Bits of this, Bits of That

Picture ID under the cut:

they've had to face settlements against stealing from current authors, so they'll just go for the old books now. they're also doing this so they have the only copies of rare books.

"One small book seller said that in April, he suddenly went from selling no more than 20 books a week to hundreds, and he’s almost certain that the customers are AI labs, noting the random selection of the books and how they all have ISBNs. He added that his inventory is full with rare and out of print books, meaning that an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies that can be found.

“I personally have mixed feelings about all of this,” the bookseller told 404. “It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell. I’ve been well-suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books.

From a Google search:

The thing that had us not realizing what was going on and was eventually really confusing to us was that the books they're buying are not ... special? In our case, at least, they're not buying rare or hard to find books. They may be out of print, but they're books we see multiple copies a month of, and they were (for a while) paying double or more what we had them priced for. (This is to do with how online storefronts adjust prices and how that can go up and down depending on *waves hands* weird fluctuations of the market. Most of these orders come through Alibris and I'm not actually well-informed about how their system works. My job is not actually interfacing with the online retailers in any way other than pulling and packaging orders our store gets.)

The combination of a gazillion orders and prices being paid got our attention, and one of my co-workers looked up the business name on the order sheets. He found a website that states its business model is 'recycling books', which is sus as hell. But in the absence of any actual information there's not much we can do about it. We could theoretically cancel all orders coming from those businesses but the damage that would do to our ability to sell via any online storefronts would be catastrophic. Until Amazon, Alibris, Ebay, et al decide to do something about these accounts we're kind of stuck.

Also, they keep changing accounts and names. Currently they're using Color + Bird as their business names. It was Green Parrot for a while. As of Sunday it was Red Sparrow.

Charlie.exe has stopped working

The Brittish goverment was unwilling to do anything for two reasons. First was the laissez-faire capitalistic ideology, that put the rights of property owners to make profits above human lives. Rent freeze was unthinkable and they even were unwilling to do proper relief efforts as free food would lower the cost of food. The second reason was distain for the Irish, and the thought that they were “breeding too much” and the famine was a natural way to trim down the population, aka genocidal reasoning.

This is why it’s important to stress it was not a potato famine. The potato blinght was all over Europe but only in Ireland there was a famine. The reasons behind it had nothing to do with potatos and everything to do with the Brittish.

Apparently what made Choctaw want to offer relief to Irish was the news about the Doolough Tragedy. Hundreds of starving people were gathered for inspection to verify they were entitled to recieve relief. The officials would for *some reason* not do that and instead left to a hunting lodge 19 kilometers away to spend the night and said to the starvqing people they would have to walk there by morning to be inspected. The weather conditions were terrible and many of them died completely needlessly during the walk thoroung day and night.

This apparently reminded the Choctaw of their own very recent (and much more explicit and bigger scale) experiences of ethnic clensing, where they were forcibly relocated. It was basically a death march and thousands of Choctaw died from the terrible conditions also completely needlessly.

In 2015 a memorial named Kindred Spirits was installed in Southern Ireland to commemorate the Chactow donation.

Then in 2020: