When I went to read the New York Times this morning, I got a 503 error instead of the homepage. Turns out Fastly, a major content delivery network service, was having major issues today, and took down a bunch of sites and services that rely upon it.

A little while later, when the Times site was loading again, I came across this article by Kevin Roose:

A few years ago, while on a work trip in Los Angeles, I hailed an Uber for a crosstown ride during rush hour. I knew it would be a long trip, and I steeled myself to fork over $60 or $70.

Instead, the app spit out a price that made my jaw drop: $16.

Experiences like these were common during the golden era of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy, which is what I like to call the period from roughly 2012 through early 2020, when many of the daily activities of big-city 20- and 30-somethings were being quietly underwritten by Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

It all puts me in mind of the fact that technology often does not solve a problem, but rather shifts it somewhere else.