American employees are too expensive, and have too many rights. You can't compete with child slaves in China when you have a federal minimum wage and labor laws. They're even cheaper than robots.

We mustn't allow the clarity of truth to be muddied by facts.

What are you, an NSA puppet or something?

Doubtful. Wal-Mart would have no problem finding customers regardless of the purchasing power of its employees.

This is just an attempt to counter bad PR by paying their employees only slightly more than as little as possible. It's still a terrible wage.

Don't disagree with you there.

If it creates buzz and makes money, it's viable. A few unsatisfied customers should be irrelevant in the greater scheme.

So are we suggesting that we know the missing step?

  1. Build something
  2. ???
  3. Profit!

We're suggesting that it's

  1. Build something
  2. Reduce convenience, increase price, piss people off, but get press
  3. Profit!

???

You can apply that attitude in general to open source software as well.

Most people using open source software trust it as implicitly as they would have to trust closed source software, they have to, because reviewing and comprehending all of the code running on any typical machine is impossible. Most people simply use open source and don't care about (or aren't capable of) dealing with the code, and of the ones that do, there is no guarantee that they're going to be competent.

Totally true - i think if you want to use open source you should be prepared to read the code in order to understand it and for debugging