I realise that this isn't an argument to show that the book market is healthy, but have you considered piracy? Many of the type of books you are describing are very easily available via libgen.
215 karma · joined March 19, 2024
You need government ID to get on a domestic flight in the UK. You also need government ID to get on a flight from the UK to Ireland.
As with the sea border and the land border, this completely invalidates your claim about what ID is required to travel between the UK and the Republic of Ireland.
You don't appear to have travelled between the UK and the Republic of Ireland, ever, or to have flown domestically in the UK since 9/11. You stated above that "they do not check ID on UK domestic flights", not "the CAA does not require ID but all airlines do". The first statement is untrue. Not sure why you are making stuff up in support of an urban legend about the UK/Irish border.
Even if there was a difference between the ID required to board a flight from the UK to the RoI and the ID required to board a UK domestic flight (there isn't - both require govt ID, not necessarily a passport), the situation at the boat and at the land border completely disproves your original claim.
You are suggesting that having to show any photographic ID is the same as having to show a passport. That's obviously silly.
No one has to prove that "they are entitled to not show a passport" by showing British or Irish ID. This is a fantasy.
On the boat everyone, British, Irish or other, has to show ID of some kind. No one has to show a passport. At the land border no one has to show anything.
The check is very much "don't stop walking but hold your ID-looking thing in your hand so a nonchalant man can glance at it". You would attract very little attention with someone else's UK or Irish driving license, a bit more if you decided to test the waters with a weird form of ID.
Children can travel with a birth certificate (no photo).
You need more than this to get on an aeroplane, but that also applies to domestic flights in the UK.
If you get the boat and show eg. a Romanian student card, they might ask you where your passport is, somewhat reasonably since you would have needed it to travel to the UK or to Ireland. They would accept an ID card probably and might let you in with legit looking non-government ID.
That's the sea border. You can cross the land border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland without any form of ID at all, government-issued, photographic or otherwise. Lots of people do it every day by car or bus and it would not remotely occur to them to take ID with them.
So the Romanian student would have no problem travelling between London and Dublin without showing anything since they could get a boat Glasgow- Belfast and then get a bus to Dublin.
If this was your best example of governments lying and changing the rules, it's not a very good one (and is also kind of offensive to Irish and British people).
Everyone can easily access the books they want. People choose to read the Bible and Harry Potter because that's what they want to read.
Of course, it might be a shame that we all coordinate on reading a few hits that everyone else is reading rather than check out some underappreciated books. But is the market really to blame for that? Amazon makes it easier than ever to find all the books. Publishers, as pointed out in the quote, are publishing tons of books that don't make it, in part because of a belief that it's a good thing to do. It's easier to self publish than ever before. And social media is often playing a big role in discovering the huge hits that everyone else is reading - many are not the books pushed by the marketing machine, but word-of-mouth successes that get discovered and shared by a huge group of dedicated, articulate readers.
If there were hardly any books selling 3-digit numbers, that to me would suggest an unhealthy market. The presence of lots and lots selling that many seems very positive.
Most of the books that sell hundreds of copies wouldn't have been published in the past. If you write a niche book about something and a few hundred people read it, that seems great. If you're (stochastically) subsidized by a few huge hits and bestsellers, that also seems great. People are reading the Bible, Harry Potter and celebrity memoirs? Great too, I'm sure they are enjoying them. Possibly many of those people have not chosen those books in preference to other more "worthy" books but in preference to other pastimes.
The only problem I can see is if you wrote a book and had it published hoping it would be this year's runaway success, and it wasn't. Fine, but someone's book was. By its nature not everyone can achieve this.
In the rest of your comment you repeat the claim that I was responding to, that all the correct information was in the contract. You seem to have ignored the two key caveats I made: that their contracts might be compliant now, but they probably weren't before they were first investigated. And secondly that they have demonstrably lied extensively outside of the contracts themselves. Lying to convince someone to sign a contract which of itself is truthful, is definitely fraud.
Perhaps you don't understand "the hidden finance charge" because you don't understand regulation of consumer credit. When you buy a car, the dealer has to show you numbers breaking down what the cash price of the car is, and how much you will pay in interest. This stops them tricking people by eg raising the sticker price and telling you that the credit is cheaper than it is. This isn't a guideline, it's a law. And the numbers have to be presented in a way which is not obscure or misleading. Scott Tucker got 16 years for this.
It's just that sooner or later someone will get it wrong.
But they clearly lied about much of this stuff in the headline publicity. Lying prominently and 'clarifying' the lies in the small print is obviously still fraud.
Doing fraud and saying 'but the majority of the people we defrauded still had an overall positive experience' is not a defense.
Jail time for consumer credit fraud is a perfectly normal outcome. Don't lend consumers money if you don't want to be in a regulatory environment where fraud is taken very seriously.
CSS allowed layouts like this to be done without tables. It still supported tables, but for the case when you actually want to show tabular data which would appear like a table on the page.
Arguably these legal systems are the conceptual basis for our modern law system because they are used pedagogically in this way.
Now think about what happens if you increase p by a tiny bit. a moves tangentially. (This works very similar to how the tangent to a curve gives the change in y for a change in x.) So the vector of cos'(p), sin'(p) is given by a vector starting from a, at a right angle to 0a, and pointing in the positive direction.
Since the point a moves through 2pi distance while p goes from 0 to 2pi (the definition of measuring angles in radians) the speed of the point is 1, and so the vector of derivatives has length 1.
You can check easily that this makes cos'(p) = -sin(p) and sin'(p) = cos(p).
So if their calculation was that all of open source would stay on their platform with them adding malware, they were wrong. But if the calculation was that a long tail of random small and semi-orphaned projects would stay there after the big popular projects had all migrated, providing them with essentially free revenue for a very long time, they were kind of right.
So yes, I am happy with code that works for a subset of files. There are thousands of applications which work with CSVs and they all do exactly this.