> If consumers are unwilling to shell out for a TV priced high enough that the manufacturer doesn't need to do things like this to earn a (decent) profit, ...
The problem is, even if the device is priced at cost plus a reasonable margin, they can make more margin by selling data that they acquire by spying. No matter the margin on the sale, there's still more money to make by selling that data. There is no upper limit that magically prevents the manufacturer from looking for other avenues to increase profit. "Premium" device priced 3x the "reasonable" price? Still more money to be made selling data.
Now, factor in the race to the bottom on selling price, and those data sales just look that much more enticing.
I get what you’re saying but the market had a choice on this, and it chose.
They wanted the “smart” tvs. Overwhelmingly. “We” chose this hellscape when we had the opportunity to say no.
So I think the person you’re replying to is kinda right. We didn’t get forced into this so much as everyone collectively said, “Yeah, that’s what I want.”
Specifically? Because it’s something people search for. Because it’s something people pay for. If the scammer can get you to pay for “a visit“ upfront, and never show up, they’ve made money.
Why are novels laid out the way they are? It's almost as though its not as simple as "bad for reading" but rather a feature of the content.
imo it highly depends on the medium. If your content is packed with distracting ads, flashing banners, other unrelated text from other stories, then its helpful to make the columns narrow to help you scan.
If you have a more focused experience around one passage of text, wider text lets you fit more on the page and make better use of paragraph breaks and subheadings
Video games are routinely stomping over all known rules of good user interface in the name of art. And that's okay because it's a leisure activity, and efficiency and comfort is not the goal. I suspect the same thing is true of novels - making the text physically easier to read wouldn't make the story emotionally easier to enjoy, so they intentionally choose a suboptimal text layout for aesthetic reasons.
The only two types of books I can think of that are routinely read for purposes other than leisure - dictionaries and the Bible - are usually printed in multi-column layout from what I've seen.
Cost has always been a major factor in publishing fiction. 25% fewer words per line may boost comprehension by $x% but definitely increases cost by 25%. When markets are as price sensitive as leisure, cost is a big factor in the decision. Books don’t sell on a price per printed page basis. Mainstream publishers with existing distribution contracts are especially sensitive because of print runs.
When we published a print magazine we optimized heavily to save 1% on printing costs. 25% would have been suicide. And indie magazine buyers are traditionally a lot more price flexible than mainstream book buyers.
Old newspapers have overly narrow columns that make both full justification and hyphenation ugly. I don’t think we should be looking at 100-year old newspapers for inspiration. Maybe look at them and see how far we’ve come and how much improvement we have in modern printed matter.
Instead we should look at modern books. Without paying good money to use tools like InDesign, just use LaTeX with microtype together with the default margins. You will get the ideal width for text lines (about 60 to 80 characters), full justification with minimal hyphenation.
The problem with your argument is that if you look at 100 year old books and modern newspapers, you arrive at exactly the opposite conclusion - it seems we ditched full width text a long time ago and fully switched to narrow columns, and it must've been for a reason!
Dictionaries in columns statistically reduce white space and thus reduce the page count.
Especially for the definitions that are very short, for example when they only reference a more preferred spelling or a more prominent word that has the exact meaning.
So multicolumn layout increases whitespace in newspapers but decreases it in dictionaries? Funny how it always does the exact thing needed to disprove whatever I say in this exact moment.
Well ok ... If a full width newspaper needs the whole sheet and you put columns to reduce the necessary whitespace, you would end with blank space that you can fill with more articles or ads.
You don't really want to reduce the number of sheets for your newspaper because size of the newspaper is an indicator of quality. But trimming off maybe 10% of a dictionary is worthwhile. Size of a dictionary is a quality indicator too, but the absolute production cost is more for a book so saving production costs is more pressing.
That's easy. The columns have to be narrow enough that you can still read a full column of scripture while your éclair rests on the other half of the page. That's why a full-spread layout is referred to a "qautréclair."
There’s a third type of language: Python. Actual poor choice for a startup, independent of complaints.
You’ll note my complaint here is actually remarkably unique. You will rarely hear a person who is an expert in both TS and Python say definitively TS is better.
Many people who know both stacks well always maintains some kind of apples and oranges opinion about it. It’s like agnosticism.
Them damn gen alphas having no sense of punctuation! Back in my day, which was when Millenialism was at its heyday, we used to put commas everywhere we, well, damn, pleased!
Honestly I'm so old that I'm not sure if this remark is satire or an actual attempt to tell me that I'm out of touch. Is writing like this considered normal now?
They are not well structured. They are syntactically correct. But, if a person wrote them, you would say they are badly structured. I have seen tripple negatives and sentences that should be split into four.
Took me a few reads too. I think the intended meaning is:
"There are those who are convinced that there is more to things; they spend their time chasing that 'more' but typically don't find it. And there are those who are convinced there isn't more to things; they find themselves frustrated at the abyss."
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