Serious question for the authors reading this - if there was a non-exclusive Fediverse e-commerce alternative to self-publishing on Amazon (including print on demand), would you use it?
Second question - what features would you like to see to make it fly? Dream big here - I'd love to hear all your ideas.
Third question - besides the topic of the article above, what does Amazon do wrong for authors? I've got a fair idea, but I really want to hear your thoughts and personal experiences.
Let's call out the particular global investment vampire in this story, KKR - Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, because it's the Count Dracula of hedge funds, and also the company that killed Toys 'R' Us:
This whole thing smelled like enshittification to me, so I kept digging, this time into OverDrive itself. Right away I saw that in June 2020, OverDrive was sold to global investment firm KKR.
With that sentence, my audience just divided into two types of people
- the ones who (like me, usually) pay no particular attention to the world of “high finance”, don’t recognize the moniker, and so had zero reaction,
and
- the ones like my friend who happens to be a business journalist at the New York Times, whose reaction as soon as I said “KKR” was the aural equivalent of the Munch scream.
The private equity firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, I quickly learned, was either the inventor of, or an early pioneer in, basically all the Shitty Business Practices: leveraged buyouts, corporate raiding, vulture capitalism. They’ve been at it since the 1970s and they’re still going strong.
Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile.
KKR was the subject of the famous 1989 book (and subsequent movie) Barbarians at the Gate, in which a pair of investigative journalists from the Wall Street Journal detail what one Times reviewer called the “avarice, malice, and egomania” of KKR’s leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco with “all the suspense of a first-rate thriller”. The ultimate result: KKR’s private equity barons raked in the cash, while thousands of employees were axed and consumer prices of RJR Nabisco products soared.
More recently, KKR teamed up with two other private equity firms to execute a leveraged buyout of Toys ‘R’ Us. They deliberately weighted down the company with a crushing level of debt in order to begin feeding on its profits; they sucked out half a billion dollars as the company staggered along for another dozen years. When Toys ‘R’ Us finally collapsed and died in 2018, the vultures flapped off, unconcerned, leaving 33,000 desperate workers unemployed and without severance.
Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile. They are the World Champions of Grabbing All The Money And Leaving Everyone Else In The Shit.
...and now it's come for your local library.
JFC that's frightening. It blew that red at about 30mph, didn't even really slow down except for the curve.
And of course, it's a political stunt to please Edrogan:
The Kurdish refugee journalist Vedat Yeler has called the eviction and destruction of the Lavrio camp a “NATO gift to [Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan.” The eviction took place only a few days before the summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on July 11 in Vilnius, Lithuania, where both Greece and Turkey were to be present. The two NATO members have wrangled over the Cyprus conflict and territorial disputes in the Aegean Sea for many decades. In mutual populist slander, Turkish politicians have been accusing Greece of harboring “terrorists” in the Lavrio camp and pressuring the Greek state to close it down for years. However, since the re-election of both Erdoğan’s Sunni-nationalist regime in Turkey and Mitsotakis’ New Democracy government in Greece in May and June, 2023, respectively, there has been a shift in bilateral relations between the two countries. During a visit in Cyprus a few days before the eviction, the Greek Foreign Minister expressed a commitment to improve relations with Turkey. The attack on Kurdish political refugees in Greece can be understood as an attempt to showcase these efforts before the NATO summit.
Greece should be ashamed of itself - evicting innocent families at gunpoint to appease a foreign autocrat. I'm not familiar with EU law, but I'm hoping someone in the comments has an analysis and legal case for the Lavrio residents - given that the camp was established community for over 50 years, there has to be some legal recourse they can use to push back.
Brave is not your friend - if they're willing to violate copyright law by secretly scraping websites and then selling the content in their AI, I'm sure they're willing to sell your data if the price is high enough (if they aren't already).
Firefox, on the other hand, has been the most trusted browser since dial-up, and is run by a non-profit. It's an easy choice for me.
It's not necessarily unethical, but it's usually a waste of time. Kinda like Twitter.
The more surprising part of this article is that enough people use Brave to create enough of a dataset to train AI.
I have a feeling that in a future AI society, one trained on Brave data would be considered special needs.
Personally I'd prefer not to have someone speaking for me, despite the supposed anonymity of the accounts. If you post any amount of content, it's likely the account can be linked back to you after the sale, which could prove problematic depending on what the new owner does with it.
But I'm a bit paranoid about such things after experiencing internet stalking. I don't see anything morally wrong with it, just that consequences from the sale might affect me negatively in the future.
My personal ones for corporate use:
Never use I when you can use we.
Even if you're the only one working on a project, never refer to it as yours. Always refer to it as ours.
Don't apologize, present solutions.
Don't say "read my fucking email again you goddamn illiterate moron", say "As previously noted in our communications...."
If Trump takes office without winning the popular vote, it will very likely lead to civil war. Not because the people will rise up to defend Biden, but because his policies are simultaneously cruel, poorly implemented, unjust, and most importantly to the wealthy who run the country, unprofitable. There were a lot of people in the business community who haven't forgotten the China trade war of 2020. And the fact of the matter is that with climate change beginning to have a real affect on the economy, an unsteady hand on the wheel is the last thing Wall Street wants.
Dictators that successfully put such policies in place do so after the fascist state is established to quell dissent. Trump can't even establish a state of denial.
Could he win? Possibly on a electoral vote basis - I think the popular vote is far out of reach for him. But I don't see the country lasting for long if he does - he doesn't have the skill to run a fascist state, much less build one, and he'd be completely out of his depth confronting a real uprising. DeSantis, on the other hand, could build such a state and has been somewhat successful in laying the groundwork in Florida. I don't think Trump will chose him as VP, but if he does, that's a match made in hell.