I am sure all of these terrible things are true of Amazon, but I also have very little sympathy for publishers.

Publishing has been historically and still is one of the most hidebound, exploitative, decrepit businesses in the world, right behind the clowns at (and members of) the RIAA and MPAA.

A hardback book at $40, with the paperback to be released a year later – or maybe never – at an also-exorbitant price?

Great idea. How is that of any value to me when I can read a 400 page book in a few hours?

Amazon being able to seize so much power is a direct consequence of the publishers being so shitty. Doesn’t make Amazon some sort of savior, but is still true.

Why the fuck do people still buy vinyl records? Absolutely shitty sound quality (poor dynamic range, degradation over time, etc.) as well as being so huge and fragile.

I am old enough to remember and have used vinyl records (I believe the first 45 single I bought with my own money was this one, for instance.) and even at the time I thought they were horrible and limiting.

I know it’s no longer cool to hate hipsters and their bullshit, but I still do anyway.

One Man’s Quest to Make Business Travel a Lot Less Awful.

This is great. So many times that I’ve traveled for business I’ve wanted a place to meet with people that wasn’t a hotel room. And no, most hotels don’t allow you to use their conference rooms without extremely, extremely exorbitant fees. Brilliant idea. Wish I’d thought of it myself.

I think it’s mostly safe to tell people to follow whatever career that want to, as it doesn’t matter anyway.

Jobs are being eliminated and offshored across every field, in every domain, and none of them are very safe – save perhaps plumbers and a few others that absolutely require on-site presence (for the moment, anyway).

Some careers are for the moment “safer” than others, but that could change very quickly. Increasing automation is coming faster than most people now realize, and with global climate change now a fait accompli of being alive in the 21st century, the economy is pretty likely to worsen over time.

In my field, the jobs that I used as a stepladder to gain the experience I have today increasingly do not exist anymore. It would be really difficult if not impossible to get where I am today how I did so, and I started only 15 years ago.

What’s interesting about that – and horrible – is that those lower-level positions are of course how people gain experience to occupy higher-level ones. If those jobs go away, obviously one cannot ever move up as there is no path of preparation to, say, move from a helpdesk to an infrastructure architect.

This fact I believe companies will use to argue that there are “no qualified candidates” and thus all should be offshored where experienced (and cheaper) people can be hired. Or, failing that, H-1B visa employees can be brought in.

So pursue whatever career strikes your fancy. Likely as not, your job will not exist in 10 years anyway – at least not in your home country – so it doesn’t really matter.