mbillie1

It's not enough to travel, save, have any remotely expensive hobbies (sports equipment for just one of many examples), or survive a car breakdown, buy a car if you don't already have one, and so on. It's funny that you budget in "media" automatically - so you've got just enough cash to eat, work, come home and plug in and to all the people living better than you, all the social signals that say you are your paycheck, and so on.

I agree it's a much better position to be in than say, indentured servitude, but it's naive to just expect or declare that people be happy living like this and stay happy living like this for the foreseeable future.

In the US at any rate you need a fairly significant amount of disposable income to meaningfully be free. Of course you are "free" to (attempt to) acquire this income, and most people reading HN will have already done so. But for a large swath of young people working low wage jobs, living at home because they can't afford rent, the notion of "freedom" might not seem that significant.

Good, I hope this spells the death of this horrifying product.

> Everyone should read Piketty.

Absolutely, unreservedly agree.

Because it's HN, where opinions other than "hooray libertarian technocracy" are frowned upon.

I haven't paid much attention to how they run as a business but I am a happy consumer, I get 2 excellent podcasts from Patreon at a price I am happy to pay. Hope they stay in business.

I meant more, "can we not debate it here," as in on HN. These discussions always end up going nowhere immediately.

Actually can we not debate it, and stop couching our barely-disguised political motivations in pedantry?

It's hard to invest if you don't have any money, and as the article points out, investment income below $38,000 is already untaxed. Mortgage rates are a tricky lever to manipulate. Wealth redistribution (in the form of taxing capital gains / investment income more and taxing wages less, particularly middle and upper-middle class wages) is probably the only realistic way to accomplish this.

It's not that I want some additional feature, I actually want fewer features. The ability to name group chats and persist them leads people to treat them like chat rooms. The ability to send animated gifs means people send them. These apps very quickly turned from "alternative to text-messaging" to "full-blown chat room that wants push notifications each time anyone sends a message," and I don't want an app to ask me to enable notifications each time I open it.

I realize there are per-thread mute settings, but the whole experience of using these things is highly intrusive. At least with text messaging (or calling) we still have, to some extent, the social expectation that it is known to be intrusive, so people (in my social group at least) are less likely to text for frivolous reasons.

In my experience, since Messenger / Hangouts / etc all support persisted, named chats, people start treating them like chatrooms rather than like text messages. I don't want notifications for a chat room (where there's a flurry of conversation that may or may not be directed at me), and in general since I work remote I try to keep the "things that make my phone buzz" list to the bare-minimum, since that list will always include "production outage" which might make me stop mid-step while heading to lunch and turn back around.

Additionally, FB messenger does not allow you to disable "read receipts," it always shows the other party when you have opened a message. Buzzing my pocket and then telling the other person I read their message feels very intrusive to me.

Same. I initially only uninstalled messenger (which intolerably presented me with a popup asking me to enable notifications EVERY TIME I OPENED THE APP), then got rid of the FB app. Now even on my laptop facebook.com is pointing at localhost in /etc/hosts, which makes me edit a root file to look at it. I'm much, much happier. If it works for you, cool, but if you're dissatisfied and considering abandoning it anyway, I can offer anecdotally that it has been a great decision for me.

(The only reason I don't close my account: I check it once every week or so, because I have older family members for whom this is probably as far as they're going into the world of social media and I feel a bit guilty either pressuring them to use some alternative or disconnecting from them further, as they are unlikely to understand my dissatisfaction with the FB product and much more likely to take it personally)

I call my both my senators and my congressional representative almost daily. It's important to do, I think more people need to be active in that sense.

Blockchain technology would prevent a web app vulnerability? What on earth?

Credit algorithms, specifically your FICO score, are not transparent. There is no reason beyond the naive assumption of good faith on the part of these companies to believe that they don't make or break at least your credit SCORE.

Nationalization of credit agencies - or even regulation governing exactly how credit scores are computed, and making that information transparent to the public - would be a huge step forward. Credit-determining algorithms are presently a black box to the public.

I would pay $5/game to stream US professional sports a la carte from my laptop (for the games I want to watch).

So... the estate tax is what you have a problem with?

In fairness, there are plenty of other places in the country with good tech scenes where you wouldn't face this anxiety. None of them quite like the bay, but it's not as though you have to relocate to Flint MI or someplace with zero other prospects. The CO front range, NY, SLC, ATL, and so on all have healthy tech economies, and more places keep cropping up.

> Free speech is a cultural value

I might equally make the point that "not overtly calling for the forcible deportation of non-whites from the US" is a cultural value.

> Once a private communications provider becomes recognized as communications infrastructure, they lose the right to police content that goes through their infrastructure.

Then I guess you're in favor of passing legislation to this extent, right?

> Do service providers have to morally support those who they provide service to?

Companies can be fined and executives imprisoned for say, selling weapons to terrorists. There's no magic hard line between "moral" / "amoral" in commerce; in a capitalist society consumption/sale are inherently moral concerns.

> I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument, but in order to do anything on the internet, you have to interact with companies.

Gee, it almost seems like there ought to be some set of laws or regulations which apply to companies providing what is effectively a public utility!

Nothing of substance to contribute but I'm immensely pleased to see Freddie DeBoer writing again.

> For each Planet Fitness, much of the cost is upfront. That is, they have to buy the property, renovate (or build), and then buy all the machines.

As said before, this is not remotely accurate. Firstly, nearly all of these franchises rent their building space. Secondly, as with any B&M business, fully loaded employee costs comprise a majority of operating expenses. Thirdly, gym equipment maintenance is a non-trivial ongoing factor. Certainly the initial equipment purchase is a bubble, but the idea that PF is only fiscally viable due to equipment longevity is specious at best.

You can see an estimate breakdown of PF expenses here: http://www.franchisedirect.com/fitnessfranchises/planet-fitn...

Note fitness equipment estimates range from $35,930 to $944,800; re-equip costs are estimated at $359,900 to $944,800. (that low estimate on re-equip may be a typo, it is likely re-equip costs are estimated in the same range)

> Except that the incremental cost of someone using a Gym is almost zero. Once you have enough members to cover the rent & employees, it's almost all upside.

Huh? What exactly do you think a gym's principal expenses are beyond rent, employee cost and equipment maintenance/replacement? And how long do you think a gym treadmill which is run on for ~6 hours a day will last?

I'm not saying MoviePass automatically makes sense, but the idea that gyms are "all upside" after the initial equipment purchase is badly misinformed.

If you actually use it, sure. Not unlike a gym membership, you let the aspirational purchasing of some people partially subsidize the cost for the actual user base. I'm not making any ethical stand for or against this practice, but it doesn't seem any different than gym memberships (or frankly an online Netflix membership) to me.

The people objecting that this is not cost effective are missing the point that most people who use this service will simply subscribe, forget, and go to the movies no more frequently than they do now (after a month or so).

It's why places like Planet Fitness are able to offer $10/month unlimited memberships.

I think the parent comment is referring to the abundance of comic book derivatives, sequels and uninspired remakes that have become increasingly prevalent of late.

> As a founder, I don't necessarily have to think about solving a problem or making money. I just need to gather enough users. Once I go past a certain threshold, I can sell the company (with the users being the main value), and this is what many of my friends are trying to do.

The valley sickness in a nutshell.