Tag: corpocracy

A letter to Hachette’s CEO

Our friends at Amazon requested that those readers and writers who support them write an email to Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch. Amazon has been very good to me over the past few years, both an author and a customer, so I was happy to oblige.

Dear Mr. Pietsch,

As a Hugo-nominated author, a Pocket Books author, and an editor
for an independent publishing house in Finland, I would like to
encourage you to rethink your position regarding Amazon. I understand
that the rapid changes in the industry are affecting your company, often
in a negative manner. I also realize that your overhead and your
contracts tend to reflect standard industry practices that are no longer
in line with the new world of digital publishing.

The fact is, Mr. Pietsch, that the world is changing and Hachette has to
change with it. Ebook prices are coming down as per the technology curve.
When have you ever known a new technology to come out and gradually
become more expensive over time? I don’t wish to criticize you or your
organization for various attempts to keep the new world at bay, as the
important point is not that colluding with other mainstream publishers,
trying to protect higher book prices, or using authors as leverage is
wrong, or even bad PR, but that such actions are ultimately futile.

The ebook genie will never go back into the bottle. Therefore, the sooner you
restructure Hachette to reflect the new realities, which include coming
to a reasonable accomodation with Amazon, the more likely it is
that your organization will survive these changes.

With regards,

Vox Day

Hachette’s position isn’t merely economically illiterate, observably hypocritical, and morally wrong, it is untenable. At the moment, Hachette obviously needs Amazon more than Amazon needs Hachette. As for its supporters among the scribbling classes, I think Amazon would do well to teach the authors who are publicly opposed to them a Very Important Lesson by refusing to sell any of their books for six months.

After the initial screeches of outrage died down, I suspect they would all fall in line very quickly. One of the things I like about Amazon is that it is the sort of thing they might actually do; I don’t think they’d be afraid to demonstrate to those various loud-mouthed authors just how unimportant they truly are. It’s amazing how many writers not only excuse their mainstream publishers for actions that Amazon has not even committed, but fail to realize that selling books is only a small part of Amazon’s business these days.

Amazon isn’t perfect. What corporation is? But they have been the best thing for authors and the reading public since Mr. Gutenberg first assembled his printing press. And the fact that the dinosaur gatekeepers and their pet authors hate and fear it is a feature, not a bug.

One of the Mad Geniuses, Amanda, adds her two cents on the subject:

[A]ll Amazon did was take a page out of Hatchette’s book and ask its authors to take a stand. Oh the cries of foul that suddenly rose from the interwebs. Within
half a hour of reading the email, I was seeing accusations of Amazon
acting like a stalker in sending the email to the usual AHDers (Amazon
Hater Disorder sufferers) about how evil Amazon was to ask its authors
to contact poor, innocent Hatchette. There was even one author claiming
that Amazon is not and never will be a friend to authors. All of those
had me shaking my head and wondering if these folks had ever really read
their contracts with their traditional publisher — several of whom are
signed with Hatchette — as well as if they actually knew the meaning of
the terms “contract”, “negotiation” and “irony”.

What pushed me over the edge was a post by another author who
admitted to not having received or read the email but, based on what
they were seeing form their author friends, Amazon was once again
resorting to dirty pool and must be stopped because, duh, Amazon is
evil.

They really are proper little Manicheans, aren’t they.

Additional ilkotism

The gentleman who had a job available for a member of the Dread Ilk has a few more on offer:

Thanks for posting the job opportunity. The turnout was pretty impressive. I am also coming across other opportunities that I am hooking Ilk up with. I have another one for you to post, if you are still inclined. We are looking for three more outside sales guys on the West Coast. These would be some spectrum of entry level to experienced.

As before, if you’re interested, shoot me an email with JOB2 in the subject and I will pass it on to the relevant party.

18,000 and H1B

Item 1: Microsoft Chief
Executive Officer Satya Nadella kicked off one of the largest layoffs in
tech history on Thursday, hoping to reshape the aging PC industry titan
into a nimbler rival to Apple and Google, and jolt a culture at the
company that is used to protecting its existing Windows and Office
franchises.
Microsoft Corp said on Thursday
it will slash up to 18,000 jobs, or 14 percent of its workforce, over
the next 12 months as it almost halves the size of its newly acquired
Nokia phone business and tries to become a cloud-computing and
mobile-friendly software company. The
larger-than-expected cuts are the deepest in the software giant’s
39-year history and come five months into Nadella’s tenure.

Item 2: Bill Gates says the United States’ position as the global leader in innovation is at risk. The Microsoft chairman says there is a deficit of Americans with computer-science degrees, and he wants the government to make it easier for Microsoft to hire foreign-born workers. Gates testified before the House Committee on Science Technology on Wednesday about what he sees as a need to liberalize rules for H1-B visas for skilled foreign workers. Currently, Congress has set an annual limit on H1-Bs at 65,000, with an additional 20,000 earmarked for foreign students with advanced degrees from U.S. universities.

Item 3: Immigration and visa reform are necessary to boost the U.S. economy and job market, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday. Disputing the idea that Silicon Valley execs are simply trying to secure a higher number of H1B visas for their own companies, Zuckerberg told attendees at the event: “This is something that we believe is really important for the future of our country — and for us to do what’s right.”

It’s not terribly difficult to understand why nations experiencing economic stress are so often inclined to resort to nationalizing corporations, not when the corporate executives are so blatantly acting against the interests of the citizenry.

Great Depression 2.0

Only instead of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, we have the geniuses who permitted the NSA to spy on allied countries:

Germany Instructs Its Companies To Limit Cooperation, Procurement Orders With The US

Update: it just got worse. Moments ago Bloomberg followed up with the second, and expected, part of this story, namely that just like China cut off major US corporations from big procurement contracts leading to a collapse in CSCO and IBM Asian revenues, it is now Germany’s turn. Per Bloomberg, the German Interior Ministry reviewing rules for awarding govt contracts for computer, communications equipment and services as political rift w/ U.S. widens, people familiar with matter told Bloomberg News’ Cornelius Rahn, Amy Thomson.

  • Ministry will probably issue new purchasing guidelines in coming weeks to replace “no-spy-order” dated April 30
  • Details being worked out, may require suppliers of components of bidder’s goods or services to guarantee they don’t hand over confidential data
  • IBM, CSCO, MSFT may be affected by any tightening of procurement procedures: Forrester Research analyst Andrew Rose

It could be for show, but I tend to doubt it. German companies have to be slavering at the notion of having an excellent excuse – nay, reason – to bar their American competitors from government contracts.

Gatekeepers vs the defensor lector

A pair of contrasting views on the Amazon vs Major Publishers battle appear in the New York Times. Joe Nocera writes of Amazon’s “bullying” tactics:

The story really began some years ago, when Amazon began issuing a standard price for e-books of $9.99 — in some cases selling below cost. Publishers feared that they would become locked into the $9.99 price the same way the music industry had been locked into 99-cent songs by Apple’s iTunes service. They fought back by joining forces with Apple, cutting preferable deals to participate in Apple’s e-book-selling service, and then forcing Amazon to go along with the same terms. E-book prices quickly rose.

Unfortunately for the publishers, their brilliant idea turned out to be an illegal conspiracy, and the government forced them to settle on terms that had the effect of boosting Amazon. Although Amazon has not entirely reverted back to $9.99 e-books, it could if it wanted to, and it has in some cases. In other cases — especially with self-published books or romances — e-book prices are down to $5.99 and even $2.99. “There is a strong gravitational pull downward,” said one publisher (who did not want to be quoted, fearing Amazon’s wrath).

The way I hear it, what Amazon is insisting upon is a deal where it would no longer have to bear the full brunt of its discounting — the publisher would have to bear some of it, in the form of tighter margins, or even losses. Hachette, meanwhile, contends that it needs to be compensated for the important things publishers do: editing, marketing, and curating.

This is an argument that may appeal to the cultural elite, but it is unlikely to move Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive. Publishers, he has been known to say, are gatekeepers. “Even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation,” he wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders, according to Brad Stone, the author of a recent book about Amazon, “The Everything Store.”

The very complaint that Amazon is selling $9.99 books at a loss reveals that it is the publishers who are the bad guys here. They are desperately trying to retain the outdated model for physical books and apply it to ebooks, which makes absolutely no sense, because that allows them to significantly increase their profit margins at the expense of a) Amazon, b) book buyers, and c) authors. Bezos is correct to dismiss the publishers as gatekeepers, and I very much doubt he considers them to be well-meaning ones.

The other article, a defense of the publishers, inadvertently proves the exact same point:

How did Amazon attain such monopsony power? By providing valuable services? Perhaps, to some extent. But consider that from the moment it introduced its Kindle product, Amazon sold e-books at prices far below what it was buying them for. If Amazon bought an e-book from Hachette for $13, it resold it to a consumer for $9.99, losing $3.01 per e-book. It should come as no surprise that under these circumstances, e-book buyers flocked to Amazon….

So far, Hachette, to its credit, has been unbending. But Amazon still
has its nuclear option. It would appear that unless Amazon backs down —
through public pressure or government intervention — publishers will
have no choice but to employ their own nuclear option: pull all their
books from Amazon and throw their weight behind a law-abiding
alternative. Perhaps the best solution would be an online marketplace
controlled by the publishers — with the 30 percent commission being
split 50-50 with the authors in addition to the author’s royalty.

The ironic thing is that the pro-publisher position is based on the fear of the possibility that Amazon might one day do what the publishers have already done. It is based on the idea that Amazon will eventually jack prices up, never mind the fact that Amazon’s entire business model is based on selling more goods and lower prices. The thing is, even if Amazon QUADRUPLED its average price to the book buyer after driving all the major publishers out of business, retail prices would still be lower than the suggested retail price given by most of the major publishers.

Seriously. The average Amazon price for an ebook is around $6.94. The publishers have been trying to push ebook retail prices up to $27.99; as I pointed out the other day, a new Tor ebook has a digital list price of $27.99, one dollar more than the retail price of $26.99 for the hardcover.

The inept nature of the defense of the publishers can be seen in the proposed solution. The publishers would NEVER be content with such a system; they would fight it even more vehemently than they are fighting Amazon’s attempt to bring ebook prices down below $5. The major publishers want the old system where they sell the book for half the retail price and pay $2.50 to the author. At $28, they get $14 from which they pay $2.50. That is $11.50 gross profit with an 82 percent profit margin; very healthy indeed.

If they set up Publizon, they’d have to reduce their prices to $9.99 to compete with Amazon. They’d pay $2.50 to the author as a royalty, plus another $1.50 as per the suggested model. That means that their gross profit would fall to $5.99 and their profit margin to 60 percent. Still healthy, but far less profitable and probably insufficient to maintain their New York office space and the rest of their expensive overhead. And that’s assuming people are willing to buy books at Publizon; knowing the publishers’ general contempt for the book buying public, it is highly unlikely they can successfully set up a retail operation catering to it.

Meanwhile, they are also competing with Castalia and the other independents, who are selling high-quality ebooks for $4.99. As well as with the self-publishers selling books for as little as $0.99. Any way you look at it, the major publishers cannot possibly survive with their current editorial and distribution structures intact.

Amazon isn’t the bad guy here. Amazon is the defensor lector, the hero of the hour. And speaking of Amazon, fans of a certain fedora-wearing author will no doubt be pleased to know that Castalia will be announcing the release of a new book on Amazon in the coming week, one entitled CITY BEYOND TIME: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis.

Mailvox: employment advice

DH, who has more than a little expertise in the area of employment and human resources,  offers some excellent advice in this age of purges:

Make them fire you. If you resign under pressure you have basically no legal standing. Make. Them. Fire. You. If they pressure you to resign, you should write a letter, declining to resign, declining to take any responsibility for your private, off-duty, speech and/or actions. Specifically point out that you are exercising your personal discretion to engage in political and social commentary regarding current events, that you are not willing to be subjected to a hostile work environment for your unorthodox political views, and that you are not willing to explain or defend or justify those personal political views.

Always make them do their own dirty work.

Most of the time, employment purges are not legal. If you are being pressured to resign, that is in itself a de facto admission that they know they can’t fire you. Of course, none of this will prevent you from getting blackballed when applying for a new job, which is why it is wise to always use an untraceable pseudonym on the Internet and to avoid social media.

It will be used against you, somehow, by someone. Whether or not that is fair and desirable is irrelevant. Those are the new rules of the game. Master them and play by them. Play by them ruthlessly and remember that the Left tends to be far more careless about these things than the Right because they assume their positions are beyond criticism.

Free speech in corporate America

While self-described savages are openly attacking free speech at SF conventions, more men are losing their jobs for expressing their opinions on current affairs:

A tech guru who was accused of making ‘weird and insensitive’ comments about the murderous manifesto written by Santa Barbara shooter Elliot Rodger has been fired. Rap Genius co-founder Mahbod Moghadam posted a series of bizarre annotations alongside extracts from the virgin killer’s 141-page memoir, including one that speculates that Rodger’s sister must be ‘smokin hot’. After the accusations, he was lambasted as being misogynistic, and it has since emerged that he was let go from the company he helped found.

Would it have been less indicative of hatred for women had Mr. Moghadam speculated that this girl was ugly? Rodger wasn’t an unattractive young man and since his Eurasian features were on the feminine side, it would be logical to conclude that his sister was likely more attractive than the norm. As, in fact, appears to be the case.

I would think that women, in particular, would want to avoid an employment standard where one will lose one’s job simply for expressing an opinion about a woman’s attractiveness. I tend to suspect that the company was simply looking for an excuse to rid itself of an unwanted founder and took advantage of an opportunity. But coming as it does on the heels of other opinion-related dismissals, the news is somewhat troubling.

UPDATE: as is so often the case, Moghadam was not actually fired. He merely resigned: “In light of this, Mahbod has resigned – both in his capacity as an
employee of the company, and as a member of our board of directors,
effective immediately.”

Women and productivity

Don’t laugh, paternity leave sounded just as ridiculous at one point:

Slate had already tackled the issue, with writer Katy Waldman dismissing it by saying, “… don’t offer us paid period leave. We’ll just spend it all taking self-pitying Buzzfeed quizzes.” But when HuffPost Live interviewed Skepchick.org founder Rebecca Watson and Mikki Kendall, editor at Hood feminism.com, the women got positively cranky.

“Just by asking the question, ‘Should women get paid menstruation leave?’ biases the listener into saying, ‘Oh, of course not,’ because you’re talking about special treatment,” said Watson. “But if you were to say, should men get paid time off if they were kicked in the testicles, yes, like if you have a medical problem, you should get to take time off,” she added.

Of course, men typically don’t get kicked in the testicles every month, but who’s counting?

Watson continued: “And again, what we’re talking about, really, is just simple workers’ rights. Studies show that when you give a worker unlimited sick days, compared to a restricted number of sick days, they actually take fewer sick days and they’re happier and more productive.”

Ask employers trying to make a profit about unlimited sick days, Rebecca.

Kendall was just as sure as Watson that menstrual leave was necessary, saying: “Just give us all more paid leave. Most people, for one reason or another, probably need a couple days off in a given month because of illness, because of family emergencies, because they woke up that day and they don’t feel great and they’re just overwrought and overtired, whatever. And so if we increase the amount of PTO available to all employees, you’d see a healthier workplace, among other things. People would stop coming to work with the flu and spreading their disease and germs to everyone else.”

Because, as we all know, menstruation is contagious.

Have you ever noticed that the chief areas of interest to women in the media with regards to employment are a) sexual harassment, b) paid leave, and c) sick days? It’s remarkable, and potentially informative, that the actual topic of work itself never seems to be of much interest to them.

If paid menstrual leave did actually result in net productivity gains, this would raise some serious questions about the overall effect of women in the work force.

“A tollbooth on the bankster turnpike”

A retiring SEC attorney criticizes the Securities and Exchange Commission:

James Kidney, who joined the SEC in 1986 and retired this month, offered the critique in a speech at his goodbye party. His remarks hit home with many in the crowd of SEC lawyers and alumni thanks to a part of his resume not publicly known: He had campaigned internally to bring charges against more executives in the agency’s 2010 case against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)

The SEC has become “an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors,” Kidney said, according to a copy of his remarks obtained by Bloomberg News. “On the rare occasions when enforcement does go to the penthouse, good manners are paramount. Tough enforcement, risky enforcement, is subject to extensive negotiation and weakening.”

Kidney said his superiors were more focused on getting high-paying jobs after their government service than on bringing difficult cases. The agency’s penalties, Kidney said, have become “at most a tollbooth on the bankster turnpike.”

This doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know, but it confirms everything we suspected. Government regulation simply Does Not Work. It is easily coopted and corrupted, most particularly in industries where large quantities of money are involved.

Fines simply do not work when penalizing corporations. They just pass on the costs to their customers, or in the case of banks, create more money out of thin air. And it’s too easy to place the blame on employees who no longer work there.

Day by Day

I was a little surprised to see that. I already knew that a fair number of people whose names you might recognize have the blog in their regular rotation, as sometimes they send me email, but I had no idea that Chris Muir did.

And speaking of the new intolerant standard for American business, here is a way to let Mozilla know your opinion directly on their feedback page. As per Conservative Intelligence Briefing: “If Mozilla was hoping to avoid controversy by edging out former CEO Brendan Eich, the company has most certainly failed. The graph below comes from the feedback page on their site. This chart goes back to when the comment system was adopted, and the highest number of “sad” comments is today, by a factor of about two. The second highest number came yesterday.”

A sample of the comments posted:

  • Im still in disbelief at Mozilla inane and intolerant decision to have
    its CEO step down. Apparently they value the opinion of LGBT over the
    first amendment. Shame 
  •  Gay folks didn’t struggle to come out of the closet just so that
    christian folks could now be shoved into it. I’ve uninstalled Firefox
    after many years of using it and I will never recommend your product to
    anyone ever again.
  •  THOUGHT NAZIS will soon reap what they sew … Uninstalled on 23 work
    and home computers. This is just the beginning you FASCISTS!!! 
  •  Giving in to the thought police is unnaceptable. The guy didn’t TREAT
    any homosexual badly, just donated a modest sum (for an executive) to a
    campaign that even BARACK ‘GOD OF THE LIBERALS’ OBAMA supported. This
    isn’t “progress”, this is medieval persecution. Wolf in sheep’s
    clothing, you are. F*ck you. 
  • It has been great riding with you since 1994. Good luck in your future endeavours.
    I have uninstalled Mozilla Firefox, Nightly, and Thunderbird
    No longer willing to support or associate with your products.
    Thanks.  

It will be informative to see how long it takes before Mozilla shuts down their feedback page. Like many supporters of the gay rights agenda, they appear to have badly miscalculated the demographic math.