This only makes sense if the tire had no value. If you assume the word "profit" represents only cash in possession, then you're using a definition of the term that nobody else does.
Look how he bolsters his qualifications - 15 hours towards a doctorate degree. Gee, I put 16 hours towards my doctorate degree on my first day in the lab.
And yet you have difficulty understanding he's talking about credit hours, not actual hours spent. Fifteen credit hours would represent 4-5 semester long classes at the doctoral level. That's not peanuts.
Ultimately someone's profit is someone else's loss.
That's about the dumbest thing I've ever read on Slashdot, and having read some very out-there stuff on this site I can't say that lightly. The idea that profit on one side must equal loss on the other is entirely incorrect because value isn't zero-sum on almost all trade anywhere. I can buy a tire from Goodyear for a lot less than I'd have to spend to make it myself, for example, so the fact that they're profiting doesn't reflect a loss on my part. QED.
Many descriptions of naval tactics involve turning broadside during pursuit, the idea being that the damage you do to the leading vessel will make up for the loss of progress you suffer from doing it. Also, back in sail days ship pursuits could last for days, so what's another twenty minutes if you might cripple your target or convince them to surrender?
My concern isn't random collection of information so much as directed use of randomly collected information. To give you an example, I leave my fingerprints everywhere. But, that doesn't mean that I'm in every database, because someone can certainly lift my prints off a table in a restaurant but they'd have a hard time tying that to my name unless they could come up with a valid reason to collect them in a controlled manner. Therefore, when a fingerprint is found at a crime scene and the police try to match it to someone, they won't have my fingerprints to compare it to unless I'm a suspect and they have reason to collect my fingerprints as a baseline. That reduces the likelihood of false positives and reduces the odds of corruption as well. On top of that are concerns about how the unscrupulous will use my biometrics and such. Is it really that hard to conceive of someone using face recognition software on everyone involved in one of the Occupy movements to sort people into political groups? Is it hard to conceive that there's someone out there who might use that information to do something like blackmail someone or try to influence an election?
Or, y'know, discriminatory laws that were around less than forty years ago and prejudicial attitudes that are still very much alive today. Who's fooling who?
You say it's all untrue, but the statement that the Black Plague is virtually nonexistent is supported by your statement about thousands of cases for billions of people. How exactly does a death toll that probably falls short of onion-related deaths qualify as "losing" to the Black Plague?
The problem with your argument is that we didn't "lose" to the Black Plague. It killed a lot of Europeans but it was unheard of in most other segments of the world, and the proof in the pudding is that we're here and the Black Plague is virtually nonexistent. The point is that we'll always be fighting this fight, and because dealing with diseases must always be reactionary, we're going to have to deal with outbreaks. MRSA is a real bitch but we'll keep attacking it until we figure out how to beat it. It's been that way with every major disease that's pathogen-based so far.
I'm glad it cracks you up, but don't be so fast to be smug about it. I've been working with these infernal machines for quite a while and I still type up Google when I want to search. I've got a bookmark but I can Alt-T and type it faster than I can navigate the bookmark. It's my default search engine but the search box isn't displayed on my browser because I don't want to give up the geography for the toolbar. It's not my home page and I clear my browser cruft when it closes so for most sessions it's not in my history list.
Not everyone who does this is too dumb to figure out another way. It's the best way for me. Different strokes and all.
mind you, before anyone says some bullshit about "well who gets to decide", this is the absolute baseline.
This statement alone shows that you wouldn't line up to your own criteria. "Who gets to decide" when it comes to the measures you describe makes an enormous difference. For example, IQ tests, even these days after decades of work to try to eliminate biases such as language and cultural bias, are still sketchy enough that trained professionals hesitate to say anything about the results except in aggregate. Deciding who knows what the hell they're talking about requires a concensus on what particular level of knowledge is the minimum requirement for understanding an issue, and again you'd have to find some way to keep test designers from biasing the test either purposefully or inadvertently. Finally, deciding what "the right thing" for the people under you is becomes an important part of the process, and has historically led to some pretty out-there side paths like eugenics (whose proponents designed the original IQ tests, by the way) and command economies.
In short, asking "who gets to decide" isn't bullshit, it's central to the problem of using your idea. To invoke Godwin, Adolf Hitler fit all of your criteria in the '30s, based on the statements of German people themselves at the time. It's obvious he failed number three after the fact, but when he came to power it was far from obvious, and your system would have given him the level of power that he ended up developing. If your system can't do better than history at filtering out the obvious bad apples, what use is it?
The part that makes it easier for me to take is that, for a pretty sizable majority of laptops, you're not paying for the Windows license. The manufacturer pays a license fee to install Windows on the machine, but then they recover a lot (in more cases than you'd think, all) of that cost from payments that companies give them to preinstall software, like the crippleware DVD burning software or McAMantic antivirus trials. If the manufacturer has to send it out without Windows, they don't pay the license but they don't collect the fees, so it's a wash or worse for them to do it. That's why the DoJ isn't getting involved; it's not a collusion, just a business decision based on reasonable costs. You could certainly be irritated by all the bloatware they throw on, but if you're going to wipe it and install Linux then that won't matter, and if not, you get a Windows license for the time it takes to uninstall the cruft.
I propose an alternative - make paedophilia punishable by a bullet to the head, and leave our privacy alone!
This makes little sense, since "pedophilia" is a description of a paraphilia, not a criminal act.
If it wasn't for paedophiles, they wouldn't have this excuse.
If you truly believe that getting rid of one excuse will make any difference whatsoever, then you'll want to look up the definition of "power grab" and take special note that it's not limited to this particular hobgoblin.
I think my proposal solved the problem neatly.
Executing people for "undesirable traits" in the absence of an actual offense has been tried more than once in history, and I defy you to find any single example that even distantly approached "neatly" in that regard. You should really be ashamed of yourself.
No one argues that cell phones don't cause accidents. But then again, no one argues that scissors aren't dangerous weapons that can be used to kill people.
The failure in this comparison is intended use. When one uses a cell phone for its intended use while driving, it causes a stistically significant increase in accidents. When people use scissors for their intended use, it doesn't cause a statistically significant rise in murder. Establishing a law that prevents cell phone use while driving increases public safety. Banning scissors would not do the same. Your comparison therefore fails as a parallel.
Finding the variable strike zone can be handled two ways. For one, you could measure each player's strike zone ahead of their trip to the plate, and then just tell the computer who's at bat and let it watch based on that. For the other, someone in the booth could touch a pen to a monitor in real time once the batter is in stance to tell the computer where the three magic points are (with fourth and fifth "index points" that would be crosshairs painted on the wall behind the plate), and it would process based on that. Either one is technologically trivial to do.
There's one part that's easy to fix. An off-angle pitcher's view camera can be corrected by putting a camera directly above/behind the plate and another looking across the plate at the batter (you'd have to have two for left and right hand batters, of course). With three cameras a computer can trivially correct for the angle of the outfield camera.
The mistake you make here is that school isn't supposed to be a race. The goal of a school should be to make every student who goes through as competent in the material as possible. If that means that they have to find ways to level the playing field so everyone finishes, that's a good thing, because it's not a competition. People can get meritocracy in college if they want it. Primary education should be "one for all and all for one" and if more people actually remembered that, it would work a lot better.
Most people feel that money or no, it's because these people are backed by shady organizations and groups along with links to various terrorist organizations, along with being linked to various slumlords and attempting to silence anyone.
Notwithstanding the fact that this description fits the Roman Catholic Church for most of its history, why does it matter where a "jihadi recruitment center" ends up? It's really comfortable to say that it's about stopping terrorists, but nobody I spoke to ever said squat about stopping terrorists, they didn't want a mosque near "hallowed ground" because they blamed Islam for the 9/11 attacks. Most of the complainers said that relocating the mosque to a different location was acceptable, which puts the lie to your statement that it's about stopping them from setting up a "jihadi recruitment center".
Though you might notice muslims around the world went on a rage, and tried to cut the heads off of people over drawn cartoons.
Way to shine out the bigotry. There were many Muslims offended by cartoons of Mohammed for the same reason that many Cristians were offended by "Piss Christ", and most of those Muslims did what most of the Christians did, which is complain about it. There were a few extremists that called for blood, but so also were there Christians calling for Mapplethorpe to be killed. You've got a lot of nerve calling anyone else a blathering idiot after your transparent attempt to spin identical situations differently.
People do don't they?
Many people have pushed to pass laws forbidding it, and I like the way you conflated nudist hippies with gay pride marchers, even though they're not usually the same people. What was that you said earlier about blathering idiocy?
Let me make the point more clear, then. In all three, people proposed or even passed laws concerning them. It took judges to step in and say that they shouldn't be punished. It may take a judge in this case too, but that doesn't mean that the three situations described above don't parallel this episode very well.
Every year, multiple states try to pass flag desecration laws. I've seen many people who are vocally in favor of these laws start complaining about "runaway political correctness" when something like this shows up. Magnus Pym is quite right that it's startlingly easy to find amazing levels of hypocrisy like this.
Ever walked into a grocery store and had everyone else leave and the clerk refuse to ring up your order? Ever had a car company refuse to sell you a car because you're white? Ever failed to get into a college because there was only one orgnaization in the whole country that would loan you money for school (we'll call it the NAAWP for example) and they ran out of cash before they got to your application? Ever been arrested for using the wrong bathroom, or prevented from voting because you couldn't prove you could read (the test being that they hand you a newspaper printed in Chinese while the black people next to you get a regular English edition)?
This all happened within my lifetime. The grocery store episode happened six years ago. You don't know the first thing about real discrimination. You don't suffer enough from prejudice to understand the opportunities you've got because of your color, and I can only hope you never will. Welcome to the real world.
A rational argument as to why embryonic stem cell research has fallen behind adult stem cell research is that ESC research is such a political football that there's not nearly as much funding. Add in active governmental suppression (read up on what the Bush administration did to it) and there's little doubt that it's running slower than it would in the absence of that. If ASC and ESC research were treated the same there's no telling how far along ESC research would be.
Just drop a random tourist deep into the jungles of Papua-New Guinea and see how long he/she survives.
"Fish out of water" arguments work both ways. Try dropping someone native to the jungles of Papua-New Guinea in the middle of New York City and see how they manage. Or, to make it more "fair" to your concept, drop that same person in Siberia, and he'd freeze just like the tourist. You can't say that a given group is more advanced or better adapted just because they're better in their own home town. The question falls to who would do better on average in a wide variety of circumstances, and that includes navigating heavily populated areas as well as basic survivalism.
So they get to win a war because they're the ones with the greater moral failing? No. The ones who put civilians in harm's way are the ones responsible for their deaths. Don't expect the drone operator or artillery forward observer to know the difference between a coerced family and collaborators.
And so you prove the point that worries me about the parent to my post. Your argument has proven to be complete crap. It's easy to say that from where you sit, but I don't buy it for a second. If you want to be the "good guys" then you don't kill civilians if you can avoid it. Does that make it tougher to win? Sure does. Is it fair? Of course not. That's just tough luck for the good guys. I fully expect the drone operator or forward observer to hold fire if they can't tell the difference between a coerced family or collaborators, because that's the only way to win in the long run. If you take your attitude, the bad guys will specifically start targeting civilians to protect themselves, because they know (and so do minds smarter than you in the military) that blowing up civilians with regularity turns the local populace against your forces, and then many of them become collaborators. In the end, all you'll do is turn Afghanistan into another Vietnam.
Previously, if those 11,000 libraries wanted to be able to lend my book, I would have gotten 11,000 sales. Now, if I interpret this correctly, all those people checking out the book translate into zero sales.
These two sentences don't go together. If a library wants a lending copy, it would buy it. There are your 11,000 sales. Then (whether dead tree or data) they lend out their copy. You wouldn't get sales from lent paper copies any more than you get them from data copies, so all those people checking it out would mean zero sales for hard copies as well. Only people who liked it enough to buy it after they got it from the library would pay for a hard copy, and those people can buy a Kindle copy as well. You could make the argument that every single borrower who checks it out will steal it, but I'd have to see some proof that that's the case before I'd buy it. If someone checks a book out of the library and then likes it so much that they decide they want a copy to reread, it stands to reason that they'd want to support you by buying that copy. It may make it easier to steal the book, but that would be true for every eReader anyway.
Excuses are like butt holes. Everybody has them. "Oh my... I can't do X because of rich/capitalism/white man" BS. My next door neighbor is a single mother working two jobs and going to school to become a RN. She doesn't think working as a waitress it a good long term career option, so she is making the required changes in her life. Capitalism is all about how much you are willing to put into life. Period. Stop blaming society on your problems and do something about it. The USA is the great country it is, because of the entrepreneur spirit.
That's a delightful story up to the point where something outside her control goes wrong. Let her get sick and see how well that dream plays out. What sort of medical benefits package does a waitress going to nursing school have? All it takes is one such event and the "American Dream" can easily fall to pieces because the societal safety nets aren't sufficient to cover the sorts of problems that the majority of Americans run into. I truly wish that capitalism was all about how hard one is willing to work, but I'm not naive enough to think that's the case in reality.
Oh, and I wish your neighbor all the best, but considering that I know several nurses who have no trouble getting jobs but couldn't get a nursing job sufficient to pay for their student loans, I suspect her American Dream just might not have a happy ending, unless you count working two jobs (one of them as a nurse) to be success.
Slashdot Mirror
This only makes sense if the tire had no value. If you assume the word "profit" represents only cash in possession, then you're using a definition of the term that nobody else does.
Virg
Look how he bolsters his qualifications - 15 hours towards a doctorate degree. Gee, I put 16 hours towards my doctorate degree on my first day in the lab.
And yet you have difficulty understanding he's talking about credit hours, not actual hours spent. Fifteen credit hours would represent 4-5 semester long classes at the doctoral level. That's not peanuts.
Virg
Ultimately someone's profit is someone else's loss.
That's about the dumbest thing I've ever read on Slashdot, and having read some very out-there stuff on this site I can't say that lightly. The idea that profit on one side must equal loss on the other is entirely incorrect because value isn't zero-sum on almost all trade anywhere. I can buy a tire from Goodyear for a lot less than I'd have to spend to make it myself, for example, so the fact that they're profiting doesn't reflect a loss on my part. QED.
Virg
Many descriptions of naval tactics involve turning broadside during pursuit, the idea being that the damage you do to the leading vessel will make up for the loss of progress you suffer from doing it. Also, back in sail days ship pursuits could last for days, so what's another twenty minutes if you might cripple your target or convince them to surrender?
Virg
My concern isn't random collection of information so much as directed use of randomly collected information. To give you an example, I leave my fingerprints everywhere. But, that doesn't mean that I'm in every database, because someone can certainly lift my prints off a table in a restaurant but they'd have a hard time tying that to my name unless they could come up with a valid reason to collect them in a controlled manner. Therefore, when a fingerprint is found at a crime scene and the police try to match it to someone, they won't have my fingerprints to compare it to unless I'm a suspect and they have reason to collect my fingerprints as a baseline. That reduces the likelihood of false positives and reduces the odds of corruption as well. On top of that are concerns about how the unscrupulous will use my biometrics and such. Is it really that hard to conceive of someone using face recognition software on everyone involved in one of the Occupy movements to sort people into political groups? Is it hard to conceive that there's someone out there who might use that information to do something like blackmail someone or try to influence an election?
Virg
Or, y'know, discriminatory laws that were around less than forty years ago and prejudicial attitudes that are still very much alive today. Who's fooling who?
Virg
You say it's all untrue, but the statement that the Black Plague is virtually nonexistent is supported by your statement about thousands of cases for billions of people. How exactly does a death toll that probably falls short of onion-related deaths qualify as "losing" to the Black Plague?
Virg
The problem with your argument is that we didn't "lose" to the Black Plague. It killed a lot of Europeans but it was unheard of in most other segments of the world, and the proof in the pudding is that we're here and the Black Plague is virtually nonexistent. The point is that we'll always be fighting this fight, and because dealing with diseases must always be reactionary, we're going to have to deal with outbreaks. MRSA is a real bitch but we'll keep attacking it until we figure out how to beat it. It's been that way with every major disease that's pathogen-based so far.
Virg
I'm glad it cracks you up, but don't be so fast to be smug about it. I've been working with these infernal machines for quite a while and I still type up Google when I want to search. I've got a bookmark but I can Alt-T and type it faster than I can navigate the bookmark. It's my default search engine but the search box isn't displayed on my browser because I don't want to give up the geography for the toolbar. It's not my home page and I clear my browser cruft when it closes so for most sessions it's not in my history list.
Not everyone who does this is too dumb to figure out another way. It's the best way for me. Different strokes and all.
Virg
mind you, before anyone says some bullshit about "well who gets to decide", this is the absolute baseline.
This statement alone shows that you wouldn't line up to your own criteria. "Who gets to decide" when it comes to the measures you describe makes an enormous difference. For example, IQ tests, even these days after decades of work to try to eliminate biases such as language and cultural bias, are still sketchy enough that trained professionals hesitate to say anything about the results except in aggregate. Deciding who knows what the hell they're talking about requires a concensus on what particular level of knowledge is the minimum requirement for understanding an issue, and again you'd have to find some way to keep test designers from biasing the test either purposefully or inadvertently. Finally, deciding what "the right thing" for the people under you is becomes an important part of the process, and has historically led to some pretty out-there side paths like eugenics (whose proponents designed the original IQ tests, by the way) and command economies.
In short, asking "who gets to decide" isn't bullshit, it's central to the problem of using your idea. To invoke Godwin, Adolf Hitler fit all of your criteria in the '30s, based on the statements of German people themselves at the time. It's obvious he failed number three after the fact, but when he came to power it was far from obvious, and your system would have given him the level of power that he ended up developing. If your system can't do better than history at filtering out the obvious bad apples, what use is it?
Virg
RTS is the only genre i see as still being a dominant PC domain. even puzzle games have moved to cellphones.
Have you not heard of World of Warcraft?
Virg
The part that makes it easier for me to take is that, for a pretty sizable majority of laptops, you're not paying for the Windows license. The manufacturer pays a license fee to install Windows on the machine, but then they recover a lot (in more cases than you'd think, all) of that cost from payments that companies give them to preinstall software, like the crippleware DVD burning software or McAMantic antivirus trials. If the manufacturer has to send it out without Windows, they don't pay the license but they don't collect the fees, so it's a wash or worse for them to do it. That's why the DoJ isn't getting involved; it's not a collusion, just a business decision based on reasonable costs. You could certainly be irritated by all the bloatware they throw on, but if you're going to wipe it and install Linux then that won't matter, and if not, you get a Windows license for the time it takes to uninstall the cruft.
Virg
I propose an alternative - make paedophilia punishable by a bullet to the head, and leave our privacy alone!
This makes little sense, since "pedophilia" is a description of a paraphilia, not a criminal act.
If it wasn't for paedophiles, they wouldn't have this excuse.
If you truly believe that getting rid of one excuse will make any difference whatsoever, then you'll want to look up the definition of "power grab" and take special note that it's not limited to this particular hobgoblin.
I think my proposal solved the problem neatly.
Executing people for "undesirable traits" in the absence of an actual offense has been tried more than once in history, and I defy you to find any single example that even distantly approached "neatly" in that regard. You should really be ashamed of yourself.
Virg
No one argues that cell phones don't cause accidents. But then again, no one argues that scissors aren't dangerous weapons that can be used to kill people.
The failure in this comparison is intended use. When one uses a cell phone for its intended use while driving, it causes a stistically significant increase in accidents. When people use scissors for their intended use, it doesn't cause a statistically significant rise in murder. Establishing a law that prevents cell phone use while driving increases public safety. Banning scissors would not do the same. Your comparison therefore fails as a parallel.
Virg
Finding the variable strike zone can be handled two ways. For one, you could measure each player's strike zone ahead of their trip to the plate, and then just tell the computer who's at bat and let it watch based on that. For the other, someone in the booth could touch a pen to a monitor in real time once the batter is in stance to tell the computer where the three magic points are (with fourth and fifth "index points" that would be crosshairs painted on the wall behind the plate), and it would process based on that. Either one is technologically trivial to do.
Virg
There's one part that's easy to fix. An off-angle pitcher's view camera can be corrected by putting a camera directly above/behind the plate and another looking across the plate at the batter (you'd have to have two for left and right hand batters, of course). With three cameras a computer can trivially correct for the angle of the outfield camera.
Virg
The mistake you make here is that school isn't supposed to be a race. The goal of a school should be to make every student who goes through as competent in the material as possible. If that means that they have to find ways to level the playing field so everyone finishes, that's a good thing, because it's not a competition. People can get meritocracy in college if they want it. Primary education should be "one for all and all for one" and if more people actually remembered that, it would work a lot better.
Virg
Most people feel that money or no, it's because these people are backed by shady organizations and groups along with links to various terrorist organizations, along with being linked to various slumlords and attempting to silence anyone.
Notwithstanding the fact that this description fits the Roman Catholic Church for most of its history, why does it matter where a "jihadi recruitment center" ends up? It's really comfortable to say that it's about stopping terrorists, but nobody I spoke to ever said squat about stopping terrorists, they didn't want a mosque near "hallowed ground" because they blamed Islam for the 9/11 attacks. Most of the complainers said that relocating the mosque to a different location was acceptable, which puts the lie to your statement that it's about stopping them from setting up a "jihadi recruitment center".
Though you might notice muslims around the world went on a rage, and tried to cut the heads off of people over drawn cartoons.
Way to shine out the bigotry. There were many Muslims offended by cartoons of Mohammed for the same reason that many Cristians were offended by "Piss Christ", and most of those Muslims did what most of the Christians did, which is complain about it. There were a few extremists that called for blood, but so also were there Christians calling for Mapplethorpe to be killed. You've got a lot of nerve calling anyone else a blathering idiot after your transparent attempt to spin identical situations differently.
People do don't they?
Many people have pushed to pass laws forbidding it, and I like the way you conflated nudist hippies with gay pride marchers, even though they're not usually the same people. What was that you said earlier about blathering idiocy?
Virg
Let me make the point more clear, then. In all three, people proposed or even passed laws concerning them. It took judges to step in and say that they shouldn't be punished. It may take a judge in this case too, but that doesn't mean that the three situations described above don't parallel this episode very well.
Every year, multiple states try to pass flag desecration laws. I've seen many people who are vocally in favor of these laws start complaining about "runaway political correctness" when something like this shows up. Magnus Pym is quite right that it's startlingly easy to find amazing levels of hypocrisy like this.
Virg
Ever walked into a grocery store and had everyone else leave and the clerk refuse to ring up your order? Ever had a car company refuse to sell you a car because you're white? Ever failed to get into a college because there was only one orgnaization in the whole country that would loan you money for school (we'll call it the NAAWP for example) and they ran out of cash before they got to your application? Ever been arrested for using the wrong bathroom, or prevented from voting because you couldn't prove you could read (the test being that they hand you a newspaper printed in Chinese while the black people next to you get a regular English edition)?
This all happened within my lifetime. The grocery store episode happened six years ago. You don't know the first thing about real discrimination. You don't suffer enough from prejudice to understand the opportunities you've got because of your color, and I can only hope you never will. Welcome to the real world.
Virg
A rational argument as to why embryonic stem cell research has fallen behind adult stem cell research is that ESC research is such a political football that there's not nearly as much funding. Add in active governmental suppression (read up on what the Bush administration did to it) and there's little doubt that it's running slower than it would in the absence of that. If ASC and ESC research were treated the same there's no telling how far along ESC research would be.
Virg
Just drop a random tourist deep into the jungles of Papua-New Guinea and see how long he/she survives.
"Fish out of water" arguments work both ways. Try dropping someone native to the jungles of Papua-New Guinea in the middle of New York City and see how they manage. Or, to make it more "fair" to your concept, drop that same person in Siberia, and he'd freeze just like the tourist. You can't say that a given group is more advanced or better adapted just because they're better in their own home town. The question falls to who would do better on average in a wide variety of circumstances, and that includes navigating heavily populated areas as well as basic survivalism.
Virg
So they get to win a war because they're the ones with the greater moral failing? No. The ones who put civilians in harm's way are the ones responsible for their deaths. Don't expect the drone operator or artillery forward observer to know the difference between a coerced family and collaborators.
And so you prove the point that worries me about the parent to my post. Your argument has proven to be complete crap. It's easy to say that from where you sit, but I don't buy it for a second. If you want to be the "good guys" then you don't kill civilians if you can avoid it. Does that make it tougher to win? Sure does. Is it fair? Of course not. That's just tough luck for the good guys. I fully expect the drone operator or forward observer to hold fire if they can't tell the difference between a coerced family or collaborators, because that's the only way to win in the long run. If you take your attitude, the bad guys will specifically start targeting civilians to protect themselves, because they know (and so do minds smarter than you in the military) that blowing up civilians with regularity turns the local populace against your forces, and then many of them become collaborators. In the end, all you'll do is turn Afghanistan into another Vietnam.
Virg
Previously, if those 11,000 libraries wanted to be able to lend my book, I would have gotten 11,000 sales. Now, if I interpret this correctly, all those people checking out the book translate into zero sales.
These two sentences don't go together. If a library wants a lending copy, it would buy it. There are your 11,000 sales. Then (whether dead tree or data) they lend out their copy. You wouldn't get sales from lent paper copies any more than you get them from data copies, so all those people checking it out would mean zero sales for hard copies as well. Only people who liked it enough to buy it after they got it from the library would pay for a hard copy, and those people can buy a Kindle copy as well. You could make the argument that every single borrower who checks it out will steal it, but I'd have to see some proof that that's the case before I'd buy it. If someone checks a book out of the library and then likes it so much that they decide they want a copy to reread, it stands to reason that they'd want to support you by buying that copy. It may make it easier to steal the book, but that would be true for every eReader anyway.
Virg
Excuses are like butt holes. Everybody has them. "Oh my... I can't do X because of rich/capitalism/white man" BS. My next door neighbor is a single mother working two jobs and going to school to become a RN. She doesn't think working as a waitress it a good long term career option, so she is making the required changes in her life. Capitalism is all about how much you are willing to put into life. Period. Stop blaming society on your problems and do something about it. The USA is the great country it is, because of the entrepreneur spirit.
That's a delightful story up to the point where something outside her control goes wrong. Let her get sick and see how well that dream plays out. What sort of medical benefits package does a waitress going to nursing school have? All it takes is one such event and the "American Dream" can easily fall to pieces because the societal safety nets aren't sufficient to cover the sorts of problems that the majority of Americans run into. I truly wish that capitalism was all about how hard one is willing to work, but I'm not naive enough to think that's the case in reality.
Oh, and I wish your neighbor all the best, but considering that I know several nurses who have no trouble getting jobs but couldn't get a nursing job sufficient to pay for their student loans, I suspect her American Dream just might not have a happy ending, unless you count working two jobs (one of them as a nurse) to be success.
Virg