Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with
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@HardwareGeek said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Failure in what sense?
I was commenting on his brain fart that likens Walmart to central planning. He does this because it's a big organization that makes plans and long term contracts or something and so proves that centrally planned economies can work.
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@boomzilla Yeah, I replied to your post, but my question (which was mostly rhetorical) was more about @LaoC's statement than your response to it.
Edit: Ah, my sarcasm detector hasn't had enough caffeine, yet.
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@Zenith said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Night classes? What are those?
After high school, I worked full time and then drove a half-hour (eating dinner while I drove; I was young and stupid) to community college. I took calculus, physics, CS and art as night classes during that time. My FORTRAN and assembly classes were night classes. After 2 or 3 years of that, I went to community college full-time and worked part-time on campus. I don't recall taking any night classes during that time. Then I transferred to university, where I took classes whenever I could fit them in my schedule, because scheduling was a nightmare and the classes you wanted to take at the times you wanted to take them were guaranteed to either conflict with another class you needed or be full. I don't recall specifically what night classes I took, but I definitely took some.
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@dangeRuss said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
I seem to remember the books having a new edition every few years just so they can keep you from buying the used ones.
And the used ones were often not that much cheaper anyways - at least thru the bookstore. (As I remember, most of the books were around $60-80 - this was in the early/mid-80s.)
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@dcon Right around the end of my school years, I read of a guy who was importing large volumes of Korean market textbooks at bargain prices. I read about it because he was being sued by publishers for breaking some sort of IP agreement like region coding on DVDs to do it.
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@HardwareGeek said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
After high school, I worked full time and then drove a half-hour (eating dinner while I drove; I was young and stupid) to community college.
I worked full time on 3rd shift and took afternoon, early evening, and weekend classes at community college. Took 2.5 yr to get my Associates Degree. Mainly because I didn't start my first year until Jan - and ran into the usual 'required class not offered this quarter' thing.
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@dcon I don't think they offered any weekend classes, not that I remember, anyway. I never did get an Associate degree. I only needed two classes, Biology and some kind of health thing. I don't remember why I didn't take the health class, but I intentionally avoided the bio class, because every bio class had a lab. I like slices of dead animal on my dinner plate, but I don't want the be the one who slices them. And I didn't care about the useless Associate degree in the slightest, since I was transferring to uni for a 4-year degree. (At uni, I managed to fulfill the life science requirement with a Zoology class that didn't have a lab. Supposedly, I could also have used the "Natural History of the Sierra Nevada" class I took the previous summer, but I never bothered getting a transcript for that.)
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
It's pretty common for full-time degree to only have 20h of classes per week.
When I was an undergraduate, we had close to 50 hours a week of lectures, labs and tutorials. Including Saturdays.
OTOH, terms were only 8 weeks long.
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@HardwareGeek said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
since I was transferring to uni for a 4-year degree
I did do that - managed to get a full tuition scholarship for the first year based on my college grades. And everything transferred nicely so it only took 2 more years.
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@cvi said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Same with a lot of CS students these days, they only get to code. I feel somethings missing if you never had to solve a practical problem where messing up has at least some minor consequences (we once accidentally flooded a lab).
That's why the robotics classes are interesting.
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@Zenith said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@dcon Right around the end of my school years, I read of a guy who was importing large volumes of Korean market textbooks at bargain prices. I read about it because he was being sued by publishers for breaking some sort of IP agreement like region coding on DVDs to do it.
First sale doctrine? Just gets in the way of juicy profits!
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@dcon said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@HardwareGeek said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
since I was transferring to uni for a 4-year degree
I did do that - managed to get a full tuition scholarship for the first year based on my college grades. And everything transferred nicely so it only took 2 more years.
The only scholarship I ever got (that I can recall; if I got anything else, it was for a trivial amount of money) was a one-time scholarship of $500 from the company my dad worked for. Got my picture in the company newsletter and everything, along with a girl who was also given one; it was the first time the company had given scholarships to employees' kids.
I got into an honor society based on my transfer grades, but no scholarships.
My dad made too much money and/or had too much in the bank to qualify for financial aid (never mind that he was in his 60s at the time and that was all he had (not much) for retirement). So my time at uni was financed mostly by First Bank of Dad, supplemented by my part-time work. (But apart from a few hundred dollars on a credit card, no debt. So yay for that.)
We won't talk about how many years it took to finish. Between classes that didn't transfer, the ever-popular "required class not offered this quarter", taking some classes again because I either didn't pass, or just barely passed but wanted a better grade on my record and/or didn't learn enough to be successful in the next class, taking way too long to finish my senior project/thesis, and taking some classes I didn't need, I took many years to complete my degree.
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@Gribnit said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@BernieTheBernie said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gribnit said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@LaoC said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@LaoC said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gribnit said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@e4tmyl33t said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
And why would it need to be a "menu" as such? Just arrange for weekly/bi-weekly deliveries of a bunch of vegetables, some varied meats, etc. and the people can make what they want with them.
Still fails. Central planning more granular than thevery high level (power of purse, contract onerousness, rights) is fail. It can't scale properly.
Hence the utter failure that is Walmart.
Fun fact--purchasing/stocking decisions are largely up to individual store owners (out of the pool of things corporate will supply). You get large variation even between stores in the same town
Out of the centrally planned "menu" that depends on often very long-term contracts with suppliers, yes. Of course. "Send 10,000 cans of baked beans to every store" is 1950s planning when telegraphing stocks and sales even on a weekly basis would have been far too much work but totally stupid today. Corporate still makes the decision to make say a new 5-year contract with Dell or take Tamagotchis off the menu. And importantly there's no market involved in the distribution of things within this 2M employee economy that's larger than some nation states.
What kind of ice cream can I get in the new world?
Durian (also called "stink fruit"). Millions of non-white people know that it has great taste.
This does not sound like good ice cream.
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@dkf said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
It's pretty common for full-time degree to only have 20h of classes per week.
When I was an undergraduate, we had close to 50 hours a week of lectures, labs and tutorials. Including Saturdays.
OTOH, terms were only 8 weeks long.
I took some stuff over summer and the schedule was similar. I think it was about 5 hours of lecture per class per week. IIRC, I took an Advanced Linear Algebra class (basically linear algebra, except you wrote proofs for everything instead of learned how to calculate stuff) and a corporate finance class.
The homework pace was brutal for the Linear Algebra course.
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@BernieTheBernie said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gribnit said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@BernieTheBernie said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gribnit said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@LaoC said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@LaoC said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gribnit said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@e4tmyl33t said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
And why would it need to be a "menu" as such? Just arrange for weekly/bi-weekly deliveries of a bunch of vegetables, some varied meats, etc. and the people can make what they want with them.
Still fails. Central planning more granular than thevery high level (power of purse, contract onerousness, rights) is fail. It can't scale properly.
Hence the utter failure that is Walmart.
Fun fact--purchasing/stocking decisions are largely up to individual store owners (out of the pool of things corporate will supply). You get large variation even between stores in the same town
Out of the centrally planned "menu" that depends on often very long-term contracts with suppliers, yes. Of course. "Send 10,000 cans of baked beans to every store" is 1950s planning when telegraphing stocks and sales even on a weekly basis would have been far too much work but totally stupid today. Corporate still makes the decision to make say a new 5-year contract with Dell or take Tamagotchis off the menu. And importantly there's no market involved in the distribution of things within this 2M employee economy that's larger than some nation states.
What kind of ice cream can I get in the new world?
Durian (also called "stink fruit"). Millions of non-white people know that it has great taste.
This does not sound like good ice cream.
"Asian delight" sounds like some kind of sexual euphemism straight from Urban Dictionary.
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@BernieTheBernie said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Look:
So interesting. Much wow.
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@boomzilla said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
The homework pace was brutal for the Linear Algebra course.
I found Linear Algebra was brutal, period, regardless of the pace. The only reason I passed it was that the instructor had the stupidest grading scheme I've ever seen. Pretty much the only way to fail it was to turn in blank papers for every assignment; you could (maybe) pass if you got every single problem wrong, but wrote down enough to look like you tried.
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@dkf said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
So interesting. Much wow.
Picture of a snow storm with a "Do not enter" sign in the middle
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@HardwareGeek said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@boomzilla said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
The homework pace was brutal for the Linear Algebra course.
I found Linear Algebra was brutal, period, regardless of the pace. The only reason I passed it was that the instructor had the stupidest grading scheme I've ever seen. Pretty much the only way to fail it was to turn in blank papers for every assignment; you could (maybe) pass if you got every single problem wrong, but wrote down enough to look like you tried.
Linear Algebra made exactly zero sense when taught by math professors. When I had to use it for quantum mechanics (and other physics settings)? Total sense.
Maybe that's just a sign that my brain is screwed up. After all, QM was never that mysterious or unintuitive to me. A pain to calculate? Sure. But intuitively, it just fit right. Doesn't mean I like it aesthetically, but that's my problem, not its.
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@TimeBandit Can't be ; the sign isn't buried.
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@HardwareGeek said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@TimeBandit Can't be ; the sign isn't buried.
The sign is sculpted into the snow.
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@HardwareGeek said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@boomzilla said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
The homework pace was brutal for the Linear Algebra course.
I found Linear Algebra was brutal, period, regardless of the pace. The only reason I passed it was that the instructor had the stupidest grading scheme I've ever seen. Pretty much the only way to fail it was to turn in blank papers for every assignment; you could (maybe) pass if you got every single problem wrong, but wrote down enough to look like you tried.
I really liked it, and the professor, too. But I also liked number theory and Modern Algebra, which was a year long course you took as a senior. I amused myself by telling people in my business classes that I had algebra homework. They'd scoff and I'd pull out my book.
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@boomzilla I didn't mind linear algebra terribly at the time (it was a fresh breath after a huge pile of analysis with different prefixes). But it took quite a bit of time before I came to appreciate it fully and started to grasp wtf we actually had been doing.
@Benjamin-Hall said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Linear Algebra made exactly zero sense when taught by math professors. When I had to use it for quantum mechanics (and other physics settings)? Total sense.
Same-ish. QM was when all the different things kinda connected. (I hadn't bought the suggested QM course book, but rather gotten an old one from my father. That book took a different approach than the course - while the course focused on a more on manipulating equations with analysis, the book took a bit more of a high-level approach that abstracted details away. That was quite beneficial; I had never really enjoyed pushing symbols forth and back across equations).
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@cvi said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Same-ish. QM was when all the different things kinda connected. (I hadn't bought the suggested QM course book, but rather gotten an old one from my father. That book took a different approach than the course - while the course focused on a more on manipulating equations with analysis, the book took a bit more of a high-level approach that abstracted details away. That was quite beneficial; I had never really enjoyed pushing symbols forth and back across equations).
The QM book we used (at the upper-division level when we were actually mathing for serious) started off with the bra-ket notation and did everything that way, relying mostly on symmetry arguments. It only got annoying once we started having to actually do integrals. So the actual calculations were minimal for the first quarter (of two semesters), but the logic and realizing that there were cheats/identities/symmetries that reduced the problem significantly was considerable. And that got a lot of people stuck. For me, that's the easy part. My formal math skills have always been lacking, but my intuition has always worked well. I do better with math the further away from numbers and direct operations we get. Math is a language, and I can do language. Numbers are evil and want to destroy your soul.
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@HardwareGeek said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@boomzilla said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
The homework pace was brutal for the Linear Algebra course.
I found Linear Algebra was brutal, period, regardless of the pace. The only reason I passed it was that the instructor had the stupidest grading scheme I've ever seen. Pretty much the only way to fail it was to turn in blank papers for every assignment; you could (maybe) pass if you got every single problem wrong, but wrote down enough to look like you tried.
My Calc 4 class combined Linear Algebra with Differential Equations. I didn't have any trouble with the math itself and did well on the individual tests, but tanked half the final because it was comprehensive with no reference material allowed and I had a tough time trying to memorize the very similar sets of formulas used in the DiffEq parts. (I was fine with the matrices.)
It didn't help that it was held on the study day between the last day of classes and when finals were supposed to start and I was finishing the project final for one of my Computer Science classes the night before.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
The QM book we used (at the upper-division level when we were actually mathing for serious) started off with the bra-ket notation and did everything that way, relying mostly on symmetry arguments. It only got annoying once we started having to actually do integrals.
The book that I had, had a similar approach, relying more on the abstraction that brakets provide (along with the duality of being viewable more as linear algebra-ish operators vs operators with a pile of analytical operators). It made it possible to make sense of things a bit more intuitively. The course was taught in a way that started with manipulating the wave equation and similar things; early on we'd be solving it with this potential and that potential. It wasn't an approach that was terribly useful to me.
My formal math skills have always been lacking, but my intuition has always worked well.
Yeah, same.
I do better with math the further away from numbers and direct operations we get. Math is a language, and I can do language. Numbers are evil and want to destroy your soul.
I kinda enjoy numerics and the intricacies that brings, and I've always wanted to put numbers into things to see if what comes out makes sense. (One of my early disappointments was in an initial class on PDEs. We'd been manipulating a certain equation for multiple lectures, when we arrived at some gnarly infinite sum. Lecturer proclaimed that we'd solved the problem after showing that it converges under some circumstances; I just thought that we'd gone from the initial kinda elegant description of the physics to something utterly useless and horrifying.)
What I didn't enjoy was "brute-force" manipulation of equations forth and back just for shits and giggles. E.g., I ended up using Mathematica somewhat exhaustively to do the heavy lifting there. Some professors didn't approve, but the few times it resulted in actual deductions, it was totally worth it.
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@cvi said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
What I didn't enjoy was "brute-force" manipulation of equations forth and back just for shits and giggles.
@error_bot xkcd integration by parts
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@error 99.9999% uptime, eh?
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@error 99.9999% uptime, eh?
That's a funny way to write 55.5555555%.
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@error 99.9999% uptime, eh?
Also, it seems to be networking issues with the server. AFAICT the service is running fine on the server, when I can manage to get an SSH connection through.
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@error_bot uptime
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I have been alive for <time dateTime="PT368H53M5.826S">15 days, 8 hours, 53 minutes, 6 seconds</time>.
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@error said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@error 99.9999% uptime, eh?
That's a funny way to write 55.5555555%.
It's funny that I always happen to be in the other 44.4444445%.
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@error said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@error 99.9999% uptime, eh?
That's a funny way to write 55.5555555%.
It's funny that I always happen to be in the other 44.4444445%.
I was bitching about the outage myself in Status today.
@error said in The Official Status Thread:
Bot status: appears to be down... along with the server.
The server itself was unreachable. The bot process, as you can see, never stopped, and reconnected as soon as network connectivity was restored.
I don't know what you want from me. I can't magically make it connect from offline.
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@error don't take it too seriously, I just like to make fun of how often the bot is down.
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@error said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
I don't know what you want from me.
A fallback mode:
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@error bot feature request: add an integration by parts module
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@cvi said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
What I didn't enjoy was "brute-force" manipulation of equations forth and back just for shits and giggles. E.g., I ended up using Mathematica somewhat exhaustively to do the heavy lifting there. Some professors didn't approve, but the few times it resulted in actual deductions, it was totally worth it.
Undergrad: I mostly just handwaved that part. I knew (intuitively or by symmetry arguments etc) what it boiled down to, so yeah.
Except the one undergrad optics class where we had to show some identities. 3-4 pages of handwritten algebra (with trig identities, and not even using complex exponentials) to show that (big long expression) was equal to 0 for all cases. That was the same professor who, when he wanted to skip unnecessary derivations would write "and a miracle occured" and then the later steps.
Grad: my lazy habits kicked me in the butt. Because I could no longer get away with doing that, especially for edge cases. Stupid minus signs and factors of two....
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Math is a language, and I can do language. Numbers are evil and want to destroy your soul.
Ah, you are a Mathematician type
2β!My truly hated class as an undergraduate was Physical Chemistry, as that involved lots of solving reaction rate equations by hand. Ugh. I hugely preferred the organic chemistry parts (except for the labs) and the purely theoretical parts where we discussed orbital hybridization. (That's the bit where everything started to make proper sense.) Physics had lots of maths with PDEs and linear algebra, but they were easy as I had spent a lot of time at school practicing by that point. And in maths, I was already specializing towards discrete math (the kind most generally useful to CS).
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@dkf said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Ah, you are a Mathematician
Severe insults thread is .
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@boomzilla said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@LaoC said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gribnit said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@e4tmyl33t said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
And why would it need to be a "menu" as such? Just arrange for weekly/bi-weekly deliveries of a bunch of vegetables, some varied meats, etc. and the people can make what they want with them.
Still fails. Central planning more granular than thevery high level (power of purse, contract onerousness, rights) is fail. It can't scale properly.
Hence the utter failure that is Walmart.
TDEMSYR. IIRC, this isn't the first time you've said this, either.
And?
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@Zenith said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@dcon Right around the end of my school years, I read of a guy who was importing large volumes of Korean market textbooks at bargain prices. I read about it because he was being sued by publishers for breaking some sort of IP agreement like region coding on DVDs to do it.
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@topspin said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Zenith said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@dcon Right around the end of my school years, I read of a guy who was importing large volumes of Korean market textbooks at bargain prices. I read about it because he was being sued by publishers for breaking some sort of IP agreement like region coding on DVDs to do it.
First sale doctrine? Just gets in the way of juicy profits!
It's all just there to protect the quality of educashun.
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@error bot feature request: add an integration by parts module
@error bot feature request: add integration using the Risch algorithm.
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@Zenith said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
The campus book store was like GameStop. If you had a $100 book, the used copy was $95 and you could sell it back for $5.
As your comparison shows, it's not exactly specific to textbooks. I was a pretty avid book-buyer when I was a student (less so now, for various reasons) and mostly bought second-hand books (for obvious cost reasons!). I regularly went back to the shop with a backpack full of books I no longer wanted, and in exchange I usually got one, or maybe two books (well, and a lot of other books that I was buying anyway).
And it's not even that somehow all buyers are greedy bastards and rolling on money, as you again witnessed yourself:
I used to list them on Amazon or eBay but trying to get even $10 for any of them was impossible
I think the main issue here is about managing stock. A second-hand bookshop (or any type of second-hand shop) is going to have a lot of deadwood, and the few items they manage to shift have to pay for all the others that they never will.
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@dkf said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@BernieTheBernie said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Look:
So interesting. Much wow.
What did you do? Why do you block lh3.googleusercontent.com?
Or is it google to show you the finger?
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@LaoC said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@boomzilla said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@LaoC said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gribnit said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@e4tmyl33t said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
And why would it need to be a "menu" as such? Just arrange for weekly/bi-weekly deliveries of a bunch of vegetables, some varied meats, etc. and the people can make what they want with them.
Still fails. Central planning more granular than thevery high level (power of purse, contract onerousness, rights) is fail. It can't scale properly.
Hence the utter failure that is Walmart.
TDEMSYR. IIRC, this isn't the first time you've said this, either.
And?
And I'm sure you will again because you seem to actually believe any of it makes sense.
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@boomzilla said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@LaoC said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@boomzilla said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@LaoC said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gribnit said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@e4tmyl33t said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
And why would it need to be a "menu" as such? Just arrange for weekly/bi-weekly deliveries of a bunch of vegetables, some varied meats, etc. and the people can make what they want with them.
Still fails. Central planning more granular than thevery high level (power of purse, contract onerousness, rights) is fail. It can't scale properly.
Hence the utter failure that is Walmart.
TDEMSYR. IIRC, this isn't the first time you've said this, either.
And?
And I'm sure you will again because you seem to actually believe any of it makes sense.
Surely the last rebuttal was equally well argued, so yes.
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@LaoC said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@boomzilla said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@LaoC said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@boomzilla said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@LaoC said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gribnit said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@e4tmyl33t said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
And why would it need to be a "menu" as such? Just arrange for weekly/bi-weekly deliveries of a bunch of vegetables, some varied meats, etc. and the people can make what they want with them.
Still fails. Central planning more granular than thevery high level (power of purse, contract onerousness, rights) is fail. It can't scale properly.
Hence the utter failure that is Walmart.
TDEMSYR. IIRC, this isn't the first time you've said this, either.
And?
And I'm sure you will again because you seem to actually believe any of it makes sense.
Surely the last rebuttal was equally well argued, so yes.
It contained as much argument as you provided, except that it was correct. But please do enlighten us about how you believe Walmart demonstrates the plausibility of central planning of economies if you'd like for a detailed rebuttal.
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@BernieTheBernie said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
What did you do? Why do you block lh3.googleusercontent.com?
Or is it google to show you the finger?I don't know. It just doesn't want to show me anything else.