I don’t disagree but it seems to me it’s going crescendo, with de facto monopolies running the show and buying anything that could be an obstacle, be it other companies or policymakers.

That there are such wild variations in price between countries shows how little that subscription is correlated to any actual costs.

At best subscribers in richest countries are subsidizing poorer ones, but most probably, Google is just trying to maximize the amount of money they can extract from everyone’s pocket. The repeated seemingly random price hikes seem to confirm this hypothesis. It’s just the MBAs enforcing terminal stage capitalism and ruining everything that is good.

This guy could suddenly rupture a brain aneurysm and you wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference.

It supposedly comes from originaly counting in base 20 ( a.k.a : vigesimal system) in some proto-european language. There are traces of it in breton, albanese, basque and danish for example. Even in english, there is a reminiscence of vigesimal, in the “score”, see for example Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address which famously starts with : “Fourscore and seven years ago…”, meaning 87 years ago.

There’s a typo in the title. If you go back to the original source (in french), they actually retain 79,5 % of their original efficiency, so even better than the article’s title would have you believe.