HN user
Why? The Beatles really wrote and performed Strawberry Fields.
Why are you entitled to it for gratis? It’s a taking for public benefit.
Ancient writings like Plato or Marcus Aurelius somehow feel different. But high-fidelity live recording feels like it shouldn’t go into the public domain. It’s someone’s commercial work product
Don’t be so nasty about w2 workers. Incredibly unbecoming.
Also see comparative advantage re best roles for each actor in an economy
“Explicit is better than implict.”
—PEP 8
I like Elestio for managing devops of self-hosting. I don't want to do backups, monitor and fork git repositories for updates, etc. It's non-trivial. My time is scarce.
However, I'm extremely reluctant to give my password database hosting to ANYONE. I feel like this is something I need to "own" myself. Perhaps on Coolify, Dokploy, or on a Raspberry Pi with regular backups hosted at my home or office. This is extra work that I'm not eager to do; and frankly, it goes against my philosophy of outsourcing "commodity" work to which I'm ill-equipped to add substantial value.
On the other hand, password managers are the most sensitive software I can imagine.
Lastly, Sharing passwords with my wife, coworkers, etc is genuinely very valuable. Either of us can update, maintain etc our shared set of passwords. Last I looked, Keepass and its ilk cannot replace that functionality
Mine shuts off because of conditions regularly. It's very annoying.
FSD is a better driver than me 99% of the time.
You mean “getting dangerous people off the streets who’d kill if they had the means”?
Where does all of the money go?
New York City is spending nearly $30,000 per student this year.
You sound like a great parent doing right by your daughter. She's lucky to have you.
The point of school is to learn to think + learn to face adversity & failure....
Why not just let them be a permanent liability on the business?
Are you worried about claims in bankruptcy court or something?
"_*Permanent liability*_" Are you insane? You have the cash in-hand. The customer has made an interest-free loan to you. You're ACTIVELY trying to *DISCOURAGE* positive cashflow!?!?!?!?!?!
You should execute the exact opposite pricing scheme: provide discounts to your most loyal customers who are willing to provide you cashflow long in advance of your incurring an expense to provide services to them in order finance your operation.
Just signup for Shifter (https://www.getshifter.io/) and call it a day.
The point of static hosting is to simplify things, not feed into developer fever dreams of complex systems.
Plus, Wordpress is established, mature ecosystem that can provide almost any mainstream feature you could imagine.
I went to them after losing a weekend trying to stand-up my company's website after some ill-advised changes to my Wordpress instance (bad plugins caused Wordpress server to crash).
I haven't looked back since. Wordpress-based static hosting Just Works + makes sense
ps HardyPress was a similar alternative I evaluated. It had an issue failing to render some of my webpages to static....but maybe it's become better
Long distance calls cost a pittance now. Service is better. VoIP is a big innovation.
Lack of competition in cellular is another story....
How is money not speech? Jeff Bezos is able to buy the Washington Post (or multiple TV stations if he wanted) and can say anything he wants under the guise of free speech.
I don’t have Jeff Bezos’ resources, but if I buy a single television ad to advocate for my position I should be regulated?
I don’t see a difference between media companies publishing material and overt partisans buying advertisements.
The right to petition the government is guaranteed by the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution.
This is exactly what we do using Shifter (http://getshifter.io/).
#1 was great. This is a joke right? You do know the US Treasury is the safest financial instrument in the known universe, right? I'm sure you also know that French debt is denominated in Euros a currency which may or may not exist in 10 years... Also, even if it does exist they don't fully control the currency.....you know what? this isn't worth debating. This is like a comic performance.
A long time ago, the French decided that quality of life, and taking an easier path was simply more important than the economic, military, and to a lesser extent cultural dominance of the US. As a result, French people live generally better quality of life, but the very ambitious don't get as rewarded as in the US. You will find French of all stripes in the US who seek to live in the US because they can be rewarded more than in France.
It is a cultural choice. But let's not deny the effect.
In France you have 35 hour work-week, siesta, lots of vacations, health care, bloated government. But there is very little entrepreneur ism. The French fell in love with the large corporation and large government.
Move to France.
You'd find their backwards, less competitive economy to your liking.
Brilliant response.
Economic ignorance encountered here can be stupefying.
This is an idiotic argument that ignores/sidesteps the main point of the parent.
No matter what you think of China's economy, it is leaps and bounds better than what it was 20 years ago and provides a dramatically superior quality of life for its citizens.
Is the answer cars, cheap land, big houses?
By your logic, pharmaceutical companies are exploiting cancer patients.
Patients with horrible, painful, fatal diseases are certainly miserable. Pharmaceutical companies are certainly looking to further their own goals through the development and sale of life saving drugs.
By the way, as a separate issue; if people were allowed to bid for organs. And assuming you're right that rich people horded them, then wouldn't the supply rise up to meet that new demand? Wouldn't more people sign up to be organ donors? Wouldn't we reach equilibrium where the supply side matched the demand side? If poor people were getting fabulously wealth from committing to donate organs, and more lives were saved, wouldn't we eventually reach equilibrium? The 1% only need so many organs.... Poor people with money in their pockets and less organ shortage wouldn't be a horrible scenario. Maybe it would force the real hard work of cloning organs and improving a unsatisfactory system.
I must say, if it became an outright bidding system some people who society might say are less deserving than someone else might benefit. But that happens already! Look at Mickey Mantle who received a liver after a lifetime of alcoholism (and died soon thereafter). Or Steve Jobs who shopped around for the best region to receive a new organ (he's not FROM Tennessee after all...).
So please tell me, how would a MORE market based system be significantly worse? It seems like we have the worst of everything right now in our pursuit of the idealistic fantasy that the system treats everyone equally and that organ donation should be a purely altruistic gesture.
I agree with everything you're saying (except the part about hording) perhaps....
My expectation is that donors would be paid based on expected value, which is how (I believe), the issue is being framed in debates.
ie assume there's a 1% probability that potential donor will be a.) young enough b.) die under right circumstances.
Then we should offer that potential donor 1% of the expected value of his/her organs (ie if organs are worth $100k then we should offer $1k).
Obviously these are all made up numbers. But the idea of paying up front based on expected value makes sense to me in theory.
What do they do now? You make it sound like there's a better alternative currently available!
The reason they would consider selling a FUTURE interest in their organs is because it would be the best option on the table. Since it's not currently available as an option, they must be choosing considerably worse option now (which is the best currently available option).
How is your alternative more just, more fair, better?
---------------- EDIT ----------------
Imagine YOUR loved one received a liver/heart/kidney in this manner, thereby saving his/her life. And in so doing it DID improve the welfare of someone loved by the donor allowing him/her to get a better education, get better housing, or something else worthwhile.
What is so horrible about that? Your insurance company would cover it and it would make the world a BETTER PLACE for everyone. By the way, the surgeon gets paid a lot of money for a complex procedure like organ transplant; what's wrong with a donor getting a tiny fraction of that for his/her contribution providing the amazing, wonderful gift of life?
Ah, now we arrive at the real nut of anti-Libertarianism: paternalism. The notion that somehow adults are not capable of making their own decisions. This is our fundamental disagreement. To me, impoverished, indigent people struggling to make ends meet are fully capable of making their own decisions. People fondly recall stories of their immigrant ancestors working hard and struggling in order to provide a better life for their children. Why do we want to curtail the ability of today's poor from making the same decisions? You're deciding for them that it's better to stay poor than whatever alternative they might choose for themselves (in an effort to climb out of poverty) because you know better than them.
I will admit, there are roles for government regulation in the marketplace. I simply do not know enough about the chicken I buy at the grocery to make an informed choice. I appreciate the health inspectors, organic labels, and other regulations that facilitate a free, fair, and efficient marketplace in which I do not need to know the farmer to be confident my chicken will not poison me.
However, I do not think lack of open (and understandable) information is the issue in this particular case.
Regarding your last point, I agree with you. The more interesting aspect here is not the implementation details, but rather the questions you're raising of free enterprise, the freedom to work, and the freedom to engage in free & fair commerce of your choosing.
Libertarianism would say that hit-jobs (and stolen organs) involve coercion. That is, it's not "2 consenting adults", but rather a market for doing harm on to other people and creating a "externality effect" of harm. This is similar to dumping pollutants into our air or oceans. Yes it might appear "free", but it actually does harm to 3rd parties.
In fact, I think the market for human organs is an interesting analog. Personally, I think that introducing free-market principles into organ exchange would be beneficial to all! The notion of paying someone to agree to donate their organs at the end of their life benefits all of society (see wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_donation): LIVES are saved with the greater availability of organs, and the life of the donor is improved with access to money that he/she would otherwise not have. This is not a zero-sum game in which one person must lose for another to win. A principal of economics is that through commerce/trade/exchange we both prosper! Both sides want what the other side is giving them more than what they have to give up. ie the donor wants money more than organs, and the recipient wants organs more than money. Both sides win!
I have absolutely no problem with compensating organ donors for actually helping other humans and improving society through their generous donation.
Likewise, if 2 consenting adults want to engage in a relationship in which 1 works for an agreed upon wage, and the other provides that work, I see no reason to intervene in that arrangement. As long as each party is aware of the risks and the full terms of the deal are openly on the table (ie if doing this work could be deleterious to worker for some reason and that information is not disclosed) then people should be free to engage in their course of business.
I agree with you completely.
As engineers, our instinct is to build things. Business discipline requires focusing on profitable uses of time.
It's highly unlikely that building expense tracking software was the best use of time for the original author. He writes that thinking about the POTENTIAL future costs of expense tracking software ($1000/year) upset him.
If one realistically considers the costs to "roll your own" in terms of time, maintenance overhead, hosting & administrative cost, and opportunity cost the obvious conclusion is that this is not a good use of time and energy.
If Tom had instead spent that time fixing a bug, doing hard sales/marketing work it would have been worth much more to him.
No for us, engineers, doing hard, repetitive work is the real discipline. Automating things and finding systems that can be made more efficient is the easy work. Picking up a phone and making a sales call, trying to improve ad words advertising....these are things that are likely more valuable than rolling your own expenses email system.
Your point is true, but so is parent post.
Standards doesn't mean "no innovation". While the electric outlet may be a "standard" devices that use the electricity shouldn't necessarily be "standard".
ie if I want an innovative lamp to plug into my standard electric socket, that is okay.
Standards have a place and so do innovations. If Google is releasing all of their innovations which have broad applicability as open source projects, I see no reason they should slow down so that slow-moving, non-innovating standards bodies can catchup.
Google just bought a 3,000,000 square foot building on 8th avenue.
Seems like they were able to find space.
Basically, yes.