Pity the Poor AIG Bankers, Unable To Pay Their Third Mortgages and Fifth Mistresses

Robert Benmosche, CEO of the insurance-finance conglomerate AIG -- you know, the one that nearly tanked the world economy a few years back? that company -- whined to the Wall Street Journal recently that it was so, so horrible that people were outraged about the bonuses he wanted to pay to his hard-working and criminally negligent employees for their economy-wrecking shenanigans.

There is not enough bile in the entire world to express how loathsome his comparison is: he thinks that taxpayers who didn't want their bailout money to go to his incompetent market-manipulators are the same as "pitch forks and their hangman nooses, and all that–sort of like what we did in the Deep South." Yes, being angry at vast rewards going to people who should rightfully be unemployed -- because their company is vastly worse than bankrupt -- is just like a lynching.

And the thinking behind his statements seems to be the bluntest possible version of "what's the problem? we always make ungodly sums of money -- a little fiscal crisis shouldn't affect that," again showing how vastly out of touch the financial sector is with the real economy and the need to actually provide value in order to be paid. 

The only way to stop the complete financialization of our economy -- and the capture of our political and regulatory apparatus by dangerously self-absorbed cretins like Benmosche -- is to have some real prosecutions of the criminals who caused the crash. Send them to jail for decades, confiscate their property, shut down their companies. (I'd like to say "and sow their field with salt," but a federal judge is unlikely to consider that during sentencing.) Let's start with this clown: he's clearly incompetent at his job, if he's stupid enough to say something like this in public, so the SEC is sure to find evidence of criminal malfeasance if they can just extract their lips from Wall Street's behind long enough to do their damn jobs.

Not Quite Schadenfreude, But Close

What's the term for a gleeful interest in other people's stupidity?

Because it has a new homepage at Old People Writing on a Restaurant's Facebook Page. You've got people who think Facebook is a search engine, random complaints, the usual all-caps rants, and a few people who fell off their medication regimen sometime in the mid-80s. Just a quick browse will make even a person of middling intelligence feel like Einstein.

Impressing People Who Can't Do Math

I got an e-mail with this message in it some days ago, and it rolled up in my inbox until I had time to properly focus scorn upon it.

Oooh! I'm one of the top twenty million profiles! Let me drop everything and start celebrating.

If your marketing communications assume that your customers can't do basic math, you're doing it wrong.

In Which I Demand More Windows

What is the deal with new versions of applications not wanting to have multiple windows? Is this some new trend among designers?

I finally upgraded to Office 2010 at work recently (kicking and screaming, because I needed the newest whiz-bang Excel formatting for a particular project), only to find that Outlook searches all now run in the main window. That's horrible -- the whole point of a search is to hive it off in its own little window, so you can refer to it, and do other things while it's searching away.

I've also been avoiding upgrading to the newest iteration of iTunes, since that also, apparently, doesn't allow the user to create any additional windows. (So this clearly isn't either a MS or an Apple thing -- both of those bastards are doing it.) Again, I usually have at least five iTunes windows open at a time, because I'm building a playlist or just playing music in one window while I sync various devices in another window.

And what I'm seeing of Windows 8 looks like the worst aspects of both of those multiplied, all sleek surfaces and one-thing-at-a-time-ness.

Programmers: your users like multiple sessions. We like control. We like doing what we want to do, and not waiting for your system to get back to us. Put it back the way it was, or we will be forced to hurt you.

Ghouls of the Media

I said what I had to say about the Newtown massacre over the weekend (though the topic is certainly coming up over at Editorial Explanations, my other blog -- look for a bunch of cartoons with bizarre slants tomorrow).

But I do have to note one particularly slimy sidenote.

My last name is Wheeler; one of the kids murdered in Newtown had the same last name. And Newtown is less than a hundred miles away from me, which is practically next door, in US terms. There's no connection, as far as I know -- Wheeler is a common name.

But there was a call, from some random reporter from my local paper, on my answering machine yesterday. I have to assume they sat someone down with a phone book and a list of last names of the dead, to scare up potential relatives who might give a sad quote to their fish-wrap.

And at moments like that, I'm happy that the US newspaper industry is in such decline, if this is how they work a major story. It's disgusting, stupid, and a massive waste of time, all in the service of "human interest." And The Wife wonders why I'm such a misanthrope!

Possibly the Worst Infographic Designed by the Hand of Man

There's an old saying to the effect that a little learning is a dangerous thing, and this here infographic about bestselling SF is a sterling example of that.

It's breathtaking in its stupidity and mistakes -- I'm half-convinced that every single "fact" in that image is utterly wrong.

For one example, it chirpily announces that Slaughterhouse-Five has sold more than 60,000 copies! Actually, the current trade paperback edition has sold about that many copies in the last two years -- the total number of sales is vastly higher. (I'd ballpark it in the 5 million range.)

It's also nuttily inconsistent in its aims -- it's far too long, to begin with, and doesn't present books in any coherent sequence (such as a countdown or countup), but tosses them at random, with odd (probably incorrect) factoids that usually, but not invariably, are numbers connected to sales figures.

(There are also plenty of grammatical, syntactical, word-choice, and other errors as well -- a fully-annotated version of this thing would be massive.)

In fact, if any of you out there are also marketers, as I am, this infographic is a perfect bad example of the form. If you ever set out to make an infographic, this is exactly what you don't want to do.

(Hat tip to Making Light, which discovered and made fun of this before I did.)

Barry Eisler Continues to Shill for Amazon

This time, it starts even before his first sentence proper, when he claims that "legacy publishers" -- he means specifically "the Big Six" US trade houses, but he's writing in The Guardian for a UK audience, and conveniently ignores many houses of similar or larger size (one of which is providing the computer on which I'm typing at this very moment).

I'm sorry, the stupid has infected me, and that sentence is a complete loss. I'll try again.

Eisler is sad that the mean ol' legacy publishers are trying to do things like "windowing" -- not publishing a work simultaneously in all formats and pricepoints, which most of us would simply call "publishing" -- and setting prices for their own goods. Eisler wishes, apparently, that they'd just stop doing that, and let nice Mr. Bezos handle all of the fiddly details -- his ideal world would not be a monopoly, but letting a bunch of publishers make their own decisions (even when those decisions go against the Will of Bezos) would be a monopoly.

It's clear that dear l'il Barry doesn't actually know what a "monopoly" is, or he wouldn't try to argue that six competitive companies embedded in a larger, and even more competitive, landscape qualify.

(There isn't much of his usual Lake Wobegone-esque "all self-publishers are creatively freed millionaires in control of their own destinies" bumf, but that undertone, of course, is the only reason anyone takes Eisler the least bit seriously at any time.)

Tell me, are his books this dull, poorly thought out and tedious? I have a dim view of the average level of writing in thrillers to begin with, but I'm afraid Eisler is driving that to new depths.

Secret Codes

One of the more amusing parts of my current working life is the variety of interesting people who think the US Tax Code is some kind of hidden game. They tend to think that if they can just use the secret password, or otherwise show they have the Inner Knowledge, that they'll at least never have to pay taxes ever again. (Some more extreme cases think that the government will give them millions of dollars.)

I was reminded of this by a news report from Friday; a district court has, once again, declared that another one of these dodges is invalid.

I know everybody has their own rules for life, and that some people are just stupider than others. (Though you do have to at least have a certain kind of low cunning to attempt tax-dodge schemes; I may call these people dumb, but they're reasonably smart.) But, for me, the most important rule in life has always been this: anything that looks too good to be true is.

The corollary, of course, is that anything that looks too bad to be true is happening sooner than you expect.

Asking the Wrong Questions

Even in the context of the ever-gaping maw of blogging, responding to the lack of a Pulitzer winner by asking "what does this mean for genre fiction?" is remarkably obtuse.

It may, however, become the new "But was it good for the Jews?" which I suppose is not nothing.

A Quick Comics Thought

I've got a longer comics-related post coming later today, but, to whet your appetite, here's a short one:

DC's "Before Watchmen" project proves what a lot of us have been saying for years: the Big Two don't understand what a "story" is.

Sure, they understand "characters," and they definitely get "universe." "Synergy" is clearly in their wheelhouse, along with "brand extension" and "exploitation." But, even after eighty years, they still don't realize what a story is, and they probably never will.

(Here's a hint: a story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Sometimes even in that order!)

The number of actual stories published by the Big Two has never been large -- and most of those were creator-owned and/or -controlled projects, like Watchmen or Ronin, to begin with -- and it may even be shrinking now, as they mine things that previously stood as stories to turn them into more "universes" with "synergy."

And, as long as the general comics audience prefers characters to story, this will never change. The fan reaction to "Before Watchmen" shows that preference is still solidly in place, so I don't have much hope. We're living in a box created by the taste preferences of four generations of eight-year-olds, and the Wednesday Crowd that the last generation solidified into. Luckily, the "comics industry" is not the whole world of comics -- and, despite what it thinks, it's an ever-shrinking and less relevant piece of that world.

Names, Names, Names

Just saw an ad box in today's Publishers Weekly e-mail:

Kendra Hilferty has been a witch for 300 years....

Kendra? Kendra is the name your witchy-girl got in 1712 or so? I very much do not think so....

Math Is Hard!

From an article about noted failed Presidential assassin and Jodie Foster aficionado John Hinckley, Jr.:

Hinckley, who tried to kill President Ronald Reagan in March 1981, is currently allowed to leave St. Elizabeths Hospital for 10 days each month to visit his mother's home in a gated community in Williamsburg, Virginia. St. Elizabeths' proposal calls for that to increase to two visits of 17 days and then to be upped again to six visits of 24 days.

If a hospital in Virginia has found a way to fit 34 days into a single month -- and has plans to increase that to 144 days in the near future -- I would suggest that is a much more newsworthy event than the petty details of Hinckley's incarceration.

The Clown Car of Literary Awards

So, let me get this straight.

If the people administering an award are so incompetent that they can't even manage to communicate effectively with each other, and mangle their own list of nominees, the only way to "preserve the integrity of the award and the judges’ work" is to ask the author you just screwed over to withdraw her book from contention?

First of all, it's idiotic to "withdraw" a book once it's already on the shortlist.

Second, withdrawing a book implies that something is wrong with the book -- or that the author dislikes the award process for some reason -- which is the opposite of the problem here.

Third -- and, as a father, this is by far the most important lesson to me -- if you make a mistake, you need to be the one to fix it. You don't ask if the person you just injured can go away quietly so that it's less trouble for you. You screw up; you fix it -- that's the rule.

Look, we all know that Shine would have no change of actually winning this award -- the same set of judges that will make the final decision decided on the mangled shortlist -- but demanding that Shine be removed entirely is the action of a petty, self-centered prick. You don't fix thoughtless stupidity by being a prick; you fix it by being generous and apologetic. Someone at the NBA -- maybe the administrators, maybe the judges, maybe both -- hasn't learned a lesson my ten-year-old already knows well.

Lauren Myracle is way too polite and understanding; the correct answer to the NBA's insulting request could only be "fuck off."

Surveying E-Books

Easily-offended British writer Stephen Hunt released the results (PDF) of his "survey" of ebook users today, claiming that 71% of people are now using ebooks.

Of course, since his poll was entirely self-selected -- and, even more so, because it took place entirely on the Internet, as part of discussions about books and ebooks -- it's utterly unreliable as proof of anything in the wider world, as two seconds' thought would prove. All that this survey actually says is that people interested in the ebook question online tend to be already reading ebooks, which should be thoroughly uncontroversial and non-newsworthy.

His comments -- claiming that ebooks will soon "top out at over 90% or market size in the near future," among others -- further prove that he has no idea what he's talking about, and that he hasn't been listening when his editors and agents have described his own book sales to him.

But, if you wanted actual numbers, you were also in luck today: Pew Research Center did a real survey (randomized and everything) of US consumers, finding that 12% of respondents owned an ebook reader (up from 6% in November). Tablet computers (such as iPads) were owned by 8% of respondents (up from 5%).

Once again: ebooks are a strongly growing market, and some categories (particularly the most mass-market categories, like romances and thrillers) have seen immense growth. But physical books are still roughly 50% of the sales of even those most e-driven categories, and consumer books will not tip over to primarily e-books until readers and tablets are much more ubiquitous than a total 17% of the potential market. (Some professional categories, and many reference works, are nearly all-digital now, but those are database businesses, and very different from the impulse-driven consumer market.)

Let me say that again: only 17% of the US population owns an e-reader or a tablet. (And only about a third of the population has a smartphone, the other potential e-reading device -- note that tablet/e-reader owners are highly likely to have smartphones as well, so those numbers are not additive.) The growth curve of e-books is going to slow down, before too long, and paper books will not go away.

And, more importantly, it is entirely possible for something new to come along and not destroy existing media -- more than possible, it's common. After all, Broadway -- that most old-fashioned of all of our entertainment media -- had a possibly-record year in 2010, bringing in $1.037 billion in sales.

The sky is not falling, and thinking that it is blinds you to the actual opportunities and threats that really exist.

Yet Another Example of Someone Pretending the "Internet" Makes Normal Economic Laws New and Special

"The law of the internet is simple: either you do something I can't do myself (or get from someone else), or I pay you less than you'd like."

Because in marketplaces for the past five thousand years, businesses got paid more than they'd like for doing things that people can easily do themselves, right? The Internet is thus completely new and utterly different, creating bizarre new concepts like "competition between providers" and "need-to-have services."

Wow. I don't know how I could have lived without knowing how special and new the Internet makes everything.

Thanks, as usual, for your uniquely thoughtful insights, Seth Goden.

(Note: This post also serves as a test of the common belief that it's impossible to ascertain sarcasm in a written work on the Internet.)

E-Book Pricing: Attack of the Consultants

Seth Godin was famously dismissive this week of Carolyn Reidy's call for publishers to battle the current market trend for bestseller e-books to be priced lower than their wholesale cost, declaring that this is a matter of "competition" and "the market," which -- as all good little capitalists know -- cannot be fought.

There's two problems with his assertion. The first, and most obvious, is that it's not "the market" that is creating this artificially low price, it's one particular retailer, which has a long history of undercutting the competition on price to gain market share before increasing prices, and which is generally believed to be losing money on each sale under the current pricing structure. And businesses, despite what Godin might believe, are not obliged to help individual customers gain power over them.

The second problem is more basic: books are not an unfettered free market. Books do compete with each other for consumer dollars, but they are not competing evenly. The reader who wants Under the Dome will not be satisfied if he finds The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society at an amazing price. Each book creates its own market, only loosely tied to the market for any other book. So publishers do have quite a bit of leeway in setting a price for a particular book or format.

Or, to put it another way: Godin reportedly charges at least $30,000 for a speaking engagement. (And that number is from 2000; it's likely he charges much more now.) Many other speakers, who talk about the same subject, receive much smaller fees. If capitalism worked the way Godin claims it does, he would have no income, since there are cheaper, equivalent goods in the market. Given that Godin keeps making wrong-headed pronouncements, I expect that he's still finding plenty of people to pay him lots of money, even when his advice is the business equivalent of "lie back and think of England."

In short: the fact that Godin has a career proves that he's wrong.

[Godin link originally seen via GalleyCat]

In Which I Post Just to Say, "What He Said"

I'd been saving this SF Signal post about "International Science Fiction Reshelving Day" -- coming up quickly on the calendar; it's next Wednesday -- because I wanted to rain scorn and bile on the idea.

But I don't need to, since the estimable Charles Tan has already done so.

So, to repeat: what Charles said. And in spades. It's a remarkably stupid idea on several levels, and not nearly as clever as it thinks it is.

Adam Roberts Hates Your Hugo Vote

In case you didn't know, Adam Roberts has better taste than you do.

So stop fooling your silly little head with the idea that you know what you like to read, and what's of interest to you. Just do what he says in future, and he won't have to whine at you a second time. Read the books he tells you to, and then vote for them when award time comes. You clearly aren't competent to judge what you enjoy and want to honor.

After all, Roberts teaches at a university, and that makes him unimpeachable. Remember: the thing to do is to listen to experts on literary matters, and avoid things that they consider mediocre or sub-literary. That's how SF got to where it is today, isn't it?

My #Amazonfail Theory

Do I have to explain the background, two days later? (OK, you get two links -- one, two.)

I have no outside knowledge, first of all. (Or inside knowledge, either -- I haven't been at work for two days, so I don't even know what the people in my office are saying about this. And I've mostly been away from the Internet, too, so I've only seen a few of the accounts.) But I do have the ability to believe that Amazon's public statements are all true...more or less, and that they're not necessarily completely true.

So: here's what I think.

1) Amazon does have a system to mark some books as "adult," and thus keep them from coming up in most searches. I don't expect that they intended to apply those tags to major-publisher books (due to not-pissing-off-major-partners reasons), but I imagine they would be quite willing to have the books from small presses -- particularly presses focusing on gay erotica -- categorized that way. And so what they said to Mark Probst might have been exactly correct -- that the books that he published were marked "adult" and put into this semi-visible status.

2) Amazon's final explanation -- see this Seattle Times article -- is more or less correct; someone, somewhere, in the vast Amazon empire, did flip a switch and throw a whole lot of books with "adult" content (as expressed in their categorization meta-data) into the semi-visible status. And Amazon did not in fact intend for that to happen -- it was a conflation of two very different definitions of "adult" content.

3) But I do believe that Amazon has a number of books -- who knows how many? -- in that status as a matter of policy. And they're trying not to focus attention on that fact.

Did You Know?

A quick lesson in copyright, from "Lady Sybilla" --

Copyright laws protect writers from unauthorized reproductions of their work, but such reproductions only include verbatim copying. Characters are only copyrightable if their creator draws them or hires an artist to draw them.

If your reaction was to snort a beverage through your nostrils, congratulations! You know something about copyright.

If your reaction was to nod sagely and tap your lips with your finger, then I'm afraid you have a little studying to do. (Preferably before the Hachette/Summit lawyers come calling.)

[via Nick Mamatas, and already at least a day late]