Tech vendors have been hiking prices by up to 24% amid inflation Inflationary pressures mean businesses have faced price increases of up to 24 percent from tech vendors attempting to claw back margins. Research from The ITAM Review – an independent global community for worldwide IT asset management, software asset management, and licensing professionals – has found the ongoing effects of …
Salaries here in Japan are stuck at levels they were at the end of the bubble when I arrived in the 90s.
Since then we’ve seen commodity prices double and the value of the yen slide by anywhere up to 30%. And city rents are astronomical and seem to increase annually since land prices have been rising these last 20 years after losing most of its value in the late 80s with Tokyo property regaining a large portion of its bubble value.
This is the toughest it’s ever been to eke out an existence. This last year alone, a lot of consumer items have hit all time high prices. Some daily necessities such as fresh groceries hiked as much as 80%
But what makes it hurt worse is reading the financial reports of many of these large companies who’re cutting staff left right and centre, raking in obscene profits with TOPIX hitting new record values never seen before, seemingly every week and bosses salaries shifting from “merely” tropopausal to truly stratospheric levels.
Something has to give at some point.
Quote
"Something has to give at some point."
And it will and it wont be nice, but when C-level execs are earning 500 times median wages, its only a matter of time before everyone else says "excuse me, we'd like some of that pie" especially when the floor workers are hit by 30%+ taxes and the C-level people can rearrange they way they are paid to end up paying less than 10%
Theres only so long bread and circuses sorry reality shows and football can keep the mob happy.......
> Theres only so long bread and circuses sorry reality shows and football can keep the mob happy.......
Yeah, I am wondering about that...is that actually the case?
Seeing how ... there is no better word for it ... docile ... alot of people have become, and how easy it seemingly is for talking heads to redirect their blame at any conjured up fright, will the masses ever manifest the strength to demand that justice in distributing resources they are due?
Not meaning to doomtalk here, but consider this: How many people elect far rightwing leaders all over the world? Leaders that are not eve trying to hide any more that their politics are bad for the "little man" they proclaim to speak for. And yet, election after election, the selfsame people that get hit the hardest by this mix of right wing and turbocapitalist policies, vote for the same people again and again. And whenever the hardships worsen, another fright is conjured up, to redirect anger and blame.
"Not meaning to doomtalk here, but consider this: How many people elect far rightwing leaders all over the world? Leaders that are not eve trying to hide any more that their politics are bad for the "little man" they proclaim to speak for. And yet, election after election, the selfsame people that get hit the hardest by this mix of right wing and turbocapitalist policies, vote for the same people again and again. And whenever the hardships worsen, another fright is conjured up, to redirect anger and blame."
Easy - stand on a platform that makes unfounded claims and promises that sound believable but, in reality, will have little bearing on what the target voters really need. And, when the proverbial hits the rotator, either blame others (even members of your own party, especially if the opposing party may actually have something good), claim nobody else could do better, or confuse the whole issue by picking a different platform.
$WORK went through this many decades ago, when Relational Technology (maker of the commercial Ingres database product) was purchased by Computer Associates (a.k.a. CA).
We managed to stretch out the process to a couple of years, if I recall correctly. They wanted to see things like copies of our purchase orders to RTI. As if they didn't already have them? And payment evidence.
In the end we were fully compliant.
But the bad taste left in the mouths of all of us, from procurement, IT management and myself, led us to avoid anything CA offered, said or did.
They were on the same pedestal as Oracle.
There's a word for this - gouging.
At the sniff of publicly reported increased upstream costs, the first reaction of many a big business is to pass the costs on but with a fat bit of padding.
Supermarket chains, energy suppliers, vehicle fuel station franchises - I'd be surprised if they haven't been lured into doing this.
And of course it feeds back.
And yet there's bugger all reporting of how the wholesale commodity prices for gas, oil and the rest have actually dropped significantly throughout late 2022 and this year.
We already know petrol in the UK has been doing this. Prices shot up due to various reasons, but then incredibly slowly dropped until the drops stopped - and then consumer groups revealed that petrol companies were taking the opportunity to massively increase their profit margins rather than bring prices down.
It took the govt "having a word" for them to drop further - and even now, the profit margins are still considerably higher today than they were before Covid/Ukraine etc...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
