“Too Cheap to Meter”: A History of the Phrase (2016)
public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov
public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov
"Too cheap to meter" may depend on the meter costing a lot. Perhaps electric meters were a significant fraction of the expense of a power hookup at some point.
I'm not sure there's still capped broadband anywhere in mainland europe, even the UK mostly stopped doing that.
IIRC some Japanese providers cap upload, in the 100s of GB, that's basically just network maintenance.
Residential bandwidth is effectively too cheap to meter, but US ISPs found they could keep nickel-and-reaming their captive audience, why would they stop?
nickel-and-reaming
Server/commercial data usage is often not metered; bandwidth is charged at a fixed price for the provided line, or e.g. a 95%ile (making off-peak data "free").
Water is not metered individually per household in some houses. There is one meter per house, and the cost is split (equally or according to some formula based on people living there or apartment size).
That's not so much "unmetered" as it is "metered using a fixed heuristic for expected usage, that results in the supplier still making a profit† even if you're using 100% of what they provide."
† a profit compared to 100% usage with the relative additional costs of metering. (This is why the price is fixed around 95%—that's the break-even where metering the extra usage would cost just as much as taking the hit on the unmetered 5% extra usage.)
This is definitely not typical in Europe. Typically you'll get a bandwidth cap and have to pay per gigabyte above that. For home use this is not the norm.
Edit: Though reading this again, I was mostly talking about server usage - in which case I don't know of any country that has unmetered bandwidth in practice (this means no FUP either, which is just a fancy way of saying "there is a cap but we can change it whenever we feel like it") in the EU and I have an above average familiarity with the space.
There was no free toilet paper in China a couple of decades ago — either bring your own, or maybe buy it for inflated prices from a nearby attendant.
If you want to talk about things that actually flow, I'm pretty sure using the sewers free during the Roman era — but you had to pay to get it hooked up. A bit ironic since now many places meter for sewage (using the water bill as a proxy).
Low marginal cost of drip coffee certainly enables restaurants to offer "unlimited" drip coffee refills. (Quotes because you might get a nudge to buy something else or leave if you hang around all day.) But deciding to do so is driven to a considerable degree by the prevailing customs/practices. You at least partly get free coffee and soda refills because customers generally expect them in the US.
And on most Burger Kings, at least in some European capitals.
When Di Cleverly and Dave Thiery set up Pluspora as a home for for G+ refugees, the costs worked out (at least for direct hosting, ignoring admin costs) to about $0.25 per user.
Not per month.
Per year.
They're hosting 10,000 users (a very considerable chunk of the active English-language G+ user core) out of pocket.
That's literally too cheap to meter. At best you might aggregate service at blocks of 100, and more likely 1,000 - 10,000 users -- large groups or communities.
One reason mass media turn to advertising-based business models, and all the dysfunction and social malfunction that generates, is because adverts are a tractable scaling and grouping mechanism. They're a hack (though not the only one) to the too-cheap-to-meter problem.
If you could pay $1000/mo for "some ads", that would be unmetered.
But that is because charging the direct users isn't tractable.
Charging users rather than advertisers fails (largely) due to TCTM. Though there are other dynamics as well.
Arguably it’s simply another case where someone judges a technology by the wrong metrics. If fuel represented a similar relative cost in nuclear and coal power plants, nuclear really would have been vastly cheaper.
Distributing the generation makes this less of an issue, you still need connection between the regions for balancing and load-shedding, but one can imagine that had civilian nuclear been more of a focus local and hyperlocal SMR would be old-hat rather than experiments.
I imagine that electricity consumption will rise with supply in the same way any life multiplies up to the capacity of its food source.
I suppose it's not implausible that household energy use could become so small compared to industrial use that it's not worth metering (so that that there'd be a maximum power deliverable but nobody would care about the household's load profile).
What would make this different than the postulated grey goo scenario, whereinstead man and machine are the ultimate exponential replicators?
In the history of computing there were quotes from prominent people such as “there will never be a need for more than five computers in the world” followed about 30 years later by something like “there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home”.
Watson probably never said the former.
And, while Olsen said the latter, it was in the context of a centralized computer turning lights on and off and so forth. To be sure, we're arguably starting to get there today (the many issues with smarthome devices notwithstanding). But it's a very different approach (distributed vs. centralized--for better or worse).
From the field, writing to colleagues, C.G. Suits (GE's director of research at Washington's Hanford site - quoted in 'Power from the Atom - An Appraisal', Nucleonics, Feb. 1951) told a different story:
"At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy which can be extracted much more economically from conventional fuels.… This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe."
Nowadays we use fusion research grants for the same purpose. Unlike fission, though, there will never be a tokamak fusion plant keeping your lights on.
“Transmutation of the elements,–unlimited power, ability to investigate the working of living cells by tracer atoms, the secret of photosynthesis about to be uncovered,–these and a host of other results all in 15 short years. [...]"
This is an interesting quote.
Not sure if all of those things are indeed possible, but it's an interesting quote nonetheless...
My letter to candidate Trump, 2016 https://archive.org/download/20160422TrumpEnergyLetterSC/201...
But the question wasn't about getting an answer, it was probably about whether the writer really believes the President reads anything, never mind unsolicited advice.
President Obama is known to have read some items addressed to him, like most previous Presidents. Is there any evidence that the latest has?