> If I went to a bank with a billion dollars I could likely negotiate an even higher rate for such a savings account.
I don't think that's how it works. As others have mentioned, FDIC insurance only covers 250k per depositor per bank. Typically when entities have that amount of cash (think Apple, Google, etc.), they put them into US government bonds, which are effectively equivalent to deposit accounts.
Edit: this is an interesting point, though. Ignoring the insurance issue, what would a bank do if you asked to open a deposit account with a billion dollars (paying, say 2%/year)? My uninformed layman's speculation would be that they would reject you because they wouldn't know what to do with that much money: they have to somehow lend out enough of it to at least break even on the 20 million/year that they're paying you for interest, but at the same time they have to be able to give you back your 1 billion at any time you ask for it.
> Edit: this is an interesting point, though. Ignoring the insurance issue, what would a bank do if you asked to open a deposit account with a billion dollars (paying, say 2%/year)? My uninformed layman's speculation would be that they would reject you because they wouldn't know what to do with that much money: they have to somehow lend out enough of it to at least break even on the 20 million/year that they're paying you for interest, but at the same time they have to be able to give you back your 1 billion at any time you ask for it.
Large banks deal with deposits in total orders of magnitude greater than that (the top banks have over $1 trillion each in deposits.) $1bn in a single demand deposit account is stupid for the depositor, but it doesn't move the needle on a major banks total of deposit accounts, and they can deal with it just fine.
I think they would totally take it, with all sorts of special terms. Also, they don't need to have a requirement to say they will get you all that cash immediately to keep the tether promise.
To your first point, if you have another entity do that type of investments for you and present it as a bank account with a variable interest rate; then you can claim you have a 1:1 cash backing truthfully, even if the reality is different. If you just stored the money in a normal bank, the reality would stay the same.
It’s also a thousand million dollars. That’s between 500 and 1000 mortgages in SF or NY. Any direct lender would love that opportunity; they’ll charge 4-5% on a 30-yr fixed and give you half.
Are "Senior" titles meaningless in many companies? Absolutely. But they also matter in many others.
It seems as though the author's "juniorness" is showing through while writing this. In particular, the assertion that "programming skill is the most important skill for senior developer". I'm not sure that's true. You cannot write code in a vacuum; software development requires communication and understanding of the business to ensure you're solving the right problem. Doesn't matter how great your code is, if you write a solution to the wrong problem, you provide zero value. At companies where seniority is done well (FAANG, etc.) your performance is measured not just on the quality of your code, but the impact you provide to the business: this includes code quality, but also working on projects that matter to the bottom line of the business, enabling teammates to do their best work, bringing in new people, basically acting as a multiplier force.
Agree. I work at a large company with very specific role guidelines for "Sr. Engineer" vs. a regular engineer. The main differences are not "programming" skills, although a Sr. Engineer is expected to have solid programming abilities.
This statements sticks out to me:
> You can argue that being a “senior” is more than just being a good programmer, but if the “junior” developer is more productive and is trusted with tough problems, at the very least we should reconsider what a “senior developer” really is.
Maybe the type of companies Eduardo has worked at, or the scope of his work, has left him thinking that the business solely values programming ability. But at my company, and at many other large companies, Sr. Engineers have a skillset that is nearly impossible for new graduates to have, because they aren't taught in college. In addition to technical prowess, these include:
* Operational best practices (how to monitor, deploy, and maintain systems)
* Project management (able to disambiguate a project and design it into achievable milestones with parallelizable work units)
* Historical context...like it or not, this is very valuable
* Knows how work happens across teams, such as best practices, pitfalls, technical strategies for minimizing coordination, etc.
* Can work and communicate clearly with stakeholders, PMs, customers, etc. to make the right product tradeoffs
* Know what matters and what doesn't when it comes to programming in a team setting, which is very different from solo programming
Almost all companies will value these skills, even if they have dropped the ball and don't have them listed as competencies.
> Yes, nobody wants to work with bad teammates, but refusing to acknowledge that there are great programmers who are also great teammates at the age of 22 is not the solution.
More than likely, those great programmers are recognized with salary increases. If they can't perform the tasks I listed above, they can be the best programmer in the world, but they don't belong as a Sr. Engineer. Which is fine, many people are happy not having to deal with all that "soft" stuff.
> also working on projects that matter to the bottom line of the business
this is my problem with this sort of assessment : as an engineer, you don't get to pick which projec to work on. The politics of the company may end up making you look like you're worthless even though you could've provided so much more value working on something else.
I don't agree with the author's stance on everything but I do think that programming skill is the most important skill for a senior software engineer/developer, for a few reasons:
- Code that is confusing/hard to approach for others (including future you) is bad code, so no "seniors" or "architects" that write crazy complex code aren't good at what they do -- true masters make complex things simple.
- Identifying the right problem to solve is not the engineers job -- this is squarely in business planning/project management domain, which is rightfully a different specialization
- Like the above, engineers shouldn't even be wasting time chasing down requirements, this is the job of project management, making people who have and specialized their craft over years spend time playing politics is wasteful.
I do recognize the need for the other skills you noted in a modern business, but maybe we should be calling those skills + programming skill something different. As far as I can tell with your response and others, a non-exhaustive list non-code metrics for "senior"s are:
- Business value understanding/delivery
- Guiding junior engineers
- Navigating politics
Maybe we can call that "Senior Engineering Project Lead" instead and make the required skill sets more distinguishable. The fact is that if you start optimizing for some of these other skills you're going to take a hit on architectural/programming skill -- time and attention is limited. If what the position requires is someone who spent 60% of their time honing their craft, and 10% learning to navigate politics and 30% focusing on business-level understanding, then maybe we should signify that with a more descriptive title. I guess the crux of my argument is that "Senior Software Engineer" is a misleading title.
As a side note, I think this is just yet another way for companies to extract more value from employees -- build in more and more requirements into an role denoted to be strictly for engineering, make another rung on the bullshit internal payment ladder to climb. I also would be more sympathetic to the "business impact" if more of the "business reward" was shared with those producing the value, and FAANG didn't actively collude in the last decade to reduce employee wages.
> identifying the right problem to solve is not the engineers job
But the senior engineer has a vital role in advising which problems are solvable. Either in terms of technology, skill, time or budget. That input needs to start at the commencement of a project.
Here's my rough delineation: a Senior knows why a particular requirement is in the Func Req Doc. A Junior doesn't.
> [and if] FAANG didn't actively collude in the last decade to reduce employee wages
I laughed at that. FAANG salaries are so out of context of most around the World that they are irrelevant. As a 15-year Senior in the UK I was earning $50,000 equivalent. And no stock options. I don't think FAANG salary ladders even start that low.
> But the senior engineer has a vital role in advising which problems are solvable. Either in terms of technology, skill, time or budget. That input needs to start at the commencement of a project.
> Here's my rough delineation: a Senior knows why a particular requirement is in the Func Req Doc. A Junior doesn't.
I still think this makes sense if the problem is an engineering problem. The problem is rarely whether you can or can't do something (unless you're doing some suuuper cutting edge tech) -- it's whether you should or not, and that's a project management/business/product person's job to decide, when they draw up the plan for the project.
I know this isn't how it will work in the real world, but the senior engineer should be called on to clarify parts of the plan, not to start doing the planning & figuring out how to maximize business value. Once you start bringing in those other aspects, it's no longer about the engineering discipline -- so the job title should reflect that -- It's obvious that a "senior engineering project lead" knows why a particular requirement is in the functional requirements -- it's less clear to me (at least) that a "senior engineer", all I expect from that person is engineering ability.
Maybe it's just pedantry/semantics but it seems like a distinguishable difference to me.
> I laughed at that. FAANG salaries are so out of context of most around the World that they are irrelevant. As a 15-year Senior in the UK I was earning $50,000 equivalent. And no stock options. I don't think FAANG salary ladders even start that low.
I can't argue with your context, but I bet FAANG's profits are also out of context compared to the companies you're thinking about in the UK as well. Tech is literally one of the US's biggest (if not biggest, I think the entertainment industry might be the biggest) export. Just because there was more money to go around doesn't mean what they did wasn't wrong and extremely employee-hostile.
As a side note, maybe you should move to another company/industry? No one is forcing you to be paid less, especially with 15 years of experience... Go to one of the companies with enough money to pay you lavishly.
UW grad here. Running has really helped me maintain motivation and life outlook throughout the years. When I was at Waterloo during the winter I would switch to swimming, which while not quite as enjoyable for me as running, was still hugely beneficial. I dealt with a sprained ankle last year and had to switch back to swimming while it healed. I don't know how much you enjoy it, but if you're just inexperienced at it, it's definitely worth the effort to become better.
Therapists are also great. PM me if you ever want to talk.
I actually don't even like -Werror for development. When I'm developing/testing/debugging, I frequently want to run partially implemented functions (a good example of this is repeatedly commenting out blocks of code to bisect a problem). Trying to deal with warnings about unused variables/parameters is extremely cumbersome.
I want to opt out of bad warnings-as-errors, rather than failing to opt into good ones. -Wall -Wextra -pedantic -Werror for me - followed by a bunch of -Wno-xyz like -Wno-unused-variable.
You could also use -Wno-error=unused-variable, but I find warnings as warnings almost completely pointless outside of extremely niche circumstances. I will lose them in a sea of other errors when a template goes awry, and after fixing that and building again the warning will disappear because the TU with said warning didn't need rebuilding.
I agree. The main place I find -Werror to be valuable is on the CI server, where you're checking that committed code compiles cleanly on your target platforms.
I'm surprised you place so much trust in our system of laws. With that proposal, we'd be one small step away (e.g. terrorist attack, etc.) from something truly Orwellian. Look what happened with 9/11 and see how fast our civil liberties can go down the drain.
Machine guns and prison camps are a lot more damaging to personal liberties and have more significant potential for abuse by government, and yet we're managing just fine for the last 100 years, thanks to our system of laws.
I work at a large, well-known Silicon Valley company. I interned at the company while I was in college, but decided to work elsewhere after I graduated. After a few years, one of their recruiters reached out to me via email, went through the normal interview process, and ended up with the job.
Past jobs/internships have been a mixture of applying directly on college job boards, recruiters reaching out through email/LinkedIn, and Hired.
First mention I see of hired. Used it while I was looking for jobs in London - definitely something I can recommend to get your foot in the door, especially for people who need visa sponsorship (at least that was my scenario)
Yeah, it was decent. My experience was that it provided a lot of leads in a short amount of time. In a matter of a week, my plate was completely full, doing phone screens, take-home problems, and on-sites. Got several offers from some pretty cool startups at the end of it, and it was nice to have salary expectations up front.
I would say that I completely underestimated the amount of time required for it. It skews more towards startups, and it seems like take-home problems have become the norm in their application processes now. If you're going to take this route, I would recommend taking 2 weeks PTO from your day job to dedicate to this.
For my last job change, I took a much more passive approach. Over a period of a couple of months, I engaged with a couple of recruiters who reached out to me, only interviewing at 2 companies, and then took this job. Far more relaxing and less pressure. The only downside is that I felt like I had less negotiating power at the end.
Intrinsic properties are the things that remain even if no one is using it. So even if no one is using bitcoin it is still quick to transfer, hard to forge, difficult to create, etc.. etc..
FogHorn is an early-stage startup in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) space. We specialize in edge computing, meaning that we do real-time computation near the source of the data, which presents unique technical challenges with respect to CPU and memory footprint of our software. We've developed a functional programming language, VEL, and an associated compiler. We also work on machine learning, low level optimization, and building distributed systems.
As the report notes, though, they already have exit information from passenger manifests, and land border entry sharing from Canada and Mexico. I would have assumed this information would have already been sufficiently accurate.
Although Canada now reports land (and ferry) arrivals to the US, Mexico does not (yet).
There is no US record of who leaves southbound into Mexico, and in most cases Mexico doesn't have a record of their entry either (requiring a Mexico tourist permit isn't enforced at most entry points).
Fair enough. But it sounds like this technology is being developed for airports, not land crossings or ferries. How would you setup this facial scanning when people leave the country in a vehicle?
If anyone's looking for another workaround, the article actually hints at the solution: Facebook's l.php redirect that it uses when you click on a link shared through the platform. It functions similarly to the Google redirect, and you don't even need a Facebook account for it to work.
How come this isn't culturally perceived in the same way as not paying for software or movies or music? I've read various reasons why people don't want to pay. That's fine. But then simply don't read it.
The reason I posted the workaround is because I feel like the publisher is trying to have their cake and eat it too. In other words, they enjoy the publicity they get from having their articles shared on Google, Facebook, Hacker News, but these sites usually don't want to feature articles that require their users to pay, so WSJ sets up a soft paywall that lets some of these users view the article for free.
But of course that becomes a bit of a blurry moral line. If I start browsing Google News in the hopes of stumbling upon a WSJ article so I can read it for free, is that immoral? What about if I google the headline of an article I'm interested in? Automatically setting my referer to facebook.com whenever I visit wsj.com probably goes too far, but then where do you draw the line?
Anyway, I feel very strongly that either everyone from HN should be able to freely read an article shared here, or no one. If no one can read it, then the link shouldn't be allowed here.
I'm fine with their paywall... however, they should no longer come up on google news... their rules have been quite clear, and why google is letting WSJ skate on the issue is beyond me.
I expect that when I click a link via google, that I get the same content that google gets. It took years for google to demote expertSexChange and now that WSJ is fully paywalled, they shouldn't get a pass on this.
You are correct. In fact the distinction between your two examples i.e the car (a tangible good) and the program (an intangible good) is what economists refer to as rivalry [0].
A car is a rivalrous good. A program is a non-rivalrous good.
The main distinction is that the marginal cost of producing a non-rivalrous good is zero.
interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.
By the way, the infringer was acquitted, since the court agreed he hadn't "stolen, converted or taken by fraud", despite even making money from his infringing activities.
Unconvincing argument. The court's statement, as I reproduced above, is not about the specifics of the statute, otherwise it would have said "it's theft, just not physical removal". The wording is very clear.
The example of the other case (which, by the way, was only a District Court decision) also seems weak. AFAIK (IANAL), the fact that copyright law preempted state law doesn't mean the two are equal, it just means that both theft and copyright infringement occurred - which is easily seen to be the case, since physical plans were actually removed from a place.
Imagine there is a technology that could copy tangible goods such as cars. Now somebody makes a copy of your car. Your car was not stolen but you may not be happy with the fact that somebody now also has a copy of your personal belongings like a smartphone that was inside the car.
This is where copyright law comes into play which only allows copying the car only under your rules. If somebody doesn't follow the rules that doesn't mean they stole your car but it still means they should receive some form of punishment to prevent future copyright infringement.
Ah, that tired old PIRATE-COPIER-MURDERER-TERRORIST argument.
You do realize that copyright protection is an invention to prevent artists from being fucked over by commercial publishers, and was originally not intended to limit people from copying content noncommercially?
That's a bit beside the point parent was making: it's true that music piracy is somehow usually not frowned upon, at least based on my anecdotal experience. People don't see it as a thing to explicitly avoid, any more that they would avoid sharing someone's (copyrighted) photo in Facebook.
I recognize that review comes from two sources, direct through sales and indirect, through discovery. So I try to make sure discovery reaches people with the best material and spend the most money to move the most people, persuading them to pay along the path of least resistance....
it's unclear if you do not realize thousands of people make their living full-time as promoters on social media. They literally pay rent with money that was paid to them proportionate to their retweets. Or if this was hyperbole to underscore your disagreement with a freemium business model
You can often loan out movies, music, books and sometimes software from a local library, free of charge. (At least in the UK.) It was also common to loan a friend a CD back when CDs were a thing. Perhaps it is more pervasive now, but I don't think it is fair to say that everybody who consumes media pays for it.
No. The publisher wants their subscribers to be able to share the stuff they pay for with other people. If you use that feature to read for free any content they publish, you misuse it. Now, I am very much against any DRM, I don't even really believe that intellectual property should be protected by law, but I believe that content creators have legitimate (but not necessarily legal) right to be paid for their content. (If they want to have legally enforceable income, they need to find different schemes.) If you avoid paying, you're denying them that right. Again, I don't think this should be covered by law, but I also don't think it's fair.
This argument comes up often but it's not convincing. You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't distribute your content on a public (free) medium and also control how people consume that content. If you want control of how people use a thing, the internet is the worst possible choice.
It's really simple, if you want to put your content behind a paywall, then put it behind a paywall. Don't leave a backdoor open and then complain when people use that door.
do you claim to know the exact intent of other people, and are prepared to judge some other people based on sharing your view and adhering to it exactly?
Don't believe IP should be protected? So every single author out there should not get paid? If their content isn't protected, they it's illogical to suggest they should also get paid. Anyone could reproduce that content and redistribute it. That's ludicrous. Film crews ought not be paid? Because if they can't sell their work, then what are they supposed to eat while making movies? Without IP protection, you no longer have new medicines. If the answer is "the government," then the question is -- where does the tax money come from to pay for it? If you wiped out IP law, you'd destroy a significant portion of the economy. The only people that would make any money would be those that control land or raw materials. Innovation would disappear.
Obviously, this is too complex a problem to discuss here, so I'll make only a few points: (1) It isn't really relevant for my point about paying the publishers. If anything, IP protection makes my point stronger. (2) I'm not suggesting to abolish IP protection, because I'm not sure I'm right. That's why I said I believe IP protection is not needed. I know I cannot argue my opinion sufficiently. (3) My biggest issue with IP protection is that since there is no unambiguous definition of what IP is, all IP laws are necessarily too restrictive. Leading e.g. to the current craziness with patents. (4) Film crews out to be paid. There are different models of financing than copyright. Music industry got pretty far with the transition. (5) As for drugs, the governments should announce which drugs are needed, and when companies deliver such drugs, they should get a one-time payment. In present language, the governments would buy the copyright from the companies and release the recipes to public domain. It would be financed from health insurance.
Etc, etc. But again, I know there are holes in my reasoning.
It doesn't seem like an unsolvable problem. The drug companies themselves must have budgets, and the publicly traded ones have a stock price. So someone somewhere must be able to create estimates for this.
I'd be happy to pay, under these conditions: 1) payment per article, at prices comparable to aggregate ad income; and 2) payments accepted via Bitcoin, or other methods which can be anonymized.
Well, ads are currently placed through a micropayment system. And there's no reason that customers would need to make individual decisions, any more than advertisers do.
i would be perfectly fine with this. just give me a way to exclude wsj from my newsfeed and search results without me having to install a trusted browser extension
I don't they're the same at all. In your example if you walk out of the store with the magazine the store has to cover the cost of the magazine. If you stay in the store and read it then the content provider didn't get paid for someone consuming their content however the magazine is still there. The store could still sell it.
The l.php script basically allows someone to read the magazine without paying for it. The only entity that loses something in that situation is the content provider.
They really should have been more vocal in announcing its release. I find that a lot of people still believe the only available options are ad-supported.
I had only discovered it when I wanted to resubscribe for other reasons; I probably would have done it earlier if I had known the option was available.
Does it work by checking the referrer? Maybe you can workaround by configuring a browser add-on (like RefControl) to just send facebook.com as a referrer while on WSJ.
The difference between absolutely free like most content on the internet and the WSJ standard monthly rate of $33/month is truly enormous. The NYT, which I also feel is priced too high, is $15/month.
Remember Netflix costs $10/month-- that's the value proposition they need to compete against.
These content producers should charge $5/month, with no scummy "special introductory offers" where you just _know_ they're going to raise the price and screw you in a couple months. At that price I would subscribe to everything I read.
Same here... while I've appreciated the articles I've clicked through to, I do not feel their content is worth over $20/month to me. I pay for netflix, cable, etc, and don't even use it much, I mostly download for convenience, but I pay for it because I feel guilty if I don't.
If I click on a google search link, I expect to see the same content google does.. for that matter, it's part of google's own rules... WSJ should not get a pass, and google should now deindex WSJ based on those rules.
Then create a fake account every week. On a fresh VPN/Tor connection so it's not tied to your IP. Better use a different browser too so it's not fingerprinted [0]. Make sure you disable those sharing links and the JS that loads them in.
Let's be real, they get data about you in a million ways. It'll all be aggregated somehow, and I wouldn't be surprised if they did aggregate in other ways like IP/browser, and those sharing links definitely leave cookies behind.
A noble thought. My problem comes not from the fact that I don't want to pay but rather from the fact that it's super annoying.
What if my browser could just say "article will be 25 cents?" and I could say y/n? But instead, I have to sign up for a service, hand over my credit card, blah blah, and now you've wasted enough of my time that it was worth just me stealing it.
See, I look at this the exact opposite way - if I have to decide whether each individual article is worth paying for, I'm probably not going to read any articles. Its much easier for me to pay $10 a month and know that I can, with zero friction, read whatever article I want from the publications I respect. We're talking about the Wall Street Journal here; odds that they're going to only occasionally publish something I'm interested in are pretty low - I'm either interested in subscribing or I'm not.
The problem is, assuming you read 20 or so online newspapers at least occasionally, this has you keeping $200 a month of subscriptions, of which in most cases you will read a 2 or 3 articles a year because they ended up HN news or some other news aggregator you actually use.
This is even true if you only subscribe to relatively reputable traditional news sources, btw. Here are 12 that individually are worth it and most informed individuals would be served by reading on occasion, but few people would want to have individual subscriptions to them: WSJ, NYT, WaPo, The Economist, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Chicago Tribune, SF Chronicle, The Guardian, Le Monde, El País, Die Welt. Nevermind the fact that I do have subscriptions to 2 of those, and they compound the problem by serving annoying video ads even to subscribers.
Edit: A model that I would consider fair though (and the journals might not, I don't know their cost structure) is: 2-5 free articles a month without subscription of any sort and with unobtrusive ads, paid subscription if you read more articles a month from that particular journal. Another option is a "library" subscription model, in which you pay $20 or $30 a month, but get access to a broad catalog of newspapers (about what you would find at a large public library in print) and they get profits based on what you actually read. And yes, I have seen this as a startup idea, Netflix for news, but newspapers never seem to go for it wholeheartedly enough for it to be worthwhile to consumers, though.
Seems to me, as readers, we're less in need of 'Netflix for news' and more in need of either consolidation or decentralization in journalism.
I have much less brand loyalty now than say 10 years ago. I have less respect for both the WSJ and NYT than I did. I don't think their incentives line up with mine anymore, and it leaves me without a news source I trust the way I once trusted both of them.
A larger entity that doesn't need to worry as much about getting me to hit the clickbait would serve me better as a reader (and I'd then be more likely to subscribe). Or, if I could subscribe to individual reporters or small groups of them in some way (such as Dave Pell's style of content delivery, but more availability and let me pay them some how), it would also better serve me as a reader.
Instead we're stuck with a structure where they don't make enough money, and thus continue devaluing their brands, and we as readers don't have an easy way to know who we can trust to respect us as customers (no surprise video ads, unbiased reporting, etc). So I guess I'll stick with using sites like HN to aggregate the news for me, and stop clicking on the WSJ links. The brand no longer signals unbiased quality journalism to me.
That all might be true, but I am still not sure the solution is simply being subscribed to a single very credible newspaper. That still means a single editorial line and no ability to share (links to) articles between people. It seems like an artifact of an old medium of distribution. When you had to get a bunch of pages at your doorstep, it made sense to have a single "provider" that bundled the news and analysis for you and decided what you got.
Now a days what we have is: individual journalists/teams that investigate and produce analysis, aggregators like HN or Reddit who point our which content is interesting/relevant and traditional media outlets which mostly serve to vouchsafe to some degree that the content is factual and credible. We can't get rid of the last component because we end up with no way of distinguishing real news from propaganda, disinformation and innuendo, and also because we haven't found a way to directly pay the first group except through the media orgs. A fully centralized system that certified news "accuracy" is the stuff of Orwellian fiction, though, so that's a non-starter. You could have a federated certification system, I suppose, where articles are published by individual journalists and then groups and institutions vouchsafe for the veracity of stories or the record of the journalist (sort of like TLS CAs or a web of trust of journalist peer review), but you still need to come up with a good way to pay all of the parties involved. That said, in principle, I'd rather pay for each individual article, or a monthly fee for access to nearly-all the articles available, than for a subscription to a very specific collection of articles in the way you do now with news subscriptions.
For me, the deal breaker is that even with a subscription I am usually saddled with consuming the content the way they want me to and they only want me to consume it that way so they can still advertise to me.
Content providers are fragmented, you can't access it while abroad, you can't access it on additional device, you cannot copy it, you are subjected to fair use limitations, you must latest version of this insecure software to access the content...
So check the "automatically pay everything below 30 cents" setting in your browser payment add-on or subscribe to the advertised flatrate shared between publishing houses (like spotify).
The Brave web browser has this built in, more or less. You give it bitcoin and it does micropayments for content you read. You can set max amounts, etc...
There's already a system for selling ad space, based on tracking data and real-time bidding. Why would it be so hard to use the same sort of system for paid access, replacing ad resellers with readers?
That is what Google Contributor once did, but was shut down recently to be completely re-thought from the ground up (and hopefully will be relaunching in the next few months) because:
1. Nobody used it
2. It didn't block ALL ads, just most (based on if you won or lost the bid)
3. There was a LOT of backlash against it because it was google and even though you can opt out of tracking nobody believes them.
4. The old "adblock is free" argument.
It used to be that you'd pay an amount between $1 and $15 per month and it would use that money to "bid" on ad spots like a normal advertiser would. If you won the bid, you'd see a picture, a pattern, or anything else you wanted in that spot. If you lost, you'd see another ad.
The fee split worked identically to a regular ad, so Google would take their cut, the site would take the rest. And any money not spent at the end of the month was refunded back to you (not rolled over, actually put back in your bank account).
But I'm arguing that publishers could simply sell per-article access. As an alternative to subscriptions. I used the current ad-brokerage system as an example, because it's so hugely cumbersome. But I'm not arguing that users should simply bid against advertisers.
This. Has been my solution for most "major news outlets with paywall" in German for quite some time now. It has a couple of English papers as well (could be better, though).
You can even get your money back when reading accidentally (guess that doesn't work 10 times in a row, but it's a good feature).
It is a small conundrum, I don't particularly like Murdoch either, but his paper is well regarded and many important pieces have appeared there (like op-ed from public figures for example), and I miss out when I can't have access to WSJ articles.
I wish there were a way to buy access to individual articles .
You are aware that you probably consume other valuable goods and services from companies whose CEOs are just as deplorable, but not as well publicized, right?
If you think a product is valuable, but you don't want to pay for it because you don't like the person selling it that makes you a retributive thief. You don't even have ideology to hide behind, you just don't like someone.
This is awesome. Just for folks who aren't clear how to create a bookmarklet:
Create a bookmark of any page, by going to a URL such as https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122878081364889613 (note that only the top part of the page loads) and enter Cmd (or Ctrl) D. Now Save the bookmark to your bookmark bar. Find the bookmark, right click, and replace the WSJ URL with the javascript URL in the parent post. Save and now test by clicking the bookmark in the bookmark bar. After a redirect through Facebook, the full WSJ article should display.
I may be misunderstanding your instructions, but I think the intended use (in Chrome, at least) is to highlight the javascript and drag it to your bookmarks bar. This creates a bookmark that executes the javascript, which you can click to unblock the WSJ article you're currently viewing by redirecting the current page through Facebook.
Another useful bookmarklet for deleting annoying DOM elements:
I don't think that's how it works. As others have mentioned, FDIC insurance only covers 250k per depositor per bank. Typically when entities have that amount of cash (think Apple, Google, etc.), they put them into US government bonds, which are effectively equivalent to deposit accounts.
Edit: this is an interesting point, though. Ignoring the insurance issue, what would a bank do if you asked to open a deposit account with a billion dollars (paying, say 2%/year)? My uninformed layman's speculation would be that they would reject you because they wouldn't know what to do with that much money: they have to somehow lend out enough of it to at least break even on the 20 million/year that they're paying you for interest, but at the same time they have to be able to give you back your 1 billion at any time you ask for it.