I agree. Some of it, I suspect, is that I've just read so many books now that I'm in 50s that when I read a trope-driven genre novel (SF, Fantasy, Mystery, Thriller, whatever), I rapidly feel like I've read this story before. I've gotten to the same place with TV and movies. Both mediums really suffer from a lack of any kind of originality, or even attempts at quirkiness. It all just feels like Thomas Kinked-esque cookie cutter.

I've started reading a lot more non-fiction, mainly history. Ironically, there's a lot more originality there than in most of the modern fiction I read.

I read the first Three Body Problem novel, and I thought it was crap. Some of that might have been the translation, although I've read other translations from Chinese without that much of an issue. The plotting was terrible, the characters flat. I finished it more because I kept expecting it to eventually turn around, breaking my rule that if I don't like a book in the first three chapters, I won't finish it. In the end, I couldn't imagine why I would want to read any more of it.

Does it have the intro "Imagine Bash, but object oriented and with function call names so long they would drive a Java developer to madness. Brought to you by the author of Microsoft Bob and Clippy, psychopaths that infect your computer with their dead-eyed smiles comes Powershell."

The hero tale is one with a long history behind it. I think it's always been the dominant style. So that's not really a legitimate criticism...not unless you are making an encompassing claim, and if you are, then it's false. (I've encountered several books with a heroine.) And the dominant style always reflects the zeitgeist. (In the late 1940's and early 50's there was lots of WWII echoes, often re-staged in different settings.)

FWIW, my tastes have always been quite narrow, and minority, but I think they've narrowed over the years. OTOH, possibly it's just that the net doesn't provide exposure to the tales that I would like. Perhaps they're still out there, but I can no longer easily browse through and tell that they're something I'd be interested in.

Part of the problem is definitely the sales channel. Grocery stores only carry "best sellers". (They may not actually be best sellers, but they're marketed as such.) 20 displays of 10 books, and two or three with only a few...probably left over from last month.) Also a few books that I already have on my shelf, from a decade ago.

Even book stores lean in this direction, sufficiently that I no longer want to browse in them. (OTOH, I always preferred science-fiction and technical books.)

But I really think part of the problem is the zeitgeist. Nobody wants to read it. It's like when the anti-hero became "popular with publishers". People found reading that stuff unpleasant, so they stopped. Except for a few. And some of those will be picked up, eventually, as classics that everyone should read. Just like "Jude the Obscure" was. Nobody that I ever met liked that story, but some academics thought it was important enough to force everyone to read it.

As an owner of the complete History of Middle Earth series, these books are not for the casual fan, or probably even the average fan. They really are more designed for Tolkien scholars, and anyone picking up The Nature of Middle Earth expecting ripping yarns filled with Hobbits and wizards is going to be very disappointed.

I also would like to know how many sell 50,000+ copies, not 500,000+. An author who can consistently sell at least 50,000 copies of each book can earn a decent living, as long as they dont take years in between each release. Knowing only 50 authors are making $1+ million per year isn't as interesting as knowing how many people can realistically be full time authors.

Instead of banning non-compete, just make sure it can't be abused. Something as simple as requiring companies to continue paying the employee their full compensation for the entire non-compete duration (with a 5% increase each year) would prevent abuse. Companies could still use them when it's important enough to protect the company, but no employees get screwed.

You work a *lot* more hours. And you do work. Back in the day you'd have time to do research projects to keep my skills up no problem, it was encouraged. These days you're on 24/7 and doing one very tightly defined task because your CEO doesn't want you to be too critical to the company, they want a cog in the machine they can replace as needed, even if that means paying a little more. The predictability is worth it.

I mean, I guess if you're one of those freaks that doesn't need sleep. I've known a few. Get by on 4 hours a night and they're fine. It's like having an extra 28 hours a week in your life. But for us mere mortals we're kinda stuck. We make due with what we've got.

The last technical book I bought used grey ink for the examples. If I'd been able to see it before I bought it, I wouldn't have. I think they probably had a decent book, but the only editing was for the e-book, and that used color, but they printed the book in black and white.

Another turned out not to have any index. The text was decent, but just try to look something up.

The editors of print books are ... not quite worthless, as they may do a decent job for e-books, but the print version is merely an afterthought. If it weren't painful to read long text passages on the screen, I'd have given up on books.

you have to get out of tech by 35. It's not because young people are more savvy of the latest trends, it's because experience is basically worthless because tech moves so fast. In 5 years your knowledge is out of date unless you've been keeping up with it on your own time, and good luck doing that working 60-70 hours a week.

So you either move into some kind of management or customer service role or you get out of tech. That works when the economy is growing like gangbusters because there's enough spots for you, but when the economy is contracting (they way all are because of trickle down economics + massive amounts of automation) it breaks down.

What are you talking about? The "infra" (you absolute tool) for a hydrogen storage peaker is a concrete pad and a grid connection.

So what do you think is a good alternative?

It shouldn't take an hour, but it does reasonably take at least ten minutes. Considering that you can get quite a bit of charge into an EV in not many more minutes, this is a long time.

When you add into that the multiple filling station explosions which occurred already it begins to look like a very, very bad deal.

No one has to sabotage green hydrogen technology, because it has to overcome physics.

Hydrogen production research is always ongoing, because there are so many uses for hydrogen. Even if there were zero people trying to use it as a motor fuel there would still be ample reason to develop more technologies for that.

"At the same time, H2 is really just another type of battery"

No. It works completely different from a chemical cell, which is what people mean when they say battery.