This video is fantastic! Alec went all out with it!

You a can also buy common university textbooks from India at a fraction of the price they sell for in the US. I say take your deals where you can get them!

Banking, messages, email, calendars, discord, messenger, maps, browser, Voyager (Lemmy), YouTube, music, shattered pixel dungeon, Wikipedia, notes, swipe keyboard, duolingo, WhatsApp, desmos, reminders, camera, photos, home automation….

I use my iPhone for a ton of different things. I pretty much never use it to make calls and hate talking on the phone (which is what flip phones are optimized for).

Greed has nothing to do with it. Even mom and pop bakeries will give you a discount if you buy a dozen bagels instead of just one. Are you going to start shouting at them? Why am I wasting my time talking to you? Blocked.

Yes I know Bezos owns Wapo. That’s why I don’t read it anymore.

Do you think it’s his personal charity? I doubt it! Even if he doesn’t need the money he’ll see it as a matter of pride to make the paper profitable. Anything otherwise would be like a gardener letting all his plants die: embarrassing.

Economics 101: if you charge a trillion dollars for a newspaper and nobody buys it, your profit is zero. If you give your paper away for free and everyone in the world accepts a free copy, your profit is also zero. Somewhere in between the two extremes is a price where profit is maximized. This is the equilibrium or market-clearing price since either raising or lowering the price from this point will reduce profits.

Again, maybe you don’t understand, but $7 < $26 < $29. If you only need the paper for 1 day (or anywhere up to 1 week), it’s cheaper to pay $7 for the 1 week subscription than it is to pay $26 (50 cents per week) for the whole year. There is no option to pay 50 cents for one week and then cancel it.

If no one’s buying it then they’re not maximizing profit. Profit is maximized at the market-clearing price.

And no, it’s not “worth 50 cents.” That’s a temporary price for the first year. The price goes up after that. At 50 cents per week they’re almost certainly losing money. The goal is to lose money the first year and make money the next year when the price goes up. It could backfire and people just cancel after the first year. But that’s still more money than not getting the 50 cents per week.

If they’re overcharging you then don’t buy. If they set a price and nobody buys it then they’ll lower it.

No one’s forcing you to subscribe to the Wapo.

Volume discounts are everywhere. Ever seen “buy X get one free” deals at the grocery store? That’s all this is.

The $7 option is good if you only need the paper for 1 week. The other options probably lock you into a 1 year contract.

Sorry dude, but cars are technology too, not just self driving cars. Every death due to cars is a technology death. You can’t escape the reality of tradeoffs.

What do you mean science backs it up? Science is finding massive social problems with technology all the time. Social media and its negative impacts on mental health (especially for teen and preteen girls), for example. Microplastics everywhere, for another. Climate change anyone?

The point is that someone posted this guy’s project to the AUR with a badly written PKGBUILD and it was failing to build. This led to him getting tons of support requests which he could not help with since he doesn’t control that AUR build.

He also couldn’t get it removed from AUR without giving the admins his personal information. Completely understandable given the history of console companies going after emulator developers. The guy has been doxxed and seems close to being run right out of the open source community by a bunch of zealots.

For troubleshooting issues with his code. Not with broken packages created by others that he has no power to fix.

He changed the license in the first place because someone took unpublished code from him and contributed it to another project. He had permission from his other contributors when he did that but people still went on GPL crusades against him.

Now it’s the issue of people re-packaging his releases for other package managers such as AUR (which is against the license) and doing so incorrectly which leads to support requests from the users of broken packages.

There’s a whole community of people who have turned hostile to this guy over his decisions but it comes off as a sense of entitlement on their part. This is after all an emulation community which is full of people who simply use these tools to run pirated old games. They don’t understand the hard work that goes into a sophisticated emulator. They just want more, better, faster! Gimme gimme gimme is all they know!

But then you can’t offer support to users of your upstream code.

This is an issue of open source etiquette and there’s no technical solution that can solve it. There have been numerous passionate developers who have been run right out of open source by well-meaning users who simply don’t know the protocol around contacting a developer for support.

He got mad because people kept bugging him to fix problems created by other people which he has no control over. His “tantrums” are his way of re-asserting control over his life.

Open source dev burnout from support requests is a real and widespread phenomenon. When a software developer releases the fruits of their hard work they are doing the wider community a service. When large numbers of people begin to contact the developer for support the effect can be overwhelming even though every individual request may be legitimate and non-malicious.

In the case of packaging errors created by a third party not in contact with (let alone under the control of) the developer, these support requests for dealing with unsolvable and irrelevant (in the developer’s eyes) problems can be absolutely maddening.

I am quite sure the developer would have had no issues with people doing what they did as long as they accepted the responsibility to fix their own issues without contacting him. The fact that they did not do so (and therefore caused him grief) is negligent even if it isn’t malicious.

One of the most entitled takes I’ve ever read.

The guy built software and opened sourced it. People started packaging it for their favourite distribution repositories and then users started coming to him for support on problems he didn’t create!

It’s like if you were a farmer selling eggs and some kids bought your eggs and started throwing them at people’s houses and then instead of the cops arresting the kids they come arrest you for selling eggs. It’s bullshit!

Pretty much every single website uses HTTPS these days which means all traffic is encrypted anyway. Instead of a VPN you could use an encrypted proxy that connects over HTTPS. I doubt the UK is just going to completely cut itself off from the rest of the world’s internet (because all it takes is one path out).

Because the argument is that guns cause violent crime (specifically mass shootings) and the example of Finland shows that not to be the case. Then if guns don’t cause violent crime what is it?

The most likely explanation to me is that there is a confounder: an unknown which causes both the acquisition of (one or more) guns and the commission of crimes. A hidden criminality element which Finland seems to lack.

The alternative explanation is that the U.S. is a broken society (in one or more ways) and that this leads people to feel the desire to lash out in extremely violent ways. The availability of guns in the US offers them an easy option for inflicting mass casualties but the recent example of Michigan shows that even without a gun there is still the opportunity for mayhem.