Your example is an interesting one, as the Reagan administration is a broad topic with many books covering just a small slice. If you are solely interested in the foreign policy of Reagan, you could find books on Iran-Contra, SDI, Grenada, the American response to the Soviet-Afghan war, the Reykjavik Summit etc.
Wikipedia is a great resource and I use it a lot, but it is far from a complete solution for topics with any depth. If I read an article on a president, I'll get a brief overview of their administration as well as a few interesting facts and could probably answer a jeopardy question about them, but I would not claim a strong understanding.
I will agree that not every bit of information can be found in a book, but the ability to comprehend book-level arguments and ideas is critical. They are a necessary, but not sufficient component of learning.
Energy is more difficult to gauge, but the average American has over 5 hours of leisure time daily. When there was more of a time crunch in the past, Americans read more.
In 2021, Russia was the source of 52% of Germany's gas. Following the expansion of the Ukraine conflict in 2022 imports from Russia quickly dropped. The biggest suppliers of gas to Germany last year were Norway, Netherlands and Belgium. LNG from the United States and other countries has increased to 10% which is not nearly enough to replace the Russian imports. The phaseout was accomplished by drastically reducing overall gas usage.
This comes off as a quite dismissive and incurious take. Are you quite sure that of the ~500 million consumers who bought a pair, nobody considered utility and it was simply a fashion choice? Or is it more likely that some consumers judge the utility differently from you?
The linked post on Take Take Take is interesting. Magnus Carlsen created a chess.com competitor and eventually sold it to chess.com and became a sponsor. While working as a sponsor he then created a new chess.com competitor.
I'm a Lichess patron and happy to see them get support, but I do feel a bit bad for chess.com in this case. Magnus is such a big figure in chess that organizations like FIDE and chess.com feel they have no choice but to accommodate his whims, but that doesn't come with any guarantees. I hope Lichess does not find themselves in a poor position if Magnus decides to "alter the deal".
Unfortunately, this does not save you. The NYT has a paywall and still has this terrible experience, which caused me to unsubscribe. I remain subscribed to The Atlantic because while it still relies on advertising, the print version is at least readable.
The March 2026 issue has 12 ads across 109 pages including the back cover. Ads do not appear within an article. I even sometimes read the ads, because many are about new book releases. I opened the cover story (just one article!) of this issue within the mobile app and encountered 38 advertisements. The ads take up nearly half the screen and there is almost always one visible. These 38 instances were just the same four ads repeated many, many times.
This is just one issue of one publication, but it's representative of the broader problem the author discusses. I want to support good journalism and am willing to pay for good writers and articles but strategies that are so frustrating and disrespectful to the reader make it difficult.
It makes sense if you're looking at it from the perspective of a European investor. e.g. You start with 1000 EUR, convert and buy into an S&P500 fund, wait a year, sell and convert back to EUR.
Celsius and Fahrenheit doesn't work as an analogy because the rate does not change over time as it does with currencies.
You can't effectively paywall it because not only is it open source, but there are many nearly equivalent competitors all of which are free. Any subscribers would essentially be donors.
There are people like yourself who would be happy to donate, but not nearly enough. Replacing MoCo's current revenue with donors would require donations at the level of Doctors without Borders, American Cancer Society, or the Make-a-Wish Foundation.
Turning into one of the largest charities in America overnight simply isn't realistic. A drastic downsizing to subsist on donor revenue also isn't wise when Mozilla already has to compete with a smaller team. And "Ladybird does it" isn't a real argument until and unless it graduates from cool project to usable and competitive browser.
A big factor in the quick return (and maybe one reason for its popularity) is that Germany has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. The ROI doesn't look as attractive in France, the US or Norway.
> Perhaps Google and Mozilla, leaders in JavaScript standards and implementations, will start developing a real standard library for JavaScript, which makes micro-dependencies like left-pad a thing of the past.
It's not wrong, but this take is kind of tired and well out of date. For about a decade or so left-pad's functionality has been standard in all browsers or runtimes. Plenty of other micropackages have been obsoleted as well and the current zeitgeist is to avoid publishing or using any sort of micropackage.
"Zero dependencies" is now a top marketing term in the frontend world. Unfortunately, their removal is an ongoing process and it's taken way too long already to fully purge the ecosystem of these packages. However, it's not because the JavaScript community has never thought of this issue before. "Add more features to the JS standards and don't use is-number" is not a particularly new idea or valuable insight.
But beyond that, there were plenty of not-tiny packages impacted as well. Continuing to beat this dead horse may be fun, but it distracts from the actual issue here.
For a magazine like the New Yorker, there was money. You might be interested in Bryan Burrough's experience writing for Vanity Fair in the 90s and 2000s.
> For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story. Then, as now, $166,000 was a good advance for an entire book. Yes, I realized it was obscene. I took it with a grin.
Yes, if you put exact versions in your package.json and do not prefix them with a caret or tilde, npm will install the exact version. A package-lock.json version will also pin your transitive dependencies to a specific version. Unfortunately, the default behavior of npm is to add a caret to the version number which npm interprets as this version or any greater minor/patch release.
Wikipedia is a great resource and I use it a lot, but it is far from a complete solution for topics with any depth. If I read an article on a president, I'll get a brief overview of their administration as well as a few interesting facts and could probably answer a jeopardy question about them, but I would not claim a strong understanding.
I will agree that not every bit of information can be found in a book, but the ability to comprehend book-level arguments and ideas is critical. They are a necessary, but not sufficient component of learning.