Saw some people on mastodon making fun of cohost for "needing 46k a month to host 12k users" and wow that left a bad taste in my mouth. People will seriously say you need to pay your workers a living wage and then turn around and mock a business that is actually doing that for not being sustainable.
Then of course there were a bunch of armchair quarterbacks who were like "well I spend 75 bucks per 250 users, even if I add two mods with low wages I only get up to 12k a month"
My dude. It's the "low wages" part that's the problem there. And what about yourself? What are you living off of while working fulltime on this? What about the other engineers that you will need on a project of this scope and complexity? What about legal and financial service fees? What about equipment costs? What about payroll? What about any of several dozen things that adds overhead to a business that you're conveniently ignoring in your back of the napkin math?
It's just the perfect intersection of bad leftist praxis and having no fucking clue how hard it is to keep any business alive to greatly upset me.
I find a lot of people (this is not unique to mastodon and not an excuse to dump on the platform in comments) interpret "value your time" as "you should enjoy your time doing a thing" and not a literal "your time has value and employers rent that, products you make have that priced in, etc and if you aren't thinking about that, you're underpricing your own product and underpaying others because you don't grasp that you're buying fractional pieces of other people's lives"
and I don't know how to bridge that gap, but we're going to need to for the system to change
this manifests in all sorts of ways, but the most obvious are people who do things for hobbies -- hobbiest crafters, hobbiest server admins, whatever. If you don't see the time put into a thing as having the inherent value, then you tend to think the costs at companies are the infrastructure. But at the small level, the major cost is that you have to pay people to live, for an entire year. After some point of growth that stops being the case and everything else is the largest expense, but uh.
