I've decided to get rid of Amazon, and ebooks are one of the difficult issues.
Are there no independent sites like goodreads or LibraryThing left? I don't really need the tracking, but the discovery.
Also I have found that actually ebooks are sometimes cheaper on other places than Amazon, so a price comprison would be good. It could be integrated into a site like LibraryThings- LibraryThing already has it to some extent, but doesn't seem to include most vendors in my country (Germany).
Also there were other reasons why I didn't want to use LibraryThing anymore, which I have forgotten. I just remember that I didn't want to use it anymore some years ago.
I recently started using https://www.thestorygraph.com/ — it's for keeping track of your own reading, and they're promoting their own reco algorithm. Also, there's a paid plan with extra features.
It's early days, but it's neat and clean and it feels the opposite of Goodreads' everything-for-everyone-at-once-all-the-time approach.
From what I've seen of their recommendation algorithm, it's actually better that Goodreads's as well. The only issue being it seems to aggregate what you put in as your mood and preferences as well as what you've read, whereas on Goodreads you can filter by 'shelf' (which is usually horrible, but a feature I'd love to have on StoryGraph)
I still buy my eBooks from Amazon. I currently live in Germany, but use Amazon’s India store to buy eBooks because the same ebook in Amazon.de costs twice. All you need is a transferwise card (or something similar) and you can pay in rupees.
P.S: I understand that the parent’s main concern with Amazon isn’t the price.
For discovery I still use LibraryThing. It is also possible to use it without an account, with some more work. The UX is not great though. Thalia has curated reviews from their librarians and a book graph with recommendations. The coverage is not superb, but if you happen to find 1-2 librarians with similar tastes, you can get some ideas.
I don’t care much about the price comparison, I mostly just buy from ebooks.de or thalia.de. Often they have a copy from a cheaper publisher (at least for English ebooks) and whether it costs 4.5 or 5 euros doesn’t make much of a difference. I am just glad I am not giving the money to Amazon. The last time I bought an ebook from Amazon is more than 10 years ago.
True overall the price is probably not that significant. I appear to have bought about 250 ebooks for my Kindle over several years. So even if I had saved 2€ for every one of them (which would be a lot), it probably wouldn't really warrant a lot of effort.
Extracting gold is very wasteful, I'm not sure it is better than Bitcoin in terms of environmental impact.
And Bitcoin is much more useful than gold. You can easily send Bitcoin to your family at the other end of the world. With gold, not so easy. Even buying and selling gold is much more difficult. Storing gold is also much more complicated, you can not encrypt gold, so you need physical protection.
Interesting idea, but how exactly would you validate the CO2 emissions? If somebody mines a block and claims it only consumed x of CO2, how do you know it is true?
What seems possible is to check what miners mined a block, and externally verify their footprint. But I don't think there is a decentralized way to do it. An entity certifying "green miners" would be a centralized authority.
Sorry but "doctors going on social media" is absolutely no proof for anything. I have also seen several doctors on social media say that there is less activity at hospitals than usual.
Seriously, just provide the numbers about hospital use. No social media nonsense.
Your data about "excess deaths" is only for the last five years, by the way, not "any previous year".
Why not simply provide data to counter their "lies"? What makes you so sure to be in possession of the truth? Have you verified yourself, or have you simply chosen to trust the authorities?
So individual labs can set their own standards for detecting an infection? Isn't that rather support for the skeptic's viewpoint? So there actually is no standard, just labs claiming things?
I don't know about the UK, but for example in Germany there are official statistics about ICU use. ICU use was at normal levels the whole time. But of course that is also being managed by scheduling risky surgery, for example.
Nevertheless, I don't know what makes you so sure your claims are true. I haven't really seen completely convincing evidence.
I have seen politicians publicly proclaim that the opportunity the pandemic provides should be used. So there definitely ARE politicians who would like to use it. What makes you so sure that none of the politicians in power, or indeed any of the other actors involved, don't share that sentiment?
Are there no independent sites like goodreads or LibraryThing left? I don't really need the tracking, but the discovery.
Also I have found that actually ebooks are sometimes cheaper on other places than Amazon, so a price comprison would be good. It could be integrated into a site like LibraryThings- LibraryThing already has it to some extent, but doesn't seem to include most vendors in my country (Germany).
Also there were other reasons why I didn't want to use LibraryThing anymore, which I have forgotten. I just remember that I didn't want to use it anymore some years ago.