State health inspectors normally enter areas of restaurants that are not public areas and conduct searches. Similarly, bank auditors (usually a requirement from the government) need to have free access to papers. Consenting to this is necessary to have licenses to run a restaurant or bank. How does this differ legally from a DUI stop?

There is something that stops everybody that few complain about: a red traffic signal. I take it that you object to a forced sobriety test, not the stop.

The Hobbsian state of nature is undesirable, and although it's theoretically free it has a lot of practical issues with freedom. (It's easier to get along in society if you don't have to carefully figure out a reason not to kill everybody you meet who isn't family.) Nazi Germany had a lot of regulation, and still wasn't free. In my opinion, a lot of things the government does fall on the side of excessive regulation that reduces freedom.

This opinion is fairly widely shared, although different people will think different things are excessive regulation. Are you freer if you have laws that say you have to be able to get reasonable internet access at a reasonable price, or if last-mile providers are unregulated? If there is or is not a publicly supported health care system? If we could get people to agree on some of these things, we could start doing things about it.

For example, the problem with getting rid of the TSA is that there are a very large number of people I consider cowards who support it, preferring to trade liberty and dignity for extremely little additional safety.

If the eBook doesn't sell, the publisher eats all the costs of editing, proofreading, marketing, etc. I don't know how the advance works out, but I suspect that the publisher also eats that expense.

The expense of printing a relatively small run of physical books is a lot smaller than those costs. You could test this yourself by seeing how much it'll cost to get a few thousand copies of a nice paperback published, as long as you present everything needed for printing (including the cover illo, etc.). That's been viable for decades now, except for the issue that generally almost all copies stayed unsold in the author's basement or garage.

First, morality and integrity can pay off long-term, even if they cost short-term. Second, I don't see that doing something despicable just for a lot of money to be in my self-interest. I have enough money to live comfortably, and I'm going to be happier not doing something despicable. (In other words, I'm very definitely not desperate for money.)

Formatting the book is a whole lot easier than it used to be, true, but that's only part of what an editor does.

The author is not going to be good at reading for consistency, since the author knows a whole lot more about the fictional world than went into the story (at least, this is my experience writing stuff that isn't really publishable). A casual reader may miss a name change or inconsistent backstory. That doesn't mean that name consistency is unimportant, but rather than a skilled editor will pick up on things that will make the book worse that most people will overlook.

If an editor can help cut 30K words out of a book, the book is almost certainly going to be much better. The file size is irrelevant, but the reader is going to get more story per hour of reading. If a lot of the cutting is excess adjectives and the like, the sentences are going to be easier to read.

Your example doesn't work. I'm willing to give about 40 hours/week to an employer, and so my labor supply is limited. It may be that I can sell 40 hours a week at $50/hour and 160 at $40/hour, but it simply doesn't work that way.

We're talking eBooks here, which have production costs of approximately zero. This means that I'm not limited to selling 40 books a week, I can sell as many as I can get people to buy. If I find I can sell a hundred times as many at $10 than at $50, and it doesn't cost me any more (in time or energy or anything like that) I'd be a fool to price the book at $50.

As far as quality work goes, suppose I find that by spending 50% more effort on a book, to increase its quality, I double sales. In that case, it pays me to put in the extra work. Again, it's a matter of not having a limit on the amount of X I can sell.

From what I've seen, the price to produce a physical book and get it to me isn't really all that much, so it doesn't matter that much in the decision to sell for $15 or $10. It does mean that the minimum profitable price will be much lower. Barnes & Noble sell Nook eBooks of various public domain books for something like $2, and they simply couldn't afford to do that with paper books.

Scalzi wasn't arguing that he wouldn't make more money off Amazon eBooks if they were priced lower, but that he thought he'd make less money overall. If Amazon eBooks are the only way to sell books (which is not something I want), then Amazon and Scalzi would benefit most from the same pricing scheme. Scalzi presumably makes money off sales of physical books.

Provided also that the new market entrants can come up with a convenient way for their customers to put their eBooks on a Kindle, since if everybody is buying their eBooks from Amazon all the e-Ink readers will be Kindles.

No, I used the on-site search, and missed that page. It says that FRB with Bitcoin is possible, which contradicts what you are saying. The page also makes an error in argument. It is not necessary that other people accept bitcoin substitutes (like checks). What is necessary is that depositors accept that their deposits aren't matched one-to-one.

Back to my example. I deposit 10 BTC in FIBB. FIBB then lends you 9 BTC. You've got 9 real BTC, so you don't have to worry about whether anybody else will accept, say, a check denominated in BTC. I've got 10 BTC, it says so right here in my bank book. I can't get it all back instantly, but this is presumably money I'd not be using immediately.

How this works is that, after some period, you're supposed to pay FIBB 10 BTC, as principle and interest, and FIBB splits that with me, so that I've got 10.5 BTC in my account, so I get interest. I forgo the use of my BTC for a period, and I get more BTC back. I may or may not be able to do better by investing elsewhere, but (assuming I trust FIBB) this is a safe and guaranteed return. There is some risk: FIBB loses if you don't pay it back, and I lose if FIBB has a catastrophic failure. Your risk is what FIBB will do to you (sue you, make it harder for you to ever get a loan again, whatever) if you default.

This is how banks used to work. (They also used to have a role in safeguarding money, much less important with Bitcoin.) They operated that way for centuries, without any sort of government guarantee. Banks did fail, taking their depositors' money with them, but not often enough to discourage the others.

The price of the hardcover is higher because it comes out first, and so it gets more money from people who are willing to spend it. The trick is that, if you sell something for $15, wait a year, and drop the price to $8 and keep selling it (so it's obviously not just on clearance), you're going to tick off the people who spent $15. If you give them a slightly nicer physical package, so you're not selling the exact same thing for $8, you get an extra $7 from the people who really want it without making them resent you. The problem with just dropping the price of the eBook is that it does cause that resentment.

You also seem to be imagining books being sold on a cost plus profit basis, so a book that's cheaper to produce should be correspondingly lower priced. In fact, like everything else, books are priced to maximize profit. It turns out that book demand is pretty inelastic, so that a book priced at $4 won't sell anywhere near twice as many copies as if it were priced at $8. There's limits to how many books I'm going to buy regardless of cost, and books are pretty cheap entertainment (even at my reading speed). (There's also the fact that the difference in cost between a physical book and an eBook isn't all that great. If it were possible to sell hundreds of thousands of $1 books, the price difference would be very significant, but it usually isn't.)

What Amazon and Scalzi are arguing about is primarily who benefits from what (and secondarily about demand curves). Amazon and Scalzi both benefit from every copy of "Redshirts" Amazon sells, but Scalzi benefits from copies sold through other venues and Amazon doesn't. To make up numbers, suppose an $18 hardcover. If the eBook is $15, Scalzi will presumably sell more physical hardcovers, and the 74% increase in sales for a $10 eBook might come at the expense of the hardcover, so Scalzi makes more money on the eBooks, less on the paper editions, and loses overall. (Disclaimer: I bought the Nook version of the book.) Moreover, Scalzi is interested in having some sort of competition in the bookselling business, so he's not completely at Amazon's mercy in a dispute between Amazon and his publisher, while Amazon would like a monopoly in the bookselling business.

It's pretty clear that Slashdot summaries are only tested on the incompetents and mentally ill. (Alternately, those are the people writing them.)

The one time I wanted to rate an app, it told me to make an app-rating account with a distinct name. That's when I stopped.

Wasn't there a Slashdot article about some developers who had their app selected for free app of the day, and wound up with support costs considerably greater than what they actually made?