Trading Percy Harvin

Although I understand why AD doesn’t like it, I think the trade was a very smart move by the Vikings, and may prove to be an excellent one depending upon how they draft.  Harvin is a fantastic complementary player, but he can never be a player around whom one builds the offense and he needs a deep threat to create space for him to be most effective.

Given his lack of durability, and the fact that the Vikings actually had a better record (5-2) against more difficult opponents when he was out of the lineup than when he was playing, it was obvious that he wasn’t necessarily a vital part of the team. And since his attitude was negative and he wanted to leave anyhow, better to replace him now and get something for him than have one more year of him and watch him walk in free agency.

So, I like this trade much better than I liked the Randy Moss trade with Oakland. It’s probably a good trade for both clubs, although I doubt it will be enough to put Seattle over the top as some seem to think.  I have a lot less confidence in the Kaepernicks and Wilsons of the NFL than most; we’ve seen far too many “reinventing the quarterback” stories end with the backup QB taking the snaps.

Eschatonic rumblings

I don’t think Hamas is the real problem here.  Evangelicals of the Left Behind variety are the ones most likely to go berserk if Obama visits the Temple Mount:

Hamas is warning that if President Obama visits the Temple Mount it would be a “declaration of war” against the Islamic world. Israel National News reports the terror group made the threat during a protest march at the religious site following riots on Friday.

Mushir al-Masri, a Hamas spokesman, called for a third intifada if Obama visits the contested religious site in Jerusalem’s Old City between Israelis and Muslims.

Public Security Minister Yitzchak Aharonovich believes the warning will lead to violence flaring up in the region ahead of the president’s visit.

Is it just me or has the world been getting distinctly crazier and crazier over the last nine months or so?

Who needs tokens?

Instapundit notes that Barack Obama’s cabinet is unexpectedly short on African descent:

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY WE’D HAVE A LILY-WHITE CABINET. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! CBC leader concerned Obama has named no blacks to new Cabinet. “Attorney General Eric Holder, appointed in Obama’s first term, remains the Obama administration’s only black Cabinet-level appointee. According to a Politics365 analysis released last week, that’s the fewest by any president over the last 38 years.”

Hey, if you’re the token, what need have you for other tokens?

Pirates, preferences, and the post-timorous

Adam Carolla has a pirate ship.  It is not a coincidence that he is one of the few men who harbor no fear of being called “raciss” by the cowards in the media and on the Internet. But he’s far from the only one and the numbers of the racially post-timorous are rapidly growing as more and more individuals of European descent become increasingly tribal by virtue of their increased exposure to Africans, Hispanics, Asians, and others from non-European tribes.

“The Huffington Post has come out with a story that says ‘Adam Carolla to Gavin Newsom: ‘What’s wrong with blacks and Latinos?’’” Carolla said. “That’s not what I said to Gavin Newsom. I didn’t bring up blacks and Latinos. He brought up blacks and Latinos. But let me take this moment to now talk to all the pussies that are out there trying to stir things up and turn me into a racist. I got news for you: Me saying parents should stick around and raise the children – me saying families and cultures should focus on education — is not radical or revolutionary. It’s the fucking truth.”

Carolla, author of “Not Taco Bell Material,” said that while Newsom is quick to blame “the system,” Newsom happens to be a part of what’s wrong that system.

“You are the system, Gavin Newsom,” Carolla said. “Fix the system, but you won’t fix the system, because you know what it takes to fix the system and you’re a fucking coward. And guys like Huffington Post — you guys fucking line up behind these people and let me tell you something, you guys all have blood on your hands, because the problem could be fixed. It’s a problem, and it’s a problem that involves bodies. People die every year.”

“There’s people getting shot,” Carolla added. “There’s brown people shooting other brown people on the streets of Chicago every fucking day of the week. And you guys sit there silently. If it was a Sandy Hook situation or anything else, you’d be all up in arms. But you can’t say a word, so you sit there with your fucking coward hands over your fucking little cowardly soup coolers. And then when somebody has the guts to say something — to speak the truth for fucking one hot second, you jump up his ass and call him a racist. Thus, you silence the media. Now you perpetuate the problem….

“So let me tell you something — I got something called a pirate ship,
Huffington Post,” Carolla said. “I don’t give a fuck about you and your
fucking opinions…. Keep going, Huffington Post,” he said. “Keep pointing fingers at
people who speak out. Good job, media. Silence everyone who says there’s
a problem. Silence everyone who attempts to take a problem and really
earnestly get them out of poverty, to really earnestly try to look at
the problem realistically, to look at the problem of violence, to look
at the problem of education, to look at the socio-economic problem —
someone who really honestly tries to take a look at this problem. You
silence them by calling them a racist. 

The reality from which the conservative, mainstream, and progressive medias are all averting their eyes is that a substantial percentage of the minority population of America are, in the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates about his wife, at war with white people. No amount of unscientific racial goodthink, no bien-pensant justifications for inordinately criminal behavior by people of a certain color, no ritual confessions of anti-racism by people living in pure lily-white communities is going to change that fact.

Jews understand tribe.  Africans understand tribe.  Hispanics understand tribe.  Asians understand tribe.  But because they collectively and intentionally rejected their tribal identity in favor of an amorphous Anglo-Saxon creed to which virtually none of them understand or subscribe anymore, white Americans will continue to be bewildered and victimized as a result of failing to understand the games being played until they rediscover the concept of tribal loyalty to one’s own kind.

And rediscover it they will, whether they want to or not. As the Washington Post article about the growing “racial consciousness” of liberal white Democrats forced to confront an unexpected Hispanic intrusion into their middle class lives illustrates, it is only a matter of time and sufficient inter-tribal contact.

It’s assumed that, as the United States becomes increasingly non-white,
white Democrats will continue to support the party. But a substantial
amount of social-science evidence suggests a different conclusion: As
the United States becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, liberal
whites might start leaning Republican….

The results were clear. After coming into contact, for just minutes
each day, with two more Latinos than they would otherwise see or
interact with, the riders, who were mostly white and liberal, were
sharply more opposed to allowing more immigrants into the country and
favored returning the children of illegal immigrants to their parents’
home country. It was a stark shift from their pre-experiment interviews,
during which they expressed more neutral attitudes.

Political
scientists, economists, sociologists and psychologists have long noted
that, under most circumstances, when people from different ethnic,
racial and religious groups come into new contact, conflict ensues.

The process of white tribal rediscovery likely to be more than a little ugly, as are the some of the potential consequences.  Just as the legacy of importing Africans continues to resonate in a negative manner hundreds of years after the initial importation, the problems related to the legacy of importing Hispanics, Asians, Jews, and other tribal peoples will likely be an order of magnitude or two higher. A peaceful geographic breakup of the Union is probably the best for which we can hope.

Ultimately, it isn’t about race per se, as race is a clumsy and outdated term that doesn’t fit well with the genetic science that is rapidly eroding the great myth of human equality.  It is about tribe, a fractal concept that encompasses race but goes considerably beyond it.  And tribal differences are so profound, that as Steve Sailer notes, they are more easily distinguished on the basis of preferences than religion, ideology, sexual orientation or even sex.

A new study out of Cambridge University
uses a database of Facebook “likes” to predict demographic and
personality information about individuals. Race (black v. white,
ignoring other races) turns out to be the easiest to predict based on
what stuff people like. The Cambridge model gets race right 95% of the
time, compared to only 93% of the time for sex.

Inflation vs deflation VII

Nate responds with post entitled “Half-Truism”: 

“There are those who say that he cure for inflation is deflation.
 And… there are those, though they are few, who say that the cure for
the man who has been run over by a motorcar, is to have the same
motorcar run over him in the opposite direction.”
– Ludwig Von Mises, “Lecture on Inflation”, 1968

Broad definition…  narrow
definition…  it is readily apparent the
broader definition is what I am referring to here. But one must remember that I
am actually no longer using Mises’ definitions at all. I am defining money as
it relates to the commodity competition… not its nature.  I call it fiat money not because it has
government force behind it, but because it is that government force that makes
the commodity win the commodity competition and therefore become the
money.  Credit money doesn’t exist at all
in physical form and thus doesn’t compete in the competition and is not
actually money. 

As you have noticed by now these responses are coming slower
and slower.  That’s because, by the very
nature of the problem, as we drill down, more and more remedial teaching is
required.   There is a knowledge base
that is required to understand these points… and we must first make sure the
reader has it.

I shall respond to this within the next day or three, as before.

The greatest living economist

Gary North nominates Thomas Sowell:

He applies simple but fundamental concepts of economics to real-world problems, which are often problems that are not widely perceived as being heavily influenced by economic categories.2. He relies exclusively on verbal communications, not graphs or equations, to explain these concepts and their applications. This keeps his expositions firmly within the realm of historical cause and effect.

3. He never begins his economic analyses with this phrase: “Let us assume. . . .” The only time he ever uses “let us assume,” is when it is followed by “for the sake of argument,” which is in preparation for a lambasting of some conventional political assumption.

4. He writes in well-honed English that is the product of over 30 years of writing newspaper columns: clear, precise, and rhetorically persuasive — in short, efficient.

5. He is the most creative economist in our era — or perhaps in any era — in implementing the division of labor in his writing. He hires astoundingly productive research assistants, and then he incorporates their remarkable but diverse discoveries into a single coherent narrative.

6. He is a better historian than he is an economist. Other economists have made observations similar to his. But no other historian matches him in his chosen specialty: economic motivations that have prompted the international migration and subsequent economic successes of modern racial, national, and religious groups.

I like Sowell and generally think well of him, but I lost an amount of respect for him when he resorted to handwaving in response to some errors of Michelle Malkin’s concerning Pearl Harbor.  I also find it remarkable that so many figures of the mainstream right originally hail from the Left.  Why is it that those who were dumb enough to get it wrong initially are most often hailed as heroes, while those who didn’t are customarily ignored?

I’m not sure who my nominee for the greatest living economist would be, but if I had to choose someone, my first thought would be Steve Keen.  I think he is deeply and profoundly wrong on a number of issues, but the work that he has done in exposing the incontrovertible flaws of neoclassical economics is truly remarkable.

How not to be SFWA president II

John Scalzi doubles down, not only in terms of jacking up his levels of emotion, irrationality, and vulgarity, but by expanding his attack on Random House to include ALL publishers who utilize a no-advance model:

So why are so many eBook-only publishers attempting to run with the “no advances” business model? If I had to guess, I would say because many of these then-erstwhile publishers assumed that publishing electronically had a low financial threshold of entry (not true, if you’re serious about it) and they fancied being publishers, so they started their businesses undercapitalized, and are now currently in the process of passing the consequences of that undercapitalization unto the authors they would like to work with. Alternately, as appears to be the case with Random House, they’re looking for a way to pass as much of the initial cost of publishing onto the author as possible, and one of the best ways to bring down those initial costs is to avoid paying the author anything up front. Both of these are bad business models, although one is more maliciously so, and both are to be avoided. Just because someone has stupidly or maliciously planned their business, doesn’t mean you’re obliged to sign a contract with them.

But, these publishers and their defenders may say (and have said), the publisher takes all the risk in producing a book! Yeah? Hey, to publishers and their defenders who say that: Fuck you. Fuck you for asserting that the author has shouldered no risk, when she’s invested the time, opportunity cost and material outlay required to create a manuscript. Fuck you for asserting the the author sees no risk to her own career from the choices that the publisher imposes on the publishing process that the author has no control of: everything from cover art (which, if horrible and/or out of step with the market, can sink a book) to the size and distribution of the initial print run, to the marketing plan the publisher has for retail.

Fuck you for lightly passing over the risk that the author has if the book fails — that any additional books in the contract might be cancelled or put out with the bare minimum of contractual obligation, that the author might not be able to sell another book to the publisher or other publishers because of a track record of poor sales — and for lightly passing over the fact the a publisher mitigates its own risk of the failure of a single book by having an entire portfolio of releases. If one single book fails but the publisher’s line holds up generally, then the risk the publisher encounters to its livelihood is minimal. The risk to the author, on the other hand, is substantially greater. Yes, to all of that, “fuck you,” is probably the politest thing to say in response.

Now, I could certainly point out that this is an incredibly stupid, unprofessional, and irresponsible thing to do, especially in light of how the Guardian has already mistaken one of his previous posts on the subject for the SFWA’s position.  So, given the dedicated journalistic commitment to calm and reasonable discourse, it would not be a surprise if we soon see headlines of this sort: SFWA To All Publishers: “FUCK YOU”.

However, I think that’s all readily apparent.  Being an Award-Winning Cruelty Artist, I happen to find it much more amusing to demonstrate that Scalzi simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and moreover, to show that his observed inability to understand the potential benefits of the no-advance, revenue-share system has already cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2012 alone.

Scalzi has publicly stated that Tor sold
35,667 eBook versions of Redshirts at $11.99, 17,008 audiobooks at $19.95 and 26,604 hardcovers at $24.95.  If we assume that he gets the
standard 20% royalty on ebooks that Tor author Robert Sawyer says Tor is paying its authors, the customary 10(5K)-12.5(5K)-15% on hardcovers, and 8% on audio books, his royalty revenues under the traditional publishing model he is defending so vigorously are likely in the vicinity of the following:

Ebook: $59,870.62
Hardcover: $90,479.22
Audiobook: $27,144.77
Total royalties: $177,494.61

That’s excellent performance by any measure, almost surely in excess of whatever advance he received for Redshirts.  One must congratulate Scalzi on his ability to write fiction that people want to buy, regardless of what one thinks of the man or the fiction.  However, one also has to seriously question his financial acumen, because if he had the very sort of publishing deal that he is claiming is so dreadful and indefensible, he would have done considerably better.

Let’s be realistic and assume that in addition to the revenue-sharing model, his contract contains an amount of chargeable overhead as many of these 50/50 contracts do.  The largest of which I am aware permitted the publisher to charge the author up to a maximum of $10,000 from the author’s royalties.  Based on the same channel discount structure as above, but this time splitting the resulting revenue equally between Tor and the author results in the following figures:

Ebook: $149,676.57
Hardcover: $165,942.45
Audiobook: $84,827.40
Total royalties: $400,446.42
(less overhead charge $10,000)
Net author revenue: $390,446.42.  

In other words, Scalzi has already thrown away $212,951.81 in additional royalty revenue due to his insistence on an advance and his inability to understand that the no-advance, 50/50 revenue-sharing model is not intrinsically unfair, disadvantageous to the writer, or predatory.  In fact, if he wasn’t such an angry and short-sighted fool, he would go to Tor and very politely ask them to publish his future books under the very no-advance model he is so vigorously decrying.  As it stands, every dollar he henceforth collects from Tor on Redshirts represents $2.55 (and counting) that he would have received had he the courage and foresight to accept the risk of foregoing a pre-payment on his royalties.

No doubt some authors believe that it is a good idea to heed the advice of a successful author when it comes to book contracts.  And that is quite often true.  But is it really a good idea to avoid no-advance, 50/50 publishing deals on the advice of an author dumb enough to hand over 54.5 percent of his potential royalties to the publisher for nothing more than the privilege of collecting part of the income beforehand?

UPDATE:  John Scalzi demonstrates that he not only can’t do math, he can’t read either:

The
fellow in question has no idea how my contract is structured, so he
hasn’t the slightest idea what I’m making. I will say his estimates
amuse me. His estimates about production and marketing costs likewise
suggest a profound ignorance of the real world (that $10,000 would have
covered this for a week, at most). Additionally, if the fellow is trying
to use the example of an outlier (i.e., a bestselling author with a
large and healthy following) in an overly-simplistic “all other things
being equal” sort of comparison, grounded in bad numbers, to show why
these sorts of contracts might be beneficial to other writers,
particularly new writers, then he’s, at best, once again letting his
need to get his mancrush on get in the way of clear and rational
thinking, or useful advice to other authors.

Ignorant and
mendacious is not a great combination, basically. And that’s all I will
say about that. It’s nice he’s still making money for those various
organizations, however.

As noted here, I have no problems with
authors choosing not to take advances — or making any other sort of
contractual maneuvers they choose — when the author has decided that it
is in his or her own best interests to do so, based on several factors.
This is manifestly different from the publisher having “no advances” as
its default setting. Anyone who doesn’t recognize the difference between
those two probably should not be dispensing career advice to anyone
else.

First, Scalzi is attempting to have it both
ways here.  I cited the standard royalty rates for ebooks, hardcovers,
and audio books from Tor Books in doing my calculations.  It is entirely
possible that as one of their leading authors, he gets better royalty
rates from them, although I very much doubt he is getting the 50 percent
royalties that Hydra is offering or that I get from my publishers.  The
numbers are not bad, they are standard and other writers, particularly
new writers, are not likely to get better royalty rates than those I
cited.

They are certainly more relevant than the numbers
that John is keeping to himself, which is certainly his right, but to which he
cannot reasonably appeal.  And, insofar as his royalties depart from those that new writers will receive he is making the very outlier mistake that he
erroneously accuses me of making.

Furthermore, I said absolutely
nothing about “production and marketing costs”, but rather, referred to
a fixed amount that is expected to help cover the publisher’s overhead
costs involved in publishing the book.  In my various book contracts,
that fixed amount ranges from zero to $10,000 and comes out of my 50
percent share.  Far from showing any “profound ignorance of the real
world”, it simply showed Scalzi’s lack of reading ability and
unfamiliarity with the revenue-sharing model.

Notice that he is backing down now that his argument has been exposed as ridiculous and materially self-defeating.  Suddenly the problem isn’t “no advances”,  but “no advances as its default setting”.

UPDATE II: The little rabbits actually manage to make Scalzi’s inept response look downright intelligent when they try to weigh in:


“Claiming that 10000 USD cover all the expenses involved in marketing and
producing Redshirts (Posters. Book tours. Wil Wheaton. Cover designs.
Typesetting. Editing. Proofreading.) is so fallacious that it renders
every other point invalid.”

Well, I suppose it might if anyone had ever made such a stupid and fallacious claim.  But no one did anything of the sort, least of all me.

The high discourse of Twitter

Captain Beagle: Which is worse, work or rape? I know 2 women who were raped. Go fuck yourself #sorrynicepplhadtohearthat

VD: Hey, talk to @johnscalzi not me. I certainly didn’t rape them.

Captain Beagle: no your article suggested an increase in rapes was less harmful than women handing out resumes. Insensitive & absurd

VD: I didn’t suggest it, I proved it. By what metric do you claim that rape is more harmful to society than women working?

Captain Beagle: I was unaware one needed statistical data to prove rape is harmful.

VD: You need something, at any rate. What is your basis for claiming rape is worse for society than female employment?

Captain Beagle: thanx for this fascinating study in hyperbolic misogyny. I’m thinking of using you as the template for my next villain.

How to write a Great American Novel

I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and while it is a well-written and entertaining novel, thus far I have found it to be neither brilliant nor sui generis.  It is intelligent, it features an expanded vocabulary, it is observant, and it is unusually detailed in both physical and psychological terms.

But at least thus far, it is, contra the book’s Introduction, far from unrecognizable.  By way of explanation, I should mention that in the aforementioned intro, Dave Eggers writes:

It’s possible, with most contemporary novels, for astute readers, if they are wont, to break it down into its parts, to take it apart as one would a car or Ikea shelving unit. That is, let’s say a reader is a sort of mechanic. And let’s say this particular reader-mechanic has worked on lots of books, and after a few hundred contemporary novels, the mechanic feels like he can take apart just about any book and put it back together again. That is, the mechanic recognizes the components of modern fiction and can say, for example, I’ve seen this part before, so I know why it’s there and what it does. And this one, too — I recognize it. This part connects to this and performs this function. This one usually goes here, and does that. All of this is familiar enough. That’s no knock on the contemporary fiction that is recognizable and breakdownable. This includes about 98 percent of the fiction we know and love.

But this is not possible with Infinite Jest. This book is like a spaceship with no recognizable components, no rivets or bolts, no entry points, no way to take it apart. It is very shiny, and it has no discernible flaws. If you could somehow smash it into smaller pieces, there would certainly be no way to put it back together again. It simply is. Page by page, line by line, it is probably the strangest, most distinctive, and most involved work of fiction by an American in the last twenty years.

Now, I haven’t finished the book yet, so it is entirely possible that it features depths as yet unplumbed by me.  But since I’ve been reading the book in the awareness of the statements made above, what has actually struck me in reading it is how absolutely familiar it was.

It genuinely makes me wonder if Eggers has ever read John Irving, Tom Robbins, or even Robert Anton Wilson.  While Infinite Jest is much larger in scope and looser in plot than any books I have read by either of the first two authors, and while Wallace is a noticeably more intelligent writer than Robbins and one apparently less obsessed with his formative years than Irving, there are elements in the work of all four writers that are every bit as recognizable as the elements one can recognize is Martin, Abercrombie, Erikson, and Sanderson, in Brooks, Goodkind, and every other would-be Tolkien, in the romance genre, in the wereseal genre, and in the vampire genre.

Take a few quirky but highly intelligent characters.  Go into excruciating detail concerning the minute-by-minute existence of their quotidian routines, especially regarding the sexual or toilet aspects, then throw in some highly implausible gonzo drama produced by their relationships with their cartoonishly dysfunctional families or inexplicably deformed lovers.  Be sure to have a strong amateur sporting element, be it wrestling or tennis.  At all times, be careful to utilize the high-low technique of an unfamiliar and elevated vocabulary taken straight from the OED alternating with the crudest vulgar slang.  The perspective, at all times, is one of vaguely bemused detachment; the narrator is more observer than actor.

The point, of course, is that there is no point, and life has no more meaning to it than the meaning one happens to find in the process of watching it proceed around one.  Now, perhaps I am incorrect about this, at least with regards to Infinite Jest, and I am quite willing to discover that I am wrong.  And yet, if I am not, that should speak volumes about the predictable nature of this supposedly flawless book.  Correct me if I am wrong, by all means, but my initial impression is that this is little more than an oversized member of the Garp genre.

I’m not saying I don’t like the book.  I do.  I’m not even saying it is not a great book that merits all the praise it has received.  I will not have an opinion on that until I finish it.  What I’m saying is that thus far, I am experiencing far too much literary deja vu to consider this anything more than a fine example of its particular genre.

Mailvox: Republican hatred of Ron Paul

Stickwick wonders why conservatives react in such a stereotypically liberal manner to Ron Paul:

I have a question about the conservative perception of Ron Paul. Rachel Lucas seems like a reasonable right-of-center person whose political views are moving towards libertarianism. In fact, she now refers to herself as a libertarian. However, she still hangs on to the idea of American interventionism. In a recent post she criticizes McCain for his criticism of Rand Paul and for his overly-interventionist policy, but agrees with Ace that *some* interventionism is necessary:

I don’t agree with it, but at least their position is stated reasonably. What I find odd is how her commenters are using this as an opportunity to dump all over Ron Paul. Here’s a typical example:

“For the record, I cannot STAND Ron Paul. Fiscally he makes sense, but in every other conceivable way he’s a senile, batshit crazy old fuck.”

Why do some right-of-center people get so vitriolic about Ron Paul? They go right past “I strongly disagree with his ideas on foreign policy,” and straight to “crazy old fuck.” This is exactly the sort of thing they denounce when the left gets personal in its attacks or calls right-of-center ideology a “mental disorder.”

Why do conservatives call Ron Paul crazy instead of just disagreeing with him? Would you shed some light on this?

It’s not at all hard to understand why so many conservatives hate Ron Paul with all the fury of a thousand suns.  The reason is that he shames them for their hypocrisy.  He reveals the inconsistency in their non-conservatism.  He forces them to confront the fact that they are not the proponents of small government and liberty they believe themselves to be.

Big government, international interventionist, and monetarist “conservatives” hate Ron Paul for exactly the same reason the Pharisees and Sadducees hated Jesus Christ.  Because he exposes their intrinsically false nature to themselves.  And the reason they dismiss him as crazy instead of responding rationally to the arguments he presents is because they know they cannot do so without losing.