non-entity is right, we do not exist in a free market, due to government intervention through regulations.
It's not simply 'some' businesses that are forced to shut down, it's non-essential businesses where the majority of the work cannot be done from home.
It is true that 'some' businesses are still operating, but this has more to do with the industry sector they've chosen to operate in, or lack of physical constraints (if non-essential), than policy based on favoritism or even arbitrariness.
There are always 'privileged elites' benefiting from contemporary market conditions within a capitalist economy. You would have to count a lot of small business owners who work hard in essential industries as privileged elites to justify your statement, which, obviously most small business owners are not elites on this planet.
> would you all be prepared to give up 100% of your wages and live in a communist society until the lockdown has been lifted?
No.
Are you aware of the magnitude of the additional money, resources, and genuine force it would cost to convert our entire society to anything resembling 'Marxism'? There is theory out there that a highly developed and mature capitalist system can gradually ease into socialism, but that if the conversion is attempted before the system is ready, there will absolutely be bloody revolution. In your scenario, how will the government force every individual and business to give all of their profits up? By force, presumably.
As an aside, there are many conceivable 'flavors' of socialism, each with their own themes and attributes. Most of them do not need to be filed under 'Marx'.
We must be careful when comparing tangible goods (like food) to intangible goods (like a browser app).
Food has an element of genuine scarcity. This scarcity is what causes food to have economic character. If there is more demand than supply, this state of things triggers investment into the production of more food to satisfy the demand some time in the future, ultimately affecting prices. Prices will rise in the short-run, but decrease in the long-run (if the demand can be met, and then some). If food was not scarce, it would not be an economic good, and it would not be subject to supply and demand.
Software, on the other hand, is intangible. It can be duplicated and distributed, essentially for free, and more or less forever. Even if you have a paid plan this does not create scarcity. We shouldn't think of software the same as we think of food in terms of economics.
What is the theoretical limit to how many paying customers would be so many, that it impacts the ability of new customers to install, pay for, and use your app? Practically, this question is insignificant, that's one of the reasons software is interesting.
The simplest answer to why 40 - 50 people discover your software per day, is that whatever marketing channels you have utilized (or not) up to this point in your apps's lifetime expose you to 40 - 50 users per day who have a direct need that they think your product may solve.
The second element to this is that there are a lot of people in the world. As others have pointed out, they don't all have the same information. You are capturing a fraction of the total number of people out there looking for a solution to this specific problem, who are influenced by, or aware of, at least one of the marketing channels that influence your app.
If the problem your app solves became a non-issue overnight (for everyone), then you would see that number start to decline over time or go away instantly.
What's more likely to change the situation (temporarily or permanently) is that something changes (positive or negative) with those marketing channels, either influenced by you, or by whatever entities or forces control those channels.
I worked as a PeopleSoft developer in college. It's a competitor to SAP. Working with esoteric software taught me how to properly read documents with hundreds of pages. It also showed me how to get by in a less than ideal circumstances.
I am a bit of a maverick in that sort of environment, though. I wrote a JSON encoder [1] to ship PeopleCode objects to the browser via these webscript endpoints you could make in order to use modern web technologies. PeopleSoft actually moved in that exact same direction years later with better JSON support, 'FluidUI', and better html5/javascript support.
ERP systems are hell to work with. It was fun, but ultimately I was glad to get back to the real world. I got back to my main interest C#, but then went fully into the Clojure world :).
Cult is the right word for it. I went to a meeting once, met the leader, and it was fascinating. I caught every bit of the psychological warfare in play.
Shortly after, I realized an important fact about MLMs, or at least Amway:
They encourage members to work harder at their real jobs (their plan A) in order to finance what they call the member's plan B (independent business, early retirement, wealth, etc). This results in a siphoning of capital from the legitimate economy to the pyramid organization, producing mind numbing amounts of physical waste in the process.
What's missing from most pyramid scheme diagrams, including the one in this article, are the arrows pointing from the legitimate economy (value adding corporations that the members work for as well) through the member, and then up the pyramid to the top.
Viewed through this lens, it's obvious that MLMs function as parasites, like a tick on a cow.
> producing mind numbing amounts of physical waste in the process.
It's hard not to see bitcoin like this, with the huge energy waste and the newly brought in funds from ad-hoc meme advertising on social media going to early investors.
>My understanding is that these services are paid for by ads but I've had an ad blocker most of that time.
Google makes money by collecting behavioral data generated by its users, which it then uses in the form of raw materials to create products for its actual paying customers: advertisers.
Whether you're using an ad-blocker or not, you're still contributing to the advertising machine by using its products, you can't stop Google from crunching your personal behavioral data on their platform.
I have no interest in Brave and I still use Google products (for now), I just wanted to point out that what's really happening is a bit more sophisticated than you may think.
Either way, indirectly or not, Google makes money from people looking at ads. What would happen to "advertisers" if everyone blocked ads? Would the whole industry collapse? It's hard for me to see how that wouldn't affect Google.
I didn't say it wouldn't affect google. If everyone who uses the internet suddenly realized the joy of ad free browsing, then that would be something of a paradigm shift in my opinion.
Like a-saleh says, about 'building your case', you want to position yourself such that it's undeniable you are producing more value with your time. Point out that there has plainly been a shift in the value of your time for the organization.
