In addition, there are things called annuities, where the purchase price today can have enough set aside to be self-sustaining. Not saying they've done that in this case, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.

Auto mechanics have this figured out -- we (developers) should be able to as well. They get paid a certain amount for a certain job (say, 3 hours for a brake job on a certain model of car). If they can do it faster/more efficiently, they still get paid the same amount even if they work fewer hours.

I've run the numbers on products like this before. In order to absorb transaction fees, build your own product, and support it, fees need to be in the 10-15% range.

Also, note that almost no companies charge less if you pay out of app -- the company just keeps more for themselves.

I wasn't really commenting on the healthiness of the startup culture, just how out of touch and corporate Dan was (apparently so out of touch he doesn't even realize he's out of touch). But you make some really good points about this trend. I'll have to think about that some more.

1. Dan's obviously not cut out for startup life. When he meets Zack, he assumes Zack must be someone's assistant because he is young. Dan has no concept of the fact that someone might have their position because they are skilled and perform well. In his mind, the only way to have a fancy title is tenure and age.

2. Sure, the language of startups is interesting (graduation as a euphemism for quitting or getting fired), but the clear message is that this is odd, and thus, wrong. As though normal corporate America is the one true way and is just fine. Bullshit. Let's make sure to keep the workplace exactly as it's been for the last 100 years and never evolve.

How do I systematically make sure that I have the latest version of every stackoverflow code snippet? If it's a new post, it may not have all the edge cases fixed yet. So now I have to check back on each of the X number of snippets I've copied.

In the npm approach, I can easily tell if there's a new version. For prod, I can lock to a specific version, but in my test environment, I can use ^ to get newer versions and test those before I put them in production.

If the edge case of new version of a package breaks my code, I've learned that I'm missing a unit test. Plus, the question isn't whether this bad thing might happen on occasion, the question is whether this approach is, on balance, superior to cutting and pasting random code snippets into my code. I think the downside of the npm approach is less than the downside of the copypasting from stackoverflow approach.

And every moderately useful npm package I've looked at has very good to great documenation.

Plus, if you think that's too small, write your own broader module that does a bunch of stuff. If people find it valuable, they'll use it. If they find it more valuable than a bunch of smaller modules, you'll get 10,000 downloads and they'll get 10.

The module you roundly ridicule has had 86 downloads in the last month, 53 of which were today (at the time of this writing). I imagine most of those 53 were after you posted. So that's 40 downloads in a month, as compared to the express framework which has had 5,653,990 downloads in the last month.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth over this module is ridiculous.

That's pretty much what I'm saying. I think the 5 races on the form conform to my understanding of race, so I think that part is right as well.

I guess fundamentally I can't wrap my head around the idea of identifying a religious group and calling that a race. As I mention, we don't do it with any other religious group, so why Jews?

It isn't. It's not a race like that (nor, really, in any other way).

Yes, some Jews have a common genetic pattern.

Many don't.

Either you're talking about the religion, which is clearly not a race (as you said). Or you're talking about a group that generally shares the same religion, that descended from a few groups that lived co-located thousands of years ago. Of course, many are descended from those groups. What makes that a race?

And I didn't mention Christianity to ask if anyone doubted it existed. I mentioned Christianity to show how silly it is to consider Jews a race. If Christianity isn't a race (even though many Christians descend from a common ancestor), then Jews aren't a race.

- Technically, if you are a Christian, you probably believe you descended from Adam & Eve, sort of the ultimate common ancestor.

Is Christian a race?

Also, this (PDF warning): https://www.opm.gov/forms/pdf_fill/sf181.pdf.