pexabit

What happened is adverse selection due to a stubbornly low valuation that doesn't even try to keep up, in the midst of a growing number of alternatives, worsened by a formal and therefore somewhat gameable process of getting in. The kind of person who really has an idea they are going to pursue regardless that he's actually committed to isn't going to part with his equity at the low prices a YC would offer. Instead what you get is people creating companies explicitly with the intention of applying for VC, which removes an important filter reflecting founder buy-in, and therefore average quality; and there's no way you can really tell one from the other.

I pay for my mail client (MailMate). I pay for my search(FoxTrot Search). I pay for my spam filter (Spamsieve). I pay for my notetaking/archival (Eagle Filer). I pay for my network monitoring (Little Snitch). There are alternatives to a lot of these they just aren't very good, in some cases astonishingly bad.

And I would pay an enormous amount of money for a browser that worked well that had features I've always imagined a browser should have. And I don't expect anyone to make that for me without the reward of getting nice stuff for doing so.

No one would bat an eye if Firefox were no more since there are other browsers more or less just as good, more or less just as bad. It's an immemorable product, the consumer surplus of which compared to the best alternative is very low.

Yeah advertising is a failure mode of what I said.

But if Firefox ever decided to make a lot of money by selling good browsers at a high price to paying users, well I think the result would be quite interesting.

Sometimes I marvel at what would be possible if just a sliver of open source talent was put to work building independent quality software for their own or an investor's profit. Marketing a product forces you to figure out what it is people actually need and deliver the knowledge and education people need to use a product well. In fact a lot of what is wrong with software from big tech companies is that individual programs are not written to make the program itself great, and the incentives generally do not encourage spending a lot of time making some part of Chrome or Safari more efficient.

Open source will never spend time marketing anything, never spend time educating an actual mass of general users as to its virtues or how to use it well, and suffer as a result. You don't have Desktop Linux that blows everything else out of the water because that would require investors to stake a lot of money doing these things, which they will only do if there is profit. PopOS gets as close as you might with something like that, but is ultimately shackled by the fact they cannot sell their software. (Enterprise is different, where I guess you can nerf the product to make money on servicing instead).

Even someone with infinite resources cannot do what a company selling something for a profit can because they are either ultimately captured by and beholden to some other interest other than the product itself, or constitutionally lack the energy to be daring and actually compete. Imagine what someone could do with a Firefox sold for a profit because of its superior functionality and superior efficiency.

This would be a good idea for ivory not so much fentanyl.

In this case, "supply creates its own demand" and in more than just the usual way.

Mexico can't dig itself out but the United States could quite easily crush the cartels and letting them continue is an active policy choice. (Consider the organized retail theft and carjacking in San Francisco and Chicago... these are not individual criminals, nor would the racket be profitable without an organized network carefully managing and allocating resources).

What are some of those reasons and why do you think Mexicans don't want that?

There is no race-neutral way to increase racial diversity by definition...

Helpful context would be that some groups in India can parlay their political power and social prestige into oppression certificates ("OBC") that lets them into top universities with scores much lower than everybody else. Which... fine... whatever -- politics is politics. But it is funny, delusional even, to see the author act as if these certificates should have any currency in the west.

there is absolutely no evidence universities are discriminating against OBCs and the guy who wrote this post does not present any.

pretty sure he would have posted his jee score if he got in without quota

That isn't really a useful comparison in a world where public or public-adjacent (bureaucratic committees operating by consensus) funding has totally crowded out rich funding interesting projects in terms of both dollars and status.

But wasn't always that way, and most of the science behind the modern industrial world was probably funded by rich guys sponsoring research at Cambridge or Edinburgh or wherever. The complaining scientists just don't like the accountability entailed by being funded by a real person very much.

Just addition with inside positive and outside negative (or vice-versa)