msftgreed

The human tradition is storytelling. The idea that storytelling was something a company could own and other's weren't allowed to tell is very, very new in our history.

People write without any profit motive today. It's weird of the OP to think of writing in such a narrow space as commercialization.

As someone who was around during Reagan, you are correct. The turn happened in the 80s, and then rapidly accelerated in the 90s and 2000s, then rapidly accelerated again in the past 10 years.

I think a lot of folks are stuck on the idea that it's been a singular bad actor -- a Trump, or a McConnell or something. This "Great Man Theory" is almost certainly a very naive read of the systems that are leading to this moment.

You say this like it's related to the parent quote. We could absolutely compensate people and not charge for information. It's not that hard to imagine that we could feed, house, care for, and provide a small stipend to authors, artists, etc. and also make their work output free to everyone who wants it.

Does that require changing some other things? Absolutely. Would it be hard to convince people to try? Probably (I'm guessing HN crowd won't like this comment, considering it unreasonable.) Has it been a suggested way to organize society for almost 200 years with a long and well argued set of principles behind it? Sure enough!

50 tons per acre, over 35 years (to grow the trees to a harvestable age) with an expectation that you can capture ~25-40% of that in long term storage via pyrolizing it.

The US alone has ~1 billion acres of forest land and could produce a lot more if needed. Over 35 years, we could remove 50 billion tons * 25-40%. Basically enough to offset a years worth of emissions during those years.

It's not enough, but it would be a significant amount of carbon removed. Combined with other efforts, we could put a lot of carbon back in the soil.

Forests do net sequester carbon. But if you want to really sock away the carbon you harvest the trees and pyrolize it. It will give you energy (heat) you can use and elemental carbon (biochar). You could bury that a few feet under or innoculate it with microorganisms and work it into fields. Carbon in that form will sit in the soil for hundreds of years. Thousands or millions if you bury it.

So a state (or municipality or anyone capable of making laws) has the ability to say, "You don't meet our local laws, take down your URL" now?

This is going to be a real problem when states start nuking whole parts of the internet from orbit. A state has a law against conversion therapy and starts to remove sites with that? A state has a law against trans people? Or abortion? Or medical misinformation? Suddenly we just start purging sites back and forth?

Battlegrounds end up as torn up, muddy, desolate places. Turning the domain registry into a battleground is a bad idea. Over the long term, no one wins if we choose to fight there.

Well, really, pick your poison I suppose.

We have wide belts of forests in the north that are warming and are potentially at risk for massive fires, which would make the problem significantly worse. So, before the taiga burns.

Or, before species reduction causes ecosystems to collapse, reducing biodiversity and ability to support humans.

Or before temperatures rise high enough that wet bulb temperatures in the summer are fatal to humans, causing parts of the globe to become inhabitable, creating refugee crises and conflict (and presumably mass starvation and death.)

Or before permafrost gets warm enough to start emitting methane, pushing our atmosphere past the point of it's ability to maintain homeostasis, putting us on a path to a Venusian atmosphere.

Or before we lose the beautiful parts of the world to decay due to increased pest pressure, decreased ability for plants and animals to survive, and general reduction in system health.

Or before we lose our ability to have wonderful winter sports in the parts of the world where skiing and snowboarding are popular.

Or before we damage the oceanic currents enough to fundamentally destroy the climate in regions like Europe and England.

Or before raising temperatures cause seafood stocks to plummet, reducing the amount of food we can harvest from the oceans (or leading us to depleting critical stocks entirely), reducing our capacity to feed ourselves as a species.

Or before fresh water becomes scarce enough that wars are fought over it, and people die unnecessarily.

I dunno. Before one of those. Or any of the other easily predictable, innumerable steps along the way to those.

Maybe we should be doing something dramatic about this global warming thing before it's too late, yeah?

> CD sales surged 16% to 16.3 million units, soundly outpacing vinyl’s comparatively modest 2.4% growth.

Ok, but the lack of a unit on vinyl makes it very hard to have an apples to apples comparison here. If cds are selling 1000 units and vinyl is selling 1,000,000 units, those 16% and 2.4% numbers are pretty wildly different things.

Also, the huge increase is primarily driven by KPOP (in particular, BTS). CD sales growth was like 6% without them.

I don't know that we can draw a conclusion from that 16% except BTS can move physical media.

You can name the brand... Häagen‑Dazs? Graeters?

In any case, why would you melt and drain it? That makes zero sense. You don't have friends who would take it? Or a food bank? Or a local Food Not Bombs?

It's totally fine to not like a brand, zero objections there, but like, why waste it?

I work in accessibility, yes.

And yet, if someone cannot meaningfully participate in society without their glasses, then yes, they have a disability. Polio paralysis and vision loss are both examples of disability. They do have differences in all those things you mentioned, and yet, are both disability.

15% is from the 2011 WHO report on disability: https://www.who.int/teams/noncommunicable-diseases/sensory-f...

The more recent WHO's Global report on health equity suggests 16%, as populations age: https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240063600

The CDC considers this closer to 30%: https://www.cdc.gov/disability-and-health/articles-documents...

This number is generally considered to be rising for a few reasons. Aging population, wars resulting in higher injuries but fewer deaths, the number of people who are able to survive disease (rather than historically just dying.

You might find the Washington Group's definition, which applies a spectrum, and estimates an approximately 6-12% rate of disability. https://www.washingtongroup-disability.com/wg-blog/post/diff...

> I doubt the number would get anywhere close to 15% if the definition only included the kinds of disabilities that are immediately obvious to anyone looking.

Thank god that's not the definition. Deafness/significant hearing impairment isn't immediately visible, and that's estimated at ~5%. Plenty of folks are low vision enough to need assistive technology (like a screenreader) even if they don't have a cane and may be able to navigate. Plenty of people with MS have great days where they can walk, and days where they cannot. There are people who lack the strength in their hands to dress themselves, yet they can go out and about just fine.

Your definition is too narrow. Plenty of people experience impassible barriers that are not visible. Happy to provide some additional educational resources for you if they would be helpful.

> Certainly it's not true that 15% of the people I see are in a wheelchair, on crutches, missing a limb, obviously blind (e.g. walking with a cane), and so on.

Are you in a wealthy area? Think globally, do you think your town has better or worse support than other parts of the world for people with disabilities? Do you think your region has better or worse regional conflicts or disease? Think globally.

I work in big tech in accessibility. I guarantee you that you are incorrect.

You've got it. Who makes the decisions? Primarily the folks with the most property.

And they decide that you'll pay a percentage of what they pay each other. Which you also have no say in.

This isn't sustainable. You really want every person who is dealing with this bureaucracy to manage negotiating between their insurance and their EMS? After they've just had a significant accident/health issue?

That seems needlessly cruel to do to people.

Well, here it is often ass AND expensive. I'd take ass and free over ass and expensive.

You know we can have volunteer supported services be very effective, right?

I volunteer to give blood. No one is paying me, and yet, someone's life is saved by that.

Some folks believe (in fact, this is the thesis statement of much of anarchist theory) that people would largely volunteer to care for one another if their basic needs were met.

Not everything has to be transactional, you can have a government setting up a scaffold that supports and encourages and organizes volunteers and run an effective service.

There's still a few brands, you'll just end up paying through the nose for them.

You don't... heat it? Egg yolks change their role in ice cream when heated, increasing their emulsifying power and creating a richer ice cream.

I think that's extremely ungenerous and misses the point of the article.

The article is specific in the mechanisms by which the industry has changed formulae -- adding air, gums, and stabilizers. It also includes information about who the offending companies are (Unilever). It includes information about how many calories per cup indicate a high quality ice cream, as well as the legally required labeling you can use to recognize not-quite-ice cream.

It also specifically addresses the "cream is expensive" concern, and discusses dairy prices which have fluctuated but not spiked.

No, this is greed and "the customer is a fool who won't notice". The products of capitalism run to a point where there's basically no recourse (short of, I suppose, manufacturing the ice cream yourself) because everything's become one giant megacorp who knows you don't really have much of a choice in brands.

And furthermore, ~15% of us are permanently disabled. So the percentages for temporary or situational disability rise even higher than that.

Do you use curb cuts? Closed captions? Difficulty sliders in games? An electric toothbrush? Audible crosswalk signals?

All of those have significant roots in accessibility for people with disabilities. I guarantee you that the people who invented them would be thrilled to see them have widespread adoption for all populations.

If something finds use in addition to its use for disability amelioration, it becomes more widespread and normalized. When it's wider spread and normalized, it becomes easier for people with disabilities to know it's available and to use it without stigma.

So no, you've got it entirely backwards I'm afraid. We do not think about assistive technology as something for people with disabilities. We think about it as something that helps people, and if it helps more people, even better.

Videogames are generally lagging WAY behind the rest of software. I've worked professionally in accessibility and in AAA game studios.

There's a lot of movement in games over the past 5-10 years, so there's a lot more visibility into a11y there, but in general that industry still has catching up to do. What you are seeing is higher interest and velocity there, and given some time they'll definitely catch up with the slower iteration cycles in mobile and web a11y, but I guarantee you the story is much richer on the web (in particular) than it is in games.

This is a great example of the curb cut effect -- a system designed for accessibility needs turns out to be useful in other contexts. Curb cuts were designed for people with disabilities, particularly veterans, and over time have become more and more standard. They help people who use wheelchairs, yes, but also people without disabilities like those with strollers, bikes, luggage, or small kids.

We love to see accessibility features find uses outside their original intent.

It made a claim, brah. If it's going to claim flowing text, then it shows that? Nah, that ain't it.

It can aspire to be whatever it wants to be, don't make claims you can't back up.

Sure, I love a Forza Horizons (I'm not much for mainline Forza), but those games aren't really experiencing the same scope creep as the the rest of the industry.

Call of Duty is, but it's also noteworthy that sales of CoD are slumping. Hard. Like down-by-60% hard. And the gamepass numbers aren't really boosting it back up.

Also, I think you'll find my list absolutely included big games. Gears of War? Zelda? These are not "indie darlings".

This is absolutely a chat UI.

I expected, from the description, it to look like text was being written by hand -- with the letterforms being stroked at roughly human pen speeds. Not just a fancy font over a text box being entered character by character. The description WAY oversells it.