This seems like an area rife for a scam, like hurricane insurance or earthquake insurance. You pocket the money, and when disaster strikes, who is going to sue you when you do nothing? If there was a real bunker-worthy event then all your insurees have been devoured by zombies or dissolved by radioactive strings or whatever.
Historically, savings accounts do much worse than the stock market. People are spoiled from the last decade and don't remember what corrections or bear periods look like. Over time you get 4% over inflation. That's it.
When my kids were little they had a toy doctors set and the fake wooden stethoscope broke; replacing it with a real one was significantly cheaper than paying Melissa and Doug for a new one.
Why the silly conspiracy theory? Can't something just be stupid and bad but well-intentioned? You really think lawmakers are involved in some secret cabal that wants to track everyone's activities online? If anything, jurisdictions have shown that they are very interested in preventing the tracking of people's activity online, they just don't know how to do it!
>You really think lawmakers are involved in some secret cabal that wants to track everyone's activities online?
...yes? Not so secret though. The internet gave everyone the power to take matters in their own hands and read up on different sources from different countries and people and to talk to more people. They don't want to lose power and want their citizens to be uninformed and not coordinate efforts to critizice them and hold them accountable. Not only online but also offline because more and more surveillance cameras get installed, police gets more powers, checks citizens without suspicion.
Why go to the silly conspiracy theory place? Up until then I was in violent agreement, but things don't need to be a conspiracy to be bad. The rules are well-intentioned but poorly thought through, which is devastatingly common for government action in digital spaces; witness the fucking cookie popups (no illuminati involved in that one, just stupidity).
People and lawmakers are just not thinking through the privacy implications for the people who are exempt from these limitations, and the persistent nature of digital paper trails.
why 'silly' conspiracy? Many cases of documented conspiracy in the past anyway.
Being on this social media (YC) people aware it's all about implementation and we should at least demanding better solutions. If you want to regulate/limit access of kids to social media just make that you have to be 16 years old to buy simcard - in many places in EU you already have to show ID to seller.
Allow parent to buy simcard to their under 16 year old children if thats what they want to and allow parents to decide at their home wifi if kid should have access to social media or not.
For the first part -- silly because there's literally no evidence presented of a conspiracy. No connection between the individual agents and actors. No motivation given for the underlying commonalities. And most importantly, for this "scale" of conspiracy, there's no suggestion that other avenues towards the same nefarious ends are in progress. It's just a bunch of countries and organizations proposing similar laws based on concerns, that while (at least to me) are exaggerated and overstated, are nonetheless well-documented, reported, and widely believed in good faith.
As for finding a technical solution, jury is still out but I am unconvinced that it is possible to have a solution that a) prevents children from using an online service, b) allows adults to use the service, and c) does not identify the specific adult who is using the service. You proposed solution is no exception.
The evidence is the part where it very obviously isn't organic. The behavior is clearly too coordinated when compared to past global changes in regulation.
> People and lawmakers are just not thinking through the privacy implications ...
It seems much more likely to me that they are thinking them through and that they have ulterior motives.
BTW "violent agreement" refers to when two parties are arguing because they mistakenly believe that they disagree. A sort of friendly fire if you will. The term you were looking for was something like enthusiastic or similar.
> The evidence is the part where it very obviously isn't organic.
Global Context: Norway joins France, Spain, and Denmark, which are considering similar measures, while Australia and Turkey (which bans users under 15) have already implemented restrictions. The UK recently rejected a similar under-16 ban.
I think it obviously is. Just as much as the migration to solar is organic. There are foils, but there is also an underpinning concerns fueling the global momentum. It's very likely that the functioning western governments (ie still representing the public's interests) are doing just that. These foils include the public service who work with children, who have been sounding the alarm for years being heard and the population that grew up with social media, are now old enough to do something about what they perceive as damaging.
Where have you provided anything to refute the observation that this bears the hallmark of being centrally orchestrated? The context you cite appears to trivially restate my own observations rather than support a counterargument. International laws never proceed in such a uniform manner all at once like this without external coordination.
Of course the lobbyists are playing off of public sentiment and almost certainly working to actively fan those same flames. Notice that the laws aren't the most sensible or least intrusive but rather just about the minimally privacy preserving and maximally authoritarian enabling "solution" that you could possibly come up with. Also notice the convenient alignment of this outcome with various well established ulterior motives of existing actors.
> No connection between the individual agents and actors.
This is obviously untrue. They all know each other and communicate. This would be true even if it were something more anodyne like antismoking regulation (that governments maybe don't have a particular stake in.) They coordinate their messaging, they use the same publicity agencies, they apply for the same financing, they cosponsor and circulate the same studies and thinktank output. Why would you just say that there is no connection between them?
What I think you've done is silently dismissed the open connections as harmless. It's really a "no true connection." The evidence would have to be a bunch of connected organizations with Snidely Whiplash mustaches, or an explicit declaration of conspiratorial intent written down, signed, and published in a newspaper that you approve of.
Although I can't imagine what they could possibly confess to: "We coordinated with national governments to generate studies and messaging, were funded by them directly and indirectly, through foundation grants, lobbied politicians who would support the bans and gave them statements to make, and attacked politicians who were against the bans."
What's wrong with that? You make it sound like some sort of conspiracy.
If we try to argue this case on the merits we've already lost. There's no technical reason to root everyone's computer to keep kids offline. Just put age statements in the protocol, legally make people serving adult material require them, and give people the tools to strip those statements or put them behind passwords at the workstation, server, or even ISP level. Kids would get around it, but they'll certainly get around this, too, unless you're going to require cameras on computers to identify their users at all times.
the solution is parents doing their parenting - government should if necessary only help educate them about existing tools + enforce no phones in basic school. I don't think any solution will prevent children from using an online service if very determined - they will commit identity fraud.
Apologies if I've missed something, but isn't this all just a fantasy? None of the current methods for getting fusion power are even close to being practical -- even the theoretical net output experiments require extensive and sensitive measurement setups just to establish whether or not they are positive energy.
We are not in a place where we expect fusion power to be incrementally achieved by the current systems. We need major breakthroughs that are both impossible to predict and may not even exist outside of stars or thermonuclear devices.
The idea that we'll get massive improvements in Qsci, while maintaining the same basic structure as existing fusion systems, is in the end a bit silly. What would we estimate our confidence to be that when someone invents the Fromboculator, that the Fromboculator will even have a heating system or "vacuum vessel" or a plasma system.
In the end, this looks like it's a steam engine simulator more than anything else, but with some fancy words thrown in.
That wildly overstates how far off we are. To take the most conservative example, tokamaks have very well-known scaling laws and based on those, CFS is generally expected to exceed breakeven with SPARC and get to practical power levels with ARC, over the next several years.
More like decades. The earliest time any planned fusion reactor will make net electrical output -- but not yet an economically useful amount -- is the mid 2030s, a decade from now.
Commercially relevant amounts of electrical generation is uncertain, but most plans start around 2045 and then would take decades to replace fossil fuel plants at scale.
There's a big difference between "it will be decades before we've replaced fossil plants at scale" and "we won't have net power until we invent magical new technologies that we have no clue about today."
Just because we understand the physics pretty well doesn't mean we've done all the detailed engineering for a production plant. That's the level we're at right now, for tokamaks.
Building extremely large plants right off the bat would be a lot slower and higher risk. I think CFS is planning a plant around 500MW, after doing a smaller prototype that should modestly exceed breakeven.
The CFS reactors are much smaller than ITER because they use stronger magnetic fields, using newer superconductors. Tokamak output scales with the square of size but the fourth power of field strength. But there are limits: how much current the superconductor can support without quenching, and the mechanical limits of the reactor. CFS is nearing those limits, so they'd have to build a much larger reactor for such high-power reactors. It's probably more economical to build lots of smaller, identical reactors.
Regulators are turning out to be pretty rational on all this. The NRC has already put fusion reactors under the same regime as medical devices and particle accelerators, rather than the extremely slow process that fission reactors have to deal with. The UK is doing the same. It makes sense due to fusion's inherent safety and lower proliferation potential.
I'm still using a Kindle Oasis (and bought a couple of unopened used ones on eBay). I need the physical page turn buttons so Amazon has basically abandoned me. Trying out the Boox and Kobo readers I was immediately struck by their leggy and unresponsive UI (and this is saying something, coming from the kindle, which is already pretty laggy). I used a Nook in a demo and was impressed, but I'm leery of buying the ereader equivalent of a Zune.
Have things improved since the last time I checked in? I really hate so much about the kindle and its ecosystem but it seems to be the best out there.
Either I've gotten so used to lagginess on the Kobo that I don't notice it anymore, or it no longer is a problem. It seems to turn pages just fine, which is the only place I'm concerned about performance. I've got a Clara BW, so no page turn buttons (they make the device bigger than I liked).
In my view the death of the eReader is just the price fixing on ebooks -- that ebooks are sold at par with at a premium to physical books still bothers me, and I think is responsible for the fact that the Kindle is dying -- Amazon can't move enough ebooks at these price levels to be worth investing anything in interested new hardware.
Is the Kindle dying? A cursory check suggests otherwise. Checking the sources on the "Sales" section of Wikipedia, they sold $5bn of devices in 2014 [0], and then hit a decade-long high in 2024 [1]. Now that's much to go on, and could easily have been worded carefully to imply things that aren't true. But at worst it seems like Kindle sales are doing fine. At a ballpark of $200/device, and assuming 2024 is as low as 2014, that means they sold a ballpark of 25 million devices in 2024. The percent of people reading ebooks annually is also increasing [2] (albeit slowly; arguably it's actually flat, but that's still not dying).
This is a mea culpa on my part -- looks like the situation here has improved*.
I pretty much only buy ebooks now and the prices have been stable, but apparently print prices have been shooting up so the situation has now been corrected.
* improved in the ratio of ebook price to physical book price; ebook prices are still too high but that's just me complaining about how a quarter used to buy a loaf of bread or whatever.
An ebook has zero cost of distribution and no middlemen.
A physical book has to be typeset, printed, shipped to stores, shipped to customers, marketed in store, etc etc etc.
If a physical book is sold for $10 at least half that is printing, distribution and retail.
Like the GP, the price fixing of ebooks at the Dane price as physical books mothers me as well, particularly because physical books can be sold, lent or given away.
The exact same thing happened when CDs launched. They were cheaper to produce than vinyl or cassette very quickly but they sold at a premium for no reason at all.
These are all fixed costs not per-unit costs. If you sell 10,000 ebooks or 10 million ebooks, the costs are basically the same.
And book themselves are 500k-5MB in size typically, which is a single HTTP request, basically. Actual costs of storage and distribution are basically zero (per unit). And sure 10M books is more traffic than 10k books but we're talking $0.10/GB or less in baseline traffic. This is like Cloudfare free tier levels of traffic. And while the traffic costs do scale, it's completely dwarfed by the amortization of fixed costs like editing, formatting and cover design.
As for tech support, it's not the same. Publishers have to handle returns from retailers. Ebooks don't. It's no more complicated than revoking a key and the actual process of requesting a refund requires no human intervention either.
This really feels like I made some blanket statement than offended your sensibilities so you decided to argue without knowing why, if I'm being honest.
>> This really feels like I made some blanket statement than offended your sensibilities so you decided to argue without knowing why, if I'm being honest.
Because you said this:
"An ebook has zero cost of distribution and no middlemen."
and then said this:
"These are all fixed costs not per-unit costs."
Which are two different arguments.
This really feels like you made two different arguments, then I offended your sensibilities by pointing it out, so you decided to argue without knowing why, if I'm being honest.
I, too, was once naive and thought that the price of goods is largely determined by the cost of production.
But as anyone who has taken Econ 101 knows, the price is based on what people are willing to pay for it. The cost of production merely dictates whether it is viable to sell in the market.
If most people are willing to pay $10 for an ebook, when the hardcopy is also $10, then $10 is what they'll sell it for.
Whatever the rationale: People will pay what people are willing to pay. If the price is too high, competition should bring it down. The price clearly wasn't too high.
When I purchase a book, I decide how much I'll pay based on what the book will do for me. I'll get the same entertainment/info whether it is printed or electronic. For some types of books I prefer printed, so I won't pay much for the ebook. For fiction, I prefer electronic (already have too many physical books in the house), so I'll happily pay for it.
Sure, it's easy to evaluate anything if you make up plausible-sounding numbers about it.
The costs of printing and retail are definitely less than half the sales price: https://www.davidderrico.com/cost-breakdowns-e-books-vs-prin... Publishers say it's 10%; Derrico thinks they are underestimating certain logistical costs but no way it's 50%.
Ok, then the other thing you're missing is that distributors also get a chunk of the ebook. You said ebooks have "no middlemen" but that's blatantly false, Amazon is the emperor of ebook middlemen. I suppose publishers could try selling ebooks directly but then they lose the Kindle platform + Amazon's reach, so Amazon charges for that service. They are a middleman.
And in some sense the publisher is a middleman. While authors can sell directly, they rarely do. All of the books I have read had editors, publishers, etc. Not just the author writing and uploading.
I might be misreading your message, but most ebooks I buy are in the $5-15 range, whilst physical books I buy are usually $20-30 range. I'm reading your message as in "they are equally expensive" which is not the case. But I'm having a bit of trouble parsing your second sentence lol.
It looks like you're right -- what I've noticed is that ebook prices have remained steady (and too high) but what I failed to notice is that physical book prices have grown wildly since I was last looking at the situation.
So maybe the economics are shifting -- I certainly hope so. I don't know if there's a big market for a premium eReader (like the Oasis) or whether there's a push to improve the UX to the point where it's usable, but I would very much like both of those things to happen.
That said, Amazon is definitely making a streaming push and the UX for their "Fire Stick" is on par with the UX for an actual "Dumpster Fire" so maybe they're just really bad at it.
That pricing really only started in 2010. Prior to that, publishers would sell them to Amazon at (presumably) a similar cost to wholesale physical books, and Amazon would mark them up much less than the physical books.
If that is true, of which I remain highly skeptical, then it implies that books are wildly inefficient to produce.
What on earth are all the middlemen between book being authored and it being sold to a customer that add so much overhead that the cost of printing and logistics disappears in the noise???
> If that is true, of which I remain highly skeptical, then it implies that books are wildly inefficient to produce.
It just means that publishers are really good at manufacturing physical goods. They've been doing it for several hundred years so no big surprise there.
Books don't sell in large quantities. The economics of scale for the publishes for labor aren't there.
No one is getting rich off of fiction publishing except for the rare break out author. Publishers go out of business (or get acquired) all the time because they are constantly one step away from being insolvent.
This is also why the industry has massively consolidated.
I highly suggest reading breakdowns of the finances of publishing books, it is an interesting field that is incredibly different than how we are used to seeing numbers work in software.
The middlemen are giving your book some (still probably rather small) chance of being bought in significant numbers. If you just want a big stack of books and don't care if anyone buys them, they're not especially expensive to produce.
When you consider that different ebooks and different font selection can result in lines and pages breaking at any random place, ebooks may actually be more expensive to produce.
Don't think I've ever read a properly produced ebook. Page breaks fall wherever and formatting is dictated more by my size/border/etc choices than by whomever "produced" then book.
Nevertheless automatic typesetting and formatting have existed for decades! TeX and LaTeX are ancient and produce better looking results than any book I've ever read on any of my ereaders, and those aren't the only tools in this space.
Whatever people are paying for such "production" seems wasted.
I converted ebooks into PDFs specifically formatted for my reader size and typeset in the fonts I like. It had proper kerning, hyphenation, widow/orphan control, drop capitals, etc.
However that PDF is not reflow-able (or changeable in any way) once it's on the device, and that's not what people are buying ebook readers for.
Has anyone done any interesting work on transflective / reflective frontlit LCD panels? It seems like this is rife for progress; LCDs can achieve densities and response rates that are beyond the reach of any eink device, and only the lack of good contrast stands in the way.
Fujitsu used to offer them --- their Stylistic ST-4110 was my favourite device for a very long while, used as for maps/navigation as well as an ebook reader in addition to being my main computer --- quite miss it and the simplicity of a single (stylus-equipped/daylight-viewable) device, as opposed to the ménagerie which I currently use (Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, Book 3 Pro 360, Kindle Scribe Coloursoft, Wacom One attached to MacBook)
Why would you disagree with the parent post and then fail to provide the title of the book in your own response? Just give the name of the book, please.
Can we make things so that you don't need a smartphone? I don't think this is as trivial as you're making it out to be.
Having a non-exfiltratable bearer token is really really hard. In order to present a zero-knowledge proof of the possession of a token you need to have some sort of challenge-response protocol. The simplest one, and the one in most common use (such as this) is a time-based method, where the shared knowledge of the current time represents the challenge.
The other method is to use civil identity as the challenge, and use government-issued IDs as the bearer token that the ticket is tied to. This doesn't scale well to larger events, and presents real challenges involved centralization of ticket exchange.
You can argue whether or not forgery is a significant enough problem to be worth this trouble, but that's a business decision, and as live events like this get more expensive forgery and resale become more and more of a problem, which end up locking out people like this who have legally and legitimately bought tickets but can't gain access to events because someone has stolen and resold their ticket.
It's a moving target. Forging tickets has gotten easier and easier, and as tickets get more expensive it becomes more and more lucrative. Law enforcement is generally not helpful for this sort of petty larceny so they are looking for structural ways to prevent it.
In past eras they used holograms and watermarks and special papers in an attempt to prevent forgery but these methods keep getting challenged by an ever more sophisticated criminal element. Moving into cryptographically secure methods is the last barrier here.
They could also rely on the state to match identities to tickets, but this approach does not scale and is frankly undesirable for the majority of people anyway.
Forgery is a non-issue -- this guy is a season ticket holder. Literally all they need is his government ID checked against a list.
The "problem" they were trying to "solve" is letting people sell some of their tickets to third parties, but not all of them. That is understandably how they arrived at a mobile application as a solution
But the problem of admitting the original ticket holder is simple as shit. Just .... check his ID?
Decades upon decades of holograms and watermarks on tickets to make them unforgeable. But it keeps getting easier to forge them. Meanwhile ticket prices keep increasing (venue space is one of the last things that's truly scarce) and the incentives for forgery keep increasing.
Even if we could make them truly unforgeable, people generally want electronically transferrable tickets. How do you propose to do this?
Go ahead and require a special gadget to get an "electronically transferrable ticket," no skin off my back. That is a feature I will never use.
Don't bother your season ticket holders about getting their own person admitted! I am standing in front of you, bearing identification, and you are whining about a mobile app?
At this point couldn't we have all tickets be printed with a QR code that is used to look up if it's a valid ticket or not (if you have the QR code you have the ticket)? I don't get why forgary would be a thing if the ticket ID's were GUIDs or something else that you can't brute force while physically in line at the event.
The real reason, I fear, that we need the apps is data harvesting to be sold to data brokers.
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