Category: Uncategorized

How not to be SFWA president

Three-time and outgoing SFWA President John Scalzi appears to want to bring his period of amateurish misrule to an end on a fittingly diplomatic note:

THIS IS A HORRIBLE AWFUL TERRIBLE APPALLING DISGUSTING CONTRACT WHICH IS BAD AND NO WRITER SHOULD SIGN IT EVER. Yes, I’m aware I’ve already said this. It bears repeating. It doesn’t matter whether it’s from Alibi, Hydra or anyone. Run away from it, as fast as you can, arms flailing like a Muppet’s. It’s the only rational response.

I will note that at the moment I have in my email queue a letter from Random House, written in a “more in sorrow than anger” style, which expresses disappointment that I (for one) didn’t talk to them before writing my piece on their terrible regrettable insulting Hydra deal terms, and waxing rhapsodic about their bold new business model. It’s profit sharing, you see, not like apparently any of those other book contracts out there, which comes as a surprise to me, considering how much of Tor’s and Subterranean’s profits I’ve shared in over the years.

I am speaking for myself and only for myself when I say that I looked at the letter that the folks at Random House sent me and wondered just how incredibly stupid they must think I am to believe that just because they sent a letter that read as all reasonable and nice sounding, that would somehow change the fact that the business model of their new eBook imprints is predicated on preying on writers — and preying on the writers most at risk for being preyed upon, the new and the desperate.

This must be more of that smart diplomacy of which we heard so much in the recent presidential elections.  It’s hardly a joking matter, but it is a little amusing in light of expressed concerns regarding my ability to get along with the major publishers.  But while I may have been personally attacked by a pair of Tor editors and been guilty of asking questions concerning the number of Nebula nominations won by Tor Books, it can honestly say it never occurred to me to publicly assail a major publishing house’s basic business practices or make assumptions concerning its views of its authors.

I am not saying the business model of Random House’s ebook imprints is ideal or even fair.  But these are issues best raised privately, not shrieked from the mountaintops.  Despite Scalzi’s hysterical whining – no, Johnny, they’re not “fucking kidding you” – there is absolutely nothing wrong with the no-advance model; I prefer it myself because it reduces the amount of risk to the publisher and costs the writer nothing while simultaneously providing him with a considerably higher share of the upside.  The shared risk model is a good one; why should the publisher have to gamble and assure the writer of revenue that may never be realized?

And the publisher’s risk is real.  I’ve been paid “advances” on three books from two different publishers that I didn’t even have to write due to various reorganizations and turf wars inside the publishing houses.

Instead of jumping up and down and screaming “it’s not fair”, the SFWA president should be speaking quietly with Random House, and explaining what aspects of the contracts are reasonable and which are not.  That’s not only the best way to address situations like these, it is the only way, because SFWA is not about to win a pissing match with a major publisher facing a declining market and a genuine need to revise its traditional business model.

As an SFWA member, I’m embarrassed by the juvenile behavior of the president and appalled that the introduction of new contracts for the new medium appear to have taken the organization by surprise.  I’ve stated that the status quo leadership of the recent past has been amateurish in the extreme; this incident is only the most recent evidence of that.  And, needless to say, if I am elected president, these matters will be handled in a considerably more professional manner.

UPDATE: Publisher’s Weekly is on it, complete with a copy of the letter to Scalzi and the SFWA:

After the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) came out swinging on Wednesday, with its president saying that it would not allow authors publishing with Random House’s e-only science fiction imprint Hydra to use that achievement as a credential for membership, the publisher has responded.

PW’s Genreville blog ran a post about the SFWA’s decision, but Random House said the organization never gave it the opportunity to address the issue at hand, namely royalty rates and overall contract terms. (The SFWA said the main reason for its decision is that Hydra “fails to pay authors an advance against royalties, as SFWA requires, and has contract terms that are onerous and unconscionable.”

In a letter to the SFWA, Random House’s digital publishing director Allison Dobson said that while it respects the organization’s stance “we strongly disagree with it, and wish you had contacted us before you published your posts.” The letter went on to say that Hydra “offers a different–but potentially lucrative–publishing model for authors: a profit share,” and that “as with every business partnership, there are specific costs associated with bringing a book successfully to market, and we state them very straightforwardly and transparently in our author agreements.”

Genotribes and superracism

Steve Sailer not only points to one of the fatal flaws of the evolutionary model but manages to lay the foundation for a new form of scientific super-racism:

Thus, there have been, last I checked, a couple of dozen different definitions of species put forward by biologists. Ernst Mayr proposed the simplest: interfertility defines a species. That’s something you can wrap your head around. But there are problems. What about species that reproduce asexually? Among sexually reproducing species, how can you tell whether or not two of the 400 different types of mussels are interfertile or not? As we know from pandas, captive breeding programs are tricky. And what about types of animals who are interfertile but seem worth differentiating, such as dog, wolves, and coyotes?

Indeed, it was while I was thinking about the Endangered Species Act and
the issues surrounding specieshood during the biodiversity debates of
the 1990s kicked off by Edward O. Wilson’s campaign to save the
rainforests that led me to try to ground the study of human biodiversity
in something less woozy than the notion of race as subspecies. Instead,
I reasoned, something we know exists for every human is a
genetic family tree and a biological extended family. If we go back to
thinking about racial groups as extended families, one given a higher
degree of coherence and endurance by partial inbreeding, then we have a
stronger, broader concept that can be used in vastly more human
situations than in just trying to differentiate continental-scale racial
groups by skin color in the post-1492 world.

If I, as a confirmed scientific sub-speciesist, am considered to be a racist on the basis of my acceptance of the current state of biology, then what words can possibly suffice to properly condemn one who would divide humanity on even more substantive grounds than mere genetic science?

But what could we call these extended families with higher degrees of coherence and endurance by partial inbreeding?  One would be tempted to suggest the term “genotribes” were it not for the fact that we are reliably informed that tribalism is the root of all human evil.

Too big to jail

Karl Denninger considers the Attorney General’s recent admission that the big banks are above the law:

The Rule of Law works and guides a just society only because it applies to everyone.  Nobody gets to rape, rob, pillage or murder.  If you do, no matter who you are, you face the same punishment, the same process, the same sentence.

We all know there are disparities in the process and always have been.  But there’s a difference between the foibles of mankind — everyone has their bias, and there is no such thing as a human process that is flawless — and intentional, designed-in or willful refusal to prosecute certain people for acts that land others in prison.

The latter is the defining action of a dictatorship.

A dictatorship can only exist by declaring war upon the people.  When a certain subset of the population is given license to pillage or worse that is the very definition of “diktat” from which the term “dictatorship” comes.

Fast and Furious, incidentally, falls into this category as well.

This is an extraordinarily dangerous state of affairs and must not be permitted to continue.  The government and its actors have lost all moral and ethical appeal to fair play and the rule of law — by exempting certain people they have declared both themselves and those they exempted beyond the protections that exist in a civilized society.

I’ve previously pointed out that there is no longer “law” as such, in the United States any more.  Everything about the “nation”, which is no longer, properly speaking, even a nation anymore, is fraudulent, from its “money” to its system of “justice”.  Even something as simple and basic as openly fighting a “war” is now beyond its bloated, cancerous make-believe structure.

I wouldn’t call the present system a dictatorship myself.  Dictatorships are more open and direct.  It is better described as a simulatorship, which is to say, rule by pretense.  It is remniscent of the latter days of the Soviet empire, when the Russian people pretended to work and the Soviet government pretended to pay them.  In the latter days of the US empire, the federal government pretends its actions are within the limits set by the U.S. Constitution and the American people pretend to believe them.

If a corporate entity is too big to fail or too big to jail, then logic dictates it must be cut down to a size that permits both.  Remember, corporations are not capitalism, they are creations of government and if they can’t reasonably be imprisoned, they can certainly be “executed”.  And if real American people can be “legally” executed at the order of the president, then can there really be any doubt that artificial American people are also liable to termination on command as well?

This section of the American Banker article particularly struck home:

Many are still angry about the 2008 bank bailouts, and they now have an
on-the-record confirmation from Justice’s top official that the
department is treating big banks softly just because they are large.
Compare it to how law enforcement typically treats American citizens
when they break the law — often times by throwing the book at them — and
it’s easy to understand how that anger could grow into more popular
support for a big bank breakup.

For example, my father was imprisoned for 12 years after being accused of evading $1.6 million in taxes, penalties, and imaginary “interest” despite having paid something like $75 million in state and federal taxes over the previous 20 years and forcing the State of Minnesota to admit that its agents knowingly lied when they falsely claimed he was a resident and seized his house for not paying taxes he didn’t owe. Meanwhile, Congressional investigators estimate that the big US banks launder about $250 billion in drug money every year in addition to their $12 billion in estimated annual mortgage fraud.  When caught, they occasionally pay a monetary penalty calculated at a rate which, in my father’s case, would have amounted to about a $20,000 fine.

So, I can understand why many Americans support a big bank breakup and seeing corporate criminals treated with the same severity as actual human beings.  But it’s not going to happen, because the entire financial system is already on the verge of collapse and all of the insiders know it.  That is why the banks will continue doing whatever they want and the regulators and politicians will continue to look the other way, until the moment when a critical node fails and the entire system breaks down in a manner that can’t be blamed on anyone in particular.

Kicking it old school

I have to admit, I rather like the cut of Paul the Younger’s jib:

In a rare, traditional filibuster, Sen. Rand Paul vowed to speak on the Senate floor “as long as it takes” to draw attention to his concerns about the Obama administration’s policy regarding the targeted killing of American terrorism suspects.

The Kentucky Republican took to the floor before noon Wednesday to block an expected vote on the nomination of John Brennan to lead the CIA, with aides saying he could continue for hours. Paul, beginning his remarks, said he would continue “until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important.”

“Are we so complacent with our rights that we would allow a president to say he might kill Americans?” Paul asked. “No one person, no one politician should be allowed … to judge the guilt of an individual and to execute an individual. It goes against everything we fundamentally believe in our country.”

Paul is absolutely right.  And it does not speak well of the Republican Party that so few of his fellow Senators are joining him in taking what should be the obvious position that the President of the United States cannot simply murder any American he wants whenever he wishes, without trial, sentencing, or even a warrant.

Inflation vs Deflation VI

Nate boldly elects to defends his position concerning fiat money in a post entitled Fiat or Shenanigans:

You.  Whimpering in the corner.  Suck it up and get back on your feet.  You knew the US money system was a wreck or you wouldn’t be reading this debate in the first place.  So Vox and I conspire through competition to show you precisely how wrecked it is… and at the first glimpse you curl up in a little ball.

Man up.  Its not going up hill from here.

Setting aside the obvious difference of opinion that we have (he’s wrong by the way which I will presently demonstrate with no little amusement), our view of where we stand in the grand scheme of things is profoundly similar.   If you look carefully… you’ll see that I was the one that dropped the bomb… not Vox.  Vox just stepped back and said.. “did you see that bomb he dropped? Say boys… That’s a big freaking bomb.  I doubt even he knows how big a bomb he just dropped.”  Then, being the cruelty artist he is, he explained the bomb. Then you realized…  “Oh damn.  There’s a bomb.”

You see what this debate is important?  It’s the format.  The format itself allows you to accept things that you would otherwise refuse to believe. 

The five or six of you still attempting to follow this debate should read the rest of it there.  My response will be posted tomorrow.

Mailvox: the line between F and SF

An SFWA author writes concerning the upcoming SFWA election:

 I voted for you and my ballot’s going out tomorrow in the mail. I thought your opening statements were hilarious! Outlandish, too….  But anyway I liked most of your ideas for SFWA.

The idea of establishing two Nebula awards — one for SF and one for F is really over the top. They overlap. Just as a good story also overlaps with dark elements. (Which we politely do  not refer to as “horror” but it is.) This is the main reason I’m writing you –I’d like to know just how you would possibly chop SF & F in half –when novels and stories contain elements of both. “Hard” sf isn’t the only definition of Science Fiction. “Hard SF” implies that there is some explicit element of science explained within the story or novel (which Landis and Haldeman do well) but it’s not the only element and anything we imagine becomes fantasy.

This was my response:  In answer to your question, those nominating a novel for a Nebula Award would be expected to indicate that they considered the nominated work to be either F or SF as part of the nomination process.  A novel that received both SF and F nominations would have both types of nominations counted but would be put up for the award in the category that received the most nominations, assuming that it received enough combined nominations to qualify.  If the author happened to disagree with the categorization and the difference between the two categories was between one and three nominations, then the category would be switched at the author’s request.

Obviously, if everyone nominates something that is clearly Fantasy and the author prefers it to compete in the Science Fiction category because he believes he is the second coming of Isaac Asimov or because he thinks it will be easier to beat out Star Trek 562: Spock Takes a Nap than the most recent rewrite of a Brontë novel published by Tor Books, there would be no reason to accommodate that.

But if a book could be reasonably considered to be either science fiction or fantasy, to such an extent that it is unclear to the readers, there is no reason not to permit the author to determine which category the book most properly belongs.

The consequences of democratization

It is itself indicative of an educational failure that the inevitable consequence of democratizing anything leads inevitably to mediocrity should prove surprising:

Years ago, school was not for everyone. Classrooms were places for discipline, study. Teachers were respected figures. Parents actually gave them permission to punish their children by slapping them or tugging their ears. But at least in those days, schools aimed to offer a more dignified life.

Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago. Even if baseline literacy, the ability to read a street sign or news bulletin, is rising, the practice of reading an actual book is not. Once a reasonably well-educated country, Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a Unesco assessment of reading habits a few years ago.

One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”

The concept of group schooling is fundamentally flawed from the start.  But throw in the expansion of the number of students attending as well as the elements of entrenched, self-interested administrative and teaching bureaucracies, and you have a perfect recipe for teaching absolutely nothing of import, regardless of whether you are considering American college students or Mexican elementary schoolers.  It should be readily apparent that the more children attend school, the more mediocre the education that ALL of those children will receive.

It’s not exactly a zero-sum game, but it might as well be.  The more resources that are committed to education, the more the parasite class is drawn to it and the more resources will be diverted away from its primary purpose.

Now lets contemplate the consequences of importing tens of millions of these uneducated quasi-illiterates with zero familiarity knowledge of the Western political tradition and giving them citizenship and the right to vote.  On what planet does anyone possibly think this is going to lead to any sort of improvement in the national well-being?  What is the case for believing this is going to do anything but hasten the decline and fall of the United States?

People sometimes wonder how I can be an open and avowed anti-equalitarian elitist.  To which my response is: precisely how mediocre do you believe yourself to be that you are not?

The new Dow high

Courtesy of Zerohedge:

  • GDP Growth: Then +2.5%; Now +1.6%
  • Regular Gas Price: Then $2.75; Now $3.73
  • Americans Unemployed (in Labor Force): Then 6.7 million; Now 13.2 million
  • Americans On Food Stamps: Then 26.9 million; Now 47.69 million
  • Size of Fed’s Balance Sheet: Then $0.89 trillion; Now $3.01 trillion
  • US Debt as a Percentage of GDP: Then ~38%; Now 74.2%
  • US Deficit (LTM): Then $97 billion; Now $975.6 billion
  • Total US Debt Oustanding: Then $9.008 trillion; Now $16.43 trillion
  • Gold: Then $748; Now $1583

However, this is the number I find most significant:

Total Credit Market Debt Outstanding: Then $50 trillion; Now $55.3 trillion.

October 2007 was the last quarter before Z1 fell below 2 percent quarterly growth for the first time in sixty years.  The numbers above reflect the heroic efforts required simply to lift Z1 by $5 trillion when the simple continuance of the 60-year average credit growth would have had it at $77.9 trillion.

It is also interesting to note that the price of gold doubled in the six years that the Dow remained flat.

Intergenerational war

As if the younger generations don’t already have a strong casus belli given the debt with which their great-grandparents and grandparents have saddled them, Karl Denninger points out yet another reason today’s children will have just cause to hate their parents:

We all have the right to consent to our data being used and even sold in exchange for something.  Today you consent to a lot of that, even though you may not be paying attention to your granting of that consent.

But children are not of age.  They thus cannot consent.  And it is a long-standing principle that a bargain must include something of at least putative value to both parties as consideration, or it’s no contract at all.

There is no benefit to the kids in this paradigm — only costs that are intentionally hidden from them but which, mark my words, will screw them in the future.

Mark this post and wait 10 years. 

Those kids who are being “tracked” now will find that they’ve been violated repeatedly by this data collection and sharing.

If your state is involved in this, and there are a lot that are, you need to get every last one of your state legislators out of office and all of the local school board members must be instantly ejected and shunned to the point of literal starvation.

If you’re in a state that is not participating, make damn sure they don’t now or in the future.

If you’re a parent and don’t do those two things then prepare for your kids to throw you into the wood chipper feet-first when they figure out how badly you allowed them to be screwed.

I utterly guarantee that you will deserve it.

On a related note, don’t put pictures of your kids on Facebook or Instagram.  It’s stupid.  It’s obnoxious.  It’s thoughtless and self-centered.  And it’s their life, not yours, that you’re putting on public display.

Inflation vs Deflation V

In his second response, Mount Chapter 3, Nate provided four categories of money:

  1. Commodity money
  2. Fiat money
  3. Money certificates
  4. Credit money

He also answered my questions, which I shall summarize as follows:

  1. When they function like money, gold and silver are commodity money, as evidenced by the historical preference for them.
  2. Federal Reserve Notes are fiat money, with some characteristics of credit money.
  3. TMS2 does not represent his definition of the money supply, but serves as a useful tool for estimating it.
  4. All of the categories in TMS2 are fiat money; some may be credit money as well.

It was a strong and informed response, much better than one would likely receive from a professional economist or a central banker.  Two of his answers were also incorrect, for reasons I shall presently demonstrate.

Nate’s first mistake is the identification of credit money as fiat money, even though he clearly has his suspicions concerning the problematic nature of the distinction as it applies to the US monetary system.  That this distinction is false can be demonstrated in two ways, first with a legitimate appeal to authority and history, and second by the money creation process.

With regards to the first point, Mises writes:

“It can hardly be contested that fiat money in the strict sense of the word is theoretically conceivable. The theory of value proves the possibility of its existence. Whether fiat money has ever actually existed is, of course, another question, and one that cannot off-hand be answered affirmatively. It can hardly be doubted that most of those kinds of money that are not commodity money must be classified as credit money. But only detailed historical investigation could clear this matter up.”
  – The Theory of Money and Credit, p. 61

So, we recognize that while fiat money can potentially exist in theory, the question of its actual existence, in the United States or anywhere else, is not settled.  Nate himself notes that Federal Reserve Notes have some characteristics of credit money and that some of the categories in TMS2 may be credit money, but he fails to take the critical step, which is to recognize that the reason they have those characteristics is that they are credit money.  Note in particular the statement that most kinds of money that are not commodity “must be classified as credit money”.

This leads us to our second point.  The “fiat money” of TMS2 includes Demand Deposits, Other Checkable Deposits at Commercial Banks, Other Checkable deposits at Thrifts, Savings deposits at Commercial Banks, Savings Deposits at Thrifts, Demand Deposits, Time and Savings Deposits, and US Government Demand Deposits, among other things.  But from whence do these deposits come?  We know they are not simply printed by either the U.S. government or the Federal Reserve; there is simply not enough currency to account for them.

Clarity is established here via the the endogenous vs exogenous money debate.  We’re not likely to get sidetracked here, because Nate ultimately comes down on the endogenous side, he simply hasn’t connected it to his conception of fiat money.  Mises, too, comes down firmly on the side of endogenous money, as evidenced by the following passage:

“It is not the State, but the common practice of all those who have dealings in the market, that creates money. It follows that State regulation attributing general power of debt-liquidation to a commodity is unable of itself to make that commodity into money. If the State creates credit money – and this is naturally true in a still greater degree of fiat money – it can do so only by taking things that are already in circulation as money substitutes (that is, as perfectly secure and immediately convertible claims to money) and isolating them for purposes of valuation by depriving them of their essential characteristic of permanent convertibility. Commerce would always protect itself against any other method of introducing a government credit currency. The attempt to put credit money into circulation has never been successful, except when the coins or notes in question have already been in circulation as money substitutes.”
  –   The Theory of Money and Credit, p.78

The significance of endogenous money to us here is that it shows that deposits of the sort that make up the TMS2 are created by loans.  They are, to the extent they can be considered money at all, quite literally credit money.  As the market in commercial paper demonstrates, these loans, these future claims, whether created by the central bank, the member banks, or other corporations, have become a commodity in their own right.

And yet, although we can establish that M1, M2, TMS2 all consist of credit money, none of these various money supply measures can be considered money by our original definition, even with its stamp of fiat approval, because the credit money concerned is not directly convertible into commodity money on demand and has not been since 1971.  Despite its use in exchanges, by our agreed-upon definition, this credit money merely represents claims to money rather than money proper, it is a money-substitute money surrogate, which Mises rather confusingly describes as “fiduciary media”.

(“We shall use the term Money Certificates for those money substitutes that are completely covered by the reservation of corresponding sums of money, and the term Fiduciary Media for those which are not covered in this way.” Mises, p. 133)

At this point, it is understandable if the mind shies away from the inescapable logical conclusion.  The question of inflation and deflation of the U.S. money supply is a category error, because there is no U.S. money supply.  This category error and failure to understand that what we have been taught to consider money is merely a money-surrogate is why all of the various quantity theories and complicated attempts to calculate the money supply and predict the consequence of changes in it go so reliably awry, because they are attempting to estimate something by looking at the derivative without realizing that it is a derivative.

To put it in more straightforward terms, while there is no U.S. money supply, there is a money-surrogate supply that consists of fiat-backed credit money.  This was inevitable with the introduction of money-surrogates, given Gresham’s Law, which is popularly summarized as “bad money drives out good money”, and which I would modify as “surrogate money drives out genuine money when it is assigned exchange value by the State”.  This has considerable implications that go well beyond the simple question of inflation versus deflation and merits serious contemplation, however, what concerns us is the three questions it raises that are directly pertinent to the current debate:

  1. What is the best measure of the money-surrogate supply?
  2. Is the money-surrogate supply growing or shrinking?
  3. To where has the genuine money been driven?

In conclusion, I will note that the great Austrian sage recognized and prophetically described the very process of transition from commodity money to credit money, from genuine money to money surrogate, that we have seen take place in American history, although he appears to have been more than a little naive concerning how the diminution of purchasing power might be considered desirable by those in a position to systematically benefit from it.  In the chapter entitled “Influence of the State”, he wrote:

“The exaggeration of the importance in monetary policy of the power at the disposal of the State in its legislative capacity can only be attributed to superficial observation of the processes involved in the transition from commodity money to credit money. This transition has normally been achieved by means of a State declaration that inconvertible claims to money were as good means of payment as money itself.  As a rule, it has not been the object of such a declaration to carry out a change of standard and substitute credit money for commodity money. In the great majority of cases, the State has taken such measures merely with certain fiscal ends in view. It has aimed to increase its own resources by the creation of credit money.  In the pursuit of such a plan as this, the diminution of the money’s purchasing power could hardly seem desirable. And yet it has always been this depreciation in value which, through the coming into play of Gresham’s Law, has caused the change of monetary standard.”
  –   The Theory of Money and Credit, p.77