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GPS was built to suck
Happy Sunday {{first_name}},
If you’re a fan of the Proteas, you’re probably still smiling from ear to ear today. It really does feel good to have two sports teams on top of the world at the moment.
Goodness knows it hasn’t always been this way.
The same is true for GPS, which used to really suck compared to the service we get today. This wasn’t for lack of technology. No, it was a deliberate decision.
Is the same thing starting to happen to free AI models, as Anthropic and competitors battle for profitability? There’s certainly an incentive to encourage upgrades to paid models now that Anthropic’s numbers will be subject to public scrutiny.
The AI link is speculation. The GPS story is historical fact. Dominique Olivier brings these concepts together in her signature style in this week’s column.
Why the first version of GPS was built to suck
When GPS first became available, the publicly available version was deliberately handicapped.
It's an approach that didn't last.
With debate around free AI models getting worse all the time, it's a good opportunity for Dominique Olivier to sniff out a parallel situation in the history books.
Read on for a story of being incredibly prepared for a crime that doesn’t seem to happen anymore, along with Dominique’s Fast Facts themed around features that may be disabled.
Enjoy the rest of your Sunday!
The Finance Ghost (follow on X) | Dominique Olivier (connect on LinkedIn)
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What on earth is the RHSADHT?
TL;DR: The Red Hook Society for the Apprehension and Detention of Horse Thieves (RHSADHT) has been on standby to chase horse thieves since 1796. It’s still waiting.
On 10 October 1796, the horse owners of Red Hook, New York, decided that horse thievery was getting out of hand, so they formed the Red Hook Society for the Apprehension and Detention of Horse Thieves.
Members paid a fee, and if their horse was stolen, the society’s riders would give chase at a moment’s notice. If the horse couldn’t be retrieved, the owner was paid its full value.
Think Cartrack or Netstar, but with horses.
There is no record of the society ever catching a horse thief. Then again, there hasn’t been a recorded horse theft in Red Hook itself since 1898.
The society, believed to have around 100 riders paying $5 a year, sees no reason to stand down. “We are ready,” it says.
The website, somewhat less reassuringly, lives at redhookhorsethieves.org. That’s the sort of branding that makes it hard to know which side you’re on.
While most horse thief societies faded away with the arrival of police forces and cars, Red Hook kept growing. It even considered expanding to car thieves, but the riders voted the idea down, on the grounds that automobiles were “in a class by themselves” and would spoil the tradition.
Its moment finally came in 1953, when a horse called Barbara galloped off into the night in nearby Poughkeepsie with an unknown rider on her back. Police called the society for help. The society checked the paperwork. Barbara’s owner wasn’t a paid-up member, and Poughkeepsie was outside its jurisdiction. Its official statement read, in full: “We do not expect to organize any posse.”
It has saved its energy for bigger threats. In 2017, it sent a cease and desist letter to the Society in Dedham for Apprehending Horse Thieves, in Massachusetts, for claiming to be the oldest in America. It enclosed records showing that Red Hook was 14 years older. In 2021, Dedham sent someone to Red Hook’s 225th annual meeting to apologise in person.
Although the website doesn’t have any annual meeting minutes available since 2019, an online search suggests that COVID wasn’t the end. They still hold meetings on the first Tuesday of every October, with dinner and a presentation about horses.
New riders earn their place by giving a successful speech about horses.
Dedham, which hasn’t investigated a horse theft since 1909, still meets just in case.
Red Hook remains at the ready.
Dominique’s Fast Facts
Inspired by user experiences and the people who shape them, this week’s Fast Facts section is titled: "Some features may be disabled”.
In 1849, some early railway companies in France ran cheap third-class carriages with no roof and bare, wooden benches. The French economist Jules Dupuit deduced that the lack of roofs wasn’t about the cost, since adding a roof to a carriage would have set the company back only a few thousand francs. Instead, he proposed that the open carriages were used as a way to make sure that anyone who could afford second class wouldn’t dare risk third. The poor were left out in the rain, Dupuit explained, purely “to frighten the rich”.
In 1990, IBM launched the LaserPrinter E, a budget version of its LaserPrinter. It did everything the original did, at half the speed: 5 pages a minute instead of 10. Economists later concluded it was essentially the same machine, slowed down on purpose. Customers who wanted faster printing didn’t even need to buy a new machine, they could just pay to have their machine “upgraded” - or, if we’re being honest, un-throttled.
In 1924, the world’s biggest lightbulb makers, including Osram and Philips, formed the Phoebus cartel and agreed between them that bulbs should last 1,000 hours before needing to be replaced. That’s roughly half of what they could already manage. Companies whose bulbs had the audacity to last longer were fined in Swiss francs.
Tesla once sold cheaper Model S and Model X cars with 75 kWh batteries that were locked by software to 60 kWh. The rest of the battery capacity was accessible, if you upgraded and paid a few thousand dollars more. In September 2017, when Hurricane Irma headed for Florida, Tesla unlocked the extra range for every affected car in the hurricane’s path for free, adding about 60 km per charge. Around mid-September, the batteries went back to their original, smaller range.
In 2022, BMW began charging around $18 (or R250 a month in South Africa) to switch on heated seats that were already built into their cars. Stop paying your “warm seat subscription”, and your seat went cold. Customers felt they were paying twice for the same seat, and said so with considerable heat. BMW dropped the scheme in September 2023. It never saw a second winter.