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The sordid reality of retirement villages: Residents are being milked for profit

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Re: The sordid reality of retirement villages: Residents are being milked for profit

#31

Post by rkomorn »

righthand wrote: post #22
afavour wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been tried many times and it always fails. How can you know if the article is worth 50c before seeing it? As you said, it's a random entity you've never heard of before. Why micropayments will never be a thing in journalism: https://www.cjr.org/opinion/micropayments-subscription-pay-b...

You don’t but you have to put a base price on content for it to work. The point of a $0.50 access fee is that all articles individually would cost $0.50. Then you charge a subscription to unlimited access. No one’s successfully done this because when they do they want to individually price articles and consumers like you for some reason want to attach a per-word-price for each article. Implement a legitimate system a…

> Implement a legitimate system and people will use it.

This sounds like no true Scotsman.

I guess it's tautological that nobody's tried the right model because nobody's been successful.

Re: The sordid reality of retirement villages: Residents are being milked for profit

#32

Post by righthand »

rkomorn wrote: post #31
righthand wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t but you have to put a base price on content for it to work. The point of a $0.50 access fee is that all articles individually would cost $0.50. Then you charge a subscription to unlimited access. No one’s successfully done this because when they do they want to individually price articles and consumers like you for some reason want to attach a per-word-price for each article. Implement a legitimate system a…

> Implement a legitimate system and people will use it. This sounds like no true Scotsman. I guess it's tautological that nobody's tried the right model because nobody's been successful.

If you implement subscriptions + micropayments but let all the web scrapers through that’s not a sound new attempt at a system. That’s the same leaky system with micropayments slapped on top. See?

Re: The sordid reality of retirement villages: Residents are being milked for profit

#33

Post by afavour »

righthand wrote: post #22
afavour wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been tried many times and it always fails. How can you know if the article is worth 50c before seeing it? As you said, it's a random entity you've never heard of before. Why micropayments will never be a thing in journalism: https://www.cjr.org/opinion/micropayments-subscription-pay-b...

You don’t but you have to put a base price on content for it to work. The point of a $0.50 access fee is that all articles individually would cost $0.50. Then you charge a subscription to unlimited access. No one’s successfully done this because when they do they want to individually price articles and consumers like you for some reason want to attach a per-word-price for each article. Implement a legitimate system a…

> No one’s successfully done this because when they do they want to individually price articles

But different articles are worth different amounts of money. You can't really escape that fact. If a news org has spent three months doing a deep dive into political corruption and created a blockbuster report on it, in what world can it be justified for that to be the same price as someone recapping last night's episode of Survivor? This is all covered in the article I linked to.

> Implement a legitimate system

By whose definition of legitimate is the question, I guess. I think it's very easy to stand on the outside and say "duh, just do it the right way!".

It's not like things haven't been tried.

- Blendle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle

- Scroll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_(web_service)

- Google Contributor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor

- Axate: https://www.axate.com

- Coil (to an extent): https://coil.com/

All these people tried to solve this problem and weren't able to.

Re: The sordid reality of retirement villages: Residents are being milked for profit

#35

Post by m0llusk »

John23832 wrote: post #10

Under capitialism, why would anyone think that this is anything but expected. These living communities are meant to house you, until you die, for a price. You have saved up money to pay for that service until you die. Why would they leave money on the table? Why would they spend any extra on someone who's "going to die anyway". Someone who is barely ambulatory; who has few outside connections. It's the horrible resul…

Capitalism is a system. When you burn your food that is not end stage cooking, but a failure to manage cooking as a system. When your worn tires blow out while speeding causing you to fly off the road that is not end stage vehicular mobility, but irresponsible driving.

The last time Capitalism went unchecked and tried to eat itself was the Great Depression. That was ended by controlling Capitalism with strong regulations, high taxes on the rich, and pervasive union membership of workers. And the Social Security system and Medicare were also a part of that deal.

When people talk of "end stage Capitalism" all they are saying is that they lack the will and the power to use the tools we already know work to solve these problems.

Re: The sordid reality of retirement villages: Residents are being milked for profit

#36

Post by Ukv »

dheera wrote: post #5
prasadjoglekar wrote: post #2

I stopped when this modal popped up: UnHerd and our 877 technology partners ask you to consent to the use of cookies to store/access and process personal data on your device.

I didn't even see that, I guess because I have both popups and cookies blocked (with exceptions for cookies on a few websites I actually log in to) so it's not like they could store data even if they wanted to. I don't need to know about their attempts that are going to fail anyway.

> I didn't even see that, I guess because I have both popups and cookies blocked

The notice is likely EU (+ UK) specific for GDPR compliance, if you're elsewhere.

> so it's not like they could store data even if they wanted to. I don't need to know about their attempts that are going to fail anyway

They're also using fingerprinting:

> > "[...] together with other information (e.g. browser type and information, language, screen size, supported technologies etc.) can be stored or read on your device to recognise it [...] Actively scan device characteristics for identification [...] certain characteristics specific to your device might be requested and used to distinguish it from other devices (such as the installed fonts or plugins, the resolution of your screen) [...]"

If you're using something like Tor browser that does its best to hide those characteristics then you may be fine.

Re: The sordid reality of retirement villages: Residents are being milked for profit

#37

Post by rkomorn »

righthand wrote: post #32
rkomorn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Implement a legitimate system and people will use it. This sounds like no true Scotsman. I guess it's tautological that nobody's tried the right model because nobody's been successful.

If you implement subscriptions + micropayments but let all the web scrapers through that’s not a sound new attempt at a system. That’s the same leaky system with micropayments slapped on top. See?

I guess.

Ancestor comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45302115 already starts with the context of not wanting to subscribe to a random site, so I don't know how we don't end back up exactly there to have a non-leaky system with micropayments on top?

Re: The sordid reality of retirement villages: Residents are being milked for profit

#38

Post by righthand »

afavour wrote: post #33
righthand wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t but you have to put a base price on content for it to work. The point of a $0.50 access fee is that all articles individually would cost $0.50. Then you charge a subscription to unlimited access. No one’s successfully done this because when they do they want to individually price articles and consumers like you for some reason want to attach a per-word-price for each article. Implement a legitimate system a…

> No one’s successfully done this because when they do they want to individually price articles But different articles are worth different amounts of money. You can't really escape that fact. If a news org has spent three months doing a deep dive into political corruption and created a blockbuster report on it, in what world can it be justified for that to be the same price as someone recapping last night's episode o…

Then don’t put the more expensive articles as accessible for $0.50. Keep them behind the subscription. Users with subscriptions are the only ones who really want to read longer articles anyways.

Re: The sordid reality of retirement villages: Residents are being milked for profit

#39

Post by FireBeyond »

> “Would you give me a hand, sweetheart?”, she calmly asks, “Don’t touch her!” the bar manager snaps as I bend towards her. “You’re not allowed to touch her!” The woman blinks up at me, confused. “We have to call the care team — otherwise she could sue.”

As a paramedic, this galls me. As much as it galled me that many of these times, the "care team" (mostly LPNs) would call 911, for anything larger than a bandaid, or simple care tasks. Why? "Because of our policy/liability insurance", generally.

The worst part? Often the big sign out front. "Round the clock nursing care!" - and a bill to match.

Re: The sordid reality of retirement villages: Residents are being milked for profit

#40

Post by parpfish »

i have a hard time feeling sympathetic to some of these stories.

their buy-back prices dont let them reap the windfall from the wild growth of housing prices? or that they're complaining about too many "old people" in a retirement home? they need to pay 5 quid for a beer?

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