I've been working on this exact problem for years, and have solved it differently. If anyone is interested, here's the draft whitepaper on my solution: https://www.stampchat.io/whitepaper.pdf
The overwhelmingly negative comments here on HN remind me of the pushback that Rust Linux kernel modules received on HN when they were first announced around 2015/2016. Now they’re seen a much loved feature (I understand they solve different problems so the analogy isn’t perfect). I’m not confident that Carbon can be used to solve the issues that arise in large C++ projects as I’ve never tried it but that’s very different from pretending C++ is some kind of perfect language that doesn’t have these flaws and doesn’t need fixing.
The followup argument is often "well they are still being under paid." While I can buy this argument, I do not think the solution is tipping. Because if they are underpaid so are non-tipped jobs like the fast food worker, janitor, grocery worker, or movie theater employee. All tipping does is divide these people and reduce the pool for a larger collective to bargain for a higher minimum wage.
I feel we have this collective belief that tipping is bad (it sure confuses my foreign friends, who sometimes get dirty looks because they didn't tip), but once we've effectively created the criteria necessary to abolish it[3], we still maintained the cultural aspect of it: that we __need__ to tip (often thinking we'll get our food spat in if we don't). I've had others get upset with me for these opinions (I do tip btw) but I don't understand how we can think tipping shouldn't exist but continue in this direction. It's also interesting that in early America we thought of tipping as akin to bribery (I still believe this and I think this is common). It also has a history with slavery[4]
[0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped
[1] Obviously the argument no longer holds outside Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington
[2] When I was a kid (some 20 years ago) 10% was common for a standard tip. Now most places have an 18%/20%/25% option on screens. Some even higher! The second image in the article even shows a 30% tip
[3] I wouldn't completely abolish it, but I'd say it shouldn't be a standard.
[4] https://www.npr.org/2021/03/22/980047710/the-land-of-the-fee
I'm a PhD chemist. Please consider this: While plastics and oil are both hydrocarbons they have this important difference. Liquid hydrocarbons have short carbon chains and lots of hydrogen. Plastics have very LONG carbon chains, usually with many double bonds, and very little hydrogen.
That is why, when you heat plastic it decomposes into char -- as in charcoal. It is IMPOSSIBLE to produce oil, even theoretically, without adding a source of hydrogen.
A few centuries ago these same fraudsters would be selling you a way to change Iron into Gold.
The carbon without hydrogen produced CO, and it is burned to produce CO2, and that is used to actually heat the mixture.
> "Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today."
I feel taken for a fool. Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase. I can't believe that Google, Shopify, Coinbase, everyone, really believed that this was the new reality going forward. It was written in the sky since April 2020. Anyone with a semblance of understanding could guess that the COVID-fueled situation and artificial economic prop up would come due in the medium term.
Really either the folks writing this crap take us for fools, or they're really shortsighted fools themselves.
Also lack of free speech isn't the problem with Twitter, nor do federated services solve it (control over your identity is meaningless if noone will let you distribute your content). The problem with Twitter/social media is that it amplifies all of the negative aspects of social power.
Moving that to a federated protocol won't make the environment less toxic. There won't suddenly be less misinformation (on one side) or less censorship (on the other). Social media is rotten at its core and just shouldn't have a place in polite society.
The fact that Twitter is so popular/necessary among journalists is a feature -- the profession moved from working class to being a tool/playground of billionaires decades ago and the combination of publications and social media is how they enforce their worldview on masses. The most social-media savvy journalists (e.g. Carlos Maza, Taylor Lorenz, etc) come from ultra-wealthy families.
Jack Dorsey either fundamentally misunderstands that or is complicit and doesn't care.
If people really want "internet freedom", then we're going to have to fully embrace balkanization and be prepared to run completely parallel networks with separate root DNS and compelling content to make people use it. It's a pipe dream.
That's the reason for the RPoW tokens, otherwise the platform would collapse from spam/DDoS.
Also, where you accept your DMs can move relatively quickly with the way the system is designed.