Public transit isnt a thing you do to profit your city directly. You do it so people can participate enough to grow your tax base.
There is no public transport system on earth which remains profitable for long. In fact, that would defeat the purpose!
Such profit would add too much transactional friction, discouraging riders. The goal is cleaner cities and less clogged roads. The goal is enlarging the tax base with increased access.
Paid parking at the metro? Pfft, guess Im driving, and adding to the parking-clog. We're too big to be an overgrown suburb like this, but I guess that's what we are.
Not gonna claim to know the situation of the folks you're replying to. And Im not gonna pretend these organizations operate for free - if you can reasonably afford it? Supporting them is a great patriotism / praxis / etc for internet denizens.
But I will say this - advertising and tracking has a long, storied history of being a malware infection route. The great boon for all of us from a free-tier DNS-filter service is the additional layer of virus and information protection.
Protecting each other, even inexperienced, or low-budget users? Is the best thing we can do to slow the propagation of malware and institutional information leeches. This in turn protects even the servers of potentially ill-informed or budget-constricted server admins.
We are dealing with internet epidemiology. Free-tier "covid masks" / DNS filters preserve more health than simply for the users actively participating. We have to be in this together, or we will watch each other sink.
Thank you for your time, and sorry for the longwinded Lefty- "Dwight Schrute"-ing. But this entire disclaimer felt necessary to me.
That sense of "ownership" in some small piece of the product? Helps build loyalty to the project, and the company. Seeing my baby with that brand name on it helps me feel a part of the team. I've left many a project that didnt offer me the loyalty of letting me fix my own mistakes (after some guidance).
Toe-stepping aside... How else are you going to develop this apparently inefficient coder without including them into the process of reforming this code? This isnt just about ego, this is about skill. This is about the code Im gonna write in the future. And here's your opportunity, written in our codebase.
>>Imagine trusting the "Market" to make wise decisions.
The market just means other people, free to act without compulsion.
It works because information is transmitted through local decisions, as the changes local decisions make to supply/demand impact the prices that are communicated to the economy at large.
The resulting price system is a result of more economic calculations than any central economic planner could perform, which is why more market-based economies outperform more centrally-planned ones, as the empirical evidence shows.
Anyway, libertarians as a group are the most educated:
I remember MySpace being a place where I could explore the ideas I wanted with people all over the world.
There was a clear, forum-inherited structure to most groups. It kept me coming back, day after day.
Google+ had a similar appeal - I dont know you, I dont care. I like what you have to offer, so I'm getting to know you.
Bridging that into meatspace relationships by frontloading them first? Was straining - I realized how little my peers cared for what they even do. Flooding that feed with game-spam? Negated the premise. And turning it into infinite-scroll of bad takes to drive engagement just turned me temporarily, but deeply misanthropic.
Turning online into afk relationships and friendships made all of this worthwhile. Facebook had that for a bit with their "events" features... But those got nerfed into being useless without an advertising firm's budget.
I, for one? Am happy to join somewhere that respects my time.
