The Celsius scale isn't that arbitrary. The freezing and boiling points of water are well covered. As well, 1 calorie is the amount of energy it takes to heat 1ml (1 cubic centimetre) of water 1 degree Celsius.

Ultimately, everything is arbitrary, sure, but that's a poor argument to put forthâ"some systems are more consistent than others. Use the system with the greatest internal consistency.

Agnosticism and theism are not incompatible. Agnosticism and atheism are not incompatible. Gnosticism is a statement of knowledge: I *know* that there is a god. Theism is a statement of belief: I *believe* that there is a god. One can be both atheist and agnostic: I *believe* that there is no god, but I do not *know* this for certain. That being said, it seems perfectly rational to be atheist, in light of the utter lack of evidence that an omnipotent, omniscient entity of any kind exists.

Yeah, but this system is taking that sales part away. Books take time to read, and the alotment of funds comes out of a small fixed pool. Where once an author would be able to hustle and just make sure they were good and that people knew about their new work, this pool makes sure that they take less away. Exposure means a lot less with a system like this. The great writers draw people in, and the crap writers get an equal cut of the pie.

And then these authors WILL get new jobsâ"as you suggestâ"and we won't have quality books to read any more. This move is ridiculous and short-sighted. There should be caps, or ways for the user to distribute funds, at least. If I get 3 books through this system one month, and one is great, one is okay and one is terrible, I should be able to split the money to reward the great writer and leave the others with less. Quality would be favoured again, hacks would be driven out, and we'd actually be able to encourage better writing than the current system allows forâ"how many times have you bought a book on a whim and then discovered that it was actually terrible and you'd been suckered. With a post-reading money distribution scheme, I'd be able to punish bad writers with slick advertising campaigns for eating my time.

Libraries have scarcity built in. In the case of physical copies, this is obvious. If they want more of a popular book, they have to buy more copies. I've definitely gotten sick of waiting in the past and just bought the book I was waiting for.

Even the digital library systems have artificial scarcity and time limits built in. At least the ones I've encountered. But as the library is effectively the customer of books, they've always had to pay for them. The writer and publisher always got their cut.

Amazon is the publisher and seller in this case, and their mandate is to make money, not spread reading around. That $10/month has to cover their costs (or at least defray them enough so that they're not even MORE unprofitable) AND pay the authors, and they're not being funded by the government. Sounds pretty tight, to me.

The problem is that Amazon is a monopsony, not a monopoly. That is, they're the only BUYER that's important in the market. If you're not on Amazon, your potential for success is seriously limited. As a result, publishers and authors cede concessions that were previously off the table, harming their long-term prospects. That also ends up giving Amazon a competitive advantage.

But monopsonies aren't regulated, as far as I know. As long as Amazon doesn't do anything damaging monopolistic with their power, they can screw up the landscape as much as they like. Like Walmart.

Or require that the subscriber actually read a certain portion of the book, which is Amazon's implementation. Since they control the Kindle market and can track what you do with your Kindle, I suspect that it will work pretty well. There are probably ways of abusing it, but they are not exactly trivial.

And Russians stand uncomfortably close by American standards. If I were to stand as close to an American student as most Russians would, I would be considered weird and creepy. Americans also consider eye contact to be very important when, say, disciplining a child. Lots of Hispanic cultures prefer that children look down and away when being disciplined, which causes a lot of American teachers to assume that their Hispanic students are ignoring them or being defiant.

Moral of the story: different cultures accept different things. Americans often smile at each other, and a male teacher should not be considered suspicious because of this.

It is a fairly well known problem that men and minorities are underrepresented in the teaching profession, particularly in the lower grades. If you were paying any attention at all to the teaching community, you would know that teacher education programs are trying to recruit and retain more men. A quick Google search to get you started...

I haven't found this to be true. I've tried swiftkey and swype for weeks at a time, and I've found that they're generally slower than me tapping words out. The problem is that the worst case--that the system gets the word wrong and you need to replace the whole thing because none of the suggestions are correct--comes up surprisingly often for me. I also find the flow of tapping to be a lot more comfortable. I never stop tapping until I'm finished, while with the swiping methods, I have to pause in between words before I start swiping again.

Mileage varies, but I'm considerably faster with the built-in Apple keyboard unless I'm walking and typing with one hand. In that case, the swiping method has an obvious payoff because I can be less accurate with my movements.

Also, I did not imply that you had claimed that hunter gatherers have it easy, although you may have been misled by my british turn of phrase. I would claim that 13-20hrs of work a week is having it easy, my question to you was whether or not that was true that hunter/gathers worked less than this? My assumption is that they would need more time than this to acquire food each week.

A typical person in a hunter/gatherer society spends (on average) less than four hours per day on subsistence activities (acquiring food, shelter, clothing, etc.).

You are rebutting an argument that I did not make. I said that hunter/gathers generally have more leisure time. I did not claim that hunter/gatherers "have it easy." Note that I specifically attempted to rebut such arguments a priori: hunter/gatherer societies are vulnerable to natural disasters (and even minor disasters that probably wouldn't have much impact at all on an industrial society, such as a bad season for the pinon trees) and hunter/gatherers don't have the resources to live a modern lifestyle. They have more leisure time, though significantly fewer choices in how they spend it.

As to your argument that only 1/3 of your wages cover basic living expenses: if you are spending 8 hours a day performing an activity that is used to pay for your food and shelter, that is time spend procuring food and shelter, whether or not you have an excess. If you can earn enough to feed yourself in 3 hours a day but don't have the option of heading home for another 5 hours, that isn't leisure time. If, on the other hand, you really do have the option to work fewer hours and choose not to, I congratulate you on finding a job that you enjoy spending your leisure time doing (not many of us are that lucky).

In hunter/gatherer societies, people typically have *more* leisure time than people in agrarian and industrial societies (where leisure time is understood to mean time that is not spent in the production or procurement of food and shelter). There are some developed nations---primarily in Europe---where people are beginning to approach the amount of leisure time that hunter/gatherers have. The nomadic lifestyle of a hunter/gatherer is simply not sustainable for a human population of 7 billion people; it has a certain brittleness with respect to natural disasters like a bad rainy season; and it doesn't provide the resources to maintain the standard of living that your average middle-class suburbanite has grown accustomed to, but you didn't make those arguments. ;)

I think the market will end up bifurcated.

For my part, I try to avoid products that are priced free. I've looked at a lot of mobile software, and so much of it that's free is low quality or has a punitive pricing model. Free games with pay-to-play mechanics, for instance, tend to be designed so heavily around monetizing the fun parts of the game that the game isn't fun no matter what you do. These fundamental decisions corrupt the process. By trying to keep fun behind a wall, even the fun parts aren't as good anymore.

It's a bit better with productivity software and the like, but I prefer payment models that unlock all the features at once, rather than one feature at a time. One-at-a-time apps necessarily remove the interaction and synergy between features. Instead of making a set of features that seamlessly works together, you get a bunch of individual features that are less powerful split apart. Again, design decisions end up being made that undermine the making of a good product.

So I'll be paying for software. As a software developer (video games) myself, I feel that we deserve to be paid for our best work, and we can't do our best work while begging for scraps. You can't make the big, great games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age or Far Cry by monetising through small transactions. The $50-$70 you pay up front is for a whole piece of coherent work that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

Here I thought they meant a sub-Riemannian manifold.

While I agree that there are predatory journals out there and that authors need to be wary of them, I am not entirely sure that requiring authors to pay for publication is quite the correct criterion for determining whether or not a journal is predatory. Peer review, editing, and publication cost money. Traditionally, this cost is paid by subscribers to the journal, and these subscriptions can often be quite expensive (consider how Elsevier prices its journals). If the goal is to disseminate information, then an extremely costly subscription service is very likely detrimental to that goal. Hence the existence of open access journals which charge authors for publication but provide access to the material at no cost.