Adderbox76

I'm not interested in a homelessness solution put forward by someone with "Green" in their title...

They're not acceptable. In fact I can't think of a single one except burnt that is still actively kicking around.

Who told you it was acceptable, if you don't mind me asking. And if it was your english teacher, please ask them how they managed to get here from all the way back in Shakespeare's time.

Government subsidies from politicians eager to greenwash their oil and gas industry.

The Saskatchewan government has been running this scam for at least a decade; throwing subsidies to their rich friends AND using it as an excuse to lie and say "see...there ARE alternatives to the Carbon Tax".

It's all bullshit. It never worked. It never will work. It's a grift to make Scott Moe's donors more money.

Past 30, age is less about biology and more sociology.

I'm a 49 year old male. But I'm divorced, no kids. Still living a bachelor life quite happily while most guys close to my age are married with the kids and coaching soccer on weekends in a minivan. As a result, my friend group almost exclusively skews younger because those are the people who are in the same stage of life as I am (regardless of biological age).

The same works for relationships. Past a certain point it doesn't matter how old you are, as long as your sociological age is compatible. (Ie. Your way of life)

Edited to Add: The rule we always learned in highschool when we were stupid kids with nothing better to do is "half your age plus 7"

51 divided by 2 = 25.5 + 7 = 32.5.

So by highschool rules, you're just a little bit outside the lines, but close enough that if you're both attractive most people will ignore it.

This is basically going to make the population choose between smoking and having kids.

Hell I'd start smoking again.

I have an orange sweater that I got for a christmas present all the way back in 2001 that, despite nearly daily use a my "lounging around at home sweater", is still in almost perfect shape except for the colours fading a bit in the places that see a lot of robbing (elbows, etc...)

Why do we need a new one?

Calling them "fakers" seems to get them all huffy already. And if you really want to piss off an AI "prompt writer", point out to them that they aren't actual artists.

Cromite. A de-googled, hardened fork of Chromium. Not perfect by any means. But it gets the job done admirably.

No worries. I freely admit that my entire opinion on the subject of self-publishing is elitist and condescending as all hell. So I can put on my big-boy pants and take a bit of my own medicine back. No worries.

But no, I didn't take your response as condescending. You're right that a person can sort and filter. But a filter should almost be an option, not a necessity. I'll happily sort by genre, or page count, or yes...even ratings, to find something interesting to me.

But I shouldn't have to have a button that says "sort out any crap that hasn't even gone through a cursory elementary school grammar course". There's a line in the sand of what should and shouldn't be acceptable in any business environment that nominally wants people to spend money with them, and "making my customers weed out unprofessional garbage" should (IMO) be that line. Amazon, Kobo, or wherever, should at the bare minimum be telling people front and centre, "this is the minimum level of quality you can expect...feel free to sort however you like, but we at least guarantee that every book will meet a certain level of literacy."

I admire your optimism about cream rising to the top. But I just can't share it.

The average person isn't going to spend an hour digging through a literal trash-heap on Amazon in order to find something worth their time. They'll give up after five minutes of reading terrible review after terrible review and then go find something else to do with their time.

And thus the collective intelligence of humanity drops; not because they're actually reading all of this white noise of self-published crap. But because they're not reading at all because of the effort it takes to weed through it at the book store (digital or otherwise).

The best example I can give is how "Oprah's Book Club" (am I giving away how damn old I am yet?) got people reading. They read because they didn't have to go and find this stuff themselves. Someone curated it for them, told them "Hey...this is good".

If the average reader didn't have Oprah and had to dig through five thousand Amazon self-published "suggestions" before stumbling onto Toni Morrison or Push by Sapphire, they're quickly go doom scroll Facebook instead.

Like I said, I admire your optimism and a part of me wishes I could share it. But the idea that the lack of any accountability for self-"published" drivel completely muddies any real "discover-ability" of the actual good stuff is a hill that my elitist ass will happily die on.

But if some are as bad as you say they are, then they’ll get rejected all the same

Oh I don't disagree with you on that.

However, because the barrier to entry is gone, and even financially there's no barrier to getting your work out there, even rejection isn't enough to curtail the slop.

First "self-published" novel got 1 review that literally called it "an atrocity worthy of the Nuremburg trials"? Who cares. Publish that sequel...and the sequel after that. There's literally no incentive to get better and no dis-incentive to prevent it no matter how crap the work might be.

The only real incentive anymore to stop publishing your glorious 12-volumes-and-counting epic story about a space wizard that has never actually sold a single copy is literally self-shame, which, in art circles, is not a common commodity.

So regardless of whether or not they are being read, or purchased, they're still just taking up more and more space. Adding more and more static to the crap that the future is going to have to sift through.

To me, anyway, it has less to do with gate-keeping and more to do with curation.