31–40 of 60 posts
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There's a useful Grease-/Fire-/Tamper-/Violent-Monkey userscript for HN marking paywalled articles and providing alternate sources: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/452024-hacker-news-anti-pa...
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Writers need paid. Do you prefer paywalls or ads? There doesn’t seem to be consensus ;)
But there isn't. Subscribing to 283894 newspapers isn't an option. Dear Newspapers, please accept the new reality. The days of people subscribing to exactly one newspaper died with the paper editions. Stop blaming your failure to offer a reasonable product on "Internet freeloaders".
Theres a podcast on iHeartRadio called Svetlana! Sventlana! I haven't listened to it yet. But I have heard the Ad too many times. (Outside the US podcast ads are mostly for other podcasts) https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-svetlana-svetlana-107693...
You're not missing out much these days; most ads in the US are for other podcasts now, too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Writers need paid. Do you prefer paywalls or ads? There doesn’t seem to be consensus ;)
If there was a simple "pay 10c to read" button, I'd click that. If there was a subscription that I could have that would give me ad-free access to all the random news articles that get shared with me, I'd buy that (at a reasonable price, that is). But there isn't. Subscribing to 283894 newspapers isn't an option. Dear Newspapers, please accept the new reality. The days of people subscribing to exactly one newspaper d…
We absolutely should find a way of returning to paying about as much of our income for news as we did before (and not indirectly via ads), but those big fat one-publication subscriptions aren't the way. Even less when they get peddled with that "first 3 months only x" lure that's essentially a promise that they'll make unsubscribe harder than a fitness studio.
What I'd love to see instead isn't a "Spotify for news" (with all the power imbalance that would come with that) but a "federated subscription" where being a subscriber at your "home publication" would give you some form of guest access at "cooperating competitors", with a fixed part of the fee passed on based on tracked cross-publication usage. The organization running the thing would ideally be a non-profit cooperative, enforcing uniform rules about what exactly would be included in "guest access" (perhaps 24h latency + ads?). The biggest issue I see with this would be that it would kind of rule out pricing competition, but we already see a very limited amount of price variation amongst consumer online subscriptions anyways. (for some reason they are almost universally just marginally lower or higher than "one Netflix", no matter what's offered).
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There was a story about Ayn Rand's sister. She came to visit in New York, and was bewildered by the vast array of toothpaste in a local grocery store. She was so accustomed to shortages, and expected queues, that she could not accept the immediacy and availability of commerce in the U.S. She did not stay long.
There seems to be a common theme to those. When Ceausescu visited NY he and his stupid wife (huge scientific fraud story on its own, including lot of reputable western universities going along with it) were sure Macy was just a show stocked specifically for them. I seem to remember him reacting by ordering to open a store just for show to western dignitaries/press. https://www.nytimes.com/1970/10/22/archives/ceausesc…
On Stalin, I recommend the HBO movie "Stalin" with a Robert Duvall playing a very realistic Stalin. The movie also covers his tortuous relationship with his daughter. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105462/
"Court of the Red Tzar" is less fun and more of a portrait of him using his enormous capacity to work and execute to relentlessly grind out his plans to take over the world in the name of Marxism/Leninism and absolutely steamrolling over anyone or anything in the most brutal way possible that got in his way.
One of the things that people miss about Stalin is that more than any leader in the past centuries, he wasn't a puppet for a shadowy cabal, or a front man for someone else, he was fully totally in charge and running the whole thing totally outmaneuvering Trotsky and anyone else who would attempt to grab power away from him. He could do this because he had a legendary memory for people and their personalities. He was able to take over the government by remembering thousands of people who he considered loyal to him and placing them in key posts throughout the government after he was appointed party secretary. There have been very few leaders with that sort of raw cognitive capability.
I wish the article had pictures, and I found the author a bit cold. When he reduced his frequency of writing, because he had finished his book and gotten what he needed, this seemed a bit distant.
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there was a simple "pay 10c to read" button, I'd click that. If there was a subscription that I could have that would give me ad-free access to all the random news articles that get shared with me, I'd buy that (at a reasonable price, that is). But there isn't. Subscribing to 283894 newspapers isn't an option. Dear Newspapers, please accept the new reality. The days of people subscribing to exactly one newspaper d…
Exactly my thoughts, going back to the paper-age pattern of reading only that one publication or two that you subscribe to isn't a customer experience that feels like money well spent now that we have been spoilt by two decades of everything available via ads. We absolutely should find a way of returning to paying about as much of our income for news as we did before (and not indirectly via ads), but those big fat on…
>Writers need paid...
The vast, vast majority of news articles concerning national and international news are pretty much copy/pasted from news agencies like Reuters [0] or AP [1]
So, yes, writers deserve to get paid. And, through news agency licensing fees, the original writers of such articles are. But how much does the person who bascially copy/pastes that into another site deserve to get paid?
Ironically, where the stereotype reporter, actually writing original content [that I portrayed above] does still exist, it tends to be in very local news gathering where the likes of a news agency has no interest. For example; your local village flower show, or the traffic congestion on the high street. And yet those very local news outlets are almost exclusively non-paywalled.
She was very lonely as her life went on, and longed for her homeland. This much I know about Svetlana, many who bear that name.
There was a story about Ayn Rand's sister. She came to visit in New York, and was bewildered by the vast array of toothpaste in a local grocery store. She was so accustomed to shortages, and expected queues, that she could not accept the immediacy and availability of commerce in the U.S. She did not stay long.