>Furthermore, he has a system of volunteer spies in which children report
on their parents, and neighbours on each other. This cannot possibly work
well since eventually everyone reports everyone else and it all has to be
abandoned.
Asimov was mistaken here. The East German Stasi did implement a system in which many, many people (not literally everyone, but a staggering percentage) reported on each other.
And North Korea maintains a system of neighborhood surveillance, mandatory self-criticism sessions, and hereditary social classes which are perhaps closer to “1984” because they are so well established now.
When it collapsed, East Germany was still led by the same people who had created it. The Berlin Wall only existed for 28 years. North Korea is a multi-generational prison.
> When it collapsed, East Germany was still led by the same people who had created it. The Berlin Wall only existed for 28 years. North Korea is a multi-generational prison.
Excellent point. Something that refutes another of Asimov's critiques in his review, that tyrannies inevitably end through tyrants' deaths, or at least become milder in their oppression. Admittedly he wrote the review in 1980, back when a) the first Kim was still in power and b) no one in the West saw North Korea as anything other than an "ordinary" Communist state—no awareness of Juche, etc.—but still.
Besides that, multiple ways to read this. "Monarchies" could've been a reference to pre modern monarchies of which many made it through at least 3 successions. Or as a correction to the upper comment, saying that the Kim's are more monarchy than plain dictatorship.
The British Crown had to concede some rights centuries ago, or there would have been civil wars and probably no more crown. Dear Leaders are the ones that don't have to concede anything, yet.
Not only have there been multiple civil wars, there has also been “no more crown” after the beheading of King Charles I (1649) until the restoration in 1660.
> Our own computers to some extent do this in the IRS, in credit files, and so on, but that does not take us towards 1984, except in fevered imaginations. Computers and tyranny do not necessarily go hand in hand. Tyrannies have worked very well without computers (consider the Nazis) and the most computerised nations in today's world are also the least tyrannical.
mbentley's Docker image version of Time Machine—which I began using back when native Time Machine support was completely broken <https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/16x3ddm/my_experien...>—which the post mentions is unaffected, and continues to work with Tahoe without configuration changes.
Title edited by me from "There are now more than 1 million “.ai” websites, contributing an estimated $70 million to Anguilla’s government revenue last year"
> So who would even do such research? The best you could find is some meaningless difference in mean scores that is likely swamped by environmental factors.
Yes, I too find it easy to avoid doing research when I assume what that research is going to find out ahead of the time.
The research has already been done historically without convincing results. That's why they want NIH large dataset (you need large dataset to find a small effect size).
But NIH understably will not share a dataset that the contributors wouldn't want to used in this way.
But if you're a researcher in this domain just go get your own dataset. You'll have to tell the potential contributors you will allow research that might stigmatize them.
Good luck with recruitment.
It you don't think you could recruit for that study because participants would find it objectionable then you can't demand access to NIH dataset.
There was a 2018 op-ed in the Times <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-r...> by a geneticist, warning society that at that moment, and increasingly in the next few years, his field would find things about humans that people wouldn't like to hear. Things like, racial differences are real, intelligence is mostly inherited, etc. (Bonus: Men and women are different, and there are only two sexes.)
The tone was not "these are breakthroughs to look forward to"; rather, "things are coming that people we disagree with are going to exploit, but they are nonetheless real". Another interpretation would be "please don't yell at us for discovering these things".
>Good. now that it is done, can EU and the rest of the world push for regional ownership of Instagram, WhatsApp and Youtube without the US complaining unfair practices.
>Chinese ownership as a security threat is currently in between reality and conspiracy realms but the US govt meddling as a threat is a proven reality worldwide.
There is nothing stopping any country from doing the same to US companies' local operations five years ago, today, or next year. The difference is that the US is not China. Your comment assumes that a US company is as dangerous as a Chinese company. As felipeerias said, China is (among other things) actively backing Russia in Ukraine.
US law did not require TikTok's divestiture to a US owner. If TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't have intervened in the first place.
Conversely, if TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, American would not have to fear a hostile government silently gathering data on American users, or a company repeatedly shown to be lying about using its app to do so.
>We've got ours since 2018 and when we balked on the price they just waived the fees
You must be in the seven figures revenuewise or higher. I am not, and can't imagine getting the fee waved.
That said, what I've heard about having an Amazon account manager: It's just another layer of the same of the usual awful seller support. Since the "manager" can't actually do anything, having one is worse than not having one.
Yeah, low 8s on Amazon. They already take ~50% of our revenue for all expenses, the SASCore person is a drop in the bucket for them.
We also do B&M and website sales which have way less hassle or much lower expenses, but get nowhere near the traffic of Amazon, so that's why we deal with 'em...
>They already take 50%+ of our revenue for all expenses
As mentioned my revenue is far smaller, so I need larger margins. My total marketplace fees plus shipping spend in 2025 was 26% of revenue. My net margin was 28%, but the metric I focus on is margin on COGS; that was 60% in 2025 and 54% lifetime.
Hearing your account and that of another seller with close to seven figures revenue makes me think I should aim for smaller margins. Not as small as yours, but maybe 10% smaller.
>We also do B&M and website sales which have way less hassle or much lower expenses, but get nowhere near the traffic of Amazon, so that's why we deal with 'em...
My Walmart revenue equaled Amazon's in 2025.
I've thought about opening my own website. On the one hand my multichannel software already supports such, so it would be from that perspective just another marketplace. On the other hand, besides the additional cost and hassle, I keep coming back to how difficult it is to match the Amazons and Walmarts of the world in terms of customer reach.
My fees are high but my COGS are low -- they're typically <30%, but our typical unit pricing is <$30 so the FBA fees and base fees/unit sold hit hard.
We make ~30% before labor and net 10-20% after everything so it works OK. Most bigger sellers I know live in the 10-30% net range.
Our Walmart store is pretty sad, cross product lines we sell between 1-10% of our rev on Amazon :( ... but that's also because our products (home and kitchen) have lower cost competitors on Walmart itself. We're the mid-premium product, which is a much better position on Amazon and the right marketplace fit.
> My fees are high but my COGS are low -- they're typically <30%
45% for me in 2025.
>but our typical unit pricing is <$30
$59 ASP in 2025 ($63 average revenue per sale).
>Most bigger sellers I know live in the 10-30% net range.
Yes, that's the impression I've gotten of the marketplace megasellers, of 10% margins being the norm. Not quite the old dotcom joke of losing money on every sale but making it up on volume, but you know what I mean.
>but that's also because our products (home and kitchen) have lower cost competitors on Walmart itself. We're the mid-premium product, which is a much better position on Amazon and the right marketplace fit
That's interesting; I would have thought that Amazon would have more sellers across price points. Walmart has more Chinese sellers with gibberish brand names than before thanks to a noticeable loosening of application criteria, but still fewer than Amazon. Are competitors at your price point not present on Amazon but are present on Walmart? Or they are present on both, but for whatever reason (advertising, FBA/FBM differential) your listings get relatively more visibility on Amazon?
For my product niche, Amazon has (many) more buyers at my pricepoint and value prop (moderately well-designed kitchen gadgets at a price point between your run-on-the-mill gadget and OXO).
Maybe I also know how to SEO better on Amazon vs Walmart, but not sure! ¯\(°_o)/¯
Asimov was mistaken here. The East German Stasi did implement a system in which many, many people (not literally everyone, but a staggering percentage) reported on each other.