Obviously, it's a great outcome that it worked. But the alternative--"it could trigger a small explosion," JPL noted--would have been interesting too. A sort of in fire or in ice outcome. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44263/fire-and-ice
Generally, I would guess conferring with the client on the facts, briefing, preparing for a hearing, and arguing a hearing would be north of, at least, 25k, assuming a lower-end rate estimate in the $800+ range and a lower-end work estimate of 30+ hours. If I had to bet, I'd go higher than the low-end estimate: both the rate and hours could be close to double. That said, the attorney / firm could be donating the time on this one.
What you said reminded me of this Royal Road (https://www.royalroad.com/home) website I came across. It is not physical publishing (at least I don't think so), but it is a large collection of different authors who release books / work incrementally. The work mainly seems to be fiction of different varieties.
Royal Road is a place for a lot of folks to get audiences seeded before they inevitably move on to some combination of Patreon, Amazon Kindle Unlimited, and Audible.
One very notable example of this is Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. He's even just announced that he managed to sell publishing only rights to Ace for large scale distribution which to my knowledge is a first (from authors that started on Royal Road).
Also, I'd highly recommend reading Dungeon Crawler Carl if you enjoy anything close to Douglas Adams-esque comedic sci-fi. Its definitely trends a lot more "adult" than Douglas Adams, but that's about as close as I can think of off the top of my head for comparison. And I'd very much recommend the Audible versions narrated by Jeff Hayes for anyone that does audio books. The Sound Booth Theater production is also good but I'd only recommend that if you're doing a re-listen.
The Dungeon Crawler Carl series' first 4 or 5 books (it's been a little while) were excellent. Carl's tone reminds me of a detective novel, while the setting is more reminiscent of Ready Player One and The Matrix. The genre is a LitRPG novel (admittedly a genre I'd never known existed until reading DCC), heavily doused with comedic elements. Lots of mature themes and references to sex, drugs, politics, and violence, but with some of the allegorical or illustrative critique (to the point of absurdity) you'd find with Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett when discussing serious topics with parallels to real life, in an imagined scifi/fantasy setting. I'd recommend the series if for those who haven't picked up a book in a while and who would appreciate those elements.
* there's a significant conflict between "this is a place to read stories" and "this is just a place to advertise for Amazon"
* the effective site rules are unwritten and quite arbitrary (one unwritten rule: you are not allowed to say anything positive about real-ish religions, only negative things)
* way too much pedophilia, including in site-promoted stories. Unlike religion, it's clearly not something they put effort into removing.
Another problem is the ratings. Everything there seems way overrated. You'll see a ton of 5-star or 4-star ratings for things that are barely readable.
Wasn't the case before, but RR allows banning readers from rating author stories. So, usually authors have become smarter and immediately ban readers whose review history looks critical. You cannot rate a story from which you have been banned.
Of-course readers have also gotten smarter, many now leaving 0.5 stars for all new stories. If they are banned later, you can still adjust your rating. So now many new stories get a surge of 0.5 ratings.
When you've spent many a year reading machine translated chinese xianxia then indeed many stories on RR are 4/5 star worthy in comparison.
Royalroad is not a place you go to find objectively good stories, it's the place you go to enjoy your particular blend of delicious trash because in the end you'd rather read chapter 1600 of the long running braindead litrpg than you would whatever just won the hugo's.
That's cool. I admit hearing that story and thinking, "Is that how it happened? could a diver find it?" Apparently, they could! Great work on someone seeing it through.
I thought of this quote from the PBS documentary Commanding Heights
LESZEK BALCEROWICZ, Finance Minister, Poland, 1989-1991: Just after breakthrough, there is a short period, a period of extraordinary politics. By definition, people are ready to accept more radical solutions because they are pretty euphoric of freshly regained freedom. One could use it only in one way, by moving forward very, very quickly.
JOSEPH STANISLAW: Poland decided to do what Bolivia did, to introduce shock therapy, cut back on government expenditure and try and introduce a market system and see if it could work.
NARRATOR: Prices almost doubled, and shortages didn't end. All Balcerowicz could do was chew his nails and wait for the law of supply and demand to kick in. But then, after a few days, farmers began to bring their produce to market.
LESZEK BALCEROWICZ: I was going for a walk, and we were looking at the prices in the shops, the prices of eggs.
NARRATOR: His aides told him to concentrate on the price of eggs. If eggs appeared, if eggs got cheaper, the market would be working. Eggs did appear. And then the price of eggs began to fall.
LESZEK BALCEROWICZ: And I remember that very important day when the prices of eggs are falling. This was one of the signals that the program, the stabilization program, is working.
Very interesting. I doubt you'd need to convince many Poles today that a market economy - with its shortcomings and all - is better than a centralized one.
Balcerowicz is hated by many Poles. The cost of his reforms was pushed onto the poorest citizens. Because of the mess created by him in the early years of transformation, some people are still convinced that communism was better. Real change came later, when proper regulations were introduced, and his successors cleaned his mess.
It wasn’t the cost of his reforms, it was the cost of 40 years of communism. The only way out of the frying pan is through the fire, sadly. Blame the people who put Poland into the frying pan, not the people who led it out.
It's a nice story. I even wish it applied to all contexts.
In the real world, we have to ponder monopolies, the export market, other, non-free, big economic bullies, trying to destroy competition through subsidized goods, etc.
I'd love to talk about it some more. Is it common to go "back to school" for this kind of thing? I'm a few years past my undergrad now. Still in my 20s, though.
Feel free, my contact information is in my profile. "Back to school" in this case would, usually, mean law school, at least in the U.S. My sense is it is not uncommon for there to be a gap between undergraduate and law school. Depending on your interests and background, there are, potentially, paths for working with / around patents (some mentioned in this branch) that would not require going back to school.
OKCupid had tons of controls and questions to optimize match making. Then Tinder came along with "swipe left, swipe right" and completely changed the industry.
1994 was still pretty early on for the web. This timeline of web browsers, which is very well done btw, illustrates the clients that were available at that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_browsers. And I'd say the timeline does not tell the full story, since many of the early browsers were on hardware that was not common (e.g., the original launch was on Next and other early browsers were on AIX).
If by "reform" you mean weaken class actions, I would argue that is a bad idea.
Larger businesses have already gone to great lengths to eliminate / curtail class actions.
I'd argue that this weakening is the root cause of a chunk of the aggregate problems I see discussed on HN.
It is in a company's interest to harm a great many people a little bit because the people often have to challenge the company as individuals rather than as a group. And the economics often make no sense in that way, so the company is functionally immune to the effects of its harm.
Further weakening the remaining viability of that case type stands to only encourage companies to commit more aggregate harms.
Businesses aren't trying to harm. They aren't a Mao or a Stalin just going for The Greater Good no matter how many people they have to kill. They're trying to make a profit, and sometimes horribly unethical people in those businesses will not care about harm in order to make a profit. But the goal isn't harm.
To be clear, I was not suggesting the intent was harm for harm's sake. I was suggesting that it was in the company's/businesses' interest to harm. I agree that, often, that interest is framed as making profit, but it can also be framed as reducing cost, not having to care, etc.
The bigger point is that such an incentive exists and that it is further incentivized if the individuals who are harmed are deprived of a mechanism to resist.
> framed as making profit, but it can also be framed as reducing cost
Reducing cost does increase profit. Profit is (basically) revenue minus cost.
> The bigger point is that such an incentive exists and that it is further incentivized if the individuals who are harmed are deprived of a mechanism to resist.
Of course. Russia is invading Ukraine right now, as causing harm can benefit you, if you don't care about harm. This isn't a business thing; it's a people thing.
It's just that the blast radius of a business's harm is much smaller than a state's, and it's possible to shape rules so that profit incentives line up (even better) with harm minimisation. There's no harm minimisation you can do when a power-hungry person gets into a political position.
Future archaeologists will find the global layer of lead in soil, ice, etc. and wonder who these supervillains were and why they were not promptly shot.
Tobacco? Asbestos? Leaded gasoline? Uncontained mining tailings and failures of tailings piles? Oil w.r.t. global warming? They are working to continue harm. As if I accidentally stabbed someone and decided the best next step is to stab deeper.
When I say "They are working to continue harm." I mean that yes, they are trying to harm. Intending to harm. Knowingly. Almost always knowing it before the public knows it.
How is "we're trying to make a profit here, we do not care about harm" any different than Mao's or Stalin's "we're doing it for The Greater Good, we do not care about harm"?
