herewegoagain2

True overall the price is probably not that significant. I appear to have bought about 250 ebooks for my Kindle over several years. So even if I had saved 2€ for every one of them (which would be a lot), it probably wouldn't really warrant a lot of effort.

I've decided to get rid of Amazon, and ebooks are one of the difficult issues.

Are there no independent sites like goodreads or LibraryThing left? I don't really need the tracking, but the discovery.

Also I have found that actually ebooks are sometimes cheaper on other places than Amazon, so a price comprison would be good. It could be integrated into a site like LibraryThings- LibraryThing already has it to some extent, but doesn't seem to include most vendors in my country (Germany).

Also there were other reasons why I didn't want to use LibraryThing anymore, which I have forgotten. I just remember that I didn't want to use it anymore some years ago.

Extracting gold is very wasteful, I'm not sure it is better than Bitcoin in terms of environmental impact.

And Bitcoin is much more useful than gold. You can easily send Bitcoin to your family at the other end of the world. With gold, not so easy. Even buying and selling gold is much more difficult. Storing gold is also much more complicated, you can not encrypt gold, so you need physical protection.

In many cases it doesn't.

So you propose shutting down the internet to end Bitcoin?

Interesting idea, but how exactly would you validate the CO2 emissions? If somebody mines a block and claims it only consumed x of CO2, how do you know it is true?

What seems possible is to check what miners mined a block, and externally verify their footprint. But I don't think there is a decentralized way to do it. An entity certifying "green miners" would be a centralized authority.

Sorry but "doctors going on social media" is absolutely no proof for anything. I have also seen several doctors on social media say that there is less activity at hospitals than usual.

Seriously, just provide the numbers about hospital use. No social media nonsense.

Your data about "excess deaths" is only for the last five years, by the way, not "any previous year".

Why not simply provide data to counter their "lies"? What makes you so sure to be in possession of the truth? Have you verified yourself, or have you simply chosen to trust the authorities?

So individual labs can set their own standards for detecting an infection? Isn't that rather support for the skeptic's viewpoint? So there actually is no standard, just labs claiming things?

I don't know about the UK, but for example in Germany there are official statistics about ICU use. ICU use was at normal levels the whole time. But of course that is also being managed by scheduling risky surgery, for example.

Nevertheless, I don't know what makes you so sure your claims are true. I haven't really seen completely convincing evidence.

I have seen politicians publicly proclaim that the opportunity the pandemic provides should be used. So there definitely ARE politicians who would like to use it. What makes you so sure that none of the politicians in power, or indeed any of the other actors involved, don't share that sentiment?

It doesn't matter, the German government hardly ever finishes their big projects. They just want to look good on paper and spend some tax payer money.

That doesn't make sense. You claim Trump rejected the offer that Amazon secretly made to him?

Who was responsible for the decision to not offer help with vaccinations under Trump? I had always defended Amazon, until that moment, when they declared they would let people die for their ideology.

Now I am trying to purge Amazon from my life, and it is hard. Much more difficult than Google. I had even started to use their grocery deliveries during Covid lockdowns. Maybe if it was Jeff's doing, and he is gone, I could justify continuing to buy from Amazon. But I guess not.

Interesting that many say AWS is the actual business of Amazon, and they may get rid of the rest. It seems to me AWS would be the easiest to replace, after all, there are lots of cloud standards. Can't you just take your Docker images and publish them somewhere else?

It seems much more difficult to me to replace the aggregation and efficient logistics. In fact I don't see any competition.

Now that they want to see me dead, I want to see Amazon dead, but I have little hopes for it.

Their achilles heel might be trust - online reviews are almost completely broken now, and complaints about fake products are rising. Their answer to the latter seems to be to steal successful products and sell them as "Amazon Basics", but that is evil and also won't work for having "everything".

Another issue could be people returning their stuff or even damaged goods. I see a surprising number of people who have no ethical qualms about returning things they already used or that are broken.

Maybe the future will be to buy directly from producers? That seems to be the only way to avoid the fake products? So someone should come up with ways to make it easy for producers to sell their products online, or at least provide a chain of trust.

You mean Brexit was kind of UK truck drivers smashing the trucks (because of cheap competition, and AI would be even cheaper, so more truck smashing)?

Maybe they will? I think somebody will still ship stuff to the UK. Or are the predictions coming true and the British people will now starve to death because of the EU trade embargo?

Nobody can prove existence or non-existence of a god (except a god if a god would exist).

It is usually just a statement about likelihoods. Absence of evidence for existence of god(s) makes it seem very unlikely god(s) exist. Especially after millennia of people looking for evidence.

Not all beliefs are equal. You personally probably wouldn't put the likelihood of the existence of the great spaghetti monster in the sky to the same level as your belief in your personal god.

Do you personally feel like smashing such a truck? Or would only ex truck drivers feel that way? Because if they are simply being faded out of existence (replacing retiring drivers with AI), there won't be any ex truckers to smash the trucks.

Fair enough, but I would still maintain that even for "internet culture", don't let journalists shape your views of it.

Why you shouldn't read the news. They always want to create narratives and drama. And reshape how people see the world. Don't let journalists shape your view of the world.

And I actually really wonder if other people see such things, because I really don't. Not saying they don't exist, but they don't seem to get pushed into my "timelines". What you could find if you were looking for it I don't know.

I've seen Goatse, though - maybe it's just that everything else pales in comparison.

Yes, please do! I think there is an inflated perception of risk because of the relentless media coverage. Risks are probably still higher than the meteor example, but the point of the example is to call for actual numbers! It's not enough to say "some bad thing COULD happen". Many bad things COULD happen.

A lot of things COULD happen. For example, a meteor could hit the earth and wipe out all life. Therefore we should pour ALL resources into space exploration, not medicine.

No that is not obvious at all. It doesn't depend on the transmission rate, just on how many people get infected. Higher transmission rate just means it spreads faster, not that it infects more people in the end.

"He notes that a more infectious virus is more dangerous than a more lethal one, “because every new case will infect more people, and each of them will infect more people, such that the number of cases will grow exponentially.”"

Oh my god, that sounds horrible - except, that's how EVERY infectious disease works. We have been living with that kind of diseases forever.

Also, no, they don't grow exponentially. The population saturates.

Not really, no.

That sounds like almost everything on TV. I can't stand any of it anymore.

I think there is not enough awareness of how manipulative moving images really are. It's probably really difficult to make a movie or documentary that is not highly manipulative, intentionally or not.

The other aspect is that Google is now jeopardizing many people who now enable "other sources", making them more susceptible to malware. (Not saying you shouldn't enable "other sources", but many people don't understand what they are doing).

So you are saying asymptomatic infections are not an issue?

Such things don't make logical sense to me. So assuming Facebook is a "natural monopoly", it is only so because of millions of people (the voters) choose to use it. Instead of voting for legislation, those people could simply vote with their feet and choose a different social network. There is no need for regulation. (If the people already WANT it, they could simply do it, without government intervention).

1) The Kenosha shooting was self defense. And if you arbitrarily lump things together, you can probably find an arbitrary number of victims. BLM is connected to socialism, so I guess you could count the 100 million dead in the Chinese Culture revolution and so on.

2) In the same vein, there seems to be only one actual victim of protester violence at the capitol, and that one also looks more like an accident (got hit in the head with a thrown item, which is of course a stupidly dangerous attack, but also common at BLM riots)

3) That's not CHAZ cooperating with authorities, but authorities cooperating with CHAZ. Just because "your people" welcomed the secession, doesn't make it any more democratic.

Also, there are videos from the capitol of security staff chatting with the protesters. So I guess they were also cooperating, and hence, by your logic, democratic.

Anyway, let's end here. There really is no point. It is just always interesting how warped people's perceptions can be.