https://www.jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/

Might be a drop in the bucket, but it doesn't take many votes to make a difference in the spam world.

I'm sure this will evolve soon enough and email delivery might increasingly become pay-to-play with all sort of backroom agreements, if it isn't already.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8513126/

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11218379/

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/china-wants-to-ri...

I'm sure it's not "xenophobic moral panic" when China does it though, right?

No, TikTok is essentially digital opium. And China itself has confirmed that reality by 1) restricting their citizens' daily access and 2) significantly filtering the content they can see on it:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069527/china-ti...

It would only be fair of the US to follow China's example of protecting its citizens from numbing out on TikTok digital garbage. We should most certainly should follow suit with an equivalently restrictive measure.

If that's true, I certainly couldn't find a table on allowable rate ranges when I did some basic research on pricing and what factors influence it. Certainly open to being schooled on how auto insurance works.

I vent my frustration to a few agents about the yearly rate increase insanity and they all shrug, give their non-empathetic "I understand" telephone script and blame it on the "system" calculating the prices and make some useless excuse about inflation.

I've got a clean driving record, a fully paid-off cheap vehicle, in a reasonably responsible age bracket, and the cost of decent auto insurance these days is essentially another car payment. Within 5 years I'll have paid back the insurance company 60-70% the value of the vehicle. The Gov/FTC needs to take a look at these companies, especially if they're forcing us to hold the insurance to reasonably participate in society.

There's no doubt about this. I spent a few months of my life doing FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) before all the white-labeled Alibaba trash dominated the Amazon search results, and it was very easy to find things in the local Target, BigLots, etc. that could be sent into Amazon and sold at 30/50/100% markups, and it would still fly off the commingled shelves.

Amazon got everyone used to the assumption that Amazon prices were the lowest, then introduced the behavioral convenience of Prime, and then slowly allowed prices to float upwards once that Prime behavior was entrained.

The Prime membership has recently reached an inflection point where the value paid is not worth the value received, I just recently let my 15-yr Prime expire for that reason.

Between the suspiciously inconvenient outages during market volatility and their forced switch-over to Plaid for bank account verification (during which they unlinked my previously verified accounts), I'm pretty much fed up with their absolute garbage customer experience over the past 3-4 years.

Problem is Binance is not any better either. If someone rolled out a boutique crypto exchange that offers a quality customer experience & phone support similar to TDA/ThinkOrSwim I would gladly sign up in a second.

Interesting that YC is willing to toe the IP theft line on this one. I think plenty of us do in fact realize that homegrown corporate ideas / apps could likely be turned into external new businesses, but then the blurred ethics and legality of doing so occurs a few thoughts later.

An F100 I worked for had an entire corporate group for the purposes of spinning off their IP so that it could be done ethically/legally and give the employees' new startup the boost it needed. Several of these startups have gone on to $MMM/$B valuations. If you're at Boring BigCo and thinking of ripping one of their developed ideas for a small YC check, I'd advise against it.

We've experienced a massive dilution in language over the past decade or so. I'm not sure if it's because we're churning out more black & white thinkers or incentivizing folks with a victim mindset, but all sorts of words like *-phobic, gaslighting, trauma, etc. have become significantly overused given their traditional symptomatic markers.

It's the language equivalent of WebMD - basically implying that a grab bag of cold symptoms are in fact brain cancer. On one hand it's good that the next generation thinks a breakup is "traumatic", because it means people are experiencing less absolute trauma. On the other hand words have meanings so we can accurately describe the world.

It's because the appendix-is-useless "belief" comes with decades of evolution vs. intelligent design emotion behind it, starting with Darwin himself.

Because the guy is framing his discouragement as "coming from a place of love" when in reality it takes roughly 2-3 weeks to go from zero-to-[LLC accepting payments on Stripe]. Which means it's really not that "fucking hard" at all to start small and begin the search for paying customers.

I've been on this board for 17 years back when it was originally called "Startup News" and full of new-company founders, sold 2 small SW apps back in 2009, and have also done the F100 corporate adventure. The emotional challenges of starting your own company can be easier than the 9-5.

"Fucking hard" compared to what? Things I'd qualify under the category of "fucking hard":

- Agricultural Farming

- Lifetime debilitating disease / health issue

- Being enslaved or a POW

- Living in a 3rd world country

- Moving West in the 1800s

- Fighting in the American Revolutionary or Civil War

This narrative that starting a company is "fucking hard" is all part of the SV/SF mythos that needs a smooth stone straight to the forehead.