Amazon still charges ebook publishers the same “delivery fee” for each sold digital copy (US$0.15/megabyte) as it did in the mid 2000s when Kindles came with 3g chips.
Maybe the technical requirements at the time were a good excuse but as soon as you demonstrate the market will tolerate that why on earth would you remove it?
To turn around the famous quote: "Amazon's margin is someone else's opportunity". :)
The Amazon flywheel is all about reducing costs to consumers. The moment that stops happening, consumers can get caught by offers elsewhere, and the flywheel can start to go backwards.
That's not exactly true, they expanded the free tier from 1 to 100GB/mo (1TB/mo out of CloudFront) and dropped egress from ~20c/GB to ~9c/GB. This was due to pressure from the Bandwidth Alliance formed by all the other Clouds and spearheaded by Cloudflare.
> Japanese knotweed tubes (don’t grow it yourself, it’s highly invasive)
Last year I was lamenting to a neighbor that bamboo doesn't survive the harsh winters where we live. He disputed that.
"There's some growing down the road, next to the ditch," he said. "It comes back every year. It's everywhere."
I was wondering what the heck he was talking about and then I realized it was Japanese knotweed. The segmented branches do look like thin bamboo, and he claimed that at one time it was sold at the local garden center as "bamboo."
We cloned Google Calendar, but it's Jeffrey Epstein's schedule from the past 20 years.
We're calling it JCal.
Made by the amazing @whosmatu and a new round of document processing from @reductoai's @omeeze
The most dense and interesting months are around 2016, where you see tons of his flights, meetings with prominent people, and medical appointments.
In 2016 he had a 3 hour CPR training with his girlfriend and staff
These notes are generated by us based on the emails they were attached to. As we try to do with all Jmail apps, just click on the sources to see for yourself.
Calendar event search is not yet ready, and there are likely even more events to infer from his text messages and elsewhere. The archive is continuing to grow!
When you meet someone, you assess them on two dimensions. The first is warmth - do you believe they mean you well? The second is competence - do you believe they're capable?
Well, sometimes.
At other times, the assessment may be based on signalling, tribalism, perception of status, personal connections, career connections, transactional goals, or other criteria.
Some people don't have or can't show warmth. Or they don't have the ability to "crack a joke at the right time" or make small talk. Should that be held against people when making assessments?
Not so in Taiwan’s east coast and rift valley, and sometimes in the lowlands. Regular road and rail washouts and sometimes whole bridges wash away. Southern cross island highway was closed for years the last time I visited the area.
I used to work as a technology journalist. A guy from the business side always used to say, “there’s no way we are leaving money on the table“ as justification for putting ad modules, video players, lead generation forms and other junk around our articles. We had no say in the matter.
Someone from the financial times did a test about the impact of this garbage on read times and brand loyalty. This was maybe 15 years ago. Of course the more ads shoehorned onto the page, the worse the metrics were.
developers from the West see no problem with clearly stating their opposition to a topic and listing the reasons why they oppose it—in many ways, this is seen as good, clear communication. This style can sometimes be jarring to Japanese speakers, who generally prefer to avoid anything that could be taken as blunt or confrontational.
This was buried at the end of the essay, but is one of the most important points.
I worked (not as a developer) in a company that was acquired by a Japanese company. Meetings were structured, and debate was kept to a minimum. If there was disagreement (typically framed as a difference of opinion or conflicting goals) there would be an effort to achieve some sort of balance or harmony. If the boundary was not hard, it was possible to push back. Politely.
Also, if Japanese colleagues expressed frustration, or were confrontational, that was a red flag that some hard boundary had been crossed. This was extremely rare, and replies had to be made in a very careful, respectful way.
From what I understand, it’s not so much that all disagreement is to be avoided entirely, but rather that it should be done on an individual level prior to the meeting. So the fundamental difference is that a western company may use the meeting as an opportunity to discuss and debate an issue, whereas that process is done before the meeting in Japanese corporate culture.
Yeah, the concept of "nemawashi" (根回し) is very important there, this idea that all the groundwork and decision making is agreed upon before the meeting happens.
The term literally comes from the concept of "preparing the roots", that is, the process of softening the ground and trimming around the roots of a tree (often a bonsai) in preparation for moving it safely.
> In Japan and in many East Asian cultures, debate is behind closed doors.
East Asia consists of only 4 countries, two of them (China and Taiwan) sharing the bulk of their main language.
In the other 3 East Asian countries, meetings being for ceremony isn't nearly as pronounced as in Japan. Plenty of meetings where discussion are had and new decisions are made.
> When the rule of law degrades into pay-to-play politics, the inevitable result is a mass exodus of both capital and top-tier talent.
No, it's not inevitable. What you've described is the way a lot of authoritarian states work, such as China. China attracts plenty of capital and external talent, including people from other countries such as Taiwan and the United States. You have be all-in on the CCP's rules, though.
Vietnam operates in a similar way. Untold billions of FDI in the past 20 years from Japan, the U.S. and China. Talk with top executives there, and you'll frequently find close connections or family ties with leaders in Hanoi.
https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200634500
reply