Notably, copyrights owners still didn't solve the "not available in your country" issue. A lot of people WANT to pay, but can't, since there is no legal option to pay for the content in their country
Not only that but some online services add DRM to their media downloads, which can range from minor annoyance to being unable to play the legally obtained file.
I've had the issue with a special edition movies set on iTunes, which prevented the playback on an external monitor (vga connector). There was no info about this limitation on their store page and only after contacting support did they mention that the problem was the DRM imposed by the publisher.
Another sector where I've noticed this quite a lot is in international media releases (music & videos). I've experienced your mentioned "not available in your country" many times with Japanese music videos. It makes (kind of) sense if we're talking excerpts from a TV show, which is usually licensed out to the individual countries, so you'll most likely not be able to watch clips on their official site unless you're accessing it from within the origin country. However, I don't understand how this applies to music videos. One would assume that those are being used to generate hype & revenue for music/ticket sales, so why do they get access restricted?
"The government bombs another country every 1-2 years"
This is dumbing down history. The world would as we know it would not exist without all the US army involvement around the world in the last 100 years: notably WWI,WWII, the cold war, & many more.Some less glorious, indeed. But it's not "bombing every 1-2 years" but a mixture of defending freedom, sometimes financial interests, mistakes and more. But overall, there would not be a "free world" without the US power and the will to use it
If only US military involvement was only in WW1 & 2. The US was one of the good guys then, sure. Most of the other conflicts US army has taken part sound like a powertrip from an arrogant white man. Indian wars and the resulting genocide, Vietnam war where the french wanted the US to spank their unruly colony into submission... I'm sorry to say, the parties who like to smear US have quite enough fact based material.
That said, I'm not claiming US is evil but it's not a force of good either.
"We're having a conversation!" is a perfectly legit saying, even to someone who is not a stranger on the street. On the other hand, Naval is a celebrity, and it's more expected for a celebrity to get such requests - maybe not wanted, but probably common. The deeper question is less anecdotal: to what extent, to cite Kevin Spacey (who cites Jack Lemon), the tech community sends the elevator back down. In this respect, AngelList has done a tremendous change to open more opportunities to more people. It actually opened the closed doors to many, and great news they are taking it to the next level. If this fund succeed, even more funds will follow.
> On the other hand, Naval is a celebrity, and it's more expected for a celebrity to get such requests - maybe not wanted, but probably common.
I'm not sure I agree. He might be relatively prominent within the SV startup community, but that doesn't make him a celebrity. The vast majority of people (heck, the vast majority of engineers) would have no idea who he is.
(1) Stop working in the middle of something, so when you get back you don't have to guess what next. It's an old hack (2) Keep a "what's next" list of 3-5 items, in addition to the project plan/to-do list (3) Do try to work, or just open it, every day. Even 15 minutes a day. It's not only the time you work on it, but also you keep thinking and solving and innovating during the day
I like hack (1) a lot. But at least for me, it's hard to stop my brain when it's in the middle of something, I have this rush to get it done, which is why I like working on my own stuff of the side.
But maybe stopping at a reasonable midpoint without, like a subfunction, is a good idea. What kind of midpoints do you use?
Nothing special, really. On a virtual machine you can even leave everything open as is, so it's ready to continue. If I'm near a commit, I will not commit until next time. Then I start with the commit review, and commit.
I just launched my product in just 2190 days. The interesting thing is that only a handful of key decisions, maybe 3-4 decisions, would save 80% of this period. But this is the (now) expert hindsight. It's not easy to spot it in real time.
Sometimes you learn about a person implicitly more than his explicit intentional declarations. This is the same Vinod Koshla who seized a public beach, and a beautiful and rare one, to his own utility against the law. This says a lot about attitude to others, maybe in business too.
> Khosla bought the 53-acre property for $32.5 million in 2008 and kept the beach open to the public for two years despite the fact that he was paying $500,000 to $600,000 a year in maintenance costs and liability insurance.
> In 2010, after receiving county court orders -- which he believed were unfair -- to keep the beach access open 24/7 and charge visitors $2 for parking, Khosla ordered his property manager to close the gate permanently.
Seems like it's not so clear cut. I mean, he was eating 500-600k a year without complaint maintaining the property for the public. That's pretty generous. Seems it was a dispute over parking and fees...and considering how trivial $2 is compared to the 500k+ he was already paying it just feels like there's a bit more to this story than "Koshla is an evil 1%'r".
edit
So, it was exceptionally hard finding anything from Khosla himself on the issue. But I did find a few more details on why the beach was closed.
So, when he got the property he allowed the same access as the previous owners. Which was generally accessible during the day, but typically closed at night, during bad whether (often during winter), and when "inconvenient" which I assume is when property managers were on vacation or whatever. This level of access has been confirmed by the previous owners, the Deeney's, in their court testimony.
So, for some unknown reason, the county issued an order to the property manager for them to a) reduce parking fees to $2 (which is what they were in the 1970's) and b) to keep the gate open 24/7.
Khosla's managers/attorney's/whatever thought this was a significant historical change in access policy and so fought it, closing the property until the dispute was resolved.
Well, I guess putting armed guards to block access [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinod_Khosla#Martin.27s_Beach_d...] paying to layers and financing black PR campaigns is expensive. No surprise it could be $500-600k. Or did he actually spend it on cleaning the beach? edit: Or had this $500-600k number been pulled out of thin air, just like 70% number?
According to the article, he spent the 500-600k in the years prior to the dispute when it was open for maintenance and liability insurance.
The dispute was over a court order to also provide parking at a required rate of $2. (just repeating the article that was linked, I'm no expert on the legal details of this case)
Vinod had bought services of a "public-relation management company" to address the issue of this negative PR that he had in regards with the Martin's Beach. That's where 500k number might have came from. Taken out of the air, just like 70% number?
And I wouldn't be surprised that this PR company would try to make a "hero" out of Vinod. And present him as a "hero, who is spending his own private money to support local surfers".
If you want to check facts, don't read blogs/potentially paid articles. Just go to the facts that a non-profit public foundation, created to protect our beaches provides. This foundation is generally spends its efforts on organizing beach cleanups. These are unambiguously good guys. In that case they've had to spend efforts on a lawsuit :(. Anyway, as a public non-profit they just don't have the ability to misrepresent facts or tell fat lies (unlike privately hired PR companies, layers or bloggers). So I'd just trust the facts as they put them:
Yes but any of that 500-600k cost which was actually required of him could have easily been known by him at time of purchasing the property. Saying you don't want to pay the required upkeep on something because it only benefits others and not you personally after you get it is pretty assholish.
I updated my original post, but the case was never about that expense or about the level of access historically provided. It was about a court order that required a change to the level of access and support in comparison to what had been provided by him and all previous owners.
In that it told him he could ONLY charge $2 for parking vs the presumably free (EDIT: incorrect assumption on my part, as previous owners also charged a fee, but I can't find any indication that he was being limited to a lower fee than they charged) parking on the road people had been getting with previous owners....
Effectively the court was allowing him to recoup some of his cost with parking, just not at the rate he wanted.
Edit: Oh your original post referred to one up several more levels, when I wrote this response I thought it referred to the post I replied to, but noticed no significant modifications.
Yeah, it also required 24/7 access 365 days a year. Which was above and beyond what everyone else had provided in the past.
It also noted that, at the time, the area's use had declined significantly due to smelt fishing decline which is why the previous owner sold it.
So, when the dispute occurred, he'd been providing the same access as ever when a mandate came out of the blue saying he had to provide a significantly higher level of access than was historically required and whatever extra costs that might incur on a beach that was largely unused at the time overall and during the periods of closer in particular.
So he was like "wtf, why?" in a very legal sense (the only sense that would work in legal disputes). And _only_ after the case went viral as some kind of down with the 1%'rs! rally cry did people actually start bothering to go visit the site...to make a point.
I'm sure the novelty will wear off and then they'll be some property manager that has to sit up there through the night and winter for....nobody.
The 24/7 access 365 days a year wasn't mentioned in the article you linked that you said you got 'all this' from. So would you please provide that source. I see them saying it needed to be open during the winter, and in previous reports I read in one of the other links in this thread that he had tried to close it all winter but has more recently had it open some days during the winter.
Also I fail to see how the decline of the areas use would have anything to do with its availability, this isn't a use it or lose it situation. Can you explain how reduced usage of the beach should effect its availability at all?
There are a lot of unsupported statements going on for both sides if I take the ones that they seem to agree on I get something of a narrative like this.
He bought the property.
He kept the beach open similar to the previous owners.
Tried to charge $X amount for parking.
People complained, and the court told him he could only charge $2.
He said well fuck you guys I'll just close the beach.
He won a case to close the beach.
He lost a 2nd case forcing him to open the beach.
He lost a 3rd beach forcing him to open the beach.
He started opening the beach sometimes. Is it more or less than the previous owners? Well this seems to be where the core disagreement is with no real support or evidence provided to the public for either side.
I think he comes off sounding like a dick, especially at the end of that article that quotes him repeatedly which you linked, where he tries to re-frame the issue as one of conservation. You apparently see him as an entitled land owner, we clearly disagree. However if you would like to continue this, which there is no need to as I believe we have reached an impasse I would ask that any numbers you use are ones I can verify. Thank you.
and sometimes you learn about a person by working with them. Long ago, Vinod was an investor and director of two of my early companies. He was helpful, supportive, polite and wonderful.
Non-billionaires take actions regularly based on the notion that they are right in their course, morally and or legally.
Now size that up to billionaire status. They too are likely to take actions based on thinking that they are in fact right in their decision making. The issue in that case: billionaires often tend to impact a lot of other people with their actions, because so much of what they do is outsized.
My issue might be with my neighbors on a single property line marker. Or maybe they think my trashcans are encroaching on their curb area, pick the issue.
Low quality comments are consistently downvoted without remorse. Your response added nothing substantive or interesting for people to read on the comment page. You didn't even bother to use proper syntax. By contrast, you will note that your original comment, disagreeable as it may be to the other commentator and to the other friends of Mr. Khosa, has not been downvoted.
You need to think about it this way: historically, the comment pages of HN have made for very good, diverse, and interesting reading. One learns odd and varied details about historical technological decisions, rocket engine design, et cetera... anything may come up. The commentators on Hacker News include a wide variety of domain experts, mildly historical figures, legions upon legions of extremely experienced programmers, managers, entrepreneurs, and so on. This is what has drawn most of us here. The comments, ideas, and speculations produced by persons such as myself are fine, perhaps, but frankly, they're not nearly as interesting to read.
This leads us to one of the most frustrating oddities of the Hacker News website: you can't collapse the comments. If there's a tree structure of comments, every comment will take up at least a good thumb's width of screen space.
The consequence of this is that every comment is an imposition on the reader. Every comment needs to be able to account for itself. Posting on Hacker News is a performance, rather than a conversation. We're on stage, whether anyone wants us there or not, and unless we're trying to write words that other people might find valuable, unless we're at least trying, then yes, we will be swiftly downvoted to oblivion by everyone, including people exactly like ourselves. There may be annoyance behind it, but there's scarcely enough thought wasted for malice.
One-liners must be very informative or situationally relevant messages. And properly capitalized and punctuated. Or else they should go unwritten.
The article also indicates he was paying a very large amount in liability taxes and maintaince for a road he possibly owned (it says $500k), and was only offered the ability to charge $2 for parking to offset that. Given, I'm not sure where the $500k comes from.
It also seems he was trying to restrict access to the road, not the beach.
Maybe he didn't own the road, but it seems you should be able to restrict access to a road you own, but that no one owns a beach, and it didn't actually say he restricted the beach.
Maybe that was the intent, but maybe it was due to problems with the cars parking along the road after leaving it open for two years.
I do believe most VCs can reduce the potential of the company when the founders have a cohesive vision for it already and know how to run it, and they do have an interest in saying they are better than the others :) So it is a lot about finding those that give good advice, but don't force it, and that's incredibly hard to judge in initial conversations with any of them.
I'd recommend talking to companies they are invested in and their fellow board members (i.e. the founders who created the tech) that work for companies they have invested in.
Basically, he entered into a contract as part of buying property and now he does not want to abide by it. Which suggests doing business with him is a terrible idea.
I have some relevant experience. My father owns a property with an easement, purchased from an attorney who worked in easement law, in a different jurisdiction: this man himself mistook some points of law, and last minute paperwork was required. At several levels of government, various departments use maps that clearly indicate (incorrectly) that my father does not own the easement, and the city at one time attempted to suggest that it was frontage. And this is regarding an easement whereupon there is a well-established thicket, not a road.
This brings me to the consideration that real estate agents are not lawyers, and that legal status of the easement might have been unclear or incorrectly represented when the purchase was made. Also, I think that if the road was being treated simultaneously as a liability and an obligation by whatever mix of regional law pertained, a legal confrontation would be completely understandable.
I do not know or assert that any of these things are the case, but I know that easements are complicated beasts, and that a simple violation of contract may not be the only explanation here.
What I gather from that is that this guy does not know how to monetize a road and/or run a public beach.
Build something along side the road. Build a strip mall and rent bays to surf shops and restaurants. For the amount of money the article claimed he spent he could have afforded to build a hotel or resort.
> Build a strip mall and rent bays to surf shops and restaurants
The government would not allow this to happen. The California Coastal Commission prohibits any such development. I've talked to a local architect who had his plans to remodel an existing single-family home in that area scuttled by the commission. That's why, when driving south after Half Moon Bay, you encounter essentially no coastal development until you hit Santa Cruz.
There are one or two shops scattered along the way but those are grandfathered in; as far as I can tell if it didn't exist 30-40 years ago, it never will. If Vinod Khosla proposed building a strip mall, anti-development activists from all of California would converge on Martin's Beach and chain themselves to the bulldozers while conducting a hunger strike while environmental groups would file at least three parallel lawsuits.
Put another way, SF bay area politics are non-intuitive.
(Note I'm not expressing a normative opinion about whether development should be allowed; I'm merely saying what is currently allowed.)
On a broad scale, we have moved from a culture of ads as info, to ads that push you to buy whatever the factory produces. This huge supply and false demand for things we don't really need has a huge impact of consumption culture, personal distress - an ongoing feeling that you always lack something, ecological waste and people wasting their hard earned dollars on things they don't really need. God bless ad blockers.
Who gets to decide whether something is necessary or not?
Maslow understood that humans "need" pathways to self-esteem and self-expression. An extensive collection of Marvel action figures could slip through that loophole.
Francis of Assisi lived in abject poverty, and would be a much harsher judge than Maslow, and would probably criticize either of us for bothering to own any electronic devices.
I'm neither a Franciscan nor a Maslowian, but the concept of "human needs" hardly lends itself to immediate and universal agreement.
Extreme cases are never good examples for a general make sense rule. Most of the west ads induced consumption is not self expression purchase, but rather a desire to confirm to an imaginary false standard that ads present as something real. The aim is not self expression, but the bottom line of corp. xyz. The effect of the massive ads everywhere is found (IMHO) even in your comment: identifying self-esteem and self-expression with buying something. For a simple argument, consider all the things you buy and never used, the piles or garbage a typical western society produces.
But its the content creators being punished, not the ad companies. If anything ad blockers are in their interest since the type of person who blocks ads is probably the type of person to ignore them anyway.
I don't think so. If an ad isn't displayed, then the impression probably doesn't count and the publishing site doesn't get paid. It would certainly hurt the content creator more.
>It would certainly hurt the content creator more.
I think you could make the argument that you affect the content creator to a higher degree (larger percent of income) but I suspect you affect the ad company to a higher dollar amount. Nonetheless it's a negative for both.
The content creator gets paid by the ad company for showing you the ad, the ad company gets paid if you click on it.
With that in mind, there is a net-positive outcome for the ad-company if users who aren't going to click on the ads use ad-block, because that means they don't have to pay the content creator for showing ads that nobody clicked on. They only miss possible profit if you're using ad-block but would have clicked on an ad were it presented to you, which is unlikely considering ad-block is generally opt-in. Depending on the ratio of how much they make per-click vs. how much they pay the content-creator per ad, they could definitely come-out with more money due to users using ad-block and not requiring them to pay the content creator when they wouldn't have clicked on the ad anyway.
Not all ads are click based. You're thinking primarily of AdSense and a lot of retargeting ads but most ads are still bought on a CPM basis based on views. Yes, if a publisher consistently shows ads that have a low CTR (clickthrough rate), then the ad network should optimize out of displaying that ad on that site.
Its disproportionately high for the publisher. Niche sites with demographics that overlap with adblockers demographic get hit harder than other sites. The ad company will find other places to serve their ads (unless its a product catering to the same demo). (Full disclosure, I work in ads and ad blocker has never cut into our cash money. That being said I'd be interested to hear from another advertiser who has been affected)
Maybe ad blockers should emulate downloading and displaying ads, perhaps via proxy servers to minimize throughput. That would protect content creators, no?
That is a weak argument. You don't need advertising to make money if what you're doing is valuable. People will compensate you for it because they know it will go away if they don't. Take the No Agenda Show[1] for example, they have no advertising. Two podcasters make a living creating six hours of original content every week and are solely supported by their listeners.
That sounds nice in theory but in actuality is complete BS. On a site like Teamliquid.net, a video game/eSports forum and team, over 50% of visitors have ad blocked enabled and they in no way make of this missed revenue from donations or TL Plus ($5/mo for ad free).
Everyone always says they only have ad block on for obnoxious sites, but that's such a load of shit. The free internet is run by ads, like it or not, and as someone who uses ad block I accept that I actively hinder it.
I don't mind if people use ad block, it's just the moral high ground people take that annoys me.
I'm responding to this post because it's a good segue (esports). I'm an esports fan myself and count as one of that 50% on the few times I visit that site. It is, unfortunately, not their fault. I have on several occasions uninstalled my ad blocker for a time -- one time it was a few months, one time it was a couple years. Both times it was ended by a single website that was a bad actor. Once it was autoplaying audio ads, which frustrated me enough that I nope'd right into installing AdBlock Plus. The second time it was a flash ad that, after about 30 seconds on the page, began consuming about half of my CPU. After I figured out why I immediately nope'd on over to AdBlock Plus once again.
For me, at least, it's a tragedy of the commons out there. All it takes is one bad actor to spoil it all.
This isn't theory, it is a concrete example of content creators who make content and make a living with absolutely zero advertisement. If you need yet another example, LWN ( http://lwn.net ) runs mostly on subscriptions, instead of ads (90% of their revenue is subscriptions).
People won't pay for bad/terrible content, that is the hard truth.
> You don't need advertising to make money if what you're doing is valuable.
Not necessarily. There is a threshold of value that must be met to make people pay directly for it. For example I run a niche site that gets 5K uniques each month - clearly I'm providing some value - but I doubt that what I provide is enough to make people pay me directly. Ads are the most effective way of solve that problem: reward content producers that can't meet that threshold but still add some value.
While I like your poetic verve, this isn't true. Ads were always garbage. Old ads lied just as much and tried to instill the same feelings. They just had less direction since they didn't know how to measure and optimize on outcomes.
Well, two comments: First, it's hard, but never before a single person or small company could at least technically reach millions of people with feasible investment. Now you can.
Second, by the time people who do paper work got to position that can make change, many already confirmed to their system bureaucracy and traditional point of view and interests. You need the people who don't take that way.
Better title would be when the "modern capitalism is rewarding value extraction over value creation" argument. Think twitter, starting with "do good" argument attracting devs when they need them, then shutting them out later. Who benefits the value of the IPOS? the public?
