throw5

Some European countries, including UK, have enough of a strong network of local supermarkets and department stores that Amazon is simply not necessary. I have not used Amazon in the last five years. Most of my family and friends rarely use it either.

There is little reason to when you can walk into a supermarket or department store, often with three or five of them within 1000 feet, and buy what you need at the normal marked price. If you cannot go there yourself, most of them offer home delivery anyway. You also know who you are buying from, you do not have to worry about questionable third-party sellers, and if there is a problem you can telephone a human being or simply walk back into the shop. What is not to like?

But yeah, not every city or country is lucky enough to have such a strong retail network. Amazon makes sense in many parts of the world. But I also think its success in those places is a sad indicator of weak local infra and underinvestment in local retail.

The world would probably be an economically healthier place if every town and region could support a strong network of supermarkets, department stores, and indie shops. It keeps more money circulating locally, supports more local jobs and improves local economy instead of funnelling all the money through one gigantic company.

In the UK, most people simply get Bupa dental insurance. A basic plan costs like 25 pounds per month. Affordable I'd say. Many people spend more than that on beer and public transport.

I know that does not help someone who has become homeless or lost their job and cannot afford the 25 pounds a month (300 pounds a year). That is why I say it is important for people who are employed to get a Bupa insurance plan. Most people do that anyway. This reduces the burden on the NHS Dental and help provide free dental treatment for people who genuinely need it.

For non-dental medical issues, I think the NHS is pretty good. When I lived in UK, I always got same-day appointments for routine check-ups and same-week appointments for more complex investigations.

> I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want. I read a statistic that in Europe and Canada you have to make those kinds of routine appointments months in advance.

Can you share a reference for that statistics?

FWIW, I live in Europe and I always got dentist appointments within a week. For a severe issue (pain involved), I got appointment on the same day.

Never underestimate the power of hubris.

All fair points. Sorry, I spend a lot of time on regional forums, and I had a brain malfunction and forgot that when I write on HN, I am writing on a worldwide forum. Sorry for the unnecessary nitpicking.

Re non profit, I do donate to a few nonprofits I like, like those working on fediverse and my favorite langs. But I don't know of anything that does this for extensions. I'd have definitely voted with money if something was there. So, yeah, no, I am not doing anything to start a nonprofit for extensions. You have a good point.

> It’s like calling surgeons extortionists for having the gall to charge for treating you. Yes, ideally that should be free and available to all

What do you mean by "should be"? Surgery is free and available to everyone. So why would one accuse surgeons of being extortionists? So I am not sure how the surgeon comparison works. That example supports the parent commenter's point that these extensions should be free.

Of course, there is still the practical question of who will do the work and how they will make a living. We can do what we do for surgeons. Maybe have a nonprofit consortium that people fund, so that it can support the extension developers. Yes, people would be spending money either way, but at least that money would be going toward a larger cause. Just like we pay taxes so the government can fund surgeons, who can then treat people.

I don't know if there is another industry that behaves this childishly. There might be. But good grief, how much more juvenile can ours possibly get? AI-generated images with obviously nonsensical text is something I never thought I'd see in professional meetings. But it is becoming more and more common.

I am sure I am not alone in observing that starting around 2020... may be even a few years earlier... Google seemed to hire a lot of middle managers. I personally knew several managers who did not seem to contribute much beyond "organizing" meetings, and I saw them all join Google one by one.

It made me think... what happened to Google's famous hiring standards? What happened to Google's engineering-heavy structure? Google is now filled with middle managers whose only previous experience has been "being scrum masters". Right then I knew that these ineffective managers I saw joining Google were not only the symptoms of Google's decline but would also become one of the causes of speeding up the decline.

How could they let this happen? What happened to all their gatekeeping... "we are okay with false negatives in hiring but we'll NOT have false positives"? Current Google hiring is all about hiring loads of true negatives.

I think I saw a similar fall in hiring standards for engineering roles too but I will leave it to someone with more data to confirm me or refute me.

I mean no disrespect. This is more of a rant at how things are today. It is telling that over-complicated solutions have become so common that, for the current generation of devs, Kubernetes is the obvious way of doing stuff and a simple systemd service is the obscure one. I am sure there are good reasons for this, but it still feels like a loss when simplicity is no longer obvious.

Way to find something negative in everything.

Congratulations on derailing what was otherwise such a nice thread. Well done.

Not everyone in this world is always on edge like you. It is OK to be cheesy sometimes. Humor exists for a reason. Not every unconventional interaction is creepy. Get over yourself, please.

> What can "own" possibly mean in this context?

This sounds unnecessarily reductive. By "own" I would mean that I can re-read the book again and again and again as many times as I want as long as I take good care of the book and prevent it from disintegrating.

But the DRM e-books can't be used like that. That was their point.

I really had fun with this one. You know what would make it even cosier? Being able to choose a small avatar for ourselves. The mouse pointer as your icon feels a very impersonal at the moment. Having avatars would make it feel more like we're all hanging out together in this wonderland.

> Lots of negativity in the comments and while I'm as distrusting of VC funding as the next guy I think competition in this space is something we should encourage, and bootstrapping that is hard if not impossible at this point.

What you are calling "negativity" are genuine concerns to me. I was excited at the headline first. But as soon as I found it is VC-funded, it became a complete non-starter for me.

Look, I'm going to make my labor of love available to the world on your platform. I'm not going to earn a dime from it. It's just free work I'm gonna put out there. If I'm going to do that, I'll choose a platform where I can be reasonably sure that there won't be a rug pull 5 years down the line.

The problem with VC-funded projects is that there is definitely going to be some kind of rug-pull. Because the investors need their money.

The Git hosting services I use today are those where I can pay as a paying customer or I can pay as a paying member. As a paying customer, I know what I am getting into. As a paying member, I have the right to vote on decisions that affect the platform.