In the golden era of advertising (don’t really know but say before the iPhone)
there was no “opt-out”. If you wanted to watch Lucille Ball, rich or poor you had to sit through the ads. If you wanted to read the New York Times article, rich or poor, you had to turn the full page ad over.
Today that’s gone - you can for a fee never see an advert again. And that fee is easier to pay if you are rich, and harder if poor. And so more and more “traditional” advertising will become aggressive and aimed at both lower income audience and more scammy products (because you are selling to the poorest you cannot beat costs eventually). And advertising will stop being about “brand” (which are naturally less aggressive and focused on closing) and more about the last click to sale.
We are already seeing this world take shape, as “influencers” become the way to reach those who have paid to stop all other advertising, and why travel influencers are head of that pack.
Ultimately this is about design of our public spaces. We rightly celebrate architects, civil engineers and their sponsors who create enjoyable and beneficial built areas - we have still to get a hold of the digital public spaces. While Times Square has a quality of its own, living there permanently would have mental health issues for most of us.
And in the end, positive public spaces are associated with the words paternalism, socialism, public good and none with Toll, extraction, rentierism.
The arguments against ads are arguments for paternalism of government control for a better life for us all.
I just realised I have been thinking about OSS funding the wrong way around
It’s not “the world economy depends on this stuff why is it not properly funded” (which is true) it’s “never before has a coupe of guys or girls in a garage been able to reach so many people, and stand a chance of getting funding”
The troubles people have finding ways to make a living whilst providing value to people suggests something is wrong not with them but the economy
If you're making a product, I think Kickstarter is awesome.
If you're making entertainment, I think Patreon is awesome.
If you're making OSS... I'm not sure we have a good system. Buy Me A Coffee or a TipJar... Starring a repository... They're good... but they're not enough.
Upvoting on Hacker News whenever I see something promising is another thing I do that I hope might help...
I kind of wish I could subscribe to some monthly payment that tracked my usage of OSS, and sent each a fraction of the money, and that they appraised which systems they depended on, so it flowed down to them, too, and etc...
I like where you're going. I'm intrigued! but what would it look like? For example, curl. I use curl it's awesome. I love it. It's not at a level where I'm going to go to community meet ups for it though, but I'm super happy it exists. I can buy stickers for my laptop and do free advertising?
It's all psychological. If curl had a micropayment system and every time you used it, it cost a 10th of a penny and there's a monthly subscription. Oh God, holy hell, no! But at the same time, I don't want Daniel Stenberg to go hungry.
I'm thinking more about a subscription to a monthly fee that you and I and other fans of OSS voluntarily pay.
Say, I pay $10 a month. It figures out I used curl 850 times. I used gunzip 1246 times. And etc.
It may turn out that I'm donating a 10th of a penny to curl every time I use it.
Do I want to commit to donating a 10th of a penny BEFORE I can use curl each time?
No.
But if I set a flat rate of donating to OSS - $10 a month - and there were a simple tool that figured out a semi-reasonable way to allocate that money... I think that'd be neat.
The tracking app would be pretty simple. A shim in the shell that tracks the first argument on the command line and increments a counter. Then usage stats are pushed to the service every 24 hours (or something like that).
app usage / all tracked app usage --> donation to app.
Handling the payments portion would be... nightmarish?
With crypto it would be really easy. I'd be tempted to take cash on the frontend, convert to crypto, split, then reconvert to cash and make payouts.
How do we handle registering apps that you use? What about upstream dependencies? Example: you just spun up a new React project, do we target all deps on that project? Is this only for command line? What about cron jobs, or systemd? Or that systemd service script you copied from a gist somewhere?
I wonder if some weird kind of aggregation could go on.
At the end of the month, I'm told to donate my entire $10 to some obscure tool I've never even heard of.
The system did all of the tracking, across all users, and then figured out how to assign users like me to projects, such that I'm only donating once or twice ($6 to this project, and $4 to that project.)
The system I propose does all of the counting, all of the aggregating, matching intended donations to the recipients, and then encourages me to do my actual gifting...
Seems possible, but weird. Or maybe we need to set up a non-profit to do all this money laundering^W^W donating.
or maybe that's a direction to go towards. Similar to Spotify wrapped, someone else made a thing to go through your bash history and say what your popular things were.
I've donated quite a bit through the Kofi and Tipjar payment systems for neat OSS apps I use. I agree that it's not enough, however we do have other systems in place via Github sponsorships, Patreon (consistent funding), etc.
It's up for the community to adopt those platforms for their project
The problem is the arbitrary way the funding is allocated, find something interesting to companies du jour with a clear path to funding and you're golden.
If whatever OSS is too obscure to be noticed by non-techies but still fundamental (think OpenSSL, libxz,etc) it's more likely to lead to burnout far before anyone wants to put in any sane money (curl is one of few counter-examples but that hasn't had a straight journey).
Humans in their "free time" will make and create things of great value to society.
We should have a system whereby you don't die of pneumonia homeless on the street if you don't have a job. The things OSS developers do for free are of value completely incomparable with what almost all of us do in our day jobs.
People should be free to make art and music and anything else they want. People should be free to contribute to our culture and society.
Alas, someone wants to take 99% of the value of your work for themselves and give you only the barest minimum they can get away with. And if you don't comply, you don't deserve to live.
How do you study software history? Most of the lessons seem forever locked away behind corporate walls - any honest assessments made public will either end careers or start lawsuits
Ticketmaster is of course only doing what the artists want. They want to look like they sell tickets at reasonable prices that young fans could afford but really want to sell tickets for as much as possible - hence ticketmaster sells a fraction at face value, then basically hands the rest to touts who sell them for 2 grand a pop and give ticketmaster a cut which goes right back to the artist
So banning selling above face value just kicks that whole industry to the grass - and people either put prices at market value or more likely stop touring
(Ok so there is a third option, that fake classes of tickets will be created - it’s happening now as you get “meet the artist tickets” or “tickets with an ice cream” going for twice the price.
But this will rebound on the artist - will Taylor Swift want to be seen as gouging 13 yo fans - or will she just tour less, or put on kids nights and so on.
Anyway it’s probably just going to die a death and not get to law.
So I did something similar (well less cool), but as old Software devs start finding our bodies don’t work as well after a while we will see more and more of this sort of “taking control”
I did wonder but I keep downloading to the app to “see how I am doing”
Throughout the day so I would not be easily able to sniff it - and I assumed that as a highly engineered professional “medical device” it would of course be encrypted with unbreakable … oh it’s probably base64
FWIW the latest version of the app does export the previous day's averages to Apple Health (only when you open the app, mind, which can make it look like there's missing data.) I use BPExtract to read the PDF and export every reading to Apple Health but I'll definitely be giving your stuff a go as well (because automation >> manual every time.)
So this when they became a new brand (?) called Hilo.
I am not following their business but presume something is up.
Of course the format change seems to have broken the extractor so the next free lunchtime(s) I get will fix it. I assumed no one else uses it so was not in a hurry - any feedback gratefully recvd :-)
I am not even that old, but already seeing need to take some things into my own hands. I find going to a GP is more or less just a semaphore for specialists, and those specialists have wait times measured in months to years. I would be insane to just do nothing for that timeframe.
Although I think you need to be quite critical to have such a mindset, and assume you are wrong rather than right.
Imagine you are an Alien playing Sims 17.0 - Earth Edition. You’ve got the Industrial Revolution part mostly done, solar is going to hit big in Africa and Apac, the climate warning light came on but the manual says you can push that out a bit.
The problem is the economic transmission thing. Money was a great invention, but you are close to enough energy production for every Sim to be fed and housed sustainably. Then you get some time for the upgrade pack but you can’t stop the oil thing right now and darn it they keep trying to do the work and dribble out wealth that way. What’s wrong with the plan? Industrial Revolution, silicon and robots level, everyone relaxes and we can do the moonbase
The problem is they keep thinking they need to create more instead of level off - sharing it more and entering maintenance mode
I never understand what “fire all the people managers” _actually_ means. Presumably, someone is in charge of hiring and firing and all the hr stuff and people development, and presumably that’s the people they promoted into roles formally held by managers?
I think he kind of alluded to it, but I wish these oeiple he would explain it instead of the clickbait “we fired all the managers”. I assume he means, he changed the expectations such that managers are expected to be held accountable and heavily invested in work output (the implication made since he talked about promoting tech leads into those roles) and then managed out the people who didn’t fit that description.
I do agree with the headline, but inevitably he says “we fired all the managers” and I don’t think that’s strictly speaking true to his point. Promoting all your best if’s to manager’s can be the best way to lose some of your best IC’s (either because they hate managing people or they hate being managed by a terrible manager)
Because 92% of Americans have health insurance, and 22% have totally free everything covered health insurance. Of the uninsured, most either are eligible but don't apply, have insurance through work but forgo it, or are not US citizens.
All said and done, you end up with a very small sliver of people who are legitimately uninsured, which means the problem mostly exists as scary stories rather than people actually experiencing it.
Wildly false. This thread is full of people sharing stories of being supposedly "insured" and getting fucked anyway. The complete lack of transparency around what your insurance covers, something you can't be expected to verify while in the middle of a dire medical crisis, can lead to a life destroying bill.
Nobody should have to be wondering what company an ambulance works for. It's crazy. The whole world thinks it's crazy.
I don't know what I said that is wildly false. Or even false for that matter.
People getting surprise bills that their insurance will not cover is rare, because being in a situation where it's a possibly is rare. Insurance pre-approves or denies care before it is done, so you really need to be in the ER and getting odd-ball care that falls outside standard procedure.
I'm also not defending them system, it is a mess (even I posted a story in this thread), but the fact of the matter is that the system largely works for most people, so things like inflation, wages, housing which have daily reminders of shittyness for huge swaths of people gets political priority.
A better way to think of this is like bad car accidents. They are horrific and most people know someone who knows someone with a story, but we don't put a lot of political capital into improving vehicle safety. Most people go their whole lives with no accident.
I know you were just explaining why America puts up with this, but it's not my opinion that everyone does prioritize inflation over healthcare. It's a core issue for a lot of people.
> People getting surprise bills that their insurance will not cover is rare
Define rare. Because millions of people per year are forced into uninsured ER visits.
> A better way to think of this is like bad car accidents
A hard disagree.
Most people avoid the hospital until they need to go to the ER, because taking time off work to find out if you're even allowed to be treated is prohibitive. I can't talk to any medical professional anymore without going in. And with the doctor shortage, if I go to a hospital, I will be dismissed unless I'm experiencing severe sickness or pain because I'm wasting their time.
People are driving all the time. People avoid the hospital as much as possible, because they are understaffed and predatory, and there are many pitfalls where you can be ripped off. This is all assuming you even know how this stuff works. Not everyone realizes an uninsured visit could cost as much as a house. You don't get the bill until it's done. That's the fucked up part.
I don't know a single person making under 100k who is comfortable with their healthcare situation. They are terrified to be unconscious or misinformed, making a mistake that could financially cripple them for life. There are no guardrails for this. Yet there is more vitriol for AWS bills then there are for the healthcare system.
Absolutely. General advice is to never ever get in an ambulance since they charge $$ and may not be covered by insurance. Drive yourself if able or get a taxi.
As a non-American, I think the thing I'm hung up on in what you said is that I don't understand why a developed country should allow anyone to be "uninsured".
Sure 92% of Americans have insurance, but they pay 5-10x the monthly premium compared to most Europeans and then on top of that the co-pay is thousands of dollars more than the small (or zero) amounts Europeans have. And insurance is not guaranteed, it's all linked to your employer. It's bad for nearly everyone, but enough people accept it so it doesn't change.
Americans still have higher take home pay and lower cost of living than Europeans. You also need to understand that the 22% who have full free coverage pay nothing, and because of their income also don't pay taxes.
There are also subsidies for middle-low earners, and most full time jobs offer insurance (which people foolishly wave to save a few bucks, but end up being another horror story).
The situation is not nearly as dire as the young American crowd that dominates social media makes it out to be. It could be much better, but as I alluded to in my other comment, don't let stories of car crashes scare you from getting a license.
The American healthcare system creates an immense amount of waste and is a parasite on society.
You go to the doctor and then the provider comes up with some reason why the service isn't covered by insurance. Then your insurance comes up with some reason why they don't need to cover you. Sometimes you contest it and the bill is removed or lowered.
But regardless, at every step in American healthcare, people are being paid full time salaries to overbill or missbill you for services, to invent arbitrary reasons to deny coverage, and to do everything possible so that people who pay thousands a year for a healthcare plan get as little out of it as possible.
The only silver lining is that medical debt is legally hard to collect, so non-payment is a real option for those who don't mind trashing their credit.
It's awful and the only hope for change is either a left-wing populist who guts the whole system, collective action where people withhold paymet, or an increased rate of Luigi-esque incidents that motivate the industry to self-reform. But these all seem unrealistic and liable to worsen the situation.
What I wonder is people are ok paying hundreds of dollars and going bankrupt but they haven't heard of taking a flight to a location that doesn't bleed them dry? They haven't heard of medical tourism?
Today that’s gone - you can for a fee never see an advert again. And that fee is easier to pay if you are rich, and harder if poor. And so more and more “traditional” advertising will become aggressive and aimed at both lower income audience and more scammy products (because you are selling to the poorest you cannot beat costs eventually). And advertising will stop being about “brand” (which are naturally less aggressive and focused on closing) and more about the last click to sale.
We are already seeing this world take shape, as “influencers” become the way to reach those who have paid to stop all other advertising, and why travel influencers are head of that pack.
Ultimately this is about design of our public spaces. We rightly celebrate architects, civil engineers and their sponsors who create enjoyable and beneficial built areas - we have still to get a hold of the digital public spaces. While Times Square has a quality of its own, living there permanently would have mental health issues for most of us.
And in the end, positive public spaces are associated with the words paternalism, socialism, public good and none with Toll, extraction, rentierism.
The arguments against ads are arguments for paternalism of government control for a better life for us all.
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