When I want to buy a suit, I go to Moore's because they're a men's clothing store, and when my wife wants a dress, she goes to some fancy schmancy place that only sells women's clothing in the mall, and we're both perfectly happy with this situation.
That, of course, has nothing to do with Wikipedia. It's not a clothing store, it's an online repository of human knowledge, ostensibly written and edited by a group of volunteers. It's not funded by public money. It's funded by donations. It is, for all intents and purposes, a club. There are no dues to pay, but like all clubs it has lots of inane rules and such, all in place to further its goal. People are free to come into and leave this club as they please, and for better or worse, they do a remarkable job of building something valuable that they offer to everyone in the world for free (even in many different languages).
When you realize that's what it is, then you realize this isn't about women and men, it's an internal dialog happening within the club about changing their marketing material. If they discovered left handed people had a usability problem with the site, and implemented changes to make it easier and more appealing for left handed people to use it in order to increase the number of users and editors, that wouldn't be news. Just because someone in the club says, "hey, there are all these femalian people out there who would join our club if only we changed, this, this, and that" doesn't mean it needs to be treated any differently.
I've been using Sneakemail for years now. The concept is the same, and it really works well. I love being able to delete an email address that someone started spamming, after they got my address by making me sign up just to get a quote for some service I never ended up buying anyway.
Worse yet, if it was like my last company, they wanted 6 x 10. It was one thing when they paid overtime, but when they insisted I move to salary, that was the beginning of the end of that job.
I would love for your statements to be true, but do you actually have any evidence or references to back up all these claims, or is everyone just spouting hot air here?
Hmm, I thought I was unique in coming up with this comparison. Darn! Anyway, I think it's right on the mark. "Why are you worried about being dead? You were dead for most of time, and you didn't mind. Think back to before you were born. Was it that bad?"
A little while ago I needed a 2D physics simulator, and I was using WPF. I used Physics2D.Net as the engine, and WPF for rendering. It uses an MVVM architecture. The whole thing was open-sourced (LGPLv3). If you happen to go down the Windows route, it's worth a look.
Here's an article I wrote about it.
This works until you get so many demerit points that they take your license away. (I know here you can go up to about 15km/h over and you might get a fine but no points - so that might work).
Isn't he just saying he believes that the roads are safe to drive at 90 mph? If that's the case, why can't we all drive at 90 mph? If everyone drives the same speed, it's safer than a few people going a lot faster.
There's just a huge cultural difference between the US and Canada when it comes to change (no pun intended). When things in the US change, the populace attacks the current government for being in office at the time. In Canada, the view is just, "whatever, I guess that's progress... sure is going to wear out your pocket a bit sooner." Heck, they just pushed through the HST in Ontario and nobody batted an eyelash.
I think that in Canada we *expect* to delegate decisions like this to the government, and we go along with the choices because it's their job to research the options and make good choices. Plus it's easily verifiable: it costs less... so ok. In the US, any change imposed from above is "evil" because every political battle is based on emotion now, not logic. I think maybe the emotion in play is fear. Let's face it, the US is "on top" right now, and when you're big, you get scared because you have a lot to lose. You lose agility because everyone's afraid that any change will disrupt the delicate balance that put you where you are. Unfortunately that means you stop progressing too, and if history is any lesson, the underdog always catches up.
The US will never change to metric or to a dollar coin. Not while it's on top anyway.
Of course, two-incomes is a doubled-edged sword; because so many are in this situation, it makes it more difficult to have a comfortable living on one because prices (at least home prices) account for the higher family income.
This makes no sense. If the status quo is that every household only has one working person, and then 90% of the households successfully send the second member off to work, you think the *real* comfort of the last 10% is negatively impacted? Ignoring, for a moment, the high value that a stay-at-home parent brings to a household, the other adult is *still* making as much money as they did, and can still afford as much. Technology increases the value of goods as a percentage of GDP over time, so this family can afford more. In fact, with almost twice as many people producing goods, etc., there's almost twice as much supply.
The fact is, a single parent household today lives better than kings did a few hundred years ago, and lives better than the average family 100 years ago.
What you're talking about is "keeping up with the Jones'". The fact is, most people used to live in shacks. Now some people can afford mansions, but some people still live in shacks. How is this making it more difficult to have a comfortable living? It's making it *easier* to have a comfortable living.
Don't forget Fanuc and Kuka. No, seriously... the idea of using Microsoft Robotics Studio in industrial automation is laughable in the industry. It's regarded as a toy. It's really targeted at people inventing their next robot vacuum cleaner, or perhaps grad students.
I was in the 5 year program, and I think the problem is that when you got to University, you're in first year with a bunch of other students who may not be from Ontario, so they may not have taken the 5th year of high school. The idea of the 5 year program was to help subsidize post-secondary education by teaching introductory level university courses to university-bound students without them having to pay tuition or live away from home, etc. I agree that it originally worked that way in principle, but once students started going to university out-of-province, the universities in Ontario had to assume you didn't have those courses, and universities outside of Ontario assumed nobody had them either, so you just ended up with a lot of repetition in first year.
Specifically I remember thinking that calculus was really easy in first year, but I was in class with people who hadn't done integration in high school. Things got harder again when everyone was up to speed.
I agreed with removing the 5th year. Not because it was a bad idea in principle, but because it was flawed in practice.
I don't design the safety systems themselves, I just apply them in the field. Any industrial equipment vendor now has a line of safety products. Rockwell Automation, Siemens, Beckhoff and Jokab come to mind. Do a search for "en 954-1 safety standard". Also search for the "ODVA CIP Safety Standard".
It's perfectly possible to operate a vehicle that has lost power steering or power assist braking. It's called muscle. It's generally considered "safe" for a machine to cut off power to its actuators in an unsafe situation. The unsafe thing to do is allow uncontrolled expenditure of energy.
I do industrial automation for a living, and machine guarding/safety is a major component of the job. There are now, in the last few years, software based safety products that are provably just as safe as a hardware only safety products. The key is that it's not just about rigorous testing, it's about correct design. If you want category 4 protection, you need to be sure that:
No single component failure can leave the system in an unsafe state
The component failure is detected
The system cannot be restarted without correcting the failure
Software becomes another component. Therefore you need to have redundancy in your software. Government regulators that certify these safety systems as compliant want to see you prove that a single component (i.e. unit of software) can't malfunction and leave the system in an unsafe state. What a lot of companies do is they have two independent processors each monitoring the inputs to the system in parallel, and each generating the required outputs. The processors are typically sourced from different companies, and the circuit boards are designed by different teams. The software running on each processor is written by a different team. If both processors agree on the outputs, the system drives those outputs, and if not, all power is dropped to everything and the system can't be restarted (may need to be replaced, etc.).
Those of us in the industry were skeptical of software based safety at first, but given the above facts and a decent amount of regulatory oversight, I'm satisfied that it will live up to the design criteria. That doesn't mean an error can't happen, but it makes the probability low enough that we can live with it.
The latest thing is safety systems running their I/O across networks like DeviceNet and even Ethernet/IP (the IP stands for Industrial Protocol, not Internet Protocol). Again, I was at first skeptical, but they use a protocol layering on top of the network using timestamps and redundant processors on both ends with reasonable failure modes that the system is provably safe, within reasonable limits.
So you can make safe embedded systems, but without being able to inspect the design and see that it lives up to these guidelines, Toyota can't ever *prove* that the system is safe.
Canadian here... I think the "one case" you're referring to (where gov't options work better than private) is insurance in general. Take a moment to understand what insurance is to begin with, and you'll see why. Imagine 10 people sitting around a table and deciding none of them by themselves could cope with their house burning down, so they enter into a mutual agreement to split the cost if any of their houses burn down. Perhaps they all start pitching some money in monthly into a pot to make sure some will be available in the future. Your risk of having to pay out is multiplied by 10, but the amount you have to pay is reduced by a factor of 10. With so few people, extra expenses are kept to a minimum.
As you add more people to this plan, and not everyone knows each other, obviously you start to incur administrative expenses. Someone needs to make sure everyone's paying, etc. So a small percentage of the money you pay has to go to pay this person's salary. But note that the insurance fund itself is non-profit. Your expenses to be part of the system are your share of the expenses incurred when peoples' houses burn down, plus the expense of this person's salary to administer it.
If you scale this all they way up, you get gov't run insurance. (Unfortunately then each person pays a different amount, but still). What I mean is that under a government insurance plan, your taxes pay for the payouts and the administrative cost.
Now contrast that with a for-profit insurance company. It's run for the benefit of the shareholders, not the subscribers. Therefore the company does everything possible to increase profit. You do this by a) increasing the number of subscribers by spending huge amounts on marketing, and b) reducing payouts by fighting cases in court and arguing over each one. All the money for marketing expenses, court costs, and shareholder profits comes out of the pockets of the subscribers.
So insurance is one of those things where we don't need market pressure to keep prices low. In a non-profit insurance plan, the costs are as low as they can possibly be. Contrast a US doctor's office, which has an army of administrative staff to handle all the paperwork associated with the various insurance plans, with a Canadian doctor's office which has one or maybe two administrative staff. As a percentage of the money spent on healthcare, the % spent on administration is MUCH higher in the US.
I'm not advocating the lack of competition in medical services. In Canada, you can choose your doctor. You can choose which hospital you go to. I'm just saying you don't need or want for-profit insurance.
Maybe that's because publishers are, by default, disabling the text-to-speech function on their works. I'm annoyed with how many books I downloads on my kindle have text-to-speech disabled.
I've crossed the Detroit/Windsor border a lot, and I remember on two occasions during long lines, someone getting out of their car and walking around to take a look at what the hold-up was. In both cases, border patrol officers responded by walking out to the line and looking for who it was. I don't think they found them either time.
Still, I remember wondering what planet this person would be from, getting out of their car and walking towards the checkpoint on foot. Not exactly a smart way to behave at the border. I'm not saying it deserves a beating, but it's dumb none-the-less.
Then if the guy asked you to get back in your car, you don't? Look, these people have the right to take you in a small room and search your body cavities. They can confiscate anything for any reason, including your vehicle. They can make you disappear and your family will never ever know what happened to you. They could easily plant stuff in your vehicle while you're in that back room. Yes, it's evil and fascist, but for goodness sake, when they ask you to get back in your car, just do it!
What is the point of saying that men and women have equal IQs? IQ tests were designed so the average IQ is 100 across genders.
IQ tests are weighted on these sex differences so there is no bias on average in favor of one sex, however the consistent difference in variance is not removed. Because the tests are defined so there is no average difference it is difficult to put any meaning on a statement that one sex has a higher intelligence than the other.
Now THAT is interesting. Great idea. The cool thing is that a series 2 can record 2 channels at the same time, so you could have 2 security cameras. You can also use Tivo Desktop to move the videos off to your PC if you wanted longer term storage.
How is this different from the previous model? Maybe it isn't supposed to be?
I think the environment has changed. We used to purchase a newspaper or magazine and understand that we're buying a "bundle" of information and subsidizing the content we didn't like in order to get cheap access to content we do like.
Search engines have changed that. I'm used to finding exactly what I want without wading through a whole bunch of other junk. It's gotten to the point where I go to a brick-and-mortar store now and I can't stand how long it takes me to find something. I'm so used to typing a carefully crafted search into a search box and finding everything I want, that brute-force scanning of all the items in a supermarket aisle just seems so wasteful.
So people now just want the one tiny little bit of information they're after. What they're after is so small that you can't possibly give them a teaser that would entice them to buy the whole content, because the teaser would have to tell them the information they wanted before they could judge if it's worth the money.
Nobody wants to pay money for a constant stream of information to be beamed at them anymore. This is because we have too much information, and there are lots of free services willing to beam you that stream for free (/. is one of them). There's too much information, and instead of media being "push", consumers are demanding it become "pull".
Going back to your question, I think that's the problem. When the only access I had to information was a newspaper or a magazine, I would pay a few dollars and sift through it myself. Information was scarce. That has changed. Now information is plentiful and it's easy to find exactly what I want.
To build on what Paul Graham is saying, I think there's a more fundamental problem with selling "content":
Each piece of content (article, story, etc.) tends to be a one-time use product (this is less true for movies, and not true at all for songs). But if you want to sell a one-time use unique product, then the consumer can't tell if it was worth the money until *after* they've consumed it. This creates risk and people are risk-averse when it comes to spending money (even one penny). So you can try to become known for producing consistently good content (very hard), and then sell that, but that means all the stuff you do first has to be given away for free. As soon as you start charging, you significantly reduce your audience growth rate.
So there are other business models for content. You can become recognized as an expert on X, and then people interested in X will read about you. However, if you try to start selling advertisements or referrals for X, you start to lose credibility.
Therefore, I think the next logical step is to become recognized as an expert on X (as a critic), then announce you're fed up with the existing offerings of X (because of reasons Y and Z), and tell your audience you've decided to go and make your own X that's much better than everyone else's X, and then you've got an audience of people who are going to be drooling to buy your X.
Slashdot Mirror
When I want to buy a suit, I go to Moore's because they're a men's clothing store, and when my wife wants a dress, she goes to some fancy schmancy place that only sells women's clothing in the mall, and we're both perfectly happy with this situation.
That, of course, has nothing to do with Wikipedia. It's not a clothing store, it's an online repository of human knowledge, ostensibly written and edited by a group of volunteers. It's not funded by public money. It's funded by donations. It is, for all intents and purposes, a club. There are no dues to pay, but like all clubs it has lots of inane rules and such, all in place to further its goal. People are free to come into and leave this club as they please, and for better or worse, they do a remarkable job of building something valuable that they offer to everyone in the world for free (even in many different languages).
When you realize that's what it is, then you realize this isn't about women and men, it's an internal dialog happening within the club about changing their marketing material. If they discovered left handed people had a usability problem with the site, and implemented changes to make it easier and more appealing for left handed people to use it in order to increase the number of users and editors, that wouldn't be news. Just because someone in the club says, "hey, there are all these femalian people out there who would join our club if only we changed, this, this, and that" doesn't mean it needs to be treated any differently.
This really isn't news, for anybody.
I've been using Sneakemail for years now. The concept is the same, and it really works well. I love being able to delete an email address that someone started spamming, after they got my address by making me sign up just to get a quote for some service I never ended up buying anyway.
Worse yet, if it was like my last company, they wanted 6 x 10. It was one thing when they paid overtime, but when they insisted I move to salary, that was the beginning of the end of that job.
I would love for your statements to be true, but do you actually have any evidence or references to back up all these claims, or is everyone just spouting hot air here?
Hmm, I thought I was unique in coming up with this comparison. Darn! Anyway, I think it's right on the mark. "Why are you worried about being dead? You were dead for most of time, and you didn't mind. Think back to before you were born. Was it that bad?"
A little while ago I needed a 2D physics simulator, and I was using WPF. I used Physics2D.Net as the engine, and WPF for rendering. It uses an MVVM architecture. The whole thing was open-sourced (LGPLv3). If you happen to go down the Windows route, it's worth a look. Here's an article I wrote about it.
This works until you get so many demerit points that they take your license away. (I know here you can go up to about 15km/h over and you might get a fine but no points - so that might work).
Isn't he just saying he believes that the roads are safe to drive at 90 mph? If that's the case, why can't we all drive at 90 mph? If everyone drives the same speed, it's safer than a few people going a lot faster.
There's just a huge cultural difference between the US and Canada when it comes to change (no pun intended). When things in the US change, the populace attacks the current government for being in office at the time. In Canada, the view is just, "whatever, I guess that's progress... sure is going to wear out your pocket a bit sooner." Heck, they just pushed through the HST in Ontario and nobody batted an eyelash.
I think that in Canada we *expect* to delegate decisions like this to the government, and we go along with the choices because it's their job to research the options and make good choices. Plus it's easily verifiable: it costs less... so ok. In the US, any change imposed from above is "evil" because every political battle is based on emotion now, not logic. I think maybe the emotion in play is fear. Let's face it, the US is "on top" right now, and when you're big, you get scared because you have a lot to lose. You lose agility because everyone's afraid that any change will disrupt the delicate balance that put you where you are. Unfortunately that means you stop progressing too, and if history is any lesson, the underdog always catches up.
The US will never change to metric or to a dollar coin. Not while it's on top anyway.
Of course, two-incomes is a doubled-edged sword; because so many are in this situation, it makes it more difficult to have a comfortable living on one because prices (at least home prices) account for the higher family income.
This makes no sense. If the status quo is that every household only has one working person, and then 90% of the households successfully send the second member off to work, you think the *real* comfort of the last 10% is negatively impacted? Ignoring, for a moment, the high value that a stay-at-home parent brings to a household, the other adult is *still* making as much money as they did, and can still afford as much. Technology increases the value of goods as a percentage of GDP over time, so this family can afford more. In fact, with almost twice as many people producing goods, etc., there's almost twice as much supply.
The fact is, a single parent household today lives better than kings did a few hundred years ago, and lives better than the average family 100 years ago.
What you're talking about is "keeping up with the Jones'". The fact is, most people used to live in shacks. Now some people can afford mansions, but some people still live in shacks. How is this making it more difficult to have a comfortable living? It's making it *easier* to have a comfortable living.
Don't forget Fanuc and Kuka. No, seriously... the idea of using Microsoft Robotics Studio in industrial automation is laughable in the industry. It's regarded as a toy. It's really targeted at people inventing their next robot vacuum cleaner, or perhaps grad students.
I was in the 5 year program, and I think the problem is that when you got to University, you're in first year with a bunch of other students who may not be from Ontario, so they may not have taken the 5th year of high school. The idea of the 5 year program was to help subsidize post-secondary education by teaching introductory level university courses to university-bound students without them having to pay tuition or live away from home, etc. I agree that it originally worked that way in principle, but once students started going to university out-of-province, the universities in Ontario had to assume you didn't have those courses, and universities outside of Ontario assumed nobody had them either, so you just ended up with a lot of repetition in first year.
Specifically I remember thinking that calculus was really easy in first year, but I was in class with people who hadn't done integration in high school. Things got harder again when everyone was up to speed.
I agreed with removing the 5th year. Not because it was a bad idea in principle, but because it was flawed in practice.
I don't design the safety systems themselves, I just apply them in the field. Any industrial equipment vendor now has a line of safety products. Rockwell Automation, Siemens, Beckhoff and Jokab come to mind. Do a search for "en 954-1 safety standard". Also search for the "ODVA CIP Safety Standard".
It's perfectly possible to operate a vehicle that has lost power steering or power assist braking. It's called muscle. It's generally considered "safe" for a machine to cut off power to its actuators in an unsafe situation. The unsafe thing to do is allow uncontrolled expenditure of energy.
I do industrial automation for a living, and machine guarding/safety is a major component of the job. There are now, in the last few years, software based safety products that are provably just as safe as a hardware only safety products. The key is that it's not just about rigorous testing, it's about correct design. If you want category 4 protection, you need to be sure that:
Software becomes another component. Therefore you need to have redundancy in your software. Government regulators that certify these safety systems as compliant want to see you prove that a single component (i.e. unit of software) can't malfunction and leave the system in an unsafe state. What a lot of companies do is they have two independent processors each monitoring the inputs to the system in parallel, and each generating the required outputs. The processors are typically sourced from different companies, and the circuit boards are designed by different teams. The software running on each processor is written by a different team. If both processors agree on the outputs, the system drives those outputs, and if not, all power is dropped to everything and the system can't be restarted (may need to be replaced, etc.).
Those of us in the industry were skeptical of software based safety at first, but given the above facts and a decent amount of regulatory oversight, I'm satisfied that it will live up to the design criteria. That doesn't mean an error can't happen, but it makes the probability low enough that we can live with it.
The latest thing is safety systems running their I/O across networks like DeviceNet and even Ethernet/IP (the IP stands for Industrial Protocol, not Internet Protocol). Again, I was at first skeptical, but they use a protocol layering on top of the network using timestamps and redundant processors on both ends with reasonable failure modes that the system is provably safe, within reasonable limits.
So you can make safe embedded systems, but without being able to inspect the design and see that it lives up to these guidelines, Toyota can't ever *prove* that the system is safe.
Canadian here... I think the "one case" you're referring to (where gov't options work better than private) is insurance in general. Take a moment to understand what insurance is to begin with, and you'll see why. Imagine 10 people sitting around a table and deciding none of them by themselves could cope with their house burning down, so they enter into a mutual agreement to split the cost if any of their houses burn down. Perhaps they all start pitching some money in monthly into a pot to make sure some will be available in the future. Your risk of having to pay out is multiplied by 10, but the amount you have to pay is reduced by a factor of 10. With so few people, extra expenses are kept to a minimum.
As you add more people to this plan, and not everyone knows each other, obviously you start to incur administrative expenses. Someone needs to make sure everyone's paying, etc. So a small percentage of the money you pay has to go to pay this person's salary. But note that the insurance fund itself is non-profit. Your expenses to be part of the system are your share of the expenses incurred when peoples' houses burn down, plus the expense of this person's salary to administer it.
If you scale this all they way up, you get gov't run insurance. (Unfortunately then each person pays a different amount, but still). What I mean is that under a government insurance plan, your taxes pay for the payouts and the administrative cost.
Now contrast that with a for-profit insurance company. It's run for the benefit of the shareholders, not the subscribers. Therefore the company does everything possible to increase profit. You do this by a) increasing the number of subscribers by spending huge amounts on marketing, and b) reducing payouts by fighting cases in court and arguing over each one. All the money for marketing expenses, court costs, and shareholder profits comes out of the pockets of the subscribers.
So insurance is one of those things where we don't need market pressure to keep prices low. In a non-profit insurance plan, the costs are as low as they can possibly be. Contrast a US doctor's office, which has an army of administrative staff to handle all the paperwork associated with the various insurance plans, with a Canadian doctor's office which has one or maybe two administrative staff. As a percentage of the money spent on healthcare, the % spent on administration is MUCH higher in the US.
I'm not advocating the lack of competition in medical services. In Canada, you can choose your doctor. You can choose which hospital you go to. I'm just saying you don't need or want for-profit insurance.
Maybe that's because publishers are, by default, disabling the text-to-speech function on their works. I'm annoyed with how many books I downloads on my kindle have text-to-speech disabled.
I've crossed the Detroit/Windsor border a lot, and I remember on two occasions during long lines, someone getting out of their car and walking around to take a look at what the hold-up was. In both cases, border patrol officers responded by walking out to the line and looking for who it was. I don't think they found them either time.
Still, I remember wondering what planet this person would be from, getting out of their car and walking towards the checkpoint on foot. Not exactly a smart way to behave at the border. I'm not saying it deserves a beating, but it's dumb none-the-less.
Then if the guy asked you to get back in your car, you don't? Look, these people have the right to take you in a small room and search your body cavities. They can confiscate anything for any reason, including your vehicle. They can make you disappear and your family will never ever know what happened to you. They could easily plant stuff in your vehicle while you're in that back room. Yes, it's evil and fascist, but for goodness sake, when they ask you to get back in your car, just do it!
If you're not going to back that up with some kind of research, you might as well be saying that there *is* a God because you believe it to be so.
consider
What is the point of saying that men and women have equal IQs? IQ tests were designed so the average IQ is 100 across genders.
(Emphasis mine.)
Yes, you're right. I didn't realize there was a series 2 single tuner. Sorry!
I was already vaccinated when I was a kid. My father said, "so help me God, if you ever smoke I will kick your a$$." He meant it too.
Now THAT is interesting. Great idea. The cool thing is that a series 2 can record 2 channels at the same time, so you could have 2 security cameras. You can also use Tivo Desktop to move the videos off to your PC if you wanted longer term storage.
How is this different from the previous model? Maybe it isn't supposed to be?
I think the environment has changed. We used to purchase a newspaper or magazine and understand that we're buying a "bundle" of information and subsidizing the content we didn't like in order to get cheap access to content we do like.
Search engines have changed that. I'm used to finding exactly what I want without wading through a whole bunch of other junk. It's gotten to the point where I go to a brick-and-mortar store now and I can't stand how long it takes me to find something. I'm so used to typing a carefully crafted search into a search box and finding everything I want, that brute-force scanning of all the items in a supermarket aisle just seems so wasteful.
So people now just want the one tiny little bit of information they're after. What they're after is so small that you can't possibly give them a teaser that would entice them to buy the whole content, because the teaser would have to tell them the information they wanted before they could judge if it's worth the money.
Nobody wants to pay money for a constant stream of information to be beamed at them anymore. This is because we have too much information, and there are lots of free services willing to beam you that stream for free (/. is one of them). There's too much information, and instead of media being "push", consumers are demanding it become "pull".
Going back to your question, I think that's the problem. When the only access I had to information was a newspaper or a magazine, I would pay a few dollars and sift through it myself. Information was scarce. That has changed. Now information is plentiful and it's easy to find exactly what I want.
To build on what Paul Graham is saying, I think there's a more fundamental problem with selling "content":
Each piece of content (article, story, etc.) tends to be a one-time use product (this is less true for movies, and not true at all for songs). But if you want to sell a one-time use unique product, then the consumer can't tell if it was worth the money until *after* they've consumed it. This creates risk and people are risk-averse when it comes to spending money (even one penny). So you can try to become known for producing consistently good content (very hard), and then sell that, but that means all the stuff you do first has to be given away for free. As soon as you start charging, you significantly reduce your audience growth rate.
So there are other business models for content. You can become recognized as an expert on X, and then people interested in X will read about you. However, if you try to start selling advertisements or referrals for X, you start to lose credibility.
Therefore, I think the next logical step is to become recognized as an expert on X (as a critic), then announce you're fed up with the existing offerings of X (because of reasons Y and Z), and tell your audience you've decided to go and make your own X that's much better than everyone else's X, and then you've got an audience of people who are going to be drooling to buy your X.