151–160 of 362 posts
Please stop ...communicating... via ... multiple ... twitter posts... please... ... write an article, blog, book, youtube video anything but these spread out posts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The site has more details in other articles. They're not worth reading. There's no substance just a lot of charged language. And I'm really annoyed at spending any time at all on reading this. The narrators don't get paid by the retail price (and the contract doesn't suggest they would). Basically Audible splits the money spent on credits among the books that the credits were spent on in proportion to the number of c…
Without having read the whole page, I understand form your summary that: A) amazon alone decides when to float credits and their price B) authors are promised a certain rate (40%) of the price, but in reality this credit system destroys that %% completely C) in the end amazon makes always a >60% profit off each book, irrespective of the price sold. D) Their incentive is thus to sell as many units as they can, underpr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get prosecuted when I visit someone's house and don't burn it down when I ring their bell. There is no excuse for this. None.
You didn't like that example of how survivorship bias has zero place in this discussion? Try on the picture of the bullet holes in planes when mounting a defense of reckless and culpable driving occasioning property damage while making your case to the judge that he hasn't heard about all the times the accused did not crash their car despite driving in a woefully incompetent manner... There is ZERO excuse for this. Y…
Fun story. So I'm sitting in court with the other people who are going to fight their ticket. I overhear a woman talking about her case. Remarkably similar to mine. Night, raining, car spun out, reckless driving ticket. Might even have been the exact same location.
If I had known this earlier, I could have compiled a record of all the other people who crashed in the same area under the same circumstances. I in fact absolutely would have used the argument with the judge "look at all the times I didn't crash", along with "look at all the times these other people didn't crash", building to a crescendo of "what are the odds all these people with otherwise clean driving records crashed in this same spot under these same conditions."
Luckily I didn't need to compile the traffic court history of that particular off ramp. I won the case anyway. Got about a third of the way through my stack of papers that I retrieved via FOIL request and online search before the judge interjected. "J: Counselor, are we beating a dead horse here? DA: I think so your honor. J: Mr. IIAOPSW you don't have to prove anything. I'm convinced the prosecution has failed to show sufficient evidence for their case. You're free to go. Me: Thank you kindly your honor."
Don't tell me what would or wouldn't work as a defense before a judge son. I've kicked the DA's ass before and I can do it again.
Your arguments are hyperbolic and you've engaged in a bait and switch. Hyperbolic, because Amazon miscalculating a few cents on a royalty payment isn't nearly on the level of wrongdoing as negligent vehicular manslaughter. Bait and switch because you started from the premise that "the fact that the error always works in Amazon's favor is proof of intentional wrongdoing". But when it was pointed out that you don't actually have evidence that the error always works in Amazon's favor, you switched to "no excuse for this. None. Ever." However, if we agreed to the standard that there's "no excuse for this ever", what's your excuse for all the people who stole from Amazon by accepting over payment for royalties? Why didn't they look at their payment slips, notice they were overpaid, and kindly notify customer service so they could return the money? Remember, in your own testimony you said "there is ZERO excuse for this. You can't accidentally rob people and claim incompetence while pointing to the other times you were incompetent and yet didn't rob people."
Your argument would be ripped to shreds by any competent lawyer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems pretty surprising to me. When the supermarket offers a discount, they don't then turn to their providers and say "since we sold this at a discount, we're going to pay you less for it". The terms on which Amazon want to offer Audiobooks are their business, but as I consumer I certainly wouldn't expect them to affect any downline incomes.
> they don't then turn to their providers and say "since we sold this at a discount, we're going to pay you less for it". Not necessarily because of sales, but one of my parents' neighbours (he was previously a fairly senior guy at a flour manufacturer) spoke from experience of big supermarket retailers "renegotiating" unit price after the fact (and after delaying payment until duress) under the threat of removing al…
I don't doubt that Amazon's practices are shady. Creating obscure and complex pricing plans out of seemingly straightforward fees has become something of an art-form on AWS. Who here has not been hit with an unexpected charge? What I honestly find hard to believe though, is the popularity of audio-books. How do you all focus on the material if you're doing other things? Or am I mistakenly assuming the mode of consump…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But again, I would buy a small fraction of the audiobooks I have purchased at full price. I’ve got ~300 audible books in my library, and I can safely say I’d have bought exactly none of them at full price.
And those promotions should be a cost of Amazon, not the authors. Weird how Amazon can take your product, sell it for a quarter of the price, and then claim they now owe you no money.
If you don't like it, your job is to turn down that offer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're misunderstanding OP. The way Audible book pricing works is a little byzantine. The "list" price of most titles is somewhere in the neighborhood of $50. Plus or minus. But as a subscriber you're given one credit each month, for $15. So right there you can get the same title for much cheaper if it's your credit redemption. But that's not all. If you buy the Kindle edition of a book, it's only $7.50 or so…
If you run out of credits, you can also buy 3 extra for £18 (I'm not sure what the USD price is). That's significantly cheaper than buying 3 audio books at full price. Credits with frequent 2-for-1 sales, £3 sales and £1 sales, there is just no reason to ever pay retail price on Audible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it happens a lot more than people want to acknowledge. I worked on a discount calculating service with no prior knowledge.It was supposed to replicate an existing system, so we went through the oroginal specs and general litterature to get a sense of what we were supposed to make. First day of test with a employee in the field, and it appears that they have specific calculation rules that are so obvious to th…
This is a universal problem, it's so universal that there's even a field of development which solves the problem - Domain-Driven Design. It's not exactly rocket-science either - you basically involve domain experts in the development proces directly, and codify their knowledge in a form that they can understand (be that very explicit models, or focussed domain-specific languages).
An extreme example would be if you're trying to introduce a logistics management system in a shop that was exclusively using pen and paper. You'll need someone with a foot in both world to even get to the point where they can look at your models and/or documentation and say "yes, it matches the business".
Or one of the participant in the project will need to become that person (ideally the client, we can dream).
I used to use Audible, then I got a few public library cards (they're easy to get), and now use Libby on mobile and desktop
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I can totally see that happening. Who develops systems with short term VAT changes in mind? I suppose it's the same codebase as any other country's amazon, and there's a different VAT rate in every country.
VAT is baked into retail prices in Germany. And retail prices are typically either something round or end in .99 or so; ie not arbitrary. So it's unlikely their German prices would just take the same input as eg Dutch prices and changed the VAT around.