> Frank Herbert wrote something that is particularly prescient.
Curiously enough the Dune books are a strong rebuke against prescience (read: humanity coveting precog abilities.) I'll leave it at that to avoid spoilering.
It’s funny: a loved one gifted me a book knowing I’m opposed to Amazon’s practices. They let me know they bought it elsewhere and the act of paying more was part of the gift’s charm (they’ll use Amazon otherwise.)
You can buy used books, they sell extremely cheap and are perfectly readable. There is a lot of seller, at least in France, but I guess it must be similar in usa.
Books are staggeringly affordable (aside from hardback), and if even they seem too expensive, libraries exist and offer ebooks. I would honestly be embarrassed to announce this – it reveals something very unflattering.
Staggeringly affordable? Last time I checked ebooks were roughly the same price as physical books. That's ridiculous. If they were like 20% of the price I'd buy them.
I don't care man. It doesn't matter to the world whether I spend money on books or not. It only matters to me. Or I guess it's more correct to say it matters much more to me than to the rest of the world.
So yeah, I'm not worried about it. I don't tip either, by the way, unless I see a very good reason to. Given the choice, I prefer to keep my money rather than give it away. Couldn't care less what you or anyone else thinks about it.
Sure, ebooks could be cheaper, but they’re still cheap as hell. $5-10 for what, ten hours of entertainment? A fraction of what you pay to dine out. I mean, you can be as cheap as you like, but this thread exists because you’re promoting your cheapness tactics for others to emulate, which, at scale, actively harms the very things you are enjoying. You can be cheap! It’s just parasitical, which is why I suggested it was a shameful thing to announce.
I looked up the price for Project Hail Mary which I read recently, it's like $20 and the physical book is the same price. Think about that. Imagine all the work involved in producing and transporting the physical book, compared to just infinitely copying a single epub file that's probably generated automatically from a word document or whatever they use to write books. The fact that those are the same price is outrageous. It's completely unreasonable.
I wouldn't say I'm cheap, I'd say I'm frugal. I'll happily spend money on things, just not when I don't need to. And especially not when it's completely unreasonable like ebook prices. I can get it for free so I'll take that deal. You can say it's parasitical, I guess I don't disagree with that. Personally I think there's a lot bigger fish to fry in that department like insanely rich people who hardly pay any taxes, but sure I'm slightly parasitical in some minor and insignificant(to everyone except me) ways.
I also don't really think it matters that much. Most authors don't make enough money to live off it. The ones who do, make a fortune. I generally read books written by those lucky few who make a fortune, and I don't feel the slightest bit guilty about not paying money to Andy Weir, who's worth about $55 million according to a quick Google search. He'll be fine. And all the middle men like Amazon and publishers etc can pound sand as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah, I mean millionaire authors are one thing, but saying "Most authors don't make enough money to live on, so I'm not going to pay them for their work" is a bit absurd.
That's not what I said. I said I don't read their work. Maybe I do some times, but it's not often and I seriously doubt the $2 or whatever they end up getting after everyone else has their cut makes any difference to them.
Oh yeah because I definitely want to be giving money to entitled shits who'll spit in my food. That makes all the sense. Tipping happens after anyway.
And for the record I'm not American, we don't have the insane tipping culture you guys do. I know you're American because only an American would say what you just did.
I'm not American, but I assumed you were American because you were defiantly declaring that you don't tip, whereas in Europe (for example) it would not be worthy of comment :P
Guess we both assumed.
Also, you're right that the tip comes after, so not tipping is safe... until you go to the same restaurant twice (in America).
No, I don't mind giving physical books as gifts to people who want them. In fact I don't mind physical books at all.
I just prefer ebooks because an ebook reader is 100 times better. It has backlight so I can read in the dark, it's compact so I can put it in my pocket, it's light and ergonomic so I can easily hold it and flip pages in one hand, and it can fit literally a whole library worth of books in my pocket. It's not even a competition, as far as I'm concerned physical books are furniture at this point.
> Sometimes you have regulation, but you don't have enforcement of the regulations.
Indeed. Let us quote the Dune books (since they're trending, and for good reason!):
"Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.-Law and Governance (The Spacing Guild)"
And if you would let me indulge one more:
"Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class: whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
-Politics as Repeat Phenomenon (Bene Gesserit Training Manual)"
Recently got a bank account which allowed my custom domain during registration, but rejected it as invalid during login. The problem? Their JS client code has a bad regex rejecting TLDs longer than 4 chars (trivial for a dev to bypass, but wow.)
Have you heard of Emby? It seems to be closed-source. However you can still run it yourself [0]. UX appears to be better than Jellyfin, but I haven't tried either and not sure which one to go for.
At the lower or easier end, there’s your standard containerisation tools like Docker Compose or the Podman equivalents. Just move your compose files and zip the mount folders and you can move stuff easily enough.
Middle ground you’ve got stuff like Ansible for if you want to install things without containers, but still want it to be scripted. I don’t use these much since they feel like the worst of both worlds.
Higher end in terms of effort is using something like NixOS, where you get basically Terraform for everything in your distro.
Something new to grapple with though is that (in the US) we have the most extremely online White House in history. Our highest ranking officials, with their departments, are on social media day in and day out, and make decisions motivated by it.
Curiously enough the Dune books are a strong rebuke against prescience (read: humanity coveting precog abilities.) I'll leave it at that to avoid spoilering.
Keep an eye on the next movie this year!
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