“Apple considers payments from supporters to creators on Patreon to be digital goods that it is entitled to receive a commission on.” 
I’m just waiting for… I don’t know, a headline like: “Man from Cupertino detained for wrestling with a homeless person over thirty percent of his booze.”
Look. I appreciate honest, unapologetic greed. But there need to be standards. Go all in, grow a black mustache and twirl it, for f***'s sake!
Well, they live in the capitalist paradise - Any way to make money is good! Billionaires need more billions or they feel inadequate.
Is it the MAKing or the TAKing that makes them feel adequate/fulfilled/safe? I suspect that the MAKing has long stopped doing much at all for many of them and that their feelings come from what they see in others (horror, fear, resignation) rather than their own feelings of joy from when they truly created something of worth that was valued by others. But there are exceptions of course.
It’s mostly a monopoly problem. Breaking them up every once in a while is healthy for the market.
This is why it’s no longer possible to buy Kindle books via the Kindle app. I expect Patreon will do something similar.
I use Pixelmator Pro and Scrivener. if not for those two apps I would have switched to Linux by now.
Nah - the dearth of real quality apps is what keeps me only playing with Linux.
DEVONthink and Tinderbox for me. Scrivener / $NEWAPP work on Wine well enough that leaving them is only a scratch but doing without DT and TBX would bite deep.
I read an article a few years ago, about a fella who owned a service company; he decided to take a massive pay cut so that he could bring all the salaries of his employees to roughly the same level.
Most of the employees were happy about this (especially the janitors), which paid dividends for him when the pandemic hit. Rather than leave, the employees were happy to work for less money to keep the business afloat. And continued to work for this fella when the good times returned and the business could afford to pay them back what he owed.
What really stood out for me though, was the two salesman who resigned when he levelled up everyone’s wages. Even though the pay rises had no material affect on their earnings (everything was paid for from the owner’s pay cut), they felt that paying everyone a decent wage undermined their own … whatever, so they quit.
It was a fascinating read, and I managed to write a couple of short stories based around the idea that billionaires don’t really enjoy their wealth; what they really enjoy is other people having nothing.
Once you can buy everything you could possibly want, bigger numbers are just a way to keep score.
If this was the moral of this (real life) story, why did the head honcho try to save everyone at his own expense, while the lower decks abandoned ship as soon as they had no one to look down at?
Usually middle management is the true source of misery in every larger organization, kissing up and kicking down.
Long before my Apple days I was General Manager ANZ for what was then a very large multinational and at that time the largest employer in the UK after the government.
The Warehouse staff came to me with the belief they may have been underpaid for some time, concerns they had raised with my predecessor. (who was still with the company but had been moved ‘sideways’ for performance.( Later moved out the door.))
Seemed he was exactly that sort of person. If it didn’t directly benefit him, he wasn’t interested. I sorted it within a week, had their backpay entitlements paid.
Didn’t make me popular with Lord W*****ock as it temporarily upset his ‘7 ratios’, but got me a totally loyal team that helped make us the first ISO certified distribution warehouse in ANZ.
When I left, they gave me a framed ‘reference’ complete with all the questions normally asked when one requested by headhunters. Under ‘any shortcomings’ they put, ‘doesn’t suck up to Head Office enough’. Was pride of place in my office for some years.
Sounds like GEC. 
what a small world we live in… hmm…
It does sound very much like GEC! 
Smaller by the day.
Reminds me of sailing the yacht (bareboat charter) into Pserimos in Greece during a storm to wait out a few hours before pushing on to Kos. Sat down in the cafe to be served by a guy from Adelaide visiting family
Maybe the fella didn’t really see it as “at his own expense”; money for the sake of it didn’t seem to drive him. As for the salesmen, if your self-worth is based on the number of people you can look down on — well, that’s very much a “you” problem.
That’s why I asked. I was wondering how this positive story inspired you to
Genuine question. If I read an uplifting report about a captain who put his life on the line to rescue every single passenger, while some crew members abandoned ship first… Writing several stories based on the idea that captains don’t really enjoy being captains, just looking down at everyone else on the ship not being captain, seems unusual. (Although I suspect that most readers are more interested in catastrophic outcomes.)
Arguing with a writer about their own sources of inspiration isn’t as useful as you seem to think.
I mean, what are they supposed to say. “No, you’re right, I was wrong, that story I thought was inspirational really wasn’t?”
I don’t know, hence the question mark. Maybe the answer is “… and that made me think of other top dogs that don’t act like that”. Who am I supposed to ask other than the author?