Ditto. Also Gaia's Toys. And Time's Child. And others. Occasionally I would find out you'd written something new, and it would be a great few hours reading it.
It wasn't until last week that I found I had somehow missed Outlaw School and now I have that great feeling of something to look forward to again.
]]>Only if you believe I can summon hordes of Chaos Hounds
You made the claim, repeatedly. Then you threatened me, and my computer suffered the kind of damage you talked about. Then it got hit again with something that does not happen by accident.
I want to know what to do to persuade you to stop it. A quick look at my system showed you or whoever that I don't know much about this stuff. I don't want to spend a lot of time learning about it -- since there is no one I would threaten or attack it would be entirely defensive. Time spent keeping up is a loss for me.
Consider this a formal surrender. What do you want me to do, so you will stop attacking my hardware?
]]>Dude, you fucked up. She is a little bit pissed at the EM nuke on the laptop (not hers) and called in her gremlins. You're fucking toast. We know who you are, we know where you live, we know what you paid in taxes and we know who you're spider-indexed to when you call in the cavalry.
Posting this threat and then denying you had anything to do with it is a trifle disingenuous, no?
]]>Your definition of fascism to me would fit the term "authoritarianism" in general. Fascists allowed and encouraged private ownership, but they planned what private businesses should do and punished them for not following the plans. To some extent they separated ownership from control.
To some extent publicly-owned corporations today separate ownership from control. The owners of large blocks of stock get some influence over the corporations, but most owners mostly have the choice of keeping the stock or selling it for whatever they can get. Sometimes management gets most of the control, or control can reside in some other corporation that indirectly holds stock etc. If you have no choice but to let WalMart look at your books and decide how much you will sell to them at a 3% to 5% markup, I'd say you've lost control.
The problem is that lots of US voters do not approve of government planning. They would probably approve even less of unaccountable private businesses doing that planning. The least offensive approach is for nobody to plan, and things just automatically work out fine on their own. Of course, that's not exactly reliable....
... So one approach is to start taking away some of the legal rights that corporations have won in recent years.
Yes. But then, the people who argue that government does no good, argue that "regulatory capture" will mostly prevent the government from enforcing good laws against large corporations. When bureaucrats who make $200,000 or less per year go up against managers who make tens of millions or more, they can be intimidated.
Limiting the size of corporations is very similar to the idea of not letting one business dominate any single market.
Yes. One virtue of this approach is that it (in theory) could be made simple and clear. A corporation can argue that they are smaller than they really are, but they can't argue that indefinitely and they can be forced to split into smaller corporations that should be more competitive. I think it's easier to show a corporation's number of employees, profit, cash-flow, etc than many of the things we would like to regulate about large corporations. It wouldn't help keep single markets from being dominated as well because different markets are different sizes. A small market could be dominated by a corporation that would be much too small to dominate a larger market. But setting a maximum would help keep individual corporations from being large enough to dominate the government.
I guess the point I'm getting at is that there is no one solution to this problem, but there are a lot of little ones.
Yes!
You can tell which ones are important because they are the ones that the corporations themselves have lobbied Congress to loosen over the years.
You can tell those have been important battlegrounds. There might be others that would be important if the challenges were made.
As for banks, there were lots of problems in 2008, but one of the main ones had been banking de-regulation.
It's like -- prostitution might work out better if it was regulated. We could have rules about how hard a pimp can hit his women, how much he must pay them if he injures them, how much of the money he must give them, their contracts must state how long they are required to stay with him, and the police will only return those who run away if their contracts haven't expired, etc. That might reduce the excesses. On the other hand, it might be better not to legalize pimps at all. Similarly, when the banking industry fails we can argue that it was insufficiently regulated, but it might be better if it was just plain shut down, and private bank loans illegal to lend though legal to borrow.
... the public votes primarily based on emotion, not intellectual analysis. Is there some way to give technical experts some formal but appropriate amount of leverage in the policy-making process?
How do we know who's an expert? The public isn't just emotional, also they know that they can't predict very well. They can't judge politicians on long-run predicted economic benefits, because those might not happen.
I would tend to suggest that we let experts make predictions about important economic variables, and give them more say in what to do according to how well their predictions come true. But this has its own problems since the indicators which are worth following will change over time.
The big US example of experts given special rights is the Federal Reserve. Fed governors are important people and particularly the Chairman can make the economy quake just by saying a few choice words. And of course people try to influence them. Greenspan was declared a genius because he kept lending more when the conventional wisdom said it would cause a catastrophe. But Greenspan saw that the conventional wisdom was wrong and everything would be fine. It's possible that Bush threatened him with assassination if he didn't do that.... I have no evidence of that, it's just a possibility....
If we give experts special leverage, we are betting that they are right. I'd like in each individual case to see objective evidence that they're likely to be right.
]]>You may not have noticed, but a moderator here told me to stop talking about it and I stopped talking about it.
Someday our society is going to go Thesis - Antithesis - Synthesis. Not now.
]]>You posted about an associate's laptop blowing up and blamed me. Two days later my own computer blew up. I figured it was a coincidence and I moved my hard disk to a backup computer.
Last week that hard disk failed. I started to copy the backup disk onto a blank one, and they both failed. Yes, I was a bumbling fool. Not nearly paranoid enough. I updated the BIOS and put in a fresh hard disk and it's working for now. I lost three weeks of backups. None of my results, but a collection of links, and tax data.
Since you found me, you know that I'm not who you thought I was. I have no connection with any government beyond paying my taxes. Please call off your dogs.
]]>You could try gnod. Gasdive sugggested it here earlier. http://www.literature-map.com/
I'm not sure how well it works. I asked for who's like RA Heinlein and it gave me Ron Goulart as a second choice, which does not seem quite right to me. It may improve over time.
]]>You got me there. Any amateur auto mechanic can listen to your engine and say it's out of tune. It takes more skill to actually tune it well.
I am more interested in the short run in trying to find principles that look kind of fair, to compete with the libertarian ideal that every large corporation should have the freedom to do whatever it wants.
After all, when the government lets people own their businesses or capital and the government decides what to do with it, isn't that exactly what they used to call fascism? It has a bad reputation. I'd prefer not to have to argue in favor of fascism, so I need something else. And yet some government regulation is needed.
My first thought is that we should try to limit the size of very entity except government (and government too, in special ways). Businesses which are too big have too much political clout and TBTF is bad. I like the idea of setting a maximum size for corporations, and when one reaches that size it must divide in two, like a bacterium or something. Of course when lots of small corporations organize together for a big project, then they might be organized enough to lobby effectively and collectively they may be TBTF. I'm not sure how to handle that, but keeping individual businesses reasonably small seems like a good start.
I'm not sure we ought to have private fractional-reserve banks. I don't see any way to justify it morally, and 2008 says we can't depend on them to deliver good results.
So, if you have money you want to spend today on consumption, you should have a whole lot of say about it. You should be able to buy anything for sale that isn't considered too socially damaging. (Like, we probably ought to try to limit iocane sales.)
But we need some sort of limits on businesses. Size. Maybe businesses should make their records transparent. If they couldn't have secrets it would change the game, maybe for the better.
Government probably should have some levers to affect the economy, and those ought to be kind of general, slow-acting levers. There's the problem that politicians like CEOs can't afford to look at the long-run when their short-run survival is at stake. They have to win in the short run and let the future take care of itself unless they have the leisure to plan. If they have too much immediate power they will use it to win elections and then deal with the consequences after they win. I'm not sure what to do about that.
So I have some ideas I think would be improvements, but designing a system that actually tunes the economy to efficiently do what we want it to? That looks hard. Especially when any statistics you use to decide what to do about the whole economy, will start getting manipulated whenever people realize that you're using them for that. Though maybe if the various economic entities were smaller, it would be harder for them to do that....
]]>That could partly be a failure of marketing. Readers who like what you want to write could be there, and the mass market didn't find them.
In the late years I was forced to write more and more romancey, conventional, "stay in a tiny segment of Northern Europe and DO NOT DEVIATE" historical or secondary-world fantasy. As a writer I felt progressively more constricted and crunched down and gender-typecast, until as a writer I lost the will to live.
I got it. They told you what you had to write to be marketable, and then it wasn't that marketable anyway. Ouch! That's been happening to male writers too. See for example
http://thatjohnbarnes.blogspot.com/2014/05/another-one-of-those-completely.html
He wrote a trilogy and the editors kept telling him to do it different.
So this led to a complete impasse because, frankly, I was tired of putting my name on a simplified-for-movie-morons version of my books, and I'd spent years vandalizing the work I liked on the promise that the books would sell well, but the marketing in fact was de-emphasizing most of what I was interested in, and shoehorning them into categories where the audience they would go to didn't interest me as much. And I don't know about other writers might have done, indeed once upon a time I thought I was pretty good at "being professional" a.k.a. self-betrayal, but I found it hard to keep coming up with the energy to finish ruining an idea I had once loved.
And there was no particular reason to think that their version would sell better. But they had promised to put some effort into marketing for him....
When I scraped enough self together to find the voice I'd forgotten I had, it wasn't commercial enough to get past the agents, but it found an audience, and that audience has been growing. My voice is intergenre, non-American-setting, non-romancey, non-trendy, flip the bird at the conventions--and I'm having fun.
OK! So with the old marketing model, they basicly sold books like toilet paper. They had room for a limited number of niches. Standard, extra-soft, extra-cheap, knobbly, etc. They figured that customers basicly did not want surprises. The number of different niches was probably limited more by the ability of a limited staff to deal with market segments, than the wishes of the public.
Now you're doing what you want and you're getting growing success! Great!
Gnod says that your writing is closest to Louise Marley, Alma Alexander, Glenda Larke, Naomi Novick, and Katherine Kurtz. If this is your old constrained writing, there's nothing wrong with you yourself spending a minute telling Gnod that people who like some other writers would probably like you too. Gnod is still new, but it might get used more with time.
]]>I don't at all say those are equivalent.
While the claims made by you and by Puppies are quite similar, and the way the claims are stated are too, I point out very important differences between them.
]]>Your idea of my implications might of course come from your own bias. It's possible that I say what I mean, more than what I falsely think I mean.
(On a side note, and not wanting to derail: Are you consciously or unconsciously mimicing CatinaDiamond?)
It's conscious, but I haven't done it very much.
]]>Yes, in the sense that voters have power in politics.
Anyway, to the peanut gallery, my claim is that this has existed and was important. Does anyone disagree?
I do not say that it ought to be that way.
The righteous man lives deep within a well and the sky appears to him as nothing but a small round hole.]]>
I haven't found a way to compile good statistics about this yet. I have one proposal that might tell something useful, and I haven't started collecting the data yet. No one has commented on whether it would be valuable.
I've had fun thinking about it.
Publishers.
I see two possible models for traditional publishers:
Publisher's Choice: Choose a few blockbusters and advertise the hell out of them, and the public chooses some of them to be very successful and some to fail, while a lot of midlist movies make moderate profits or losses.
Chumming: Dump a variety of products onto the shelves. Advertise the ones that cost more a little extra, because it's more embarrassing if those fail. As quick as they sell, do JIT publishing to create more product to sell. Push whatever is selling best.
With Publisher's Choice, it's very hard to get beyond midlist unless your publisher has chosen you, and they have various biases about who they think can win. You do better by fitting their guess about what a winner looks like. They may have an unconscious bias about women, or it may be a bias about something else that being a woman correlates with.
With Chumming, the main things would be to be dependable, and to sell well. A publisher might be more help to a writer who doesn't switch around among publishers, because then what they do to help your reputation will help them for later books, but otherwise they can help you and then you go off with somebody else. But the bottom line ought to be more important to them.
strong>Agents.
One group of 100 agents was shown to be sexist. I can imagine four causes for that. One is unconscious bias. A second is that publishers might be biased and agents try to adapt to that. A third is that agents might find that new women writers on average are a lot more trouble. They might demand more attention, and therefore be less wanted. (I have absolutely no evidence for this, it's only a possible idea, like unconscious bias.) Fourth, the particular proposal might look like something easier to sell with a man's name. As an example, extreme war porn might not sell as well with a woman's name -- the people who want it will assume that women won't write that way, while people who buy it expecting something different may be put off.
It would be worthwhile for an unpublished writer to find out what agents expect, and try to fit that. But agents are better off not revealing that, because if it was widely known then a whole lot of people would try to fake it. If the story got out that agents prefer submissions done in green ink on red paper, then for decades some of their submissions would have green ink on red paper.... So if you can get an agent to tell you the secret, don't share it.
The public.
If the buying public is biased against you, I don't see what you can do about it in the short run except change yourself. With self-publishing, it's testable. It would be unethical to self-publish the same story under two names. (Although you could give refunds to anyone who bought it twice.) But you can still get a pretty clear idea how much the name matters. If there's a lot of sexism in the old publishing chain and not much in the new, then probably the problem is with the publishers, though it could be that the people who buy elf-published work are different from the ones who buy in mundane bookstores.
My point has been to look for ways to test how much sexism there is and where it is, and more important how to be successful in the face of whatever biases are important.
If your point is to assert that sexism is important and it's a damn shame, then we're probably at cross-purposes.
]]>The second part of that of course does not follow at all. No matter what a swell guy I am, sexism can still be quite real.
I want to call attention to a parallel, though. The Puppies have the complaint that they are being discriminated against. Publishers don't publish as many Puppy works as they ought to. People with feminist and other agendas are pulling ahead, and causing discrimination against Puppies. These are their grievances that they say justify their behavior.
Various women make exactly the same claims with the names changed around. (And of course without the same bad behavior to justify.)
In general, we tell the Puppies that they deserve to be discriminated against because we don't like them and basicly they suck. They don't deserve any better than they get.
And we tell the women that we do like them and we do read their stuff and it's somebody else that wrongly discriminates against them.
I think there are two fundamental reasons for the difference in the responses. One is that women create inherently better fiction than Puppies. The other is that we like women more than we like Puppies.
]]>