit more like software, but I do agree that these cloud providers don’t have 0 marginal cost.

Either way, thank you for de-buzzwording the original argument. It makes much more sense in English
1 comments
daxfohl 2439 days ago
Sorry for all the buzzwords....It was 6 AM PST and coffee hadn't kicked in yet.

Interestingly the de-buzzwording of the argument makes sense for the actual thing called "gig economy" too. It could just as well be called the "human rental business".

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wbronitsky 2439 days ago
Hey it happens, no value judgements really; I do it myself all the time. The problem lies in my misunderstanding more than anything else.

“Human rental business” absolutely makes whatever economy that is sound much more like the reality these workers live in. We should use it more instead of the euphemisms we all use now.

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daxfohl 2438 days ago
In fact it highlights the difference too. Cloud services companies own the hardware they rent. Human rental services are pass-thru accounts. Cloud services are more financially successful.

A similar thing happened with eBay and Amazon: Amazon owned the products they sold (initially anyway) and eBay was pass-thru. Amazon was more successful.

So Bezos is currently thinking, how can we own some Amazon humans and provide them for rent?

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