Some countries have banned plastic bags outright. It tends to be the countries that receive exports of waste that lead on this, plus a lot of island nations. There's a map here summarising legislation in different countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Parma ham is made without. It's expensive.
My local butcher also does a sausage without nitrates - labelled the Victorian sausage, it comes with extra salt and pepper so it preserves better. So there are drawbacks.
The best alternative I've found is to just get fresh meat that hasn't been adulterated and cook it as soon as possible.
My ISP applies a support charge to any websites that don't run the latest version, whether that's PHP or MySQL. It's an incentive to upgrade, and it would be interesting to find out how many just accept the charge versus those who upgrade or pull their sites entirely. It certainly encouraged me to ditch a few websites I was half-hearted about.
...not sure where rage against Amazon is coming from. They run their own store, they run a market that others can rent space in, they run some TV distribution, they run ebooks and an ebook reader to varying degrees of success. They also have a cloud platform that anyone could rent time on.
None of these are monopolistic.
In ebooks, they have both an overwhelming share of the market in many English-speaking countries, and a Select programme that demands ebook exclusivity. If you hang out on writers' forums you'll hear the rage. With ebooks you're (hopefully) not talking about commodities, but in terms of whether it's monopolistic, the sheer size of Amazon's market means a lot of self-publishers and smaller publishers don't feel they can turn down the exclusivity, which comes with added visibility in the store and promotional tools.
Their payment terms involve paying a sum they decide into a pool and authors and publishers won't know how much they'll get until after it's been earned. There are concerns about various types of scamming in the Kindle Unlimited programme, including the practice of "book stuffing" (a form of double-dipping by which several novels of "bonus" books, not labelled, are put in the back of books several times over to increase the overall page length and therefore the payout, which is per page.) Many writers, including David Gaughran, have criticised Amazon's poor response to this problem in the KU store. A non-monopoly couldn't get away with such practices.
This. Decreasing numbers of indie authors are "wide", ie selling on platforms other than Amazon, because of the lure of its exclusive Select platform which allows authors to take part in Kindle Unlimited. So when Amazon makes changes like this with no warning it can have a profound effect on authors whose careers are largely dependent on Amazon sales. It's also quite hard to have some books in Select and others at different retailers, because readers will complain about not being able to get titles on KU.
The only way to correct this imbalance is for readers to buy elsewhere. That's a big ask, when the only benefit to the reader is something as intangible as the general health of the publishing market.
This move will change that lock-in to an extent. The reason many books are only available on Amazon is the Kindle Select exclusivity clause: independent authors can't list with other vendors if they want to take advantage of participation in Kindle Unlimited, better visibility in the Amazon store, and promotional opportunities like Countdown deals that non-exclusive authors can't use. So independent authors have the stark choice between selling better on Amazon but being exclusive, or selling widely but to a potentially much smaller market.
However, by opening up Kobo to Walmart's large customer base, it could make it more attractive to authors to sell widely. Currently a lot of Canadians have Kobos, but their market share in the UK and especially the US is tiny.
A month or two ago Amazon put in a cap of 3000 pages per book that they will pay for books in the programme. That gives you an idea of what was going on, and that they already knew about it. People were bundling together several books and getting click-farmers to "read" them. Now the fraudsters are forced to publish more books in order to get the same payout, so the problem has become much, much more visible.
That's what's got a lot of regular authors up in arms - the new books that are stuffed with nonsense text and aren't aimed at normal readers are crowding out new releases. It used to be easy to release a book on Amazon and expect a few people to check it out, even if you didn't promote it heavily, because it would appear on the "new releases" list for that genre. That would guarantee a few organic sales if the cover and premise were up to scratch, and with any luck good reviews and word of mouth would spread from there. Due to the flood of scam books this is now impossible, because many readers have given up looking through the new releases for reading suggestions.
The idea of giving out money in proportion to how much the reader pays in has promise. But Amazon don't seem to have been able to successfully pay authors in the way they said they would in the first place, by page read. They seem to be paying according to the last page accessed, and counting skipped pages as read. If they can't even get that right, what hope is there they'll be able to implement something more complex?
Goodreads had a fair shot at being such a central source, until Amazon bought them out. I don't think it's possible to organise the world's books without having some way of making money out of it, because it's so expensive to do well.
The other problem is that other retailers have relatively poor search and discovery systems, as well as smaller inventories. It's a chicken and egg thing: they mostly won't invest in improving their search and browsing until they have more customers, who are staying away until they hold more varied stock and have better websites. I've heard good things about Kobo's plans to improve its search and browsing, including that they've been in talks with the Book Genome Project, so I hope it gets past the planning stage.
I used to sleep badly, until I started to follow one rule: no screens after 9pm, whether it's for the TV, internet or games. Now I always get enough sleep, unless I break this rule for some reason.
Funnily enough it doesn't seem to matter if I read in bed, which makes me think that the backlighting on screens may have played some role in stuffing up my circadian rhythms.
I only play fitness games that make me sweat: currently New U and My Fitness Coach. If designers came up with a game that could match those intense levels of exercise with a long, involved storyline I'd buy it. So far no-one has. Instead this market is full of simple, cheaply-made, narrative-free games.
It's this misguided label of the casual gamer that's leading so many developers astray. I don't care about the time it takes to pick up a game. I just don't want to be sat on my bum for 5 hours at a time, getting fatter.
I find myself printing out less since I got an e-reader, but it's still just for certain documents. Temporary stuff, mostly. If I could doodle and use colour that might cut it down some more. I don't think screen size makes a lot of difference for me, but it might for some people.
You can't pass round electronic documents as easily, but what if someone built an e-reader that allowed you to dock with other readers and transfer files between them? That would change things (provided everyone in the office has compatible machines).
Slashdot Mirror
Some countries have banned plastic bags outright. It tends to be the countries that receive exports of waste that lead on this, plus a lot of island nations. There's a map here summarising legislation in different countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Parma ham is made without. It's expensive. My local butcher also does a sausage without nitrates - labelled the Victorian sausage, it comes with extra salt and pepper so it preserves better. So there are drawbacks. The best alternative I've found is to just get fresh meat that hasn't been adulterated and cook it as soon as possible.
Mastodon is busy this week.
My ISP applies a support charge to any websites that don't run the latest version, whether that's PHP or MySQL. It's an incentive to upgrade, and it would be interesting to find out how many just accept the charge versus those who upgrade or pull their sites entirely. It certainly encouraged me to ditch a few websites I was half-hearted about.
...not sure where rage against Amazon is coming from. They run their own store, they run a market that others can rent space in, they run some TV distribution, they run ebooks and an ebook reader to varying degrees of success. They also have a cloud platform that anyone could rent time on.
None of these are monopolistic.
In ebooks, they have both an overwhelming share of the market in many English-speaking countries, and a Select programme that demands ebook exclusivity. If you hang out on writers' forums you'll hear the rage. With ebooks you're (hopefully) not talking about commodities, but in terms of whether it's monopolistic, the sheer size of Amazon's market means a lot of self-publishers and smaller publishers don't feel they can turn down the exclusivity, which comes with added visibility in the store and promotional tools. Their payment terms involve paying a sum they decide into a pool and authors and publishers won't know how much they'll get until after it's been earned. There are concerns about various types of scamming in the Kindle Unlimited programme, including the practice of "book stuffing" (a form of double-dipping by which several novels of "bonus" books, not labelled, are put in the back of books several times over to increase the overall page length and therefore the payout, which is per page.) Many writers, including David Gaughran, have criticised Amazon's poor response to this problem in the KU store. A non-monopoly couldn't get away with such practices.
This. Decreasing numbers of indie authors are "wide", ie selling on platforms other than Amazon, because of the lure of its exclusive Select platform which allows authors to take part in Kindle Unlimited. So when Amazon makes changes like this with no warning it can have a profound effect on authors whose careers are largely dependent on Amazon sales. It's also quite hard to have some books in Select and others at different retailers, because readers will complain about not being able to get titles on KU. The only way to correct this imbalance is for readers to buy elsewhere. That's a big ask, when the only benefit to the reader is something as intangible as the general health of the publishing market.
This move will change that lock-in to an extent. The reason many books are only available on Amazon is the Kindle Select exclusivity clause: independent authors can't list with other vendors if they want to take advantage of participation in Kindle Unlimited, better visibility in the Amazon store, and promotional opportunities like Countdown deals that non-exclusive authors can't use. So independent authors have the stark choice between selling better on Amazon but being exclusive, or selling widely but to a potentially much smaller market. However, by opening up Kobo to Walmart's large customer base, it could make it more attractive to authors to sell widely. Currently a lot of Canadians have Kobos, but their market share in the UK and especially the US is tiny.
A month or two ago Amazon put in a cap of 3000 pages per book that they will pay for books in the programme. That gives you an idea of what was going on, and that they already knew about it. People were bundling together several books and getting click-farmers to "read" them. Now the fraudsters are forced to publish more books in order to get the same payout, so the problem has become much, much more visible. That's what's got a lot of regular authors up in arms - the new books that are stuffed with nonsense text and aren't aimed at normal readers are crowding out new releases. It used to be easy to release a book on Amazon and expect a few people to check it out, even if you didn't promote it heavily, because it would appear on the "new releases" list for that genre. That would guarantee a few organic sales if the cover and premise were up to scratch, and with any luck good reviews and word of mouth would spread from there. Due to the flood of scam books this is now impossible, because many readers have given up looking through the new releases for reading suggestions. The idea of giving out money in proportion to how much the reader pays in has promise. But Amazon don't seem to have been able to successfully pay authors in the way they said they would in the first place, by page read. They seem to be paying according to the last page accessed, and counting skipped pages as read. If they can't even get that right, what hope is there they'll be able to implement something more complex?
Goodreads had a fair shot at being such a central source, until Amazon bought them out. I don't think it's possible to organise the world's books without having some way of making money out of it, because it's so expensive to do well. The other problem is that other retailers have relatively poor search and discovery systems, as well as smaller inventories. It's a chicken and egg thing: they mostly won't invest in improving their search and browsing until they have more customers, who are staying away until they hold more varied stock and have better websites. I've heard good things about Kobo's plans to improve its search and browsing, including that they've been in talks with the Book Genome Project, so I hope it gets past the planning stage.
O2 messed up by releasing this tool without explaining what it means, and also by having a whitelist blocker that's so restrictive it's entirely useless. But in some ways this whitelist is a distraction from the main issue of whether anyone should have the right to carry out this censorship, against young people who are in some cases old enough to be having sex. And who has the right to define what is porn, what is sex education, and what is "mature" content, particularly when there are grey areas that shade into political issues? There's a petition against the blocking: http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/bt-o2-talktalk-virgin-media-sky-we-urge-the-government-internet-service-providers-to-rethink-their-filtering-plans-which-are-detrimental-to-free-speech-and-child-safety?share_id=ClZgdVULyz&utm_campaign=autopublish&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=share_petition
I used to sleep badly, until I started to follow one rule: no screens after 9pm, whether it's for the TV, internet or games. Now I always get enough sleep, unless I break this rule for some reason. Funnily enough it doesn't seem to matter if I read in bed, which makes me think that the backlighting on screens may have played some role in stuffing up my circadian rhythms.
I only play fitness games that make me sweat: currently New U and My Fitness Coach. If designers came up with a game that could match those intense levels of exercise with a long, involved storyline I'd buy it. So far no-one has. Instead this market is full of simple, cheaply-made, narrative-free games. It's this misguided label of the casual gamer that's leading so many developers astray. I don't care about the time it takes to pick up a game. I just don't want to be sat on my bum for 5 hours at a time, getting fatter.
I find myself printing out less since I got an e-reader, but it's still just for certain documents. Temporary stuff, mostly. If I could doodle and use colour that might cut it down some more. I don't think screen size makes a lot of difference for me, but it might for some people. You can't pass round electronic documents as easily, but what if someone built an e-reader that allowed you to dock with other readers and transfer files between them? That would change things (provided everyone in the office has compatible machines).