> "Give me liberty or give me death!" is a quotation attributed to American politician and orator Patrick Henry from a speech he made to the Second Virginia Convention on March 23, 1775, at St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia. Henry is credited with having swung the balance in convincing the convention to pass a resolution delivering Virginian troops for the Revolutionary War.
This happens routinely on HN. People read one thing, which causes them to remember or discover something else on the same topic, and submit that. People likely to upvote one will likely upvote the other. Frequently, that second submission started as a top HN comment in the first submission.
While I agree that this is ordinary for very rich people, it's good reporting and context for us to know where and how the 2nd richest man in the world takes a tax deduction that we publicly fund.
I always thought that, with Dropbox, you weren't paying so much for the tech as for the storage space. I'm on a free Dropbox plan, which is presumably using essentially the same tech as a paid plan, just with less storage.
TBF that is 3 licenses – for one license it is $35. Also quite a lot IMO: it's really just a screenshot cropping and editing tool, since macOS has a screenshot tool already.
I mean, it's worth it because it's been so helpful, but I bought Recut (which takes the silences out of video editing and is on that list) a couple of weeks ago, and now it's 50% off.
I wonder if marketers ever think about how black friday sales annoy customers.
Hey, Recut creator here :) Glad to hear it's helpful! I also hate this feeling of missing a sale by mere days, so I've been offering partial refunds to folks that bought very recently. Feel free to shoot me an email! (in my profile)
I agree with this. I would also consider talking to a recruiter or paying a professional resume writer (one that specializes in tech) to help rewrite your resume and adjust your positioning.
Micropayments keep failing over and over again. I think it's because the friction of microdecisions of whether or not to pay for that individual transaction is tedious. "Should I click on that link? What if it's not what I want Hmm, better not for now." Biggest recent push was Blendle, which pivoted: https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/micropayments-for-news-pio...
And yet most people I know don't get microdecision fatigue every time they decide whether to turn on a light or use an appliance due to the electricity transactions.
I claim that--to the extent to which this was ever an issue--this is due to the notion of "micropayment" really being too large still: the industry has often used this term to describe transactions on the order $1-$10.
Instead, this discussion is about hosting fees for a chat app that will add up to almost nothing for light usage, not the $1 per article news companies keep wanting to charge. My company (Orchid) has been calling these fees for incremental hosting costs--which are on the order of $0.001-$0.10--"nanopayments".
But that's not the correct comparison right? It's not that you have to initiate a transfer for the flipping-on of the light. You pay integrated, at the end of the month (or really, the utility trusts you to not change your behaviour dramatically and you pay an expected usage, which is then corrected at the end of the year).
That's my main gripe with all those transactions. If you need to initialise a complex utility that involves the trust of multiple parties and the need to verify identities on multiple people. That kind of thing costs macroscopic amounts of money (the going rate seems to be O(20ct)). Unless your average transaction size is much above that, you'll loose to friction.
There isn't a price tag on my light switch. Also light is of course a must have, news articles or chatrooms aren't.
If I could use micropayments this way and be sure that the final price is
a) somewhat predicable
b) usually not ruinous
It would work better.
Cloud Services for companies like AWS are using this mode and it's working well for them.
But I have a feeling it's not easy/legal to do away with the immediate price tag for consumers. At the very least it would require the a constant price per "thing" and a hard spending limit.
They work well within ecosystems. See the any number of video games and gaming platforms that invent their own micro-currency. My kid plays roblox and every month or so asks for some of their allowance to go into their ecosystem. They spend pennies on different cosmetics with nearly no friction.
That said, I don't think even "Web Points" would work for links. Maybe something like buying "Member Status" with "Web Points" for a month on a site could work.
USG already publishes a ton of free data, like weather and maps. The ecosystem of repackaging and building improved services seems to be working fine because it opens up a broad range of competitive options, not a paid embargo to a few.
I can think of a few accounts that, with a single tweet, could move markets, inflame tensions, or kick off multiple cycles of misinformation. For many of these large, influential accounts, Twitter is effectively the same as an official press release.
