By that logic, any policy that assigns a fixed price to a good or service penalizes the poor. Which is true but is just a roundabout way of saying that poverty penalizes the poor.
Roads and signaling infrastructure are an expensive public good whose value is enjoyed unevenly. Attaching usage fees to public goods is never popular but makes sense when they are not limitless.
Yes it is. For example a $100 parking ticket for someone surviving on minimum wage will wreck their finances for months (if they're lucky) but a rich person will take it like just a meaningless fee to park.
Nope, that’s not true. You had monks copying books of course (mostly bibles), and very rich people could afford very expensive books made by scribes, but students at universities were expected to make their own copy during a reading/lecture run by a reader/professor. The words are still used in some older universities.
I was a medievalist before moving into tech, and I was always taught that students usually could not afford parchment on which to take notes, much less to copy down every word read out to them. Please cite a source for this claim.
Also, people bought books to read them outside of the context of universities.
Most students couldn’t afford books. Here is one ref, which revisits pre-printing press university education in a piece about the last step people complained about (the internet)
> Before the printing press, faculty had to assume that none of their students had books. This led to a widely adopted practice known as dictation, in which faculty slowly read out the text for students so that they could make their own handwritten copies. (This was, of course, not the only mode of instruction. But it was a common one.) Blair writes that dictation was widely believed to have pedagogical merit, as “the act of copying out a text was often considered an essential part of mastering it” (p. 46). She provides a wide range of support for this view, going all the way back to Demosthenes and St. Jerome. However, others argued that dictation hurt student learning as the focus on writing distracted students from paying closer attention to the faculty themselves. (Presumably no one likes to stand in front of an audience and have them all looking down at their phones parchment the entire time.)
> You may be unsurprised to learn that there is a strong economic undercurrent to the conversation about dictation, and that it often pit students against faculty and others. Blair notes that students saw it as “a cheaper way of procuring oneself a classroom text” (p.45). Consequently, a ban on dictations by Arts Faculty at the University of Paris in 1355 “anticipated vehement student resistance to the ban.”
I still use Android but have replaced most Google apps with a 3P alternative that works better for me.
Google search has felt useless to me for years, and AI results have made it worse. I use DDG for stuff like finding a business's website, but anything more complex will generally send me to a specialized engine. I've been meaning to try Kagi but haven't gotten around to it yet
My org has a bot that generates AI summaries of all internal pull requests, and it's honestly been pretty helpful to compare that (a fairly accurate guess of what the PR will do) against the PR author's description (a statement of what the PR is meant to do). The main thing I look for in PRs is an alignment of intentions and actions, so the AI summary helps, especially for large PRs.
Of course, some engineers have stopped writing PR descriptions since the bot will do it for them. But that means that the only people who can effectively review that PR are the ones who already know what it's supposed to do, which is generally a small pool.
This has been a pattern I've seen repeated with workplace AI: they make something hard a little bit easier, but in a way that will the underlying problem worse over time.
Libraries purchase the copies they loan out. In the US, libraries can typically only loan out an ebook a fixed number of times, and in other jurisdictions (like the UK), authors are paid per check out.
Please check out a book from a library instead of pirating it; it's much better for the author and your community!
It's just SUCH AN ARTIFICIALLY STUPID process, basically actively engineering the technology to work worse than "by default." As in, it's literally more difficult to do this lending thing than to just dump the books on the device and have them all there forever with their essentially infinite storage space.
> it's literally more difficult to do this lending thing than to just dump the books on the device and have them all there forever with their essentially infinite storage space
True, but you could say the same of music streaming platforms, but we're still experimenting with ways to make that work. In both cases, the platform is trying to replicate via policy what was previously an inherent limitation of physical media, and different offerings have made competing choices about what limitations are critical to the business model and which can be let go of.
I personally see a lot more promise in the model where libraries use a policy to enforce a loan period but pay per-checkout royalties instead of trying to recreate wear and tear like Libby/OverDrive does. It makes it more feasible for small libraries to have an "infinite catalog" of ebooks, and authors seem to like it better: https://bsky.app/profile/premeemohamed.com/post/3liafq4gsoc2...
That's not true. Just like in every other time, many authors rely on multiple income streams, but book sales are an important part of that. Amazon would love for your assertion to be true, but we're not there yet.
Also true of smut! Chuck Tingle recently signed with Tor, but I believe all of his earlier books (including classics like Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt) are Kindle-only. Same for niche favorites like C.M. Nascosta
For books from small and specialty presses, I like to buy the ebook from the publisher because they'll often sell you a copy without DRM. Mind you, this has been true for tech presses and small companies but not for university presses and imprints attached to big publishing houses.
Humble Bundles (if you get lucky and find a good one) are also usually just DRM-free files in a zip archive. I've seen more sci-fi bundles lately (e.g., they had bundles of the complete works of John Scalzi, V.E. Schwab, and Ursula K LeGuin last year), and I think they usually have some anime bundle on offer.
Kobo is also a pretty complete bookstore, and they tend to match a lot of the "1.99 ebook today only!" sales that Amazon runs. I do most of my reading on one of their devices becaus you can sync PDFs/ePubs (via a USB cable or Dropbox) and log in directly to Pocket (for web pages) and OverDrive (for library books).
I saw Bookshop.org also sells ebooks, but their marketing copy ("read right in your web browser, or download our iPhone or Android apps for the full reading experience") makes it sound like they built a closed platform and don't sell files.
The filtering of blocked replies is done server-side. You can view whatever top-level posts you want in the protocol; making those visible/invisible is up to the client software.
If I post something that gets traction, and someone replies with an ad for ED pills, I should be able to remove that spam from the discussion on my thread and not just from my view of it. If others have already "engaged" with a plug for boner pills, their replies are not lost but are just no longer part of the thread stemming from my post.
If you as the OP don't want this behavior, there are other tools at your disposal (mute the replier instead, "hide for everyone", etc).
- Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesch -- really phenomenal pacing and psychological terror in a sci-fi action novel.
- The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach -- good portrait of different strains of American Judaism in a book structured around a quest
- Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters -- great characters and structured revelation. This was sitting unread on my shelf for years because I thought it would be preachy, but it wasn't.
- The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman -- tales from Camelot in the aftermath of Arthur's defeat at Camlann. Excellent mixing of round table legends from different points in history.
Roads and signaling infrastructure are an expensive public good whose value is enjoyed unevenly. Attaching usage fees to public goods is never popular but makes sense when they are not limitless.