Welcome aboard 🫡

I’ve tried it all: modals, banners, rewording it, … and, like, I get it. If I contributed a few bucks to every worthwhile thing, I’d run out of money quickly. There actually is one at the bottom of every post right now, though it’s quite small, because I’ve learned that it really doesn’t matter.

Also, to be clear, I didn’t mean to complain or anything. I just wanted to explain the reality of the ecosystem as it currently exists, to the best of my knowledge.

I just want to emphasize that to set up a truly independent and unpaywalled piece of media, you probably need to abandon hope of it being even a viable side hustle. Quasi-independent media on, say, YouTube or Substack can make some money, but you’re then stuck on those corporate platforms. If you want to do your own website or podcast or whatever, that’s more independent, but you’re still dependent on Google if you run ads, or on Patreon if you do that sort of thing. The lesson of Twitter should make pretty clear the danger inherent to that ecosystem. Even podcasts that seem independent can easily get into huge trouble if, say, Musk were to buy Patreon or iHeart.

I’ve been writing on my website for over two years now. My goal has always been to be completely independent of these kinds of platforms for the long term, no matter what, and the site’s popularity has frankly exceeded my wildest dreams. For example, I’m the #1 google result for “anticapitalist tech:”

But I make no money. If I wanted this to be anything but a hobby, I’d have to sacrifice something that I think makes it valuable: I’d have to paywall something, or run ads, or have a paid discord server, or restrict the RSS feed. As things stand now, I don’t know my exact conversion rate because I don’t do any analytics and delete all web logs after a week, but I did keep the web logs from the most recent time that I went viral (top of hackernews and several big subreddits). I made something like 100 USD in tips, even though the web logs have millions of unique IPs. That’s a conversion rate of something like 0.00002 USD per unique visitor.

Honestly, if I got paid even $15/hr, I would probably switch to doing it at least as a part time job, because I love it. Compare that to the right wing ecosystem, where there’s fracking money and Thiel money just sloshing around, and it’s very very obvious why Democrats are fucked, much less an actual, meaningful left. Even Thiel himself was a right wing weirdo before he was a tech investor, and a right wing think tank funded his anti-DEI book. He then went on to fund Vance. It’s really hard to fight that propaganda machine part time.

I have been predicting for well over a year now that they will both die before the election, but after the primaries, such that we can’t change the ballots, and when Americans go to vote, we will vote between two dead guys. Everyone always asks “I wonder what happens then,” and while I’m sure that there’s a technical legal answer to that question, the real answer is that no one knows,

My beloved internet friend, thank you so, so much. I like duolingo for expanding my vocabulary, but the infantilizing gamification drives me nuts, to the point where when I run out of hearts, I just don’t use it for weeks. This little trick will make it so that I actually use it!

I don’t really agree with this. It is the answer that I think classical economics would give but I just don’t think it’s useful. For one, it ignores politics. Large corporations also have bought our government, and a few large wealth management funds like vanguard own a de facto controlling share in many public companies, oftentimes including virtually an entire industry, such that competition between them isn’t really incentived as much as financial shenanigans and other Jack Welch style shit.

Some scholars (i think I read this in Adrienne bullers value of a whale, which is basically basis for this entire comment) even argue that we’ve reached a point where it might be more useful to think of our economy as a planned economy, but planned by finance instead of a state central authority.

All that is to say: why would we expect competition to grow, as you suggest, when the current companies already won, and therefore have the power to crush competition? They’ve already dismantled so many of the antimonopoly and other regulations standing in their way. The classical economics argument treats these new better companies as just sorta rising out of the aether but in reality there’s a whole political context that is probably worth considering.

Yet another program that supposedly helps the poor by giving money to the rich.

third peg of the program will see the federal government draw up a public list of buildings it owns that could be made available for sale to help bolster development.

Jesus Christ. If the government wants to build housing, then it should build fucking housing. Selling publicly owned buildings to private developers to turn into rentals for poor people is trickle down neoliberal bullshit.