This doesn't really make it clear how bitcoin is helpful. I think the trouble is getting valuable physical stuff into the area, not access to various payment systems or domestic transactions. It might well be true, but the article doesn't really tell us how.
Here is a post where people are discussing how they sent money to Gaza, some times to specific people they wanted to help, and crypto comes up but there are plenty of other options too.
What happened is adverse selection due to a stubbornly low valuation that doesn't even try to keep up, in the midst of a growing number of alternatives, worsened by a formal and therefore somewhat gameable process of getting in. The kind of person who really has an idea they are going to pursue regardless that he's actually committed to isn't going to part with his equity at the low prices a YC would offer. Instead what you get is people creating companies explicitly with the intention of applying for VC, which removes an important filter reflecting founder buy-in, and therefore average quality; and there's no way you can really tell one from the other.
Sometimes I marvel at what would be possible if just a sliver of open source talent was put to work building independent quality software for their own or an investor's profit. Marketing a product forces you to figure out what it is people actually need and deliver the knowledge and education people need to use a product well. In fact a lot of what is wrong with software from big tech companies is that individual programs are not written to make the program itself great, and the incentives generally do not encourage spending a lot of time making some part of Chrome or Safari more efficient.
Open source will never spend time marketing anything, never spend time educating an actual mass of general users as to its virtues or how to use it well, and suffer as a result. You don't have Desktop Linux that blows everything else out of the water because that would require investors to stake a lot of money doing these things, which they will only do if there is profit. PopOS gets as close as you might with something like that, but is ultimately shackled by the fact they cannot sell their software. (Enterprise is different, where I guess you can nerf the product to make money on servicing instead).
Even someone with infinite resources cannot do what a company selling something for a profit can because they are either ultimately captured by and beholden to some other interest other than the product itself, or constitutionally lack the energy to be daring and actually compete. Imagine what someone could do with a Firefox sold for a profit because of its superior functionality and superior efficiency.
> You don't have Desktop Linux that blows everything else out of the water because that would require investors to stake a lot of money doing these things, which they will only do if there is profit.
I think this illustrates what I believe you get backwards well. It's not that getting good quality and concise software requires traditional investors and a centralised force of vision. It's because doing software in general but specially desktops is hard.
I think Linux is not what it is despite investment, I think it is what it is because of it. Look at Windows and Mac, they show that they listen and develop their products with users in mind just as far as the market and investors let them. They will otherwise push anti-consumer features (like ads in the start menu) without even batting an eye.
This belief that profit drives innovation is just silly. Profit drives profit, innovation and competition are accidents. In a world with Googles and Amazons, Microsofts and Teslas, I am really baffled that it isn't clearer for us in tech that this is exactly like this.
The state of Linux and opensource in general, flourishing for decades is a living testament to that. Opensource is not only moral, it is the practice that we know to be the most sustainable and resilient in the long run.
I feel compelled to write, though, that even though I frame profit in this bad light, they are only so when the they are the ultimate goal of your product. What countless enterprises are enabled by Linux and OSS initiatives? What vast amounts of money flow only because Foss and OSS are the way they are?
The problem is that "innovation is driven by profits" is a religious credo at least in the USA. If you’ve ever read Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, you would laugh at how silly it is, how transparently absurd the "story" is.
Then you realize that a lot of billionaires in the USA consider this book as a scientific economical treaty. And they have the power to make it true and to brainwash everybody, including politicians, to believe it is true.
As it is the 40th anniversary of the GNU project, it worth remembering that software has always been created as free and open source. It was how innovation was possible. To the point that, in 1976, a young Bill Gates had to write an "Open Letter to the Hobbyists" which could be summarized as "Stop sharing! Please! Give us money and stop sharing stuff between yourself. We want to be a profitable industry, not an innovation playground".
That highlight how nobody took proprietary software seriously at the time. But people listened. People voted for Reagan (who managed to dismantle antitrust laws because monopolies are good to make lot of money) and, suddenly, making Bill Gates the richest man in the world became a top priority instead of pushing innovation and cooperation.
As Facebook, Microsoft and Google demonstrates every day, a monopoly is never innovating. Every new single "innovation" is from a startup that was bought by fear of having a competitor in the future. So, today, to become rich, you don’t have to make a real innovating business. You simply have to pretend be a bunch of geniuses that could create the next monopoly and be sufficiently good at pretending that an actual monopoly buy you. That’s basically what is now told in every startup incubator (the technical term is "exit" and, as soon as VC enter the dance, you already talk about your exit plans. Which is easier when one of your VC is on the board of an existing monopoly. That’s how he manage to extract lot of money from his position).
The system is completely unfair, corrupt, suboptimal. But we have to tell the fiction that it works so people don’t request a change.
> Even someone with infinite resources cannot do what a company selling something for a profit can because they are either ultimately captured by and beholden to some other interest other than the product itself, or constitutionally lack the energy to be daring and actually compete. Imagine what someone could do with a Firefox sold for a profit because of its superior functionality and superior efficiency.
turns on imagination…Firefox eventually goes all-in on making profit from selling user data and making advertising deals after they realize that the vast majority of users are totally fine with the default and other free options and have no interest in paying for your product.
Yeah advertising is a failure mode of what I said.
But if Firefox ever decided to make a lot of money by selling good browsers at a high price to paying users, well I think the result would be quite interesting.
The reason that doesn’t happen is that that business model is not viable in the presence of alternatives. The “quite interesting result” would be that there wouldn’t be a Firefox anymore.
I pay for my mail client (MailMate). I pay for my search(FoxTrot Search). I pay for my spam filter (Spamsieve). I pay for my notetaking/archival (Eagle Filer).
I pay for my network monitoring (Little Snitch). There are alternatives to a lot of these they just aren't very good, in some cases astonishingly bad.
And I would pay an enormous amount of money for a browser that worked well that had features I've always imagined a browser should have. And I don't expect anyone to make that for me without the reward of getting nice stuff for doing so.
No one would bat an eye if Firefox were no more since there are other browsers more or less just as good, more or less just as bad. It's an immemorable product, the consumer surplus of which compared to the best alternative is very low.
You're what's called an outlier. As a tech enthusiast you appreciate software.
I pay for FreeBSD and KDE. Because I believe in them. But I don't want them to make a profit. Once they do, the people receiving that profit will want to see a rising trend. Because business believes that a steady profit is decline, there must be growth at all costs. Once they reached the limit of what the market will bear, the focus shifts from giving the customer what they need to extracting as much value from them as possible. This is a death spiral because extracted value can never be infinite. The result is the phenomenon we now call enshittification.
The lack of a profit-driven approach is the only sustainable way to avoid this in the long run. Sooner or later it will always happen. Even if you have intelligent and ethical investors (which are extremely rare) sooner or later some sharks will buy it.
In fact the phase where a product truly has the customers' interests in mind is usually not very profitable but instead a gamble by investors, sacrificing short-term profits with the goal of extracting much more from the customer once they believe in the product and are too locked-in to leave.
If you want to provide “features” commercially, it’s much easier to just use Chrome’s engine. The point of Firefox, at this time, is that we have at least one alternative implementation.
MailMate is closed source donationware with a bus factor of 1, which is just hilarious. As I understand it, the “sell a mail client for a one-time payment” model turned out to be insufficient to support the single developer, leading to the whole “patron of a for-profit company” theme.
In this case, "supply creates its own demand" and in more than just the usual way.
Mexico can't dig itself out but the United States could quite easily crush the cartels and letting them continue is an active policy choice. (Consider the organized retail theft and carjacking in San Francisco and Chicago... these are not individual criminals, nor would the racket be profitable without an organized network carefully managing and allocating resources).
The US would just need to flood the drug market with cheap state made drugs collapsing the price for a year or two. But then like any company the cartels and the prison industry lobby to well.
It would be a years-long occupation with no clear end goal.
It would kill at _least_ hundreds of thousands and negatively affect the lives of an order of magnitude more.
It would almost certainly fail by any reasonable metric. Look at how occupying Iraq and Afganistan went, or how the US has done in South America over the last century.
Yeah and cartel membership isn't so simple. Most people in any cartel prominent state know cartel members and have a complicated relationship with it and them. They don't want some foreign military coming in and killing their uncle/cousin. They want better opportunities for their family members who are affiliated. In fact - that would probably be much cheaper than trying to kill cartel members with drone strikes.
I live in Mexico and talk to people here about the clowns that are running for president in the US. It's genuinely embarrassing.
Edit to address actual reasons it would be bad:
1) Mexicans (in Mexico) distrust the US and its military. The US should not damage the remaining trust it has with an enormous trade ally. That would push Mexico towards China.
2) Could the US significantly damage the cartel(s) on their own turf?
3) What are the cartels? Are they the literal president-level politicians who are affiliated? Should the US "take them out" too?
I could go on but really the short answer is that the US would end up causing a mess, ruining the lives of normal people, and damaging its relationship with a major world economy and major trade ally.
They should call Iraq and Afghanistan for references /s
It's an impossible situation, but I don't think it's difficult to understand why Mexicans would not want the US military to invade based on its track record.
Helpful context would be that some groups in India can parlay their political power and social prestige into oppression certificates ("OBC") that lets them into top universities with scores much lower than everybody else. Which... fine... whatever -- politics is politics. But it is funny, delusional even, to see the author act as if these certificates should have any currency in the west.
To be fair, getting in even with the Quota is extremely difficult. If difficulty without the quota is a 10, difficulty with the quota is more like a 9.7.
If you were Forward Caste and rejected from CSE@IITB only because of a Caste Quota, you statistically would have ended up at CSE@IITK or EE@IITD, which has no meaningful difference.
Belittling people who attended top programs on caste quotas is lame and mean.
Common Rank List :90.7788642 (Brahmins, upper castes which Ycombinator hates)
Gen-EWS:75.6229025
OBC-NCL:73.6114227 : Mr Kuldeep meel (based on his caste)
SC:51.9776027
ST:37.2348772
PwD:0.0013527
I would say 73 is minuscule in comparison of 90. Kuldeep is a typical Kota kid, he is not someone coming out from rural India. I wish him best. Sad to see he stopped so low for clicks.
The thread is just a headsup to those, who are not well informed on the issues and the word caste triggers them. The effort is to provide factual data along with the circumstances so that people can weight and relate all kind of arguments with their own life experiences. Also, help our white bois/gals understand what they talking about lol.
Discrimination goes against article one of my country's Constitution. I don't need to know anything about caste just as I don't need to know that in some countries you can marry an 11 year old.
The point is no one is discriminating against Jaats, the group the professor belongs to. They are one of the richest & powerful groups in India. The blog is very misleading since caste based discrimination against Jatts is unheard of.
In fact the group the professor belongs to is responsible for 80% of caste based discriminations that happen in India.
That isn't really a useful comparison in a world where public or public-adjacent (bureaucratic committees operating by consensus) funding has totally crowded out rich funding interesting projects in terms of both dollars and status.
But wasn't always that way, and most of the science behind the modern industrial world was probably funded by rich guys sponsoring research at Cambridge or Edinburgh or wherever. The complaining scientists just don't like the accountability entailed by being funded by a real person very much.
Here is a post where people are discussing how they sent money to Gaza, some times to specific people they wanted to help, and crypto comes up but there are plenty of other options too.
Edit: Sorry, here. https://www.reddit.com/r/Crowdfunding/comments/17phhk4/best_...