• 10 Posts
  • 845 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • That’s the thing that the person in the made up story doesn’t understand:

    Even the majority of “made in america” products are actually “assembled in america”. Just like the majority of “chinese knockoffs” are after hours runs at the same factories that make the real thing. Sometimes crappier and sometimes actually better because they sourced better materials from a different factory.

    And… that is why we are so fucked. Because there will be the “Well, product A costs more because of tariffs so product B can sell for more too”. But also? Product B’s profit margins will go down because they are paying for tariffs too. Which gets passed on to the consumer.





  • And Kindle supports mobi files? It is just that those tend to get preprocessed into azw or the other one files. Much like Kobo tends to work best if you preprocess those epubs into kepubs.

    The issue is that Amazon has repeatedly changed their mobi variants to fight against de-drm tools as well as increasingly locking down their apps and even devices to make it harder to get data off (and now on) to them.

    There is absolutely nothing stopping Rakuten from doing the exact same with Kobo. And people should be aware of that rather than just stanning their favorite company.


  • Profitability as reported by companies, especially tech companies, is complex. Also understand that most of that 20 years (assuming that is an accurate statement) was the era of venture capitalism and infinite funding.

    But yes. Amazon did spend decades inventing and taking over e-commerce.

    But that is not what you described. You described a “bait and switch” which implies that they designed the old keyboard kindles with built in wikipedia support as some long con to get around the eventual invention of a de-drm plugin for the eventually invented Calibre library manager.

    The reality is that this is just a case of locking down walled gardens to take advantage of market share. Everyone is doing it. It isn’t some deep conspiracy and is more just the logical end result of a walled garden with large market share.


  • The “original sale” in that case is not even pennies. So… not sure why amazon would care?

    Also: Many smaller authors basically depend on kindle because of the ease of use of the web portal and incentives to do larger discounts for their audiences. One of my favorite guilty pleasures has talked about exactly this (although he IS investigating alternatives).

    And, much like with video games: The Sandersons of the world will be pirated. MAYBE a Dalglish will be too. But nobody cares enough to go after a Samphire or Shel.



  • I recommend actually listening to some authors.

    The “gatekeeping” back in the days before ebooks was infinitely worse than it is now. These days? Basically anyone who can fill out a webform can publish a kindle book. And other stores aren’t much harder. And those ebooks can be sold indefinitely.

    Contrast that with needing to find a publisher who is willing to allocate some of their limited production time to you. And then hope that Borders et al are willing to put you on the shelf. And then realize that you are never getting another penny for that book because the first MMPB run ran out and you aren’t getting a second because you didn’t sell enough to justify it.



  • Andrew Rea is a special kind of asshole (gotta love how he uses his own, probably legit, stories of struggles with mental health to sell fucking Better Help of all things).

    But recipes and paywalls have always been a mess. Cookbooks were, and still are, a thing. And the time and cost it takes to develop a recipe is REALLY high. Brian Lagerstrom has talked about this on and off and half joked about how many lasagnas and cakes he and his partner have eaten to get a 15 minute youtube video up. And then someone else just steals that verbatim without any credit at all. So a lot of “recipe creators” are looking at methods to make sure they at least break even on their IP.

    And Rea is very aware of this. Partially because he has a long history of using the exact same techniques that Kenji et al do without any accreditation (Alvin is REALLY good about saying where he got an idea though) and partially because he is pretty good friends with some of the most notorious recipe thiefs out there.

    But yeah. If they had done a “going forward, all recipes are paywalled” I would not be too bothered. But he retroactively paywalled all his old recipes. Which sucks because many videos outright contained errors that weren’t in the text recipes because he screwed up the narration.

    But also? The good news is that you can generally just google a few of the ingredients of a given recipe and get the “real” name of it and five different versions.





  • Yeah…

    Spend some time in the “I hate reddit and am glad I am never going back but do you think reddit still thinks about me and hey, can I take a picture of your penis and send it to show reddit that my new boyfriend is massive?” communities. LOTS of the folk around here have those “I was banned for absolutely nothing” mentalities.

    And it shows with how fast people are to “clown on” folk with just blatant insults.

    Those folk aren’t at all exclusive to hexbear.


  • Lemmy, in general, is left leaning with the lead dev and “main” instance being unabashedly tankies.

    Hexbear is the big instance of people who are so fucked they tend to get banned even from there. The ml crowd is generally still worth talking to. Whereas the hexbear crowd immediately jump to harassment the moment they decide you failed a purity test because you advocated for a social program rather than insisting the entire system needs to be burned down and a managed economy run by putin put in its place.

    Needless to say: Anyone who spends enough time “on lemmy” is either on an instance that banned hexbear or muted them themselves.