Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Logically Answered" channel.

IKR, I'm fortunate enough to live 3 blocks from where I work and being able to commute in only 10 minutes each way means that I'm only spending roughly an hour and a half a week commuting rather than the more typical 10 hours that people spend.
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The main reason that it hasn't happened is that you've got rentseekers jacking up the prices on apartments and bosses that insist on making the poors show up to work for 40 hours a day, even though it's pretty well-established that few people actually work during all that time with some companies having a lot of slacking off just to fill out the time.
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Generally speaking, don't get in bed with Amazon, they have a long history of screwing the people that buy from them and the people that sell on their sites. Definitely do your research and figure out what is in your best interest, but please consider selling the book through as many different stores as possible. Ultimately, that's the only way that this will ever improve.
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@stainlesssteellemming Which is why we should have minimum wages that are tailored closer to regional costs of living rather than state and national costs of living. In both cases, it does little to keep the areas affordable to the poorest and is commonly tied with insufficient welfare benefits to make up the difference. Ideally, minimum wage + welfare should result in people having a decent standard of living, but in practice both tend to be too cheap to allow for that.
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I don't think so. I think the change will happen suddenly as ML based text to speech programs drop the price of generating these audiobooks to practically nothing, and customers can do it for themselves with services where the author gets a cut when it's done. As big as Audible is, it doesn't have all books being published, probably nowhere near it.
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It may also be a company that's run by incompetent management that was forced to allow remote work.
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@JustSomeDinosaurPerson Yes, unfortunately, a lot of these reductions in work hours schemes really only work for jobs where being there 40 hours is a lot less of a convenience. The ones where the reduction in hours would make the biggest reduction in human suffering, are the ones that will probably never see those cuts.
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@rosepainting8775 Yes, although if the hours wind up being cut back to 20 to 30 hours, that opens up a lot of time to socialize outside of work. And that doesn't even include the time wasted on commuting.
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@michaelxz1305 40% is bad because it doesn't cost anywhere near that amount to provide the service and in exchange for taking the money, it means that other sites can't compete on pricing to give more to the writers, charge the customers less or provide better features/service. If they were taking 60% of the money, but providing services that would justify just a large cut, that would be completely different.
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I used to buy from them many years ago, back then it wasn't nearly as bad, this was before the push to advertise it on YouTube was a major thing. But, I stopped buying years ago because of how crappy Amazon's practices are.
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@southcoastinventors6583 Not enough to matter, and you're giving them more money if you opt to buy the book in a different format. Depending upon the genre, an ebook with text to speech may be good enough. The author gets money, you've avoided rewarding Audible and if you buy what audio books are available elsewhere, you're nudging the market in the right direction.
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@jonevansauthor Yes, and there's always self-publishing epubs on your own website via one of the many ecommerce providers.
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It depends what you're doing, but I know that at my job, 6 hours is about the point where I start getting tired and have a hard time keeping up with the earlier pace.
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That has it's own issues, but probably ones that are better for society over the long term. Really, what people ought to be doing is avoiding Audible and either use whatever competitors or exist or run their own books through ML based text to speech programs to make their own. It's not as good of an experience, but it beats the current situation where so much money and power is in the hands of a psychopath.
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