I'd imagine for minimum mage workers, that's obscene.
The internet is effectively a need, on the level of electricity, so it's closer to being an assumed cost. Nonetheless, some people probably can't afford it, and for those that do but struggle financially, adding more on top of it doesn't at all help. The idea that these people should be concerned about a diffuse danger of privacy violations compared to the very real danger of not being able to afford important things is completely preposterous.
Stop passing the cost to the consumer. Companies that abuse privacy should be regulated. If you're expecting this task to be done by people of low socioeconomic status, whom your own system has deemed as people deserving of less power, you're looking at the whole thing completely backwards.
I'm not a fan, and I apologize for contributing to it. I'll try to be more thoughtful in the future.
I suspect most poor people hide it in part because the stigma can impede their ability to escape poverty. Classism is alive and well.
Ideally, I would like to see a culture where "rich" people help poor people figure out how to solve their problems. That's all I have ever asked and it doesn't really get taken seriously. I get a lot of flak about just being a charity case, not worth real money, and that I should get a real job instead of trying to figure out how to make money online. Meanwhile, almost everyone else on HN is trying to figure out how to make money online in some sense.
Plenty of other people must value your comments too, because you've accumulated a karma of over 5000 points in about 4 months - say 15,000 points a year, which is definitely a lot - cf HN leaders. [0]
SSDI pays very close to the federal poverty level. Even with the benefit of receiving Medicare, the monthly cost of very-necessary medication plus very frugal living expenses usually leaves me with up to ~$(40 +/- 40) each month in "discretionary spending" that I can use to buy anything beyond rent/medication/food. (e.g. clothes, household cleaning/repair/etc, very rarely travel expenses)
I'm lucky that my interest has always involved computers, which I can use for free for many different purposes. Well, as long as nothing happens to my old desktop (Core 2 Quad Q9650, nForce 790i, RAID-1 of ancient SATA disks). An extra $300/yr would would mean buying new boots and some new shirts. Paying that would mean dropping on of my medications (maybe fatal in the short term, defiantly fatal within a year or two), or skipping a few months of food.
For the record, I'm fine living frugally. I simply suggest that it's important to avoid falling victim to a filter bubble or survivor bias[1], because there are a lot of people - even engineers in Silicon Valley - that have an even worse[2] situation that mine.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qd3erAPI9w
[2] I'm fortunate to have the privilege of being male and white. My friends without those privileges have only recently been able to start leaning math/software/etc. They are hackers at heart, but a math/CS/engineering education and SV startup opportunities were not available to black women in the 80s/90s.
hi pdkl95,
I'm somewhat new to HN, so sorry if this is bad form, but I couldn't find a way to send a private message.
I've been doing a lot of research on systemd because a lot of the developer practices behind it frankly scare the shit out of me.
I thought you had some excellent comments (these were threads from like 2015/2016) - is there anywhere we could discuss the current state of systemd if you're okay with that? Basically I want to see if any of your opinions have changed, or if systemd still seems like a giant ugly tightly-coupled octopus that attempts to subsume too many features.
tl;dr: I've been playing around with arch linux and I've been loving it, but something about systemd rubs me the wrong way and it feels like an obvious target for security compromise if I were the NSA or [insert evil org] since systemd is present on so many linux distros
(Don't sit at desk ~100% of the time for multiple decades, and get minor problems checked out before they accumulate damage and become major problems)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apnea%E2%80%93hypopnea_index ( >30 is usually "severe" apnea. 150 is "how did you survive the severe drops in blood O2 every night?!". The hospital delivered emergency O2 to my house within hours of reading the results of that sleep study)
A couple of years back I was so poor I was sleeping on my brother's couch.
Not to mention that there are people on HN who are from developing countries, where even relatively well paid jobs don't pay a lot by Western standards.
The line gets a bit blurry when you consider that there are a few high school-aged people on HN who can't legally get a full time job.
Is paying 1/12th of your total annual income just to get 4 services worth it?
That would be, what?, like you paying $10,000 a year for those services?
Would you pay $150/month to not have ads ever again? I definitely would but considering how much people complain about $3/month for no-ad hulu...
I'm all for getting rid of all advertising in any (humanitarian) way possible, but that's the one thing that still bugs me - how to ensure kids with no disposable income will be able to work with the software used by pros?
My point is, people are paying it anyway.
The total comes to just over $300/yr. That's... really not that much, is it?