I noticed there was a movie in the making ... did not know it is done!
I hope it will be shown in germany as well!
I guess it was a funny thing?

Lets wait and see how it works out for France :) And Amazon.

And how exactly do you adapt to a book store gone bankrupt? I guess you can somehow 'deal' with it, but gone is gone, nothing to adapt to.

Are you just as histrionic over Lois Lerner's missing emails?

That was awful. Pick up just about any Harry Turtledove book for a more thoughtful take on the subject.

You need one of those gay European man purses to carry around all your loose change. Then it makes sense, I suppose.

That Left vs. Right is only or mostly a distraction is a Leftie/Libertarian tactic. They are of course highly distinctly opposing philosophies, even if the extreme divide between the philosophies is not fully represented in Congress.

I don't know about the banks, but corporations are only trying to buy favor in regulations and subsidies, so that they can be more successful. This is tyranny in that it's anti-competitive and hurts the average citizen, but is nowhere near where the vast majority of the tyranny we're experiencing nowadays is coming from: The GOP's progressivism towards more and more perfect national security, and the Left's progressivism towards more and more perfect outcomes in almost everything in general.

TL;DR: That cartoon pushes the standard commie line that the institutions of capitalism are our biggest problem.

p.s. What it does get right is that, since neither major party cares one whit about libertarianism, in that sense it's meaningless which one you vote for, because neither will advance that cause. (But then that's hardly the only meaningful factor, whereupon there becomes a huge difference between the parties.)

Another thought is this: I've written my share of T-SQL in the same spirit as this. And that is, what I have come to philosophically consider to be doing too much on the database side. An RDBMS's strong suit is retrieving data, not string manipulations. And your requirements for the data to be built into a string and of a certain format is really a business rule, where even if you're not doing a tiered architecture physically, it isn't a best practice to mix business layer concerns into what is logically the data layer.

I'm to the point where I consider the T-SQL language's non-DML/non-DDL stuff to be only as a last resort, such as needing to send already formatted data into say SQL Server Reporting Services, where you might not have middle tier(s) and the luxury of processing the data via any other means before it gets presented. But for application work, I want to start using the database to do just enough calculating to identify what data I want retrieved, and then the rest of the crunching that needs to be performed being done in C# or whatever (which will typically be more expressive and efficient for this).

Then in your case you wouldn't have the recursion going on in the database side to construct the string.

p.s. Over time the DBA's can alter the indexes on tables, and the SQL Server query analyzer can adopt different cached data access plans depending on the amount of and distributions within the data. So timings can change, so if you were already close to a limit...

In SQL's order of operations, ORDER BY is done after SELECT, where in that 2nd query the string is built up, and then somehow some sorting is supposed to happen. It could be harmless or fouling things up, and it might not be what you want judging from the 1st query where the string is built in Sequence order.

I think you lost context somewhere.
Yes, I doubt there exist 'small online shops for books' how would they operate, what would they sell?
Sure there are book stored, especially eBooks that are smaller than Apple or Amazon or B&N ... was that the topic of dicussion?