And this absurd outcome is partially due to a flagrant disregard for the sets of rules and procedures that came before this case.
The Knowledge Fight podcast covers this case in its entirety and it's clear that Infowars et al. has toed the line of criminal to delay and deny justice to the victims. The legal system hit the end of the road and said "everything owed to the victims or everything Infowars has" and this is the result.
I was recently working on a project and bumped into this. It's not currently but here are the relevant Github links if you want to learn more (it doesn't look like there's much movement recently):
Innovation and problem-solving are two very, very different things. You can have the former without the latter but generally not the latter without the former.
"Problems" to solve IMO come down to basic human necessities:
- How do we get more people food for a lower cost?
- How do we get more people shelter for a lower cost?
- How do we make more people less sick for a lower cost?
Everything past that is basically a "luxury", AKA innovation for the sake of entertainment/discovery/challenge/socialization. Also, people tend to pay for entertainment/luxuries, whereas providing access to necessities for a lower cost doesn't have as high of a profit margin. Ergo, less reason to innovate.
That's the exact opposite conclusion. All of the innovations happened for the profitable things. The conclusion is that we need to make solving problems, that we want to be solved, profitable.
And how do "we" change the profitability equation? If it were more profitable to do more social good, then more companies would be doing more social good. It seems like we agree on that.
Why, then, isn't it profitable to do right now, and what solutions exist to make it so?
FWIW I had a friend apply to a 'remote' position here and they turned him down because that team decided they didn't want to have remote employees after all. Be wary of the remote tag on this post.
I'm sorry about your friend's experience. As a fully remote employee, I can assure folks that "remoteness" has become a much bigger part of our culture. We try very hard to make sure that remote folks are comfortable and kept in the loop. I'm not sure what team he/she applied for, but I would encourage them to give us another look!
There's something I'm working on that's essentially a paypal button, but acts as a little widget on the site.
I'm still in the testing phases of it, but a lot of people that I've talked to have said "Yes, I'd pay $1-3 to a site that I visit regularly if it didn't have ads"
https://www.trussapp.com/ for the curious (it's still just a hair away from being a beta product, so keep that in mind)
I'm working on something that will benefit people who have high traffic sites that don't want to show their users ads. The basics are here: http://www.trussapp.com/ -- it's not quite ready for production, but if it's something you might be interested in, I'm looking for beta users. cam@trussapp.com
Small nitpick, and if you want some unsolicited feedback on that site: the GIF that shows a user using the site goes super slow and it would be a lot more engaging if the user typed faster.
Although I don't know how much I can blame this on connection problems on my end, it looks like it takes five seconds or so to type "Test Tester", when in my opinion it should take only one.
It's effectively the same thing, but it prevents users from having to leave your site to contribute. The hope is that it will increase donations because of that.
I'm working on building something that will incentivize site owners who have some kind of creative content on their site to remove ads in favor of donations to their site. It's a pretty unobtrusive widget they can add to their pages and it makes it so the user doesn't have to leave the page to donate. Still a WIP, but it's getting there!
The Knowledge Fight podcast covers this case in its entirety and it's clear that Infowars et al. has toed the line of criminal to delay and deny justice to the victims. The legal system hit the end of the road and said "everything owed to the victims or everything Infowars has" and this is the result.