No, and the argument I was suggesting is that if the costs were low enough, no one would really need to make those decisions, any more than they need to decide whether running a glass of water is worth the cost.
>If I'm rich enough that it's not a concern, just bill me the 0.33% out of my income tax that it would cost to provide this.
Why? If a micropayment system worked well enough that no one cared about the prices, what reason would there be to involve the government?
(Not that I'm averse to such a scheme, I just think you're making a strange leap of logic here.)
> I've considered your arguments and rejected them.
It feels like you just read my first sentence, and reacted to that, despite the fact the rest of my comment argues against that position, and ultimately agrees with you (although from a slightly different direction).
Measure share of readership, and you're largely set.
You're re-iterating (best I can tell) earlier arguments, made and dismissed. HN's "only show the immediate post being replied to", particularly on mobile, makes referencing your GP comments all but impossible, but again: I and others far more intelligent than me have considered and rejected the micropayment arguments and pointed out further inequities they ignore.
Make the individual item payments small enough, and quite literally, it isn't worth my time to have to decide on the value. You see, transaction costs matter, and the actual price paid itself is a very small component. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_costs
Again: the amount of money necessary to eliminate advertising completely is all but inconsequential. The frictions, costs, inefficiencies, and negative externalities of fractional-mill per-page costs would be stupidly inefficient.
E.g., I can read ~50-100 web pages/day. That's, roughly, 36,000 pages, tops, per year, or $0.002 per page. Should I really have to decide one hundred times a day if a page was worth reading?
And to what end?
If I'm broke enough that that's a concern, then there's a tremendous social inequity in denying me the information.
If I'm rich enough that it's not a concern, just bill me the 0.33% out of my income tax that it would cost to provide this. I don't care, literally, it isn't worth my time, and I'm subsidising access for the poor in my own country and around the world.
My whole point is that markets and information are exceptionally poorly suited. I've considered your arguments and rejected them.
Water, incidentally, is another case where the infrastructure, that is, fixed costs hugely outweight the marginal costs of delivery in most cases.