1. Somehow people moving into houses that went for $4 to $25 million didn't notice or bother to check that there's a landfill a mile from their houses.
2. Ash waste from last year's huge wildfires needs a place to go, but it's de facto toxic.
3. A waiver granted to allow the toxic waste to be dumped into landfills not rated for handling it.
4. Rich people find they have no more power than residents of Flint, MI
Addendum: at least the cops are deferential to the crowd of protestors that include rich white moms with a babies. They didn't declare a "riot" and didn't fire teargas or rubber bullets at anyone.
I think point #4 is a little off. Rich people think they have more power than poor people, but at least in this case they lacked the motivation to actually try to change things.
Look at the facts. The article throws out a bunch of famous names, and shows the Kardashians protesting. And yet the protest seemed to last only a few days before one person was arrested and the rest lost interest. A city of millionaires only raised $76k in a GoFundMe.
This doesn't paint a picture of powerful people being thwarted. It's a bunch of unserious people writing letters for a few weeks and then losing interest when things don't immediately go their way.
> This doesn't paint a picture of powerful people being thwarted. It's a bunch of unserious people writing letters for a few weeks and then losing interest when things don't immediately go their way.
They are powerful, but they probably don't have the incentives, especially when you consider that people who have that kind of wealth typically have many homes. That's quite a set of incentives than someone protecting the only home they have.
> 1. Somehow people moving into houses that went for $4 to $25 million didn't notice or bother to check that there's a landfill a mile from their houses
Presumably, it's not a landfill that you can smell or see readily, otherwise a wealthy enclave wouldn't have developed there.
> 4. Rich people find they have no more power than residents of Flint, MI
I think this is a rare exception, and not representative of normalcy. Nuch of the toxic waste is itself from a well-off area (the Palisades), and the state government wouldn't want to be seen as giving special treatment to wealthy celebrities.
Of course people with babies didn't riot, and of course rubber bullets can't be fired near them. What are you suggesting?? There's some truly "weird" stuff on HN as of late.
Moving on.
Perhaps they didn't riot.
Whereas we know that a lot of actual riots in the past six years weren't treated enough as such. Allowing the populations that they affected to be terrorized, sometimes over an extended period of time.
Sometimes the riot happens after the teargas and rubber bullets. Sometimes the riot happens because people whose humanity isn't being respected choose not to respect your property. And sometimes riots happen because people are assholes and nobody is going to stop them.
The neat thing is all 3 of those can be true at the same time.
This is about where to put the toxic waste created by the Palisades (7,000 homes) and Altadena (9,400 structures) fires.
The process removes the top 12" and replaces with with clean fill. The governor granted an exemption from California Environment Quality Act (CEQA), and recent legislation passed will streamline or waive the process for all future development. The material will go somewhere, the question is which NIMBY is the recipient.
Probably worth noting that before the CEQA revamp legislation this year, 50% of all California construction development was challenged/thwarted with lawsuits by the same people for multiple or no reasons. That usually resulted in one or two years of delays, with the cost added to the construction. The price to build "affordable" housing in California is $700,000 to $1,000,000.
paywalled.
tldr: A posh bit of LA called Calabasas, home to "Will Smith, John Travolta, Justin Bieber, Kevin Hart, Jessica Simpson, Jake Paul, Katie Holmes, Kanye West and a bunch of Kardashians" happens to have a Landfill site in it, which most of the posh people had not noticed was there. The LA fires of 2025 generated 2.6 million tons of waste - more than the entire city of Philadelphia produces in a year. That waste was _potentially_ classifiable as toxic but the official site for toxic waste was too far away for such a large amount so someone decided to send it to local landfills including Calabasas. There was legal basis for local landfills to accept fire waste. Then there's lots of details about how posh people tried to stop it from happening but it happened away. "That, for many residents, was the most haunting revelation of all. The 2025 fires had augured a future in which even a Calabasan could suffer sudden and catastrophic environmental injustice."
>"which even a Calabasan could suffer sudden and catastrophic environmental injustice."
What a crazy tactic to switch blame from the City of LA's total failure, to prevent and stop the fire, to the environment.
Everyone knows that California is dry. Everyone knows that everything West of the Mississippi is dry. For how long? Much longer than industry has existed.
I'd consider it to be a failure of environmental advocacy to be so ham-fisted so as to drive people away from policy support because you can't fight the impulse to abuse the issue to absolve the guilty.
Neither the City of LA nor any city in the world has a municipal water supply equipped to combat an urban wildfire. Embers were blown miles ahead of the fire front onto new rooftops.
Using guidelines from the National Fire Academy to suppress housefires, they would've needed to simultaneously deploy 10 or 12 thousand industrial-zone (not residential-zone) fire hydrants. Not only do those not exist, but there would've been no way to pressurize them simultaneously.
At only hour 4 of the fire (1200 acres, assume 5% are structures), they already would've had to deploy 1800 industrial-zone fire hydrants to suppress it. Again using NFA's flow rate guidelines. The Santa Ynez Reservoir, had it been full, would've been emptied in about an hour assuming it could maintain pressure (which it couldn't).
Wildfires are fundamentally fought with firebreaks and aircraft, both of which are extremely challenging in high-wind urban environments. They are contained until they burn out their fuel. They are not ever combatted with municipal water supplies.
Can you state specifically what were obviously avoidable failures?
You've got to be kidding. Have you ever even gone hiking in those hills? Much of the terrain doesn't allow for heavy equipment use. The areas where the wildfires spread fastest are so rough and steep that even doing it by manual labor is extremely challenging. The state and local governments simply don't have that many workers (or goats), or the budget to pay for the work. The scale of the problem is immense.
Interestingly hills used to be considered a horrible place to build and poor shanty towns were constructed up the hill with the nicer parts of town in the valley. People didn't want to climb up the hill every day, you had problems with access to water and supplies. The ground was prone to shifting. You also had high winds and yeah, in fire prone areas, fire goes uphill.
What changed? Automobiles, reinforced concrete, retention walls, lift pumps, subsidized road construction.. People in LA with money now want their homes perched up a hill with inaccessible terrain covered in brush below it (that ensures nobody will build on their view!).
Same with oceanside land by the way. If you go to the shore of the bay of Biscay in France, for instance, the "seaside" villages are built not on the beach, but a few hundred yards inland. Building right on a sandy storm-swept shoreline would have seemed ludicrous when those towns were being constructed.
You're not making any sense. Even with roads, the terrain above and below the roads is largely inaccessible. If you haven't personally traveled through those areas then you might not be able to visualize the difficulty.
As for fences, what a stupid and pointless idea. The wildfires spread largely by embers blown up in the air, not by flaming debris being pushed across the ground. And what exactly are you going to build the fences out of?
In the vicinity of San Francisco, in the 80s, there was a big fire in a rural area, where every house but one burned to the ground. The one was untouched. One feature it had was a low masonry wall about 20 feet away from the house. The firemen quoted in the newspaper said that wall was instrumental in keeping rolling, burning debris away from the house.
Fires aren't always accompanied by high velocity winds. Lower velocity winds will pile up the embers behind various obstacles, like a low wall.
Masonry walls also are an obstacle for the wind, which will slow down near the ground, and behind the wall it will be still, which will result in debris falling to the ground.
The wall can also be made of chicken wire. It would be appropriate to experiment with various forms of inexpensive fencing like chicken wire.
As for hills, it isn't necessary to denude them completely of vegetation. Just the parts that are easily accessed, and alongside the roads.
I seriously doubt experienced wildfire firefighters would agree with your assessment that it's completely hopeless.
These aren't done more commonly in the LA area due to intense public opposition. It turns out people don't like inhaling smoke year round. Cities in general struggle to do things their citizens don't want them to do and it's not clear to me that this is a bad thing or something you can really blame the city for.
Sure, and here's what has changed between then and now:
1. A much longer and drier dry season
2. A much larger urban-wilderness interface
3. A much more organized public apparatus to combat environmental hazards (even in cases like this which require tradeoffs against more severe future risks)
The reason this is such a challenging problem today is not because everyone living in 2025 is a moron or morally corrupt and the people in the 70s were not.
California is digging out of a combination of over a century of misguided forest management efforts (replacing thousands of years of work by indigenous people with fire suppression), and also unprecedented climate change.
Should they do more? Of course. With what resources?
I recently learned 82% of California fire fighters are unpaid volunteers. That doesn’t include the prison labor.
The entire government has its
priorities completely wrong, especially at the federal level. Blaming the city of LA makes very little sense.
Blaming environmentalists for consistently sounding the alarm over this stuff for 50+ years and then being ignored also doesn’t make sense.
One thing that does make sense: Look at the writings of the people that blocked wind and nuclear power in the 1980’s, and solar / batteries in the 1990s.
They explicitly said they knew their actions would burn the planet down, and it didn’t matter to them. Now they’ve dismantling our democracy, eliminating emergency response groups like FEMA, and retasking the national guard (California’s last line of fire defense) as an illegal police force.
Your comment is quite disconnected from reality. Blaming the city of LA makes a lot of sense. The mayor Karen Bass was completely ineffectual. And even before she was elected the city had failed to properly upgrade their fire fighting infrastructure or building codes.
Most volunteer fire fighters act as reserves in more rural areas and are only called up for major incidents. The city of LA and surrounding cities like Calabasas don't rely heavily on volunteers.
Climate change might be a minor factor in the intensity of the 2025 Southern California wildfires but those have been happening periodically for millennia. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) will sometimes dump a lot of rain on Southern California for several years at a stretch causing extensive brush growth, then shift north for several years allowing everything to dry out. At that point any little spark will ignite a raging wildfire, especially when the Santa Ana winds are blowing. This is not "forest" that can be actively managed, it's chaparral in rough hilly terrain. It's simply impossible to clear much of the brush or conduct controlled burns. The only effective measures are building fire-resistant structures with defensible space around them — or simply not building in those areas at all.
> California is digging out of a combination of over a century of misguided forest management efforts
Including building in the chaparral hills in the first place. Sane policy would be to forbid new construction where fires have ravaged in the past or at least deny insurance, because it's like building in a floodplain. The problem is that the same area is suffering from systemic under-construction of housing.
Aside from a healthy dose of schadenfreude, my next reaction is anger - we shouldn't be putting toxic waste next to anybody's home, particularly not in landfills that aren't configured to deal with it. "It was a big fire" is a pretty shit excuse to ignore the law.
Newspapers used to be printed on paper and no one batted an eye when they were asked to fork over a few quarters per issue. It was not considered ritzy or posh to read about what is going on. Someone needs to pay those people who create the papers.
Now that newspapers are online, somehow it's ritzy to be able to read and the fact that people have jobs which involve creating newspaper content is a bitter lesson.
The price was mostly symbolic (if they were free people would probably abuse it, e.g. for paper to line your birdcage with), and it was ads in the paper that paid for the business.
Heck, now we have multi-billion dollar companies selling us ads (Google, Meta) but no one wants to pay the people whose jobs include investigating government corruption (as well as reporting on Taylor Swift getting a ring...). Somewhat understandably, since ads on the Internet are much more obnoxious than ads on newspaper/magazines.
I just miss when a newspaper stand didn't ask to track your every interest, hobby and political view. And track which articles you read for all time in a profile to be monetized.
The cost of the above is orders of magnitude greater than some loose change adjusted for inflation.
People got spoiled with free content. Some never in their life payed for a newspaper. The problem is subscribing to one or two sources is not enough. You will miss a lot. To understand what happens in Chine you better read Chinese, and not BBC's interpretation. Now that there are so many free translating tools it's easy. The same about every conflict. There are two sides at least. Your favorite source will show most likely only one. Test it on Ukraine or Gaza.
The NYT is $23/month and I live in Australia. I'd be happy to pay them a dollar or two and buy an issue containing a known and limited set of articles from a particular date, but a subscription is irrelevant to me and I would bankrupt myself if I paid to subscribe to every newspaper that paywalls me.
You used to be able to buy the daily NYT printed edition in Canberra and Sydney at the very least. I’d actually be pretty surprised if you can’t still do it.
I agree that it has become hard to buy single issues in the digital world. I have some digital subscriptions, and would be happy to pay a bit here and there for one-off issues.
1. I could read a newspaper without a subscription. I could buy just one issue. NYT does that that online
2. A newspaper in a vending machine showed you more than just the headline. Like the subhead, for example. I can’t even see that. The default NYT experience without a subscription gives you only the title. And I have to agree to $25/month to get anything else assuming I’m not using a paywall bypass
“We have stuff, we say you’ll like it, cough up a bunch of money to find out what” is a tough sell for me.
Paywalls that give you at least the first few sentences make far more sense to me.
Right now when I went to their front page I could see a one paragraph summary of several news items. Granted, other front page stories only show the headline but I think that is an adequate substitute for what we got from peeking at the vending machine window.
"I don't want to pay for content, and don't you dare push advertising on me. I want your content. I don't care how you have to pay to make it, that's not my problem."
Multiple bitter lessons
1. Somehow people moving into houses that went for $4 to $25 million didn't notice or bother to check that there's a landfill a mile from their houses.
2. Ash waste from last year's huge wildfires needs a place to go, but it's de facto toxic.
3. A waiver granted to allow the toxic waste to be dumped into landfills not rated for handling it.
4. Rich people find they have no more power than residents of Flint, MI
Addendum: at least the cops are deferential to the crowd of protestors that include rich white moms with a babies. They didn't declare a "riot" and didn't fire teargas or rubber bullets at anyone.
I think point #4 is a little off. Rich people think they have more power than poor people, but at least in this case they lacked the motivation to actually try to change things.
Look at the facts. The article throws out a bunch of famous names, and shows the Kardashians protesting. And yet the protest seemed to last only a few days before one person was arrested and the rest lost interest. A city of millionaires only raised $76k in a GoFundMe.
This doesn't paint a picture of powerful people being thwarted. It's a bunch of unserious people writing letters for a few weeks and then losing interest when things don't immediately go their way.
> This doesn't paint a picture of powerful people being thwarted. It's a bunch of unserious people writing letters for a few weeks and then losing interest when things don't immediately go their way.
They are powerful, but they probably don't have the incentives, especially when you consider that people who have that kind of wealth typically have many homes. That's quite a set of incentives than someone protecting the only home they have.
> 1. Somehow people moving into houses that went for $4 to $25 million didn't notice or bother to check that there's a landfill a mile from their houses
Presumably, it's not a landfill that you can smell or see readily, otherwise a wealthy enclave wouldn't have developed there.
> 4. Rich people find they have no more power than residents of Flint, MI
I think this is a rare exception, and not representative of normalcy. Nuch of the toxic waste is itself from a well-off area (the Palisades), and the state government wouldn't want to be seen as giving special treatment to wealthy celebrities.
Of course people with babies didn't riot, and of course rubber bullets can't be fired near them. What are you suggesting?? There's some truly "weird" stuff on HN as of late.
Moving on.
Perhaps they didn't riot.
Whereas we know that a lot of actual riots in the past six years weren't treated enough as such. Allowing the populations that they affected to be terrorized, sometimes over an extended period of time.
Sometimes the riot happens after the teargas and rubber bullets. Sometimes the riot happens because people whose humanity isn't being respected choose not to respect your property. And sometimes riots happen because people are assholes and nobody is going to stop them.
The neat thing is all 3 of those can be true at the same time.
Peaceful protestors in Washington D.C. have been teargassed in recent memory.
Rioting is not needed for police to abuse their authority.
This is about where to put the toxic waste created by the Palisades (7,000 homes) and Altadena (9,400 structures) fires.
The process removes the top 12" and replaces with with clean fill. The governor granted an exemption from California Environment Quality Act (CEQA), and recent legislation passed will streamline or waive the process for all future development. The material will go somewhere, the question is which NIMBY is the recipient.
Probably worth noting that before the CEQA revamp legislation this year, 50% of all California construction development was challenged/thwarted with lawsuits by the same people for multiple or no reasons. That usually resulted in one or two years of delays, with the cost added to the construction. The price to build "affordable" housing in California is $700,000 to $1,000,000.
https://www.pacificresearch.org/newsom-right-to-waive-ceqa-f...
For those who are interested, Pacific Research is a libertarian organization:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Research_Institute
https://archive.is/VDwyO
paywalled. tldr: A posh bit of LA called Calabasas, home to "Will Smith, John Travolta, Justin Bieber, Kevin Hart, Jessica Simpson, Jake Paul, Katie Holmes, Kanye West and a bunch of Kardashians" happens to have a Landfill site in it, which most of the posh people had not noticed was there. The LA fires of 2025 generated 2.6 million tons of waste - more than the entire city of Philadelphia produces in a year. That waste was _potentially_ classifiable as toxic but the official site for toxic waste was too far away for such a large amount so someone decided to send it to local landfills including Calabasas. There was legal basis for local landfills to accept fire waste. Then there's lots of details about how posh people tried to stop it from happening but it happened away. "That, for many residents, was the most haunting revelation of all. The 2025 fires had augured a future in which even a Calabasan could suffer sudden and catastrophic environmental injustice."
>"which even a Calabasan could suffer sudden and catastrophic environmental injustice."
What a crazy tactic to switch blame from the City of LA's total failure, to prevent and stop the fire, to the environment.
Everyone knows that California is dry. Everyone knows that everything West of the Mississippi is dry. For how long? Much longer than industry has existed.
I'd consider it to be a failure of environmental advocacy to be so ham-fisted so as to drive people away from policy support because you can't fight the impulse to abuse the issue to absolve the guilty.
Neither the City of LA nor any city in the world has a municipal water supply equipped to combat an urban wildfire. Embers were blown miles ahead of the fire front onto new rooftops.
Using guidelines from the National Fire Academy to suppress housefires, they would've needed to simultaneously deploy 10 or 12 thousand industrial-zone (not residential-zone) fire hydrants. Not only do those not exist, but there would've been no way to pressurize them simultaneously.
At only hour 4 of the fire (1200 acres, assume 5% are structures), they already would've had to deploy 1800 industrial-zone fire hydrants to suppress it. Again using NFA's flow rate guidelines. The Santa Ynez Reservoir, had it been full, would've been emptied in about an hour assuming it could maintain pressure (which it couldn't).
Wildfires are fundamentally fought with firebreaks and aircraft, both of which are extremely challenging in high-wind urban environments. They are contained until they burn out their fuel. They are not ever combatted with municipal water supplies.
Can you state specifically what were obviously avoidable failures?
> Can you state specifically what were obviously avoidable failures?
Strategically removing/reducing fire-prone vegetation in the hills surrounding LA?
You've got to be kidding. Have you ever even gone hiking in those hills? Much of the terrain doesn't allow for heavy equipment use. The areas where the wildfires spread fastest are so rough and steep that even doing it by manual labor is extremely challenging. The state and local governments simply don't have that many workers (or goats), or the budget to pay for the work. The scale of the problem is immense.
Interestingly hills used to be considered a horrible place to build and poor shanty towns were constructed up the hill with the nicer parts of town in the valley. People didn't want to climb up the hill every day, you had problems with access to water and supplies. The ground was prone to shifting. You also had high winds and yeah, in fire prone areas, fire goes uphill.
What changed? Automobiles, reinforced concrete, retention walls, lift pumps, subsidized road construction.. People in LA with money now want their homes perched up a hill with inaccessible terrain covered in brush below it (that ensures nobody will build on their view!).
Same with oceanside land by the way. If you go to the shore of the bay of Biscay in France, for instance, the "seaside" villages are built not on the beach, but a few hundred yards inland. Building right on a sandy storm-swept shoreline would have seemed ludicrous when those towns were being constructed.
> Much of the terrain doesn't allow for heavy equipment use
Do the areas that are reachable. After all, somehow roads manage to get constructed.
> or the budget
Well, the budget for the devastation from the fires will be orders of magnitude more.
Fences can also be constructed that will stop flaming debris from being pushed across the ground.
You're not making any sense. Even with roads, the terrain above and below the roads is largely inaccessible. If you haven't personally traveled through those areas then you might not be able to visualize the difficulty.
As for fences, what a stupid and pointless idea. The wildfires spread largely by embers blown up in the air, not by flaming debris being pushed across the ground. And what exactly are you going to build the fences out of?
In the vicinity of San Francisco, in the 80s, there was a big fire in a rural area, where every house but one burned to the ground. The one was untouched. One feature it had was a low masonry wall about 20 feet away from the house. The firemen quoted in the newspaper said that wall was instrumental in keeping rolling, burning debris away from the house.
Fires aren't always accompanied by high velocity winds. Lower velocity winds will pile up the embers behind various obstacles, like a low wall.
Masonry walls also are an obstacle for the wind, which will slow down near the ground, and behind the wall it will be still, which will result in debris falling to the ground.
The wall can also be made of chicken wire. It would be appropriate to experiment with various forms of inexpensive fencing like chicken wire.
As for hills, it isn't necessary to denude them completely of vegetation. Just the parts that are easily accessed, and alongside the roads.
I seriously doubt experienced wildfire firefighters would agree with your assessment that it's completely hopeless.
The specific risk in the specific area we're talking about is indeed extremely dry, extremely high speed wind.
If you take away the wind, we wouldn't even be talking about this problem.
One can also do controlled burns on cold, humid and windless days.
These aren't done more commonly in the LA area due to intense public opposition. It turns out people don't like inhaling smoke year round. Cities in general struggle to do things their citizens don't want them to do and it's not clear to me that this is a bad thing or something you can really blame the city for.
When I lived in Pasadena in the 70s, there were fires now and then, with smoke and ashes falling like snow. It was just part of life in that area.
The way to present it to the citizens is, do you want to smell smoke now and then, or have your house burn down? Like what happened a few months ago?
Or you can do the controlled burns when the wind is blowing away from the city.
Sure, and here's what has changed between then and now:
1. A much longer and drier dry season
2. A much larger urban-wilderness interface
3. A much more organized public apparatus to combat environmental hazards (even in cases like this which require tradeoffs against more severe future risks)
The reason this is such a challenging problem today is not because everyone living in 2025 is a moron or morally corrupt and the people in the 70s were not.
California is digging out of a combination of over a century of misguided forest management efforts (replacing thousands of years of work by indigenous people with fire suppression), and also unprecedented climate change.
Should they do more? Of course. With what resources?
I recently learned 82% of California fire fighters are unpaid volunteers. That doesn’t include the prison labor.
The entire government has its priorities completely wrong, especially at the federal level. Blaming the city of LA makes very little sense.
Blaming environmentalists for consistently sounding the alarm over this stuff for 50+ years and then being ignored also doesn’t make sense.
One thing that does make sense: Look at the writings of the people that blocked wind and nuclear power in the 1980’s, and solar / batteries in the 1990s.
They explicitly said they knew their actions would burn the planet down, and it didn’t matter to them. Now they’ve dismantling our democracy, eliminating emergency response groups like FEMA, and retasking the national guard (California’s last line of fire defense) as an illegal police force.
Your comment is quite disconnected from reality. Blaming the city of LA makes a lot of sense. The mayor Karen Bass was completely ineffectual. And even before she was elected the city had failed to properly upgrade their fire fighting infrastructure or building codes.
Most volunteer fire fighters act as reserves in more rural areas and are only called up for major incidents. The city of LA and surrounding cities like Calabasas don't rely heavily on volunteers.
Climate change might be a minor factor in the intensity of the 2025 Southern California wildfires but those have been happening periodically for millennia. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) will sometimes dump a lot of rain on Southern California for several years at a stretch causing extensive brush growth, then shift north for several years allowing everything to dry out. At that point any little spark will ignite a raging wildfire, especially when the Santa Ana winds are blowing. This is not "forest" that can be actively managed, it's chaparral in rough hilly terrain. It's simply impossible to clear much of the brush or conduct controlled burns. The only effective measures are building fire-resistant structures with defensible space around them — or simply not building in those areas at all.
> California is digging out of a combination of over a century of misguided forest management efforts
Including building in the chaparral hills in the first place. Sane policy would be to forbid new construction where fires have ravaged in the past or at least deny insurance, because it's like building in a floodplain. The problem is that the same area is suffering from systemic under-construction of housing.
Aside from a healthy dose of schadenfreude, my next reaction is anger - we shouldn't be putting toxic waste next to anybody's home, particularly not in landfills that aren't configured to deal with it. "It was a big fire" is a pretty shit excuse to ignore the law.
No one is arguing that it's a good idea.
However, finding a better idea is difficult.
They want me to subscribe to read a about the ritzy enclave. Came for the bitter lesson, not disappointed.
Newspapers used to be printed on paper and no one batted an eye when they were asked to fork over a few quarters per issue. It was not considered ritzy or posh to read about what is going on. Someone needs to pay those people who create the papers.
Now that newspapers are online, somehow it's ritzy to be able to read and the fact that people have jobs which involve creating newspaper content is a bitter lesson.
The price was mostly symbolic (if they were free people would probably abuse it, e.g. for paper to line your birdcage with), and it was ads in the paper that paid for the business.
Heck, now we have multi-billion dollar companies selling us ads (Google, Meta) but no one wants to pay the people whose jobs include investigating government corruption (as well as reporting on Taylor Swift getting a ring...). Somewhat understandably, since ads on the Internet are much more obnoxious than ads on newspaper/magazines.
I just miss when a newspaper stand didn't ask to track your every interest, hobby and political view. And track which articles you read for all time in a profile to be monetized.
The cost of the above is orders of magnitude greater than some loose change adjusted for inflation.
People got spoiled with free content. Some never in their life payed for a newspaper. The problem is subscribing to one or two sources is not enough. You will miss a lot. To understand what happens in Chine you better read Chinese, and not BBC's interpretation. Now that there are so many free translating tools it's easy. The same about every conflict. There are two sides at least. Your favorite source will show most likely only one. Test it on Ukraine or Gaza.
> a few quarters per issue
Not X dollars per month with a yearly commitment that auto renews and for which you need to stay on hold for 6-12 hours to cancel...
Cry me a river.
If "newspapers" really wanted my money they'd band up and set up a micropayments agency so I could pay them for the issue i'm interested in again.
But they're only chasing whales instead so I have zero compassion.
The NYT is $23/month and I live in Australia. I'd be happy to pay them a dollar or two and buy an issue containing a known and limited set of articles from a particular date, but a subscription is irrelevant to me and I would bankrupt myself if I paid to subscribe to every newspaper that paywalls me.
You used to be able to buy the daily NYT printed edition in Canberra and Sydney at the very least. I’d actually be pretty surprised if you can’t still do it.
Don't know about this story in particular but a lot of online articles never make the print edition.
I agree that it has become hard to buy single issues in the digital world. I have some digital subscriptions, and would be happy to pay a bit here and there for one-off issues.
It would not be even if I read newspapers. Real news qualify by not being fit to print since long before ww1 - I just like rearranging words.
Newspapers also used to be heavily syndicated or covered the same large subjects, while keeping 2-3 to a geographical area.
Now that newspapers are online, an end user may be presented with hundreds or thousands of them, asking for a subscription.
I’m not opposed to paying, but I see two issues:
1. I could read a newspaper without a subscription. I could buy just one issue. NYT does that that online
2. A newspaper in a vending machine showed you more than just the headline. Like the subhead, for example. I can’t even see that. The default NYT experience without a subscription gives you only the title. And I have to agree to $25/month to get anything else assuming I’m not using a paywall bypass
“We have stuff, we say you’ll like it, cough up a bunch of money to find out what” is a tough sell for me.
Paywalls that give you at least the first few sentences make far more sense to me.
Right now when I went to their front page I could see a one paragraph summary of several news items. Granted, other front page stories only show the headline but I think that is an adequate substitute for what we got from peeking at the vending machine window.
I’d agree. Oddly, if you’re direct linked to the article you don’t get it though.
So I guess I could go find the story on their homepage and see it there. That’s a rather odd workflow.
[dead]
"I don't want to pay for content, and don't you dare push advertising on me. I want your content. I don't care how you have to pay to make it, that's not my problem."
If people bounce without reading or paying, how much do they really want the content?
Articles like this might get me with a headline but once I hit a paywall I realize very quickly how little I care.
Right. I’m hitting the paywall before I even know what it’s about. I’m not hooked, so I have no interest in paying.
Which leaves trying to skirt the paywall. If it works I don’t need to pay, if it doesn’t that’s more confirmation it’s not worth it for me.
Lose/lose for them.
A trick.
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