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A world where people pay for software

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Re: A world where people pay for software

#511

Post by picadores »

dminvs wrote: post #427
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you say that because the most popular 3D printer firmwares are open source. Does QA’ing 3D printer firmware sound fun to you? No? Great well you don’t have to do that someone else is literally doing that right now because they thought it was fun. By the way this is a decent job for an apprentice under supervision. It’s a good way to learn with minimal risk and young people are often willing to do this kind of t…

printers can’t flood your kitchen

Concrete printers can?

Re: A world where people pay for software

#512

Post by fulafel »

drekipus wrote: post #481
JoshTriplett wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious answer is "pay people more". If we had UBI, for instance, and people did not have to work in order to have basic needs (food and shelter) met, then the willingness to do unpleasant jobs like sewer cleaning will go down, and it'll be necessary to pay people more to do that work. And the need to pay people more will then drive technological innovation that may today not be worthwhile because "just hire some…

> UBI plus a free market If there's a ubi, then there's price floor that is higher than a non ubi price floor, meaning that the median prices of goods go up, less taxes to find the ubi, and the ubi must then increase to meet the increased costs for a basic standard of living. Well done you invented inflation.

This aspect of UBI is functionally equivalent to the generous unemployment + other benefits that exist in many developed countries. The accelerating inflation hypothesis is easily empirically disproven there.

(There's of course normal inflation in these places, like everywhere else, it's a by-design feature of most monetary systems)

Re: A world where people pay for software

#513

Post by Chris2048 »

elcritch wrote: post #502
lend000 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem smart and it always amazes me how popular communist concepts are with smart people on HN. Didn't you have some assigned group projects in school? Perhaps some people are easily satisfied by carrying the burden of other people who they don't know and who don't appreciate them, but I'd wager a ridiculously high majority of value producers would not be. Humans are social animals, but we're individuals first and…

There's lots of kibbutz (communes) in Israel. Apparently most aren't too bad. The one I visited seemed decent. But Jewish culture has a pretty strong community ethic which is key. I also visited a couple of Greek Orthodox monasteries and they were not just nice but beautiful. So for small scale communities with a strong cultural binding "communes" can totally work. It doesn't scale though.

For some issues around this, also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz_crisis and the "Decline and restructuring" section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz

Re: A world where people pay for software

#514

Post by Chris2048 »

geocar wrote: post #362
thorncorona wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the exact same answer every leftist I've talked to says when I ask them who will run the garbage system, and who will clean the sewers.

Why would you be so bothered to just let them? Would you feel embarrassed that "leftists" are nicer? That can be a motivation too! I know some people just show up so they can have someone to talk to for a few hours on a Saturday. I think if you can't find volunteers, you can have a lottery.

> you can have a lottery

what happens if the lottery "winners" refuse?

Re: A world where people pay for software

#515

Post by Chris2048 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #357
thorncorona wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the exact same answer every leftist I've talked to says when I ask them who will run the garbage system, and who will clean the sewers.

How often do you talk to people this far to the left? I live in a family full of liberals and none of them even remotely think the world should operate this way. I think you could take every person in the US with ideology this far out to the left and put them in a single medium size stadium.

Presumably they mean "every leftist that holds this opinion, I've talked to", not "every leftist I've ever talked to".

Re: A world where people pay for software

#516

Post by Chris2048 »

Niksko wrote: post #415
martinsnow wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it the meantime while there exists no such robots, or while the prototypes get stuck downthere. Someone has to manually fetch them, and do the job. It's not very enticing and I don't think there will be many software engineers ready to suit up, to dig one out.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. You iterate, as with everything.

It took/is taking a long while to develop self-driving cars, despite the money and big players chasing it. How long will a fat-berg shark take-a-to-make-a?

Also, think of the people who might help you with this - sewer-diving experts! You are essentially collaborating with them to displace their own roles.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#517

Post by rootusrootus »

Chris2048 wrote: post #515
rootusrootus wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often do you talk to people this far to the left? I live in a family full of liberals and none of them even remotely think the world should operate this way. I think you could take every person in the US with ideology this far out to the left and put them in a single medium size stadium.

Presumably they mean "every leftist that holds this opinion , I've talked to", not "every leftist I've ever talked to".

That's a charitable reading given they literally wrote the latter, not the former.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#518

Post by Chris2048 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #452
bee_rider wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m talking about intellectual property, the legal fiction invented to let people own ideas. I’m not sure why you’d bring up actual property rights. I don’t see any suggestions to remove property rights. This was the bit of confusion I was pointing out.

All property rights are legal fiction, there's no "actual property rights". Owning ideas is perfectly reasonable because that's where the entire value is, and having rights to your own ideas guarantees that you are compensated for the invention and value they provide to others. Property rights, intellectual and non-intellectual, correctly allocate resources to value creators.

What if an idea has value independent from an inventor e.g. someone invents it independently. Novel-ty of invention is hard to prove. There is a strong incentive towards rent-seeking beyond the collaborative value invention is supposed to provide.

There are "actual property rights" because an actual property is an actual property - owning one house doesn't mean you own them all. An idea is an abstract "property" that isn't like real estate at all, and most of the concerns highly subjective interpretation of scope and value.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#519

Post by manoDev »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #490
manoDev wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A world with community ownership of the means of production You seem to be trying really hard to avoid the word "communism". Is it a banned word in HN?

It’s not an officially banned word but I live in the USA and folks turn off their brain if you advocate for communism. Also it’s not very specific to advocate for communism because doing so leaves things quite open to interpretation. Would that mean I want Soviet style communism? Chinese style communism? Advocating for “community ownership of the means of production” is precise without being overly proscriptive. I’m…

I understand "common ownership of means of production" is just plain communism in the way Marx intended when it refers to "post-capitalistic economic organisation".

Re: A world where people pay for software

#520

Post by MichaelZuo »

singlow wrote: post #489
MichaelZuo wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 1985 version of Excel was Mac only. The 2003 version is about as closely related as iOS is to Mac System 7. If you don't understand Excel's history, it's better to not make such a bizarre claim.

Did the development of Excel 2003 not benefit from all of the work done in the previous versions? Even if it had been a from-scratch rewrite, which it was not, it would have still benefited from the design iteration and experience of the development team in solving the same problems in previous versions. Excel 2003 was not a first-release that was suddenly a refined product that would be useful for years without addi…

By the same logic someone could claim that 1985 Excel was in fact based on the preceding 20 years of mainframe and minicomputer software and the very first spreadsheet-esque programs.

And that those were in turn based on the ideas of Von Neuman & co. from 1945 of tabulating numbers efficiently, and so on and so forth in roughly equivalent leaps all the way back to the first abacus.

It's so reductive of a perspective that it's self-defeating, since no human being, including you, could ever actually comprehend the entirety of technological development, or even just the post-1945 developments.

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