US launches inquiry into French plan to tax tech giants - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48945828 <comment><USER2> Quite funny of the US to complain about protectionism. I guess that's the paradox attached to it. When you do it it's fine, when someone else does it and you're affected, suddenly it's "discriminatory". Well yeah it's always been discriminatory in nature.

They make a profit somewhere, they pay their taxes, period. Those loopholes need to be closed.

<comment><USER3> Even with recent tariffs, US tariffs are still generally low, it's hardly a poster child for "protectionism", the EU has other barriers in addition to tariffs and much of it is due to french protectionism.

If you think that these "loopholes" should be closed then close them for all companies and countries, don't enact discriminatory laws and then act indignant about it.

<comment><USER4> The US strong protectionism is not through tariffs but through tax incentives, targeted investments hidden as national security contracts and things like "buy american" acts.

Just because you dress it up doesn't change what it actually is.

<comment><USER3> Are you litigating the boeing v airbus thing? didn't the WTO rule that airbus is receiving billions in illegal subsidies?

And are you suggesting that france doesn't subside specific industries?

If you're complaints are exclusive to the aviation and defence industries then a US complaint regarding the EU and france could include that and every other industry.

<comment><USER5> AFAIK the case against Boeing is still open. Arguably Airbus is getting direct subsidies (WTO ruling) while Boeing seems to get pampered by overpriced defense contracts which has the same result more or less (no WTO ruling yet). Conclusion is nobody is innocent, just guilty in different ways.

<comment><USER3> "EU paid Airbus billions in illegal subsidies, WTO rules" [https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44120525](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44120525)

<comment><USER6> Imagine if Airbus was not there, there would be no safe plane to do short- haul.

<comment><USER7> Nonsense. Plenty of 717, non-Max 737, MD-88, MD-90, and E170/175/190/195 out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> US has a trade deficit with France. So potentially there is more to loose for France in case of a trade war: [https://www.census.gov/foreign- trade/balance/c4279.html](https://www.census.gov/foreign- trade/balance/c4279.html)

And generally speaking the US has a trade deficit with Europe: [https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle- east/europe...](https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle- east/europe/european-union)

My understanding of the economic system between the US and the world is that other countries support the US dollar by using it for trade, and that the US in turn is able to print a lot of US dollars that can be used by american consumers to buy goods from the world.

Could other countries retaliate to US trade tariffs by dedollarizing trade?

<comment><USER9> Not sure I agree with the analysis, at least on France.

France's top exports to the US are aircraft parts and beverages (wine).

Since the US needs those parts to export the (assembled) planes, I think the aircraft lobby (e.g. Boeing) will press hard to prevent a tariff here because it'd raise rates across the board, so that leaves wine: My hunch is even a 100% tariff on wine is unlikely to dissuade anyone from purchasing French wine -- the American wine is better, so the only people buying it are people who really wanted French wine anyway oh là là.

I don't know yet what I think about a trade war with all of Europe though.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for this precision. Knowing this detail about aircraft parts seems to change the dynamic though.

I have to disagree with one point though:

"American wine is better than French wine...." (gulp!).

<comment><USER9> A certain amount of that is certainly tongue-in-cheek. I think if you compare a $20 wine in California to a €10 wine you buy somewhere along the Garonne, you're probably going to enjoy the French wine more.

But we're talking about what changes buying-behaviour, and it's important to consider that as a savvy shopper in the US you can go into a wine shop and buy everything under $20, and you'll find local wins. That's how you anchor your expectations about prices and quality. Now whether that's because of duty/import or it's because of shipping, or it's simply because only big brands will bother exporting is, or any other reason, _those_ reasons are out of scope simply because a tariff isn't going to change them in the slightest.

<comment><USER10> For reference, French wine in France can be had for 3 or 4 euros a 75 cl bottle.

That's for good wine. There are cheaper wines available of course.

If you're saying $20, you must be talking about a 6 pack ;)

<comment><USER11> > For reference, French wine in France can be had for 3 or 4 euros a 75 cl > bottle.

This legend about french cheap wine is getting better and better everytime I hear it. 3-4€ is the low price for wine in a bottle. Some are decent, some are utter shit. But that's not "for good wine". That's entry level, which sometimes is decent.

I know some of the export wine is cooking-grade shit and people don't know the difference. But for people versed in wine in the US, the €3-4 bottles aren't going to cut it.

<comment><USER10> I don't know how it is in a WallMart in the US but in a French Carrefour there can be a 20 meter long aisle dedicated to wines and spirituous, possibly both sides of the aisle.

That's a huge selection covering all types of wine for as little as a few euros. Price is not a predictor of anything, there are both good and bad wines all over the place.

Wine is truly a commodity in France. There are very few people paying 10€ a bottle unless you're talking Champagne, that's not considered a wine.

edit: See for yourself [https://www.carrefour.fr/r/boissons-et-cave-a- vins/cave-a-vi...](https://www.carrefour.fr/r/boissons-et-cave-a-vins/cave-a- vins?sort=facet_price&noRedirect=0)

<comment><USER11> I _am_ french. I know the supermarkets, and still I frequently buy bottles above 10€. My demographic is not small, there are just many people that can't afford storage space for bottles and don't want to buy entry-level wine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Countries including France and the UK have accused firms of routing some > profits through low-tax EU member states such as Ireland and Luxembourg.

This seems to be the problem. The EU laws have allowed these companies to avoid taxes. Small countries just next to France (Luxembourg) are able to help these companies. But France will not go against these countries and instead try to handle things through taxes.

I don't think this will workout greatly for France. France solution to everything seems to be: "Put a tax on it". The EU needs to get its crap together.

I don't like Tariffs. But if you worked internationally you should know that the US is one of the most open countries when it comes to doing business. You can open a company, a bank account, get a tax ID, buy shares in US companies, trade, etc...

<comment><USER13> The UK accuses firms of routing profits through low-tax EU member states?

Did they mention Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man + Anguilla, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, Turks and Caicos Islands?

Well, I suppose they aren't EU member states, carry on.

<comment><USER12> Same with France: Monaco. That's why I said they got to get their shit together.

<comment><USER14> Monaco is not part of France.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> National sovereignty versus globalisation again. Is it reasonable for a company to make profits from customers in a country and then not pay that country's profit-based taxes?

(Also, the US trying to bully France on this one is unlikely to go well, that tends to trigger a French nationalist response.)

<comment><USER16> It's not reasonable. But it sure is profitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> To be frank, a 3% tax is too little too late.

<comment><USER4> We still hope to get it turned into a global EU thing rather than each of us bickering with its own ten of a percent competition over who gets screwed up more. But several EU countries are not on board, so we're taking baby steps, mostly aiming to prove that it does work and no those tech giants will not leave the french market (or if they do, yes someone else will rise in place).

<comment><USER18> Agreed, I applaud France to take a first step in the right direction.

<comment><USER19> I wonder about the US response. Because they themselves also get shortchanged by the same companies, yet still doing their legwork, in this case by bullying France.

Why doesn't the US tell Google to go complain to Bermuda, and implement a comparable tax themselves? And apply it to all corporation evading US corporate taxes while using US infrastructure? (big pharma)

(The answer, of course is nationalism and corporate money in US politics)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> funny how people feels supportive of some companies based on very loose national links. If you think companies have a national interest at heart (I will make an exception for Chinese), I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell to you.

</comment><comment><USER20> If I'm not mistaken the UK is planning to enact a similar tax as well

</comment><comment><USER21> I guess we'll get the usual response of the US trying to bring France to its knees by putting tariffs on wine and cheese.

<comment> yusi-san They have different pressure means on France now, like what they did about Alstom which is a strategic company for France (they produce essential elements about nuclear plants, nuclear submarines for example) now in the US hand through General Electric.

<comment><USER21> Correct me if I'm wrong but GE bought the energy/grid part of the company, not the infrastructure/transportation part.

<comment><USER22> The turbines production is now under GE

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The US can continue to bully everyone around them, but one day there will be no friends left and while the US is starting a trade war (or even an actual war) with friends and enemies other nations will strengthen their relations and the power balance will shift eventually.

China has been on track to overtake the US as the largest economy for many years now. The US obviously feels threatened by the shift of economic powers and currently tries every thing they can to prevent this from happening, but it's going to happen regardless. China has a stable country, a hard working population, people feel content and the government is looking after its people despite what Western media is reporting. The Western world is increasingly becoming divided, fueled by capitalist greed, social media which is anything but "social", huge wealth disparities, racism and many other deep ingrained problems. The US might complain about other nations spying, etc., but it is the US and the NSA who has been the only nation which has been proven black on white that they have been grossly spying on everyone else in this world, it is the US which is the only nation which is constantly starting wars with other nations and destabilising economies. It's not China, nor France, nor the EU.

I can only recommend anyone in the US to go and visit other nations and explore the world and it becomes very quickly apparent that the Western world has some deep issues which other countries seem to be much better in control of. If entire freedom of everything means that people live divided, in poverty, exploited, plagued by suicide, mental health issues, obesity and mass shootings, then maybe the way the West has shaped in the last 50 years is not all that great which everyone wants us to believe.

Other countries have other issues, but honestly, after being to many many other places and far East I can only say that these problems look minor in comparison to what I observe in the West.

<comment><USER4> I don't stricly disagree (nor agree) with your comment, but there are several thing that you include as "a global grave issue of the western world" in general but is actually very US-centric. When I look at the list you give, "people live divided, in poverty, exploited, plagued by suicide, mental health issues, obesity and mass shootings", it's not that those issues don't exists in other countries, but in the western world the US has that strange habit of always exhibiting the most extreme form, and frankly to not look like it's working and making any advance at fixing them.

<comment><USER23> The US is a much more diverse population and a much larger population. It's going to be more chaotic than anything the Europeans have to deal with.

But dealing with that chaos, at that scale, produces lessons and learning that won't happen anywhere else, other than probably India.

<comment><USER24> > _The US is a much more diverse population..._

Why is this _always_ a fallback reference point? It is demonstrably false[0,1,2,3] and is continually regurgitated - as if the continued repetition would make it consequently true. There are countries in Europe that are far more diverse than the United States. Full stop.

> _But dealing with that chaos, at that scale, produces lessons and learning > that won 't happen anywhere else, other than probably India._

You could start with your immediate neighbours, yeah? Canada and Mexico are both far more diverse than the United States and would - by your own argument - be far more chaotic than anything the United States or Europe has to deal with, yeah?

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_et...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_ethnic_and_cultural_diversity_level)

[1] - [https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/18/the-most- an...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/18/the-most-and-least- culturally-diverse-countries-in-the-world/)

[2] - [https://www.atlasandboots.com/worlds-most-diverse- country/](https://www.atlasandboots.com/worlds-most-diverse-country/)

[3] - [https://archive.fo/9AV1K](https://archive.fo/9AV1K)

<comment><USER23> Just point at the data. The extra layer of attitude doesn't sell your argument, but just distracts from it.

Sort the first table by rank US - 87 UK -109 France - 117 Germany - 148. When we talk about the West who else is anyone referring to? Denmark - 144. Norway - 146.

My comment is in response to someone separating the US from the west, not US compared to the rest of the world. So don't be in such a hurry to react.

The data shows the US is more diverse than other western countries.

Population is another important factor. What happens in a city of 10 million people and what happens in a country of 10 million people is very different. I come from India and have lived in both the US and Europe. My city has a population somewhere between Ireland and Norway but it's impossible to handle social issues the way those countries do or use them as models precisely because of the population density and diversity.

<comment><USER25> Belgium(65) and Switzerland(63) are definitely western world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Shouldn't be a long inquiry, this tax is textbook discriminatory trade barrier.

If you look at EU policy as france and germany protecting their perceived interests by targeting US tech companies it starts making sense, I think a rule of thumb there is: "if it hurts google it should be law".

<comment><USER4> > by targeting US tech companies

It does not. In a preliminary evaluation, there are 26 companies that would match the criterias, 11 are not americans, 4 of them (that's 1/6th) are even french companies to begin with.

• Vente de biens: Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Ebay, Google, Groupon, Rakuten, Schibsted, Wish, Zalando.

• Intermédiaire de services: Amadeus, Axel Springer, Booking, Expedia, Match.com, Randstad, Recruit, Sabre, Travelport Worldwide, Tripadvisor, Uber.

• Publicité en ligne: Amazon, Criteo, Ebay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Verizon.

The point is to catch up with something everyone else has figured out: that the value is in the users data. Investors have caught up to it and acted on it, so did VC, so did companies, so did everyone ... Except governments. If the data is what you extract your value from, then it should be normal that it is what you are taxed on.

<comment><USER3> If my math is correct then most of the companies are American, and by far most of the potential revenue.

Considering the rhetoric leading to this tax and the french government's many raids and failed investigations into US companies and their taxes it's difficult even with careful wording for the french government to deny the actual target of this tax in a WTO type setting.

<comment><USER26> Maybe the US should be targeting those companies, too. I don't think you can really say a multinational still is or acts "American", even if a majority of its employees and its owners are.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How America Uses Its Land - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/ <comment><USER2> The one third being used for cows is misleading. Pasture is basically the Bureau of Land Management's default use for the vast swaths of federal land. It's like "here is this land, you're allowed to graze on it with a permit." That doesn't produce that many cows—it's more about politics and the fact that much of the land is good for little else besides growing grass.

The real land use from growing meat comes from the land used to grow the corn that feeds the cows. In the article, that's counted as agricultural land, not pasture.

<comment><USER3> >Pasture is basically the Bureau of Land Management's default use for the vast swaths of federal land. It's like "here is this land, you're allowed to graze on it with a permit." That doesn't produce that many cows...

And yet it is an incredibly destructive use of land for so few cows. BLM land is often shrubby desert and is not able to cope with the impacts of the cows and remain a healthy ecosystem.

<comment><USER4> I have the opposite impression, that the grazing of cows on this land is beneficial as it mimics the role the buffalo formerly played.

<comment><USER5> If and only if it's done correctly. Both the above statement and yours are true, it really depends a lot on how it's done.

In most cases it's not done well.

<comment><USER6> To be more specific, the cows should take a bite and move on. This keeps the grass short, but doesn't kill it. With short grass, predators can see prey easier, so birds can eat and deposit droppings to add more nitrogen to the soil.

<comment><USER7> We can simulate buffalo mob grazing with "managed intensive grazing": many cows in a small area for about a day, then they move. In addition to what you said, it manures the land quite evenly. The grass can stay in its fastest- growing "adolescent" stage. Builds topsoil quickly and sequesters unbelievable amounts of carbon. (This is _not_ how most beef is raised.)

<comment><USER8> "This is not how most beef is raised."

It's how most beef _should_ be raised, though, IMO.

Unfortunately, if we were to take all the cows stuck in factory farms and turn them loose on BLM land, I somehow doubt there would be enough food out there for them.

<comment><USER7> Grass-feed cattle farmers tell me it takes almost exactly the same amount of land to graze cows as it does to grow the grain to feed them in a feedlot, so that would be a direction to look: replacing grain farming with ecological grazing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > More than one-third of U.S. land is used for pasture ... There's a single, > major occupant on all this land: cows.

Not here. I live on cow range land, but the cattle are outnumbered by elk. The elk hunting industry here is larger than the cattle industry. Every third local seems to be a hunting guide, and many of those are cow growers too.

This seems to me to be a very positive thing that should be encouraged. Instead of buying all their meat at the local supermarket meat counter thousands of city dwellers dream of the hunt. They buy expensive equipment and tags then come out here and work their asses off for a chance.

Why would anyone spend that much and work that hard for an uncertain outcome unless it was fulfilling in some way? It sure doesn't save money on meat. Hunting forces you to commune with nature, dressing and hauling out your kill rubs your nose in it. It forces you to own responsibility for killing your dinner. Paying the blood price carries meaning that paying $/lb for a BOGO does not.

If we can arrange for more people to harvest their own meat rather than accepting an industrial commodity, more people would have a greater love and understanding of nature, more respect for themselves, and more meaning in their lives. In many places it's a superior use of the range.

<comment><USER10> Having people travel to hunt the meat they eat doesn't scale, though, at all. It's quite simply not possible to use it as a way to improve land use and reduce climate change. Suggestions like yours can be good, but they don't recognize the scale of the changes that are needed. It's the equivalent of trying to get people to buy hybrids to stop climate change - even if everyone could do it, it wouldn't make a dent in the problem.

Even given that hunting provides some kind of spiritual value (which I must admit I'm very skeptical of), it's a value only available to those who are by any reasonable standard quite wealthy (excepting rural people). It takes a lot of time, costs more, and is hard work that a lot of people aren't capable of. A marked increase in demand would make this even more of a problem.

>It forces you to own responsibility for killing your dinner.

I wonder if, faced with this choice, most people would not simply become vegetarians.

<comment><USER11> >I wonder if, faced with this choice, most people would not simply become vegetarians.

Probably not if they had to forage all their foods at current densities.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is plenty of land that could be used for well-managed forest gardens. Bali is an example of a modern economy where people can forage a lot of their calories that way.

<comment><USER11> It would be real nice if our neighborhoods and streets were lined with edible plants. It seems like it could/would be a lot of work to maintain, but with the appropriate tools and planning it might be pretty simple. Non-edible (as far as I know) street trees are already watered by hand (with water trucks) here and they only seem to be used for decoration and shade.

edit: one issue to be careful of is the plants collecting "pollution"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > According to The Land Report magazine, since 2008 the amount of land owned > by the 100 largest private landowners has grown from 28 million acres to 40 > million, an area larger than the state of Florida.

Wow, it's almost 50% increase in just 10 years.

<comment><USER13> Inequality in land ownership has been continuously increasing in the United States since the 1930s. Higher property tax rates on land ownership are needed to reverse it, as well as the elimination of property tax exemptions which the owners of non-profits, private forests, golf courses, etc are currently receiving.

<comment><USER14> Why is it a problem that those people are buying more land? If anything, a single owner that doesn't need the land for economic purposes can protect it much better than a bunch of individual people. My point is that people assume automatically that this is bad and must be stopped. Maybe it is good?

<comment><USER15> Concentrated ownership is power. Power tends to corrupt.

<comment><USER16> Yes, accountability and balance are the main issues. Hoping people will be good doesn't tend to work out well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looking at that map, Between livestock pasture, feed and feed export it accounts for around 45% of the US. Food that we eat is only a small fraction.

Isn't this a huge waste of resources, and completely unsustainable?

If we ate the produce directly instead of feeding it to cows and eating them, how many people could we feed?

What about the gigantic consumption of water this implies?

The link between this to global warming and climate change is undeniable.

<comment><USER18> You're comparing alfalfa and oranges. You're not going to grow wheat on pastureland that can support sheep or cattle. Much less other vegetables.

You're also making the assumption that agricultural land is a resource that needs conservation, when there is a massive surplus of it. We've allowed huge tracts to revert to forest on the east coast.

<comment><USER19> 65% of the grain grown in the US is fed to animals:

[https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food- fuel...](https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel-animal- feed)

Start feeding that directly to people instead and you can use the rest of that land a lot more efficiently. And that's not even addressing all the other nasty externalities of breeding that many animals.

<comment><USER20> More efficiently for what?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How about a private company (Weyerhaeuser) owning 12.4 million acres of timberlands. It's about twice the size of Maryland!

<comment><USER22> Growing timber like Weyerhaeuser does should probably be counted as cropland. They grow mono-culture trees the same way most farmers grow corn, but instead of harvesting every year it's every couple decades.

The very last line is what bothers me the most:

 _" since 2008 the amount of land owned by the 100 largest private landowners has grown from 28 million acres to 40 million, an area larger than the state of Florida."_

That much land-wealth locked up by a handful of individuals seems like yet another knock against economic mobility. At one time people feared that sort of wealth concentration could mean a return of the aristocracy and was slowed somewhat through estate taxes.

<comment><USER23> If Ted Turner is who they're talking about it's mainly useless land and he doesn't even own the mineral rights.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "With so much of the U.S. population in urban areas, it's little surprise that these areas contribute an outsize amount to the economy. The 10 most productive metropolitan areas alone contributed to about 40 percent of U.S. GDP in 2016."

I always find facts like this misleading, not purposefully so but misleading all the same. Take a semi-random example, PepsiCO. HQ in NY, Incorporated in NC, 250k + employees, 60B+ revenue. This is a huge company with many brands and global sales. They are stocked and sold all over the world with factories, distribution centers, sales centers, etc all over the place.

Does the NY metropolitan area claim all 60B in productivity?

Weyerhauser is another interesting company. For 100 years they were based on of Federal Way and only recently moved to Seattle (probably same metro area anyway). Obviously their bread and butter, timber, is not grown, harvested or converted into product in the metro area. The CEO lives in Seattle but the thousands of lumberjacks and mill workers are not in urban areas. The employees that "do the work" are not in urban areas. That last sentence isn't meant to be inflamatory but it was the best wording I could think of.

Some companies, maybe Facebook, do generate the vast majority from the HQ in an urban area.

It is beyond my skills to figure it out but I think an equally cool map/graph/infographic (I do think this is cool, just a small nitpick here) would be to break down how and where companies actually generate their revenue.

Another possibility- I don't know what I am talking about and these stats already take this into account.

</comment><comment><USER25> This really looks like what theoutline.com does now.

I can't imagine bloomberg.com would be creating this sort of web experience without whatever Topolsky did while he was there.

</comment><comment><USER26> The portion of the country owned by Weyerhaeuser, shown in the map at the bottom of the article, is astounding. According to Wikipedia they own or control nearly 12.4 million acres of timberlands in the U.S. and manage an additional 14.0 million acres timberlands under long-term licenses in Canada.

</comment><comment><USER27> Whoa, America has lot of golf courses!

</comment><comment><USER28> That graphic at the end is a great way to explain how much area is used for our meat eating habit. Think of all the land which is not being used for... anything else. We are truly ecologically privileged to be able to create such a huge impact in order to eat meat.

Incredible.

<comment><USER29> A lot less impressive when you recognize most grazing land isn't much good for anything else.

<comment><USER28> It is a pretty significant diversion of land from a natural state though. Cattle grazing, thought it isn't an ecological disaster like dam building, is quite different than leaving the land untouched.

Plus, a good portion of the country's good farmland is diverted to growing feed for those animals.

Think of it like: how many acres have been changed from a natural ecosystem to an artificial one for meat eating.

<comment><USER30> >Cattle grazing, thought it isn't an ecological disaster like dam building, is quite different than leaving the land untouched.

Leaving the land untouched is even more 'ecologically privileged' than using it to make expensive food.

>Plus, a good portion of the country's good farmland is diverted to growing feed for those animals.

Growing feed (hay/grass) is much easier than growing things like almonds. If a farmer could grow something humans would pay for directly rather than hay, they would.

<comment><USER31> Given the colossal and uneven levels of subsidies in US agriculture, I'd be reluctant to draw any conclusions about what the market is willing to bear.

<comment><USER32> US agriculture subsidies are not colossal in fact. They're about $20-$25 billion per year. They shouldn't exist at all ideally, however given the immense size of the US agriculture market, and how critical it is to keeping hundreds of millions of people alive, it's hardly a concerning sum.

By contrast, EU farm subsidies in a smaller economy are three times that size. If the US farm subsidies are colossal, I'm not sure what you'd call 3x colossal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Huh. When you look at the graphics which concentrate all the urbanized land on the northeast coast, it looks like our total urban area is close to the size of Mega-City One. Cool.

</comment><comment><USER34> interesting article but i couldn't get the entire map to fit on my (13 inch) screen no matter how I adjusted the browser. Very annoying.

<comment><USER35> You should let the reporters know you can't see the image. I'm sure they would appreciate the feedback and fix it right away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I find the scroll UI for this really annoying. It gets stuck on the bottom of my screen until the last image.

</comment><comment><USER37> If urban (built-up) areas have quadrupled since the 50's, I don't think that pace can continue unabated. Population has roughly doubled since then. It would seem the trend would require denser cities and suburbs, which should not be too difficult given that most metro areas are relatively low density.

<comment><USER31> The United States has a population density of 86 people per square mile. In Britain it's 704, in the Netherlands it's 1075 and in Singapore it's 20,192. You've got plenty of room.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density)

<comment><USER38> While im sure they don't utilize all of their available farm land, it is worth mentioning that Britain imports almost 30% of their food, which means they are at or near the limit of sustainably feeding themselves, and even then almost 60% of the world's crop yield is the direct result of fossil fuel derived fertilizer, which we are going to have to give up soon if we don't all want to be cooked alive, which will increase the energy costs of fertilizer production 10 fold. The US would be hard pressed to find similar external sources of food if their population density rose significantly higher. Especially on top of all the desert and arid grassland areas that are pretty poor for farming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> 56 million acres are Indian reservations and should probably be marked as such.

<comment><USER40> Reservations are a political boundary, this is a map of land use. You'd have a fair argument that the state boundaries shown on that map should reflect the reservations too, but not that the color key should include the nature of the local government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I really enjoyed this page's UI on a mobile device.

</comment><comment><USER42> * Here's How The United States Uses Its Land

</comment><comment><USER43> Excellent well presented interesting analytical article. No surprise (but still remarkable) that Americans use more land for Golf than growing vegetables. Tragic though the insane amount of land used to grow biofuel, must be one of the most idiotic decisions ever made by politicians, cow towing to the anti (life giving) CO2 cult.

<comment><USER44> > Tragic though the insane amount of land used to grow biofuel

Out of curiosity, why do you think it's tragic? Aren't these fuels used for experimentation with sustainable energy?</comment></comment>


Manchester's bike-share scheme isn't working - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/16/manchesters-bike-share-scheme-isnt-working-because-people-dont-know-how-to-share <comment><USER2> The article goes on to explain that Manchester's bike share _is_ working, doing 4,000 trips a day, that of their 1,000 bike fleet only 50 so far have been trashed, and that Mobike is proactive about recovering bikes being kept on private property when not in use.</comment>


Yahoo's Marissa Mayer on Selling a Company While Trying to Turn It Around - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-marissa-mayer-interview-issue/ <comment><USER2> > My husband [the venture capital investor Zachary Bogue] runs a co-working > office in San Francisco. He runs his company out of there and other startups > cycle through. And if you go in on a Saturday afternoon, I can tell you > which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there > on the weekend is a huge indicator of success, mostly because these > companies just don't happen. They happen because of really hard work.

I bet if you tell me only these three things, I'll have a more accurate prediction of which startups will succeed:

* Founder's parents' income

* Founder's parents' education level

* Number of people with over $1M liquid assets that founder knows or has "social access" to

<comment><USER3> > * Founder's parents' income

I find this to be one of the biggest indicators. I have friends whose parents are extremely wealthy and they tried all sorts of random careers before finally settling on something. For them there was zero real risk since they always had their parents to fall back on. One's dad even told him to come up with a business idea and he would fund it and help him make it happen. Instead he goofed around for awhile, before simply going back to school.

Personally, I'm more irked at potential wasted than jealous. I have no one to fall back on, and that has made me fiercely independent, but also very risk conscious. The good thing is that it is easier than every to bootstrap ideas with minimal time.

<comment><USER4> This is a good argument for a basic income, combined with free healthcare and higher education.

I suspect that lowering the risk of entrepreneurship could unlock enormous innovation potential for society.

<comment><USER5> Two thirds of the above seem to exist in Denmark (and a few other European countries) with no visible improvements to the entrepreneurial scene (I struggle to come up with a Danish startup success story that's been founded in the last decade or two).

<comment><USER6> They're there if you just do a little Googling. Unity Technologies, SteelSeries, Zendesk come to mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _"Could you work 130 hours in a week?" The answer is yes, if you're strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom. The nap rooms at Google were there because it was safer to stay in the office than walk to your car at 3 a.m. For my first five years, I did at least one all-nighter a week_

Really? I always thought that pulling all-nighters hurts more than it helps. Optimizing your bathroom breaks seems really silly to me.

<comment><USER8> Some people work to live and, well, Marissa chooses to live to work. Some people cannot help but revolve their lives around their job 24/7.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. A good indicator of that is when you start micromanaging your bathroom breaks, i.e. when not only your mental life but also your bodily functions get subordinated to corporate success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _The other piece that gets overlooked in the Google story is the value of hard work. When reporters write about Google, they write about it as if it was inevitable. The actual experience was more like, "Could you work 130 hours in a week?" The answer is yes, if you're strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom. The nap rooms at Google were there because it was safer to stay in the office than walk to your car at 3 a.m. For my first five years, I did at least one all-nighter a week, except when I was on vacation—and the vacations were few and far between.

My husband [the venture capital investor Zachary Bogue] runs a co-working office in San Francisco. He runs his company out of there and other startups cycle through. And if you go in on a Saturday afternoon, I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success, mostly because these companies just don't happen. They happen because of really hard work._

This was actually the part I found most surprising and interesting. One the one hand, it's scary that you have to put in insanely long hours like that to succeed. But on the other hand, it's liberating knowing that one of the keys to success, is something everyone has access to.

If some random person had made the above comments, I would have laughed them off as an insane workaholic. But knowing that this advice is coming from someone's who's seen it first hand at early-stage-Google, and many other startups... it's hard to ignore it, no matter how much I may want to.

<comment><USER11> The amount you work is one of the few variables in your control. I'm still a believer that luck plays a bigger role than most will give credit.

Also, people tend to think they work harder than they actually do. I'm sure they worked hard, but there's almost no chance they were working 130 hour weeks, certainly not consistently. There are only 168 hours in a week. I also don't believe the one all-nighter a week line. Working like this would completely destroy your productivity.

<comment><USER12> I found this especially true in US culture.

There seems to be a lot of "showing off" of and around your work.

<comment><USER13> Yep, not just in work, but in personal life too. Everyone is always so "busy" but if you actually probe, it's mostly false or exaggerated. I don't know why having free time is such a dirty word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've never been more convinced Yahoo is a 20th century company with 20th century ideals. It's no wonder they can't survive in the 21st.

I'm sure she has a whole staff of weekend workers that spend quite a lot of time making sure you know just how much they're working.

<comment><USER15> You are reading far more into this interview than she actually said.

<comment><USER14> My comment was made in the context of her entire tenure. Though I think she said plenty about her definition of success and hard work in this interview to justify my statement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The bit she has in here about knowing which companies will succeed based on who's there on the weekends is such a crock of shit. It's like she's saying all the ones that failed it's because the people involved didn't work hard enough. That is so condescending and insulting.

Start ups fail for all kinds of reasons, sure sometimes it's because people didn't work hard enough. But not remotely always. Sometimes an idea just doesn't pan out. Sometimes people get screwed by a bad choice, sometimes that bad choice was made _because_ they were working so hard they weren't thinking straight.

Any kind of statement like saying that you can tell which start ups will succeed or fail based on a single criteria is just hubris and obviously wrong.

<comment><USER17> I agree. The difference between 40-80 a week isn't that much when you can consider some places you can get by doing just a few hours of work. If you create an atmosphere where people are excited to work then you are perhaps 20x more productive than some other companies.

<comment><USER18> maybe she is saying that yahoo failed cause ppl didnt work hard enough

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19>
      > If I'd stuck to my original five-year plan
      > when I was 18, I would have missed every
      > great thing that ever happened to me.

I'm not a fan of five-year plans, or any x-year plans, but this sounds very passive - in the sense of 'happened _to_ me'.

Which sounds out of place in the context of the other advice <sic> provided - such as 'work Saturdays to guarantee success', 'make a choice and stick to it and make it great', 'it's safer to keep working than walk to your car', and the Alibaba question dodge.

Clearly we live in different worlds.

<comment><USER20> Her 5 year plan at 18 probably didn't include working 130 hour weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> _There are some mothers who want to work; there are some mothers who need to work; there are some mothers who want to stay home; there are some mothers who need to stay home_

Interesting quote from the boss that banned working from home!

<comment><USER22> Why?

<comment><USER23> Because this is the woman who had a _nursery_ built in her office so that someone would attend to her kids while she worked, while at the same time _not_ extending this same courtesy to any of her female employees.

Cutting off the ability to work remotely, which is how most people who cannot afford child care manage small children, sends the message that she is uniquely allowed to work and be a mom, while everyone else can pound sand.

<comment><USER24> >Cutting off the ability to work remotely, which is how most people who cannot afford child care manage small children

I haven't seen anyone who can look after a small child and work at the same time. Either you're working or looking after the child.

On the other hand if your argument is that Yahoo should have offered discounted childcare on onsite that Marissa received, then your argument makes perfect sense.

<comment><USER23> I don't agree, particularly for a developer role. I've known developers who worked remotely specifically for this reason, that they could not afford daycare. Developers tend to be tracked more based on hours logged into a project than being in one's desk from 9-5, so the general concensus was that if they punched in their 40 hours and met deadlines, no one really cared where those 40 hours came from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > The other piece that gets overlooked in the Google story is the value of > hard work. When reporters write about Google, they write about it as if it > was inevitable. The actual experience was more like, "Could you work 130 > hours in a week?" The answer is yes, if you're strategic about when you > sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.

You could add to that "and care not a jot about the quality of the decisions you're making."

</comment><comment><USER26> > But I would never have a five-year plan. If I'd stuck to my original five- > year plan when I was 18, I would have missed every great thing that ever > happened to me.

_____

As someone who just created the general outline of a five-year plan (my first one), I'm wondering what other HNers have to say about the subject.

<comment><USER27> "Plans are useless. Planning is vital." \-- attr. Eisenhower.

That is, you need to do the planning to look around and see e.g. what your strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats are, what your objectives are, and what direction to set out in. Otherwise you run the risk of paralysis or being permanently _behind_ events.

On the other hand, reality deviates from the plan immediately, for better or for worse. But at least you have the information gathered from the planning phase to re-plan from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm currently watching a Stanford class online called blitz scaling and recently saw the class in which they brought in Marissa Mayer. I enjoyed it but it bothers me that a lot of what she says in this interview is word for word the same things she said in the video. Must have a memorized speech for this type of thing.

</comment><comment><USER29> marissa mayer values hours at work; she'd better because she's logged a lot and accomplished basically nothing as yahoo's "boss". below the article, stan lee talks about bosses:

"What's the worst advice you ever got? Listen to what your boss tells you. My boss never liked the idea of Spider-Man. He didn't want to do it. I had to sneak Spider-Man into another book, over my boss's head. Experts really know nothing."

</comment><comment><USER30> _> In the Midwest, where I grew up, you shrug off a compliment like that and think a lot of people in the world are really busy, like President Obama. And then President Obama started posting YouTube videos for fun._

I have nothing against Marissa Mayer and some respects really appreciate having a prominent female CEO but did anyone else find that shocking that she would say that? I mean she is a CEO. Wouldn't she want to avoid talking about US political figures. Also I'm not really sure if it is a dig or a compliment. It could be a compliment. Lots of busy people can have the facade of looking like they have relaxing lives which takes even more work.

There is also an intensity factor of work. Some work is insanely intense both physically and mentally and you just can't do 130 hours. I did consulting for 40 hours a month for a brief period. Those 40 hours felt like 40 hours a week. Meanwhile I worked on my own startup and early in its fledgling years my wife complained about how many hours I worked (she claims more than 90 hours) but to me it felt like 40 hour work week.

</comment><comment><USER31> "Will you stay at Yahoo indefinitely? - I plan to stay. I love the company, and I want to see it go into its next chapter."

Anyone want to take that bet?

<comment><USER32> Until the deal is fully closed, or only ancillary closing conditions remain to be met, she kind of has to say that. Also for her golden parachute to deploy, she has to be let go so she can't sound as if she wants to quit.

Actually stay? I have trouble seeing it. Only if she's got some guaranteed line of sight on the VZW ceo gig, but Armstrong and many others will contend there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> >> And if you go in on a Saturday afternoon, I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success, mostly because these companies just don't happen. They happen because of really hard work.

Do people still think you can get away with 40-50 hours when the next guy is just as good as you and putting in 80?

<comment><USER34> I don't think that many people working 80 hours a week for months can be just as good as people of the same skill level working only 40.

<comment><USER3> There are times in a startup when it is a race. Those working 80 will beat those working 40. Can those working 80 do that forever? No, but if it helps them put the ones working 40 out of business they do not need to work 80 forever.

I think the real key is recognizing when working more will help.

<comment><USER35> An example would be nice as I cannot think of any.

<comment><USER36> Basically most of the companies mentioned in Founders at Work.[1]

There are several common themes to why all those companies had to put in crazy hours but one theme that sticks out is the _" oh shit, the user count is growing like crazy and we've got to scale out our servers to handle the exponential workload like YESTERDAY or we're going to DIE!"_

It happened to the Youtube engineers, Google, Napster, Etsy, etc. It's a stressful combination of fighting fires and adding capacity at the same time.

For horizontal scaling re-architecting & re-engineering, there is no commercial off-the-shelf or open-source software that let's you install it in one afternoon such that all programmers can just work 40 hours a week without a hiccup. Today, you can't just install a distributed database like Cassandra and fire up more AWS instances and assume those newer technologies that the previous _Founders at Work_ didn't have will prevent _your_ employees from putting in 80 hour weeks _for months_.

Going from a single instance database to handle 10k to 100k users to a sharded distributed db to handle 100 million is not going to be a 40-hour a week job for startup employees. If any companies have done it with zero overtime, please write a blog highlighting your user traffic growth, database sizes, and migration strategy. That would be a very impressive achievement.

[1] [http://www.foundersatwork.com/interviews.html](http://www.foundersatwork.com/interviews.html)

<comment><USER35> You are right, thanks. I have misunderstood it as being a race against some other company/team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anyone that has the discipline to work 130 hours a week doesn't need to take a job at a startup.

<comment><USER29> when i graduated from college, the ibank analysts were the ones declaring "120 hour work weeks!". none of them worked that much, but it's funny that the lie has gotten even bigger ("130!").

<comment><USER37> The whole "work until you can't think at all" thing really does sound like propaganda, doesn't it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Boy, I disagree with Mayer's take on sustained crunch => success. But she seems to repeat it.

> _When reporters write about Google, they write about it as if it was > inevitable. The actual experience was more like, "Could you work 130 hours > in a week?" The answer is yes, if you're strategic about when you sleep, > when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom_

This is fine in spurts but doing it on a sustained basis is actually suboptimal. Crunch time for extended periods is _bad_ for problem-solving and for productivity. There are critical periods where it can be productive... when the team is all obsessed in tackling a crisis or timely opportunity. But sustaining this for more than several weeks a year at most in total is actually detrimental.

> _I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they > do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success_

No. This is not true. At best, this is a gross oversimplification.

And it's disheartening to see Mayer hammering this single point over and over. It almost seems like a point of pride for her... which leads to:

> _There was a moment when someone said to me, "Wow, you might be the busiest > person on the planet." In the Midwest, where I grew up, you shrug off a > compliment like that and think a lot of people in the world are really > busy, like President Obama. And then President Obama started posting YouTube > videos for fun._

Alright, douchey-ness of this humble brag (let alone humble-brag in even glancing comparing yourself to the POTUS) aside, this underscores again the obsession with hours worked. I just vehemently disagree with this. Valuable output and quality matter most, not hours worked. It's highly questionable to claim that more hours worked leads to greater overall value of output. Beyond some threshold (which I believe varies person by person), there is an asymptotic incremental contribution to total valuable output. And at some point, total value of output declines, where the incremental contribution of more time worked in a given period is _negative_.

This is an unhealthy and unhelpful view.

Moving onto totally different topics...

> > _Does it bother you that your parenting choices were criticized?

> In my view, there's just entirely too much judgment over motherhood..._

Here, here! Totally agree.

> _I would never have a five-year plan. If I'd stuck to my original five-year > plan when I was 18, I would have missed every great thing that ever happened > to me._

Agree very much again. I think you can have high-level achievement goals, but not a specific destination or path laid out for getting there. Having fungible plans is usually wisest because every day you have more information than you did before and every day you have a chance of encountering a previously unknown opportunity. Need to be open to leveraging that information and those opportunities when it's called for, as opposed to sticking to a rigid plan.

> _We had shareholders with two different priorities. We have some people who > owned Yahoo stock because they really cared about digital advertising and > the internet and a possible turnaround there. And we had another set of > stakeholders who owned it because they saw a lot of positive transactions > that could happen with these very large, lucrative Asian assets. And we had > duties to both as the executive team of the company._

That is totally fair. I think Mayer's biggest failing was not recognizing this early enough and not being proactive enough about resolving it. It was a disaster waiting to happen. She and the company seemed very focused on the turnaround early on, and overly committed to holding the assets together. Recognizing from the get go that Yahoo had different shareholder groups -- and in particular that Yahoo was or easily could become the target of activist investors -- it is surprising that this wasn't addressed boldly, head-on, quickly.

It seems the company (and Mayer) could have landed in a much better spot if they'd been proactive in selling off or restructuring assets. If they ended up in a spot where they're splitting up assets amyway, it might have been better to do that from the get go and use it as a way to clean up the shareholder base at the same time. _Plenty_ of PE and IB firms would have been interested in helping to do a structured deal around Yahoo's investment assets and this might have positioned Yahoo much, much better to execute the turnaround Mayer seems to have clearly wanted to focus on (stronger balance sheet, less ammo for activist investors, opportunity to clear out unhelpful shareholders, perhaps even an opportunity to go private, if that would have been helpful).

Shame this didn't happen.

<comment><USER18> the funny thing is that, imagine business is a car and CEO is the driver. if you step on gas (working harder) but heading toward the wrong direction, you would end up further away from the destination.

to me Mayer is saying Yahoo did not get over the hump cause they dont have enough determination, while failed to acknowledge that she drove them the wrong direction past few years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> All that we've learned from her now makes me question whether she was actually useful while at Google.

Seems like she a walking business cliche. Can anyone counter this with evidence of her creativity?

</comment><comment><USER39> I digress... but surely they could have selected a better photo of her in their article.

<comment><USER40> I find it charming and human</comment></comment>


The GraphQL Sweet Spot - <AUTHOR> https://productionreadygraphql.com/blog/2020-05-14-sweetspot <comment><USER2> Rather than looking at generic abstract classes of use (such as "multiple internal clients") I think a more valuable discussion would have been a look at what specific use cases work well for graphql such as answering questions like:

"What products did customer X order last month"

The resolvers for this query are likely easy to create and perform well against most data sources even those with limited support for indexing. They also will likely work nicely even if products and customers are different databases or even database architectures.

Vs use cases where graphql does not work well such as attempts to answer questions like:

"What is the ranking of customer X in terms of our profitability last month?"

If this result is not pre-calculated and if customers, sales, products, and shipping costs come from four different data sources then this can be very tricky and really cannot be answered efficiently.

I fully admit there are ways to work around these potential pain points, but people should know that answering questions like the above can be way harder to answer via GQL than (I at least) expected.

We drank the Cool Aid on our first GQL based implementation without understanding:

1) Cross resolver math is unexpectedly tricky

2) Summarizing data in resolvers is unexpectedly tricky and expensive

3) Sorting and ranking data points is unexpectedly tricky and expensive

4) doing all of the above is crazy difficult compared to what we had been lead to believe.</comment>


Cryptocurrencies 'unlikely to survive' in the coming decade, says Goldman Sachs - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/goldman-sachs-cryptocurrency-bitcoin-future-crash-steve-strongin-investment-trading-a8199281.html <comment><USER2> Yeah, no. Bitcoin has issues of trade speed, but alt-coin and things like XRP Ripple are going to be used to keep transfer fees down. If lightening market can fix high fees and transfer speeds, bitcoin will stick around, if not...

People and companies have tasted the experience and freedom of bypassing payment processors, they wont go away, it will just evolve.</comment>


Show HN: Supp – Browser Extn for Mindful Status Management in WFH-Heavy World - <AUTHOR> https://suppme.netlify.app/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HackerNews!

Supp is a simple browser extension for mindful status management. You can form group with your coworkers or friends, and Supp gives you an instant glance at what they are doing & who's free or busy.

 _The Idea_

It's designed mainly for the current remote/WFH heavy workspace, where working peacefully has, startlingly, become quite challenging.There are too many sync- ups, just to know what everyone is doing in the team.Along with frequent Slack/Hangouts messages like "Are you available for a call?", "What are you doing?". Not to mention some people who don't even bother to ask your availability before shooting out their pings.

I was unable to find disturbance-free time to focus on my own work and wished there was an automated way to know what everyone was doing & see if someone is free to be bothered with or not before pinging them.

Been there, felt that? Supp is for you!</comment>


3 UX Ideas to Help HelloFax - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jasonshah.org/post/16953641110/3-ux-ideas-to-help-hellofax

<comment><USER2> Great ideas. I'd love to see more sites incorporate their actual value add to the user into the sign up process. If your site is about uploading images, get me to do that BEFORE I sign up. If your site is about participating in a conversation, let me participate before asking me for my credentials. You don't have to actually allow the action to proceed before sign up, but you can let the user in to see where the magic happens and, with any luck, they'll already be invested in going further.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree in a lot of ways. Apparently HelloFax tried incorporated file uploads into the sign up process, but it dropped conversions. I wonder though if it's OK to see registrations drop if it increases long term engagement and value of users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You have some really great analysis here. I'd challenge you to mock up what the solution might be since that more clearly communicates your intent. Otherwise, it feels like a usability session rather than a holistic UX review. As they say, a good idea is only as good as you can communicate it. HelloFax would definitely benefit from your work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback and challenge. I'm definitely planning on doing some mocks of these recommendations and the ones I have done for Listia and CarWoo! soon. You're absolutely right in saying how important communicating the idea is, and I think it's always more valuable to have a suggested improvement than just a criticism, too.

So, mockups on the way!</comment></comment>


Military Leaders Are Starting to Freak Out Over Russia's Info Warfare Dominance - <AUTHOR> https://taskandpurpose.com/russia-information-war/ <comment><USER2> What worries me more than a bunch of trolls in Moscow is this fashionable belief in the West that democracy cannot work because people are idiots whose vote can be turned by a meme on Facebook. If people didn't vote for your party, it's because people were not attracted by your party, mkay?

<comment><USER3> > fashionable belief in the West that democracy cannot work because people are > idiots whose vote can be turned by a meme on Facebook.

Eh, it's more than people are suseptible to confirmation bias, and the meme ads on facebook re-enforce the beliefs imparted upon them by <insert preferred single "news" source here>.

> If people didn't vote for your party, it's because people were not attracted > by your party, mkay?

May the most entertaining party win!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Put simply, Russia seems to be playing chess, while the U.S. is trying to figure out how to set up the board to play checkers."

This doesn't surprise me as they need to play on an asymmetrical board.

</comment><comment><USER5> Meanwhile, the US government is pushing toward cloud computing. I hope they know how to make it secure.

<comment><USER6> They don't. That's why they're passing the buck to someone who can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> And what so? Western countries are free democracies that don't spend 1 billion buck a year on propaganda, sedition, sabotage and subversion.

The West has no need to resort to underhanded tricks, and should not resort to a mirror version of Russian information warfare.

<comment><USER8> That's how you lose a war, whether it be a conventional one or a geopolitical one.

<comment><USER7> People with moral integrity win wars against ones without, will keyboard warriors stand the ground when confronted by an enemy paratrooper pointing a rifle on them, or will they prostrate and beg mercy saying "I only edited articles"...

<comment><USER9> It doesn't work like that btw :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Truth was an effective weapon in the Cold War.

Fake news seems to be effective in Cold War 2.

Hopefully the efficacy of truth outweighs fake news moving forward.

<comment><USER3> 'fake news' really isn't a new creation. Propoganda was an effective weapon in the Cold War, both world wars, and a staple of politics since, well, forever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "The Russians are really good at this. Better than us"

I disagree. US LE and intelligence services are at least as good at subverting the security of US information systems as Russians. State and local governments have taken all practical and legal measures to make it worse for my entire life by:

\--banning and nerfing crypto (from the old export ban to present),

\--hoarding vulnerabilities,

\--prosecuting whistle-blowers who threaten to embarrass large companies,

\--chilling research with vague and draconian hacking laws (CFAA),

\--turning an indifferent eye to dangerously invalid security assumptions underlying telecom, payment systems, data brokers (cellular, ACH, CC/MCVISA, Experian et. all)

\--and then getting into turf wars over who gets to exploit those defective systems in secret...

...and just hoping no one outside our jurisdiction will notice.

The military has made mistakes like this too. Remember that time that they used unencrypted video transmission for the MQ-9 predator drone? Someone noticed.* The strategy that "the best defense is a good offense" is probably not appropriate for information security.

Part of this is an economic problem as described, for example, by Schneier in his recent Op-Ed. __There is little short term incentive for vendors to accept the opportunity cost of building secure systems; if you can't write it yourself a parade of ethically questionable, bumbling contractors (HBGary?) will sell you after the fact solutions.

Hopefully the US military takes it's own operational security seriously enough to keep soldiers from carrying off-the-shelf commercial cell phones, as the Ukrainians reportedly did. Maybe this is harder than it sounds; it's apparently hard even to keep presidents from trying to do this. It appears demonstrably unrealistic to expect that government personnel will remain unaffected by the insecure systems used by unwashed masses of civilians. The actual attacks discussed in the article are mostly against large scale public infrastructure. The root of these problems is not really something you can shoot at.

The article offers a number of quotes like the following, by Major General Gedney: "It's got to be operationalized down into a genuine multi-domain battle." I really have no idea what this means, but I sure hope it means "instead of government agencies undermining civilian infosec and then using the vulnerabilities to advance our parochial interests, let's help the private sector fix it, or at least get out of the way."

* "In 2009, it was discovered that insurgents successfully intercepted video feeds from unmanned platforms using cheap software to exploit the use of unencrypted data links between the unmanned system and the ground control station." RAND Corporation. 2014. ([https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/...](https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR600/RR626/RAND_RR626.pdf))

 __'Internet Hacking Is About to Get Much Worse'. Schneier.[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/opinion/internet- hacking-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/opinion/internet-hacking- cybersecurity-iot.html)</comment>


Twitter Reducing Some Tweets to Just 117 Characters - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/12/07/twitter-url-117-characters/ <comment><USER2> Wow, that's a trollish headline. Of course if you add a URL to a tweet you will have fewer characters left _for the rest of your tweet_.</comment>


Charge more for app subscriptions - <AUTHOR> https://mronge.com/why-you-should-charge-more-for-your-app-subscriptions/ <comment><USER2> This analysis is very US/Euro-centric.

Bumping the price from US$20 to US$100 might indeed allow you to focus more on your _most dedicated customers_.

It also bumps the price way above anything that billions of people around the world can pay for such a thing.

At Ardour, we have 3 subscription price levels:

       Regular: US$10/month
       Low Cost: US$4/month
       Developing World: US$1/month

We leave it to users to decide which category to select. Maybe you don't care about people in Senegal or Bangladesh or the Phillipines. That's certain an option, but some demonstration that this has crossed your mind is probably a good idea.

It may also be important that on a technical level, our subscriptions are not like e.g. Adobe's. Stop subscribing to this GPL'ed software and nothing changes except for your ability to get updates for free.

<comment><USER3> I wrote a tool to calculate product or service prices for different parts of the world based on the Big Mac Index (the price of a local mcdonalds lunch burger). That method makes more sense to me because all your customers have a similar point of reference.

McD is thought of as a premium product in some very poor areas, but on the whole they aim for mass market affordability, which makes it a fair comparison.

[https://bigmacpricing.com/](https://bigmacpricing.com/)

<comment><USER4> This is cool. I think it would be helpful if the input was in terms of units of currency, rather than Big Macs.

Like: I want to charge €10 a month for my product in the EU. Use the Big Mac pricing model to tell me what that is in Brazil.

According to your site, a Big Mac in the EU is €4.21 (is it really the same across all EU countries?) which means €1 buys you 0.237 burgers. €10 is therefore 2.37 burgers. At the current Brazilian price of 20.9 BRL per burger, you should charge 2.37 * 20.9 = 49.53 BRL (at the time of writing Google says €10 is worth 62 BRL)

<comment><USER3> Yup, I need that too. Will add it in.

The Euro zone is reported as a single economic zone in the index (it's published by the Economist). I'm not sure if the prices are actually exactly the same, but from an economic reference point of view, they ought to be. I'm sure there are differences in the prices within each city that McD operates in as well... the currency prices are probably an average.

<comment><USER5> I assure you, a Big Mac in the Netherlands will cost more than a Big Mac in Latvia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The higher revenues for onetime purchase show the weakness of subscriptions vs the old upgrade model, and I wish Apple would understand it. Subscriptions carry the fear of paying for something you won't be using, or being nickel and dimed for years on end.

Upgrades are a much simpler purchase decision. Am I using the app? Is it offering a good value? Does the upgrade provide new features I want or need at a reasonable price?

Some customers will say no to one of those questions at first, but eventually change their minds. Like subscriptions this model matches revenues to usage, so engaged customers support future development. iOS would be a much better platform with easy upgrades vs. easy subscriptions.

<comment><USER7> This. With very few exceptions (content subscriptions (e.g. Netflix) and services that have a server-side component core to its functionality (e.g. Dropbox)), I avoid subscriptions like the plague.

With applications, I don't choose between more or less expensive subscription, but I'll chose your competitor who sells upfront.

<comment><USER8> The way I see it: unless you're putting in a bunch of monthly resources for me (in terms of content creation or server resources), you have no business charging me a recurring fee. If it's essentially an offline app (or easily could be) then I'm either paying up front or not at all. I've passed up on many apps that I would have happily paid for (in some cases up to about $100), but was unwilling to pay a subscription of any cost.

<comment><USER9> ES Explorer, I'm looking at you

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Whenever I read "charge more," I think of the implicit assumption that service owners want to maximize total profit.

While I can understand that desire, there's no law of nature that says we have to act in a profit-maximizing manner. A SaaS service could have a different goal: running a sustainable business that benefits as many people as possible.

So they could choose to charge a deliberately low amount such that more people can afford to or are willing to pay for it, while also charging a high enough amount that the business is financially sustainable.

<comment><USER11> I can't see how charging less would help with running a sustainable business. I would imagine charging more would help with that.

<comment><USER12> Parent never said that. Charging less helps with the goal of having a sustainable business that benefits as many people as possible because it lowers the barrier of entry.

<comment><USER13> Maybe, but it's also possible that if you charge too little, people subscribe but don't benefit, because they don't use the service much.

Subscribing doesn't necessarily imply benefitting, but the higher the price, the more correlated these are likely to be.

<comment><USER12> If people don't use your product if they don't have the pressure of sunken cost, then maybe they're not really benefitting either way.

<comment><USER13> The whole point of subscriptions is that they aren't _sunken_ cost.

<comment><USER14> If I subscribe to something for a month, and then feel compelled to use it that month instead of some better tool because I paid for it, I would say that's a sunken cost.

A time limited one, but still there.

<comment><USER13> Technically true, but seems like an exotic case, and proves the point that sunk cost isn't a substantial issue here.

<comment><USER14> >Seems like an exotic case,

I've worked with enough people who used adobe because "I've already payed for this month, so I have to use this" that I'm not sure it's that exotic.

And while sunk cost may not be a huge issue, it's definitely still there.

I'm not going to make any sort of comment on anything else in this thread, because I don't really know what I'm talking about.

However, I don't see how it's possible for someone to derive more benefit from an app overall by paying a higher subscription.

Your subscribers might correlate better with people who are benefiting, but for an individual, either they [Pay less and have the same amount of possible benefit] or [Pay more and have the same amount of possible benefit]. How does it work out that they get better value from the second option?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The way to fix app "subscriptions" is not to charge more (or less) but to fix the customer-hostile structure of app "subscriptions".

The big issue with app "subscriptions" is that they don't actually work like subscriptions.

Before the digital age, "subscription" used to mean (and for physical products it still means) that you get regular delivery of something as long as you pay. If you stop paying, you no longer get more stuff, but you get to keep whatever you already received. You don't have to return your back issues of the newspaper when you cancel your subscription. Arguably TV subscriptions have always been an exception, but functionally they're not because you can record TV.

App "subscriptions" are different. Developers like to emphasize how they fund sustained future development of an app, but the reality is that when you cancel you usually lose access even to current features (you arguably already helped pay for).

The way app subscriptions _should_ work is that you can perpetually keep using whatever version of the app was current when you stopped paying (Jetbrains actually does this, and I salute them for it: [https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en- gb/articles/207240845-What...](https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en- gb/articles/207240845-What-is-perpetual-fallback- license-?_ga=2.179586276.1564311569.1599521489-1376937852.1598939461)).

The current model is really "app rental", and it's inherently customer- hostile. Playing with the pricing does not fundamentally change that.

<comment><USER15> > _Developers like to emphasize how they fund sustained future development of > an app, but the reality is that when you cancel you usually lose access even > to current features (you arguably already helped pay for)._

I make a browser plugin that functions as a productivity/accessibility tool. When I first started charging, I actually did grandfather in all our existing free users and give them perpetual access to the then-existing feature set. But it's not clear what it would mean to freeze people who had a paid subscription and then terminated it.

If someone pays for one month, do they forever get access to the version that they briefly paid for? How do I deal with customers who are upset that certain websites have changed and no longer work with old versions of our plugins? I would expect lots of questions from folks who want to know if this bug or that bug had been fixed by later releases (and then they would briefly subscribe to get perpetual access to the newer version).

Another commenter mentioned giving folks access to the version that existed a year before they stopped paying, but if I release version 1, then 2, then 3, someone might try out 3, stop paying, and then end up on 2. That seems confusing and suboptimal for everyone.

<comment><USER16> The jetbrains model only kicks in after a year. If you sub for 1 month, and cancel, you get nothing. If you sub for 12 months, you get a perpetual license for the version that was relesed 12 months before you finished.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > The first thing you'll notice is that people are much more willing to make a > one-time purchase.

This X 100

I would rather pay you $50 with a major update every year that costs $50 than $50/yr subscription. Because if the resubscription comes up and things are a little tight I lose access to the app. Or if I don't use the app I don't have to worry about accidentally autoresubscribing

<comment><USER18> For desktop software, and mobile apps without a backend, I agree.

For everything with a backend though, I just don't see how it's a sustainable business model to allow customers to keep using the backend in perpetuity. Of course, a lot of consumers know knowing about the tech that's involved, so as a software engineer I have a different perspective here.

<comment><USER17> sure, but don't tie in a backend if it isn't required (e.g. adobe) sell it as a separate service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I watched a very interesting video about selling to consumers as opposed to businesses [0]. The key takeaway is that consumers' target price to pay is actually $0. Therefore, any price above that, even a 3 to 4 dollar a month difference, is seen as extremely annoying to them, because again, they actually only want to pay nothing. This is why you should, if not charging business, at least charge prices that are sufficiently high such that only those who see the value in them will pay, which are usually in a different class of consumers from bottom-feeders who look for the lowest price, ideally 0. An example is Superhuman, an email app that costs $30 dollars a month. Only those who see the value in a fast, keyboard-driven email app will pay that much.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEc- qGK5cjY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEc-qGK5cjY)

<comment><USER20> In an ideal world where people have a decent disposable income, those arguments might be true.

In the real world, it's not that "people don't want to pay anything", it's that people have a small amount of money to throw at things for a marginally better experience. I sure like keyboard-driven apps, but I'm never going to pay as much as I pay for my entire Internet package for _any_ online service. Hell, all of them I pay for barely add up to $30/month.

Superhuman and similar are tools for rich people, equivalent to a Rolex or the latest iPhone. Those with less income are assumed not to be its target audience. I'd argue that they could double the price without losing more than a single digit percentage of current users.

<comment><USER19> Yes, it seems your comment is reinforcing my point. Consumers like you don't want to pay $30 and that's fine, you are not their target audience. You may like keyboard-driven apps but you don't like them enough to pay $30, so in terms of microeconomics, you don't believe you'll get as much value from the tool as you'd spend. Again, that is fine, because the company should only target customers who do realize your product's value.

One may say that the takeaway is basically, target prosumers and rich customers who see the value of the product in order to make the most money. That they are price insensitive is also great as a dev, because, yes, you can increase the price multifold and not lose customers, which increases your revenue overall.

<comment> crooked-v The comment you're replying to is talking about actual amount of money available for the consumer, not perceived value.

Or, in other words: if I look at an app and decide that it's perfect and I'd really like to have it, but it costs $30/month and I need that money for gas to get to work or to put into my kid's college fund, I'm not going to get it.

The kind of people who post on HN usually have enough money that just $30/month isn't a problem, but what if there's 10 apps that do the same thing? At $300/mo that's now a substantial budget item, and if I have anything serious to save up money for, individual apps are going to be the first thing to go.

<comment><USER19> Perceived value and realization of that value are the same thing to the vendor. If you don't buy, then it doesn't really matter to those who sell. If it does, then there may be some price stratification they could do to capture that value, but it might be best to not target price-conscious customers at all, due to their tendency to be a larger support concern than those who are price-invariant; they are not worth the money they bring in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Until it stops _clearly_ rewarding scammers, I cannot support subscriptions in any way. From the very start, these criminals figured out some great ways to trick people into auto-renewing subscriptions at exorbitant rates for garbage apps [1]. I especially love how they reached the "Top Grossing" lists (I sure never have...must be nice to not have any morals).

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/sneaky-subscriptions- are-p...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/sneaky-subscriptions-are-plaguing- the-app-store/)

Also, I just plain want to make things that lots of people can enjoy. Subscriptions _certainly_ limit your audience so why is that better (and why should that be the _only_ option or even the _preferred_ one?).

I know developers who asked for this in 2007 but can we please have "free trial, pay at end of trial" and "paid major upgrades" as standard, store- supported options, at long last? There was never anything wrong with these models and they are _also_ great ways to make a living.

</comment><comment><USER22> I use a podcast downloader/player daily. I paid something like £5 maybe ten years ago for it.

Around a month or so ago, one of my feeds had weird description text that caused the download button to be bumped off the visible area, meaning I couldn't download that episode. I took a screenshot and reported it to the developers.

When filing the bug, I wondered about that £5 all those years ago and I imagined we'd both be happier if I had taken out a yearly subscription instead. The developers would be motivated to keep me happy because I'd stop paying if I didn't get my bug fixes done.

In the end, they promptly fixed the bug and pushed out an update by the end of the day without taking any extra payment, so I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make.

</comment><comment><USER23> > Looking at the estimates for revenue per 10,000 visitors clearly shows as > well, we would make 2x as much revenue at $100/year than we would at just > $20/year!

Maybe I missed it, but it's worth pointing out that while in the table the one-time cost makes less than the yearly pricing plans, that's only for the first year - presumably the yearly plans come out ahead the next year and even more the year after as long as the user retention is decent.

For my paid Chrome extension ([https://www.checkbot.io/](https://www.checkbot.io/)), I've experimented with yearly only, then quarterly + yearly, then monthly + yearly plans. I think quarterly plans are worth exploring (I don't see them often) as it means users get longer to evaluate the service before they decide if they're going to renew. They can be a pain to be clear about in pricing tables though.

</comment><comment><USER24> Man I dunno, for the sector they're in, folks are pretty likely to already be paying for a subscription to the Adobe suite, and honestly I think the whole "subscription" thing is gonna strangle Adobe in the future when there's a generation of artists who grew up using other tools that were buy once, use until upgrading something else breaks it, and/or were easier to pirate.

Also I have a piece of hardware I bought from the Astropad folks and if the app suddenly stops working because they demand a subscription I'm gonna be pretty damn unhappy.

Part of the problem, of course, is that app stores have completely killed "upgrade pricing". There's no good way for your existing users to give you money for "hey we added some new features and fixed some bugs" without bullshit workarounds like "okay the new version is a totally new app, go buy it".

<comment><USER25> > in the future when there's a generation of artists who grew up using other > tools that were buy once, use until upgrading something else breaks it, > and/or were easier to pirate.

In the future when? Isn't that _now_? Adobe changed to subscription model in 2013. Everyone that is paying subscription _now_ grew up with the buy-once model, right? In the future, people will have grown up with adobe's current subscription model.

<comment><USER24> Yeah I think it may be about now. And now that I think about it _very_ few of the younger pro artists in my circles are using Adobe's stuff, they're using Clip Studio or Procreate for the most part.

<comment> crooked-v The Affinity line of apps are also pretty great, and have (I think) full feature parity across desktop and iPad.

<comment><USER26> Affinity Designer _not having DXF / DWG import export_...

Is preventing me from using it in a professional capacity.

I purchased Affinity Designer without checking for the feature, and people have been asking for the feature for _at least 5 years_.

Edit to add the forum link I forgot to paste in:

[https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/6756-dxf-o...](https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/6756-dxf- or-dwg-file-import-in-affinity-designer/)

<comment><USER24> I think a lack of support for spot colors was one of my sticking points, personally. That and 20+ years of Illustrator work to pull resources out of to make new images faster, and multi-year projects meticulously built to maximize re-use and speed, and honestly that's the killer feature for me at this point unless Adobe completely falls apart.

Not that Illustrator lacks its share of long-running requests, "rotate the view" has been near the top of their publicly-voted bug/feature request site ever since they opened it, and would be "picked up shortly" back in 2017. [https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657-illustrator-...](https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657-illustrator- feature-requests/suggestions/19196641-illustrator-rotation-of-the-artboard)

(And I know I was asking for it _years_ before they abandoned the old "here's a hole to put your bugs and feature requests into" setup.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Subscriptions for purely software updates seem like a steep price hike over buy once and get updates for a long time. I really don't like how devs are under the guise of we need to make a living and start charging subscription for such. I won't buy that unless is totally indispensable

</comment><comment><USER28> "Why you should avoid using subscriptions for your apps." User hostility 101.

</comment><comment><USER29> Some people go way out the their way to avoid toll bridges. Especially, if the bulk of their trip is otherwise toll free.

For me, if there is a free website app paired with a pay-to-play mobile app, I will never buy (or subscribe to) the mobile app because I consider that a bait-and-switch. If the whole stack was pay-to-play and I want the service offered I will pay.

</comment><comment><USER15> It looks like this is all based on survey data, which I have found to not correlate particularly well with how people actually behave. Am I misreading this (or not giving survey data enough credit)?

<comment><USER30> My biggest issue is broad generalization, SaaS is not homogenous. I suspect the author never meant for anyone to take it as universal truth, rather his own observation of his speck of SaaS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Pricing subscriptions higher has more side effects:

* you get users who care more about your app * you get users who will not place irrational demands ("I paid $0.99 for your app, now implement this feature or I want my money back!") * you get to focus on features that matter and long-term development, without having to implement shiny cruft just so that a "major version number upgrade" is justified * you have a sustainable business

I've reached a point where I am _worried_ if an app I use regularly does not have a subscription model with reasonable pricing. Experience shows that this means that sooner or later the authors will lose interest and abandon the app, or go overly broad with features. I've seen this happen so many times that I'm actually wary of even starting to use new apps at this point.

As for the "but it's too expensive" problem, well, perhaps you don't need all those apps after all? There aren't that many apps that I use regularly and I'd much rather limit the selection and then pay for those that I use and need.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm an indie dev that wrote a useful Electron app for designing and printing labels (both rolls and sheets), data import, rendering batches of images, etc. My competition is either free (DYMO/Brother) or $500 commercial software for expensive printers.

So how do I price? For a year I had my price at $47.99 one-time and did OK. A month ago I segmented my licenses/users into Personal (same price of $47.99) and Business ($147.99) licenses. Business license has the ability to print barcodes. Revenue increased w a slight decrease of units sold.

Then last week I launched a Business subscription at $14.99/month. Everyone is still buying the one-time licenses. I don't blame them... I generally avoid subscriptions.

Soon I'll be releasing a Shopify app/integration and I'm really curious how that user group will respond. As far as I know, merchants are already used to monthly costs so it just becomes the cost of operating their store.

I need a pricing consultant. Check out my pricing page at [https://label.live/download](https://label.live/download)

<comment><AUTHOR> >Everyone is still buying the one-time licenses.

I'm not surprised, everybody can multiply $15 by 12 and see that doesn't add up.

<comment><USER32> Can you help me understand how you, as a user, would prefer to see it add up?

<comment><AUTHOR> If something costs more to rent over the next 12 months than buy outright then I am going to buy it outright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> And here I am, in EU, thinking a very long amount of time before committing to even a 5$ subscription.

</comment><comment><USER34> I recently downloaded "Jambl" which is a music/synth app for iPhone based on a TikTok ad.

It immediately pushed me to start a 7.99 GBP a week subscription.

About 550 USD a year.

<comment><USER34> Music Ally Startup Files: Jambl, the music-making app for non-musicians

[https://musically.com/2020/02/12/startup-files-jambl- music-m...](https://musically.com/2020/02/12/startup-files-jambl-music-making- app/)

"The rationale for aggressively pushing a £7.99-a-week subscription (the same pricing as sister app Beat Maker Go) whilst showing freemium users unskippable ads is that, by pushing away all but truly determined users, Jambl can get feedback, iterate and make its app super-sticky – then shift to full-on growth."

<comment><USER18> Aren't they only going to be left with about 3 lunatic users, and perhaps 2 very rich ones that don't notice they're paying for it?

$550/y is a _lot_ for consumer software. Windows OS, O365, nope, I can't even think of any other consumer software priced that high!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Personally I like apps which provide both - a subscription and pay once model. I have no problem paying monthly for an app I use on a daily base. But I don't want dozens of subscriptions for all my apps to run in parallel. The problem is that a lot of apps with subscription models don't provide enough value to justify a monthly payment fee.

</comment><comment><USER36> There is a problem with in-app subscriptions which is rarely brought up -

\- apple/google cut. OK for a $2 purchase. Not OK for recurrent payments. If it is indeed a valuable service, it should have a web site. More often than not online subscriptions will be priced more competitively. See Babbel subscriptions in app and online.

</comment><comment><USER37> Very good post. I wonder how much these percentages would differ between B2B and B2C apps. I'm not sure I can imagine many people paying anything like $10 per month for a non-business app (not including Spotify, I see that as a special case). I would understand it if the budget isn't coming out of their own pocket.

<comment><USER38> The two fitness apps I use are $60/year and $30/year.

Headspace is ~$55/year and they have a ton of subscribers.

Plenty of language learning apps are over $100/year.

If the value is there, and especially if there is a direct comparable to a non-app based service, people will pay.

<comment><USER37> That's interesting you say your fitness apps cost 60 and 30 per year. Would you say that's another factor, and that yearly less frequent subscriptions and more appealing than monthly?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I believe that both the app store and Google play store charge 30% fees for all app purchases except for subscriptions lasting over a year, which are 15%.

That further incentivizes developers to concentrate on the subscription model.</comment>


Ask HN: How to compensate employees when there's little or no cash? - <AUTHOR>

If you're starting up with little or no budget for salaries, in which ways could you compensate someone that you would like to bring on board? <comment><USER2> I really doubt, if anybody would join when there is no budget for salaries, unless you can offer them a partnership and they actually believe in the probability of success of the idea.

And unless you alrady know them well, it would be tough to either convince them of the probability of success or keep the idea protected till they sign up or both.

But then, everything is possible, you just have to figure out how.

Cheers

</comment><comment><USER3> They would just not be "employees"; more like founders or associates, with a significant equity (eg: not 1%).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes they would be founders/associates—not employees. I would really like to know what a reasonable amount of equity would be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think you have to ask yourself the difficult question: if VCs and angels with lots of money to spend aren't willing to fund it, why would developers etc fund it with their time?

If you don't have any cash, you can't have employees :) Find some co-founders!</comment>


Knitting machine from the 80s hacked to "print" digital images - <AUTHOR> http://andrewsalomone.com/blog/2011/09/27/recursive-cosby-sweater/

<comment><USER2> Brother kh-930e

They are $700 to $900 on eBay.

You use a Python proggy to emulate a Tandy floppy drive with the design from a 1-bit bitmap.

<comment><USER3> Yes, the interesting bit is not the Cosby sweater, but the interfacing of the knitting machine itself by emulation of a serial attached Tandy floppy drive.

[http://www.antitronics.com/wiki/index.php?title=Electroknit_...](http://www.antitronics.com/wiki/index.php?title=Electroknit_Technical_Information)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The toughest part about this is hiring Bill Cosby to stand still while you knit a sweater of him. Then have Bill Cosby put on the sweater and stand still again.

Then you knit another sweater!

</comment><comment><USER5> Just sent the link to a friend who has a MakerBot and also knits. I said think of it as a MakerBot using yarn as its feedstock.

</comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone know if there's a picture of Bill Cosby with the sweater?

</comment><comment><USER7> It's Cosbys all the way down.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is awesome!</comment>


Mozilla made $436M from search deals in 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google <comment><USER2> If you want an independent Mozilla, you should consider donating to them: [https://donate.mozilla.org](https://donate.mozilla.org). Otherwise their only choice is to get money from Google and have their independence endangered.

I understood that Mozilla mostly does not fund Firefox development, but I am sure they would like to if they had enough resources.

By the way, they have 4 out of 4 stars rating at Charity Navigator: [https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...](https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=16300)

<comment><USER3> It's a good charity and you should donate to it if it aligns to your views but it'd take 4 times the donation rate of Wikipedia to make them independent of this single deal which probably isn't where they want to cap themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This might sound like a lot, but it sounds like peanuts to what Safari made in the same sort of deal: [https://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari- search-en...](https://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search- engine/).</comment>


Appear.in Changes Name to Whereby - <AUTHOR> https://whereby.com/information/brand <comment><USER2>
      > When is this change happening?
      >
      > As of July 25, 2019, all Norwegian accounts will be
      > redirected to Whereby.com. *Due to a court mandate
      > Norwegian based users will no longer be able to visit
      > the appear.in in page as of August 25th.

So this sudden change wasn't your everyday marketing decision.</comment>