He's full of it. Charles Stross is an excellent writer, whom I will seek out and read. If he's not on Kindle/Amazon at some reasonable price THEN I WON'T BUY FROM AMAZON. Its just like you say here with buying a paperback, I will buy an iPad or whatever the heck it takes to get Charlie's books.

The TRUE analogy here would be ESPN and Comcast. Every so often ESPN TELLS COMCAST how much they're paying for their channel, AND COMCAST PAYS IT. So, Charles, this is what you do, you tell Amazon what you ARE GOING TO GET for a royalty, and they will pass it on to me, or someone else will. Its just that simple.

Honestly, I don't see how Amazon has more or less leverage than any other publisher has ever had. Publisher's have a good bit of weight in the market and they pretty well dictate what up-and-coming authors are going to get (and hint, it was always crap in case you forgot Chuck). However when you're Charles Stross or Steven King, etc then you pretty much have the shoe on your foot and do the kickin'. Just like Ace is going to suck it up and pay a nice advance and a good royalty or else you'll go to Tor, so Amazon will to or else you'll go to Apple.

As time goes on this becomes less and less of a problem as well because eReaders are now pretty much a generic hardware commodity and little private walled-gardens like Apple and Kindle are really fairly silly. The whole book technology stack just isn't that daunting, In a week a guy like me can have a publisher up and running with an app that will let their customers pay for and access ebooks over the net. Yes, Amazon is big and they are slick and they'll always be an attractive marketplace, but the barriers to entry are now too low to let them rake everyone over the coals and get high monopoly rents.

The difference between propanol and ethanol is trivial in this context. Actually the shorter chain molecule is going to be a slightly better drying agent by mass.

Fuel drying additive IS anhydrous ethyl/methyl alcohol. That's what alcohol does is dissolve the water. The problem is its also hygroscopic, so it will pull water right out of the air. The upshot is the ethyl in E10 can dry out the gas, but it can also attract more moisture. Adding drygas will do the same thing, you don't want either one to sit in your tank for a long time if you can help it.

Lots of factors are involved, but the fundamental weakness is when people haven't been taught how to THINK. Well, thinking is dangerous to the status quo so of course you can trace some things back to various parties. The truth is though, most of it is just human nature. Human society is flawed because human beings aren't well-adapted to participating in a globe-spanning civilization such as our own. Its failure seems almost inevitable really.

When half the people stopped voting and much of the other half got so poor an education that they can't distinguish between truth and bullshit.

And we all know it. Nobody gets to be head of the FCC and is so stupid they cannot understand how ANY PAID PRIORITY invalidates the whole concept of network neutrality. We need to keep hammering on these fuckers until we have (at least) retail ISPs under Title II and that's ALL there is to it.

This is a nice book

http://www.amazon.com/The-Engi...

I've done plenty of dieting and I have enjoyed plenty of meat at earlier times in my life. Really though, admit it, all the "rar I'm a carnivore!" people ARE afraid to validate the contrary finding, that they've been eating badly and hurting themselves and could have enjoyed equally tasty food that was a lot healthier. Its like climate change, all the people driving SUVs want it to not exist. Just the way we humans are.

But you misapprehend me if you think I don't believe that people DO enjoy meat. That's not really a debatable point. Sure they do. They'd just be healthier and get equal enjoyment other ways.

Oh don't be ridiculous. I never claimed that everyone has my tastes etc. that's just your unwarranted assumptions. There is a vast array of foods that fall into the category of vegetarian or vegan, surely everyone's tastes can be accommodated. All I'm really saying is that most people have rejected "pseudo meat", not properly prepared and unabashedly vegetarian food, which they have often never experienced. Imitation hot dogs made of tofu are not the sin-qua-non of vegetarian, they kinda suck if you ask me. OTOH there are very good dishes you can find, IF you know where to look. Sadly in the US all you get are the tofu hot dogs.

Right, the no-meat version is better ;) If its cooked well, which the Chinese can do since they've been cooking this way for 1000's of years, then you get a very good result. If your criteria for good food is limited to "It must be meat or exactly like meat to be good" then you're of course setting up nothing but failure. I think people mostly don't want to enjoy their non-meat meals, they COULD, but they'd feel like maybe they weren't eating well before. Its scary.

You can't compare 15 billion of one to 3 billion of the other. Its not at all clear that the Earth can sustain 3 billion or even 1 billion meat eaters. It is absolutely clear that a given number of people will have less impact if they don't eat meat. So I think your 'point' is not meaningful.

The health advantages are entirely clear, there's just a huge business dedicated to meat eating that obscures the facts. Read the survey of health outcomes in China (the 'China Study' as it T Colin Powell calls it). The results are clear, the people NOT EATING MEAT had drastically reduced cardiac disease (about 1/7 as much) as the people who ate meat at all. Most of the benefit arises at basically zero animal protein.

Well obviously you didn't do it right! Sheesh! ;) Really though, meat is just not a very useful part of the diet.

Yeah, go to China and try the actual cooking there. Its nothing like what you're probably getting in the US.

My real point is that if people are feeding you tofu and telling you "this is supposed to be like meat" then they're doing it wrong. It should be its own thing, and in its own right can provide just as much eating pleasure as all these meat products. What I have found is that I can always find some enthusiasm for eating those things, but that once I don't eat the meat products I actually find them unpalatable.

I wouldn't eat test tube meat for the same reason I don't eat 'real' meat, its not healthy. The best available scientific evidence (not opinions, evidence) indicates that health increases as meat intake declines all the way to 0 and most of the benefit happens right near zero.

As for the wonders of this or that hunk of burnt flesh... try eating other things. My real point is that I don't get why people are fixed on trying to imitate food X with food Y when food Y has its own virtues if you just stop fixating on "I must eat something just like X". You really don't. There's a whole world of good food out there that your typical meat-obsessed American is ignorant of that they should be eating and can very much enjoy. There's no need to keep trying to make ersatz hot dogs and chickens out of it.