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Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

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Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#241

Post by dangus »

rfd4sgmk8u wrote: post #184
dangus wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone shares that opinion, including myself. This article does a great job of explaining some reasons why: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/04/bill-gates-foundation-phi... Something not a lot of people think about a lot is that having a billion dollars is so wildly greater in scale than being a simple multi-millionaire. You have to have 999 million dollars before you have your first billion. If I make $100k, an…

And while this is a nice analogy, it doesn't quite work out in the real world. What is important is liquidity of the assets. And things like capital gains taxes if one was to liquidate. Having most of your wealth in your companies stock is not equivalent to the $10k banana. Its probably more like the $500 banana and a big stack of toilet paper. Absolute dollar value of wealth is a trick of the misinformed socialists…

Obviously, I'm aware that billionaires can't just liquidate their net worth.

I'm just using the analogy to show just how much more wealthy a billionaire is than a millionaire. For example, millionaires on TV news or playing football for your favorite NFL teams are like minimum wage employees when you consider their relative wealth compared to the owners of those organizations.

The point of the analogy is to show just how much the wealthiest of the wealthy really are, to show that these oligarchs are powerful on the level of a state, on the level of millions of regular people.

You used the boogeyman word, "socialists." In my opinion, capitalist education teaches us to fear "wealth redistribution," but it's not even really about wealth redistribution. It's about excess wealth inequality prevention.

When a small group of people become wildly more wealthy than everyone else, even more wildly wealthy than major business owners and CEOs, they become unelected oligarchs that control the state.

So, if your main argument is "socialism bad," I'd encourage you to think of it more along the lines of wealth and power inequality. I think oligarchs want to distort this message and make it sound like "socialists" are trying to force everyone to make the exact same wage, or increase taxes on regular people, or enact a "nanny state."

Not a lot of people want to end capitalism entirely, they just don't want there to be people out there who are so wealthy and powerful that they can control governments without being fairly and freely elected. They want a relatively level playing field where the best ideas win, not the ideas that come from the people with outsized influence.

Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#242

Post by dangus »

cercatrova wrote: post #189
dangus wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone shares that opinion, including myself. This article does a great job of explaining some reasons why: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/04/bill-gates-foundation-phi... Something not a lot of people think about a lot is that having a billion dollars is so wildly greater in scale than being a simple multi-millionaire. You have to have 999 million dollars before you have your first billion. If I make $100k, an…

> to be a billionaire, you have to hoard wealth away from other people in a dramatic way. Why would it be so? Wealth is not a zero sum game.

On the contrary, there is only so much wealth, because monetary wealth represents the distribution of natural resources.

Natural resources are the root of where all wealth comes from, even services like software. You can follow the chain all the way down: a human types some code in a computer, which was made out of metals and minerals mined from the earth. Oil is used to power the machinery that mines those metals, and the human typing out the code eats food grown in farms and fished from oceans.

There is quite literally a finite amount of wealth to go around, and billionaires keep an extreme amount of that wealth for themselves. When they build a $50 million mansion using bookmatched marble and burn insane amounts of oil for their $200 million yachts, they're taking resources that could have been used by someone else, and those resources are not renewable.

When you look at the most wealthy nations per capita, they all have one thing in common: natural resources, especially oil and gas.

Let's say it's 1999 and I'm a worker and I make $50,000 a year. I bought a new computer that comes with Microsoft Windows 98, and $50-100 of my purchase went directly to Microsoft for the license. Would that price have been lower if there were more alternatives available on the market, if Microsoft software wasn't a baseline requirement for conducting digital business for most companies and individuals?

We actually know the answer to that question, because eventually the Microsoft OS monopoly was broken, and now we see that the most popular operating systems (Linux for servers and Android for smartphones) are provided for free or very little cost, and they even include their source code.

That license money I gave Microsoft is a natural resource I'll never get back.

Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#243

Post by picardythird »

witrak wrote: post #235
picardythird wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a publisher or author doesn't mind, as is the case with the article you linked, that's fantastic. O'reilly is a good business. But it's still stealing. I think if you have the money, you should pay for the product. It's one thing for a teenager to download a bunch of songs on Kazaa in 2000. But I don't understand why so many self respecting adult knowledge workers feel the need to pirate things they can afford jus…

The whole publishing business is effectively a service of providing content created by the author to final users. And because of the uneven power of authors and publishers, the latter is able to grab almost 100% of the price paid by people. Music labels are used to pay artists after long lawsuits. These are the best cases. Scientific publishers do more: they require payments from authors too and don't pay reviewers.…

All good points for reforming the business, but none justify stealing the content, in my view. Voting with the wallet is about abstaining, not stealing.

For better or for worse, subscriptions are king in 2022, and I don’t see a meta-subscription for news being a good thing for journalism itself. Personally, I prefer something closer to the iTunes model, but that’s dead. I’m growing entirely sick of singular platforms that hold all the cards of entirely industries (and they don’t pay any better than the publishers do).

Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#244

Post by duckmysick »

asteroidp wrote: post #129
sethbannon wrote: post #24

I feel like I'm getting old. The youth ethos of "information should be free!" has been replaced with the reaction "gee, I really hope great journalism can make money, otherwise we won't have any".

They should pick one: pay for it, OR fill the page with 50 shitty ads You shouldn't have to deal with both

Newspapers did both. You paid for them and they had a classified section.

On the other hand, they didn't have invasive tracking of modern websites.

Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#245

Post by gxqoz »

jmckib wrote: post #206
gxqoz wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I subscribed at one of their cheap rates last year and didn't find much in it unique from other sources I'm already subscribed to.

What other sources are you already subscribed to? I'm always looking for recommendations.

Lots of stuff. For "pure news" New York Times, Seattle Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian. Lots of somewhat more general interest subscriptions also have news angles like Slate Plus, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Harpers, Literary Review, ProPublica, New York Magazine, some Substacks. I realize this is a lot (and is only a partial list) but pretty much all of these listed ones have various interesting pieces I wasn't finding anywhere else. Whereas WP felt very "cable news" to me, just giving article after article on the latest stuff happening at the White House. I can get that elsewhere and am already not interested in most cases.

Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#246

Post by webmaven »

picardythird wrote: post #229
webmaven wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made no claim about the relative morality of piracy vs. license violations. But I will note that you are (by using the framing of "stealing") implying that piracy results in lost sales, which is largely not the case, except possibly for the most popular works. See "Piracy is Progressive Taxation": https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxati...

If a publisher or author doesn't mind, as is the case with the article you linked, that's fantastic. O'reilly is a good business. But it's still stealing. I think if you have the money, you should pay for the product. It's one thing for a teenager to download a bunch of songs on Kazaa in 2000. But I don't understand why so many self respecting adult knowledge workers feel the need to pirate things they can afford jus…

You're still not getting it. It doesn't matter if the publisher minds or not; copying is not theft:

https://freakonomics.com/2012/04/copying-is-not-theft/

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