Tag: corpocracy

Fair play for FATCA

It looks like the Law of Unintended Consequences is about to strike the US federal government again:

This week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) will announce its final package of measures under its Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project that would enable foreign governments to tax overseas earnings of American companies. If the United States fails to make changes of our own before that plan begins being enacted next year, this effort, which The Wall Street Journal called “a global revenue grab,” will ensure much of these American earnings stay overseas permanently.

Considering that the US government claims the right to force foreign banks to track and report its citizens, it’s not going to have much of a leg to stand on when foreign governments start claiming the right to tax the earnings of US corporations with bank accounts in their countries.

This is why it is so reprehensibly stupid for the US to insist on intervening in sovereign lands; by doing so it sacrifices its own claims to sovereignty. It is unlikely that Putin would have intervened in Syria if the US had not intervened in Ukraine and Syria. This foreign cash grab probably would not have been successful without FATCA.

Fire local, hire global

Okay, that’s not entirely fair. But it does raise some serious questions when Microsoft is simultaneously a) laying off 7 percent of its workforce while b) lobbying hard for more H1B visas to permit it to import more foreign workers.

Up to 7,800 people will be laid off globally, the company announced Wednesday morning. Most of the jobs are within its smartphone hardware business. Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) had 118,600 employees as of March 30, with about 60,000 of those workers in the United States. The cuts represents about 7% of its staff.

This is Nadella’s second major restructuring. He announced 18,000 layoffs in Nokia’s devices and services business last year, following Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30)’s acquisition of the handset maker.

Of course, I don’t think anyone is even remotely surprised that the Nokia acquisition didn’t work out well.

Rumblings of tech war

This article is amusingly incoherent concerning the growing fears of US technology companies concerning Europe:

One message so far from the corridors around the World Economic Forum
in Davos: U.S. technology companies are very worried about the backlash
they are now facing in Europe. From their standpoint, Europe
risks shooting itself in the foot by rejecting the cutting-edge
technologies they have brought to the continent. But they would say that, wouldn’t they? Look at it from the European point of view.

Europe
once led the world in mobile technology: The Global System for Mobile
Communications, developed in Europe, became the global standard. But
that was a long time ago. Now, most innovation in information and
communications technology comes in waves from across the Atlantic.

With America’s vibrant capital markets giving them billions of dollars in risk capital, they can absorb the successful European tech enterprises—look at Skype Technologies, swallowed by Microsoft Corp.

These U.S. companies— Google, Facebook , Amazon and others—are disrupting industry after industry. Publishing, telecoms and retailing have already been convulsed. Now, the companies, and Google in particular, are turning their gaze from consumer-oriented to business-oriented platforms.

That is a big deal for growth-starved Europe and for its biggest economy, Germany, which leads the world in high-quality engineering. Europe’s car industry is a leading employer, its suppliers reach through the continent, and it is one of the biggest spenders on research and development. Germany’s machine-tool manufacturers are deservedly renowned.

But much of the future profit for these industries won’t flow from punching metal but from the networks they will use to manage information—for example, taking the cars where they want to go, catering to passengers with entertainment and retail experiences as they travel—and it’s a strategic question who owns them.

Isn’t it good of those US technology executives to worry so much about Europe shooting themselves in the foot? They must have tremendous empathy! Or could it be that they are not telling the truth and it is something else that worries them?

Such as, perhaps, the possibility that they will be legally locked out of Europe due to their enabling of US goverment espionage and their continued disinclination to show any respect for various European privacy laws?

Ocean-front diplomacy

Never let it be said that Obama doesn’t think ahead:

President Obama announced sweeping changes to U.S. policy with Cuba on Wednesday, moving to normalize relations with the island nation and tear down the last remaining pillar of the Cold War.

Under the new measures, the United States plans to reopen its embassy in Havana and significantly ease restrictions on travel and commerce within the next several weeks and months, Obama said. Speaking from the White House, he declared that a half-century of isolation of the Communist country “has not worked.”

“It’s time for a new approach,” he said.

The history-shaping overtures come after more than 18 months of secret negotiations with the Cuban government of President Raul Castro. The final touches appeared to be arrangements for a series of simultaneous prisoner releases.

It’s probably one of the smartest moves of his presidency, if not the smartest. Cubans don’t vote for Democrats anyhow, and no one gives a damn about them anymore since they’re massively outnumbered by Mexicans now. It’s all upside for Obama; no doubt there are plenty of big-money interests just slavering to snap up Cuban real estate.

I’d be astonished if he doesn’t come out of it with a sweet post-presidential villa.

“Women have no idea”

And here I thought we’d be more productive with women in the workforce. Tapping into that vast pool of hitherto untapped talent and all. And yet, Dr. Helen is unimpressed with her sex, nominally at work:

Apparently, rather than focusing on their own jobs, men are supposed to spend their time playing therapist to how women think and feel. And of course the author has no understanding of how hard it is for men to even interact with women at work, given all the rules and regulations. One “tip” in the article tells men not to be afraid of tears:

    When Paul Gotti of Cardinal Health gave performance reviews, he says that, without even realizing it, he was easier on female directors: “I didn’t want them to cry, to feel bad.” He recognizes now that this was no favor. They should have the feedback “so that they can grow too.”

    Ms. Flynn of Flynn Heath Holt says that her firm has found that men aren’t only afraid of tears but of getting in trouble with “the diversity police” for speaking harshly, or of women being “too high maintenance, or [that] she’ll ask a million questions.” As a result, “men are scared to death to give us feedback…. They’ll let women run astray and off course and be fired before they’ll take the chance to give them feedback.”

    Her advice: Be honest. That doesn’t mean you have to be blunt, adds Mr. Schwartz of the Energy Project, which is more than 60% female: “I’ve learned it’s a balance between honesty and empathy. Honesty without empathy is cruelty.”

Women have no idea what men in the workplace are dealing with when they
work with women. And men, despite what the author thinks, are not there
to babysit women by telling them to ask for raises, brushing away tears
and “twisting” women’s arms to ask for her own promotion.

I suggest learning to refer to “equality” and to say “look, you’re a strong, independent woman who doesn’t need any help from a man to do her job” will be vital for many men in the corporate environment. Black knighting and ruthless compliance with all workplace regulations is the optimal way to circumvent the lunacy.

A refusal to learn

We have learned nothing from history and so we are bound to repeat it:

We’ve known for 5,000 years that mass spying on one’s own people is always aimed at grabbing power and crushing dissent, not protecting us from bad guys.

We’ve known for 4,000 years that debts need to be periodically written down, or the entire economy will collapse. And see this.

We’ve known for 2,500 years that prolonged war bankrupts an economy.

We’ve known for 2,000 years that wars are based on lies.

We’ve known for 1,900 years that runaway inequality destroys societies.

We’ve known for thousands of years that debasing currencies leads to economic collapse.

We’ve known for millennia that torture is a form of terrorism.

We’ve known for thousands of years that – when criminals are not punished – crime spreads.

We’ve known for hundreds of years that the failure to punish financial fraud destroys economies, as it destroys all trust in the financial system.

We’ve known for centuries that monopolies and the political influence which accompanies too much power in too few hands are dangerous for free markets.

We’ve known for hundreds of years that companies will try to pawn their debts off on governments, and that it is a huge mistake for governments to allow corporate debt to be backstopped by government.

We’ve known for centuries that powerful people – unless held to account – will get together and steal from everyone else.

It’s not different this time. There will be ethnic cleansing and probably several incidents of mass slaughter, although whether it will be the immigrants or the native people on the short end is yet to be determined.

There will be series of economic crashes and the ongoing depression will deepen and widen, because the incipient credit busts in 1987 and 2001 and 2008 were all papered over with more central bank “money” created ex nihilo.

There will be wars, both due to the great clash of civilizations and pro-globalist elites clinging to government power in the face of furiously nationalistic people denied their will through the limitations and legalistic perversions of representative democracy.

These things are all inevitable. Not likely, inevitable. There is no force on Earth that can stop them, because in our arrogance and foolishness, we have again decided this time it’s different. But it’s not. It never is. And if you’re still a Republican defending income inequality because communism or a Democrat defending big government because poor people or a Libertarian defending open borders and free trade because individual, your entire political perspective is outdated and irrelevant. That world doesn’t exist anymore.

Disclose and DISQUALIFY

runsonmagic explains the reason behind the growing pressure to eliminate online anonymity:

Anonymity forces you to evaluate a writer only on their work, which is precisely why so many oppose it. The people against online anonymity are intellectually lazy. They want to be able to tell what they think of an idea based on who is telling them to think that way. They want to nod when a minority, “alpha male,” or person who looks like them tells them something. Knowing an author only by their words forces readers to think abstractly, to think for themselves, and they hate it.

Social justice warriors and feminists hate anonymity because they do not believe in objective truth. They believe it matters more who makes a certain statement than what is being said. The same words that are okay for a black lesbian to say, might be offensive if a white heterosexual male says them. This is precisely why social justice warriors hate Anne Gus and #notyoursheild….

The real reason many social justice warriors are against anonymity is
because it prevents them from harassing writers and getting them fired
from jobs. It prevents tech companies from collecting accurate data on
public forums. Even in the manosphere, anonymity prevents internet
marketers from slandering their competition by claiming they are “not a
real alpha male” without photographic evidence. Like most things, the
push against online anonymity comes back to money and power.

I can’t tell you how many times pinkshirts and other lefties have tried to out me. They assume that simply because one has a pen name, they must be trying to hide something. (Never mind that all it did was demonstrate their insufficient level of intelligence and classical education.) In fact, their deliberate choice of addressing me by my given name is always a dead giveaway that they are an ideological enemy.

The whole point of forcing disclosure is to DISQUALIFY, which is the only form of argument that the sub-intellects of the Left are ever capable of making. Which, of course, is why it is pointless to even attempt to engage in rational dialectic with them. Relentless scorn and dismissive rhetoric is the most reliable means of routing them, but it is a tactic that requires confidence and a combative nature.

But anonymity is an absolute necessity for every non-combatant who dares to stand in the way of the pinkshirts, which of course is why they are desperate to eliminate it in the belief that everyone will cower obediently before them once they are stripped naked and forced to choose between submission and being unable to make a living. They don’t realize that there are millions who will embrace the ISIS model before submitting to them. Their triumphalism is not merely foolish, it is insanely suicidal.

Look at how panicky they sound when a few advertisers simply withdraw advertising and show their vulnerability. And then imagine if we were truly the monsters they claim us to be. My strong suspicion is that they have limited imaginations and are simply incapable of realizing that the status quo is not built upon a foundation of stone, history does not progress inevitably in one direction, and civilization is considerably more fragile than they understand.

Vietnam vs America: round 2

Vietnam appears to be coming out ahead again:

According to the Pew Global Poll, 95% of people in Vietnam agree that most people are better off under capitalism, even if there is inequality. By contrast, only 70% of Americans believe the same thing…. But the Vietnamese advantage may boil down to this: Free markets are new there, whereas America has had them for a long time. Scientist Thomas Ray once said that every successful system accumulates parasites, and the free market in America has been successful for a very long time. Established businesses get tied down with regulations that keep out new innovations — like Michigan’s GM-backed anti-Tesla law that bars carmakers from selling directly to the public — while politicians line up to line their pockets with taxes and fees and campaign contributions.

This phenomenon probably explains why most of the growth and innovation in the U.S. economy has been in the Internet or Internet-enabled sectors where regulation has been light, though even there the politicians are cracking down. Ultimately, the political system doesn’t like anything to go on unless it has control — and a chance for politicians to wet their beaks and look after their own.

I expect Glen’s explanation is correct. All things are corrupted in time, all empires, even the mightiest, fall. Glen quite rightly doesn’t want a war or revolution, but that is what the USA is likely to eventually see at least one of those things as it inevitably fragments, as all force-imposed empires do in time. The UK very nearly broke apart earlier this year, and the Catalan-Spain union will likely do so within ten years.

Both of those unions were voluntary, so how can anyone possibly assume that the USA, which is a union imposed by military force and the will of a conqueror rather than the people, will not do so as well? It’s simply not a credible position, and demonstrates both the lack of the imagination and historical ignorance of anyone who holds it.

NB: I’m sorry about the comment captchas, but I’ve already got word verification turned off and I can’t seem to do anything about it. The way to avoid it is to be logged into Google; you can still use Name/URL and you won’t be forced to deal with the captchas. I suspect it is because I use an old template, but I don’t actually know why Blogger is suddenly ignoring the Word Verification setting.

Technology making life better

For bankers, anyhow. And don’t think this payment technology won’t eventually be applied to medical systems:

Auto loans to borrowers considered subprime, those with credit scores at or below 640, have spiked in the last five years. The jump has been driven in large part by the demand among investors for securities backed by the loans, which offer high returns at a time of low interest rates. Roughly 25 percent of all new auto loans made last year were subprime, and the volume of subprime auto loans reached more than $145 billion in the first three months of this year.

But before they can drive off the lot, many subprime borrowers like Ms. Bolender must have their car outfitted with a so-called starter interrupt device, which allows lenders to remotely disable the ignition. Using the GPS technology on the devices, the lenders can also track the cars’ location and movements.

The devices, which have been installed in about two million vehicles, are helping feed the subprime boom by enabling more high-risk borrowers to get loans. But there is a big catch. By simply clicking a mouse or tapping a smartphone, lenders retain the ultimate control. Borrowers must stay current with their payments, or lose access to their vehicle…. Now used in about one-quarter of subprime auto loans nationwide, the
devices are reshaping the dynamics of auto lending by making timely
payments as vital to driving a car as gasoline.

Brave New World indeed. They’re really squeezing every last drop of credit out of the economy.

Spinning the “bestseller” narrative

Once more, Johnny is counting on the fact that people don’t know the relevant facts in order to attempt to mislead them and spin the narrative in his favor. Notice, in particular, his blatant lie about my ignorance, when the fact is that just as when I caught him repeatedly lying about his traffic, I am the precise opposite of ignorant on the subject:

Vaguely related, not too long ago I noted with some amusement a perennial detractor of mine blathering ignorantly, as he nearly always does on any subject relating to me, about how it didn’t seem to him that Lock In was doing particularly well; this was almost immediately before the book hit the NYT Hardcover list and was Bookscan’s #1 top-selling front list science fiction novel. I considered sending him one of these cookies, so he could eat his words. But then I thought that giving a cookie to an asshole was a backwards way of doing things, at least from the point of view of the cookie. So, no cookies for him. He’ll just have to bask in the infinite pleasure of being wrong, so very wrong, yet again. He’s used to that, in any event.

Now, who was wrong about those “two million page views monthly” again? It’s so typical of SF/F’s Bernie Madoff that he claims I am “so very wrong” when events have gone EXACTLY as I predicted they would. It’s not that Lock In has been a massive failure; most, though not all, books by a reasonably known author that have been pushed as hard as Tor has pushed Lock In will be similarly successful in its first month. Initial “success” in the publishing industry is, to a great extent, predetermined by the publisher’s decisions concerning print runs and marketing budgets.

For example, Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons was such an initial failure for Pocket Books that they turned down its sequel. That’s why The Da Vinci Code has a different publisher than its predecessor. Pocket has since sold millions of copies, and they could have sold tens of millions of copies of Brown’s other books as well if they had simply given Angels and Demons a bigger print run and a marketing campaign. An executive at Random House once told me that Pocket’s mishandling of Dan Brown was the single biggest mistake he has personally observed in the industry.

So, it’s no surprise that Lock In is superficially successful, as Tor has invested a lot of money (relatively speaking) in the marketing of the book in both obvious ways, such as the author’s nationwide book tour and the reviews in various media outlets, and less obvious ways, such as buying the book onto the New York Times Bestseller list.  On Hugh Howey’s site, Tim Grahl explains how these lists work and why they are merely marketing vehicles as opposed to reliable indicators of how a book is selling vis-a-vis other books.

This is the specific “also selling” addendum to the Hardcover Fiction list of September 14th, to which McRapey is referring:

    17. THE HEIST, by Daniel Silva (Harper)
    18. THE SILKWORM, by Robert Galbraith (Mulholland/Little, Brown)
    19. THE MINIATURIST, by Jessie Burton (Ecco)
    20. LOCK IN, by John Scalzi (Tor)
    21. TOM CLANCY: SUPPORT AND DEFEND, by Mark Greaney (Putnam)
    22. LOVE LETTERS, by Debbie Macomber (Ballantine)
    23. CLOSE TO HOME, by Lisa Jackson (Kensington)
    24. INVISIBLE, by James Patterson and David Ellis (Little, Brown)
    25. HER LAST WHISPER, by Karen Robards (Ballantine)

A version of this list appears in the September 14, 2014 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings reflect sales for the week ending August 30, 2014.

That’s great and all, but recall what I pointed out before Lock In reached the NYT bestseller list: “McRapey is getting annoyed that people keep pointing out that Larry
Correia sells more than he does, even though his publisher keeps buying
him a one-week spot on the NYT bestseller list each time he writes a
book.”  And also “Just keep an eye on the NYT list. If LOCK IN is only on it for one week,
it’s a paid marketing stunt. If it stays on it for several weeks, it’s
probably legitimate.”

And now the verdict is in, which is probably why McRapey is already out there frantically trying to spin the narrative again.  Here is the most recent New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestseller list, including the “also selling” section, for the week of September 21st. Care to guess what book isn’t on it?

  1. PERSONAL, by Lee Child
  2. SOMEWHERE SAFE WITH SOMEBODY GOOD, by Jane Karon
  3. THE BONE CLOCKS, by David Mitchell
  4. THE SECRET PLACE, by Tana French
  5. THE EYE OF HEAVEN, by Clive Kussler
  6. COLORLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI, by Haruku Murakami
  7. THE LONG WAY HOME, by Louise Penny
  8. THE GOLDFINCH, by Donna Tartt
  9. BIG LITTLE LIES, by Liane Moriarty
  10. MEAN STREAK, by Sandra Brown
  11. ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, by Anthony Doerr
  12. DARK BLOOD, by Christine Feehan
  13. SON OF NO ONE, by Sherrilyn Kenyon
  14. WE ARE NOT OURSELVES, by Matthew Thomas
  15. ADULTERY, by Paulo Coelho
  16. SHIFTING SHADOWS, by Patricia Briggs 
  17. MURDER 101, by Faye Kellerman
  18. ANGELS WALKING, by Karen Kingsbury 
  19. THE HUSBAND’S SECRET, by Liane Moriarty
  20. THE 6TH EXTINCTION, by James Rollins

What a complete surprise! With its one-week showing of #20, Lock In didn’t even do as well as his previous “New York Times bestseller” Redshirts (#15) although it did do better than that famously popular bestseller Fuzzy Nation (#23).  Recall what I wrote back in February 2013: “the fact is that most of Tor’s “New York Times bestsellers” observably
fit what we are informed is the profile of the fake bestseller. They
appear on the list for a single week, only to vanish the following week,
never to make another appearance there again.”

(Scalzi also claims The Lost Colony was a New York Times bestseller, although I was unable to find it on any of the 2007 lists. I suspect this is because the historical lists do not include the “also selling” section. Redshirts is his only book to appear on the actual list per se.)

Notice that the closest comparable, Paolo Coelho’s Adultery, which is presently at #15 in its third week on the list, has an Amazon rank of 292 overall and a Science Fiction and Fantasy rank of 71. That’s what a legitimate bestseller looks like. Lock In, by comparison, has an overall rank of 2,807 and isn’t even in the Science Fiction and Fantasy top 100. It falls an order of magnitude short. Haruki Murakami’s latest is on the top 100 list for some reason, which I find very strange since there is literally nothing science fictional or fantastic about it, although I suppose that won’t prevent it from winning a Hugo next year either.

Lock In does not appear on The Wall Street Journal’s bestseller list and is #107 on the USA Today list. Perhaps it will go up from there, but note that Redshirts never went higher than 55 on that list and Fuzzy Nation never appeared at all. In other words, the initial indications are that despite the massive marketing effort Tor Books put behind it, Lock In is not even doing as well as Scalzi’s award-winning Star Trek ripoff.

This is potentially significant due to what it may mean for Tor Books. I’ve heard, and seen, evidence that they are not doing very well over the last two or three years. I suspected that the otherwise inexplicable decision to push Lock In so hard was an indication of their urgent need for a quick revenue boost, and so I conclude that Lock In‘s failure to become a legitimate bestseller presages an eventual shake-up of some kind at the publisher. As always, the value of a predictive model is its ability to predict future events. It will be interesting to see if PNH is still at Tor Books proper one
year from now. If he is not, I suggest that will tend to support my
observations here.

In any event, Scalzi is spinning his “success” in the same way that an NFL running back’s agent spins it when he’s angling for a new contract. Sure, he gained a thousand yards and the team made the playoffs, but the problem is that it took him 305 attempts to gain those yards, he’s averaging 3.3 YPC , the team was a wild card that lost in the first round, and his salary is $8 million per year. The team can get similar results at considerably less cost from someone else. That’s the inevitable downside of the big splashy marketing campaign for every Big Five author. With great marketing expenditures come great expectations. Merely good results of the sort that observably could have been achieved without them is a failure.

UPDATE: McRapey is so busy with his book tour and NOT paying attention to anything that I say that he tweeted this response almost immediately:

Latest stupid from my detractors: “You were ONLY on the NYT list for a week! You’re not a real bestseller!” Shine on, you crazy diamonds!

Well, this is awkward. Ah, Johnny, look, it’s not a real bestseller. It’s a fake one that Tor Books bulk-bought for you, just like they did with The Last Colony and Fuzzy Nation and Redshirts. Some would call it fraud. Tor Books calls it “marketing”.

Chin up, Johnny! Oh, wait, you don’t have one. Um, well, stay strong, tiger!