Interesting.

For Hurricane Helene specifically, my team at Newspack actually worked with Blue Ridge Public Radio and a number of other news organizations in the affected area to set up text versions of their websites for low bandwidth readers[1] and get info to 10s of thousands of people[2].

In fact, it was so successful (maybe not at reaching you specifically though), that we got a grant to roll out a general purpose plain text web solution for breaking news situations to news organizations across the country![3] So I think there may have been a mismatch in that you didn't know about all of the plain text versions of news sites available in your area during the disaster -- that's something we'll have to keep in mind.

[1] https://text.bpr.org/

[2] https://awards.journalists.org/entries/hell-or-high-water-bp...

[3] https://opennews.org/blog/press-forward-release/

I mean I regularly read the news and I didn’t know CNN has a lite version

I simply live with this, but if I need to download it in a compatible format from Google Drive, I just screenshot the photo from Google Drive instead of downloading it. That solves the problem for me but from a different direction.

Real estate, automobiles, credentials/degrees, and businesses are all assets that would counterbalance their debt. (Credentials and degrees are not liquid, but you'd be hard pressed to argue that a doctor's license isn't worth many dollars).

The much more likely situation is a person with no assets or money and some credit card debt. Indeed, a person with simply no money is better off than such a person.

Right, and they're arguing that the quoted statistic isn't counting credentials and degrees as assets, because there's not a convention for how to value them.

You're comparing what appears to be the MAXIMUM cost of German health insurance with the AVERAGE cost of US health insurance.

I prefer to say, the MEAN cost, on this topic; it’s the same thing but more opinion-forward :)

I did it the other direction -- I bought a relatively cheap house, and if the winds of change come, I would rather get a different career than location! Two different equally valid perspectives IMO, as long as you're not dependent on having a particular career in order to make your house payments.

Good point, not good to be so dependent on a career. I'm almost there; useless without a computer involved. Eager to change the location one more time to somewhere affordable. The city is wasted on me.

A career change may be earlier than expected with the LLM craze.

> I'd say about 25% of them came from a "moneyed" background. The rest were just regular people with regular backgrounds who were obsessive about starting businesses.

This is a very similar point to the article though -- the moneyed class is much smaller than 25% of the population, so they are disproportionately represented in even your anecdotal sample. To be clear, that doesn't mean that regular people can't make it though!

Super late to the party, but Dale Harris Cash Register is a free Point of Sales TUI program that has been maintained by Dale since the 90s[1]. The website is pretty great too. He originally made it for his locksmith/key business. He has a gallery of people using it in the wild [2]. I've always wanted to have some sort of business where it makes sense to use it!

[1] https://keyhut.com/pos.htm [2] https://keyhut.com/posphoto.htm

A fob on a lanyard would work well I think. It would be nerdy as hell, but in a practical sense, it's better than carrying around another phone-like thing or wearing something on your face.

> "How paid subscriptions ate the spread of information"

The "irony" here is that news organizations are moving to gate their content precisely because that's the only effective technique for preventing AI crawlers from ingesting it all ...

So we as the real people have to pay because the AI might consume it ? If you believe the AI isn't consuming those paywalled articles also, I have a bridge to sell you.

>If you believe the AI isn't consuming those paywalled articles also

it's 50/50. Given the NYT lawsuit, I don't think that's something they would do recklessly. I'm sure a subscription has more strict ToS than just browsing a publicly viewable webpage.

I'd also add that the industry is not the same as when the iphone came out. When I was younger I wanted to do shareware games like iD and Apogee, and I'd still be down to do that if it was a thing any more. But you have to meet the market where it's at if you want an actual viable business. I don't have a ton of hunger for starting an b2b SaaS, and I'd bet the OP doesn't either.