If you care about the author, navigate to their website and buy a book directly from them, or a tshirt or something. Then they'll actually get paid, unlike from a library loan, or the scraps that Amazon gives them (unless the author depends on Amazon's print on demand for all prints of their books in which case, I guess buy it from Amazon).
In order for the writer not to starve, we must bypass the zillionaires.
Send pennies directly to the artist and work for a just society.
I'd prefer a complete bypass of the enshittified economy. Replaced with a system that doesn't trust that people with absolute power won't turn into narcissist cunts.
We've seen this waterfall of a system in communism, capitalism and more recently technofeodalism so one would think the logical solution would be to replace it with a grassroots up system.
> I'd prefer a complete bypass of the enshittified economy. Replaced with a system that doesn't trust that people with absolute power won't turn into narcissist cunts.
I've been running a co-op for about 4 years now and I really want to expand the model since it seems to be working really well. Turns out giving everyone in the company ownership and an equal say in what we do with our profits (including simply redistributing it to everyone) results in ridiculously hard working people. I'm trying to leverage this into making our own internal product development happen but am kinda stuck coming up with ideas.
Anyway someone interviewed me recently and was asking, "why don't more companies form as co-ops? What's the hidden downsides?" I was surprised that there was this suspicion that there must be some sneaky hidden downside, when in fact co-ops are more sustainable, have lower turnover, higher profit per person, and happier employees. There's no actual downside, it's literally all upsides - oh, except for the fact that there's no way to get obscenely rich as the owner of a co-op. That's it, that's the entire reason. People with capital start companies so they can exploit labor to get even more capital, and only people with capital have enough time and money to start companies, so thus there's not many co-ops.
> replace it with a grassroots up system.
This is basically how Marx wrote about Communism, and how Kropotkin wrote about Anarchist Communism. There have been many... interpretations... of their work in practice. Spanish anarchist syndicalism actually worked remarkably well, they had nearly their entire economy syndicalized before they were betrayed by the communists and then killed en masse by the fascists.
> Waiting in line in a library app is annoying, but the waiting signals demand, which drives the library to buy more copies to circulate.
This is not true for digital libraries. They do not "buy more copies" to circulate. They don't physically send you an USB Stick with a copy of the book and you send that back without making a copy. They can send everyone "in line" as many copies as they want. Whats the size of an ebook these days? 1MB? How many trillion copies could you make in a day?
You have to wait in line to hopefully someday maybe be allowed to read a copy of a book while meta torrents a petabyte of books for their AI usage. This is nothing but a humiliation ritual.
The credit card thing doesn't surprise me. I expect United makes a ton of revenue from the card. With how credit card transaction fees are capped in Europe, I doubt it's worth it for European airlines to bother pushing their branded card much, if they even have one in the first place.
I was on a Virgin Atlantic flight last week, and while there weren't ads before the safety video, there were three ads before every movie I tried to watch... and it was the same three ads each time.
I flew Turkish in October, and was annoyed to find the movies and TV shows heavily censored, including blanking out or dubbing over minor swear words. It was also wild to see the Qur'an in the entertainment system's reading library. (No judgement there, just notable as I've never seen the Christian Bible present on other airlines.)
I think you're just falling victim to the usual thing where what you're used to feels normal, and everything else seems weird. I've definitely experienced the same as an American, when flying on European, Latin American, and Asian airlines.
Interesting; I just flew Virgin Atlantic for the first time a week ago (SFO->LHR) and found the experience aggressively mediocre. Reservation management and check-in experience with their app was the hottest of hot garbage, boarding was slow, in-flight meal below average, general comfort just kinda okay. No complaints about the crew, at least.
I generally fly United (while they are also aggressively mediocre, they mostly fly direct to the places I need them to, and their pricing is generally good on the routes I take), and I'd honestly rate United higher than Virgin Atlantic, which surprised me. Maybe my single experience was a fluke, but it was a really bad first impression.
And I say this as someone who absolutely adored Virgin America back when it existed. Bizarre that the two could be so different.
Checked luggage is lost luggage, in my experience. I think I've only checked maybe two or three bags in the past 20 years (after two lost-luggage incidents prompted me to switch to a carry-on-only packing regimen), and then only because I needed to transport liquids in excess of the in-cabin allowance.
I also like to leave the airport after my plane arrives, not stand around a conveyor belt for some unguessable amount of time.
But I get your frustration; I'm the kind of person who barely breaks stride out of the aisle and into my row as I sling my bag up into the bin. It makes me want to scream when someone is standing there in the aisle for 30+ seconds, holding up the boarding process.
Then again, the airlines are to blame as well, most of them having terribly inefficient boarding processes.
Waiting in line in a library app is annoying, but the waiting signals demand, which drives the library to buy more copies to circulate.
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