Jill is rather pleased with her new cover for her book Anna and the Dragon. She writes: “Check out the book cover [JartStar] made for me. I think it’s beautiful.”
It is, indeed, an unusually pretty cover. I particularly like the rich colors and the ur-Celtic pattern underneath the dragon. And, let’s face it, who doesn’t like slender redheads?
So congratulations to her, and congratulations to JartStar as well. It’s always good to see readers collaborating in such a productive and mutually beneficial manner. There is a lot of talent here, so whether you’re looking for a writer, an artist, a programmer, a physicist, a lawyer, or any number of other specialties, it might surprise you what can be found here.
I am, of course, always available for consultations concerning gratuitous cruelty, should my own artistic services ever be required. “Look to Wowbagger” will probably be the title of my autobiography.
Ryan and a few others requested lists of my favorite books. You can read a top 50 list I put together a few years ago on Black Gate, although it’s limited to SF/F. But I thought about it a little, and upon further review, I don’t think it makes sense to put science fiction and fantasy on the same list; one might as reasonably compare romance and mystery. So, here are two top ten lists, one science fiction, one fantasy. I’m limiting myself to one book, not an entire series, and one book per author.
Top 10 Science Fiction novels
Dune, Frank Herbert
The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse
The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury
Count Zero, William Gibson
Anathem, Neal Stephenson
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller
Robots of Dawn, Isaac Asimov
Embassytown, China Mieville
Tunnel in the Sky, Robert Heinlein
VALIS, Philip K. Dick
I suppose can quibble with whether Das Glaspernspiel is truly a science fiction novel or not, but it fits much more comfortably in the SF subgenre than in fantasy or anywhere else. I consider it to be a better and more important book than Dune, but Dune is the best pure science fiction novel and thereby merited the top spot. In the same way, Dandelion Wine is the better book, but The Martin Chronicles are more purely science fiction. As for Heinlein, one could just as easily have put three or four other novels there, from Starship Troopers to Stranger in a Strange Land, but Tunnel in the Sky is the most purely Heinlein at his best, in my opinion. (Although I regard either “The Man Who Sold the Moon” or “The Menace from Earth” as the pinnacles of his fiction.) And while Foundation is Asimov’s best series, I think Robots of Dawn is the best single novel.
Top 10 Fantasy novels
The Two Towers, JRR Tolkien
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
Watership Down, Richard Adams
The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
A Game of Thrones, George RR Martin
The Book of the Damned, Tanith Lee
The Black Cauldron, Lloyd Alexander
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Two Towers was actually my first exposure to Tolkien, at the age of 10 at a Boy Scout slumber party. While everyone else was running around, I picked up a book belonging to one of the other Scouts and was instantly transfixed. Even after several re-readings, it remains my favorite volume of the trilogy; Gondor and Rohan have always interested me more than Mordor, Rivendell, or the Shire. Again, Watership Down is a book that many might not consider fantasy proper, but it is an astonishingly great book that is in a class of its own. And the greatness of A Game of Thrones only underlines the disappointment of the way in which the series has plodded steadily downhill. There are a plethora of books I would have preferred to put in the place of Interview with the Vampire, but both the concept and the execution were excellent and only Tolkien has proven more influential over time.
Not everyone is going to agree with everything on these lists, but if you’re at all interested in the genre, I think you are unlikely to regret reading any of them. There are obvious omissions too. For example, many writers adore Jack Vance; Tanith Lee’s Tales from the Flat Earth are clearly inspired by Vance’s Tales from the Dying Earth, but despite his inimitable style and enormous influence on the genre, I find that his stories tend to leave me a little bored. I had The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke on the list, but I couldn’t possibly leave off PKD and VALIS is the best of his vast contribution to the field.
Later this week, I’ll post two more lists, one of the best non-SF/F novels, and one of the books that have most influenced my writing. Needless to say, a number of these books will be on the latter list.
UPDATE: Speaking of fiction, I belatedly noticed that Amazon is giving away free copies of The Last Witchking today.
Phoenician attempts economics again, hilarity once more ensues:
Brief clue, Dipshit, if your argument is based on a discontinuity –
(” And in fact, the deleterious effects on wages of women entering the work force was largely hidden until 1973, when men finally stopped leaving the work force in numbers sufficient to conceal what was happening.”) – and the actual data shows no such discontinuity but a fairly smooth and continuing trend instead, then your argument is disproven.
You’re in the situation of someone who claims that rising icecream sales in May are caused by the Easter Bunny and, when shown the Easter Bunny doesn’t actually exists, goes out to prove that more icecream is being sold than you originally stated.
Yes, that may be true – real wages may be actually less than you stated before – but your ‘explanation” for that has been shown to be crap.
Because you’re a misogynist little dickhead who can’t let go of your bigotry, Dipshit.
Some readers don’t understand why I often respond directly to Phony and would prefer that I simply ban him from commenting. But he serves a useful purpose, which is to illustrate the way people on the Left often communicate in a dismissive, superior, and insulting tone that is meant to convince people that they know what they are talking about.
It’s related to the way that they are forever claiming that their opponents are stupid without providing any evidence for it, thereby implying that they themselves are much more intelligent. But the fact of the matter, as Phony often demonstrates, their level of knowledge doesn’t even rise to the level of Wikipedia and it is usually quite easy to show that they don’t understand what the evidence they have mustered in a brief Google search actually means.
What Phony was attempting to do here is try to salvage his incorrect position that “if women are producing more value than they get paid for, as seems reasonable in a capitalist society, then the wages paid will go up”. This is exactly backward, as it happens, because increased productivity actually reduces wages, as it reduces the amount of labor required to produce the same amount of goods, thereby reducing demand for labor as well as its price.
And in his desperate flailing about to attempt to defend himself by prove both me and the law of supply and demand wrong, he cited this graph from the Federal Reserve while claiming it showed me to be “a liar AND a fool.” Which is bizarre, since it shows exactly what I described, a continuing plunge in the male labor participation rate from 1950 to the present.
What Phony didn’t understand is that my argument isn’t based on any discontinuity and that to understand the net effect of female employment on wages, it isn’t enough to simply look at the declining male participation rate, however continuous, one has to take into account the increasing female participation rate and the population growth rate as well. Or, better yet, do what I did back in 2006 and actually do the math rather than simply looking at the pretty pictures.
It’s not enough to note that the lines appear to cross, which they actually don’t. Wages didn’t stagnate from 1950 to 1975 because the number of men leaving the labor force in excess of the growth of the population was roughly equivalent to the number of women entering it. Consider: 45.8 percent of 65+ men worked in 1950. By 1980, only 19 percent did, a number that has remained basically flat ever since. With women, the biggest change was from the 25-34 demographic, as only 34 percent worked in 1950 compared to 65.5 percent in 1980. In sum, by 1980, 27 million additional women had entered the labor force and the female percentage of the labor force rose from 29.6 percent to 42.5 percent. And don’t forget that inexperienced female workers tend to command considerably less salary than the most experienced male ones; a simple exchange of younger women for older men would tend to reduce wages in itself.
The current female share of the labor force is 46.9 percent. So, it is easy to see that the larger part of the male-to-female labor exchange took place prior to 1980. In fact, we can safely conclude that the crossover point was reached in 1973 because that’s when average wages peaked. As the first chart indicates, men were still leaving the workforce, and women were still entering it at that time, but combined with the slowdown of economic growth that began in the 70s, the point at which the net wage-depressing effect had become statistically obvious had been reached. If you look at the actual data, you can see that the crossover point was likely sometime between Q4 1972 and Q2 1973, when men temporarily stopped leaving the labor force for two years even as the pace of women entering it jumped up by two percentage points in a matter of months.
The Phonies of the world can point their finger and call names all they like. But it should be abundantly clear that what they call misogyny and bigotry is simply economic reality. The facts are what they are. The addition of 55.3 million women to the labor force since 1950 has done exactly what one would expect a 315 percent increase in the supply of female labor to do in driving down its price. Whether one thinks that is a good thing or a bad thing depends upon one’s perspective, but what one cannot reasonably do is to deny that it happened.
UPDATE: Perhaps the graph below will help those who can’t seem to understand anything but pictures. Probably not, but if you still can’t get the concept after seeing this, I have to conclude you’re simply incapable of it. Note that these are based on the actual BLS numbers, adding the male and female participation rates as a percentage of the actual civilian population that year. The magic number with regards to wage rate growth appears to be around 60, as the 59.85 percent in January 1973 marked the very last time the total labor participation rate as a percentage of the civilian non-institutional population was below 60 percent.
It should be fascinating to hear Phoney and others attempt to explain the mysterious inverse correlation between the labor force participation rate and the weekly wages while simultaneously denying the law of supply and demand.
CA writes to inquire about QM, progress on Book Two, and other matters:
Just wondering how your writing projects have been going. A few weeks back you mentioned that you would talk about Quantum Mortis that you are co-writing with Steve Rzasa (I know about the co-authoring part cause I found the mention of QM on Rzasa’s site before it showed up on yours.) You haven’t yet mentioned anything. When are you going to spill the beans? 😉
Also wondering how Book 2 of Arts of Dark and Light is coming? How close are you to having a first draft of the book? What’s the page count so far? Any tasty morsels that you can drop for us readers? Looking forward to your writing,
I have to apologize for the light posting last week. I was rather busy with my day job, which involved a technology conference that was truly excellent. I had the distinct privilege of meeting the founder of the Pirate Party, and you can expect to see an interview with him posted here in the reasonably near future. I’m also going to see if I can arrange to do a Lions Den of his tactical manual, Swarmwise.
I also had the chance to see my better-looking intellectual twin again, which is always a delight. While everyone else was discussing who Yahoo was overpaying for next and the wisdom of staying out of the way of Google in the consumer space, we were talking about the implications of Janet Yellen at the Fed, various gold conspiracy theories, and the possibility of the pseudo-shutdown turning into a real one. Great fun and I learned a lot from a number of different people. It was easily the best conference I’ve been to since the 1996 CGDC in Santa Clara.
As to Quantum Mortis, it is the result of the realization that TAODAL will prevent me from getting around to any of my other ideas for at least five years. QM is based upon a novella I started about 12 years ago and somehow managed to lose in the transition from one computer to another. When it turned up again, I read it and really liked the idea, but I knew I couldn’t justify taking the time to turn it into a proper novel.
So, I contacted Steve, handed it over to him, and he turned the beginning into a complete novel. I took 30 days off of Book Two to rewrite certain parts and add some new sections, and finished it last week. Two of the regulars who shall remain nameless for the present have read the draft, and I will take the liberty of quoting one of them concerning it:
“I loved every second of this. I sincerely did. I think it’s more enjoyable than A Throne of Bones… and I think it has broader market appeal. Seriously. Standing fucking ovation.”
That’s all I will say about it for the present, other than to say that the release date of the ebook will be safely before Christmas, with the hardcover to follow. As before, those who preorder the hardcover will receive the ebook free. With regards to Book Two of TAODAL, I’m not quite as far along as I would like to be, but I do not expect any trouble sticking to my 24-month release schedule. Also, ACX has released the audiobook of A Magic Broken to Audible, iTunes, and the other retailers, so I expect to be able to post a sample and make an announcement about that being available very soon.
And no one need worry that I am pulling a Martin. In addition to being considerably younger and healthier, I have no intention of allowing myself to be unduly distracted by other writing projects. It was refreshing to take a brief break from the war and politics of Selenoth, but I’m quite happy to rejoin Marcus Valerius, newly christened “Cavarus” by the men of his legion, and the other surviving characters again.
I’m not sure which is more impressive, the ability of those who don’t wish to see the obvious to not see it, or the stubborn determination of the inept anklebiter to think that this time, for sure, he’s going to be able to prove me wrong.
Irish Farmer doesn’t appear to understand what is meant by either “wages” or “consumption”:
If women were consumers before they entered the workforce, then who’s money were they consuming with? Mens? Parents’? In that case, those wages were already practically depressed by the fact that men and/or parents were providing women with a sort of salary.
No. Wages are not reduced by consumption. Wages are reduced by increased supply of labor or decreased demand for labor. Because consumption tends to increase demand for labor, it tends to increase wages. He digs himself deeper by failing to understand that a consumer is a consumer regardless of whether the consumer is in the labor force or not:
I think it’s simplistic to say, “Women were still consumers.” I’ll admit I don’t have the answers to these questions, but they still come to mind: Isn’t it possible that women workers created new markets, created increase consumption in some way? Can you really just say, “It was the exact same level of consumption now as it was in the ’50s”?
It is not only not simplistic to point out that women were, and continued to be, consumers before, during, and after they entered the labor force, it is absolutely idiotic to attempt to claim otherwise. None of this is equivalent, in any way, to saying anything about “the exact same level of consumption as in the 1950s”. In fact, a moment’s thought will make it apparent that an increased number of women entering the work force will tend to reduce consumption in the short term; perhaps the women here can help us out. Do you do tend to do most of your shopping when you are at work or when you are not at work?
Moreover, the reduced number of children produced by working women has unquestionably meant less consumption and less demand for labor in the long term as well. The mitigating effect on the labor supply of fewer children will not suffice to counterbalance this, since children are consumers for 18+ years before they enter the labor force.
And Phony not only reveals that he doesn’t know anything about economics, but he’s a relative newbie here. He’s clearly unaware of the fact that I addressed his objection back in 2006 as well as again earlier this year.
You’re making the implicit assumption, Dipshit, that they don’t produce anything for the wages they get. If they *are* producing more value than they get paid for, as seems reasonable in a capitalist society, then the wages paid will go up but be spent purchasing even more goods.
By your “logic”, Dipshit, the best America could do would be to have one person working to produce goods for 300 million consumers – after all, if anyone else enters the workforce, it will lower wages…
You talk about the post-1950 rise in female employment. So tell us, Dipshit, how come real wages continued to rise (in line with productivity) between 1950 and 1975 or so?
First, I am quite obviously not making the implicit assumption that women don’t produce anything for the wages they receive. Second, if we apply his own logic, then the fact that real wages have not gone up since 1973 forces us to conclude that women are not producing more value than they are paid for. Third, my logic doesn’t suggest anything of the sort.
“In the perfect world of economic modeling, it would make no difference if men or women were working. And in fact, the deleterious effects on wages of women entering the work force was largely hidden until 1973, when men finally stopped leaving the work force in numbers sufficient to conceal what was happening. In fact, one could characterize the period from 1950 to 1973 as women working so that men over 60 could play golf. The BLS numbers make this clear.”
GV writes to observe that the USA is about to experiment with an economic application of Hultgreen-Curie Syndrome:
I was listing to the radio when I heard the news that Janet Yellen would be named the next fed chair. I went online to confirm this story and found this news story by NBC News.
It appears you were right about what you wrote in your blog post on 9/16/2013 entitled The job no one wants. You wrote that you assumed it would be Janet Yellen. It’s funny how the link to the NBC news story talks about her being the first women to head the central bank and some of her accomplishment but it leaves out the quote you put at the end of that blog post were she said the following;
“For my own part I did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.’s — I didn’t see any of that coming until it happened.” – Janet Yellen, 2010
With someone like that in charge what could possibly go wrong.
Christine Lagarde at the IMF and Janet Yellen at the Fed. This should be an interesting test of whether putting women in charge will make it all better. I wouldn’t mind being wrong, for all of our sakes, but I’m not terribly sanguine about the probabilities here.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard summarizes: “So there we have it. The next chairman of the Fed is going to track the labour participation rate. Money will stay loose.”
ML’s experiences in computer programming have been similar to mine.
Your posts regarding the college gender gap have been fascinating. I graduated in 2001 with a degree in computer science. At the time, our program had about ten women. As it happens, two of them happened to end up in a few of my upper division classes. They were both mediocre programmers at best. From what I gathered they graduated by hanging out in the lab and “collaborating” with the beta, gamma, and omega males working on their own projects.
I went on to work at IBM for twelve years as a software engineer. By that time IBM had long been infected with the diversity cancer and women in technology were vital to IBM’s success in the global economy. There were hundreds of women in my division and while most of them were on the technical career track they worked mostly as project managers or testers. The women that started out in actual software development positions did not last long. They were frequently promoted to management or moved to project management or test positions.
There were two notable exceptions. In the mid to late 80’s IBM experienced a shortage of software developers. The universities, typically lagging, had not yet created the programs to educate programmers in sufficient numbers. IBM decided it would offer it’s semi-skilled workforce the opportunity to attend an in house programming school. Those that graduated were guaranteed promotions from manufacturing and secretarial jobs to professional careers. Since IBM had a very large pool of candidates, it didn’t care about the graduation rate. The goal was to create functional programmers. In talking to the old timers I gather the program was very challenging. The only two competent female coders I came into contact with during my time at IBM graduated from that program. Both of these women were exceptionally good, better than 90% of their male peers. Even though the program allowed women, graduating them was not mandatory. In fact women were not expected to graduate so those that did actually achieved something meaningful.
You discuss alternative credentialing systems much like IBMs old boot camp coming into existence. How do you foresee these systems withstanding the “need for diversity”. Certainly no such system would be successful at today’s diverse multicultural IBM.
There was one good female programmer at the small tech company of about 100 people where I worked for two years before starting my first game company. She was quite attractive too. But the other one spent years, literally years, finding creative ways to avoid doing anything at all. It was rather impressive in retrospect; I’m not even sure she knew how to program.
Diversity is a luxury item. The new credential systems spring up because there is a need for them, the old ones having been ruined by diversity, equality, and so forth. Whenever and wherever there is more need for actual performance than the pretense of it, people will find away to utilize them.
A young friend of ours has, after my recommending he read “The Irrational Atheist”, said this:
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Day insist atheists are moral parasites? He says that atheists inherit their morality from a foundation already established by Christianity. The problem with this stance is that it is unfalsifyable. It suggests that a society lacking Christian influence would be incapable of developing a similar morality. Well we live in a world which has had religious influence (mostly Abrahamic faiths) permeated throughout it, so where can we test the notion? We cannot. The argument cannot be tested. It therefore holds little weight.
I will read this book, i promise you that as a friend, and we may or may not have a discussion about it. My concern with approaching the work is that it will be littered with similar logic. But like I said I will read it. We’ll see if my concerns are founded.”
It’s always so cute when young atheists attempt to construct logical arguments on the basis of foundations they don’t understand with reason they utilize improperly. There are numerous problems with this attempt to preemptively rebut my arguments without even reading them; I continue to find it astonishing how many atheists observably believe that it is possible to provide substantive criticism in complete and self-admitted ignorance.
First, my argument concerning moral parasitism is that atheists tend to inherit or absorb their moralities from the dominant society in which they dwell rather than reasoning them out from first principles or developing them from science as many of them claim to have done. That is why it is meaningful to identify someone as a Catholic atheist, a Jewish atheist, or a Muslim atheist; their moral standards tend to be Catholic morality less whatever the atheist doesn’t like, Jewish morality less whatever the atheist doesn’t like, etc.
It is true that in the West, which was once known as Christendom, most atheists are Christian moral parasites. But this is considerably less true in other parts of the world, despite Christianity’s current global reach.
Second, the young atheist’s objection underlines my point about the remarkable atheist ignorance of history. Where can we test the notion? My suggestion would be to look at pre-Christian societies and compare the differences between the moralities advocated by the atheists in those societies and those to which modern Christian atheists subscribe. Is he truly unaware that we are privy to a considerable amount of ideas from philosophers untouched by the Abrahamic faiths? Alternatively, we could look at the moralities espoused by atheists raised in current religious traditions such as Islam, Judaism, the Chinese pagan folk religion, Buddhism, and the myriad of less popular religions.
We know, from history, that societies lacking Christian influence do not develop Christian morality. In fact, we can go much farther, as we know that societies lacking Christian influence did not develop modern science. It would be going too far to definitely claim that Christianity is a prerequisite for the development of scientody, but it cannot be denied that none of the hundreds of non-Christian societiesever independently developed the scientific method.
It is theoretically possible to claim my observation is incorrect, but it is not even remotely credible to claim that it is unfalsifiable. The fact that it has not been tested does not mean that it cannot be tested. As it happens, the hypothesis can be tested on an experimental basis with proper control groups; one wonders if the young atheist is consistent and rejects both evolution by natural selection and string theory on the same basis he has ventured here. Based on the level of logic-mastery he has demonstrated here, I would tend to doubt it.
I read your Sept 6, 2004 review of Michele Malkin’s book supporting internment and I was wondering if you remember or noted where you found the information for this paragraph:
“In January 1942, prior to both Executive Order 9066 and the battle of Midway, the Imperial Japanese Navy possessed 717 carrier-borne planes and 176 ships, of which 15 were troop transports. The IJN’s troop-bearing capacity was about 42,000 men. Reinforcement and resupply required a roundtrip transit of 11,000 miles to a coastline only 1,359 miles long.”
Less important are the facts here, but just in case you have it:
“The Overlord invasion required 4,600 ships to travel 100 miles under the air cover of 12,000 planes to land 156,000 troops on a French coastline 3,437 miles long. Over the next three weeks, the Allies brought in another 850,000 men, 148,000 vehicles, and 570,000 tons of supplies.”
If I recall correctly, I worked out the IJN numbers from Tony Tully’s excellent The Imperial Japanese Navy Page. I don’t remember where I looked up the statistics related to the invasion of Normandy, but they’re readily available.
It is a little amusing to look back and recall that some people actually took Me So Michelle’s book seriously at the time. It’s largely forgotten now, but it didn’t escaped my attention how she quickly stopped talking about it in public after I exposed her complete lack of research in support of her attempt to manufacture a retroactive military justification for the historical internment of Japanese-Americans.
One thing I didn’t mention in that article was that the former Marine Commandant’s first reaction, when asked about the viability of a Japanese invasion of the U.S. West Coast, was an instinctive snort of disdain. I mean, the hypothetical invasion is the sort of thing you have to be a complete military ignoramus to even contemplate for a millesecond. Forget Anzio. An IJN invasion of California would have made the Bay of Pigs invasion look sane and conservative by comparison.
This is a fascinating account of the religion that is Teach for America and the women that inhabit it. This passage was particularly interesting because it shows the religious nature of the TFA girls:
“I am shifting my weight uncomfortably in a plastic classroom chair on an Atlanta summer afternoon. Our adviser interrupts lunch by asking us to pause to spend a few minutes reflecting on what brought us to TFA in the first place. After the requisite reflection time, and after turning off the room’s lights, Alicia begins to share a story about growing up with a single mother, culminating in an emotional appeal to do whatever we can to help “our kids” in the future. Although I have always found Alicia to be rather stoic, she suddenly begins sobbing when relaying this story. After regaining composure, she makes it clear that we are meant to follow suit. One by one, until the 12th person has spoken, we deliver either tearful accounts of personal hardship or awkward, halting stories recounted by people uncomfortable with the level of intimacy. While talking to other TFA teachers from different schools over dinner, I learn that other groups had nearly identical sessions.”
This is the classic “testifying” step in poor fundamentalist Christian church services in which the various converted sinners are invited to testify about their sinful past and how low they were before they “came to Jesus”. They recount all the bad things in their past and how it all changed when they “came to Jesus”. Each person who is testifying get kudos and respect for how deeply they had fallen and therefore how much farther Jesus raised them from sin and degradation before they were redeemed. Lots of weeping and wailing, and “Praise Jesus!”, particularly by the women in the congregations.
It reminded me of accounts I’ve read of both Womyn’s Studies classes and Maoist reedcuation sessions. You really have to read the whole thing. It is like music to the ears of those of us who anticipate the collapse of the public school system; one would feel bad for the young women being so perfectly set up to fail if they weren’t such a poisonously destructive collection of mindlessly self-perpetuating leftbots.
Jill is rather pleased with her new cover for her book Anna and the Dragon. She writes: “Check out the book cover [JartStar] made for me. I think it’s beautiful.”
