kawhah

Nothing is stopping them; this is exactly what people do.

The headline says that this year was the largest increase in population since 1962. That increase was 1% or ~600,000 people.

It is still small in relation to population change though.

> for every fairly executed person we can have up to one wrongly executed person, and that's totally fine?

you are confusing two ratios. the number of fairly executed people and the number of guilty people who are acquitted are obviously totally different.

Have you tried to get ChatGPT to answer questions about factual topics at a level of junior grad student/hobbyist independent researcher?

It will generally tell you those things which are known to someone who has neither done detailed research, nor gained specific insights into that topic. (Together with made-up stuff.)

It seems odd to treat the suggestion that unnecessary emails cause excessive carbon emisions and the suggestion that unnecessary air travel causes excessive carbon emissions as the same or similar.

> so they get flooded by less tech-savy, more casual users that don't really see the value of open source other than they don't pay for it

this was solved 30 years ago by an important socio-technical invention called the FAQ, used together with a social convention of not elevating or rewarding vexatious messages.

In the UK, planning started on Hinkley Point in 2010. It was supposed to run at 3 TW by 2020, costing £24 per MWh. It's now 13 years into a process that is projected to complete in another 5 years, eventually producing energy for £90 per MWh.

In roughly the same period of time 30 TW of wind capacity have been installed. Even if you discount windfarm capacity at an aggressive 4:1, wind has already succeeded in producing 2.5 times what nuclear said it would be able to and failed at.

Onshore wind is being delivered at a per MWh cost below that of the new nuke, if it ever runs. The offshore cost is much lower still.

> Another is that these people are pretty good at starting shit storms trying to ruin your reputation if you don't comply with their unreasonable demands.

If you go on social media and offer your well-thought-out opinions about some controversial subject, you are very likely to get large number of people sending you offensive messages, arguing with you objectionably, trying to start pile-ons, attempting to dox you, etc.

Is the correct response to announce that "your participation in political discussion for free has become unsustainable", and that you need to be paid by all the people who find your comments interesting?

So become a contractor, work for an inflated fee for two months. Then take a month off and work for yourself on whatever you want. Or just do nothing, if you prefer that to working on your own projects.

Economic injustices and inefficiencies can and do exist in free-ish markets. But this isn't one of them. It's more like "old man shouts at supply and demand".

> Most complex, unique, value producing things have a path to monetization for the builder of the thing.

I don't think this is true. You need an extra condition 'that few people want to produce'.

There is lots of good free art. Why? Because lots of people want to be artists and make art. There is tons of good free writing. Why? Because lots of people want to write. There is masses of good free music. Why? Because many, many people enjoy making music.

There aren't people who collect garbage, clean toilets, dig holes in the ground, or work in oil refineries for free. But there are people publishing science, doing research, writing philosophy, producing erotic material, designing things, putting on theatre, producing textbooks and teaching people things, making clothes, thinking of jokes, answering questions, providing peer support to addicts, playing music, making games, making animations, all without monetary compensation. This is because the people doing these things want to do them.

This isn't a failure of our economic system. It's a great thing - it makes the products better, the producers happier (provided they have the economic freedom to spend time on these projects) and the consumers better off.

First of all, it's obvious that in the vast majority of cases, writing free software falls into the 'amateur art' category not the 'dirty, boring and necessary job' category. Many, many people enjoy the time spent on writing and maintaining software, are motivated to solve their and other people's problems, and take pride in doing so well. You might expect that only games, intellectual toys or fanciful projects would motivate people to work on them in their free time. The reality is that software projects which could be seen as dry and boring to non-technical people (OS kernel design, file transfer protocols, laptop power management support, database and webserver stability, document rendering) attract many very talented people to work on them.

Secondly, if we think that there's some deep inequality or instability in our society because (for example) critical Internet infrastructure depends on hobbyists and volunteers, doesn't it make more sense to try and improve the conditions for hobbyists and volunteers, and make it possible for there to be more of them? The alternative put forward seems to be to turn them into more of the people who both don't enjoy the time spent on what they do, nor produce the best product that they can.

Yes, the main reason why people don't do this is because they aren't psychologically ready to find out that the thing which cost them a lot of effort has very little monetary value.

What is the evidence for this feeling of entitlement?

I use tons of free software. I've never either demanded that anyone work on it for free, nor have I expressed any sense of entitlement or expectation.

> You could though, if the mindset of open source software consumers were to shift to 'pay for things you get value from'

What if the mindset of producers were to shift? What if people only worked for free on things that they want to work on? Isn't that both more realistic and better for everyone?

They were built in the past as part of nuclear-weapons-oriented industry of the Cold War. Like many things about nuclear, taking away the need to build weapons changes a lot of the economics around them.