And people over in dw_news are *still* complaining about what they've lost....

[conuly]

Isn't there a parable about this? Something about how the laborer is worthy of his hire?

A guy wanting to bring in his harvest hired people in the morning to help him, but when he saw he didn't have enough people he went back in the afternoon to hire more people to help him, and when that still wasn't enough he went back a few hours later for still more people - and then paid everybody the same flat wage, right?

And Jesus' response was pretty much "Yeah, it's unfair, suck it up", right?

Something like that*.

Of course, Jesus wasn't talking about LiveJournal, I think he was talking about Heaven, but the point still remains. If you buy a t-shirt for $25, and the very next day it goes on sale for $5, yeah, that sucks, but you're not going to whine that the store cheated you.

Well, probably. I may be overestimating the sense of the average LiveJournal user here. This isn't even the same thing! It's like if the store started selling cheap knock-offs for $5.

*_{Corrections to my version of events are more than welcome}

Comments

[pne.livejournal.com]

Isn't there a parable about this?

Yep. Called the "parable of the labourers in the vineyard" (among other things, no doubt).

Something like that*.

Pretty close (though not so much with the "it's unfair, suck it up" comment -- more like "You agreed that a penny a day was a fair wage, didn't you? Well, you got a penny. Why do you care what anyone else got?", perhaps with the implication "if you thought that was too little, you could have negotiated something else" but more likely "if you thought that was fair wage then, what made you change your mind?"). Here's the appropriate passage (using the KJV translation) (http://scriptures.lds.org/matt/20/1-16#1).

And I have heard that applied to happenings in news -- several times; I remember the argument being made when the number of userpics for paid accounts was increased (from 15 to 30, IIRC), and people with add-on userpic space claimed they had paid for the privilege of having "85 more pictures than normal". Which they hadn't; they had paid for the privilege of having 100 userpics, which they still had.

I also thought of that during a discussion in Slashdot about how VMWare was starting to give away one of their products for free, and somebody complained about how he had bought it for several hundred dollars not long ago. And it was pointed out to him that he had obviously considered it worth the money or he wouldn't have spent it, and he still has his money's worth; just because it's now cheaper doesn't mean that the worth of the program he already has went down or something. Err. Not sure whether that paragraph made sense; I knew what I was thinking while I read the /. discussion, though.

At any rate. Yes. Paid and permanent accounts still all have at least all the privileges they had when you paid for/bought the account, so in that sense, nothing was taken away from you.

(Unless you consider that what you paid for was some kind of exclusivity, or that you paid for "having function X which nobody else has", rather than the advertised "having function X".)

[conuly]

Oh, thanks. Maybe "it's unfair, suck it up" is the moral of Prodigal Son?

[pne.livejournal.com]

TBH I'm not quite sure what the moral of the Prodigal Son is supposed to be.

The father's answer to the "good" son must have sounded like "it's unfair, suck it up" to him, though.

[leora.livejournal.com]

This was discussed in my journal too - with parable in comments. *G*

I personally feel that people need to spend less time comparing themselves to others.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Isn't there a parable about this?

Yep. Called the "parable of the labourers in the vineyard" (among other things, no doubt).

Something like that*.

Pretty close (though not so much with the "it's unfair, suck it up" comment -- more like "You agreed that a penny a day was a fair wage, didn't you? Well, you got a penny. Why do you care what anyone else got?", perhaps with the implication "if you thought that was too little, you could have negotiated something else" but more likely "if you thought that was fair wage then, what made you change your mind?"). Here's the appropriate passage (using the KJV translation) (http://scriptures.lds.org/matt/20/1-16#1).

And I have heard that applied to happenings in news -- several times; I remember the argument being made when the number of userpics for paid accounts was increased (from 15 to 30, IIRC), and people with add-on userpic space claimed they had paid for the privilege of having "85 more pictures than normal". Which they hadn't; they had paid for the privilege of having 100 userpics, which they still had.

I also thought of that during a discussion in Slashdot about how VMWare was starting to give away one of their products for free, and somebody complained about how he had bought it for several hundred dollars not long ago. And it was pointed out to him that he had obviously considered it worth the money or he wouldn't have spent it, and he still has his money's worth; just because it's now cheaper doesn't mean that the worth of the program he already has went down or something. Err. Not sure whether that paragraph made sense; I knew what I was thinking while I read the /. discussion, though.

At any rate. Yes. Paid and permanent accounts still all have at least all the privileges they had when you paid for/bought the account, so in that sense, nothing was taken away from you.

(Unless you consider that what you paid for was some kind of exclusivity, or that you paid for "having function X which nobody else has", rather than the advertised "having function X".)

[conuly]

Oh, thanks. Maybe "it's unfair, suck it up" is the moral of Prodigal Son?

[pne.livejournal.com]

TBH I'm not quite sure what the moral of the Prodigal Son is supposed to be.

The father's answer to the "good" son must have sounded like "it's unfair, suck it up" to him, though.

[leora.livejournal.com]

This was discussed in my journal too - with parable in comments. *G*

I personally feel that people need to spend less time comparing themselves to others.