you don’t contribute tens of thousands every year

Really depends on the business model. If it’s business software, I very well might because it’s cheaper to finance hours for improvements than to commission custom code from third parties. I’ve worked at a number of companies that operate this way - letting the lead spenders define future work while the small fries just take what’s on offer.

Most 100% unmonetized FOSS projects just don’t have a stable revenue stream and to make it worse, the users can be real assholes, hounding the devs to work more or put someone else in charge to accept PRs quicker, etc.

Sure. It’s far from a perfect system. But public financing of projects and official lines of communication can improve this significantly.

Universities are great at churning out FOSS applications for this reason. A lot of the mainline software has derivative applications. So you’ll get a library that’s great at file management/transfer used for purely academic work and financed by a public grant to that end. But then you’ve got people picking up the library updates on Git and applying them to all sorts of tangential projects without needing to go out of pocket to finance it.

They might contribute bug reports and the occasional feature improvement (or just fork and let the OG authors pick up improvements as they please). But they aren’t on the hook for thousands of dollars to use something that is just a useful improvement to existing technology.

Ugh. Deeply depressing.

Google crams it into every search and acts like it’s literally the future of all search

I’m genuinely dreading the day that Google takes away the search results and just replies with the AI prompt.

I know it’s on the horizon, as soon as they can figure out how to get ad revenue from it properly.

people want to be paid for their work

There’s multiple flavors of this, unfortunately.

Love to contribute money to a project I support.

Hate to have my favorite software suite acquired by a Big Tech company that pays some oversees software sweatshop to shove pop-ups in my face trying to sell me glitter icons.

This is how the world ends

This is how the world ends

This is how the world ends

Not with a bang, but with a big popup you can’t close that’s asking if you’d like to become a premium member.

Worm eating the powdered bones of a dead animal: Am I a joke to you?

If you can provide her with 1960s health care and living costs, she might be willing to sell you her house for 1960s real estate prices.

Would you be replacing her hip for an authentic 1973 mint edition Jefferson Nickel?

Grandma is not the problem.

You can’t go blaming the institutions for the high cost of living when it is very clearly this one anonymous old person who isn’t giving this other anonymous young person a sweetheart deal out of misplaced nostalgia.

Fun Fact: There are 16 million vacant homes nationwide.

Okay, but a bunch of them are in the Rust Belt, where de-industrialization eviscerated the economy and caused a mass exodus to the Gulf Coast and the Mountain West in pursuit of lower wage service sector and sales employment.

I suppose you’re going to claim that the wholesale restructuring of the manufacturing economy was the fault of a handful of 90s-era Wall Street bankers and Corporate Executives, rather than millions of Boomer-era suburbanites with pocket change in their retirement accounts 40 years ago?

Likely. Fucking. Story. This is just bigotry against the 1% is what it is.

This is important.

It’s the downstream consequence of decades of outsourcing, kicked off in earnest in the Reagan Administration. “Right to Repair” is just the tip of an enormous iceberg of military privatization.

Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

That’s the nut of it. This money is being wasted in the general sense. But it isn’t wasted in the eyes of crony legislators and bureaucrats who see themselves on the receiving end of the kickback stream.

This goes back to the BBB and its rampage through some of the most high efficiency Medicaid programs on offer, in order to shuttle somewhere between $175B and $541B (depending on who is counting) to a national security system that’s just legions of badged up bullies harassing locals for the entertainment of a few hooting chuds.

why can’t the military fix their own equipment or farmers fix tractors?

Because

and SaaS is how corporate industry has decided it will continue to grow its profits indefinitely.

Our target audience is people with cognitive disabilities who still have access to a credit card.

Hitting myself with the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind machine

Websites in 2005 never had annoying popups and obnoxious JavaScript and a thousand bad design decisions that made using them terrible.

Everything was so easy back then and you could always trust your anonymous Internet retail vendor to do exactly what you paid them for.

Unfortunately, it was a 737 Max. So maybe I got lucky.

Flew back from Mexico last week and got to keep my shoes on. We all survived

Silicon Valley turtleneck was just the Mao Suit of its era.

Jeff Bezos saved hundreds of billions of dollars by downsizing his wife.

Wake up, Hustle, and Grind. Ain’t no time for time off. You think Elon Musk became a billionaire while chasing tail or doing drugs or spending all his time playing video games?

Stalinist approach

Capitalist prole looking at a private media institution managed by unpaid laborers intent on maximizing profits for a gaggle of overpaid administrative flaks and their indolent shareholders: “God damn, this is like when the Russian guy ran a Communist newspaper.”

Nevermind that these people think women can have dicks

Anyway, here’s why Reddit is broke. Too. Many. Trans-Friendly. Leftists. Amirite, folks?

Fucking 4chan. Just stay dead already.

Inflation, in absolute terms, is a larger benefit to people with higher interest rates.

Fair enough. I’m more thinking in a discrete sense… “saving money” versus “owing money”… rather than implicitly how much less are you paying.

That’s a historically unusual artifact of the financialized housing market in a country where the population outpaces new available housing units while the economy continues to grow.

Go to Italy or - God forbid - Iraq or Ukraine or Myanmar, and you’ll find record inflation combined with falling real estate values. Buying a home in Lebanon or El Salvador or Bulgaria in 1975 wasn’t a good move. You had to be a certain proximity near the US/EU money printing machines and a distance from the US/Russia bomb dropping machines to get that arbitrage to work.

inflation is good if you borrow money

at below the rate of inflation

Inflation going to 2% to 6% when you’ve got a credit card with a 30% APY is of very marginal benefit.