Uhh, points at 2020
The CDC advising people to not buy masks in February because "they don't work" comes to mind. The US Gov in general completely letting businesses and individuals plunge into bankruptcy. I think a lot of people have been awakened to the fact that "the system" is pretty ambivalent to their personal well-being.
Scientists are people to. They don't magically know how a new never before seen virus works, instantly. It takes time to study it. Advice at the beginning are best guesses; some is going to turn out to be wrong. With time and experience, knowledge gets more firm, advice shifts and solidifies.
We're hardly at the "beginning". There have been very large trials to establish safety and efficacy. Sure its not like we have years of study, but its hardly the beginning. More like the middle.
The scale of how much money the USA spends pointlessly on weapons is almost as mind boggling to comprehend as the size of the galaxy. It's depressing to imagine what we could do otherwise if all this money wasn't wasted, or if it was simply returned to taxpayers.
Welfare programs promote the welfare of USA residents, which is a valid use of public funds. The defense budget is almost entirely wasted. We haven't won a war in 75 years. Our various bumbling military misadventures have killed thousands of Americans and millions of other humans. If we spent a tenth of what we spend, both we and humanity in general would be safer, happier, and more prosperous. The Pentagon is never held to account for its myriad failures, so over time it has evolved to do only one thing well: consume vast resources.
> You think that removing 2 F-35s from the budget will significantly alter that calculus?
you think that the "don't buy 2 F-35s and fix arecibo" train of thought ends at fixing arecibo? like, if the military hawks would just give up enough budget to fix it, all the other cries to reduce their budget would cease?
I don't think they were being condescending – there's a lot of material out there on why Tailwind is good, it's easy to find via Google, but nothing beats trying it out.
If you don't want to do that then you could watch some of Adam Wathan's screencasts on YouTube where he uses Tailwind to recreate pages or build new ones.
The benefits are "you don't suffer from <some set of problems I've never suffered from, even on large projects>". The cost is cluttered markup and what appears to be impossible reuse.
This smells a lot like every other tech bandwagon. It's the best thing since sliced bread until wide adoption exposes all the flaws and we go back to what proceeded it.
I dunno. The vibe I get from it is very similar to React. The excitement, the arguments for and against, the focus on some kind of 'separation of concerns' purity that isn't ultimately that convincing.
I waited a while before bothering with React, but based on my positive experience with that particular 'paradigm shift' I gave Tailwind a shot. So far it's been really, really pleasant on a moderately-sized project, so that's hopeful.
I don't see the point in dismissing it, based on all that. We didn't go back from React to jQuery and Backbone, we moved forward from it.
That said, it's fair enough and probably smart to wait and see at this point if you don't have the luxury of experimenting. I totally get that.
Because by suggesting Apple pay developers to make apps and not the other way around you either don't know history, how markets and distribution work, or you're making a joke.
You strategy played out very well in pre 2008 days with Windows Mobile. It also played out very well for Microsoft paying developers to create apps for Windows Phone, before Microsoft admitted defeat and left the phone market they were in since 1996.
About the 15%.
Have you tried running a business to make a living?
Have you tried building something yourself?
Have you tried selling it in 155 countries?
Have you tried getting access to a market of 1+ billion people?
Have you tried monitoring you don't breach regulations and tax thresholds in 155 countries?
Have you tried registering for VAT MOSS in one of the EU countries?
Have you tried implementing IP geo-location for your European customers, to charge a correct VAT amount out of 27 options?
This is laughable. You can setup Shopify to sell your physical inventory worldwide plus get an invoicing solution that deals with MOSS etc. for fraction of what Apple charges for hosting a file in an app.
Plus they don't allow competing app stores, so they can dictate these extortionate prices.
Once you get the foam out of your mouth, you could go and check how the various console markets were bootstrapped. Paying developers to make apps is just fine, if done well. Windows Mobile was undone by a number of mistakes (like rebuilding the platform 3 times from scratch), paying developers was not one of them.
> about the 15%
Yeah, about that. As it is, it’s monopoly rent (and before you bring up consoles - yes, there too). Nothing more, nothing less. Personally, I wouldn’t be happy with 5% or 1% either, because the point is not how you measure the tax, but the tax itself and the fact that it’s not set by the market. Once they allow third-party appstores they can charge 50% for all I care.
It's very kind of you, but there's no foam coming out of my mouth. Thank you.
Was BlackBerry undone by rebuilding the platform 3 times from scratch too? And Symbian too?
> Paying developers to make apps is just fine, if done well.
Of course. But it hasn't been done well in the mobile world, has it? So why is it relevant here?
I remember pre 2008 when carriers controlled apps on phones. I also remember xda-developers days. Discoverability, distribution and quality was disaster compared to what we have today. And do you know what developers earned from their applications compared to today?
People take marketplaces and what has been done in the last 10 years for granted.
Should we also be happy that aristocracy has been abolished in most European countries, so the Napoleonic regime was excellent and we should have kept that? “It’s better than it was” is no argument for keeping still. Apple’s regime is more open than the previous one was, but it’s still nowhere near a really-open market.
I’m not sure why you’re trying to go through the catalogue of failures in the mobile world. Nokia afaik didn’t even pay developers, certainly not when they were spinning around trying to reboot their fossil OS - no app, paid or otherwise, could save that pile of crap. Blackberry I never followed, but I understand they also crumbled largely from within, I don’t think they ever paid developers either.
> why is it relevant here
It’s relevant in the sense that the lack of success of one particular effort does not mean the strategy is absolutely bad, as you were arguing.
Entirely reasonable of OP to posit bad faith on your part, especially given how you've reacted and the way you constructed a strawman to get upset about.
I understand the point of the original article, since I agree that most people are entitled whiny jerks much of the time, myself included. I’m not here to argue that anyone should be obligated to provide help or fixes for their open source software, paid or otherwise.
I do feel that’s an important point — paid or otherwise. There’s a similarly whiny attitude people have: “I paid $5 for your thing, so you have to do as I say!” I don’t really think the distinction is how much it cost. If you have a support contract that says “in exchange for paying me, I’ll help you with X, Y, and Z”, that’s a different story.
But what I really wanted to remark on: to the point of “activities that take no time at all”, when I report a bug, I often spend hours of my time trying to understand what’s broken, narrowing it down to specific conditions and observations, often a attempting to fix it myself, and then writing everything up and whenever possible including test cases, screenshots, videos, etc. By the time I hit send on that bug, I may have contributed hundreds or thousands of dollars of my time to the project.
It’s also possible to just take 5 seconds to fire off “your stupid app is broken your stupid too fix it”. All I’m saying is that painting all bug reports with the brush of “trying to get free support” discounts the amount of free QA open source projects can benefit from.
> I may have contributed hundreds or thousands of dollars of my time to the project
Sure, but that was you deciding to do it, and it's commendable.
This is very different from someone emailing you and telling you to (or expecting that you will) donate thousands of dollars of your time to a project.
