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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • What the industry desperately needs is some distributed payment platform. Maybe you sign up for a subscription clearinghouse for $50/month. The service then distributes your subscription funds to the dozens of different news websites you visit, in proportion to the amount of time spent on or stories read from each.

    This is basically what Apple News+ is, which includes quite a large set of newspapers and magazines and their back catalogues.

    Also, various libraries will include some sort of mechanism to access a small set of news subscriptions as part of their digital offerings.










  • America has thousands of tax jurisdictions, every state, county, city/town can impose their own set of taxes. For the longest time, online shopping was effectively tax-free shopping unless you happened to be based in the same state as the seller. That is largely not the case anymore though as various states passed legislation to enforce tax collections on online sales rather than trust the consumer to volunteer that info when it’s time to fill out tax forms.



  • There is already traction here at the state-level. It’s been the law in California since the summer and Minnesota has something similar going into force on Jan 1st.

    I expect many more states to follow with their own rules if these federal rules die with the new administration. I expect some noise to be made but wouldn’t be surprised if it survives for some time to avoid more complex state-level that would be more expensive to manage.




  • It’s cheaper if you don’t have constant load as you are only paying for resources you are actively using. Once you have constant load, you are paying a premium for flexibility you don’t need.

    For example, I did a cost estimate of porting one of our high volume, high compute services to an event-driven, serverless architecture and it would be literally millions of dollars a month vs $10,000s a month rolling our own solution with EC2 or ECS instances.

    Of course, self hosting in our own data center is even cheaper, where we can buy and run new hardware that we can run for years for a fraction of the cost of even the most cost-effective cloud solutions, as long as you have the people to maintain it.