I hate to break it to you guys.

But it's getting harder to distinguish between podslop and human-produced podcasts.

For example, I've been actively listening to a technology podcast summarizing science and technology articles found in someone's Google Notebook LM. The owner of the notebook must have added customizations to give more personality to the male and female voices, but the summaries are interesting and listenable.

After I realized that it was podslop, I stopped listening to these podcasts, but I had to admit that I enjoyed the episodes that I had listened to, and it introduced me to lots of concepts and innovations I had never been exposed to (I did have to move past the gushing about the Notebook owner's wisdom in choosing this article to discuss).

You are probably wrong about the ghost writing thing. Comedians know how to write things. It's easy. The Bedwetter was published by Harper, so they probably had an editor make it flow better and give feedback about what belongs and what doesn't belong. That actually is a major and time-consuming task (FYI I've been a book editor with 15+ years experience). Other celebrities -- like athletes, politicians etc. might have difficulty doing the writing part, so they team up with someone who interviews them and transcribes their answers. But it's unlikely for this to happen here.

Ouch! Apparently not, thanks!

Naw, use ebooks. Prices for that may eventually go up for that (because of the high cost of marketing), but for now ebook prices compare very favorably to printed books. (BTW, I run an ebook publishing press)

Also, ebooks are always being discounted. Just subscribe to an ebook daily newsletter like Bookbub, Freebooksy, Bargainbooksy, Fussy Librarian. (There are dozens others). Better yet, if you like a publisher, subscribe to one of their newsletters.

I use ereaderiq, a price alert service for Amazon prices. I simply add a book title I want to ereaderiq and it will notify me when an ebook reaches a certain price on Amazon. So I end up learning about the lowest prices before anyone else does. Your welcome.

Oh, I thought of another problem. Most libraries are terrible at purchasing ebooks. They get their recommendations mainly from the usual sources like Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and Kirkus, and these are the services which charge authors and authors the highest prices. They buy from NY publishers which can afford to do tradeshows and send quarterly catalogs. That is why public libraries stock a lot of Harlequin romance ebooks and bestselling ebooks from the Big 5 publishers, and not much else. I have library cards with two major libraries and I remain shocked at how their ebook offerings will include a ton of celebrity books and memoirs and romance titles and hardly any indie titles or specialized titles. If you want to make a difference, use the Contact form on your city library's website and suggest indie or local authors!

I run a small ebook publishing company which publishes both on cloud-based services and DRM-free stores , and I don't think you're identifying the right problem.

Piracy is a concern in movies and perhaps in music still, but in ebooks hardly at all. Perhaps it's an issue with bestsellers, college textbooks and IT books, but not most of ebooks being published today.

Fear of piracy is perhaps an issue, and that's why major NY publishers and technical publishers rarely publish on DRM-free platforms like Smashwords. Frankly, though, most authors also publish on the cloud-based services even it if includes DRM. The reason is mainly because Amazon, Google Play Books and Apple store have more mindshare. Perhaps in sci fi, fans are sophisticated enough to seek no DRM, but most consumers don't care or even know about that.

The two biggest problems as I see it is 1)the market power of Amazon to set prices and royalties and 2)the high cost of marketing and promotion. Unfortunately Amazon has so much power that many promotional services become dependent on Amazon to do marketing. Actually a 3rd problem is the declining number of newspapers and magazines that hire people to write book reviews. This is offset by some amazing online litblogs and online book review services and now podcasts, but it's still an uphill battle.

Bookstreaming services like Kindle Unlimited have made some headway, but they are still somewhat pricey. KU is often bundled with device purchases, but I don't see a lot of people paying 10 dollars monthly just to read ebooks.

So if it's $5000 lower, what is the expected price of the actual car? I'm not looking to buy, but it would be good to know if this is some luxury product or something which ordinary plebes can one day afford. (But the range data sounds exciting!)

The current ACA system from the very state guarantees that premiums do not exceed approximately 10% of a person's income for a silver plan. This has always been true. Geez, I tire of having to explain this to people on the right.

This sounds like b.s. One bedrock of the ACA program is setting premiums to no more than 10% of income. You qualify for subsidies on a sliding scale, so this kind of drop is impossible. If your monthly premiums are 730 per month, then your income is probably at least 7300 per month.

The fact that this commenter's income is so high explains his/her misunderstanding of the plight of Whole Foods workers as well. Most of these workers are on the low end of income; qualifying for subsidies will be no problem -- unless their income falls below the poverty line and they live in a state which hasn't expanded Medicaid (in which case, they are SOL).

Wow, I have a SO horror story to tell. For 2 consecutive years I was the #1 contributor on a low traffic Stack Exchange (Ebooks).

I eventually left the site for good after moderators took down too many of my contributions. I just grew sick of it.

The funny thing is, these moderators had no background in the subject; they almost never contributed an answer; they made the SE a worse place.

I finally posted this rant on my own domain because I grew weary of this nonsense: http://www.ghostlypopulations....

The underlying problem is that the moderators fail to understand context of a question and simply view everything as a bunch of rules needing to be followed.

I don't know about the fuel mix in the state of New York (and maybe the headline is a mistake), but one explanation is that there are 2 ways to use the offshore area: 1) for producing wind power and 2) to drill for oil for cars. Cuomo's decision may pre-empt using the land for oil exploration and drilling. That's my two cents anyway.

Marc Jacobson has done a lot of research into the viability of renewables. (Indeed, he presented this very idea to NY a few years ago. https://news.stanford.edu/news... ) He found that using solar and wind are complementary. Wind tends to be highest at night; solar by day.

I hear you that cds are a technology past its due date.

But public libraries can buy, store and lend physical media easily and not have to deal with DRM or licensing restrictions.

Patrons can check out CDs and then decide to rip from them in the privacy of their own homes. Totally legal too.

Ironically, the ripping habit (which I admit I have) leads me to buy a lot of digital music that I never would have learned about otherwise.

Even if CDs stopped being sold tomorrow, there are still lots of indie/fringe CDs out there which aren't being sold digitally anywhere. Don't believe me? Go to a garage sale or used CD/DVD store and count the number of CDs still unknown to most of the musical world.....

In a recent feature on This American Life, Betsy DeVos was depicted as being a very compassionate and generous person (she helped individual students to get private schooling), but lacking empathy (she didn't understand the multiple issues with public schools and the diverse population and the regulatory frameworks for the public school system in the US. Also, she didn't appreciate the need for scalable solutions). MORE: https://www.thisamericanlife.o...

The problem when unemployed is that you need to monitor your phone for job-related calls, so you have to keep the ringer on.

Also, my particular cell phone makes it really difficult to blacklist numbers.

I seem to recall that the rules state that if you send them a note by snail mail, they are required to stop contacting you by phone.

Recently I was late on paying a Chase card, and I literally got called every single day about the matter. Eventually I called up and said, hey, I'm unemployed, I'm waiting on a check to arrive, and the rep explained that they will be robodialing my phone every single day until it is paid.

For a while I was giving out my skype number instead of my cell so they wouldn't keep harassing me, until I realized that I had enrolled in two step authentication using my phone as the second step. That meant they would always have my cell phone number. Which really sucks.

Emusic is a good place to buy DRM free music. It's 20-40% cheaper too!

http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/2013/04/fave-emusic-finds/

But emusic has no cloud backup. (I just back up my emusic stuff and ripped files to Amazon cloud player.