I think everyone should pay for their own externalities. Put gas in your car, and you are generating the externality, so expect to pay some company a gas tax to remove that carbon.
Buy electricity from coal and the power plant is the emitter, who should pay for capture. However, if you are a electricity customer, expect that cost to be passed on to you on your bill.
Nobody in the article mentions Star Trek movies, though. That guy mentions "They Live" and somebody else makes a comparison to Dementors in Harry Potter movies, but Star Trek was gratuitously inserted by your cranky chatbot.
The problem with paying is that there are an unreasonable number of publications out there to subscribe to. It would cost an absolute fortune to support every journalist for every article out there. Given HN is a link aggregator you have to assume that most publishers are going to be represented here.
If there were a quick and easy way to pay a reasonably small fee per article (similar to what we used to do with newspapers) then your unnecessarily condescending comment may have some merit.
How do you know that the parent comment here doesn’t ever pay for journalism? For all you know they pay for literally every publisher out there except for this particular one.
I pay for some journalism, but I reader mode others. Things rarely exist at the polar extremes. Usually my willingness to pay depends on the value proposition, if they’re asking me to pay for a lot of content I have no interest in I’m not likely to subscribe.
Perhaps it’s less a moral question for the consumer and more a logistical question for publishers to make it viable to pay for only the content we actually consume.
This is as bad of an argument as "You wouldn't steal a car" regarding piracy of media. Stealing a physical thing is never the same as obtaining a digital copy of something.
The problem with subscriptions is that you don’t have unlimited means, which means you can only afford a certain number of subscriptions. A subscription is always more than the cost of a single purchase, so by forcing you to subscribe the company is coercing you into also choosing them for the next purchase as well.
Yeah, you can go to another pizza place to get the pepperoni that you want, but you have already subscribed to the first place and it is a nontrivial decision to not utilize the subscription you already have. Plus the new place will require you to subscribe and now you’re paying far more than the two slices would have actually cost you if you were allowed to buy by the slice.
If you want to talk ethics, pursuing exclusively a business model that is anticompetitive via a reduction in consumer choice per transaction is on the wrong side of that line. I don’t fault people for opportunistically avoiding the paywall.
I don’t like anti-competitive, anti-consumer sales tactics. When that is all that is offered, I don’t blame people for finding ways around it.
What if instead every pizza place said “you must pay for five slices up front”? If you want a single slice, you have to pay for five. You get the next four without paying, but you have to buy them all up front.
Now you have purchased your five slices, but the next time you want pizza you want something that isn’t offered where you bought from last time. You can go across the street to where they have what you want, but you have to pay for five slices.
Now you have purchased ten slices and consumed two. Is that fair? What happens when you decide that the next slice you want isn’t offered at either of the two places you bought from before? Now you’ve bought fifteen slices and eaten three.
At what point do you decide to eat what you don’t really want simply because you’ve already paid for it? At some point this choice is taken away from you entirely because you can’t reasonably afford another five slices.
Subscription exclusivity in pricing is anti-consumer. They’re pushing you to consume only from them because they know you have to decide based on your means rather than purely what they offer.
I think I fully get what you're saying. I just don't think you have a human right or entitlement to buy pizza or news articles on the terms that you prefer.
You are right that if everyone does it you don't have a choice that allows you to get what you want for the price in terms that you want.
I don't think not being able to get your way means you get to take what you want. I don't think pizza companies individually or in aggregate have a moral obligation to satisfy you or have you as a customer.
It's like Mutual consent is only required as long as you get what you want , and if you can't get what you want, it doesn't matter. Do you apply this logic to the rest of your life?
There are laws against anti-consumer and anti-competitive practices, I’m not sure why you think we don’t have a right to purchase what we want without the market attempting to coerce us into buying from them exclusively.
I don’t need to apply this to the rest of my life because it isn’t tolerated anywhere but a few select places. I can buy my bread from a Vons and my milk from a Kroger and my meat from a butcher and we don’t allow any of those three to make it difficult to do so. I can buy a Honda motorcycle and a Ford truck and they aren’t allowed to subscription me into their brand.
Not that long ago, I could walk to a news stand and buy the journalism that I wanted case-by-case. You were allowed to “subscribe” to delivery of one but it was the delivery you were purchasing on cadence not the publication. I got to make that decision of which to buy daily, and I got to choose not to buy at all on days where I didn’t want to.
Current journalism has robbed us of these choices, and if they’re allowed to do that then I don’t see why we should be held to an ethical standard that they aren’t.
I think you have it all backwards, but I also don't think I'll be able to convince you of anything. There's no law preventing any of these grocery stores you talk about from selling only in bulk. They choose to sell lower volumes of their own free will.
This was an interesting, relevent article in the leading newspaper in the U.S. Many peope subscribe, and if it's important enough, you can go to the Library to read it.
Are you saying that relevent articles in major newspapers, like the WSJ, NYTimes, or WaPo shouldn't be discussed here, and only things on "free" sites like BuzzFeed, and PerezHilton are good?
As of 21 June 2023, there were 52,642 distinct sites (as defined by HN) which have made just the front page (30 items/day). That's roughly 3% of all submitted posts, which would be a rather larger site tally.
How many of those 52,642 sites do you suggest HN members subscribe to?
If we restrict that to only the sites with 100+ front-page submissions, that number falls to 149.
Of the sites I've identified as "general news" (all sites w/ >= 17 appearances, plus a few others), that list is 146.
Those constitute 8.47% of all HN front-page posts.
I would suggest that expecting the 600k+ active HN participants, let alone the 5 million or so total monthly users, to individually subscribe to more than a very small handful of such sites is entirely unrealistic.
> The end of D.B.A., as it’s known, along with that of its neighboring venue Glasslands — Vice, the media conglomerate, is taking over the building — was met with hand-wringing but also weary resignation. As the neighborhood around it was transformed from abandoned lots to high-rise condos, it was only a matter of time until a small, semi-underground, all-ages club, which steadfastly kept ticket prices low, disappeared. Copies of Vice magazine were shredded in commemoration.
