464 karma · joined May 15, 2015
It's true that you can lend ebooks, there are just a lot more hoops to jump through ;) I can't lend my ebooks, because I don't have a spare device, but that can be changed if I want. If I'm going to pay just as much for the paper book, though, I might as well buy that and skip the extra device management.
If authors get more money for ebooks that would be an argument for buying ebooks despite their drawbacks.
Also, it drives me mad that families have to have some weird hacky system to share ebooks - either have all ereaders use the same Amazon/Kobo/Whatever account, thus messing up any recommendations, or DRM stripping, which is a pain.
The times I really want to read a book now the instant delivery is great, but I think there have only been 3 times in the something like 4 years that we've had an ereader in the house that I've wanted a book that badly and the ebook hasn't been available at a library.
Edit: I do wish physical books were searchable, and had a built-in dictionary.
> [Amazon] accounted for 64% of the U.S. e-book market, by units sold
That's actually lower than I thought, but higher than publishers should be comfortable with.
In Canada, with a Kobo, buying from Chapters/Indigo, the trade paperback is often cheaper than the ebook. This is my situation, and it means that the only time I buy an ebook is if I'm extremely motivated to read a book right now and I can't get it digitally from the library. If I had a situation where I was travelling and extremely space-constrained I might pay the premium for an ebook, but that hasn't happened to me yet.
All that doesn't mean I don't read ebooks, but that I don't buy them. The ebooks I read come from the library, (I'm a member of two libraries with great ebook selections), or are classics from Project Gutenberg or similar.
I actually did the math for the 2009 - 2013 thing, and truck tonnage increased by 21.75%, so a 17% increase in accidents means that trucks got safer over that time.
If I understand the these DOT numbers[1,2] properly the number of truck miles from 2009 to 2013 has dropped, which would be especially bad if the number of accidents has ridden, but that doesn't jibe with a) the 2008 recession ending and b) increased truck sales over the past 5 years[3]. The trucking industry publications I've been reading are generally in agreement that trucking demand exceeds capacity, and that demand has been steadily increasing since 2008.
He's right that some of the safety regulations have changed recently, and to the layman it appears that they have changed to be less safe. For example, as of this past June, drivers hauling oversize/overweight loads no longer have to take a 30-minute break that was formerly required. However, part of that reasoning was that it can be more dangerous for oversize trucks to be parked, especially at night, than it is for them to continue driving straight through[4].
The 30-minute break exemption has been granted in several other situations as well, for example when hauling HazMat that requires the driver to "attend," or supervise the vehicle even when it's stopped, since this is defined as an on-duty activity the driver would either have to eliminate the break, or stop supervising the load, so he/she would have to break a law no matter what, so it was decided that the 30-minute break would become optional.
About on-truck technology to make the road safer, it's a good idea, but it needs to work right every time. I've spoken to my business partner about it, (he's the one who's been through the whole trucking industry from driving right up to management), and in his other job, where he manages a trucking company, they've had demonstration units with all kinds of collision warnings, lane departure warnings, blind-spot warnings, and so on. They found that the alarms went off way too often when there was no problem - to the point where none of the drivers wanted to take these brand-new demonstration trucks out on a run. And the article's posterboy crash - the Tracy Morgan accident, was a new truck with those bells & whistles installed. The problem there was the driver's commute time to get to work.
Finally, the article reads as if the trucking industry wants to be unsafe. This is simply not true. There are jerks that drive trucks, just like there are jerks that drive 4-wheelers, but there's a culture of safety in trucking that really impresses me. Safety records for both drivers and companies, including inspection results, are tracked by the US government. If a driver's record is too bad no company will take them on, and if a carrier's record is too bad it will be prohibited from operating. Most of the "trucking industry" is truck drivers, and a truck driver's top priority is arriving alive and uninjured.
[1]https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2010/v... [2]https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2013/v... [3]http://www.ttnews.com/articles/printopt.aspx?storyid=37081 [4]http://www.ccjdigital.com/oversizeoverweight-interstate-haul...
Is this some still-unreleased version of the app the article is about, or has the privacy policy changed with no changes to the data that Spotify actually accesses?
I've heard of Saltwater batteries before, hopefully they live up to the promise. My grandmother lived off-grid for several years with a wind/solar/battery/diesel-for-emergencies/wood-for-heating/propane-for-cooking system. It's amazing how easy it is to generate your own electricity, the up-front cost is just a little expensive.
The first linked article talks about storage, not generation - is it the correct link? If we can get solar into the $0.02 - $0.04 range we'll have largely won the battle.
On shrinking wilderness, I'm not sure about some of the methodology in that paper. For land use in agriculture it seems to have tailored the timescale studied to support the theory that we're using less land for agriculture, but even the selective charts show we're almost at peak corn acreage and headed up-and-to-the-right. The argument about saying cubic yards of wood production per hectare of forest is going up was missing a timescale, and charting wood used per dollar of GDP doesn't really tell us anything about how much wood is actually being used, it just makes a chart that looks like its heading in the right direction. I think the US may be seeing less land under agriculture, but I think a lot more food is being imported from Central & South America, and Asia, areas that were not discussed in relation to area under agriculture. I didn't look up the reputation of thebreakthrough.org, but the paper read somewhat like a "we're doing fine - stop worrying" study influenced by parties that don't want rapid change.
There have been some major wins on the wilderness vs. non-wilderness front, though. Many waterways in North America is probably cleaner than it was 30 years ago, (think of the Great Lakes, and around NYC. I'm not sure about the Mississippi, Columbia, or Colorado river systems). Acid rain on the east coast & central Canada has largely been dealt with, and some species are even coming back to places they've been gone from for years, (I caught a salmon on vacation in BC last year for the first time in 20 years).
Let's turn this into a positive. I would love to hear more about how things are improving. Do you have more examples?
Miss a word?
> Literally anything you want is possible with code.
I came here to say this. Anything is possible with code, (although sometimes the effort is not worth the reward).
It's possible to set it up properly on most of these hosts, but it's much more difficult, and if you ever have issues the support team says you're using a "non-supported configuration." At least WordPress lets you move your config file one level above the webroot and will find it automatically.
It'll also be interesting to see drop-off at that point in the funnel - my signup form is a bit of a monster.
I haven't A/B tested it, that's something I should do.
[1]https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-decision-lab/201109...
I know she was feeling crappy, enough to head into a hospital late-ish at night, and apparently by that time her kidneys had already shut down. I don't live in the same city as she did anymore, so I don't have any more info.
I'm 35, and I've already lost at least 4 friends. Causes of death: Drunk driving, Suicide, Murder, and bacterial infection/dropped dead.
The friend with the infection was a super-healthy woman who was opening a fitness studio, one of those people that you would expect to grow old, not catch a random bug and die.