View 749 Monday, November 05, 2012

I am too depressed to say much. I knew that this was the result predicted by the polls, but I really thought the outcome would be very different. President Obama made a Presidential and conciliatory victory speech, but he made it very clear what his coming policy would be; and I thought – clearly more hoped than though – that this would have an effect on voters. I have always believed in rational thought, and while I know a great number of people are not governed by rational thought, a great many are.

There will be endless analysis of the election, but it seems clear to me: President Obama promised that if he is reelected he will continue with his program of Free Stuff. A major part of the US economy consists of opening containers from China, and paying for them with money borrowed from China; while the national strategy of technology is not X Projects or even research grants, but actual investment of tax funds and borrowed money in companies the government hopes will succeed. I cannot believe that makes economic sense, and I confess I thought that the President had made it clear that he did believe that policy works. But of course with that you get Free Stuff.

If something cannot go on forever it will stop. The economic policies of the last four years cannot go on forever: there just isn’t enough money anywhere in the world to allow it to continue. The next step is to use inflation to tax away all savings and reduce all those on fixed incomes to dependency. When everyone is dependent on government, the power of government is maximized; and of course government workers enjoy automatic cost of living increases. It’s almost certain that inflation will reach 10% a year within two years. We have endured that in the past. This time the debts are much larger and it will take much more dramatic inflation to continue the spending. Of course the end of that game is the 3 pfennig postage stamp issued by Weimar Germany: the stamp was overprinted to the value of Three Mird Millionen Marks. And I used to have a 100,000 real Brazilian banknote which I got in change when Dvorak and I went down to Sao Paulo as guests of the Brazilian COMDEX about 1990. I think I got it in change when I broke an American $20 bill.

The good news is that both Germany and Brazil have obviously recovered from such ruinous inflation. The bad news is that the inflation ruined most of those who had savings. Of course new rich emerged. There are always rich people. Sometimes they are simply government employees who have guaranteed cost of living raises…

The country will recover. Brazil did. But we have not hit bottom yet.

Politics works. The Democratic strategy worked. They got their vote out. The vote was determined by campaign tactics and organization, not by rational debate of ideas. President Obama promised that his reelection would be considered a mandate for Four More Years of essentially the same policies.

But California will go broke before the United States does. Perhaps that will serve as a hideous enough warning to the rest of the nation. And apparently California, by direct democracy, has raised its taxes while burdening the productive with new regulations. It will be interesting to see where the pornography industry goes, now that Los Angeles County has in essence driven it out. Will it stay in California, or leave the state altogether? And which state wants it? Texas has already extracted tens of thousands of jobs and small businesses from California. Does it want the porn industry? Or perhaps Nevada does.

Of course there was a time when Los Angeles had a much larger entertainment industry without the need for XXX rated movies. Ah well.

Historically, entertainment has always thrived during hard economic times. Story tellers can always sing for their supper. When I did a Britannica article on science fiction decades ago, I described my profession as the bards of the sciences: we are much like the wandering poets of the Bronze Age who would find a camp of warriors and say, in effect, If you cut me a piece of that roast and fill my cup with wine, I will tell you a story about a virgin and a bull…

The worse the times, the larger the number of people who will pay for a few hours of being unaware of them as they wander through stories and songs. Which tells me what I had better get working on. My house is paid for, but the government’s appetite for tax money is insatiable. They will want more money.

Good night. Alas, it won’t look better in the morning. But we may rejoice in this much: the election is over. The loser has conceded. There will be no riots. The President has been gracious in his victory speech. Compromise will be sought.

All money bills must originate in the House, and the House remains in the hands of people concerned about deficits and inflation.

View 749 Monday, November 05, 2012

Guy Fawkes Day

It is the eve of the election. I’ve been hesitant to comment because I can’t think of much I can say that would have much effect on anyone likely to read it.

Most of the experts are predicting a very close race. I don’t believe that. I have not seen much to change the mood of the country over the past two years since the 2010 election, and I have seen a very great deal to change it since the 2008 election.

Four years ago Mr. Obama was seen as a possible savior, someone who could bring the nation together, who would bring hope and change. He was the symbol of national healing, of a new day in American politics, and many very sincerely believed that. That sentiment is much attenuated in 2012, and that will affect the election turnout.

My apologies for being slow at getting back to work. It has not been a good week. Sable, our ten year old red Siberian Husky, was diagnosed as having bone cancer in her right forepaw, and the only possible treatment is amputation. Amputation of a foreleg on a large and active dog is not likely to have much success, and doesn’t add much to her probable length of life. She isn’t unhappy now, and still enjoys taking walks with us. She tires easily and limps, but she’s still a happy dog. We don’t expect that to last.

We will know tomorrow what happens with the election, and I should be able to get back to commenting. I also am working on a revival of Chaos Manor Reviews, with new machines, a look at Windows 8, some stories, new technologies, and observations about the continuing computer revolution.

I will note that Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began, remains reasonably stable. That cannot be said of Egypt or Libya, and is not a reasonable prediction for Syria. We do not know the final outcome of the Libya affair, but it does not reflect well on US policy there. Meanwhile events continue in Syria.

Iran will by now have tens of kilograms of fuel grade Uranium. Fuel grade is 10% to 20% U235. Creating it is about 80% of the work required to create weapons grade Uranium, which is about 90% U235. Building a Hiroshima weapon from 90% U235 metallic Uranium is a fairly simple process: the Manhattan Project didn’t even bother to test a Uranium weapon. The Trinity test was a Plutonium bomb. Refining Uranium from Fuel Grade to Weapons Grade is an order of magnitude less difficult (and time consuming) than refining natural Uranium to Fuel Grade. The point is that Iran has done 80 to 90% of the work required to create a Hiroshima nuke, and this is known to everyone who takes the trouble to look at the situation. It is possible that Vice President Biden did not know this during the Vice-Presidential Debate, but he certainly knows it now. There is no difficulty at all in building a Hiroshima bomb from Weapons Grade Uranium. The resulting weapon can be carried in a Six By truck, a small power boat, or most aircraft. There is no need for a missile.

All this is widely known.

Remember, remember, the Fifth of November,
Gunpowder Treason and plot,
I see no reason why Gunpowder Treason
Ever should be forgot.

RE your optimism about the mood of the country, I hope you’re right.

I don’t question that mood among those of us still dedicated to freedom under the Constitution’s original intent. It’s intense.

I do worry very much whether there are enough of us left. The basic operating premise of the Obamistas is that there aren’t, that their people are the new majority and after winning tomorrow they may rule as they will. You probably don’t run into those people much day to day.

They’re out there, in numbers. Half the country is below average, and near half the country now feeds off taxpayers. And of those well above average, far too many are amoral, lack the common sense not to play with fire in a powder magazine, or both.

Tomorrow will tell. I very, very much hope you’re right…

And just in case you’re wrong

sign me

Porkypine

Below average isn’t stupid or venal. In the United States the average has been fairly high for a long time. On the other hand, there never was a democracy that didn’t commit suicide. Nothing last forever.

There is always an ecology. There is always a government. The many are always ruled by the few. What varies is the scope of government power, and the consent of the governed. A system that continually tests that consent, and continually has a very large number of those not ruled by their consent will generally be unstable.

Limiting the scope – not the power – of government, and leaving much to the lowest levels necessarily produces a system that maximizes consent, but do note that this was true of the United States before the Civil War. Webster hated slavery but he understood the problem and the need for compromise. The Abolitionists had a different view. They could not tolerate a compromise that allowed slave states.

From the end of Reconstruction to Johnson’s Great Society we had a different set of compromises that worked quite well, but with the best of intentions we threw those out as well. We have yet to find a new compromise, and alas, our universities no longer discuss such matters in that kind of term.

Tomorrow will be a critical day.

View 748 Thursday, November 01, 2012

We have this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michaellevin/publishers-weakly-what-th_b_2024074.html

Which ran with a puff for Levin

New York Times best selling author and Shark Tank survivor Michael Levin runs www.BusinessGhost.com, and is a nationally acknowledged thought leader on the future of book publishing.

Levin is commenting on the Random Penguins merger. Among other things he says:

Here’s what happens next: The remaining major publishers will find it harder to compete, because the resulting publisher (Penguin House?) will be able to produce books more cheaply. So they’ll fire people, merge, fire more people, and eventually roll over and die.
All because publishers never figured out how to deal with the Internet and how to sell books in a wired world.
All because publishers considered themselves "special" and thought they could get away with selling products they didn’t market.
All because publishers are English majors wearing Daddy’s work clothes and pretending to be business people, running their businesses on whim and gut feeling instead of figuring out what people want and giving it to them, the way smart businesses work.
I have no pity for the fallen publishers. In Wall Street terms, there isn’t enough lipstick in the world to make these pigs kissable. They had the responsibility to shape society by providing it with books worth reading, to create a cultural legacy for our generation and generations to come. And instead, what did they give us?

I first saw the Levin essay in an author association – Science Fiction Writers of America – discussion, and replied off the top of my head. Some fellow members of SFWA have suggested it might be appreciated by a wider readership.

I am reminded of the Old Timer in the late Fibber McGee series, who would listen to a long rant and say "Pretty good, Sonny, but it ain’t the way I heard it."

I have had my criticisms of the publishing world, but I don’t think things are as bad as all that. Indeed, the big problem with publishing seems to be that the bean counters come in and decide that there ought to be much higher returns on investment than publishing generally makes, and try to apply what they think thy know from the business community to publishing. The result is usually a disaster.

Publishing has its ups and downs, but the ups don’t go all that high: traditionally the return on investment in publishing is much smaller than the average in the business world, and the efficiencies are awful– but attempts to streamline and make things more efficient have generally made things worse. At least that’s the way I heard it and what I have seen since I got into this racket in the late 1960’s.

It’s certainly the case that new technologies have changed publishing at its core and no one is quite sure how to adjust to that. Worse, the collapse of the distribution system in which all the smart business people tried to eat each other with hostile takeovers left traditional publishing with real dilemmas. When you go from 200 distributors to about three and a half, and some of the takeovers were so hostile that the losers ‘lost’ their customer lists and accounts retrievable files on their way out the door, you are going to get some real dilemmas. More, the consolidated distribution companies, hugely in debt, thought they could now put bigger squeezes on the publishers just as technology made enormous changes in the very nature of distributing.

Alas, authors and their associations were taken in surprise as much as anyone else.

More, looking at the new generation of computers, laptops, netbooks, readers, etc., and new print technologies and print on demand system, the revolution isn’t anywhere near over. This means that publishers are going to have to scrap a lot of what they "know" and learn the new world.
Authors have to be aware of all this, but authors aren’t publishers, and most authors who thought they could be publishers have regretted trying that. The whole point of the publishing business was to take a lot of decisions out of the hands of authors — indeed, SFWA uses the publishers as its Membership Committee, and the collapse of publishing is making us wonder if we need to come up with our own means for choosing members.
Publishers have taken most of the business and marketing work out of the system leaving authors to write, not manage. Publishers give out advances and publish and market books. They try to choose books that will sell while at the same time playing for the favor of certain public intellectuals in the hopes of being well thought of, not just panders. What most publishers wanted was to do ‘important’ books that made money. That didn’t always work. "I publish Mickey Spillane so that I can publish award winning books…"

After the huge flop of Day of the Locust (it sold about 400 copies total) Bennett Cerf famously said "If I ever publish another Hollywood novel it will be My Fifty Ways of Making Love by Hedy Lamar". Of course that’s now considered one of the great American novels and Random House is quite proud of having published it.

Publishers have ceased to be the gatekeepers in the sense that anyone can now ‘publish’ a book. On the other hand, there is still the need for advances, editing, marketing including soliciting puffs and blurbs and reviews — every reviewer I know of is now bombarded with requests for reviews from people they don’t know, and every author receives requests for puffs from people who swear they have been readers and fans for many years, and no matter what good intentions we may have there is no way we can read all that. Someone has to become the equivalent of the publishers reader and the slush pile editor. Someone has to select what book ideas should have an advance, and there has to be a way to get a return on that risky investment. I will still read soon to be published books sent to me by my editors and publishers, but I can’t possibly read everything sent me by readers seeking a puff. Nor can anyone else.

I’m not sure that the rant that began this topic is terribly useful in finding answers to these questions.

= = = = =

I can add this:

In the past year one effect of the publisher revolution has been that eBook rights have become more valuable than print rights. Lucifer’s Hammer and Mote in God’s Eye are now selling quite well as eBooks even though they are decades old. Oath of Fealty isn’t doing too badly. Backlists are valuable again – and publishers haven’t done anything to market those books. Amazon has with its clever “People who bought this book also enjoyed” advertisements, which spreads the popularity of Mote and Hammer to many other works.

Which doesn’t mean that there isn’t a great deal for publishers to do. There are still the difficult tasks of editing – both line editing and copy-editing and the specialized copy editing required for eBooks which have to be examined in several publishing formats.

There is still the fact that publishers serve as the Membership Committee for the Author’s Guild, Mystery Writers of American, Science Fiction Writers of America, etc.: That is many author associations only allow membership to published authors, and ‘published’ specifically excludes self-published. This is now challenged by ‘self-published’ eBooks making more in a year than they would have got as advances for first novels. Author associations don’t know how to deal with this.

Niven and Benford have just been on an author’s death march – book signing tour – for their new collaboration, Bowl of Heaven, which managed to hit the best seller list. There is still money in book publishing of the old fashioned variety.

Publishing has been through many crises and will go through more. Publishers and authors have many mutual interests; the problem is usually the bean counters who come into publishing not understanding that to be a successful publisher you need to know something about authors – not only getting along with established authors who can make money for you, but in recognizing and encouraging and developing newcomers whose first efforts probably won’t make any money, but who can become the best sellers you will need in ten years and more.

At least that’s the way I heard it.

View 748 Wednesday, October 31, 2012

ALL HALLOWS EVE

I’ve been a bit under the weather the last couple of days. Much of my family is on the east coast, and all came through Sandy unharmed. I have friends in Manhattan who still have no electric power, and I understand that the looting has begun – I saw pictures of people carrying huge flat screen TV monitors down the street, and other such matters. Our best wishes to all.

A long time correspondent sends this:

Screwy Polls

Jerry,

A lot of people seem to be stressing over the difference between the national polls that show a modest Romney lead, and the state-by-state polls that still point toward an Obama win in the Electoral College.

I’ve been following polls closely for months, particularly the electoral-vote map with state-by-state poll averages at RealClearPolitics, and one thing I’ve noticed is that some polling outfits have been playing pro-Dem games with their state polls – in at least one blatantly obvious case, temporarily dropping their ~5 point Dem skew earlier this month, then after a week or so readopting it. (In aid of some sort of "comeback kid" narrative? Because word came down "damn salvaging your credibility"? Who knows.)

It’s gotten bad enough that the people at RealClearPolitics have written a story about it, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/10/31/whats_behind_the_state-national_poll_divergence_115979.html.

They’re very diplomatic about it; they don’t ever actually state that some of the state polls in their averages are rigged (or to be charitable, merely a mix of incompetence and wishful thinking). But they do calculate that the nationwide average of the state-by-state polls is biased 2 to 2.5 points toward the Dems compared to the national polls. They go on to state that the correct answer is very unlikely to be an average of the two, and leave it at that.

I’ll go out on a limb and say that it’s the national polls that are correct. I’ve come to apply about two points of Kentucky windage to the RCP averages in key swing states (or in some cases I just ignore the more blatant pro-Dem outliers) and the RCP piece reinforces my belief I have it about right.

Nobody should draw too much comfort from this. Even applying RCP’s Kentucky windage to the current swing state poll averages yields only the narrowest of Romney wins – and several key states, notably Ohio, Nevada, and Wisconsin, will be well within the margin of cheating that their regional Dem machines have demonstrated in the past. (Iowa is also razor-close, but less historically prone to ballot-box stuffing.)

My current take: Romney wins if he takes any two out of those four by greater than the margin of cheating. This assumes he also holds onto current narrow leads in Colorado, Virgina, and Florida. And in at least one case it assumes he also knocks off one electoral vote from Maine (as seems likely).

Bottom line: Absent a couple more points Romney pickup nationally (possible but nothing to count on) it’ll be a damned close-run thing.

sign me

Porkypine

Polls are subject to manipulation, and they are also vulnerable to mistaken assumptions. Few people are competent in both the mathematical complexities of statistical inference, and the subtleties of political thinking. In particular, there are powerful social forces at work that make it very difficult to factor in dishonesty in answering pollsters. When I was Managing Director of the Pepperdine research Institute we won contracts to study polling and results from both the FDA and the Department of Justice, and it was very clear that training pollsters is both difficult and expensive, and few polling companies can afford to do it right.

In the present situation we have a President who was elected not only to the Presidency, but to something greater than that. He was the bringer of Hope and Change, The One you’ve been waiting for. Not surprisingly he did not meet all those expectations. Those who believed he would can either denounce him, or retreat into silence, or react in other ways. There are numerous studies of what happens to Believers when their expectations are not met. None of them look to be too useful for pollsters.

My own view, not based on much evidence, is that there are a number of people disappointed in Mr. Obama who do not care to admit that, and that many of them will react to this by abandoning electoral politics – and by not voting. That’s not much more than a guess, but I would not be astonished if a week from today we find that the election wasn’t even close.

The technology march continues, and there’s a lot to write about. We have an embarrassment of riches in cell phones, iPads , Tablets, communications devices other than phones, desktops, laptops, and all of them at consumer prices. I’m trying to keep up with all of it. I note that I am not alone in being not quite overwhelmed with the latest development – not quite overwhelmed, but faced with a very great deal to write about.

But first it’s getting late and it will be dark in an hour or so. It should be a good Halloween. I rather enjoy seeing the spectacle.