tl;dr: high natural gas prices, weather caused production delays, COVID caused production/shipping delays, power shortages in China (a major exporter) resulting in lower production
Counter-counterpoint: Culture, art and science only exist if its accessible. It not much point to a discussion about such topics if the participants does not have access to the material.
High quality comments on HN get undermined if only a small selection of people has access to the topic of discussion. Comments based only on the title is usually a sign of low quality.
The existing funding mechanisms for journalism exacerbate the problem.
The highest-quality generally-accessible journalism is virtually uniformly some form of national or public media, usually broadcast: BBC, DW, CBC, ABC (Australia), Al Jazeera, PBS, NPR. These treat journalism as the public good it is.
For Internet media, I'm increasingly of the view that news costs should be bundled into primary connectivity whether wired or wireless.
The total budget for journalism in the US amounts to less than $200/person. The cost of managing subscription-management systems often greatly exceeds this. (There's no such thing as a free lunch-monetisation system.)
At the 2005 advertising peak, ads income (a cost born by the public through product purchases) was $50 billion. Subscription expense in 2020 was another $11 billion. Pro-rated per person among the 330 million population of the US:
An advertising-free subscription assuming 2.5 persons per household on average would run less than $40/mo. With advertising, the cost would be less than $8/mo. This would fund journalism at the levels of 2005, whilst making the work product available to every household in the US.
My suggestion would be to further index ISP fees to the typical household wealth of an area. Richer locations would pay more, poorer locations would have their news source somewhat subsidised. Businesses could be similarly assessed.
It turns out that either paying directly for news, or indirectly through advertising, creates tremendous distortions.
That's a problem for an aggregator site like HN. Dozens of paywalled sites are likely to show up here. Even if the average reader wanted to subscribe to them, he or she might not have the money and time to do so.
For me it's not paying that's the issue, but rather having to sign up to an individual service and pay a monthly fee for every piece you read on every different website.
There really needs to be a Spotify for journalism and similar content. I know there are some attempts (apple news for example) but they haven't cracked it yet.
The average person skips paywalls for the same reason the average person used to pirate movies. It isn't about cost, but about the most convenient means of access
Counterpoint accepted. But what they mostly do is some clickbait title and/or teasertext and when you visit that link and start reading ... please pay.
That is waisting time, because there is no obvious hint to the pay wall given upfront.
I would support, but not if they play tricks on me, or, if they're out of the legislation area I live in.
And then, wanting 2.5$ for one article is just transferring the real world to the online. But online is not working on the same principles like the real world.. my thoughts.
> To me it is sufficient to beat the top 20% of drivers.
It's interesting that you set the threshold there (I presume you meant 'beat the bottom 80% of drivers'). Rationally, we should be happy if their driving performance is above average. I fear that the public (and the courts and the insurers, etc) will require airline levels of per-mile safety and still be wary.
I would be fine with beating average but as soon as this thing kills someone, I want there to be a significant difference in accident rate so it does not end up in regulatory hell.
I think from a statistical standpoint, beating average is great. But the big difference is that we have this odd and fundamental requirement for justice/punishment in our society that gets lost with self-driving cars.
If a human driver kills someone / injures someone / damages property, people get satisfaction or resolution when the human is punished - insurance increases, license points, jail, etc.
But when a self-driving car - even if it's better-than-average - does something wrong, there's nobody to punish and no retribution to exact, so people will be left feeling unsatisfied. That's why the bar is going to need to be so much higher.
There's also the bias (accurate or not) of "most people are bad drivers, but I'm better". Beating the average only beats the average. It improves things across the board (and that's awesome), but people who are particularly careful or skilled will balk until it's perceived as better than they are.
Pick something you pay extra attention to. Now imagine being informed you can't do that any more, you have to take what [this robot] does for you. Also remember all the terrible UI changes in software that have been done for a majority instead of your use-case.
Reluctance until it's substantially better seems reasonable to me. Somewhat unfortunate on a species level, but not for many individuals.
https://www.fb.org/market-intel/too-many-to-count-factors-dr...
tl;dr: high natural gas prices, weather caused production delays, COVID caused production/shipping delays, power shortages in China (a major exporter) resulting in lower production