2,827 karma · joined February 8, 2022
I’m open to being convinced that there are better ways of doing things, but despite what half a century of propaganda has been saying, regulations generally aren’t enacted for funsies. They’re there for a reason, specially the reason that in the absence of those regulations, commercial actors were privatizing profit at the expense of society as a whole, and democratic society made a decision to make rules to stop that from happening.
In literal or figurative battles, there are plenty of examples of actions that are simultaneously indisputably brave and utterly futile.
That also seems to have very little to due with the safety concerns you express in your last two paragraphs.
This should have been referred to the company’s legal department, who could have coordinated the response and/or investigation (if either were warranted), and then decided how to deal with something that sure looks a lot like invoice fraud.
This wasn’t a technical issue or a business issue; as soon as Monotype alleged a license violation, they made it a legal issue, and the lawyers should have been involved from that point on. It makes no sense for some random tech guy to be taking a meeting or handling the response on a licensing dispute.
I remember once wandering around my college library and finding the book “The Soviet Economy Through the Year 2000.” This occurred during the current millennium.
Personally, I’m completely fine with having this be the subject of regulation - even if it’s possibly an overly blunt instrument, this is not an area where I’d be comfortable letting the free hand of the market do its thing. Further, I suspect that universal, subsidized, high-quality pre-K would be a net economic benefit in the long run, but I haven’t done the research to back up this assertion.
I’m happy to pay for software, but I really don’t care for subscriptions. (Why no, holding back the tide is not going well at all, why do you ask?)
The only criticism I’d make is that patching drywall is dead simple and cheap and so your solution seems possibly a bit overengineered (and, while I’m at it, that Andreesen’s observation is both facile and meaningless and is probably a reflection more of the bids Marc Andreesen’s house manager gets than anything insightful about labor costs in America).