bruce511

> Maybe publishers should JUST pay authors WELL, and get a book every 2-3 years

There are a couple problems with this approach.

Firstly, while the median income is 20k, the book business is like films or music; ie not evenly distributed. At the top end are a small number of successful authors. They effectively subsidize the publishing house while the house throws advances at authors hoping for the next big whale.

Many books never earn back their advance. Meaning if the author was paid out of royalties they'd make less, not more.

Making advances bigger would result in fewer advances. The pot of money is finite.

This is all happening in a market where supply is unconstrained (everyone thinks they can write), and demand is very limited.

And before we discuss the value, or lack thereof of having an intermediary at all, it should be noted from your link that the median for published authors is higher than self-published authors. So clearly they seem to be making authors more valuable.

In truth of course, most (published) books aren't terribly valuable. Like music and movies most float to the bottom.

So no, the answer is not "pay authors more".

I always find this line of thought interesting. Because it implies the manufacturer has all the power. But they don't. The consumer does.

Ultimately the manufacturer wins the horse-shoe battle because they are cheaper. And the consumers in the village prefer cheap shoes to locally made (expensive) ones.

Fundamentally consumers like cheap stuff. Manufacturing shifts happen because as soon as there's a cheaper output, you've won. Consumers will reliably switch to cheap. At the start there may be some brand loyalty, there may even be a quality difference, but both those erode quickly.

Lots of people promote the idea of buying locally, even if it's more expensive. But it's a hard message to sell, and a tough one to buy. I'm sorry for the blacksmith, but times are hard and I need my horses shod.

It's easy to blame capitalism or factory owners or foreign cheap labor or any other convenient political scapegoat. But the root of the problem is consumer preference for cheap (even if inferior) to the exclusion of everything else.

This is perhaps culturally most evident where the premise above is false. In the US for example food is low quality, but plentiful. In Europe food generally costs more, but is of a much higher standard. Portions are smaller. Quality is more important than quantity.

This is not by accident. Europe has deliberately fostered local food markets, local food production, and promoted a narrative around history and good production. Cheap food is available, but quality food has a strong foothold.

I think this is the key metric. Get people in the door.

Sure you can jack up prices on food and drink. Sure you can fleece the people who do come, but everyone who stops coming "because it's too expensive" is lost forever.

The alternative is to create a space people want to come to. Yes sell food & drink. Being "good value" helps that. Being expensive fights it.

While yes, the flashy electronics is cool, do people come for that? Does it make it more fun? I just saw the ball with my own two eyes. Does an animation make it better?

What brings in a family? Work colleagues? Teenagers on a date? What brings in more competitive folks? Is there progression? What makes my friend group go once a week? Why do housewives want to hang out there at 11am? How to catch the bored teenagers at 3pm in the afternoon?

It's not even just about bowling. Can you create a space people want to come to?

Oh I agree. The US is not doing the same thing as China at all.

China is spending its money developing manufacturing of goods the world wants. It has targeted markets and the govt is spending money in those markets. The markets they have chosen have huge economic and political value.

By contrast the US has chosen to spend its (govt) money on the military. Because, you know, national security.

The US is spending just as much money as China, but focused on different areas. Your complaint (if there is one) is that China chose different markets and didn't "play the game" (as the USSR did) and base their economy on flashy weapons.

Since the collapse of the USSR in 1990 its not clear to me why US spending on military continues to grow. It's not fear of attack; there is no threat to the US itself. It has to be a desire to project power and influence.

And yet the very limitations of that goal have been exposed in 18 months. The dismantling of USAid (or more accurately the manner of the dismantling) has destroyed 75 years of goodwill. Coupled with punitive tarifs (which are paid for by US consumers) they make the US an unreliable trade partner.

Then the war in Iran showed the very real limitations of the military. To be fair they're currently being lead by incompetence, with no clear goals or strategies. But it reinforces the point that all that military money is wasted when even simple conflicts are lost. And it further drives home the limits of that power projection in unpopular conflicts. A lesson, it would seem, the US wishes to re-learn all the time.

China it seems has different ambitions, and a very different strategy. And I get why you might not like that, because maybe (just maybe) their strategy is the smarter one in the long run.

I don't know what it's like in Scandinavia, but here, as an employer, I would see it as a positive. Something you can use as a differentiator when interviewing.

Recent graduates often underestimate what really matters to employers, Stability.

Obviously I'm not expecting people to necessarily stay 40 years in the company, but it costs a lot of time effort and money to add a new person to the team. I'd like you to hang around a bit to make that worth it.

Having children makes fathers less "flighty". You're less obsessed with "building a resume" and more interested in the stability of the paycheck, stress-free working environment and so on.

Yes, you'll still leave for a better job, more pay and so on. But it'll be more calculated and less impulsive. Which gives us more opportunity to match your needs with my needs.

In other words the maturity you learn at home translates into more maturity in the office as well.

When interviewing for jobs, lean into words like maturity, responsibility, stability and so on. These things matter.

I'm not sure I agree. In the aircraft industry especially the US has strongly pushed for exports. Overseas programs (TRS2, Avro Arrow) were terminated for political reasons (and replaced with F111 etc). More recently see F35 impact.

That's before we discuss the advantage Boeing has in the commercial market thanks to DoD contracts.

Your link shows that the US exports the same as the next 20 countries added together. That suggests some market dominance.

I also suspect these numbers do not include "military aid" - where weapons and munitions are "given" by the US to Ukraine wherever[1]. (But they may, I don't know.)

I agree though that the primary benefit of this is not "sales". And even if it was these aren't consumer goods. So it's not easily compared to China's approach. I'm not suggesting it's a terribly good subsidy. But it's still a subsidy.

[1] there are a lot of political benefits to be gained by having bases in foreign countries, or by port visits by US ships. Unfortunately most of those benefits have been eroded in the last 2 years. The gutting of USAid (which saved basically nothing), leaving the WHO, the tarrif nonsense, bombing Iran - all have destroyed a benevolent reputation 75 years in the making.

Arms, weapons, fighter jets and so on. The US sounds a trillion $ a year subsidizing the military industrial complex.

The US chose their market (arms). The Chinese chose consumer goods. Go figure.

I think "why" is a good question. And frankly for 99.9% of people the answer is "no reason".

One has to differentiate between "computers as a tool" and "creating computers".

I drive a car. It's good transport. If it breaks I take it to a mechanic. If I bash it I take it to a panel beater. I don't care about engine specs. It's a tool to do a job.

100 years ago if you owned a car you also had to be a mechanic. My father built his own car. Enthusiasts will wax lyrical for hours on engine upgrades.

In the same way, when I was young, the market for computers was basically the "creatives". There wasn't much software to buy. Most (PC) computers got built from parts. You could swap out each part at a time. You set IRQs manually. Good times.

But those products didn't suit the everyman. That only happens in the late 90s. Since then most users are "consumers" not creative.

The creatives still have lots of tools to learn (more than I did). But they will never be more than a tiny tiny fraction of the population.

There definitely were machines in (larger) businesses before the personal computers of the 80s, but the scales are different.

There were around 650 000 PDP machines produced. By contrast Commodore 64 made over 12.5 million. VIC 20 another 1.5. Zx Spectrum about 5 mil. Similar for the Apple 2. IBM pc made 7.5 million by 1987. BBC Micro another couple million.

And of course yes, these were the first "home" pcs. So as I said, before this time the machines were locked away and only used for "real work". PCs were "everywhere". We had a computer club (with 2, count them 2 machines).

Of course, compared to now they were rare. But my generation entered the work-force and spent the 90s "computerising" businesses. Not the giant corporates but the millions of regular businesses. I wrote software but it was common to have to supply hardware to go with the software.

It certainly was fun being around as an entire industry was birthed. It was very dynamic, things moved quickly, and there was a lot of "keeping up".

We saw it again with web, and then mobile, but they were less exciting in many respects.

There was this era in the late 70's and early 80's where this story is ubiquitous. And while we are all in our 50s or later now, it's interesting that we were essentially the "first generation".

When I went to work in the early 90s we were already the "old guys". Out in the real world everyone[1] who could use a computer at all was under 30. And we'd all cut our teeth on Apple 2's and Spectrum and Commodore and BBC and so on.

[1] yes there were folks from before that saw a PDP or whatever but they were rare, and usually either deep in academia or IBM etc.

Marketing is the hard part. Ideas are trivial. Code is easy (and now with AI trivial.)

Most humans do the easy part first. It's the most fun. Lots of people can play a guitar. Only a tiny fraction market enough to make any money.

If you want success (in anything) learn (and do) the hard part first. Every product idea starts with 3 basic questions;

A) who is this for?

B) how do I reach them. Prove it by getting 10 names, email addresses, and nominal deposits.

C) can my target market afford this? Poor people need private jet transport, but that market cannot afford that product.

Writing the code is the last thing you do, not the first.

Assuming of course your goal is to make money. I make ceramics for fun, not to sell. I get the joy of making and using my own pots. It's a hobby, not my day job. I'm not interested in marketing or selling them. And that's perfectly OK.

In SQLite the max int is 64 bit. So a rather large number (about 9 billion billion, aka 19 digits). That's a lot of rows to add.

I would suggest if you are storing that much data, SQLite may not be the correct engine. (And you probably shouldn't be using an Int primary key.)

It's a good question to ask, but probably not a concern for most of us.

I agree. In the long run some AI providers will be "greener" than others.

Once AI becomes a commodity this is the sort of thing that will become a differentiating factor when consumers choose one over the other.

Neither the power, nor cooling, requirements are necessarily environmentally harmful. As always ymmv.

First water; there are plenty of places on the planet where water is bountiful. If you site a data center well (say on a big lake in a rainfall area) then water is not an issue. An "using" water in this way doesn't affect water scarce areas.

Equally lots of electricity can be generated in environmentally harmless ways. Solar, wind, hydro are all clean. (Hydro depending on how and where.)

Yes, in the long run, it may make sense to put data centers outside the US. Norway for example has no problem cooling things down. And hydro is abundant.

Plus, water "consumption" is also variable. Water is used for cooling, but is not necessarily "lost". Its "used" in the sense of "made use of" but may also then be "used for something else".

Using this quirk allows for "hiding" data in the database. Because data after the nul is more-or-less invisible to generic dbBrowser type programs.

If you suspect it is happening you can read it (by casting the SELECT as a BLOB, but obviously that's not a common pattern.

Personally I've never done it, and clearly it's not something useful for security, but it does open the door to interesting meta-data storage opportunities. Again with the proviso that it is "untrustworthy".

> you delete an entity and it's unique ID gets reused? Is that a good idea?

That's default behavior, but it can be altered when creating a table. See;

https://sqlite.org/autoinc.html

Sure, a battery isn't available to everyone. But I is available for many.

One would have to do the math, cost of battery versus 24kw free daily. But clearly for lots of people the math will work.

A side effect of policies like this is effectively getting people to invest capital to time-shift elec usage. That's good policy. Reducing the peaks in consumption solves other problems.

Ahh, so the 30c rate is locked in for everyone? So they've basically price-shifted the elec so it follows production cost better?

Even if you're not home I'm thinking there are a number of ways to make use of the free elec. Hot water geyser seems like the obvious first candidate.

I'd also think heating (in winter), cooling in summer. Even if you're not there in those times, the effects will be evident for many hours after.

For those who have programmable washer/dryers or dishwashers it's also good. Even ovens on occasion.

I get that not everyone is best placed to take advantage of this, but equally improvements don't have to be an "everyone or no one" option.

Can you elaborate on the higher elec prices for the benefit of those of us not in Aus? Is that because of the smart meter requirement?

From the article; this applies to NSW, South Australia and part of Queensland.

So yeah, not universal yet. But the precedent means it's moving in that direction. If WA homes end up producing lots of solar at midday then this opens the door there as well.

Who decides who should be included or excluded from the statistics?

The govt? In this era of open hostility to institutions that won't toe the line? Who are looking for ways to punish what they don't like?

Or perhaps the college? If they decide then can they pick and choose who goes into what statistic? Does a drop-out (like say Bill Gates) get included or excluded?

Do we even accept the premise, that education's sole goal is higher salaries?

This whole rule is performative. It merely gives power to the powerful to exercise in whatever way they like.

> i think it's clear in retrospect that most of the interventions in the face of the pandemic were based on profit and scant science

Lock-downs weren't in the service of profit. The vast majority of businesses, big and small, were hurt (many fatally) by lock downs.

And yes, there was scant science involved. Almost all interventions were on a "best guess" basis. Govts around the world had to make very big decisions with no science at all. Anthropologists can dissect the data for decades to come. Govt response, but equally population responses will help guide future decision makers.

On the face of it, countries where lockdowns were adopted (by the population) typically had lower death rates, but that's somewhat anecdotal at this point.

Yes, vaccine development was hasty. Partly because very large studies were easy to setup. Yes some drug companies made profits. Yes unvaccinated people still died. Yes we dont know if the vaccines have generational level side effects.

All things considered I think we came out of it pretty well.

Indeed. Equally the person who has 4 Years experience in the workplace probably does better than a first year grad.

In other words, when trying to measure value outcomes, what time period should one consider?

And does the rule apply at the college level or the program level? If I churn out 100 people in my law school, can I average their prospects with 50 from my Archaeology degree? Or with 50 from my "music in movies" degree?

Lots of people will take any treatment offered. Indeed I would. That's a perfectly acceptable approach.

Yes, medical treatments are improving and hanging on is a good approach cause something may be around the corner.

I don't think the article is advocating for no treatment ever.

I think it is advocating for a balanced understanding of what treatment looks like, and balances that with quality of life. And indeed balances your age as well.

If I'm 80, I'm (somewhat) less concerned with length of life, and more concerned with quality. If I'm 50 that's a different equation.

It's very much a personal choice, but to make a choice you have to have information. And it's helpful if you can make the choice in a calm relaxed environment. Both can be missing immediately after hearing a diagnosis.

The point is that medical intervention is usually desired. But equally there's a place for acceptance and contentment.

It's much more complicated than that.

> If an undergraduate program's graduates don't earn more than workers who never went to college,

Lots of things affect earnings. Obviously education is one of them, but it's not the only one.

Location, economic environment, social status, personal network - all are factors. In other words comparing unequal things leads to unequal results.

For example, a first-generation college attendee gets a solid job working at a non-profit helping others. Someone else in the same town goes straight into Dad's profitable factory as a manager.

Of course those might be outliers. We can use statistics to smooth things. But equally we can use statistics to show anything we want.

Yes, there are lots of really crap colleges. There are colleges that specialize in nonsense degrees in useless subjects. (English Poetry you say? Hah. Poets never made any money...)

But equally there are lots of community colleges, taking in marginal students, giving them opportunities where others won't. Some, maybe most, of those students won't make it. But some will.

The effect of a rule like this is that colleges are forced to game the system. To exclude those who might fail. To reduce social mobility.

A cynic might even suggest this is the real goal of the rule to begin with.

Why does the US feel this way, while (it seems to me) most other places don't?

I've been traveling a bit lately, and (again, it seems to me) that the US is trapped by "exceptionalism". They are the self-proclaimed best at everything all the time. If that's the starting point, then improvement seems impossible.

I can only conclude that consumers are treated badly in the US simply because they want to be.

I don't mean to be flippant. I mean that it the US people (as a majority) vote against their own interest. A majority looked at a candidate who was an obvious grifter, who ran on a policy of gutting consumer protections, and said "I want that".

A majority looked at a man, obsessed with personal gain and transactional relationships, who constantly rewarded business over consumers and said "I want that."

The entire premise of the MAGA movement is to return to an era of limited company oversight, reduced voter franchise, poorer population. The very heart of it is taking a chainsaw to the state that grew around protecting people from robber barron's.

And this runs deeper than personality. More than half a nation, and all levels of govt, support a party that overtly supports business over consumers. They reduce taxes (for the rich), they bloat the deficit, they erode protections.

Therefore I think it is this way because deep down Americans want it this way. They are easily convinced that "both sides are the same" or "cutting taxes for rich people is good for less-rich people", or that "if you vote our way you'll be a billionaire like me".

Ultimately the US is the best at everything. To claim improvement is possible is, well, frankly Unamerican. To learn from anyone else is to suggest a weakness, when clearly there aren't any.

When in doubt, everyone suggesting that things can be better is obviously a communist. Because that's the only alternative to the status quo.

Came here to say the same. I use DNS-Challenge rather than HTTP-challenge, and that makes internal servers trivial.

You need a DNS provider which supports API calls (I use DNSimple) but the core is all very straightforward.

To prevent having to include DNSimple authentication on the client's internal server I have a small API server on the web which does the Acme work.

Naming is hard. The name needs to be long enough to make the variable meaningful, but not longer.

I have encountered a programmer (in the corporate space) who bought into the "longer name" concept, to the point where he started complaining that the compiler had a 128 char limit for variable names.

For example instead of a variable called say "tax" he'd use something like "CustomerSalesTax". That was mostly bearable, but the context (and the fact it was the only tax field) made the extra description redundant.

That habit expanded though. Until he had names 50+ characters long. By then the code is illegible. Especially when the difference in variable names is minor. As in

TotalDepreciationAnnualisedInterimTaxValue versus TotalDepreciationAnnualisedInterimBookValue

So yeah, descriptive names good. Verbose names bad.

Well done for doing some market research before rushing off to code. This is far more sensible than coding first and wondering later.

To answer your question, no. I read a lot and frankly I've never wanted to discuss anything with an author. My relationship is with the characters in the book, not the author.

For non-fiction books there is so much information online that if I want to dig deeper I'll just Google or Chat it.

I've written two text books myself - very (very) niche books that sold in the hundreds of copies. (So very small). I've never had a reader reach out to discuss anything.

Yes, I expect there are people out there who want to correspond with authors. But I suspect a large fraction of them aren't "curious" but more want to demonstrate competence or whatever. I doubt an AI would satisfy them.

Yes, I think there is a market (however thin) for this, but reaching that market will be close to impossible. I would suggest either building this knowing you'd be the only user, or abandoning the idea.

The reason I think it is hard in the US is because there is a very strong "work or die" ethic in the US. Everything is driven by money. Even basic things like healthcare are driven by money. Your life after retirement is determined by how much money you accumulated. The word-association between "poor" and "lazy" is strong. Taxation should be light. Each man should keep what he accumulates.

BI by contrast values people over money. It recognises not just the social responsibility of the rich to the poor, but also the dignity of being human.

Some countries are further along that path than others. Health care, education, unemployment benefits, are all steps towards BI. The wealthy are taxed to pay for the poor. Ultimately the suppresses the excess, while raising the floor.

From a cultural point of view, the US has many steps to take before society is really for (real) BI.