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legsarerequired posted:Online shopping makes everything so much easier, but I'm worried about ensuring humane treatment for the contract employees. I don't know what to do besides boycotting companies that have ignored public backlash against their working conditions for drivers/warehouse employees/etc. The main companies I avoid are Ubereats and Amazon, although I'm sure many of them are pretty bad. warehouses are gonna be among the first jobs to be automated away so uh, not so sure about this fear of yours
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# ? Jan 7, 2018 01:04 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 13:47 |
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BrandorKP posted:The cool kids listen to navel poetry sung by improvisational jazz singers... cool kids should just listen to sea shanties in general.
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# ? Jan 7, 2018 01:21 |
Also! Audiobook sales are way up year over year. I think they are increasing 20% every quarter. Everyone has a smartphone, and it’s easy to fit in during your day with chores / commuting. It can be inexpensive with sales or buying extra credits (I think it averages $11 a “credit” which can be cheaper than the new release kindle edition.) That of course wrecks Barnes & Noble since selling physical CDs for $40 is obsolete.
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# ? Jan 7, 2018 03:16 |
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Freakazoid_ posted:cool kids should just listen to sea shanties in general. How about a canoe shanty? https://youtu.be/8W-t2VvocZ8 By a self published mountain man. Music is at the point where even something pretty esoteric is easily obtainable free to very cheap. I will likely never buy music again. I still buy books and ebooks, mostly used physical books but that's only because I love them.
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# ? Jan 7, 2018 03:23 |
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Still not sure how Trans World Entertainment (the parent company of f.y.e. and several other chains) is still in business, to be honest.
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# ? Jan 7, 2018 03:43 |
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Freakazoid_ posted:cool kids should just listen to sea shanties in general. Lol if you think you are cool but somehow don't attend a monthly chantey sing.
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# ? Jan 7, 2018 05:01 |
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withak posted:Lol if you think you are cool but somehow don't attend a monthly chantey sing. Lol if half your record collection isn't gravelly- voiced men singing about drinking and murder
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# ? Jan 7, 2018 05:10 |
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It always makes me sad that norms about men singing in public are what they are. I just get looked at weird down on the waterfront at night.
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# ? Jan 7, 2018 06:04 |
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Paradoxish posted:If it's true that people don't want to buy books, then it's a new trend. Younger people read more than older generations, so if there's some overall decline in reading that's happening then it's something unique to the last year or two People either want the cheapest price for an item they've already researched exhaustively, to peruse an endless panoply of extremely cheap things they might need, or enjoy a full fledged "retail experience" where they drink coffee and wave their hands around. That's it.
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# ? Jan 7, 2018 06:17 |
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got any sevens posted:Pirating games is still the hardest, you also worry about patches and vid card compatibility, etc. Freakazoid_ posted:cool kids should just listen to sea shanties in general. Horseshoe theory posted:Still not sure how Trans World Entertainment (the parent company of f.y.e. and several other chains) is still in business, to be honest. boner confessor posted:stores that only sell books are done. barnes and noble already has a media section, but really the more likely future are physical media stores that sell books, movies, music, etc. for folks who want to have tangible media vs. digital media I think it's just going to come down to the same thing with all of these media stores: They can work at a certain size and in certain markets, but the opportunities are shrinking. There's probably going to be a place for book stores to exist in 2018 and beyond, but as a big-box store, and in as many locations as B&N has, probably not. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 07:25 on Jan 7, 2018 |
# ? Jan 7, 2018 07:22 |
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fishmech posted:Big publishers have been pushing that for many years now, even though they had to stop enforcing it as hard as a result of the massive antitrust cases against them and Apple from when they started doing it. At that price point i say gently caress it and can spend the rest of my life at the library and never run out of books i havent read
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# ? Jan 7, 2018 07:37 |
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got any sevens posted:At that price point i say gently caress it and can spend the rest of my life at the library and never run out of books i havent read Every now and then I come across a book I want, but the e-book is fifteen, twenty, fifty dollars. This is especially true when it comes to niche war books. Now, even if my library doesn't have it, it takes just a few clicks to see if Amazon can hook me up with a used copy. They often can. It's frequently cheaper to get a real copy than a digital one. You'd think easy access to used copies would stop ridiculous price points like the digital versions being MORE expensive than a real brand new hardcover copy. I've seen that a few times, and I wonder what's going on there. NerdyMcNerdNerd fucked around with this message at 08:21 on Jan 7, 2018 |
# ? Jan 7, 2018 08:19 |
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Crow Jane posted:Lol if half your record collection isn't gravelly- voiced men singing about drinking and murder Isnt that what metal is for
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# ? Jan 7, 2018 08:37 |
fishmech posted:No you just go to a certain website, search for the book you want, and click the download links, it's very simple and relatively centralized ever since the thing took off with academic journals being available for free and of course attracted a bunch of fiction and other such books. Most anything popular is very quick to pirate these days. My thing with pirated books is that the book needs to be in a pretty narrow range in order to find it. Want books about computers, sci-fi, and other stuff nerds like? Great, you're sorted, it's all over the place. Outside of that? Good luck. Lucky for me I have access to a very good public library system.
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# ? Jan 7, 2018 09:12 |
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Every time I've went looking for an epub/pdf copy of a book for friends or family I've found it. I'm sure there's a lot of books that aren't available digitally in some form but a hell of a lot of the popular stuff is.
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# ? Jan 7, 2018 11:59 |
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skooma512 posted:My thing with pirated books is that the book needs to be in a pretty narrow range in order to find it. That seems like that was true when books were pirated by someone scanning or typing in a copy of a book, where only stuff the type of person that would scan a book ends up online, now every book is digital anyway so books just get pirated the same way everything gets pirated: someone just buys 10,000 different books from russian amazon on a stolen credit card then uploads them all.
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# ? Jan 7, 2018 15:00 |
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got any sevens posted:Isnt that what metal is for Tons of folk and country as well
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# ? Jan 7, 2018 17:08 |
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Crow Jane posted:Tons of folk and country as well And Tuvan Throat Singing https://youtu.be/p_5yt5IX38I
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# ? Jan 7, 2018 20:59 |
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:You'd think easy access to used copies would stop ridiculous price points like the digital versions being MORE expensive than a real brand new hardcover copy. I've seen that a few times, and I wonder what's going on there. 1.) Price discrimination - They've figured out that people who are searching for digital editions of niche war books are generally more accepting of high prices, so they mark them up because they can. But for a hardcover copy, well, the cost is physically printed on the back cover, so they're kind of limited in their ability to jack up prices. 2.) Human laziness or impatience - Once someone has successfully found the digital edition, they're probably either too lazy to even bother to make the comparison to a physical book or too eager to wait the extra 5 days for the physical book to get shipped, so why not squeeze an extra couple bucks out of their human failings? 3.) For older stuff, since paper copies actually cost money to hold on to, at some point, they start pricing down hard cover copies just to clear a bit of space in their warehouses. You can actually see this in the PC gaming industry all the time - the Digital Edition of a 1.5 year-old game might still cost near-new price (if you don't hit it on a Steam Sale), whereas at a big box store, the hard copies will be buried in a $9.99 discount bin.
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# ? Jan 7, 2018 21:57 |
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That said, it is flatly guaranteed that any single.player game will be at least 25% on sale on Steam within six months to a year. Usually 50% when the first expansion comes out. Steam is really good at marketing.
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# ? Jan 8, 2018 01:04 |
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I went into a Sears at my local mall over the weekend. The register line in the Men's department had a wall of 36-packs of bottled water, five or six baskets of $1.00 women's thongs, and where candy or gift cards would be on the racks they instead had roach killer, bed bug/flea bombs, rat glue traps, and draino for sale. I have no conclusions to draw from this, but it definitely feels a bit... off.
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# ? Jan 8, 2018 22:33 |
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Sundae posted:I went into a Sears at my local mall over the weekend. The register line in the Men's department had a wall of 36-packs of bottled water, five or six baskets of $1.00 women's thongs, and where candy or gift cards would be on the racks they instead had roach killer, bed bug/flea bombs, rat glue traps, and draino for sale. What more would a man need?
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# ? Jan 8, 2018 22:40 |
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Man? No. Their new target demographic is that crazy Internet sex woman who lives in a tent in the forest.
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 17:43 |
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turn all sears into stores that exclusively sell prepper supplies Edit: are there prepper stores besides army surplus?
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 17:59 |
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FCKGW posted:turn all sears into stores that exclusively sell prepper supplies It's weird that there is multiple old sci-fi where the world is ended or ending and everyone needs to go to abercrombie and fitch to stock up. Like in the 40s when it was written they were thinking like, guns and survival tools but now it reads like they want cool outfits.
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 18:07 |
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"Cozy catastrophe" is an old sci-fi writers' workshop term for a story where the world's coming apart at the seams, but the protagonist experiences it as an exciting vacation. The prepper fantasy is just the fantasy of being a rich white guy, in military drag. "If you want to survive the coming apocalypse, you should own land in the country, and build a comfortable house well stocked with food and expensive toys."
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 18:29 |
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this is also why the zombie apocalypse was (is?) so popular, it very unsubtly reinforces that you are a special person and not one of the mindless horde
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 18:43 |
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...and that you can machinegun all the poor people without guilt because they're subhuman, yes.
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 18:47 |
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boner confessor posted:this is also why the zombie apocalypse was (is?) so popular, it very unsubtly reinforces that you are a special person and not one of the mindless horde
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 18:53 |
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so barnes and noble is going the way of gamestop now? With digital distribution/amazon killing sales it seems they've also gone into selling funko pops and board games and stuff. While being able to play board games with a starbucks in the same building would be nice I don't know why people wouldn't just buy the specialty items online.
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 18:53 |
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Magius1337est posted:so barnes and noble is going the way of gamestop now? With digital distribution/amazon killing sales it seems they've also gone into selling funko pops and board games and stuff. While being able to play board games with a starbucks in the same building would be nice I don't know why people wouldn't just buy the specialty items online. They're almost nice enough to be impulse buys. Not quite cheap enough, tho.
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 18:55 |
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FCKGW posted:turn all sears into stores that exclusively sell prepper supplies Costco
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 19:00 |
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There are two sort of mini-Barnes and Nobles around me. Both are connected to colleges, so it's like half textbooks/school supplies/stuff related to the school and half regular book store stuff open to the public. You'd probably have to special order more obscure titles, but it's still nice to have it in the neighborhood.
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 19:02 |
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I always like to stop in to the Barnes and Noble near me and their selection of board games is actually really decent. It's just not really feasible to buy them there when I have a dedicated game shop nearby that sells them for less. e: Come to think of it, I think the only thing I've purchased there in the last few years was a pack of Christmas cards. The Nook display is probably the saddest thing, but the rest of B & N is quite nice.
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 19:06 |
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Halloween Jack posted:Man? No. Their new target demographic is that crazy Internet sex woman who lives in a tent in the forest. Don't doxx me
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 19:10 |
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I went to Bed Bath & Beyond last week and they had an end cap dedicated to selling a USB turntable and they were cross-promoting it with a vinyl copy of a Justin Timberlake album but it isn't his new album. The whole thing was so bizarre so I bought six.
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 19:14 |
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Magius1337est posted:so barnes and noble is going the way of gamestop now? With digital distribution/amazon killing sales it seems they've also gone into selling funko pops and board games and stuff. While being able to play board games with a starbucks in the same building would be nice I don't know why people wouldn't just buy the specialty items online. My local B&N seems to be about 50% kids books and toys right now, and most customers seem to be under 10.
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 19:20 |
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boner confessor posted:this is also why the zombie apocalypse was (is?) so popular, it very unsubtly reinforces that you are a special person and not one of the mindless horde Destrage did a really good song about this. Your uh mileage may vary depending on how much you like metal. I find it kinda weird that this is the way zombie media went since if I'm not totally off the mark the classics in the genre were much more about social critique and less about the being the hero of the wasteland. Like gently caress, did anyone survive a Romero movie?
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 19:24 |
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Great Metal Jesus posted:Destrage did a really good song about this. Your uh mileage may vary depending on how much you like metal. contemporary zombie media is a social critique too, even if it rarely rises above the basic level of "turns out MAN is the greatest MONSTER of all!!!"
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 19:26 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 13:47 |
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zombie stories are a lot of things because it's a super generic concept that has been applied a lot of times by a lot of people
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# ? Jan 9, 2018 19:29 |