lukecooperatus

“People often say to me, ‘You don’t pay the authors. You don’t pay the reviewers. You hardly print anymore. The Web is free. Why do you charge?’” said H. Frederick Dylla, the former director of the American Institute of Physics and board member of the Association of American Publishers. “It sounds like a compelling argument. But it actually isn’t.”

Albert Greco, a publishing expert at Fordham University who is working on a book about scholarly publishing, said those making that argument are forgetting everything they learned or should have learned in economics class.

“There are costs,” he said. “Does The Washington Post have a paywall?”

Yes.

“So is it fair then if some high-school student wants to really follow the Supreme Court and doesn’t have the money to pay?” Greco said. “Life is a bitter mystery. We can’t give everything away for free. It’s not that kind of country.”

These assholes don't even have a better reason for fleecing everyone than base greed, and they don't try to hide it.

Ignorant person checking in with probably a dumb and oversimplified question, but what prevents you and other science researchers from posting your writing independently? Why must you submit to these corpo controlled publications?

This thread is like talking to my father who insists that "mainstream media" is evil, while he watches Fox News and misses the irony entirely.

Yeah I'm not sure "generational" is the correct term here. It was often the same people living through those eras (and beyond) who were doing the pirating. It wasn't a generational shift in that different generations were necessary for CDs to get copied; everyone in every generation was changing how they operated as technology changed. Piracy naturally evolved with the times. Because of course it did. Why wouldn't it?

I worry that approach would increase feelings of entitlement from people who don't understand the process and effort involved with development.

It systemizes the notion of "I paid you to do X, where is it?", a perspective which some annoying people already have even without giving anyone money.

Additionally, how do you determine how much payment a feature is worth?

What if the community is split about the direction of a project, and there happens to be two "pay for high priority" demands that conflict with each other? Who gets their feature that they paid for?

I also think that the people actually working on a project should be the ones setting the direction and priorities for it, not whoever has a big enough purse. We don't need to replicate corporate models that deny developer autonomy.

Humans also carry diseases and destroy the landscape and each other. By your logic, we shouldn't care about anyone dying, or try to empathize with anything outside of ourselves. Seems like a sad perspective, IMO.

I'm not sure that's a valid assumption in this specific case. The immediate drama around the way donations were requested could have prevented a lot of donations from occurring.

Volatility isn't exactly conducive to getting support, so it's hard to tell how many people would have happily supported the project if things had shaken out differently. The developer quitting angrily a day after asking for financial help, for example. Seems like people might wonder why they need to give money to someone who has already quit, even if none of the other kerfuffle had taken place.

Same reason why there are so many text editors that all do basically the same thing, I suppose. More options are not a bad idea, IMO. Maybe they'll do something different and interesting.

Everything has always been political. Just because you're too privileged to notice that until someone mentions a viewpoint you dislike doesn't mean anything except that you're usually oblivious.

Have you (rhetorical you) seen the ridiculously boring and shallow shit that people watch nearly 24/7 now, though? Video platforms are filled with useless nonsense and people eat it up.

There are people who will have a show playing in the background every hour of the day, showing the "news" or soap operas or reality shows or game shows or movie reruns or etc etc, just soaking it up subconsciously forever until they die.

Go to any doctors office or bar or restaurant (in the US, anyway, maybe it's different elsewhere) and there's a high chance they'll also be playing some nonsense drivel on a dozen TVs strategically positioned so you can't sit anywhere in the place without being subjected to a view of one.

Society loves giving attention to the most inane shit available, even if just for background noise.

The idea of there being an audience for the early years of the Truman Show doesn't seem at all like an unfathomable stretch to me.

For what it's worth, lanolin is not vegan, despite the pictured ad claiming it's ethically sourced and implying that animals are not harmed. Lanolin is produced from wool, and if you care about such things, often a result of unpleasant (to say the least) farming conditions for sheep. Probably there are some sources that aren't so bad, but apparently there are reports that wool industry practices are pretty horrific to the sheep. (Read more here and here if you like.)

On the positive side though, there are plant-based lanolin alternatives, including vegan nipple creams. I couldn't find any source that weren't also ads for a product, so I'll leave the search up to whoever is interested in them.

How would you determine who is "objectively bad" without introducing subjective bias in the process of determination?