Works in progress also had a great article recently (also discussed on hacker news) about how Japanese railways are private, profit earning real estate development corporations. [1]
Unfortunately, people from western countries have very negative views toward the privatization of mass transit despite the wild success that Japan has experienced. The model makes so much sense: if trains are just a way to get people to the real estate that you developed, then you’re going to make sure that the trains AND the destinations are really nice, which also turns out to be very lucrative (at least in densely populated areas) as a cherry on top.
And even worse, like this commenter above alludes to, it is trendy in the West to believe that real estate developers are evil, and that corporations that make money are sucking the life out of society. This kind of degrowth populism pretty much guarantees that the successful Japanese model is out of reach for most countries, because it is exactly the pursuit of profit that makes Japan’s system so nice - not some edicts from a benevolent and extremely capable government.
> Unfortunately, people from western countries have very negative views toward the privatization of mass transit despite the wild success that Japan has experienced
Japanese culture would frown heavily on enshittifying the transit experience to earn more profit. Western culture mass transit is already often shitty, and I cannot imagine how shit it would become if a for profit corporation took it over and started to squeeze it to make more money
Did you read what I said? The whole Japanese system is for profit and the one of the biggest reasons for Japan’s system being so pleasant is that it is done for commercial purposes.
If the incentives are right American companies can make good things, but usually they are not so because of poor policy.
> If the incentives are right American companies can make good things, but usually they are not so because of poor policy
I disagree. The incentives are never right for American companies because the only incentive they care about is making money at all costs. They don't even care about their reputations anymore if they can sell their rep for money
“I absolutely agree that consumers and wage earners should not be exploited by the use of their data,” he said. “But it’s still overly broad and it’s still overly vague in very important parts. And I believe it’s overly simplistic in its definition of wage setting.”
The North American car market is more subsidized than any other. It is why it is so uncompetitive.
North America imports cars in large quantities from every car making region in the world (that is not banned). What parts of the world sell high volumes of NA vehicles? They are not banned, just unwanted.
There’s controlling competition in your own country and dominating global markets. Nothing wrong with either. It’s not like it’s not happening anywhere else in the world.
It just makes me laugh when people complain about China propping up it's industry to complete globally. The US has overthrown governments to protect its geopolitical priorities.
I've got no love for China, but I'm not gonna shed a tear for a large corporations crying over someone else having an unfair advantage.
I have no problem with monetization. I do have a problem with rug-pulling, especially if it's a tool I'm adopting into my workflow. I ask about monetization strategy because it can be an indicator. If the answer is, "never thought about it" then rug pull is a strong possibility. If the answer is, "planning to offer paid hosting" then that can be a positive sign.
Very good points. Including the AGPL, that is definitely a better license for this type of project. I am just used to starting with MIT when I start a new open source project, but you have a point.
About monetization, that is definitely very important. For now, and not sure how long, could be days or weeks, I am offering api-keys at no charge, because I want the feedback of real users. But obviously that is not sustainable in the long term, servers cost money and monetization also help keep the project alive.
At a second stage, I am planning to offer monthly or yearly plans with different limitations or unlimited also. But I am also planning on offering pay per use with short lives api-keys targeting agentic workflows, for example or people that dont really want to pay a monthly fee, but instead just cents for a short-lived tunnel.
For the monthly plans, I am planning to keep as low cost as possible, just enough to maintain the infrastructure and development + some overhead.
The premise is that you have a bunch of unsavvy people dumping savings into the market. As an individual you can try to play the game, as a system most people will lose.
What is the game? Who has been losing from buying broad-market index funds? Even if the market falls from recent highs all but the most recent investors will be ahead.
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