This may vary by country, it isn't a subject I'm particularly familiar with, but at least in the UK that isn't true - many, I think most, life insurance policies here do pay out for suicide. There's just a period of years between the start of the policy and when suicide starts to be covered, to prevent people who are planning on killing themselves from being able to take out insurance just before doing so.
I'm not very familiar with anti-cartel laws (in any country), but I wonder if there would be legal issues preventing publishing companies from working together in such a way even if they otherwise had wanted to?
(Though even if that is the case, I'd still think they could have at least agreed on open standards to use, to prevent anyone like Amazon from creating vendor lock-in.)
But Amazon had advantages from its size. In terms of economies of scale for device manufacturing, publishers could have somewhat caught up if they pooled money to invest in a co-owned company that made devices (though still wouldn't have had such an advantage as Amazon, who could share R&D and production costs with any overlaps to other devices such as smart home speakers, Android tablets, etc.) But Amazon was also able to take a bigger picture approach, using cheap Kindles/ebooks to attract people into their ecosystem and then converting a not-insignificant amount of them to buying other stuff on Amazon.
Collaboration need not be subversive. In fact, it can be the opposite. As you point to, by using open standards.
Devices are not a real problem. You don’t need scale to get hold of affordable readers in bulk. There’s lots of them available and if the market were to grow, there would be even more devices. Today these devices are not very useful as putting content on them is awkward and fragmented. If that pain went away, there would be a huge market.
I think the problem is that Amazon would retaliate. And the publishing industry are too afraid of challenging them. Because they have never been able to get their act together before.
> I'm not very familiar with anti-cartel laws (in any country), but I wonder if there would be legal issues preventing publishing companies from working together in such a way even if they otherwise had wanted to?
Then all syndication services would have been banned, including Spotify, Netflix, and so on.
There definitely are ways that publishers could have avoided falling foul of anti-Cartel legislation (my question was about where the line is, ie if they did it legally would it actually benefit them), but...
Spotify and Netflix aren't owned or created by a syndicate of all the major publishers, so that's not actually a counter point. There's a huge difference legally speaking between a company negotiating with lots of rights holders to offer customers all of their content in one place, vs. those rights holders co-creating that platform and running it themselves.
(Not that the distributor has to be owned by a cartel of the rights holders to still abuse their position illegally, eg https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/blog/e-book-retailers-d... - it's just that the cartel aspect is the bit I had been talking about.)
Have we really come to a point where the only business structures we can envision are huge monopolies playing zero-sum games?
Imagine if every publisher offered every book to every service that sells it to consumers? And are free to sell their own and other publishers books? They could even include Amazon. Yes, it would require DRM and a bit of software infrastructure, but guess what: they could choose to fund development of an open source system for managing this.
They can do this. But they won’t. They’d rather be beholden to Bezos and not even try.
I’ll repeat myself: they’d rather get collectively screwed than risk that a competitor might get a small advantage.
There have been quite a few punctuations proposed for indicating sarcasm, but interrobang not one of them - that (‽) is literally a combined ? and !, and is (per wikipedia) for "a question in an excited manner, expresses excitement, disbelief, or confusion in the form of a question, or asks a rhetorical question".
This page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation - has sarcasm ones (but I don't think any are as well known as the interrobang, which itself isn't exactly universally used... though personally I'm weird enough to have a keyboard shortcut to type it on my phone)
How do you know that is a “gut ecosystem collapse” as opposed to hypermotility? Or an overgrowth of the gut ecosystem? Or a problem with the intestinal lining?
Observing that if you eat/drink something specific then you get the shits is valid. Concluding that it is due to a specific mechanism is not valid unless you have something objective like a test supporting that.
It’s like if your train is late and you just conclude that it must be because the steam condenser’s gasket is leaking based on nothing. Maybe true, or maybe the conductor broke his leg, or there is a signaling failure.
If you drop an ACME 100Kg anvil on your foot, you get a broken foot, and you can conclude "this fucked me, I won't do it again". But if you say "I suffered foot ecosystem collapse" and people ask you what that means and how you identified it, whinging about how people should stop asking stupid questions because all bad things are bad therefore they must be the same thing, is not helping anyone.
With IBS-D every meal can result in a loose and unsatisfying stool output! Don't ask me how I know. GLP-1s actually make a hell of a difference for me.
In a similar vein to cobbzilla, I have a couple of family members (and to a lesser extent myself too) who would be keen on such an app for their iOS devices if you ever need some testers for that :)
(iPhones 15 Pro, 11 Pro, SE-2nd; and an iPad of some kind)
Personally I find the formatting used by the Gutenberg one to be a lot nicer/easier to read, despite (or perhaps because of) being simpler, more plain.
At least for the first few pages of content that I looked at on both versions.
Are you just sharing "this is something else on a TV program that amused me", or am I being dense in my failing to spot anything that's similar between the two situations?
Very much depends on the site - certainly there's plenty that are annoying in the way you describe, but there's also plenty (I wouldn't be surprised if either side were the majority) that will take you to the exact same content on the more local version of the site.
> "That feels likely everyone is failing at sleep, not just parents."
This doesn't really mean anything for comparing parents with non-parents, since it's self-reported so "failing" could mean "missing several hours of needed sleep each night" to one person and "failing to hit higher-than-needed sleep target twice a week" to another.
This may vary by country, it isn't a subject I'm particularly familiar with, but at least in the UK that isn't true - many, I think most, life insurance policies here do pay out for suicide. There's just a period of years between the start of the policy and when suicide starts to be covered, to prevent people who are planning on killing themselves from being able to take out insurance just before doing so.
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