Kuiper

As one example: in order for a baseball game to be considered valid, both teams must play 5 innings. If the weather is bad and teams are unable to continue due to rain, a <5 inning game is considered invalid and scheduled for a later date. If one team is behind and knows there's a high chance of rain later in the day, the pitcher can begin drawing out the length of innings by intentionally giving up hits. (After all, it doesn't matter how many runs he gives up if the game is canceled.) This, in turn, gives the opposite incentive to the opposing team's offense, who wants their runners to be declared "out" so that the inning can end faster. There's a real-time rules-gaming arms race as both teams test the bounds of what's legally permissible, driven by incentives that lead to a very unusual game of baseball.

The effect described by the poster you're responding to is the opposite of that, and actually how credibility is presumed to normally work: you see that a publication get things right in a narrow domain that you have a lot of expertise in (and thus are qualified to identify which publications are purveyors of truth), and extrapolate that and assume, "if this one story is of impressive quality, then there's a good chance the rest of the publication is held to a similar standard." This is how a publication earns a badge of trustworthiness.

If someone pays $10/mo for access to a library of tens of thousands of books but doesn't actually read any of them, then Amazon gets income without having to pay royalties, in the same way that Netflix still gets your money if you subscribe but don't watch anything. This is true even if you decided to subscribe to KU/Netflix because "Oh, I should get around to reading Harry Potter/watching Stranger Things" and then don't get around to actually reading Harry Potter or watching Stranger Things. This is very much legal.

It used to be that if Blockbuster wanted to rent out Raiders of the Lost Ark to six different customers simultaneously, they needed to own 6 VHS copies of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now, with streaming, Netflix doesn't have a finite number of "copies" that they can lend out at a time; if every single Netflix subscriber in the country decides that they want to start watching Indiana Jones right now, the only thing preventing Netflix from providing that is their bandwidth, because Netflix has worked out an arrangement with Paramount Pictures that allows them to do this.

Likewise, Amazon has an arrangement with KDP authors that says, "We lend your ebook out to as many KU subscribers as want it. At the end of the month we pay you based on how much people read your books." If an author doesn't like the terms of the KU program for any other reason, they are free to decline the subscription model and sell their ebooks through the regular "customer pays fixed price for ebook, I get money from sale" model. In fact, most authors don't opt into KU; there are a millions of Kindle books, and only tens of thousands of books in the KU program.

Because you pay a fixed subscription fee and the money gets divided between all the authors you've read, it's effectively zero sum: if Amazon wants to give more money to authors who wrote books that people dropped after the 1st chapter, that means less money for the authors who wrote books that people actually liked enough to read past the first chapter. Amazon has structured their program to reward authors for writing books that people consume more of, which seems like a good way of rewarding creators based on the value that they contribute to the platform. If you don't like it, don't opt in and instead sell your books the "normal" way.

The "authors get paid per page read" model is only for Kindle Unlimited, not for regular Kindle ebook sales. When you buy a Kindle book for $6.99 or whatever, Amazon sends the money directly along to the author (or their publisher) after taking their cut, just like you'd expect.

But if you pay $10 a month for a Kindle Unlimited subscription, and read a dozen books by different authors, Amazon has to figure out how to split that fixed monthly subscription fee between all the authors that you read; paying authors based on page reads seems like the best way for your KU money to go to the authors/books that you actually read.

For similar reasons, the quality and genre of made-for-TV movies currently airing on the Hallmark channel is probably different from what you could experience for the cost of a ticket at your local movie theater: one of these distribution channels caters to people who want to consume several hours of content every day at no marginal cost beyond the monthly subscription that is already part of their budget, while the other caters to people who are willing to pay $15 to spend 2 hours watching a film that a studio spent millions of dollars marketing to them.

Because Netflix pays for their content up front, they have to take a bit of a gamble. (Maybe they spend a bunch of money for a new Coen Brothers film, but nobody watches it, so they take a loss on that project. Or, as was the case in 2008, maybe TV networks grossly under-estimate the value of their catalog of old shows, so Netflix gets to pay peanuts for the content that serves as the bread and butter.)

The money that people spend on $10/month KU subscriptions is used to pay authors based on which authors people spent the most time reading (or, more accurately, which books you read the most pages of). If I read 400 pages of book A, and 5 pages of book B, then author A gets paid more than author B. I think the reasoning behind this should be pretty intuitive and obvious. Since every KU subscriber only spends $10/mo regardless of how much they read, there is a fixed "pie" to distribute to authors, and it makes sense to divide the pie based on which authors contributed the most to the readers' use of the KU platform.

Readers don't get a "refund" for dropping a KU book 5% of the way through, because even if you quit reading one book, the fact that you stopped reading a book does not change the fact that you still have access to tens of thousands of other ebooks in the KU library for the remainder of that month, which is the thing that you are ostensibly paying for. (I don't phone Netflix to request a partial refund if I start watching the first episode of Bojack Horseman and quit halfway through the first episode, I just start watching Stranger Things or Narcos instead.)

If authors don't like this arrangement, they are free to not participate in Kindle Unlimited, and sell their books under a more traditional model (where the author sets a price, and people can buy the book for that price irrespective of any participation in any sort of subscription program).

New city? There's a bunch of cool/fun things to do that you haven't tried yet. New hobby? Hop onto Youtube and there's hundreds of hours of "explainer" videos made by passionate hobbyists looking to share their favorite parts of that hobby with you. New to a particular field? Other people have probably already done the work of curating the 1% most interesting, important, and fascinating things to learn about. It's easy to feel like you're making progress when you're starting from zero.

I recently bought a guitar and started playing Rocksmith -- think Guitar Hero, but with a real guitar hooked up to your computer, with learning tools designed to help you learn how to play songs of your choosing, along with lessons covering everything from how to play power chords to the very basics of how to hold your guitar when sitting vs standing. I'm a total noob when it comes to playing guitar, but I've enjoyed every part of my time with Rocksmith, from the very first moment I plugged in my guitar and let the software step me through the process of tuning it.

I've found it incredibly edifying largely because the experience of picking up an instrument and learning how to play it has reminded me of what it's like to learn a completely new skill from scratch -- I think spending a week with Rocksmith has not only taught me guitar basics, but also given me a refresher course on how to learn a new skill.

In fact, I wonder if this can lead to its own problem -- someone who gets too much pleasure from the experience of being a noob and may turn into a dilettante, moving from hobby to hobby without ever taking the time to spend years cultivating a deep expertise. Which, I suppose, is fine on a certain level, but there are definitely times when I've procrastinated and hidden from the intimidating prospect of achieving mastery in a field where I already have a lot of experience, and instead spent that time venturing into new fields where there's still low-hanging fruit for me to pick.

>any religious group that considers your occasional absence as a crisis is a group i'd stay away from.

Indeed, which is probably why the poster you're responding to specifically made the point about consistent absence (not occasional absence) and it being a mild crisis.

Most religious communities I've observed are also quite lax about what qualifies as an excuse. For example, any sort of travel (be it vacation, visiting family, going on a business trip, or traveling with the team for little Jimmy's soccer tournament), seems to be accepted as valid excuse. So are other institutional commitments, provided that they don't become regular/recurring reasons for missing religious attendance. "I overslept" or "I was tired after staying up late Saturday night" or "I decided that there were other activities I'd prefer to spend my Sunday doing" are not.

Furthermore, having your absence declared to be a "mild crisis" for the group is not necessarily a bad thing: certain excuses like being sick (or caring for a sick family member) are likely to draw the support of the group; if you're in a small religious community where people hold each other accountable for religious attendance, there's a decent chance that if members of your church know that you missed Sunday service due to being ill or pregnant or recovering from surgery (or caring for a family member who is any of the above), some of them will stop by later in the afternoon (or later in the week) to drop off a home-cooked meal or some other sort of care package.

(I understand that some people might prefer to deal with their health situation in private without having a community of people who take it upon themselves to offer support, and I've always been one to appreciate the benefits of solitude and privacy, but in contemporary society I feel like we may have veered too far in the direction of isolation and atomization.)

>if anything, for things like scouting and sports groups, or any kind of group where you learn something together it is more important that members attend regularly.

Many religious practices involve a service that involves teaching (for example, a "sermon" that is delivered to a congregation by a preacher), so for many people, religious attendance falls into the category of "group where you learn something together." Indeed, I've observed it's common for many churches to have weekly sermons that are part of a "series," offering a sort of week-to-week continuity as they provide a deep exploration of a single topic over the course of a month, so if you miss a single service you might perhaps be inclined to ask a friend what was covered in the sermon later in the week when you meet them at something like a Wednesday Bible study or a Tuesday morning prayer group.