My hypothesis is they know they can’t build effective enough guardrails, so scaring people into not trying is how they have decided to stop it.

This isn't true in something like fictional content, but...

> You're right to raise this, and we want to address it directly and provide you important context on how this happened.

> Vincent Lapierre's channel should never have been part of our affiliate and sponsorship program, because we intentionally avoid association with channels whose content could distract from our message and divide our community.

> Proton operates globally, and while our services are available to everyone regardless of political views and our mission is consistent everywhere, our knowledge of every local media landscape is not. In this case, our team didn't have enough context about the French space to make a well-informed decision, and that's on us.

> We also want to be straight about what a placement like this is and isn't. An affiliate or sponsorship arrangement is a transactional placement for awareness, not an endorsement of a creator's views. In the case of Vincent Lapierre, this was a single video sponsorship, not a partnership.

> But that distinction doesn't excuse what happened here. The responsibility to vet who we put our name next to is ours, and we didn't meet it this time. We're now reviewing our vetting process and our guidelines for our marketing agencies to ensure this doesn't happen again.

> If you see something like this again, tell us. We rely on your feedback and vigilance.

Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1u05xs2/comment...

Demand is there, money is coming in to these companies from customers. It isn't all circular.

Uber successfully displaced most of the alternatives, slowly raised rates, and maintained operating margin while their fixed costs didn't have to scale as much. Post Travis they've, financially, nailed it.

You can kick off more model training runs and experiments than your competitors.

You can kick off a $1-2t IPO claiming you are going to capture a large portion of the largest TAM the world has ever seen.

Things like paid surface parking lots. Used to you could pay at a machine or a lot attendant, well there aren’t attendants anymore and few people use the machines so there isn’t enough incentive to fix them when they’re vandalized.

Some restaurants have printed backup menus but some straight up don’t. Printing menus costs money, why spend it if they don’t have to?

Digital signage that tells you how far away transit is, whether there are currently adjusted times, etc. is a lower priority now that everyone has maps in their pocket that track the transit in real time.

Showing up to a concert early to convince the ticket window to give you a physical ticket for a digital only event, and then they want email proof or to visibly see an app on the smartphone that is glitching is ridiculous.

The list of tiny cuts goes on and on. All of them worked without smartphones but the incentives flipped and now you can’t escape and you don’t realize the backups are gone until you try it for a while. It sucks.

> Last week I posted about how hay buyers and sellers were frozen, waiting for each other to move first. Here's an update....

looks generally correct. On the 2025 CO hay report you can see that last year in this period, there were 22k tons sold. This year, there were 9750 tons sold. Last year[1], the week before (4/28/2025) there were only 400 tons reported sold.

Seems like there is an annual inflection point that causes prices to settle, and it wouldn't be in the report linked just yet. Meanwhile, if you do a news search for hay prices, you can see plenty of articles from different sources discussing how the drought is driving prices higher, so it appears to be at least a common discussion point.

[1] CO Hay 2025: https://esmis.nal.usda.gov/sites/default/release-files/r207t...