I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

The people providing the service should get paid. Who bears the cost in the end, and whose credit card gets billed, are just implementation details. Choices for employers and employees to make among themselves. The provider doesn't care. The provider gets paid.

Employees will like to read that employers should pay, because they don't want to pay. Nobody likes to pay, including employers. But in the end, employers pay employees for value delivered. If that value includes the benefit of a service that costs money, it's part of value delivered.

Maybe the employee pays and the employer reimburses. Maybe the employer pays and the employee's pay, benefits, or expenses allowance gets docked accordingly. Maybe the employee and the employer split the cost somehow. Maybe the employee bears the cost entirely, so employees who can do without the service have financial incentive to do so.

It's not up to the provider to figure this out or negotiate it. If diners want to argue about who pays how much of the tab, the restaurant still gets paid. If tenants want to argue about who pays how much of the rent, the landlord still gets paid. In the USA, auto mechanics usually own their own tools, while in Germany, garages usually provide them. Either way, the toolmakers get paid. They don't wait to get paid until employee and employer figure it all out.

Basically the statement you made that employees are paid based on value delivered is not really accurate in most cases.

I mentioned this before and the claims were that you lost the "trust of the employees" infering that the work environment wasn't feasible. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23681475

I think for a private action that's insane. But oh well.

It's not just technical information either. The internet has done this to everything. In comparison, the old mainstream media seemed to be more "truthful", in some sense. It is more truthful when it came to hard, citable facts. Most things the MSM offered as facts had cites, and turned out to be accurate. In comparison, the Internet swims in bullshit. It ranges from opinion dressed up as fact to outright lies told by trolls, and then and onto conspiracy theories from people living in some alternate Universe. Worst, since these people believe (probably correctly) that the louder they yell, the more they are likely to convince the internet seems to be mostly this stuff (outposts like Wikipedia being an exception).

And yet, I prefer this situation to what the mainstream media offered. The MSM suffered from two defects. Firstly, they were very prone to repeating accepted meme's as fact, over and over again, as if there were no competing theories. The most recent example masks where the MSM was flooded with the prevailing western expert opinion that masks had no effect. Back in the day, before the internet, I would have just accepted that. There was no easy way (where easy is spend 1/2 an hour entering search terms, clicking and reading) to fact check, so how could you do otherwise?

The second thing journalists are bloody hopeless at distilling and summarising the truth from an expert. Before the internet you rarely had an opportunity to see it in action. I had been told by elders repeatedly that if you see a story in the media about an event you attended or place you know well, you won't recognise it. That happened to me once too - it was a report about the commonwealth games in Time magazine. It was exactly as predicted - utterly unrecognisable. But it only happened once, and the lesson faded. Then the internet came along and you would read a MSM report, then happen on the comments of someone there or read the expert's own words, and it was like "wtf?". Now I find myself treating the output of journalists with suspicion, avoiding it where possible.

Much later it dawned on me why it was like this. The journalists main task, the one their employers judged them on and remunerated them on accordingly, had nothing to do with how accurately they reported the facts. It was whether you came back for more; bought tomorrow's paper, switched on the TV news; the only relevance of the truth to that endeavour is whether sticking to it brings readers or not. The combination of repeating established memes without question, the overarching drive to deliver addictive brain candy rather than information, and the difficulty of fact checking made the output of the MSM a truly insipid product.

So yeah, the Internet is swimming in endless repeats of bullshit and lies, but unlike the old MSM floating in that torrent of crap are the actual facts. You just have to put in the work to find them. And once you figure out how to do it, it's not even that much work. Knowing about sites like MDN, which is a reliable, complete, and up-to-date source of information is one of these tricks. For those of us who like our facts neat, being able to go straight to the MDN saves us literally hours of time in shifting through torrents of bullshit, or god-help us reading yards of inscrutable standards in order to find the thing we need to know. Loss of the MDN would be a real disaster in the economic sense - it would cost a lot of people a huge amount of money and time.

Still, as Wikipedia, and stack overflow demonstrate, it's possible to crowd source that style of site. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.