Chrononautic Log: economics

September 11, 2006

Fascinating (if you’re fascinated by this sort of thing) discussion of the future of massively multiplayer online gaming over at someplaced called F13.net.

Raph: Yeah, NPCs in a game like WoW clearly deserve the name quest dispensers . . .

Yoru: Whereas NPCs in pen and paper games are kind of central . . .

Raph: Yeah, in WoW, they’re quest dispensers except they’re shaped like meat. Rather than shaped like a terminal.

(Courtesy of Bruce Sterling.)

Also of interest: “Do Levels Suck?” by Raph Koster (the “Raph” in the exchange above, and author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design), which among other things does a pretty good job of convincing me I’ve had most of the fun in World of Warcraft that I’m ever going to have.

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Update: See also “What are the lessons of MMORPGs today?” For instance:

• You never, ever, ever change jobs. If you want to, you probably need to die.
• There is always a demand for couriers and assassins.
• Killing is the only real way to gain people’s admiration.
• If you don’t keep up with the Joneses, you will never see them again. In fact, if you don’t keep up with your friends, you will never see them again either.

As Raph says, it may seem like a joke, but it’s actually a lament.

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July 24, 2006

Via William Gibson, Neomarxisme, a fascinating English-language blog about contemporary Japan. Some brief samples:

Politics:

Last Friday night, I saw a tiny left-wing demonstration in Shibuya, but the thing about people power is that the cast and crew actually show their faces, walk the walk as they talk the talk. And there were handicap people! And women! These ultra-nationalists hide behind machines, like Darth Vader. They could all be remote-controlled from some central base in Yamanashi, and we would never know.

Sorry to keep writing about the yakuza and the right-wing, but I keep running into them week after week. I guess I should just cower in fear like a good boy. God didn't make right-wing soundtrucks so we would question their impact on the political process. Unlike the rest of the world, trucks in Japan run on wa, not gasoline, so it is quite rude to be too inquisitive about the internal combustion process.

— Right-Wing Parad(is)e

Pop culture:

One of the key presuppositions of this blog is, "For the last five years, Japanese mainstream pop culture has gotten progressively more boring and less stimulating," to which many answer:

1. Yes! The innovation and spark of the 90s is gone!
2. No! Your head is stuck in the past and you are missing the stunning glory of today!
3. No! You are deluded and have no idea what is actually going on!
4. No! You are looking in the wrong fields. Culture is not just music and street fashion!
5. No! You are a hater!

Every month or so, I start toying with ideas 2-5 and ask my Japanese friends to fill me in on everything I am missing. They never come up with much of anything: they either shrug in resigned apathy or call me later on my cellphone to announce that they are so bored with things that they don’t leave the house and I have been talking to thin air the entire time.

— Now I Understand Why Contemporary Japanese Pop Culture is at a Nadir

Politics, pop culture, and porn:

Even during the “Sex Boom” of the 80s, female university students still held a strong position in the collective libido, but now they were on late-night TV, bouncing around in bikinis and skimpy outfits. Following soon after that, the Onyanko Club lowered the bar by shifting desires to average-looking high school girls singing suggestive songs. A decade later in the mid-90s, the enjokousai (compensated dating) boom revealed to the public that old men would pay a lot of cash to have sex with middle school girls.

Sociologists and critics have proffered a lot of explanations over the years for the falling age of Japanese men’s sexual preferences, most notably that rising educational opportunities for women increased their intellectual maturity above the level desired by most Japanese men. In order to procure mental inferiors, men had to keep slinking down the food chain. . . .

So, now we have arrived upon the symbol of our own post-post-modern era — Saaya Irie — the busty twelve year-old slowly becoming a household name.

. . . The appreciation of most porn in Japan essentially comes from a type of misogyny — a belief in a cosmic order that determines women to be objects formed for the sole mission of male pleasure. The same graying bigwigs who prevented the birth control pill from gaining legal status in Japan for thirty years are the ones who would gnaw off an arm before any government body takes away their rights to paid sex and dirty videos. The powers-that-be would have no tiff with Saaya Irie.

— What to do about Saaya Irie?

Well worth checking out, whether you’re a Japanophile (I’m looking at you, Barzak!), an ex-Japanophile, or just an armchair cultural anthropologist.

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July 3, 2006

(This started as an email response to Jackie M. [Hi, Jackie! I’ll finish the email soon, promise.] Then it got longer. Then I had to put some more stuff in ’cause I was writing to a larger audience. Anyway:)

Let me start by saying that I’m not even going to talk about whether trying to get published in the Big Three SF magazines is a worthwhile endeavor. I think that’s been adequately covered elsewhere. (And besides, everyone knows, or should know, that the answer is it depends.)

I’ve been watching the August 18th thing kind of bemusedly from the sidelines, particularly the negative responses to it. If the claim that I’ve heard several times is true that F&SF’s published gender balance roughly tracks submissions, then, ceteris paribus, this is exactly the sort of thing that ought to work (where “work” is defined as “get more stories by women into F&SF.”) In any case it should provide some interesting data, the interpretation of which will give us something new to fight over.

(Whether having your gender balance track submissions is good enough, and whether you have a responsibility to try to do something about your submission gender balance, are separate questions that if I was buying more than twenty stories every couple of years would definitely keep me up at night.)

(Also, discussions of this sort of thing tend to degenerate into some really stupid arguments about “good” stories and “bad“ stories, just as discussions of workplace affirmative action tend to degenerate into some really stupid arguments about good and bad candidates.)

What I wonder is, what it would take to get guys complaining (do they?) about women, on a percentage-published vs. percentage-of-submissions basis, being two or three times as likely to get published in Strange Horizons as men.

I actually don’t read anywhere near enough F&SF — award winners (sometimes), stories by friends (sometimes), stories by famous people (sometimes) if they happen to be in the same issue as an award winner or a story by a friend — to know what sort of stories GvG buys —

(Hey, I was going to subscribe to the major mags while I was over here, as an alternative to spending too much money ordering books from overseas. Maybe I should do that right now. Okay, F&SF done, Asimov’s done . . . do I dare subscribe to Analog? Rrrrr . . . chickening out. Should get me some Interzone, though.)

— anyway, where was I? Yes. It’s no mystery to me that SH publishes more stories by women than men, because without making any assertions about any particular story or any particular writer or any particular editorial buying decision, I have some idea what sorts of stories SH buys, what sorts of stories tend to be written by women and what sorts tend to be written by men, and when you add those vectors up they all point in more or less the same direction. And it wouldn't surprise me if something similar was happening in F&SF.

What I wonder is, is editorial bias the only thing that needs to be dealt with? I mean, if it could be demonstrated that an editor was in fact gender-blind, would the publication skew — whether it’s a factor of pure submission skew, or of the sort of stories the editor publishes, or some combination — still in itself be a problem?

I don’t expect anyone to try the gender-blind submissions experiment soon, by the way, because it would be a lot of work, and the last thing an understaffed magazine wants when dealing with the slush pile is more work. (Though with its highly automated submission-tracking process, SH is probably best place to do it.) (Not that I’m suggesting that, kids.) And I wonder what there is to be done absent that. Is not having enough data really the issue? All more data will tell us is that for a given market one gender does or dosn’t have some probably-not-overwhelming advantage or disadvantage over the other.

Which is the sort of thing we authors like to know. It makes us feel better when we know we’re being treated fairly, it makes us feel better to have somebody to blame when we know we’re being treated unfairly.

But is how we feel really the problem?

I don’t like the kind of world that gets created when a culture (whether large or whether just the culture of a magazine) is dominated by one gender.

— Matt Cheney

Yes. Exactly. Never mind the writers. We get enough attention. How — whether there’s editorial bias at work or not — is this hurting the readers? And what’s to be done about it?

Comments (37)

June 25, 2006

In what way is it not completely insane for someone to be selling All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories for fifty-four dollars?

Comments (3)

April 28, 2006

Why does a one-way flight from Chicago to Zurich cost fifty percent more than a round trip? (Not fifty percent more than half a round trip. Fifty percent more than a whole round trip.)

I mean, it’s not like I’m surprised by this, but seriously, what is up with it?

I need an answer that does not assume that airlines are crazy, and does not assume that customers are too stupid to realize they could buy a round trip and not use the second half.

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April 26, 2006

Mary Anne on the Kaavya Viswanathan thing:

What bothers me the most about the whole thing is not what Kaavya did or didn't consciously do. It’s that if she had been paid $500 for the book, instead of $500,000, most of the people ranting about it clearly wouldn't care.

Exactly.

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December 9, 2005

For those of you who enjoyed Cory’s “Anda’s Game,” and/or for the WoWers out there (you know who you are), the real-life (real-virtual-life?) version: a fascinating piece on gold farming from one “Paul,” a player who’s spent the time to get to know the farmers on his server.

Comments (1)

December 7, 2005

More Americans Falling For ‘Get Rich Slowly Over A Lifetime Of Hard Work’ Schemes. “Girouard added that steady employment which claims to offer long-term financial gain in the form of a pension plan is nothing more than an elaborate Ponzi scheme.”

Clearly they’ve been following the news about General Motors . . .

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November 18, 2005

I’m not really into the whole “blogosphere” thing — I’m more into the blog-augmented* monkeysphere — so I haven’t really paid any attention to this conservative new media thing calling itself Open Source Media. And I don’t figure to start. But this account by Jim Lowney of the OSM launch party at Manhattan’s W Hotel was, in a quiet way, pretty damn funny.

Nothing I could say would change Boston guy’s mind that there was some media conspiracy being led by the New York Times. Even worse, Blair still hadn’t delivered my martini.

The conversation went around in circles with me asking about how OSM could do it better and what exactly was wrong with the Times. Finally my drink arrived but any enjoyment was short lived.

“You are of the second millennium,” Boston guy spat at me, in French no less.

“Excuse me, but you don’t know anything about me.”

“I can tell by your reactions.”

What really made me laugh, though, was what it all adds up to. A business opportunity, to be sure, but not one for OSM’s investors.

“What kind of business?” she asked.

“Big business,” he lied.

“Oh, I like big,” she smiled.

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* N.B.: First person to shorten that to “blogmented” gets a smack upside the head.

Comments (1)

November 2, 2005

— or so said the Man from Trier. Me, I’m not so sure. And Bruce Sterling, commenting on a piece called “Here comes the Indian consumer” by Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach, thinks Karl (and Mr. Roach) may have had it exactly backward . . .

I kinda derive the exact opposite conclusion out of this piece that the author himself derives; [Roach] thinks that booming economies in, say, Mumbai can drag the whole Indian population out of poverty, while, to me, this suggests that certain high-tech areas in the USA could cheerily continue to thrive even while desperate internal migrants from New Orleans and Florida are sleeping on our pavements, a vast and utterly bereft American underclass pillowing their heads on the curbstones in their very millions. Yep, India may really be tomorrow’s developmental model; you gotta watch what you ask for, ’cause you may well get it.

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July 18, 2005

The stuff the movie tried to do, it generally did pretty well. But it didn’t try to do enough stuff.

Also: I hope Nokia didn’t pay very much for that product placement.

Comments (4)

July 13, 2005

But Marxism without the dialectic is just a set of economic, historical and sociological analyses, any of which you can take or leave. Without the deep conviction of having uncovered the laws of motion of nature, society and thought, it loses much of its zeal. Not such a revision of Marxism, but a complete abandonment of it, is socialism’s only hope.

With fact and value radically disjunct, and no destiny or duty written in nature, the only basis for reuniting our values with our knowledge is the recognition that the principle of objectivity is itself a free, and thus ethical, choice. A like recognition is . . . the only basis for a scientific socialist humanism. We can choose to build a kingdom of knowledge and freedom, or we can choose the darkness.

— Ken MacLeod, riffing on French chemist Jacques Monod

Comments (1)

May 20, 2005

Editors are on the corners with signs that say “WILL EDIT YOUR ‘WILL WORK FOR FOOD’ SIGN FOR FOOD.”

— John Scalzi

(His sinking ship metaphor is a lot more biting than my coastal town metaphor, BTW.)

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May 19, 2005

The sea level is rising. We all know this. Some day, maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but some day soon, in the lifetimes of many of us, the waves will overtop the sea wall, the dikes will burst, and our town, this beautiful town, once the wonder of the coast, will finally be swept away.

Some of us, the elders of the town, have lived here all their lives. They’ve seen the other coastal towns go under, one by one; they’ve traveled, some of them, to the rich inland cities and found no welcome there for our people. They are in no hurry to die, but if they must die, they would rather die here, in the town they helped build, the town where they once prospered, that has sheltered and supported them all their lives.

For others, the town’s young people, the town is already lost to us in our minds — not unmourned, not unregretted, but lost, nevertheless. We have known since we were children that it would be in our time that the ocean would come. We have never dreamed, as some of our elders have, that by some miracle the wonders of the old town would be restored. We have no wish to die here. We would rather build a new town on higher ground — smaller, no doubt; meaner, perhaps, by the standards of our elders; but a place where we can raise our children, and perhaps tell them stories of the grand coastal town that gave our people birth.

But now our elders would set us to filling sandbags, would take the timber we need to build our new town and use it to shore up the levees, would ask us to stand with them and plug the holes in the dikes with our fingers when we should be carrying our children to safety.

All to add a few more years to the life of the town that all of us, young people and elders alike, know cannot be saved.

Comments (11)

May 18, 2005

Pirating copyrighted etext on Usenet and elsewhere is going to happen more and more, for the same reasons that everyday folks make audio cassettes from vinyl LPs and audio CDs, and videocassette copies of store-bought videotapes. Partly it’s greed; partly it’s annoyance over retail prices; partly it’s the desire to Share Cool Stuff (a motivation usually underrated by the victims of this kind of small-time hand-level piracy). Instantly going to Defcon One over it and claiming it’s morally tantamount to mugging little old ladies in the street will make it kind of difficult to move forward from that position when it doesn’t work. In the 1970s, the record industry shrieked that “home taping is killing music.” It’s hard for ordinary folks to avoid noticing that music didn’t die. But the record industry’s credibility on the subject wasn’t exactly enhanced.

— Patrick Nielsen Hayden (from alt.binaries.ebooks, quoted by Cory)

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May 17, 2005

Over at his new Goblin Mercantile Exchange, Alan translates part of SFWA’s “ePiracy FAQ”

Morally . . . O’ course ’tis a problem if ye take somethin’ fer free that ye’re supposed t’ pay fer. Be seein’ below fer all th’ harms this causes. Quality . . . Th’ thin’ be, ye canna trust that a gentleman-o’-fortuned work be really what th’ author wrote. We’re nay jus’ talkin’ typos here (which can be quite annoyin’, dependin’ how badly th’ story has been mangled), but worse: Buccanneers ben documented as changin’ works t’ match the’r philosophies(!).

I’m not sure what I think of “gentleman of fortune” as a verb, but hopefully this clarifies things.

Comments (2)

May 16, 2005

Well, not really. But if you’re in SFWA, and you got Andrew Burt’s push poll about Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” feature in your mailbox last week, and you haven’t answered it yet, read this before you do.

For example, one questions asking how much of a work one would want to have accessible to Amazon browsers is phrased this way: "What percent would you want blocked of your work to prevent piracy?" I'm not a professional pollster, but I know a push poll question when I see it, and I don't like it any more when it comes from SFWA than when it comes from a political party.

My response to the poll, incidentally, was that I wanted all of the book available for Amazon shoppers to browse. I want this for many reasons, not the least of which is simply parity of shopping experience to bookstores, where one can go up to the bookshelves, crack open a book, and read as much of it as one wants to see if one is interested in making a purchase. As it happens, I don't buy very many books online because I can't open the book and see the text, and with new writers especially, I'm not going to buy without checking out the book first.

Bingo. Thank you, Mr. Scalzi. Via Tim. In fact, let’s quote Tim, too:

I’ll just add this note, for the vast majority of SF writers who worry about their books being pirated: Yeah, you wish. You wish there was such a demand for your work that people were pirating it in sufficient numbers to affect your sales. You wish there were hordes of unscrupulous people ready to cash in on the vast crowds clamoring hungrily for your book, and that there was sufficient demand for your works for pirates to turn a profit on it.

The more I think about this, the more irritated I get. In fact, I’m sufficiently irritated that I’m going to go order a Creative Commies T-shirt right this minute.

Why is it that people whose stuff no one would want to pirate are the most obsessed with piracy?

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Update: See also Cory.

I’m sure Mr. Burt is a great guy and all, but I’m glad he didn’t win his SFWA presidential bid.

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Update #2: Charlie Stross puts it well, if bluntly, on sff . private . sfwa . electronic-piracy, in a thread responding to Ben:

The fact of the matter is, once we sell our wares we lose all say over what happens to them. We can't control whether a reader buys a copy at full price in a bookstore, shoplifts it, or buys it for ten cents when it’s remaindered. We can’t control whether they like the book, hate it, or use it as toilet paper. It’s out of our hands.

We profit no more from the honestly-bought copy in the second-hand store than the shoplifted copy or the pirated ebook — so why don’t we declare a jihad against second-hand bookstores?

Bluntly, we don’t do that (or declare war on libraries, for that matter) because we grew up with them and we recognize their utility to ourselves both as readers and as writers trying to reach new eyeballs.

This is why I believe the whole fuss over Amazon and Google is a storm in a teacup — indeed, getting worked up about them is counter-productive because it alienates customers, makes us look like idiots, and primes people to ignore us if or when a REAL threat to our income emerges.

Yes, digital lowers the bar and makes piracy easier, so there’s an argument to be made that, e.g., emailing somebody an e-text is different, maybe in some fundamental way, from lending them a book. But I can’t help noticing that it seems like those of us with Interthing-related day jobs, who you’d think would understand that, often seem to be among the least sympathetic to that argument . . .

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Update #3: Also, further down the thread, Ben:

Excepting King and Rowling, I expect we all have plenty of new potential readers to win. I think what we should be worried about in the brave new electronic world is not the spectre of it being suddenly much easier to pirate . . . it's that of it becoming suddenly much harder to browse.

Somehow this all seems like it’s coming from the same psychology that led the voting poor of Alabama to vote down a tax increase for the rich.

Comments (10)

May 10, 2005

Viz., this. Maybe they should just call the program PublishUK. (Via Eugie Foster, Tangent Online.)

Comments (3)

April 19, 2005

. . . did I totally lose touch with (or interest in) the idea that artists have a moral right to control what’s done with their works?

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April 8, 2005

Has anyone looked at whether there’s a relationship between the last couple of decades’ mysterious US labor productivity growth and the last couple of decades’ not at all mysterious increase in risk and income volatility for the US middle class?

I’m not enough of an economist to even posit a model here, but all that productivity’s got to be coming from somewhere, and the shift of risk from institutions onto individuals seems as likely a factor as any.

Comments (2)

March 7, 2005

Looks like they finally put the content foxes in charge of the consumer electronics henhouse. The company that brought you the VCR and the Walkman is now being run by the people who brought you the copy-protected CD.

Next: Lee Iacocca to run Honda.

Comments (2)

January 13, 2005

From the Greeley Tribune, via Josh Marshall. Emphasis added.

“I believe we have a problem with Social Security that will emerge in 2018,” ]Senator Allard] said. “At that point in time, Social Security pay out will be more than what is in the fund put in by working people or employers.”

Allard said there are no reserves in Social Security because what is there is automatically transferred into the general fund, leaving a debt of $28 trillion. But he doesn’t believe the money will ever be repaid to the fund.

“The money is spent,” he said. “I don't believe in my own opinion we'll be able to raise the funds to pay it back.”

Comments (3)

December 13, 2004

What part of “We will be accepting submissions from December 20th, 2004, to March 21st, 2005” don’t you . . .

Ah, forget it.

Comments (3)

October 21, 2004

This Neal Stephenson interview, brought to my attention by Brandon for other reasons, has an interesting and, I think, somewhat new take on the “genre ghetto” issue.

Accountability in the writing profession has been bifurcated for many centuries. I already mentioned that Dante and other writers were supported by patrons at least as far back as the Renaissance. But I doubt that Beowulf was written on commission. Probably there was a collection of legends and tales that had been passed along in an oral tradition — which is just a fancy way of saying that lots of people liked those stories and wanted to hear them told. And at some point perhaps there was an especially well-liked storyteller who pulled a few such tales together and fashioned them into the what we now know as Beowulf. Maybe there was a king or other wealthy patron who then caused the tale to be written down by a scribe. But I doubt it was created at the behest of a king. It was created at the behest of lots and lots of intoxicated Frisians sitting around the fire wanting to hear a yarn. And there was no grand purpose behind its creation, as there was with the painting of the Sistine Chapel.

The novel is a very new form of art. It was unthinkable until the invention of printing and impractical until a significant fraction of the population became literate. But when the conditions were right, it suddenly became huge. The great serialized novelists of the 19th Century were like rock stars or movie stars. The printing press and the apparatus of publishing had given these creators a means to bypass traditional arbiters and gatekeepers of culture and connect directly to a mass audience. And the economics worked out such that they didn’t need to land a commission or find a patron in order to put bread on the table. The creators of those novels were therefore able to have a connection with a mass audience and a livelihood fundamentally different from other types of artists.

Nowadays, rock stars and movie stars are making all the money. But the publishing industry still works for some lucky novelists who find a way to establish a connection with a readership sufficiently large to put bread on their tables. It’s conventional to refer to these as “commercial” novelists, but I hate that term, so I’m going to call them Beowulf writers.

But this is not true for a great many other writers who are every bit as talented and worthy of finding readers. And so, in addition, we have got an alternate system that makes it possible for those writers to pursue their careers and make their voices heard. Just as Renaissance princes supported writers like Dante because they felt it was the right thing to do, there are many affluent persons in modern society who, by making donations to cultural institutions like universities, support all sorts of artists, including writers. Usually they are called “literary” as opposed to “commercial” but I hate that term too, so I’m going to call them Dante writers. And this is what I mean when I speak of a bifurcated system.

Like all tricks for dividing people into two groups, this is simplistic, and needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But there is a cultural difference between these two types of writers, rooted in to whom they are accountable, and it explains what MosesJones is complaining about. Beowulf writers and Dante writers appear to have the same job, but in fact there is a quite radical difference between them — hence the odd conversation that I had with my fellow author at the writer’s conference. Because she’d never heard of me, she made the quite reasonable assumption that I was a Dante writer — one so new or obscure that she'd never seen me mentioned in a journal of literary criticism, and never bumped into me at a conference. Therefore, I couldn’t be making any money at it. Therefore, I was most likely teaching somewhere. All perfectly logical. In order to set her straight, I had to let her know that the reason she’d never heard of me was because I was famous.

All of this places someone like me in critical limbo. As everyone knows, there are literary critics, and journals that publish their work, and I imagine they have the same dual role as art critics. That is, they are engaging in intellectual discourse for its own sake. But they are also performing an economic function by making judgments. These judgments, taken collectively, eventually determine who’s deemed worthy of receiving fellowships, teaching appointments, etc.

(Because Slashdot, obnoxiously, doesn’t have anchor tags for individual questions, you’ll have to do some scrolling. It’s question two.)

(Also, you should read the bit about Bruce Sterling crashing a liquified natural gas tanker into William Gibson’s pleasure barge.)

Then there’s that large collection of us who fall in between — whose writing is not fully supported either by patrons or by the public. I think that once upon a time most of us — in SF, at any rate — expected to become Beowulf writers. For whatever reason [insert favorite ill-conceived rant about the decline of literacy, or the consolidation of publishing, or the end of the small independent bookstore, or whatever, here] that no longer seems to be as attainable a goal as it once did. It seems like there’s an interesting and, I think, fairly new thing going on right now in SF (groups like the SLF and Interstitial Arts come to mind, not to mention many individual SF writers on the MFA track): A shift from the dream of being a Beowulf writer to the dream of being a Dante writer.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate what those folks are doing. (All-Star Stories is a member of the SLF’s Small Press Co-op, for instance.) But I do understand now, I think, why it’s always seemed to be a little bit at an angle from what I’m doing. I’m not counting on being a Beowulf writer, and I don’t particularly want to be a Dante writer — I’ve got a day job, and it pays better than teaching freshman comp.

Maybe I’m a Kafka writer. Kafka was in insurance.

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September 28, 2004

Nick Mamatas, in his characteristic, inimitable manner, shreds a Washington Post article on self-publishing.

Here’s another bit of almost good advice: “Hiring an editor isn’t a bad idea; you can post ads on Craiglist.com, Copyeditor.com or local job boards (ask for references, and try out prospects with a few pages first).” Ah yes, you know what kind of editors hang out on craigslist? Me. The first thing I tell folks is that I charge a penny a word. The second thing is not to self-publish. I’ve found that there are very few people willing to pay $800-$1000 for a manuscript dripping with a red ink and an editorial letter that boils down to “Shred this and start over, but in English.”

Ah, what a sweet, sweet dream. I could work a week every other month and still make more than my day job pays me now.

 . . . I’ll leave aside, for now, the massive difference between editing as it actually exists and editing as the average craigslister conceives of it, which involves “checking for typos.” Or, to speak the native language of CL, “typo's.” That ' isn't an apostrophe, it’s a glottal click.

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September 24, 2004

The Three-Toed Sloth pinpoints something that’s been gnawing at me at least since A Deepness in the Sky. The topic: “libertarian capitalism”.

On the one hand, the sanctity of private property and private contracts is held to be a matter of inalienable natural right, guaranteed by the fundamental facts of morality, if not a basic part of Objective Reality; capitalism is the Right Thing to Do. On the other hand, much effort is devoted to arguing that unfettered laissez-faire capitalism is also the economic system which will produce the greatest benefit for the greatest number, indeed for all, if only people would just see it. Natural right therefore coincides exactly with personal interest. A clearer example of wishful thinking could hardly be asked for.

 . . . Now, if the empirical track-record of what are conventionally called free markets is decidedly mixed, there are three courses of action open to the libertarian. (1) Embrace the natural-liberty argument wholeheartedly, and say that we should adopt laissez-faire even when it hurts us, because it’s the right thing to do. Unsurprisingly, moral austerity in defense of liberty finds few takers, though it has some. (2) Argue that the empirical track-record of alternative economic arrangements is actually no better than that of free markets (that, e.g., every instance of market failure is at least matched by an instance of “government failure”), so that’s a wash, and accordingly we should go with the market solution, since that respects natural liberty. (3) Argue that, appearances to the contrary, free markets really are optimal. This option, unlike the other two, is incompatible with intellectual honesty; it is also by the far the most popular, perhaps because it can be well-paid.

(Ob. disclaimer: By linking this quotation with A Deepness in the Sky I do not intend to accuse Dr. Vinge of lacking intellectual honesty. I do think, however, that his discussion of economic relations among Qeng Ho under Emergent occupation did not sufficiently consider transaction costs.)

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August 4, 2004

There was this lopsided conversation at Rockaway about SF conventions, and about writers going to them to do or to not do business, and the difference between fan and fan (those links are a little off, but you get the idea), and all like that. I say “lopsided” because started to go pear-shaped, mostly on account of it being Sunday afternoon of a very long weekend, I think . . . Anyhow, there’s apparently this discussion springing up on the subject of advice to writers attending conventions. Some of it would give me a headache if I didn’t have one already, but Michelle Sagara says one thing that is fairly close to something I meant to say at Rockaway, and didn’t:

I think it comes down to this: I don’t do anything that doesn’t look like fun. This goes for everything at a Worldcon, including talking to editors. If it’s not fun to speak with a specific editor? I don’t do it. I am guaranteed to get away from home once a year, and even if it’s in theory for business reasons I’m selfish enough not to want to spend that time putting on a fake smile and pretending I’m enjoying something I’m not. If it’s fun to speak with an editor, even if I think there’s no chance I’d ever submit to them (or that they’d ask <wry g>), I speak with the editor. Ditto pretty much everything else at a convention.

That’s what it comes down to: Nothing that doesn’t look like fun. The writing itself is enough work. If the rest of it isn’t fun, you seriously have to ask yourself what’s the point of it all.

Comments (1)

August 3, 2004

John Holbo has a suggestion:

[China] Miéville should seriously consider writing a thumping great historical political economy of his world – Marx’s Das Silmaril, if you will. It would be huge fun to read. It should be a multivolume affair that, ideally, he never manages to finish. (“What I have to examine is the magical mode of production, its supernatural laws and tendencies winning their way through and working themselves out with necessity as hard as mithril.” A long and careful analysis would follow of how power in Middle Earth is a function of — and race relations are inescapably mediated by — silmarills and, in later stages, ring ownership; value and use-value; importance of control of the means of ring production. “A spectre is haunting Middle Earth — no, really, a spectre!”)

Update: If you’re interested in epic fantasy — and when I say “interested in”, that includes “hostile to” — go and read the rest of his expanded post on Miéville. Post haste.

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July 29, 2004

Brad deLong throws out an off-hand remark (in the course of a much longer post that finally explains to me why education is so badly underfunded.

One of the big problems with American education today is that we still imagine that we can underpay teachers — we still imagine that for teachers (and nurses) we have this large pool of constrained high-quality female labor to draw on.

So let me see if I’ve got this right. In the — what — late 1800s? women start to get more access to education, but no corresponding access to jobs. Result, a surplus of educated labor — result, a boom in public education in the early part of the 20th century. Now the economy’s changed: more jobs require more education, and women start to achieve something more like equality in the workplace . . . and what looked like a surplus of educated labor starts to look more like scarcity . . . and we have a public-education bust.

Which no amount of “accountability” (standardized testing) or “school choice” (vouchers) is going to solve.

Wow. I can’t believe I never saw that before. I wonder who’s written about it?

Apparently we’re starting to import a lot of nurses from places like the Phillippines. If we’re not willing to pay 21st-century prices for public education, maybe we need to start getting our teachers from overseas, too.

Comments (6)

July 28, 2004

So, I’ve been tasked with putting up a new web site for Cascade Kendo Kai, and we’re also looking for a new hosting provider. Imanishi-sensei came up with the list below, but I’m none too sure of its provenance, and I’m sufficiently out of the net-dot-loop that I haven’t heard of any of them.. Does anyone have experience with any of the providers?

• IPOWERWEB
• StartLogic
• Jumpline
• Infinology
• iPage
• Lunar Pages
• PowWeb
• Globat
• Easy CGI Web
• HostRocket

Criteria: Reliable, cheap, easy for non-technical person to manage (e.g., web-based file management), easy for technical person to manage (e.g., shell access). Any other suggestions? Let me know.

Comments (6)

May 24, 2004

 . . .But I’ll do my best. Received over the weekend by the All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories inbox:

From: Bookman Publishing <sendmail3@certifiedit.com>
To: zeppelin@allstarstories.com
Subject: Sell your book in our bookstore, even if you published with another company!
Reply-To: brien@bookmanmarketing.com
Date: 21 May 2004 23:06:22 -0500

Bookman Publishing is already the only company in the industry contacting bookstore owners for our authors.

What industry would that be? The vanity publishing industry? Hey, I suppose they might even be telling the truth.

Now, to learn even more about the retail book industry we have just purchased our first bookstore.

So they went into “publishing” without knowing anything about how to sell books. Still, at least they’re honest about it.

This is not a website, it’s a real store made out of bricks and glass. The Bookman Store is on the square in Franklin Indiana and will be open in June. All of our author’s books will be sold there automatically.

MapQuest gives me two candidates for “Franklin, Indiana.” I think I might have driven through the one between Bloomington and Indianapolis. Nice enough area, I guess, but, somehow I don’t think my book is exactly going to be hopping off the shelves.

(Plus, ten yards and a loss of down for apostrophe misuse. Or do they only have one author?)

For the very first time ever, we can now guarantee that your book will be sold in a real store. As always, we will sell your book even if another company published it.

“For the first time ever . . . As always . . .” Er — what am I missing here?

You still have time to take advantage of our 50% discount on selected bookselling services, or publish your book at our introductory price. (Both offers expire May 28)

Gosh. Unfortunately, their web site doesn’t tell me what that introductory price is, or what those services have been discounted from. Sadly, though, it provides no hard numbers. In fact, it doesn’t even mention this offer, though it does mention their March Publishing Promotion: 30% Off All Book-selling Services!

Still — if only ASZAS was finished! If only I didn’t already have a gentleman’s agreement with a reputable small press! Alas, Fortune is bald behind . . . But perhaps one of my readers can still grasp her by the forelock.

Just reply or call:

Brien Jones
Bookman Publishing
35 Industrial Drive, Suite 104
Martinsville, IN 46151
Author Consultant
(800) 342-6068 Phone
(765) 342-7217 Fax
brien@bookmanmarketing.com
www.bookmanmarketing.com

Comments (4)

May 18, 2004

To promote America's Army: Overmatch, a free game created by the Army as a recruitment tool, a group of Army Special Forces personnel staged an urban tactical assault exercise outside the L.A. convention center where the E3 gaming expo was taking place. It may have been a staged promotional event, but judging from the panicked expressions on pedestrian faces, some may have thought it was the real thing.

(Wired, via BoingBoing.)

Comments (0)

March 23, 2004

Who says new technologies don’t create new jobs?

Permanent full-time position for a personal social coordinator for a New York-based web designer.

Your primary responsibility will be managing my accounts with various online social networking sites including, but not limited to, Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe, Orkut, Ryze, Spoke, ZeroDegrees, Ecademy, RealContacts, Ringo, MySpace, Yafro, EveryonesConnected, Friendzy, FriendSurfer, Tickle, Evite, Plaxo, Squiby, and WhizSpark.

Future duties may include discouraging companies and individuals from starting new social networking sites so that additional staff won't be necessary in the future. Past employment as a bouncer, “heavy”, or hired goon may be helpful in this regard.

Okay, so he’s kidding. But look: Somebody really needs to invent something new, soon, so tech companies and venture capitalists will stop chasing all these trivial little ideas expecting one of them to be the next Tulip Bubble.

Comments (0)

February 13, 2004

Artists are always disappointed by their audience’s attention-spans. . . . As artists, it would be a hell of a lot easier if our audiences were more tolerant of our penchant for boring them. We’d get to explore a lot more ideas without worrying about tarting them up with easy-to-swallow chocolate coatings of entertainment. We like to think of shortened attention spans as a product of the information age, but check this out:

To be sure one thing necessary above all: if one is to practice reading as an art in this way, something needs to be un-learned most thoroughly in these days.

In other words, if my book is too boring, it’s because you're not paying enough attention. Writers say this stuff all the time, but this quote isn't from this century or the last. It’s from the preface to Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morals,” published in 1887.

Yeah, our attention-spans are different today, but they aren't necessarily shorter.

—— Cory Doctorow, “Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books”

Comments (0)

February 11, 2004

Hey, I don’t actually have a “Technology” category. How cool is that? So I’ll file this one under “Economics”:

World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else

All we need to do is pay attention to what the Internet really is. It’s not hard. The Net isn’t rocket science. It isn’t even 6th grade science fair, when you get right down to it. We can end the tragedy of Repetitive Mistake Syndrome in our lifetimes — and save a few trillion dollars’ worth of dumb decisions — if we can just remember one simple fact: the Net is a world of ends. You’re at one end, and everybody and everything else are at the other ends.

Sure, that’s a feel-good statement about everyone having value on the Net, etc. But it’s also the basic rock-solid fact about the Net’s technical architecture. And the Internet’s value is founded in its technical architecture.

Fortunately, the true nature of the Internet isn’t hard to understand. In fact, just a fistful of statements stands between Repetitive Mistake Syndrome and Enlightenment . . .

Unfortunately, the article’s probably still too technical for a lot of the people it needs to reach, and the ones it’s not too technical for will probably answer: “Like I care about maximizing the ‘value of the Internet’? What the Internet is, is interfering with my business model. That’s what the Internet is.” But it’s a start.

Comments (1)

February 9, 2004

On the Asimov’s message board, Locus reviewer Rich Horton has posted the TOC for a virtual Year’s Best, and Gardner Dozois has noted (just below) some of the stories he would have included in his non-virtual Year’s Best if only it was open to fantasy. I’m pleased to see “Theo’s Girl” on both lists. (Thanks to Scott Reilly for the heads-up.)

(But it’s starting to make me nervous. What have I done for y’all lately?)

Comments (5)

January 13, 2004

This post on John Savage’s Scrivener’s Error, is (at least on my browser) nearly impossible to read on account of inadequate leading, but once deciphered, it makes a useful point:

• If the publisher pays you, and the publisher owns the books, that’s traditional publishing.
• If you pay the publisher, and you own the books, that’s self-publishing.
• If you pay the publisher, and the publisher owns the books, that’s vanity publishing.

If the publisher pays you, and you own the books, good on ‘yer, mate — you’ve discovered Bizarro World.

(Courtesy of the Making Light sidebar.)

Comments (10)

December 18, 2003

Yes, folks, it’s Barbie® and Ken® as Arwen and Aragorn. $59.97, plus shipping and handling. (Warning thoughtfully provided by Jon Hansen.)

No word yet on whether there’s going to be a companion set Kelly™ and Tommy™ as Eowyn and Faramir.

Comments (3)

November 14, 2003

The Strange Horizons November fund drive is under way. They’re not assaulting your eyeballs with interstitial advertising. They’re not ringing your telephone during dinner. They’re not going door to door. They’re not interrupting their regularly scheduled programming to have the staff members with the shrillest voices harangue you about how they’d really like to get back to their regularly scheduled programming only they need five more donations in the next fifteen minutes. They’re just publishing really good speculative fiction, and they need your support.

Plus, if you give them money, you get cool stuff.

Comments (0)

October 27, 2003

J. Bradford DeLong’s thirteen-year old son is working his way through Greg Mankiw’s Principles of Economics.

“You mean that back before civilization economics was much simpler?" asks the Ten-Year-Old.

“Yes,” says the Thirteen-Year-Old. “Back then, Principles of Economics books were really simple. They said: ‘(1) Find a rock. (2) Throw the rock to kill some small furry creature. (3) Eat the small furry creature.’ That was it. But then things became more complicated. People invented farming, and some people became peasant farmers who grew the crops.”

“And other people became workers who made pots,” says the Ten-Year-Old. “And other people became blacksmiths who made spears.”

“And,” says the Thirteen-Year-Old, “then the people who got the spears told the peasants and the workers to give them half their crop — or else!”

“But,” says the Ten-Year-Old, “the peasants and the workers made an alliance with the small furry animals. And then one night while the spear-chuckers were all asleep they raised the banner of revolution!”

“Now wait a minute,” I say. The economics I teach is not the Materialist Interpretation of History crossed with the Chronicles of Narnia.

Aw, Dad, you’re no fun any more.

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October 24, 2003

Yes, it’s a slow afternoon here in Seattle. Where was this good weather last weekend when I needed it?

John Snow, the Treasury secretary, told The Times of London on Monday that he expected the U.S. economy to add two million jobs before the next election — that is, almost 200,000 per month. His forecast was higher than those of most independent analysts; nothing in the data suggests that jobs are being created at that rate. . . .

[T]o have kept up with the population growth since Mr. Bush took office, the economy would have to add not two million, but seven million jobs by next November.

Mr. Bush’s employment policies would truly have been a success if he had left the job market no worse than he found it. In fact, even his own Treasury secretary thinks he’ll fall five million or so jobs short of that mark. . . .

Congress has given [Bush] everything he has wanted in terms of economic policy, even though that has led to a frightening explosion in federal debt: in the current fiscal year the Bush tax cuts will account for almost $300 billion of a deficit expected to top $500 billion. (If that $300 billion had been used to employ workers directly — a new WPA, anyone? — it would have created six million jobs.)

—— Paul Krugman, “Too Low A Bar”, NYT 24 Oct. 2003

In case you missed the point, Congress has given Bush pretty much every damned thing he’s asked for on the economic front, and the economy still is in the tank. Voodoo economics doesn’t work.

Whereas, y’know, we at least got some pretty decent public art out of the WPA.

But that would mean, like, trusting the gummint with our money. And this is obviously not a government we can trust with our money.

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October 3, 2003

Wrapping up all the loose ends — laundry, dry cleaning, bills . . . and picking up some pounds sterling so I’ll have money for the Tube.

If any of you happen to run into Treasury Secretary John Snow while I’m gone, say at a cocktail party, do me a favor: Whap him upside the head, from me, and ask him what the hell he was thinking.

These exchange rates suck.

Comments (4)

September 23, 2003

John Caudwell, CEO of British mobile phone retailer Phones4U, has banned the use of email company wide. Tech sites like Ars Technica are reporting this as a prime example of management technophobia, mental sclerosis, and general lack of clue, but really, the guy’s in the voice business. What did you expect?

Comments (0)

September 22, 2003

Wow. I am so not interested* in the new SFWA rate requirements argument.

I’m not sure why.

---

*Except as it affects Jed, Susan, and Karen.

Comments (25)

August 11, 2003

House Budget Chairman Jim Nussle last week declared, “tax cuts don't cause deficits.”

—— the Wall Street Journal, via Brad deLong

Comments (2)

July 23, 2003

I am not discussing the moral correctness of blood money. This is the way things are done here and if this money will stop any sort of revenge killings then it is worth it. No, I only have one comment: being foreigners, they paid too much. Habibi, everything is bargainable here, and paying 15 million in blood money will ruin the blood money market — it is way too much. You should improve your tribal connections and get someone to bargain for you.

—— Salam Pax, writing in the Guardian

Comments (3)

July 21, 2003

“The move from ‘property rights are sacrosanct’ to ‘. . . but the expropriation of the commons (or the clearance of the peasants from the estates, etc) is for the greater good of all so get into the factory and shut the fuck up’ is a major feature of right-libertarianism, and indeed of conservative rhetoric for the last couple of centuries.”

——Ken Macleod

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May 19, 2003

From the “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” department, this tidbit:

[AP] The SEC and WorldCom reached a partial settlement in late November in which the company agreed to a permanent injunction barring it from future violations of securities laws.

Obviously I am not a lawyer — the 100-hour-a-week lifestyle of the junior attorney somehow is not to my taste — but still, I would have thought that WorldCom was already barred from violations of securities laws... by, er, securities laws.

Comments (3)

May 11, 2003

Ran across this side note in an otherwise not overly interesting article about the maturation of the IT industry:

It is a very sad thing unquestionably that railways, which mechanically have succeeded beyond anticipation and are quite wonderful for their general utility and convenience, should have failed commercially.

—— The Economist, 1857

Still true, alas. (And if you’re in the biz, it has to make you wonder about airplanes.)

Comments (2)

May 2, 2003

Australia’s first publicly traded brothel is called, yes, The Daily Planet.

Comments (2)

April 4, 2003

A transcript is up at the Federal Reserve of a lengthy speech by Alan Greenspan on the economics of intellectual property. It’s a bit dry, naturally —

In the case of physical property, we take it for granted that the ownership right should have the potential of persisting as long as the physical object itself. In the case of an idea, however, we have chosen to strike a different balance in recognition of the chaos that could follow from having to trace back all the thoughts implicit in one's current undertaking and pay a royalty to the originator of each one.

— and Mr. Greenspan isn’t the world’s clearest speaker (legend has it that it took his then-girlfriend 24 hours to work out that he had in fact proposed to her).

But it’s interesting, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. And if you are, there are some gems:

According to the legends of the early American West, the only law west of the Pecos River was administered by Judge Bean. I am not sure how much law that was, but I do know that much protection of property in sparsely settled western communities just after the Civil War had to be privately provided.

— for example, and:

Ownership of physical property is capable of being defended by police, the militia, or private mercenaries. Ownership of ideas is far less easily protected.

I still think it’s a bit creepy that the entire US economy is being run by an old chum