While the author makes good points about the relative affordability of Berlin, one does have to wonder what the general plan for newsletter profitability is.
Hey! I'm the author! This is pretty cool to be number one on Hacker News. The idea behind the newsletter is to build a brand which makes liberal metropolitans comfortable with hearing viewpoints outside their own. Then I can monetise it! :)
No offence intended as I enjoyed reading your article and it wasn't really about your business, but if a liberal metropolitan wanted to experience viewpoints outside their own, couldn't they just browse to dailymail.co.uk? It's free and monetised already.
If the idea is something more highbrow, again, surely they could just subscribe to the Telegraph? Or watch Fox News?
Or heck, just use reddit? Lots of different viewpoints there.
Providing people with news that violates their own political biases and then getting them to pay for it seems very difficult. The more open minded ones who are willing to pay for views different to their own have lots of places they can seek out such views already.
I would say that my target market aren't really familiar with twitter - let alone Reddit. Also it's just a time thing - I spend about 15 - 20 hours researching each newsletter.