OP addresses this directly, if you bothered to read the whole thing:
"The stakes should be low. Whatever you’re selling, it’s gotta be cheap. And if things go awry? No one’s going to launch a chargeback crusade. Just like a reliable vending machine, if it jams, it’ll return your coins."
I was commenting on the reality of his current site. He has a purchase form, where you purchase for $5, connected to Stripe.
In more detail:
A bad actor with a large quantity of stolen credit card info who finds this site (and eventually, someone always does) will use it to test whether each card works. Small-dollar-amount payment forms accessible without going through a sign-up-and-verify process attract these bad actors.
The point I was trying to make is that this won’t be the low-hassle, easy-to-run product that OP wants it to be.
Which sucks. It really does. The bad actors ruin this stuff.
(I write from the experience of running a pay-once B2C desktop app for 10 years and a B2B SaaS for 8 years.)
The stakes don't matter if you're testing credit card number. Just that the service tells you if it works or not. And low amounts are good, since you're not wasting the card's limit.
I'm reminded of a passage from the last psychiatrist blog:
“One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never really want an object, you only want the wanting, which means the solution is to set your sights on an impossible ideal and work hard to reach it. You won’t. That’s not just okay, that’s the point. It’s ok if you fantasize about knowing kung fu if you then try to actually learn kung fu, eventually you will understand you can never really know kung fu, and then you will die. And it will have been worth it.”
That is the sort of quote which gives psychiatry a bad name. Of course people want (and achieve) things, label-referrent-object wordplay aside, and of course people come to learn things, despite there being an infinite level of skill achievable. Imagine if instead of talking about kung foo they'd said "peeling potatoes", or "crossing the road", or "taking a shower". Same paradoxes around completion, but somehow less mysteriously unmasterable.
I once wanted to learn how to change the oil in my car. I learned, and then I changed the oil in my car. It was never about wanting to want to learn about my car.
After you learnt it, did you keep on feeling good about that forever or did it just fade away into the pile of other things you don't care about anymore while you went on to want to learn new things?
can you explain how an oil change is an object, otherwise it seems like you've got the wrong predicate. Knowledge isn't an object, either. Neither is "Kung Fu", "taking a shower", or "crossing the road."
I would like my own suborbital two-seat rocket plane. That is an object. I probably will never have a two-seat rocket plane. I would like to win the lottery when it's over $300mm, the object would be the $150mm in after-tax winnings. I will probably never have $150mm in lottery winnings.
I very specifically mentioned the lottery so maybe it "clicks" what's being talked about, at least the way i read it.
> One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never really want an object, you only want the wanting
...no it's not?
Much of traditional psychoanalysis has been superseded by modern psychotherapy. And I'm not even familiar with that idea being part of psychoanalysis in the first place. (And there are many schools of psychoanalysis that disagree with each other too.)
Quite frankly, it's not a great insight. It's perfectly fine to want something and then get it. Don't worry, you'll want something else afterwards. The idea that you should set your sights on an impossible goal doesn't hold up to the slightest logical scrutiny here. And a lot of people get disillusioned or burned out from trying to achieve impossible things and failing.
Modern psychotherapy is actually about aiming for achievable, realistic goals in your life. It's much more in line with the serenity prayer, in terms of aiming for realism:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
It's from a 10+ year-old blog post so I wouldn't expect it to be in line with modern psychotherapy.
It's an insight that has stuck with me since then and seems to strike a chord with others when shared, regardless of whether or not it's "great".
Of course it's fine to want something and then get it. Last night I wanted a Klondike bar so I walked to my freezer and got one. This misses the point entirely.
Plenty of examples of people getting what they thought they wanted and still feeling unfulfilled.
I appreciate your point about the serenity prayer, I think there's something relevant there for sure.
> Plenty of examples of people getting what they thought they wanted and still feeling unfulfilled.
Right, I think that's what might be striking a chord.
Modern psychotherapy would tell you that you'd picked something thinking it would solve problems that it never would. A classic example is that if you achieved a certain career objective or measure of success, you would feel loved and approved of and worthy. And then when you achieve it, you don't.
The answer is absolutely not to pick a goal you can't achieve. That's completely wrong.
The answer is to understand that career or professional success will not make you feel loved. That if you feel like you have an unmet need for love and approval, you need psychotherapy to understand where that is coming from in terms of your childhood, current relationships, etc.
And then you can reframe your professional or career goals as something else entirely. And when you reach one, you can feel proud and then set another one. You won't have a feeling of emptiness or unfulfillment, because you'd never set unrealistic expectations for what that achievement would provide.
It’s possible these are both right. You should pick achievable goals which will actually make you happy, and you should pick impossible goals that you will always enjoy working towards.
The problem with impossible goals is that there's no feedback if you're actually making progress.
Far better to identify achievable goals that have a timespan of a few years max, and with milestones at least every few months to know you're on the right track.
Impossible goals are ultimately a nonsensical proposition. And if you have an activity you enjoy, you just do that activity. Like crossword puzzles. They don't have a goal.
Sounds like you're thinking inside of a fairly small bubble. If you picked 10 people, at random, from the 800k residents, I assure you that there would be substantial differences.
Off the top of my head, you might get SF State students, tech bros, Chinatown senior citizens who have never left an 8-block radius and don't speak english, Marina moms, Mission District multi-gen families. I mean, come on.
Maybe if you were only picking from people working at tech cos, but even then my experience does not match yours.
The point is that no one in practice selects a random sample of the people living near them. Everyone they meet is from some self-selected sub-group—the people who live close to X park, the people who work at Y place, the people who shop at Z store. And the larger the city, the more people there are nearby you who are like you, so your total variety experienced will be smaller unless you're actively going out of your way to go places that you don't normally enjoy.
So while OP may be wrong about a random sample of people in SF, they're probably correct about the people that they know in SF.
In a small town everyone shops at the same store, visits the same parks, works out at the same gym. There's only one library and a few restaurants, so there are fewer opportunities to self-select into smaller groups.
That's the point, isn't it? You need to try, and have both the determination and "skill", to find variety when the environment gives you homogeneity.
I'm sure I could find an elementary school teacher, or an insurance salesperson to chit-chat with in SF or NY. I never tried, cause why would I? These aren't Pokemon to collect. It just so happens that my gym in the middle of Manhattan filters quite strongly for a certain income level, and thus age, but also profession, etc. In my current gym we all just go to the same class together.
Next time I'm in SF or NY I guess I can invest the time and effort to join a facebook group to meet school teachers, if that's what we mean by skill here.
Cable TV (or even OTA antenna in the right service area) is simply a superior live product compared to anything streaming.
The Masters app is the only thing that comes close imo.
Cable TV + DVR + high speed internet for torrenting is still an unmatched entertainment setup. Streaming landscape is a mess.
It's too bad the cable companies abused their position and lost any market goodwill. Copper connection direct to every home in America is a huge advantage to have fumbled.
The interesting thing is that a lot of TV infrastructure is now running over IP networks. If I were to order a TV connection for my home I'd get an IPTV box to connect to my broadband router via Ethernet, and it'd simply tell the upstream router to send a copy of a multicast stream my way.
Reliable and redundant multicast streaming is pretty much a solved problem, but it does require everyone along the way to participate. Not a problem if you're an ISP offering TV, definitely a problem if you're Netflix trying to convince every single provider to set it up for some one-off boxing match.
This. Im honestly going to cancel my streaming shit. They remove and mess with it so much. Like right now HBO max or whatever removes my recent watches after 90 days. why?
