3 comments

  • wincy 1 hour ago
    This mindset is so strange to me. Destroying books is anathema? These are niche subjects for books that may only have a few copies in the world. This knowledge should be digitized so it can be available and shared for thousands of years.

    Better yet, why not raise prices by 10x for these online AI orders? Then again, I suppose you don’t really run a book shop in 2026 because you want to make money.

    • krautsauer 14 minutes ago
      There's a bit of history to destroying books. So yes, anathema.
    • jandrese 1 hour ago
      Except we know they're going to digitize it, use that data to feed an AI, and never release it to the world.

      Legally they can't, they would immediately land in copyright claim hell.

      • buildbot 59 minutes ago
        Most people do not support the destruction of books - it seems like the issue in both cases is copyright forcing the destruction and non-release of the scan.
        • jandrese 53 minutes ago
          They don't have to destroy the books to scan them. There are techniques for doing it non-destructively, but they're slower and more expensive. It's cheaper to cut the spines off and drop the stack of papers on a flatbed scanner with a paper feeder.
  • aaron695 1 day ago
    [dead]
  • LAC-Tech 1 hour ago
    For those wondering why she's wearing wool and gloves indoors - New Zealanders typically can't afford electric heating, and wear woolen clothing in doors to to make up for this, when they can't burn firewood or coal.
    • kiwih 1 hour ago
      Often kiwis can afford it but just choose not to. My own parents are well off and yet still have an absolutely freezing house all winter, it drives me crazy. Just put on a sweater, and another one over that, and a blanket....
    • jemmyw 1 hour ago
      More likely a second hand book store in Newtown is an old and draughty building. Running a heater in there would be the same as running one outdoors.

      Or she just gets cold. My daughter wears those kind of gloves all winter regardless of how warm we heat the house.

      • LAC-Tech 1 hour ago
        What percentage of New Zealanders do you think live somehwere that isn't cold and draughty?
        • enquirewithin 6 minutes ago
          Jacinda Ardern and her family.

          Because she’s so reviled by New Zealanders she left NZ.

    • potatosalad99 6 minutes ago
      That’s a funny callback to last weeks RNZ article https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/wellbeing/cosy-ways-to-keep-warm-...
    • AnotherGoodName 1 hour ago
      Lol but seriously 4th highest median wealth per capita. The median NZ citizen has 3x the wealth of the median us citizen.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...

      Of course they have very low wealth inequality so they don’t have trillionaires at all which some people may see as a problem. In fact remarkably despite the median wealth of NZ being so much higher than the USA they have a lower average wealth per capita.

      They just spread the wealth around making the middle class 3x richer.

      • loeg 43 minutes ago
        Wikipedia's (UBS') US figure ($69k) is probably wrong? US median household wealth is ~$193k[1]. I don't think there's a way to square claimed median individual wealth of $69k with that? Even taking into account children (22% population) and assuming 2 adults/household (more favorable to the math than the real 1.2-1.4 figure). I can't find anything on UBS' methodology, just the short 1.5 page paper.

        [1]: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm

        • nl 24 minutes ago
          I don't have an explanation for this but I did note that the 2023 UBS report had US Median Wealth per adult at $107K[1].

          I wonder if there is a per adult vs per person vs per working person difference in the measurement or something like that?

          Edit: I've dug into this more, and the closest thing I can come up with for an explanation is that UBS changed its model for 2026 to "normalize household debt" in order to make it more comparable across countries. There doesn't seem to be sufficient information to explain how that change caused such a radical change.

          [1]https://web.archive.org/web/20230815103944/https://www.ubs.c...

      • LAC-Tech 50 minutes ago
        That wealthy is all tied up in draughty houses. It's not real.