>I actually kind of agree with this: Patreon is indeed a good way to earn enough money to buy dinner once a week or whatever. I guess it's also good for big time influencer types who are in growth mode and not worrying about their overhead. I just think it's a mediocre solution if what you want is to create a stable, predictable, and mature small business out of your work.
Pretty much, I was planning a system for bug bounties in 2011, after doing some back of the envelope calculations it turned out you would need 150% overhead for a $10 bounty with human due diligence and using master card/visa/pay pal. Oh and you could never support any project that has anything that the banks don't like, which then included porn, lgbt rights, fair use drm exemptions and a bunch of other stuff that I can't remember any more.
So you either had to convince people to use some alt-coin that wasn't a pyramid scheme, then build an escrow service on top of it, then use that service to fund the bug bounty program. Or you could just do everything terribly and end up with Patreon (which for the above reasons will get even more creator hostile in the coming years).
>For no fault of her own, Katharina’s life is in shambles: her career is over, and her friends distance themselves for self-preservation. In desperation, she tries to meet with the reporter who has been hounding her. The reporter tries to extort her for sex, whereupon she shoots him. Remorseless, she turns herself in to the police for justice.
I think this describes Gawker more than the current howling mob. There is someone to blame at the end of the day, and there is a clear malevolence in motives.
Today what we have is closer to the medieval village in winter where there is nothing to do but go to the town square and watch the witches be humiliated.
>B) If the "western world" is the bar, the bar is low.
And yet China manages to fail this low bar stunningly. To the point that they are running actual concentration camps for Muslims. Something no Western government has done, and the last one to do finished paying reparations to the victims 4 years ago, 70 years after it happened.
If you're going to be the one that explains to shareholders why their dividend is dropping each year but will only asymptotically approach zero so they should not fire you, by all means try. Somehow I don't think you'd be successful.
Belief in infinite growth stems from an inability to understand how the exponential function works.
There is no such thing as indefinite growth, there is logistic growth between steady states. Pretending that immigration is always good is like pretending that drinking water is always good. Useful when you're in the Sahara, less so when you're drowning.
The US is currently in a situation where the labor market has an oversupply of people which is why real per hour worked wages are still at the level they were in '72. Adding more immigration now will only lower the living standards of the people already here, this will be the case until we increase the carrying capacity of the US economy with better labor laws, more government spending on fundamentals and better targeted research.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."
Not really. The yellow press has been creating violent controversies ever since the printing press was invented.
That they have moved on from urging the burning of heretics and infidels alive to making sure racists and bigots can't afford food and shelter is progress of a sort, but not one I would have chosen.
Still I might be speaking too soon. I wouldn't put it past them to reinvent the 30 Years War over which race is more virtuous for more clicks.
>Also, it seems like with user sovereignty and decentralization, that there will be various objectionable or even vile communities is inevitable, right? [...] I imagine responding to tech blogs with, "yes, there are white supremacist sub-communities, but you don't have to see them if you don't want to" won't come across as a very satisfying answer from their perspective.
We comply with the letter of the law for the jurisdiction we fall under.
Trying to explain anything to a mob is pointless. We don't need to add ever more censors to what we see. The US government is bad enough, some hipster in NY or SF writing for a glorified wordpress blog should be as relevant as the mullah for Iran's most backward village.
Kind of funny you're not banning any of the spam CPC accounts here promoting nationalistic, ideological, and political flames the second you point out the CPC is the only country in the world running actual concentration camps for minorities.
This isn't even a strawman in this case, since the company in question is literally cutting pay to its workers for the sake of minorities.
The capitalists are very good at starting a race war to keep workers from uniting.