The C&D isn't for the customers, it's for Waffle House. Apprising a party of their infringement and putting them on notice is a crucial procedural step for potential litigation.
>They should have embraced this guy and his website, engage him, and through that channel let him know "hey, you can't use our trademarks, etc. so you'll need to rebrand, but we love what you're doing and want to help."
I don't mean this cynically or rhetorically, but: why? I get that this is a fun and humorous side project for the creator, but I don't see any real upside for Waffle House in supporting it. If Waffle House wanted to lean into the proxy-for-FEMA marketing angle, it'd be much better off doing it in-house, where it'd have complete creative control. More likely, Waffle House marketing strategists crunched the numbers and are understandably hesitant to expand branding based on national disasters and the woeful state of government response infrastructure.
We do this every year when Nintendo sends an icy C&D to some quirky project built on its IP. Techies rend their garments about the deplorable state of IP law, and forecast imminent fallout from all the "bad PR" and "missed opportunities," as if there's a vast, highly sensitive market segment of temporarily aggrieved nerds that has somehow gone unaccounted for in its sprawling global marketing strategy. "I'll never buy a Nintendo product again!" says the 42-year-old Senior Software Engineer with 312 unplayed games in his Steam library, and the money-printing machine continues to hum unabated.
>But why doesn't this happen to restaurants, or super markets or car mechanics?
This is a bafflingly underinformed rhetorical given the previous sentence. It happens all the time with the exact counter-examples you list. I'm honestly shocked you mentioned restaurants when articles were floating around HN less than a week ago about the death of Red Lobster by way of private equity:
> Why don't new cardiologists enter the field? Because there is a cap of graduates that the AMA controls.
The AMA doesn't have the authority to cap anything, and I encourage you to devote more research to your premises before relying so heavily on them. The cap on new doctors arises from a complex set of competing laws, policies, and blended public/private billing models for how doctors get trained and paid during residencies, which itself is downstream of how hospitals are funded and operated. There is no singular "do this -> get more doctors" solution; it is enormously complicated, often by both design and necessity, and is not easily untangled with the naive techie "just make a pull request" mentality that pervades the HN comments section. You also seem to misunderstand what the AMA does and have miscast it as some sort of central licensing authority when most of what they due is effete lobbying and begging physicians for donations/dues. They're annoying and probably a net negative for public health at this point, but they're not some boogeyman holding back the libertarian fantasy of an unregulated healthcare market.
>Try to ask your doctor how much something costs and they'll stare at you like you have two heads. Imagine getting your car fixed without knowing how much it's going to cost
I can't help but notice that you didn't mention the role of private health insurance when that undergirds much of the grousing. Doctors can't give you an answer on what your procedure will cost because they have to play a multi-stage game of Price is Right with a cartel of investor-driven private health insurers with the express business model of avoiding paying for those services whenever possible. The fact that everyone BUT the investors suffer from this arrangement is the actual, literal point of the article - it's even in the byline!
>Why would it be any different for Monero
This response does not make much sense: how do you pay for cars, groceries, condoms with Monero?
With fiat, you use some centralized banking instrument like cash, credit, debit, or whatever. Reconciling how that purchase experience is identical with Monero (but is somehow an anonymous, decentralized transaction) might require slightly more explanation to distinguish it from your garden variety anarchocapitalist crypto daydreaming.
Or, more likely, you mean that _in theory_ you could use it to buy anything, with the small hurdle of instantly overturning all of modern commerce infrastructure and the leviathan hard currency sovereigns that deliberately engineered traceable, centralized transactions as political and cultural contagion. Just gotta overcome that, teach grandma about cold wallets and the paramount value of anonymity, and we'll be off fiat.
Wake me up when Monero is broadly known for something other than the de facto payment vehicle for ransomware.
It's a stretch to call FIAT "money", let alone "hard money". The US dollar has lost >97% of it's value just since the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913... and that's widely viewed as one of the strongest FIAT currencies in the world. The only stronger FIAT currency that immediately comes to mind for me is the Swiss Franc (CHF).
In places like Venezuela, doctors and lawyers spend their days playing Runescape and World of Warcraft, because thlse fictional, virtual currencies are more stable than their real state-backed FIAT currency, and because they can earn more real-world currency by exchanging ingame currency for it than they can as doctors and lawyers in their "equitable" economic system of socialism.
> The US dollar has lost >97% of it's value just since the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913
That's over a 100 years ago. I can easily see bitcoin lose much of its value in about 4 decades when the block subsidy is negligible and it relies almost exclusively on transaction fees for security.
>I can easily see bitcoin lose much of its value in about 4 decades when the block subsidy is negligible and it relies almost exclusively on transaction fees for security.
I actually agree with this, and that's one reason I, too, prefer Monero - the tail emissions + tx fees are more economically sustainable than tx fees alone.
> The US dollar has lost >97% of it’s value just since the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913…
Yeah, that’s the result of placing function as medium of exchange nd unit of account over function as a store of value, as a deliberate measure to both facilitate exchange and encourage investment outside of the money in productive assets.
Also why, while Bitcoin might arguably be a decent investment if you can take the volatility (note that I am not saying that it is, either), its crappy money compared to major world currencies.
lol @ the hackernews commentariat learning that the ideal CEO isn't just some ascendant version of a rockstar coder that makes gantt charts.
> suddenly it's a CEOs fiduciary incompetence that a seed round isn't distributed amongst 16 banks
Yes. There's no "suddenly" to it - you're describing well-established fiduciary responsibilities. A CEO's responsibility is to delegate those tasks to someone like a CFO, who _absolutely should_ incorporate a strategy that balances liquidity with stability. The CFO also has a responsibility to see just what, exactly, a bank is doing with their deposits and make a determination about the associated risk. And yes, it is very normal to park money in various accounts and instruments as part of that strategy.
It is deeply distressing that half the comments here and abroad think this is some absurd, unattainable standard instead of the operative norm for the other 90% of the economy that doesn't get treated like a miracle baby for simply existing. You're not running a lemonade stand, and witnessing self-anointed "innovators" screech for a bailout because they somehow accrued millions of dollars in investments without ever learning about private deposit insurance or Cash Sweep or T-bills goes a long way to explaining why the majority of these goofs fashioned their Twitter bios into graveyards for failed ventures.
Look, I get that in hindsight the "of course you should do this thing that historically you would never think of" thing makes sense, but my bigger point was the blame shifting.
Sub-20 person startup CEOs didn't cause this problem. Saying "this is YOUR fault, person who just got their first seed round" seems to gloss over the large(r) issues.
>They should have embraced this guy and his website, engage him, and through that channel let him know "hey, you can't use our trademarks, etc. so you'll need to rebrand, but we love what you're doing and want to help."
I don't mean this cynically or rhetorically, but: why? I get that this is a fun and humorous side project for the creator, but I don't see any real upside for Waffle House in supporting it. If Waffle House wanted to lean into the proxy-for-FEMA marketing angle, it'd be much better off doing it in-house, where it'd have complete creative control. More likely, Waffle House marketing strategists crunched the numbers and are understandably hesitant to expand branding based on national disasters and the woeful state of government response infrastructure.
We do this every year when Nintendo sends an icy C&D to some quirky project built on its IP. Techies rend their garments about the deplorable state of IP law, and forecast imminent fallout from all the "bad PR" and "missed opportunities," as if there's a vast, highly sensitive market segment of temporarily aggrieved nerds that has somehow gone unaccounted for in its sprawling global marketing strategy. "I'll never buy a Nintendo product again!" says the 42-year-old Senior Software Engineer with 312 unplayed games in his Steam library, and the money-printing machine continues to hum unabated.