[talldayo]

As long as a free market exists, there will still be a stupid tax. That's just what happens when you let people sell other people stuff through marketing and advertising, you fill the gap between "expected utility" and "realized value" with lies. White lies, not like "our product will fly you to the moon" but unrealistic stuff like "the Humane AI pin will read you recipes while you cook!" The Humane pin will be dead in a drawer in 6 weeks; the people selling that know full-well they don't have market fit.

The worse practice IMO is exploiting a captive audience. It doesn't matter how stupid you are if you're an Apple developer or an Oracle customer; these companies will bleed you dry for simply touching their product. The only path of recourse is antitrust settlement, which is a lengthy and unnecessary process that is inherently stacked in the favor of whoever can hire more lawyers. Because of this, companies have no motivation to improve a paid product. Instead, the goal is to make you reliant on it somehow and then increase the price. We see this in Netflix, Amazon Prime, Windows/Office365/OneDrive, Apple developer program/Apple One/iCloud/App Store, and YouTube's TV/subscription services. The most successful businesses in our daily lives are the ones that have dug their claws into us and refuse to be anything other than a parasite.