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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • The part that isn’t mentioned in this article is the onus of marketing. Now that anyone can self publish with almost no overhead, more than a million books are published every year. How many of those even get noticed? Sometimes it feels like people see the same 10-20 books on the bestseller list (which is gameable btw) and think that’s all there is to read.

    These days, traditional publishers don’t do any marketing on behalf of authors unless they feel it’s a sure thing, similar to how they give out advances. If you are already famous or have large social media following, you’re far more likely to get an advance or a marketing effort. Everyone who self publishes, and even most who are traditionally published, have to do their own marketing. Most writers are not marketers, and this is where they fail, no matter how good their book might be.

    Personally, I think the big publishers will collapse soon and the whole industry might move to a subscription model ala Spotify. That would probably be worse for writers, but no one seems to be able to come up with a solution that makes book writing a more viable career.






  • If they know how many years they’ll hold the rights, that information should be given to the consumer, i.e., “you will have access to this media product for at least N years.” Then the consumer can make an informed decision (is $24.99 worth it to own a movie for 6 years? Etc). Otherwise it’s just a gamble. Everything else you can rent (cars, tools, equipment, venues, clothing, dumpsters) comes with very clear temporal terms. Imagine if rental car companies could remotely brick your rental car halfway through your vacation.


  • The earth is flat.

    If no one contradicts that statement or downvotes me or anything, someone might later come along and read it and believe it just because no one else disagreed. There are a lot of people who haven’t had a great education or don’t have critical thinking skills, or are actual children. When people just make claims with no discussion of the merit of those claims, how can the less educated figure out they’re not true? After all, if the host invited this hypothetical flat earther to be on their show, there must be something legit about them, right? They don’t just invite any rando person off the street onto their show, do they?




  • An enormous chunk of housing sits unused and empty because real estate speculators want to rent them out at exorbitant prices rather than use it for it’s intended purpose of having a roof over people’s heads.

    If they are renting it out at exorbitant prices, then it’s not empty. If it’s empty, then they get zero money. You’re saying it’s both, which makes no sense. Interest rates and property taxes are both high right now. It costs investors money to hold empty property without renting it out. They don’t have to wait for people to pay inflated prices. The demand is already there.

    I’m all for more regulation, especially for developers and investors. Stiupulate that at least 50% of all new housing built be affordable. Give incentives to rehab old condemned properties. And stop letting AI algorithms determine rental prices.





  • Don’t stand here and try to tell us it’s not a moral issue. It is. And people who refuse to learn anything are doing something wrong.

    I literally said it is a moral issue. And I get the importance of people changing. But you have to accept that you can’t control this. You can lead by example or you can try to educate people. If you really want to control people, become a dictator. Judging people doesn’t make the world a better place. OP said they don’t like religion, but this is exactly what religion does: it declares there’s one right way to live and judges anyone who dares to not live that way.


  • I think you’re mixing up intellectualism and morality. There are many reasons people choose not to eat meat, and some of those reasons are emotional or moral rather than intellectual. Some people only eat a vegan diet because their doctor told them they had to. Are those people somehow more intellectual than someone who researched the science and came to the conclusion that humans are omnivores?

    You have already judged the outcomes of people’s decisions as being objectively correct or incorrect. To you, eating meat is incorrect regardless of the reasons for doing so. That is not an intellectual stance, it is a moral one. You are ultimately judging people for having different values than you. Maybe they don’t care about the environment, maybe they don’t care about the safety of animals or other people. Like it or not, to care about those things is emotion. You can argue they’re wrong as much as you like, but you can’t prove that any human behavior is objectively “the right thing to do,” meaning you are not as objectively correct as you think you are. There isn’t a one-fits-all solution for how to live. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can stop judging others for not being like you.