• 0 Posts
  • 52 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 9th, 2023

help-circle





  • The part that isn’t mentioned in this article is the onus of marketing. Now that anyone can self publish with almost no overhead, more than a million books are published every year. How many of those even get noticed? Sometimes it feels like people see the same 10-20 books on the bestseller list (which is gameable btw) and think that’s all there is to read.

    These days, traditional publishers don’t do any marketing on behalf of authors unless they feel it’s a sure thing, similar to how they give out advances. If you are already famous or have large social media following, you’re far more likely to get an advance or a marketing effort. Everyone who self publishes, and even most who are traditionally published, have to do their own marketing. Most writers are not marketers, and this is where they fail, no matter how good their book might be.

    Personally, I think the big publishers will collapse soon and the whole industry might move to a subscription model ala Spotify. That would probably be worse for writers, but no one seems to be able to come up with a solution that makes book writing a more viable career.





  • I see your confusion. They could have worded this better, but it’s two grants being split between eight nonprofit financial institutions. My understanding is these entities will lend that money to communities to do ongoing infrastructure projects. The goal is “turning $20 billion of public funds into $150 billion of public and private investment to maximize the impact of public funds.” I don’t know how that part works exactly, but to me that doesn’t sound like a handout. Of course I would hope they would be held responsible for any mismanagement.

    As for why they need to create a financial nework to do this: These kinds of projects can take many years and sometimes need ongoing financing. Apparently, when Obama tried to fund something like this, there was a lending bottleneck where I guess banks didn’t want to finance community infrastructure projects or something, so a lot of the funding just sat there until the grants expired. This is supposed to prevent that from happening.








  • If they know how many years they’ll hold the rights, that information should be given to the consumer, i.e., “you will have access to this media product for at least N years.” Then the consumer can make an informed decision (is $24.99 worth it to own a movie for 6 years? Etc). Otherwise it’s just a gamble. Everything else you can rent (cars, tools, equipment, venues, clothing, dumpsters) comes with very clear temporal terms. Imagine if rental car companies could remotely brick your rental car halfway through your vacation.



  • The earth is flat.

    If no one contradicts that statement or downvotes me or anything, someone might later come along and read it and believe it just because no one else disagreed. There are a lot of people who haven’t had a great education or don’t have critical thinking skills, or are actual children. When people just make claims with no discussion of the merit of those claims, how can the less educated figure out they’re not true? After all, if the host invited this hypothetical flat earther to be on their show, there must be something legit about them, right? They don’t just invite any rando person off the street onto their show, do they?


  • Just a PSA, the IRS recently instituted some kind of AI algorithm that is re-flagging a lot of things that have already been resolved… a friend got a bill for $1500 which they had earlier sent a letter of apology for. He doesn’t actually owe anything, it’s just the glitchy algorithm sending the old bill out again.

    If you don’t understand why you owe more, don’t just give up and pay it. The IRS can make mistakes too.