I remember really liking lifehacker when it was basically a blog.
I think the issue is that these sites don’t generate enough income for whole teams of editors and to be bought by media companies like ZiffDavis.
Maybe they are better now, that’s nice.
But I think what works is a single person or maybe 3 finding life hacks and writing about them.
I’m not even sure what lifehacker is supposed to write about now. But I think until they get back to someone’s passion project, they won’t be very good.
I think the issue is that these sites don’t
generate enough income for whole teams of editors
Unfortunately the challenge isn't just "make enough enough money to pay the writers and keep the lights on." They have to do that, and then make enough additional money to keep the corporate overlords happy and interested.
A great recent example is Defector Media, formed by the former staff of Deadspin (also of G/O media) who quit en masse and then formed their own employee-owned blog, Defector.com with minimal advertising and a direct reader supported revenue model. Direct reader support isn't the right model for every blog, but the larger lesson is that they were able to switch to a sustainable and spam-free format once they no longer had to pay the bills and generate some additional zillion dollars of revenue for their corporate masters.
"The company has 19 employees, each of whom own approximately 5% of the company"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defector_Media
Since their founding, they've offered annual financial updates and are doing well.
"Unfortunately the challenge isn't just "make enough enough money to pay the writers and keep the lights on." They have to do that, and then make enough additional money to keep the corporate overlords happy and interested."
Which rather well describes what just happened to DPReview. One wonders if some of the community there might be able to do something like this...
Does it? They host a ton of media content reached by most likely millions of page views with a full staff and little to no ads. I wouldn't be surprised if they've been running the site at a loss for most of its life.
This is my dream for a strong social safety net, maybe up to a UBI. If you could actually provide for people’s basic needs by default, people would lean in to passion projects like these. I think these are some of the most wonderful parts of being human.
This is my dream for a strong social safety net,
maybe up to a UBI
Amen. Many, many artists in the UK have commented how they could not possibly have pursued a career in the arts without the safety net of the NHS (National Health Service)
Arguably at least 3/5 of the greatest rock and roll hands of all time were British (Pick any of: Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Queen, Pink Floyd, Tne Clash…)
A very large percentage of the musicians in those bands were graduates of the “Art Schools” of the time, which were like STEM schools, just, well, art.
Yes absolutely. In my mind, the US has had a robust rock and pop history, but name an artist pre 2000 and a good chance they are from the UK. The US slays now with hip hop and r&b, but the UK has their own unique scenes like grime, which aren’t big in the states.
I don't know how we'd quantify that in any objective way.
Subjectively, it has 1/5 the population of the US and its influence is rather large.
But really, what's the counterargument here? We're not sure if it's good for artists to have healthcare? I'm not sure the quality of the "arts scene" is the right question to ask.
The more important question is how many people are unable to survive as artists in the US, and how much work is compromised just to make ends meet. This is also something that afflicts journalism to a very high degree in the US. Hence why certain topics are untouchable for US corporate media.
Says you. We're talking about public money being spent. I certainly don't agree that maximizing the number of people who can survive as artists is a good public policy goal. And I interpret "compromised" here to be producing something people want. That's vital, it's not a downside.
Fortunately providing healthcare to the public has public policy benefits besides maximizing the number of people who can survive as artists. It causes the population to have higher life expectancy, for one thing.
This is much easier to measure than who has the best artists.
This National Health Service is not a government program designed to promote the arts, so the issue of whether it "helps artists" is orthogonal to whether it is a good use of public funds.
That's just one of many, many examples, which I chose because the thread was already about artists. I also mentioned journalism, which you completely ignored.
These days that's changed somewhat in the US after the affordable care act. I just did the covered california calculator for my area, using an income estimate of $30k (less than what in n out starts at these days, honestly), medium use of doctor visits and prescriptions, and came up with bronze plans at $25 a month and silver plans at $75 a month.
It's changed a bit now, but back in the day in addition to free healthcare, you could get free higher education (actually the government would pay you), and free money for not having a job in the summer break.
Even the most generous UBI proposals are basically a “don’t starve to death” level of income. Maybe fine for a 20 year old who is couch surfing and working on their blog for a while, but UBI isn’t a realistic solution to free everyone from the need to work.
The idea of a UBI that provides a comfortable lifestyle for anyone who doesn’t want to work a normal job is just a pipe dream.
I think there's room to assume a little more steel in the man you're responding to.
The statement wasn't "UBI frees people from the need to work"; it was something more like "UBI might embolden people to pursue passion projects since they'd have reduced fear of financial ruin."
The latter seems plausible to me. I have personally decided not to pursue a startup idea because I didn't want to take a ride on the venture capital pain train, and I also didn't want to drop my income all the way to zero and start burning through my savings in order to do it. UBI might have changed that calculus.
I don't know how much it would even sway things. Rather than fear of financial ruin, you now have fear of having some of your best income earning years squandered doing something less fruitful. This is fear enough to keep people out of certain fields entirely today, especially if the payoff is late and uncertain relative to other more lucrative things you can be doing in your 20s and early 30s.
Even today, people do live like this, cheaply on a "basic" income to grind out a dream. Only instead of relying on ubi, they work part time at a restaurant while waiting for more work in their field to line up in the meanwhile perhaps, and take on roommates to cut rent in half or more. Would UBI mean those people no longer have to wait tables? Sure, but its not like the struggling actor suddenly gets more phone calls when they call off work for their other job, since they are taking the restaurant job in the first place because they have so much free time between jobs they might as well monetize it. Plus, someone has to wait the tables at the end of the day.
Opposite opinion, why should society fund your startup idea and take the risk if you couldn’t convince investors to back your idea or you don’t have enough confidence in your own vision to take the risk with your own savings?
That's not what UBI is about. The risk you take to pursue innovation shouldn't be the threat of complete personal financial ruin that you can't get out of for many decades.
It doesn't matter how confident I am in my vision. If the potential failure scenario is life-long debt and debilitating financial pain for my family and my children for their entire upbringing, anything less than 100% certainty might as well be 0%.
For many people, the decision is "I think this is a good idea, and could do very well, and could bring a lot of good to a very large amount of people, but good things fail all the time. If for some reason, the market decides not to take interest, or some competitor that has yearly turnover in the tens of billions of dollars decides to crush me, then I will be carrying the consequences of other peoples' decisions for the rest of my life, and my savings will be gone, and I won't be able to cope with even a minor medical situation, which is why I make sure to keep 5 figures in my savings account, because even with my medical insurance that I pay $1k monthly for, I can still lose up to $8k per year out of pocket, and medical insurance frequently decides to not even cover my needs anyway. I can't afford the time and effort to even sue them for what I need."
The US is not a good place for innovation unless you're already rich or the innovation is guaranteed not to fail.
That concern rings true even if you had UBI. The floor is higher, but you are still missing out on relative earnings bootstrapping something that isn't getting any more certain of succeeding.
- Because investors typically only care only about return on investment - not everything that's beneficial to society has a monetary return, or an immediately apparent monetary return (e.g. NASA investments have given some of the best returns ever, over time, but they didn't have the goal or apparent method of making returns at the start).
- Intelligent people are typically less confident than idiots, because they are more likely to be aware of additional potential risks/failure points. Confidence in an idea/vision is not necessarily a good indicator of anything and you're more likely to support an idiot's idea if confidence is your deciding factor.
- In the case of a UBI, it's not like the money is going to disappear. It will go immediately into securing basic needs, which will cycle the money back through the economy immediately and more likely at a local level.
1. Assumes one knows enough about the process for getting a grant that you could a) write a proper grant application (at least as well as an e.g. uninspired rando who knows nothing but the best ways to navigate the system) and b) knows where/when/how and to whom to submit the grant - assuming there is even a grant currently available that serves the purpose. So to recap, if we wanted to apply this to the number of people who could be freed up by a UBI, you would have millions or tens of millions of people writing grants instead of developing their ideas... after they figure out all the other aspects (additional time, energy, and money). Then you would also have a ton of other people reviewing these new grants. This does not seem better in any way. Instead of making it easier for creatives to bring their ideas to life, this adds additional burden to them and a bunch of other people.
2. This is the problem. If I have an idea that could revolutionize the world, but I suck at 'convincing people' or explaining the value of my idea, (according to you) I have nothing - thus everyone else loses out. Amongst the billions in the world, there could be untold millions who have the ability to improve the world with their work, but have no chance to develop it because they're working their asses off at dead end jobs just to stay afloat.
But hey, at least with your way we can make ourselves feel better about our successes, because we are capable of convincing someone with money that our idea might have merit.
So with UBI, how do you get your idea out there? How is that any different than music, ebooks, youtube videos or anything else that has basically zero marginal cost?
You may need to re-read the comment you are replying to.
I have underlying medical conditions, so like the parent poster I have decided against any startups because I need to tie myself to a corporate overlord so that they can pay my insurance premiums. Last time I checked Healthcare.gov I would have $26,000+ in medical bills each year. That’s a paywall for my health and well-being that would make an early startup so much harder. Taking a shock like the startup folding becomes truly traumatic. So I don’t. I sit in my cubicle so that I can stay healthy.
The parent poster was talking about this. In the US, failing a venture isn’t just “running out of money”. It can be really dangerous and difficult to navigate. Not that anyone should hand them money to fund a startup.
I'm really curious what plans you are looking at. From what I gleam on covered california out of pocket max are no higher than $8700 for most silver plans, some as low as $900. The plans offered seem pretty comparable to private corporate plans imo, and the premiums are affordable considering what is being offered. It would be easy to negotiate for a salary bump to cover your anticipated healthcare costs for a startup in tech I would imagine.
But they could then supplement that income with their blog. Once the bare essentials are taken care off, you have more options with low paying passion projects
Mine as well, being able to give advice about personal finances, computers, providing mentorship. Lifehacker used to be one of my favorite websites, it's a shame what it has become.
I think the issue is that these sites don’t generate enough income for whole teams of editors and to be bought by media companies like ZiffDavis.
Maybe they are better now, that’s nice.
But I think what works is a single person or maybe 3 finding life hacks and writing about them.
I’m not even sure what lifehacker is supposed to write about now. But I think until they get back to someone’s passion project, they won’t be very good.