Apparently the window for returns is one year, which seems like quite an overly lenient policy - I can see people having a backlog for audiobooks, but it shouldn’t be taking that long to realize you don’t like one. I didn’t realize a return policy existed… I’d just assumed the customer was stuck with the purchase no matter what.
Their FAQ does say you can only return “a certain number” before they remove the ability to do an automatic return and require you to talk to them. Dunno what that limit’s set at, though…
(I don’t use Audible unless I really want a book and can’t find it elsewhere, mainly because I have to jump through too many (questionably legal) hoops to get an Audible book into a portable format that I can keep without the chance of them revoking it later.)
I use the Libby app with my library card and most audiobooks are free that way. You have to listen to them within a certain window of time. But you can check it out again.
If following Peter Thiel’s advice, seek out secrets and front-run where possible, and drive misfortune if you must.
Pig speculators (“chao zhu tuan”) — yes, there is a specific term for them — traveled to various households and villages to collect these pigs and ship them to other localities, enabling the disease to cross administrative borders and disseminate. In northern and central China, some speculators even deliberately tried to spread the diseaseby using drones to drop contaminated pork products into farms. After causing an outbreak, or at least sparking fears about one, speculators could buy pigs for cheap — then stockpile the animals for a time to create shortages locally and sell them only after the prices had gone back up.
Specifically, Brooks posits that Bernie Sanders’s “class-war Theyism” — which holds that “billionaires have rigged the economy to benefit themselves and impoverish everyone else” — is plainly false. What follows is exceptionally dense with fallacies, even for a David Brooks column, and so it’s worth breaking his argument into two parts. Here’s the first:
Sanders starts with a truth: Workers need more bargaining power as they negotiate wages with their employers. But then he blows this up into an all-explaining ideology: Capitalism is a system of exploitation in which capitalist power completely dominates worker power. This ideology crashes against the facts.
In the first place, over the past few years wages for workers toward the bottom of the income scale have been rising faster than wages for those at the top. If the bosses have the workers by the throat, how can this be happening?
Already, our columnist’s ideology has crashed against multiple facts. The first, and most fundamental, is that Bernie Sanders’s does not argue that “capitalist power completely dominates worker power” in the United States. On the contrary, the socialist senator has pushed for reforming America’s labor laws to promote unionization on the grounds that while one worker has “no strength,” when “when we stand together then we have some power.” If Sanders believed that it was impossible for ordinary people to meaningfully improve their economic circumstances in a capitalist economy — because in such an economy, capitalists exert complete domination over workers — then his campaign would have no reason to exist. It may seem unfair to suggest that Brooks is using the word completely in a literal sense. But his own rhetorical question confirms that he is: The fact that wages are rising modestly for low-income workers, after years of stagnation, only refutes Sanders’s ideology if one posits that the socialist senator believes no worker has ever gotten a raise since the advent of wage labor.
I’ve found that other media outlets were quite anxious about my reporting too. CNBC had me on for a long segment. Bloomberg couldn’t wait to attack the whole idea of people getting tips from inside or around the Trump administration, because Bloomberg’s whole business model depends on the public thinking that the markets are fair and open and not rigged. Bloomberg and others with the same commitment must do everything they can to bat down this idea that somehow people are getting inside information that isn’t available to everybody else.
Magic robot slaves will not save the capital-D Democrats. Success still requires people who are skilled:
On Twitter, University of Michigan tech and media scholar Justin Joque, who is writing a book on the role of algorithms and statistics in late capitalism, pinned the Iowa disaster on consultants usurping processes that trained workers once ran.
