“What is truth?” a man of the world asked, and washed his hands.
And now in what was once the land of the free, we’re reading newspapers that sound like echo chambers and we’re asking ourselves, “What is truth?”
I don’t now, and you don’t either.
In some cases, like when “the truth” refers to who created the world, or the date set for the heat death of the universe, this is not exactly a problem. At any rate, I suspect the answer to the first doesn’t filter well through time/place bound minds, and so, the best we can do is an approximation. And, as Heinlein put it, one of these days you will know. Until then, you and everyone else just do the best you can.
In other cases, though, not knowing the truth is a real problem.
I am the sort of person who is always suspicious when too coherent an image is presented — or as my mom puts it, I can’t see a freshly painted wall without making a little scratch to see what’s beneath — which means I never precisely fell for the glossy images the Soviet Union presented in the seventies. Does anyone but me remember it? The glowing production numbers, the assurance that there were no poor and no unemployment? Why in the eighties I read a poor idiotic journalist who’d visited the USSR enthuse in the Charlotte paper about how the very simple cartoon she’d seen on Russian TV represented their embrace of simple living and sophisticated aesthetics. When in fact it represented their penury, their old equipment and, yes, the fact that their audience had no other choice.
In Europe this sort of self-delusion was almost universal particularly among the intellectuals. You see, they had bet their future, after WWII on a Marxist-lite mess of pottage. To suddenly find out that neither socialism nor its big, bad cousin communism worked, would have shattered their view of the world and revealed that they’d in fact been taken for patsies and wrenched the more or less functional core of their country’s economy, and engaged in massive redistribution… for nothing.
So they couldn’t believe that, and instead chose to believe USSR was a finely tuned, humming machine or success.
They managed to believe this despite the fact that visitors to the Soviet Union inevitably caught a feeling for just how deprived these people were. But of course, they could tell themselves that they were just rich in non-material things. (Someone tried to make a similar point when I echoed a post by Charlie, on Facebook, in which he pointed out how astonishingly well the Free Market has done in the last fifty years, in making us massively more wealthy. All of us.)
They managed to believe this despite the fact that escapes occurred overwhelmingly in one direction: from the USSR to the free world.
Humans can believe just about anything if it’s printed in glossy magazines and nice (wholly made up) figures. Particularly if it tells them what they very much want to believe.
So… You’ve probably by now got the glad tidings, that our unemployment is way down, and we’re roaring…
Do you believe it? Or does it seem like a repeat of the “roaring recovery through the summer of 12 which continued through the elections, so that smart people said that “the economic policies of the Obama administration are working. We must give them more time” even as they made fun of us skeptics who said “uh… isn’t this awfully convenient timing? And lookit the innards of these figures?”
Amazingly when the real news trickled out they were not only bad, but appalling, kind of like the squalor beneath the facade of the USSR.
Steve Green goes into the figures behind our “good news” here.
Is he right? Or are the people right who say “see, cutting off unemployment insurance works?” (Of course it does. Drops people off the books like a rock.)
Look, I know I have my haunch. Yeah, yeah, the plural of anecdote isn’t data. Bah. Do you see the job market superheated, right now? Are your friends spoiled for a choice of jobs after years of unemployment? Do you see the restaurants with a wait after work, as they had even ten years ago? Do you see shops opening? Do you feel the economy taking off?
Or are you sitting there figuring out how to make your car limp another year, and are your friends in pretty much the same situation? Are you tempted to cry while grocery shopping, because everything costs three times more? Is your family all out of luxuries to cut, and is now cutting into what you used to consider necessities?
I’ll confess my situation and those of my friends resemble the second more than the first. I confess after summer of recovery 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 and… I don’t believe the economy is roaring back. I confess I think this is a case of lies, damn lies and government reports.
But the the truth is as unknowable as the truth about who created the universe. While I doubt the fact sand figures of our sad situation are transcendant and unknowable by the human mind, when you are dependent on a government for all your information, and when that government visibly puts ideology over information, you end up not knowing.
Look, it’s entirely possible that people who were dead broke in their town in the USSR, and who knew all their neighbors were broke, yet thought that maybe, possibly, in other towns the economy was roaring. They had no way of knowing.
By making itself an uncritical lapdog, our media has made itself even more partisan, more unreliable, than the old Pravda and the glossy Soviet Life.
Which means the books are cooked, but we don’t know how far. We don’t know if some books aren’t cooked. We don’t know which books are cooked.
The problem is not just that absent information on what’s really happening, we can slide slowly into the abyss, as others before us — Zimbabwe, Argentina, Greece — have. The problem the information on what is going on with the economy is vital for a hundred different decisions: which job to take; what property to buy; whether to invest in this or that.
Of course, the administration that couldn’t run a lemonade stand doesn’t know that. They’re academics and ideologues for whom the essential ingredient for success has been fanatical adherence to progressive ideology, not rational analysis of reality.
And so they spin their numbers and they think if they click their heels three times and wish really hard, this time when they stop telling us lies after securing the election, it will really be true. The economy will be roaring, you see, roaring.
It might very well be true, too. Being from Colorado I’m used to massive fires, and they do roar as they consume anything of value in their path and leave only ashes and destruction behind.
Which is what I expect to be plain once this last effort of obfuscation evaporates.
But until then even sensible people are believing those glossy pictures. Because none of us wants to see the real squalor. It must be that we love simplicity! Yes, and we’re really aesthetically advanced. And besides, this is a wonderful day until we get buried in the corn field.
And we don’t know the truth. Knowing you’re being lied to is not the same as knowing the truth.
They say the truth will set you free. Perhaps that’s why the administration is so carefully making sure no one (not even the various departments who make up one or the other set of numbers, but assume all others are right) has it.
And meanwhile we drown in a welter of made up figures and pretend facts.
“What is the truth?” a man of the world asked.
At least he had the decency to wash his hands.
According To Hoyt 
In the same vein, there’s an opinion column in the WSJ today titled “Confessions of a Computer Modeler”, detailing how the EPA asked him to cook the books. I don’t subscribe to the WSJ so I haven’t been able to read it yet (I think they’ll make it available to everyone after a few days, but right now it’s new enough that it’s subscribers-only), but the Powerline guys quoted a few paragraphs in this blog post.
Key quote, after the guy’s supervisor had shot down three modeling runs for producing “wrong” results and told the modeler to go back and redo his model: “I finally turned enough knobs to get the answer he wanted, and everyone was happy …”
Once this article becomes free-to-read, I’ll be sending it to everyone I know, saying “keep in mind when you read predictions about global warming that they’re based on computer models.” Specifically, computer models of the future, none of which have been able to predict the past or the present.
There are many ways to lie to people, and politicians seem bound and determined to explore every single possible one.
Burt (the Great) Rutan is very, very, anti-AGW.. He took his considerable brain and decided to look into AGW to see if maybe he could come up with anything to help the situation. After seeing the models, and looking into the numbers, he decided that it was a massive fraud, and is known to not even talk to reporters who he knows push the AGW line.
Of course, the True Believers, will point out he is not a “Climate Scientist”.
They are right … if he did things like those they follow, likely Mike Melville would be dead from attempting to fly a poorly designed plane of some sort.
The article is available now. (At least, when I googled it, I was able to read the whole article. WSJ is weird.)
Best line in the article:
“Surely the scientific community wouldn’t succumb to these pressures like us money-grabbing consultants. Aren’t they laboring for knowledge instead of profit? If you believe that, boy do I have a computer model to sell you. “
I guess the WSJ has a bit of code in their servers that says “if you got here by clicking on a News search result on Google, we’ll let you read that article.” Probably to give people a “free sample” they were already interested in, in hopes of convincing them to buy the rest.
At any rate, I just read the article myself now, and it’s amazing how mealy-mouthed the author is as he tries hard to avoid the obvious conclusions. For example, he says, “Was the EPA official asking me to lie? I have to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he believed in the value of continuing the program.” Gee, let me think: he’s just been told “keep tweaking your model until you get the conclusion I want.” And he knows, though he’s trying very hard to dodge that knowledge, that the official is going to take that computer model result to Congress and say, “This program will produce $2 billion in benefits, and here’s the proof.” Conveniently omitting the fact that he ordered precisely those results to be produced. That’s what’s called a lie, and Mr. Caprara knows it. He was asked to become an accessory to that lie, and he valued his paycheck more than he valued the truth, so he acquiesced.
Another example of Mr. Caprara’s valuing his paycheck more than he values the truth is found in his discussion of the climate change debate. He knows full well, from his own professional experience, what a load of bovine excrement most of the AGW models are built on. But he also knows how much pressure would be brought onto PSKW LLC, his employer, if he were to actually say so. So he speaks in mealy-mouthed platitudes and hopes that people will read between the lines, rather than stating his opinion.
It might be a little unfair of me to call him a coward, since my job is not at stake if I speak the truth. So my own bravery is small: it costs me little to say “the AGW hypothesis is a fraud built on bullying those who disagree into silence.” It would cost Mr. Caprara a lot more to come out and say so out loud. And yet, his choice not to do so is still cowardice. Just because the stakes are higher does not change the truth — it just makes the coward’s path easier to choose. It would have taken him more courage to speak the truth than it takes me to speak the truth, but giving in to fear is still giving in to fear, no matter if that fear is large or small.
The key words (to me at least) in the article are:
“There are no exact values for the coefficients in models such as these. There are only ranges of potential values. By moving a bunch of these parameters to one side or the other you can usually get very different results, often (surprise) in line with your initial beliefs.”
I don’t have but a very tiny experience in modeling of this type, from the seventies when I was studying physics at Cornell and we tried our hand at a rudimentary model of the Martian atmosphere. What we found even then with the crude model we made was that by adjusting the various thermodynamic and fluid flow parameters was that we could get pretty much any result we wanted.
All models are wrong, but some are useful.
Models are made by making simplifying assumptions from the case of the real world. These make the thing easier to calculate, at the cost of making it match reality less closely.
We have to make some in order to have a mathematical model at all, because the real world has so fine level of detail that our measurement error introduces enough uncertainty to make it beyond calculation.
It is easy to simplify to uselessness. Treating the world as a homogeneous sphere of constant temperature cannot tell us anything about human impact.
The flip side is that the more complicated the model, the easier it is for it to slide into crazy land without the person working on it being aware.
‘A scientist made this model, so reality will conform to it’ is magical thinking. To be specific, ‘the map is the territory’.
Models are useful scientific methods, and we certain need to try to understand the climate as it changes–whatever the cause.
But mistaking the models for reality, using the models for political purposes, and then “adjusting” the input data . . . That’s not science.
To paraphrase another author, “The map is not the territory. The file is not the man.”
I guess the WSJ has a bit of code in their servers that says “if you got here by clicking on a News search result on Google, we’ll let you read that article.”
From what I was told, Google requires that any article that comes up in their search results has to be available for free when you click through, so that’s probably how they do it.
I had a college OR professor who talked about the three rules of forecasting. They are (as best as I can recall):
1) The forecast is wrong.
2) The forecast will change.
3) The further out the forecast is, the further the predicted value will be from what actually happens.
You can see these in a simple way just by looking at weather forecasts. And these rules are why I take anything that the global warming alarmists say with a giant grain of salt. It’s like the guys who predict the hurricane season in January who finally admitted their model didn’t really work.
Oddly my google-fu only found the “you have to pay for this article” version.
Ho hum, I got enough of it.
I think it can be summed up by Newton’s Laws of Experts.
– First Law: every expert persists in his state of rest or opinion unless acted upon by an external grant;
– Second Law: the rate of change of opinion is directly proportional to the applied grant; and
– Third Law: for every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.
(taken from
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6812 )
*snort*
This I like, and so will copy to the quotes file.
I should add that to the second non-fic book’s conclusion.
Robin, we get the paper version – wasn’t that an astonishing article? I wonder if one of the government agencies will “make this many sorry” like the VA management has done to so many whistleblowers/
That, I believe, is precisely why he was so mealy-mouthed about the AGW debate’s computer models: he was trying to protect his job from retaliation by EPA bureaucrats. (Or some other agency, but the EPA seems most likely given that article). He’s about to find out that it won’t work: for the crime of even hinting that the anti-AGW position may have a smidgen of truth about it (“[People] usually have great BS detectors, and when they see one side of a debate trying to shut down the other side, they will most likely assume it has something to hide, has the weaker argument, or both”), someone will make sure he Never Works In This Town Again™.
” Or are the people right who say “see, cutting off unemployment insurance works?” ”
These are the same people that have been insisting on 96 weeks worth of unemployment for the last several years.
And yes cutting people off the dole will work to an extent to cause people to go back to work. (although just switching which line they stand in for their handout, doesn’t work nearly as well) What it works even better for though, is dropping the number of people receiving that dole. And if you are counting the number of unemployed solely by counting how many are receiving unemployment benefits; why yes cutting said benefits off does tend to lower the numbers very effectively.
Or as I’m fond of saying “It’ll all get a lot simpler when the money runs out. Not better – but simpler.”
It won’t be all that much longer, I think… 😦
One of the things I found amusing in Steve Green’s article was the fact that FULL TIME jobs dropped by 500k, while part-time jobs ROSE by 800k. That means that there are more people working, but they’re all working fewer hours, and output is unchanged.
Lots of people getting cut to 30 hours, to avoid Ocare.
When the government changes the regs so that it costs more for an employer to have one full time employee than it does for them to have two part time employees (even at considerably more total hours) a lot of employers are going to go to part time help.
Yep. Simple math, it hurts! In my own teeny business, I have only one employee – me, and a part of another – my daughter. Everything else is independent contractors or service providers. Welcome to the wonderful new world of guilds, and of personal relationships – that of employers giving work to skilled experts personally known to them. Thanks, Obamacare – you have done so much for us, we are lost for words to express our ‘gratitude’*
* Yeah, those are viciously skeptical quote marks.
Reality so often outpaces sarcasm and parody these days, it’s sometimes a challenge to be humorous.
Government regulation has made independent contractors the business wave of the future. I first seen it in the timber industry back when I was in high school. Regulations made it so onerous for employers to have employees, due to insurance requirements, additional safety regulations for employees, excessive liability for employers, Unemployment Insurance, Social Security and the whole ball of wax. So outfit after outfit fired all their employees, then immediately rehired them as independent contractors, who got paid more, but were responsible for their own insurance, Social Security, Medicare, and saving money to live on during the seasonal down times. This has since transferred to most other industries; interestingly enough the path of the surge in independent contractors roughly coincides with the path of government intrusion into business.
Only problem is that independent contractors don’t have large organizations to lobby those in Washington making the rules. And around about tax time the government always runs short on lube, so they aren’t going to waste any on the independent contractors.
Happened in the VFX industry as well, at least at some shops
I’ll believe my lying eyes. I think that this is the worst economy since the Great Depression.
I didn’t live through the Great Depression, but most of the family I grew up around did. They lived through it. Our current situation is going to leave a lasting legacy to future generations, as well.
Those descendants of ours to come, when they look back will they see the crazy? Be able to distill out what actually happened from what most folks said? Maybe they will be re-learning skills their parents forgot, or never learned themselves. Maybe they’ll have inherent suspicion of anyone offering something “free” (and a good thing, that).
It may be that they grow up to value freedom more. If they know it. String-cut, no net, mistakes-cost-real-things freedom. When something’s at risk, or when it’s already gone, we tend to value it more, after all. Hope it gets better, though.
I think the main reason the government is getting away with calling this a recovery is that the banks are still working. If they go, yeah, then all doubt will evaporate.
“the banks are still working” up to a point Lady Copper, up to a point.
If you are a small business (or individual without a spotless credit record) then any attempt to get a load from the bank demonstrates that they are NOT really working.
The banks are still in business because the central banks (Fed, BoE, ECB etc.) are printing money and lending it to the banks at extremely low rates of interest (effectively 0%) that the banks then turn around and “invest” in givernment bonds at a slightly higher rate of interest. They then pay their salaries etc. on the difference in interest rates.
PS http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/18/get_rich_quick_scheme/ has a useful way to split up banks:
One way to think about banking is to divide it into four different types: transaction, savings, commercial and investment. Investment banking is all that City-style markets ‘n’ stuff; commercial is trying to work out to whom you should lend money; savings is flogging savings certificates to retail punters; and the latter, transactional banking, is what we should concern ourselves with here today. People need to be able to put their wage packet into an account and then use some system to be able to pay their bills and get a bit of cash from an ATM.
Also, the Stock Market continues to rise.
Of course, possibly the biggest reason that it continues to rise is that interest rates are non-existant, which means that putting your money in the bank is a losing proposition (since you won’t be gaining any interest). So quite literally the *only* place to invest money right now is in the stock market.
I think that for some people bank interest rates are negative. You pay more in fees than you get in interest.
The Stock Market is “growing,” but that not a good thing.
http://home.earthlink.net/~intelligentbear/com-dj-infl.htm
Just because a number gets larger doesn’t mean the value of the stock market rose. In nominal evaluation the Stock Market is just now hovering around where it was in 2000. And 2000 was do to the Tech Bubble. Tech collapsed. Housing Collapsed. Now we are just inflating a currency bubble and trying to call that growth in the stock market.
How dumb do you have to be to fall for the same thing more than twice?
Thing is, there’s literally NOWHERE else to put it right now. It’s either put it in the stock market, or you might as well leave it under your mattress.
junior,
I would in vest in tangible assets over the stock market. I would sugest investing in the tools and skills to set up a machine/repair shop and a blacksmith forge. I would invest in securing muliple sourced of food production. Auquaponics and Food Forests along with suporting local farmers markets. I would invest in barter items of of things that might become hard to find or produce.
The US Markets are also not the only markets.
The trouble with machine shops, forges, hydroponics, etc., etc., is that they require not just an investment of capital, but enormous amounts of time and skill. If you do them as hobbies you will do them badly, and you might as well be throwing away your money. If you do them for a living you will have to give up whatever you were doing for a living before, and since you will be going from a business you knew well to one you know little about, you will end up not having any more money to throw away.
Tom,
Your point seems to be that this will be hard and difficult so why bother. Or maybe or don’t try anything new because you won’t be good at first? You can fail doing or trying anything. Are you looking for a guaranty? There is no guarantees in life, but one.
Difficulty is not a reason not to learn self-sufficiency skills, and decuple from collecting little pieces of papper to trade in for the nesesities of life. Hell! It might be all the more reason to start now to learning skills and building under* in your free time. At some point we might not have a choice and then we will be playing catchup.
* https://accordingtohoyt.com/2013/02/21/building-under/
“Back to Basics” is a whole book on skills our grand and great grand parents had to fall back on that current generations lack.
His point that “if you buy stuff you don’t know how to use, you’re going to do it badly” should include that “doing it badly” can mean destroying the expensive thing you just bought or maiming yourself, in addition to wasting the materials used in an attempt.
Don’t invest in equipment if you aren’t at least basically familiar with the use of; invest in training if you think you’re interested.
Even if you previously had training, you should get a class before picking something like smithing back up.
http://whitehartforge.com/classes/
If you’re in travel range of Portland, this dentist’s classes are first rate and the required basic course has you making all of your tools.
next piece of equipment we’re looking at is a 3D printer
Oooooh, shiny!
yes, I can model well enough to make use of it, and yes, i can make watertight models. I was thinking of seeing if there was a good enough description of a ‘burner’ to create one…
Nice thing about three-D printers, if you know enough to know that they CAN be bought, you probably respect them enough to know what you’re doing.
Blacksmithing… well, there’s more than one reason why that shop I linked insists of folks doing the basic course first, no matter what.
yeah, i couldn’t do that anymore…
(One of these days I’d like to try my hand at whitesmithing, but that’s a pipe dream for now.)
whitesmithing?
Usually used (or at least in old books) for folks who worked in silver, but includes tin and any metal that isn’t “black” like worked iron. Poking around, it’s even used for iron work that is shiny– galvanized or stainless.
I’d be more in the tinker-or-jewelry category, mostly repair. I’m pretty good at invisible fixes, but… well, silver is expensive and I have no real art skills. (or, if we’re going to be nice, my taste differs from the fashions)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinsmith
What’s whitesmithing?
Silver, tin, any “white” metal– usually expands to include anything you make jewelry out of, even though copper isn’t white.
Foxfrier,
Agreed that is why I said, “I would sugest investing in the tools and skills to set up a machine/repair shop and a blacksmith forge.”
🙂
When they are crucial, however, people will make the leap. Particularly if their old business, the one they knew so much about, has been rendered obsolete by the Leviathan.
I agree it won’t be fun.
The taxes on owning equipment (or land) will eat you alive.
Washington has exemptions for folks who make stuff (manufacturers, but I wanted to give the definition) but have decided that if you, say, do anything else– you’re not a manufacturer.
Also, from my TSP reports– the non-US markets are doing worse. They dove and, from memory, some are still randomly losing value.
Foxfier,
What?
Not exemptions but deductions. Certain business are given deductions to help with exspense of owning/buying the equipment.
Other than a Sales Tax, at the time of purchase, I’m not aware of any taxes on just owning equipment.
And property taxes all depended on where you live.
Also, whether or not you can afford something is all dependent on your revenue streams. “eat you alive” is a broad statement based on no actual specific information or situation.
My point was I would rather place my money into tangible assests than into a system that in a bad year can loose most of the value of the investment.
In 2008 peoples 401k’s lost on average 50% of their value.
How many peoples house mortgagees are under water?
Foxfrier, I was just pointing out my preferences and what I believe to be correct. Other are free to invest differently.
To each their own.
Other than a Sales Tax, at the time of purchase, I’m not aware of any taxes on just owning equipment.
Sign making company.
He explained that the extra taxes for having the equipment, after they’ve been charged for the 4 years they’ve been deemed to have been in violation, will be a worker’s salary.
And exemption. Not deduction. You can find a stream of the Lars Larson show if you’d like to verify.
Foxfrier, I was just pointing out my preferences and what I believe to be correct. Other are free to invest differently.
And I was pointing out additional considerations that need to be considered; imagine if I’d pointed out that much equipment deteriorates over time if not properly up-kept, even when not in use.
Foxfier,
Fair enough point taken.
For both of you, what Foxifer is talking about is a real property tax on equipment and facilities used to operate a business. At the moment it can include things like buildings, drill presses and office art. At this point in my state there is no real property tax on private possessions, just property.
Be careful; they’re sneaky. For example, in both AL and TX, a major component of your vehicle tags are “property taxes”, once you start examining the details….
It will get better, the only questions are: How long will it take? And at what cost?
My father lived through the Depression. Things were rougher then, I think. Times were certainly quite different.
Very different. I was raised by my maternal grandparents who kept a business going through two world wars and the depression between them, so got a lot of anecdotal information first hand.
During the worst of the depression the head of the family would often hit the road seeking odd jobs or join the CCC for room, board, and a few pennies of salary. His wife and kids went to live with family on the farm where they at least had a roof over their heads and food to eat. At least that was the case in the midwest where I was born. Found out there was a different attitude in the south when I moved here back in the ’80s. When the bottom fell out of the cotton markets the large cotton growers did not as I would have assumed start truck gardens to feed the families. Instead they plowed up their yards to plant more cotton. Land owners, you see, didn’t grow their own food, they bought it with their earnings. So a lot of formerly rich land owners starved and lost their farms while the poor folk struggled through but survived.
Of course there are no family farms these days, they’re all corporate mega farms, specializing in one GMO crop or another, so that safety net is long gone.
As for the business that supported my grand folks? Grand dad was a baker. People always need bread, and if they do splurge birthday and wedding cakes are high on the list.
Of course there are no family farms these days, they’re all corporate mega farms, specializing in one GMO crop or another, so that safety net is long gone.
Not actually true.
And no, the family farms aren’t all living off of gov’t grants, either. The trust fund babies with their start-up organic farms and the really big guys generally do get a lot, but people who don’t have a dedicated secretary avoid them where possible. (sometimes you’re required to apply for them, such as for automated sprinklers in my folks’ area– an erosion reduction program)
I get my potatoes from a huge farm… owned by a single guy. The only genetic modding in those is the old fashion way.
Pet peeve. (Along with the cousin where the “organic” stuff tends to come from mega farms because that’s who can afford to lose so much food.)
Thanks for posting this Foxfier. I knew it wasn’t true but I didn’t know how to say it.
Forgive me my hyperbole.
I know that family farms still exist. I know a number of farmers, but the days of a family owning 400 acres and earning a decent living are mostly gone. The exception would be high density poultry farms in my area, but those are not typical of most of the country. In general family farms have had to expand tremendously simply to compete. And my main point was that the ratio of city folk to farm folk has drastically changed since the depression days. There just aren’t the sheer number of family farms that might accommodate kinfolk for an extended stay as there were back in the day.
And my mention of GMO was not intended as a slam. My only reservation about the process is that I fear it leaves large portions of our agriculture vulnerable to a single failure, somewhat like the famed Irish potato famine, mainly because one strain tends to dominate a particular market, so disease or blight that targets that strain can wipe out a significant portion of the year’s crop.
As for “organic” farming, John Ringo did that subject quite completely in his novel “The Last Centurion.”
US population in 1930 was 123 million. now it’s 317 million, and much more urbanized. A bank collapse, people losing everything, paychecks not honored etc. will send us straight into the depths of an obvious depression, with two and a half times as many people, too many of them raised to expect the government to support them, and too many of them on the government payroll at one level or another.
Point; a lot of “family farms” ARE “corporate mega farms”, because that’s what makes sense with the tax laws the way they are. You incorporate, you save on taxes. you incorporate, your liabilities are lower. And if, as farmers, your family is successful, you tend to buy more land to farm, because that’s what you know how to do.
John Ringo touches on this in THE LAST CENTURION, but I’ve seen it in Iowa, Ohio, and elsewhere.
Small family farms stay small family farms either because they are failing, or because the next generation isn’t interested in farming …. and if they get taken by the banks it’s often because the next generation was more interested in collecting neat tractor-stuff than in actually doing the work. Successful family farms get bigger, incorporate, and freak out the greenies who (as usual) don’t know nothin’ about nothin’ beyond the confines of their little urban or academic bubbles.
Yes, what you say is true. There is another aspect of it. Family farms used to passed down by inheritance. Your parents died, the family farm was either split between a couple siblings, (often with one running the farm and paying a lease to the others for their portion) or one sibling bought out the others. Usually in payments lasting for years, because farms are expensive, a farm large enough to make a living wage off of running, costs a tremendous amount to buy. A lot of these farms had been being run by the child/children for quite a few years before the death of the parents. They had grown up working on the farm, and gradually took over the work as the parents aged. The only real difference at the parents death is that the name on the deed changed.
Now days with the inheritance tax, the only way for most family farms to stay in the family is either for them to be VERY successful or for the child to take a successful job elsewhere and save up enough money to virtually be able to buy the farm outright in order to be able to afford to pay the taxes when their parent dies. At which point they already have a successful career, so the most common things to do with the family farm are a) sell it, or all of it but a small chunk, generally the original home, that is saved for a retirement home, b) incorporate it and have someone else run it, or c)lease it out to the corporation owned by that guy down the road that was two grades ahead of you in school and already incorporated his family farm and is attempting to gather up enough land to farm to both pay his employees wages and see enough of a profit to make it worthwhile/live on himself/retire on himself. or d) sell half of it to that corporation owned by the guy down the road, in order to pay the taxes, usually the best half, and put the rest of it in CRP in order to both lower taxes, and attempt to bring in enough government money to pay most of those taxes.
So yep, most of those family farms are corporations, and more are going that way every generation. Those yuppie farms where some yuppie moves out to the country and buys a farm with mommy and daddies money, and then grows all organic veggies, free range chickens, and free range, organic goaties; they don’t last generations.
The inheritance tax is a blight on the land. It ensures, among other things, that after the founder of a company dies there will be nobody directly connected with it that gives a damn about it’s reputation, save as an abstract PR matter.
The suits take over, and they have the kind of mentality that takes weeks to recognize that something they have done that is completely legal represents a public relations catastrophe. Case in point; the year the man who found the $1,000,000 McDonalds game piece and gave it to his pastor. It took McDonalds three days to realize that saying “Well they aren’t transferable, so we don’t have to pay out” was going to cost them a hell of a lot more than ponying up the $1,000,000 (and, yes, I know they had insurance to pay for the prize that wouldn’t pay because of the non-transferable clause).
I have to believe that Ray Croc would have stopped that nonsense in 24hrs, if not before we ever heard about it. That was HIS BABY.
So in most companies, there’s no one to say “Look, don’t be an asshole about this; my NAME is on the building!”
I remember back in the early 1980 how many old family farms had to be sold to holding groups (mostly Japanese, IIRC) because of the inability of the heirs to cough up the state and fed death taxes. Not a happy time in Nebraska, the early 1980s.
Things were rougher then in the best of times. Prices were slighter higher west of the Rockies because it was harder to get stuff there. Medical treatments were more primitive — there were no mass-produced antibiotics! Fresh fruit was not flown in from Chile in the dead of winter.
I love the scene at the beginning of the second Captain America movie where Steve Rogers lists some of the things that he likes about the 21st Century… and the virtual eradication of polio is one of the things he brings up.
Amen. I interviewed a gent who had been one of the first, if not the first person west of the Missouri River treated with penicillin. He got bitten by a catfish while noodling and the wound turned septic. The only thing was this experimental treatment, and the doc had to have the stuff flown in.
Was in an online discussion once about The Great Divorce where a reader did not understand the grumbling ghost. One problem was that he didn’t realize when she said, “They should never have operated” she was saying she was deathly ill, because they did operate. At that time — he was writing during World War II — they never operated unless they considered the risk of your developing a fatal infection in the wound was worth it.
TB is back.
Polio keeps surviving out there due to the “vaccines are a Western plot!” nutjobs in parts of the Islamic world.
Alas, we’re getting it in the Western world due to leftist nutjobs. Different forms of idiocy, similiar results. It’s like a moronic convergence or something.
Unfortunately, the idiocy isn’t confined to the leftist nutjobs. I have quite a large group of very right-wing friends who are rabidly anti-vaccine. We can’t even discuss it anymore because they are so certain that vaccination is just another way “the government is trying to control us” (because it’s in bed with Big Pharma, you know). I’m considered one of the poor deluded “sheeple” because I chose to vaccinate all my children.
Amusingly, I’ve been accused of being a rabid anti-vaccine person because I point out that they do have risks, and shouldn’t be mandatory unless it’s a VERY high risk disease that is transmitted socially.
For example, I’m one of those annoying people who quite seriously never got the flu unless I’d been vaccinated; I’d guess it had to do with putting everyone through the place that sick people go; my husband is one of the one in… three hundred?… that had a reaction requiring hospitalization from the small pox vaccine. (Navy)
Good grief, I grew up around cattle– it’s not a zero-cost option to use a vaccine! (not talking money, in this case) Thing is, that is more along the lines of explaining “no, you cannot require that people have the flu vaccine to go out in public, that’s crazy” than arguing against MMR or any of the other “helps prevent stuff that maims or kills” vaccines.
Heaven save us from the folks who wish to force things for our own good….
It’s kind of scary to watch folks who are otherwise rational go all magical thinking about vaccines– makes me halfway believe the folks you hear about on the news, who poison themselves with prescription medication because it must be OK if it came from the doctor, even when you totally ignore the use information.
There are anti vaccine idiots here in the states. They endanger everyone’s health.
Mom Nature in her own uniquely caring and gently way will over the long haul correct such practices. In the meanwhile we all suffer the actions of fools.
Oh, and I was also exposed to TB over 20 years ago in the US. Fortunately, so long as you don’t actually develop it during your initial exposure, we have drugs now that are supposed to reduce the risk of developing it later on as a result of a previous exposure.
Even if you develop it, it can be combated. As in, I’m still here. They caught it at six when I went to school.
it can be combated now. If it develops resistance. . . .
Yeah, that’s what really scares me right now…
It has developed resistance. There is one strain that is resistant to ALL THREE available drug therapies.
My husband was vaccinated against TB, which is a vaccine we can’t get in the USA. What no medical professional has been able to tell me is why we can’t get it, or whether the kids should get it while visiting their grandparents overseas someday. They do, however, get annoyed that husband had the vaccine, because it’s inconvenient that they can’t check the negative skin test box.
yes, they should. My kids have taken a lot of vaccines because we travel to Portugal. Where, btw, tb is endemic.
Here’s what the CDC says about it.
http://www.cdc.gov/tb/publications/factsheets/prevention/bcg.htm
Not too cure why the skin test matters to them, if the vaccine has been given, though.
My hubby was vaccinated in Vietnam. He also can’t do the skin test, which annoys the docs tremendously. 😉
Wayne, medical professionals being merely human: if the skin test can’t be done, it’s more work for them. There’s no spot on the forms for ‘person has been vaccinated’ so they try to talk husband into an unnecessary chest x-ray, I put my foot down, they have to write a letter. So they get annoyed.
The chest x-ray thing is weird, since the site mentions that the blood test rarely gives false positives.
My brother was diagnosed with TB when he was little, and had to have chest x-rays every year (at a time when they were the bad old high-power kind), until he had one at 17 or 18 and was told:
Doctor: “You never had TB.”
Brother: “Huh?”
Doctor: “If you had had TB, you would have scars on your lungs, but you don’t.”
Brother: “Then why did they diagnose TB?”
Doctor: “Back then, there was something going around that presented like TB, and a bunch of people were diagnosed who didn’t have it.”
Brother: “Oh, great, so I’ve been getting these X-rays for no reason.”
Doctor: “Yeah, Pretty much.”
Okay, here’s one for you — had tb. Half of one lung was a mass of scars. Was required to have x rays EVERY year. Test was positive. Had intercellular pneumonia. Suddenly tested negative. X-rays are clear. Explanation? NONE
HOWEVER ten (?) years ago stumbled on a study that says if you get JUST the right type of infection, it somehow gets lungs to regenerate to recover. Can’t find study now. If I didn’t have DECADES of x rays showing corroded lung, would not believe it myself. Fortunately husband remembers too and tells me I’m not nuts.
Probably they were going by symptoms. In the 19th century, people with consumption were sometimes known to recover with a month or two in the country. 21st century deduction: wasn’t TB, actually.
On the lung regeneration, I’ve read elsewhere that we do have the genes for regrowing things in our system, and in theory it should work, but it currently doesn’t because the scaring process outruns the regeneration process in most cases.
I’m wondering if there is a connection, and one disease has something about it that inhibits the scaring process, without also inhibiting the regeneration process. The disease itself would cause enough damage that new tissue of some form would have to be grown.
The “undocumented juveniles” now flooding the border and being airlifted to San Diego are carrying much more than their little selves, some literally crawling with lice and parasites I’ve never heard of “Chagas”? as well as new varieties of TB etc. If they won’t deport them, maybe they could be shipped to Washington DC and bunked in the halls of congress.
Chagas disease
Charming.
If it comes from the tropics, assume it is trying to kill you. If it comes from Africa, assume it is actively trying to eradicate you and your posterity from the face of the planet. As one of my profs pointed out, assuming that humans came from Africa, “the bugs there have had a lot longer to figure out interesting ways to kill us.”
Yup.
If antibiotic resistance knocks out enough antibiotics, we’re going to have to forget feminism. Because the societies that keep it will go extinct.
Oh, yeah, now that I think about it, TB got mentioned by Cap as well, though it was in the first movie. Steve explains his mother’s death as “She was a nurse who worked in a TB ward.”
My brother-in-law is a pulmonary specialist, I heard about this 20-30 years ago.
Yeah, my cousin would have probably preferred that happened a little sooner.
I didn’t know him very well (he lived in another state), but my Dad’s uncle was affected by polio. He walked with a limp, and had to use a cane as a result of it.
Nowhere near as bad as a lot of people. But still a problem that I’m sure he would have happily done without.
I think it’s a great line in the movie, and showed that someone on the writing staff was paying at least a little attention. To Cap it would have been a big deal. When he went to sleep, the Iron Lung was a very real thing. When he woke up, a good-sized chunk of the population had never heard of them.
Why would (in the Avengers movie) Captain America say that patriotism was old-fashioned? I know why a screenwriter would think that, but isn’t it out of character for Captain America to say that?
I gathered, (my opinion) that he’s noticed that things like being patriotic and such aren’t common things; he knows he is out of ‘touch’ with the world he’s woken up in, and it’s a bit of dry snark for the Captain. Everything he’s used to is now considered ‘old’ and ‘historic’, or ‘out of date’, so ‘old fashioned’ is kind of like ‘I know it’s not the in thing’ – at least, that’s how I interpreted his use of it.
Aha! I just don’t get things sometimes.
yes, he needs to go somewhere besides NYC and L.A.
Doesn’t he live in NYC though?
Yes, but in Marvel comics, so does everyone else 😀
Crowded city, New York.
Makes you wonder why the criminals don’t hit up Pittsburgh or something.
Because that’s where the money is! Also because they don’t to fall off the edge of the world past the Bronx.
Poor Steve also tried to move back into his old apartment block, which in his day was in a nice neighborhood of friendly folks… and he was finding out the hard way that it’s not the case in the age in which he woke… (At least in the comic I read. He was also quite horrified at the change in prices for clothes.)
Yes in Brooklyn. Because that is where he lived before he was Captain America.
He needs to come to Texas or Arizona or Louisiana or MS or AL etc.
Yes, that’s my point. But it is also the screenwriters (and the modern comic writers) with the same attitude.
Sounds like you read the Ultimates version of Cap. The Ultimates was an alternate universe version of The Avengers. Unfortunately, the series was written by Mark Millar (at least originally), and it’s colored by very heavily by an “America the Arrogant” tone, imo. Cap himself was a bit of a jerk – something completely opposite of the regular version.
When Cap in the Avengers movie is saying those things, he is somewhat depressed. That scene is very soon after he wakes in “our time”. He gets better later in the Avengers movie. By the way, I haven’t yet seen the “Winter Soldier” movie.
As for the Ultimate Cap, I haven’t read the Ultimate “series” but I have heard the same thing about that Cap.
I know some folks like the Ultimate stuff, but for someone that loved the classic ones… more like Ultimate Crap; I read enough to realize they were doing all the stuff that pisses me off in movie remakes of classics by folks who don’t love the original and stopped buying.
(I believe it as shortly after the Uncanny decided that Nightcrawler being a priest was a plot to trick the Catholic Church into making him Pope so that when they killed a ton of people they’d think the rapture was happening because his illusion device would break and he’d look like a demon so he’d be the anti-christ. Or something. I still have it somewhere, and I think TV tropes has it in the “wow, have you ever HEARD of research?” section.)
I only read the early Ultimate X-Men and I agree with “Ultimate Crap”. Of course, I’ve gotten away from the “Mainstream” X-Men because of the crap they’re doing. “Mutants = Gays” is utter nonsense. There are good reasons to fear Magneto and Professor X.
It’s kinda scary, really.
Black= Gay.
Gay= Mutant.
Mutant= walking nuclear device.
So if your’e black or homosexual you are morally the same as someone who can kill people with their mind.
And this is supposed to be SUPPORTING “minorities”?
(More along this line at “strawman/bigot has a point” on TV Tropes.)
“Fantastic Racism” is an even more suitable trope for dealing with mutants. Werewolves are just like another other persecuted group — except for the trivial detail that they go on a monthly murderous rampage.
He wasn’t advocating it only that it seems to be the prevaling thinking of the times.
My history mentor is a polio survivor. He’s used canes for the past 20 years, and has now shifted to using a scooter for long distances. And he still considers himself very, very lucky.
I went to high school with a boy who had no legs. Polio. High school.
There’s nothing quite like my husband sympathizing with my bad case of food poisoning by recounting the time he had cholera.
I may have been the one hurling up last week’s lunches, but he still “won.”
…I freakin’ love America. And Africa’s never getting him back.
I remember reading a story about a woman medevaced from I think the Philippines to have heart surgery because of rheumatic heart disease. Wasn’t available there. . . .
My grandfather died from that when my mother was a little girl. Wasn’t available at all. My mother once observed that they may have performed heart surgery at the time — once or twice, experimentally.
Some decades ago, when my Lady and I were moving into our first apartment together, the local Free Paper had an ongoing fight in the letters column over the possible side effects of the Polio vaccine (the beginnings of the Autism scare, maybe?). It was ended with a bang by a letter from an MD old enough to remember when Polio swept across the country every summer, and he was helpless to stop it. He said, in effect, that he would be prepared to commit murder to avoid ever having to live through that again.
Next week in the letters column? No letters about vaccines.
I am just old enough to remember how concerned and grateful that my grandparents were; that Mom ensured that my brother and I were to get polio inoculations. The vaccine came into use when we were both small children, and of course, my parents and grandparents recalled how the polio epidemic scourged children in the first half of the 20th century. It would have been a horrible thing to them – the scourge of the polio epidemic. I am just barely old enough to remember the child-sized wheel-chairs, the braces and the crutches. I wrote about this once – that the monster was gone, by the time that I was aware … but the lingering damage was left to be seen, everywhere, when I was in elementary school.
They started mass polio immunizations when I was in first grade. They came around to the schools . . . and my parents kept me home that day. I was dead lucky I never got it, and got myself immunized at 21.
Your parents kept you home intentionally?
Oh yes, and my sisters, so we didn’t accidentally get given this horrible stuff, despite a lack of signed permission.
I do remember my brother and I going to the doctor and getting the Salk shot. Then a couple years later we all lined up at the local school and were given blue sugar cubes with the Sabin oral vaccine. Not just the kids, the entire town of some 4,000 lined up and waited patiently for their turn. Only time I ever saw that bunch of krauts and dike climbers agree on much of anything. (I’m allowed to use those words because I have both in my ancestry, and besides, it’s the truth)
When we had the scare about smallpox as a terrorist weapon, my mother remembered that my older sister had the vax, and my younger hadn’t, and on me she dithered — I was just at the cusp — until finally I glanced in the mirror and noticed something while going to shower.
Next time I saw her, I pulled up my sleeve and said, “Isn’t that a smallpox vaccination scar?”
my generation didn’t get it — but as far as I can figure out, we HAD it, in the last plague sweeping Europe, the one that escaped from the lab.
The problem is, this was the village so it was indeterminate what it really was being called Measles and small pox by different people.
However, from both how it manifested (by zones. I was lucky. My scars are ALL on my belly.) and the mortality levels and hitting only kids under school age (aka unvaccinated) my older son thinks it was small pox.
“the possible side effects of the Polio vaccine”
Let us be just. Vaccines are frequently capable of killing people. As Thomas Sowell warns us, there are always trade-offs. If you don’t remember that, you end up with people who think they can vote themselves free everything without any consequences.
Technology helps a lot.
Oh yeah!
I’ve been thinking about the fact that my father was raised through the Depression, but then I keep going back to how they had a farm, and therefore didn’t have to worry about their food as much. Dad told me that, since they had cows, separated the milk and sold the cream, they had all the skim milk they wanted to drink, really never went wanting for meat to eat, and any times they didn’t have enough vegetables was because of his father being an idiot and not planting enough garden (they had plenty of space).
Now, they didn’t waste anything, but they weren’t really affected by it as much as other people, either.
Farmers were affected, but it was due to a couple of specific problems. The first was the Dust Bowl. I don’t think I need to say more about that. The other problem was the “helpful” *cough* schemes fixed up by the Roosevelt administration.
I’m actually sort of surprised that no government men came by to harrass your parents about selling the cream from their cows.
If you ever want some interesting reading, look up Wickard v Filburn.
Or J. Evetts Haley’s article “Cow Business and Monkey Business” that was in the Saturday Evening Post. He talks about the AAA, ranchers, and drought. Short version: he’s not a fan.
Let us be just. On the whole, the law at question in that case had effect of regulating interstate commerce. The man growing his own grain was the fringe of those affected.
It’s not like calling it interstate commerce to force people to buy something that can’t be sold across state borders.
That is an excellent point. At least the SCOTUS was in the realm of possibility. It wasn’t like they were reviewing a “tax” before it had been collected or inventing a severability clause where there specifically was none.
Yeah, we had a communist President during the great depression that was going to put a chicken in every pot, and the government was going to make the economy all better for everybody.
Funny dat.
FDR was the communist and his policies extended the depression until the war saved the economy. He was a polio surviver BTW.
The war put a hiatus on it. We went into recession when it was over, and Truman tried to bring the New Deal back. We (finally!!!!) revolted and recovered.
The war didn’t save the economy. You can’t save an economy by spending money to blow stuff up. The war distracted FDR from diddling with the economy. THAT is what saved the economy.
Thank you. I’ve been saying this for years.
You have to admit that full employment was a shot in the arm to a moribund economy. Artificial and unsustainable long term given production was focused on war material, but throwing the country’s industrial machine into high gear certainly didn’t hurt. OTOH government wage controls resulted in employers offering never before seen fringe benefits such as health insurance as enticements to hire and keep the best workers.
Over employment. Thousands of retirees gave up retirement benefits to go back to work, a lot more (albeit estimated) did not apply for them because they were still working, kids left school to work, etc.
Full employment means diddly if you can’t buy anything because all of the goods are rationed. And full employment has its own set of problems, as you pointed out. What really gave the economy a shot in the arm was the extra five years of pent-up demand, but there was more than enough pent-up demand by the late ’30’s to drive a recovery. The problem was that FDR was masking all of the signals that would let people know where to invest.
Actually, something does need to be said about the “Dust Bowl”; it has been the accepted narrative for decades that this was “caused” by excessive farming and ranching. However, I remember reading some years ago that archaeologists had unearthed strong evidence suggesting that this was a recurring phenomenon of the North American Continent, that happened on a cycle a couple of centuries long.
Don’t know which is true, but I am suspicious of “The Plow That Broke The Plains” simply because it is so often used to support government intervention.
The drought is a recurring problem in North America. The poor plowing practices are what turned the drought into the Dust Bowl.
I have a ghastly book called “The Children’s Blizzard,” by David Laskin, about the Schoolhouse Blizzard or the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard of 1888. That’s another roughly hundred-year cycle. Wiki Schoolhouse Blizzard.
Pro “the plow did it:” Worst Hard Time (T. Egan), Dust Bowl (D. Worster – the classic for good reasons), and related. Climate school: “On the Great Plains” (G. Cunfer – not an easy book, read last chapters if just want conclusions) and James Malin’s “Kansas History Quarterly” articles starting here:http://www.kancoll.org/khq/1946/46_2_malin.htm
Yeah, that wasn’t gonna happen where they lived. And the Dust Bowl didn’t affect people here in Ky, except for perhaps raising the price they could sell things for.
Similar to what others have said, but– I bet the Depression archetypes are from the places that were dust bowled, and the stuff that depended on them to break even, at least at first.
(The “fixing” probably spread the pain around a LOT.)
We are in a country where 10s of millions are not working but still eating, watching TV, talking on a smart phone….you get the drift.
There is a difference between “can’t work” and “won’t work”. What would the perception of the economy and the ongoing recession be if poverty really was miserable for those who can work but won’t?
My parents lived through the Great Depression, and it was something they heard about on the radio. Yeah, I suspect the suffering of the GD was real but greatly exaggerated and the suffering now hidden from view as much as the MSM can manage it.
In 1938, my parents, then a young married couple, listened to Orson Welles’ broadcast of a radio drama based on “The War of the Worlds” by H. G. Wells. They thought it was a very well-done, engaging show. The next few days, there were stories in the newspapers about panics involving people thinking the story was a real news broadcast. No one in Gastonia reported anyone thininking the story was real, and I have never met anyone who participated in or witnessed any panic. It was just an approved,harmless silly season story, mostly a lie.
The thing was, the problem wasn’t the people who listened to the show. It was the people who were flipping the dial and happened on the show half way, without the clues it was fiction.
Except being on the same station, at the same time, that “Mercury Theater on the Air” was on every week.
The legend of the panic was ginned up from a couple of instances, and lives because of a few useful narratives: all powerful press, those rubes, and more. Wells certainly milked it do self-promotion.
Well, yeah, the alternative was to say, “Who heard it? Look at my ratings. Everyone was listening to Edgar Bergen.”
Seems a bit odd that, listening to a ventriloquist. But I guess Charlie McCarthy was a character on his own, independent of the ventriloquism novelty.
A ventriloquist . . . on the radio. (narrows eyes suspiciously)
Ever hear the phrase, “could sell refrigerators to an Eskimo,” ? Some people can convince people to buy anything.
Hey, Charley MacCarthy was cool, as was Rochester, who also played in some Topper movies. The radio also had fun stuff like the Lone Ranger, listened to with earphones under the blankets on my homemade Cub Scout crystal radio. Seriously,. and I’m not that old either.
The shows were performed in front of a live audience.
Old Surfer — I listen to “old time radio” via satellite on my commute. Johnny Dollar is some of the best detective fiction around; Jack Benny (and everyone in the cast of his show) is funnier than every modern “comedian” combined.
There are some duds, though… Lum and Abner, for example.
LOL. No joke, dude, the “War of the Worlds” ratings were way behind Bergen. It was actually “The Charlie McCarthy Show!”
You want some idea (late range, I hasten to add) how old I am? I was ALMOST named after a character in a RADIO soap opera! Barnabas Beverley Quinn!
I will sometimes when in a quirky and playful mood answer my phone with: “Duffy’s tavern, Duffy ain’t here!” Yet another reason my kids suspect the old man is a bit nuts.
“Do you have Prince Albert in a can? Well, let him out!”
Eric Frank Russell has a chapter on the Day The Martians Landed in the book THE RABBLE ROUSERS. It was only published once, but it’s well worth getting through interlibrary loan, for that story and several others; factual dark humor about mob behavior.
Similarly, I saw infinitely more stories about how huge that creepy con with the blue eyes was among “young women on social media” than I did anyone actually saying he was dreamy. (Two news stories about how horrible women are, two shares of different “people shared creepy dude but won’t share this Marine”– same Marine, too, just different pictures and overall graphic– and a couple of things from Salon and Huff’n’puff and such about “what does this say about us” type things.
Wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised that the vast majority was people (who would NOT have open pages, and thus wouldn’t be “reported” on but would be in the numbers) sharing it and going “Wow, this guy is gonna be in MY nightmares– looks like a psycho, what?”
Some experimental observations have more value than others. Seeing the number of small business locations that are still empty as you drive by them, fairly high. Politically-spun reports and statistics, not so much.
There’s your sign! Lots of “space available” all over the place, yet they keep building new malls and subdivisions.
I rank the building and road contractor associations as second only to the education associations for their behind the scene lobbyist activities and crony capitalism. With massive infrastructure investments they have to keep producing or watch their companies fail. And they’re not above bribery and other assorted chicanery to keep the money flowing at all costs.
Heard an interview with the Bend Downtown Business Council that said they had the highest rate of storefronts being full ever recorded, only two empty.
Eventually mentioned that they weren’t counting upstairs offices.
While I am no kind of expert, when I use to walk around it was notable that the upper floors were usually stuffed, while the ground ones with the nice big windows were for rent– obviously costing more.
If those are all rented out, it’s probably because the prices dropped. Bet the upper levels are echoing.
For many years my employment more or less depended on being able to catch details that others were missing. To do something like this, you’ve got to train yourself to see the details – not just look at them.
Economics? Eh. You can tell me this and that and something else – but I’m going to be seeing the real-world effects. I’m going to see the little strip shopping centers that are barely half-full with struggling businesses. I’m going to see the shopping centers that were thriving a decade ago now getting by with an anchor grocery store, a nail salon and dry cleaners on one end and a cheap Chinese place on the other.
A Family Dollar store opened up about a year ago in one. It’s closing now, for whatever reason. (I mostly shop at Walmart and Amazon, myself.)
And I remember what Obama said in 2008 – “Under my plan (cap and trade for CO2, because warming was the worst possible problem facing the US) the rates for electricity would necessarily skyrocket.”
The more energy costs, the more everything costs. Costs to produce, costs to transport, costs to keep the lights on in the stores… and the costs to keep businesses open and people employed.
Our elected elite in Washington could well believe that everything is fine in the hinterlands. After all, THEY don’t have to worry about food or gas prices. THEY have their expenses paid, so they don’t see the results of their efforts to ‘help’ us via more and more fine-tuned regulation that makes it difficult to do anything.
Almost makes me wonder if some of the idiots inside the Beltway have read the “Hunger Games” novels along with ‘1984’ and thought… hey, that could totally work as a social model…
Pardon me. I’m obviously running on a caffeine deficit. See ya’ll later.
When Gillard implemented the carbon tax here, our electricity bill nearly quadrupled. Just the other day I was told that there was a single woman protest done by a little old lady who basically sat down on the steps of a government building, where she pretty much had two government statements of either having to pay a massive electricity bill, or pay a massive fine for not paying on time. Her sign? “Which do I choose?”
On a 45 degree Celsius day.
(The story had a good ending; as exceptions and incentives were made for seniors who would need to turn on their air conditioners or heaters in order to survive the extreme temperatures, but worried about whether they could afford it.)
All the Carbon Tax stuff would make sense to me – if it were going to have any sort of actual effect.
Apparently all the carbon taxing and sequestration that’s on the table right now for the US will have the effect of dropping the temperature a whopping .05 C. And no, that’s not a misprint.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/05/epas-next-wave-of-job-killing-co2-regulations/
I like a good bit of science fantasy as much as the next guy, but there’s fantasy and then there’s reality. And the reality is that there’s fools in Washington DC who don’t see any problem at all with chasing a nebulous gain somewhere down the road and causing horrible damage in the process.
I thought that dropping temps was just a cover to scam money out of/impoverish the population. Many poor people are dependent on the gov’t. I think that they think that if we were all poor as Africans we’d be begging them to help us. My nightmare is that they want to turn us into Somalia and we’d be the starving hordes and they’d be the ultra powerful, ultra wealthy rulers.
I don’t think that’s as much of a nightmare as you think it is – it’s more reality. I think that’s what a fair number of people in politics are wanting – to set themselves up as a new aristocracy over a massive number of serfs and peons they see as stupid and in need of the right kind of ‘guidance’ – which they’re fortunately able to provide.
(Their disdain shows clearly for those they don’t consider ‘intelligent’ enough… which is basically everyone not like them.)
Fortunately, this country can take a lot of damage and our political system self-corrects fast once the constraints are removed and people see what’s going on. The IRS scandal, the VA scandal, the immigration scandal, the unemployment problems, the energy problems – it’s all putting pressure to swing the pendulum back towards the center, and the self-appointed aristocracy is going to be pretty unappy when it does.
At this point I’m ready to hang some from lamposts. I’m reserving tarring and feathering for especially awful cases.
I’m not quite ready to decorate lampposts – but the idiots need to realize their dream legislation is having bad effects on the reality the rest of us need to live in. They may get their jollies from passing it and getting stroked by their sycophants, but we’ve got to deal with the messes their ‘generosity’ is creating.
I think that they feel that there won’t be any negative consequences for them. They don’t know how close to the edge of the abyss they are treading. I think that they will have to find out the hard way that there are indeed negative consequences in store for them. Zero and his cronies have two more years to mess things up. If they go too far, their consequences will become harsh indeed. If a man feels that he has nothing left to lose, there’s many a thing he can do.
That’s okay; you can sell the rope to the rest of us. 🙂
What about sausage inna bun?
So fresh the pig ain’t noticed it’s missing yet.
You don’t use hot tar (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarring_and_feathering); today, you might even use glue. And it’s far more temporary in effects than stringing from lampposts.
How about we give them the sixth column treatment? Naked, choice words written in hard to wash off ink all over them, dropped miles from where they can get help?
Glue and feathers is easier to write (fewer chances of embarrassing misspellings!), easier to read from a distance or in a fuzzy TV or newspaper picture, and carries the same meanings.
(See, that’s the problem with writers: they think written words are always the best medium. 😉 )
Simple solution. Stencils and Krylon.
like tattoo ink?
oooh. “I’m a traitor to the people and the constitution of the united states” across the forehead.
I’d always favored the treatment meted out to Frenchwomen who slept with German soldiers, after Liberation, administered to the Fifth Column which afflicts our once-glorious republic. Stripped naked, head shaved, made to walk down the street, in front of jeering crowds.
The indelible ink, or temporary tattoos is a nice modern touch, though.
You’d need to pass out eye-bleach by the gallon, after Nancy Pelosi does her perp-walk, though.
Who said anything about temporary tattoos?
Time consuming, mostly. The crowd will want their jollies immediately.
Maybe after the perp-walk, the tattoos can be made permanent…
Endorsed.
I would use hot tar and feathers. I believe it’s the hot tar that kills the person.
You want to modulate your punishments. if the regular tar and feathers don’t larn ’em, you decide then what is the best final treatment.
Save the hot tar for the worst offenders.
I would use lampposts as a way of hanging from the neck until dead. I want them dead. No half measures.
Mockery makes for a less sympathetic martyr.
true. but vengeance beckons. However, that isn’t my prerogative. Does it say in the Torah, Vengeance is mine, sayeth HaShem? Being consumed by revenge is bad but I’m sure a little is ok.
D’varim (Deuteronomy) 32:35 is a promise, not a monopoly.
The New English Bible is wishy-washy. I do like the King James for a reason.
It isn’t about saving the planet, it’s about the politics of power. I have a friend who refers to them as Watermelons: Green on the outside, Red in the middle. If they really want to lower CO2 emissions, they’d be backing some form of nuclear. The New Green Glows.
There’s a wonderful book by James Delingpole titled “Watermelons”
Originally coined by Thomas Sowell, IIRC.
It doesn’t surprise me in the least bit that this would kill people, literally, and that the folks implementing this don’t mind the deaths. These are the people who believe we’re overpopulated, and that it’s the DUTY of the folk in the West to reduce the population count – by not breeding, by dying, to ‘save’ the planet – a message directed only at the West, not the parts of the planet with no interest in implementing ‘family planning.’
I assume that it’s aimed at the West because they hate the West? Same folks who started the voluntary human extinction program?
Did the Voluntary Human Extinction Program result in suicides, or murders? *curious*
Every time I hear the ‘save the planet, reduce overpopulation’ schtick, I’m tempted to tell them they should really live their convictions and suicide, because I’m not interested in becoming the sacrifice on the altar of their insanity.
I don’t know if VHEM has resulted in any murders or suicides. My hubby’s response is simple: You first!
OT: would you please explain what RAEME stands for? You mentioned it a while back in relation to your husband and the military. Thank you.
XD I have a usericon somewhere that says “Save the planet! Kill yourself!” that I use as a retort to the VHEM.
Royal Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. When he was trying to explain to me what it was when he was enlisting (the recruitment guy refused to let him join Infantry because he was a new father and said someone as intelligent as him would easily get bored and discouraged) my brain condensed it to “Oooh, so you’ll be a Warsmith, and is the guy who fixes weapons!” (One of the options was fitter-armorer/mechanical engineer, which is what he is.)
My bad – that was .05F, not .05C.
From a measurement standpoint in the real world, .05C or F would be completely lost in either background noise, or normal error of anything but the most precise lab equipment.
AHA! So it WAS a misprint! 😛 (RUNS)
Sigh. 😉
113 degrees?!! Damn that’s hot!
Yeah. I start wilting at 30 here, and 40 degrees hurt a lot. Dry heat too. I’d read somewhere in the Daintree rainforest it can reach a hundred – supposedly part of the reason why the Japanese really didn’t get very far trying to conquer from the North. Australia is God’s Mad Scientist Lab, I swear…
I read somewhere that in the opal mining area of Australia, it gets so hot (50 C?) during the day that some people have built their houses underground.
Coober Pedy. I’d like to visit there someday. ^_^ Yeah, we’ve been discussing what to do to get electricity costs down, if we ever decided to go on and get property, and one of the ideas was to build the house into a hill.
Rhys figures that since Aussies seem to resemble dwarves (obligatory timesink warning: TVTropes ahoy!) we may as well take the trope and run with it.
50 degrees C? that’s a number of places though. Adelaide – I used to hear our now-Housemate say ‘oh, its 52 degrees…’; I think it’s reached nearly 50 in Victoria before; the closer you get to the center of Australia, the hotter it seems to be (it’s mostly rocky, scrubby desert).
Of course, I started reading through the LandDownUnder trope page and learned something new: The Vulcan Embassy is supposed to be located in Canberra.
Guess it was the closest thing on the planet that the Vulcans felt was like home (Deserty death world where everything tries to kill you…)
At 40 C I’d only leave my air conditioned house for an emergency.
Yeah. When it was 37 degrees here once, I filled the spa bath with cold water, and told the kids to soak in it to cool off. During those heatwave weeks, I ordered groceries off the Internet. This was BEFORE the carbon tax kicked in so we had our air conditioner on set to 26 degrees in the parts of the house we were in for the day.
Thank God we have no such insanity here in TX. I have the house set at 21C. 26C would leave me sweaty and sick. It’s okay as an outdoor temp but indoors? Feh!! We have central A/C and ceiling fans.
I’m giggling at the page in TVTropes, ‘Everything Trying to Kill You.’ Australia has it’s own subsection. I love living here, it’ll never be boring.
o/~Come to Australia!/You might accidentally get killed!o/~
When it was forty degrees in Portugal, no air conditioning (but a stone house, which nonetheless gets hot after a while) we slept on the balconies. ALL the neighborhood slept on the balconies and terraces.
I was eight. I read Asterix and Cleopatra with my flashlight. over and over and over again.
Asterix… gigglesnort
And to bring the discussion back to publishing, the rights to Asterix are currently owned by… Hachette.
EWWWWW.
XD Asterix was our childhood hero. I liked Asterix. Middle bro liked Obelix. Youngest? Getafix. “Because he’s the one with the *real* power.”
The most miserably hot I’ve been has been in Europe. Once in Vienna, helping someone shop for a dirndl when it was 33 outside and only-heaven-knows-what inside the Lanz loft, surrounded by tight-packed woolens and heavy leather coats. The worst was in Germany, in student housing along the Rhine. It reached 42 outdoors, 45 in my apartment (facing west, natch), almost no wind, and no cross ventilation anyway. We all flocked to the 16th-17th century fortress housing part of the university, because it stayed somewhat cooler inside the 6-8 foot thick stone walls. But we still had to go home in the evening. Blargh.
During the soviet era the Russians had a saying about thier news: V Pravda ne Izvesti. V Izvesti ne Pravda. (Izvesti and Pravda being the major news papers and translating to ‘News’ and ‘Truth’ respectively.) Which means “In Truth there is no News, and in News there is no Truth.
I fly into various airports in China on a monthly basis. Routinely the weather forecasts call “Clear and visibility unlimited.” We won’t see the runway until on short final for all the smog.
This stat “they” trot out all the time about how “The US is 12% of the world’s economy but produces 25% of the carbon…” or whatever the actual numbers usually are…I’m in the ball park…
This stat is nothing but BS and body putty. China and India’s air is filthy by my direct observation and none of the fixes address them. All they do is attack the US’ economy.
Flying west into asia, you start running into China’s smog blowing east as you enter Japan’s airspace.
China’s environmental problems are just grotesque. One of the things China agreed to in order to get the Olympics was to clean up the air in the host city… and they couldn’t even do that.
I was in Beijing a day or so after the last event. The air was clearer. Not so much now.
They faked it by putting the factories on half shifts starting , according to reports, a month before.
The one I love is “America consumes 75% of the oil (we’re so greedy) and produces 25% of the carbon, but we’re only 5% of the population.”
More or less. And they don’t like it when I say “That means the rest of the world uses energy so uncleanly that they produce 75% of the pollution using 25% of the oil… They should be more like us.”
The part that bugs me (at the moment) is the huge number of people complicit in the lies, simply so they can keep their cushy little spots. Politicians, journalists, bureaucrats.
Sniveling basoons, all.
Not anything new. All societies, in all ages, have had these parasites.
Yes, generally speaking. But there is a limit to all things. We can support a mass of non-working able bodied adults, at a cost. The deadweight is a millstone on the economy. Simply adding a *few* obstacles to the parasites latching on would make working less onerous than jumping through the government regulatory hoops.
There will always be those that would rather starve without lifting a finger than live in plenty with a bit of sustained effort. That will never change, it is endemic to human nature. Put the path of least resistance in the right place, and habit will form there, too.
Ah, but it isn’t the bone idle I was referring to. The real parasites are the ones who clog things up with their petty egos. the twits who want to run things despite a congenital inability to arrange a piss-up in a brewery or lead a pack of hungry vampires to a blood bank. You know; Politicians, journalists, and bureaucrats.
Ah yes, those clever souls who firmly believe that if things were just a tad bit different they would be recognized for their vast abilities, placed in charge to run things the way they ought to be, and have rewards showered upon them and receive the acclaim of the masses.
And when enough of the clueless idjits get their wish we find ourselves in situations remarkably similar to where we are today. Go figure.
Actually, when enough of those clueless idiots get their way, there is anough power in the hands of the State to attract a monster like Stalin or Mao. He quickly takes over, because he is smarter than they are, and attends meetings with an axe instead of a clipboard, and liquidates any smart enought to represnt a threat.
OT: but interesting
“Amazon.com has an offer for authors at the book publisher Hachette, which is embroiled in a fight with the Internet retailer over e-book prices: Amazon will restore the authors’ books to its Web site and give writers all of the revenue from digital sales of their books.”
Sounds nice but….
IMO, Amazon is asking the authors to violate their contract with Hachette.
No, this isn’t an “evil” Amazon post as I think Hachette is “playing dirty” and I think this response on Amazon’s part is Amazon “returning the favor”.
Oh, yes, I know that authors can’t take it, but then Onus is on Hatchette to let them. I don’t expect the idiots at SFWA to change tune, though.
If the authors are bound by their contract I don’t see where Hachette has to respond. Authors could finish out the current contract and not sign a new one.
Personally I think that Amazon’s offer is much better for authors.
Oh, I agree that the idea is better for the authors. [Smile]
MILES. Particularly since Hatchette’s number reports are largely fictitious.
Hmm…
What happens when a group of authors asks Amazon to publically publish exact monthly sales for all books/titles (this should be a trivial hack) so that “Authors have a better grip on where their sales are coming from/going” and then when Amazon does that, bring pressure to bear on Barnes and Noble to “keep up with the rest of the industry…”
You get (for certain books) Hugh Howey and Data Guy’s page: http://authorearnings.com/
They have some fascinating stuff, with more every month or so.
TXRed’s response notwithstanding, they can probably be prevented from publishing that information by the book publishers.
Now, they can obviously make self-pubbed information available to authors, and it would be interesting to see someone put together a site that would allow them to access that data and apply data analysis tools to it. In fact, I can envision a site which would act as an aggregator, which would allow authors to sign up and opt-in to make their data anonymously available to a larger data pool, which could then be data mined in any number of ways.
Authors could finish out the current contract and not sign a new one.
You do know, don’t you, that unless you’re a mega-seller on the order of King or Rowling, all contracts with Big Five publishers are for the term of the copyright? And most of them nowadays include a non-compete clause, which may or may not be legally enforceable, but you will get a Big Publisher’s 10,000-ton legal department coming down on your head if they think you are violating it?
No I didn’t know this.
So you’re saying that if an author decided not to renew their contract they’d be sued if they decided to self pub a new book?
If it is in the same series, uses the same characters, or is set in the same “universe”, quite possibly. I’ve even read horror stories about authors losing the right to their own name and having to find a deep pen name and new genre because of contract stipulations.
yep. The nasty little term is “for the life of copyright”, which means lifetime of the author + 70 years, in the USA.
IIRC some contracts have/had an “in-print” clause meaning that if the publisher put the book into “out of print” status, the author got the copy-rights back.
However, Roland Green had one book with that clause where the publisher had never put the book into official “out of print” status. So Roland Green doesn’t have the rights to that book even though it hasn’t been in print for years.
Renew? They do not have renew it. As long as they sell X many copies, they can keep it — and they can lie about X, and how you gonna prove it?
The difference being, Amazon can afford to play dirty. Because, clearly “Hachette has a flaw in their business plan”. Amazon is not wrong…
I’ll slip the link in.
Amazon’s not actually asking them to violate their contract:
They’re just setting the dirty ball back on Hachette’s side. And Hachette is picking it up and licking it, I’d say:
Because Hachette likes it dirty.
And authors continue to shill for their abusers. Doug Preston calls it “blood money” and he’d never do something like that to his benevolent/innocent publisher. Scott Turow proves his lawyer bona fides with obfuscation.
As a reader, I wish the authors would pull their head out and realize I and the vast majority like me don’t give a damn about the publisher. Not a whit. We care about the books. Wherein the publisher is getting us the books, they’re invisible and interchangeable. Wherein they’re blocking us from the books they’re an irritating obstacle and they’ll be pushed aside. Authors can figure out who the customer is and make rational decisions, or they can continue to play mouthpiece for huge corporate conglomerations and enjoy the dirty mouth treatment.
As a wannabe author, I think they’re idiots.
Hrm. Sneaky WaPo slipped a no-follow into the link. Find the article at Washington Post, Amazon makes an offer to Hachette autors.
I’ve found it several places. Here’s one: http://gigaom.com/2014/07/08/amazon-makes-a-direct-offer-to-hachette-authors-heres-the-full-letter/
Ah, that one has Amazon’s full letter. Even better. I like this little comment/subtle jab:
… we’re particularly sensitive to the effect on debut and midlist authors.
And their response to Doug Preston reported at WaPo:
Preston can opt out of the offer for himself if he wants to, but he shouldn’t stand in the way of debut and midlist authors benefiting from this offer.
Centimillionaire author’s wanna shill for Hachette, Amazon will focus on the midlisters and debut authors. Is it dirty? Eh. I do know it’s funny.
Dirty? To offer the midlisters and debut authors, who are typically getting a raw deal, something better? The essence of clean competition, say I.
I wouldn’t disagree, but there’s layers to it that might taint in some folks minds.
That’s different.
Oh, I sort of approved of Amazon’s action even before I saw the “if Hachette agrees”. The “if Hachette agrees” makes it an even better action on Amazon’s part. [Smile]
VERY interesting.
Was on Instapundit today. There was also a link which I didn’t post.
….and give writers all of the revenue from digital sales of their books…
Oooh, isn’t THAT a lovely poison pill! For the cost of a few weeks of ebook sales, they’ll be showing the authors how much they could be making…and what kind of sales they’ve actually been having…..
I’d be willing to speculate that the prospect of Amazon reporting sales numbers directly to authors is enough to have Hachette blocking the merest hint of the possibility of this proposal.
And I’ll bet the authors will continue with their willful misunderstanding of the terms of contract with the publishers. But let’s try to let them in on the secret: They’re not your employer. You’re not even contract labor. You’re a vendor, a supplier, and you’ve signed a ridiculous contract for the privilege of making them money. You have no relationship, professional or otherwise outside of the limits of the contract. They have no incentive to treat you well or ‘fairly.’ Their only incentives exist within the contract you signed. Chances are, that contract does a nice job of incentivizing them to lie to you. But, congratulations! You’re a real author!
(I think I may be in a perverse and contemptuous mood regarding trad-pub today. Discount as appropriate.)
I’d be willing to speculate that the prospect of Amazon reporting sales numbers directly to authors is enough to have Hachette blocking the merest hint of the possibility of this proposal.
Wait wait wait. Sarah, or anyone else who’s ever read a legacy publishing contract before — is there anything in the contract that forbids an author from asking Amazon for themselves what their ebook sales numbers were? Second question, which nobody here will be able to answer with certainty — is there anything in Amazon’s contract with the publishers that would forbid them from telling the authors “We sold X copies of your book this month”?
If the legacy publishers were on the ball, the answer to the second question will be yes. But what if it’s not? If authors started writing to Amazon and saying “Hey, are you willing to tell me how many ebook copies of my books you sold? I want to cross-reference my data against what the publisher is telling me,” would Amazon perhaps give them that data? The cost to Amazon would be small (a database query doesn’t cost that much to put together and run), but non-zero. But the potential benefits to Amazon would be large: more authors who see what a lousy job their publishers are doing would equal more authors willing to sign up directly with Amazon, cutting out the middleman and thus bringing more profit to Amazon (and, of course, more profit to the author at the same time).
It’s entirely possible that Amazon won’t see the benefits to them, and won’t respond to such queries. But if a lot of authors started asking for those numbers… hmmmm. There are some interesting possibilities here.
I — hadn’t thought of that. Hm. That…
Rationally, you should never sign a contract that prohibits third party aggregation or reporting of numbers. But I’ve seen examples of some of the contracts authors have signed.
As to contracts between Amazon and publishers? I wonder if Amazon would sign a non-disclosure on sales numbers? What’s the cost/benefit for Amazon? Tied in to larger contract goals I can see it.
Yes. Their contract is with the publisher. They can’t share numbers with a third party — you.
Third party being the author? Figures.
I’d think breaking that provision would be a rational goal for authors contracts. After all, if publisher’s numbers are legitimate, they have no reason to fear retailer reporting.
There isn’t even a place to INSERT that. Until recently this was simply impossible.
You can ask for an audit, but it’s expensive and most authors are broke.
Yeah, THAT I understand. Would be the value of a real professional organization. Didn’t RWA force one in the eighties? Or only threaten?
So are publishing contracts relatively non-negotiable? Is the walk away provision likely to put any real pressure on publishers in the short term? I know midlist and debut authors are held to be relatively powerless in the old model, but they’re bread’n’butter for publishers, no? Seems like the power dynamic has to shift at some point.
Publishers don’t SEEM to realize these are bread and butter. You see they drink their own ink. And for decades, to be fair, no matter how many authors careers’ they burned out, the more were waiting and willing to jump in. SO…
Way I see it there are three advantages to writing for a traditional publishing house:
1) cash advance
2) ancillary support, ie copy edit, cover art, etc.
3) the cache of being a “published author.”
#1 would be valid save for the creative and deceptive accounting practices rampant in the industry. As is there is a strong resemblance to selling your birthright for a mess of pottage.
#2 handy were it something the average author could still count on getting. As is cheaper and more reliable to buy it by the yard or do it yourself.
#3 loses its allure when you compare “I’m published by so-and-so house” with “my book just sold a thousand units on Amazon last month, and the month before, and before that.” As the saying goes, quantity has a quality all of itself.
As I’ve noted before, watching the death of dinosaurs can be very instructive. Pass the popcorn, please.
I’d say I was hopeful that the acquisition of publishing concerns by large conglomerates would introduce some business sense, even if I had no expectation of it introducing fair treatment for authors, but I’ve seen some remarkably idiotic business decisions at high levels in recent years.
Understanding the “maximize shareholder value” model still doesn’t endear me to business idiocy.
So I guess I’m left hoping more midlist and debut authors will learn more, faster and abandon the publishers so their model can be broken making way for new and innovative models.
Which leaves me hoping nobody is listening to James Patterson and his idiotic calls for .gov intervention in publishing.
During the Napoleonic Wars, an English author proposed a toast to Napoleon, Much indignation.
“Gentlemen, you must not mistake me. I admit that the French Emperor is a tyrant. I admit that he is a monster. I admit that he is the sworn foe of our nation, and, if you will, of the whole human race. But, gentlemen, we must be just to our great enemy. We must not forget that he once shot a bookseller.”
SFWA did some upon a time.
I say that Amazon sees a benefit to them in telling authors the real number of ebook sales the authors made. It may not be a short term benefit, but it will definitely be a long term benefit for everyone except the legacy publishers.
Bookscan has its place in the industry.
When they started up, they were shocked to be besieged by authors who wanted their numbers.
Considering I just got laid off because the client had to cut back it’s contact due to poor business conditions. I am looking askance at the numbers. I have several prospects, but still..
We just got our yearly “things suck, here’s your 2.6% raise” chat. Though this year, they dispensed with the stupid evaluations process, pretending they were evaluating what exactly they were going to do. I guess the third year in with exactly the same raise for everybody except middle management (who last year got less than 2.6) they dropped the pretense.
You, at least, got a raise. When we were transferred from one contractor to another one here at the plant we were told we’d be getting evaluations and raises every 6 months.
3 years. No evaluations, no raises. Raises coming ‘real soon now, honest, we promise.’
(Shrug.)
Gotta a job, so I’m not going to gripe about not getting a raise. (Much.)
Where we are, too. With the guys still in the house for at least another year, and tuition for one of them for at least three years and the prices climbing. Sigh. Not bitching. I just need to write faster, and I’m blessed to have a job where I can make more by working harder.
Ditto. Salary frozen since ’09. Didn’t grip much as I had a job and the benefits were good. This year they started chipping away at the benefits.
Yeah, we damn near freaked when it looked like I’d be dropped off my lovely bride’s insurance due to the idiocies of Obamacare. (‘Keep your insurance if you like it’ my bleeding hindquarters…)
Fortunately, what I’m offered here at work is about on a par with self-administered leeches and band-aids, so I’m on hers until something ELSE changes with that mess of legislation masquerading as the ‘Affordable Care Act’.
We’re on the imperial extension and it’s costing us double what it did. it actually makes our dream of supporting ourselves from writing (Possible, when house is sold, moved to smaller place, and have a few more books out. So… five years or so) more impossible. I’ll be danged if I sign for Obamacare exchanges.
You’ll get the same plan eventually anyway.
Or become and outlaw.
the second sounds like fun.
It’s not.
When your kid starts climbing a tree, you grit your teeth and hope. You start to question whether what were previously “normal” activities are worth it (going to a climbing gym, going to an IDPA match) because a “little” injury could wipe out years of savings.
No, having “real” insurance is awesome, and shoving your middle finger at teh government because they’re f*ing twits isn’t “fun”, it’s a gamble. But if I don’t take this gamble I pay a lot for very, very little, and I get further and further behind financially.
I was being sarcastic. But also, bitterly, deciding that’s what we’ll do.
When they outlaw medical care, only outlaws will have medical care.
Beauty! Possibly best in thread.
You know, that’s kinda starting. Where I work, it’s hard to get a specialist to see you. So when someone you know needs care, we start calling everyone to push ahead of the line. It’s becoming all about who you know….
I was able to get a solo policy, but the deductible is three times what it had been, and the rates will probably go up 25% this fall. But it’s there if I get run over by a bus or a flying cow loses lift and drops onto me some morning while I’m out walking.
I dropped my insurance completely–it would have cost my family 10k a year, and we would get no benefit out of it at all until we spent over 3k per person.
So I’m using the extra to pay down the CC and plan on that being my main form of health insurance until this stupid shit collapses.
I wish I could drop mine. It costs my employer over $6K/year, and I could put that money to much better use. I really don’t need $500/mo medical insurance.
CC?
Credit Card?
OH. We don’t use them, so… no brain.
Yup.
I’ve got one with a 16k limit that is empty and one that is getting drained down faster with what I used to spend on health care.
thing is for me, I know the cost to make, and the sale prices. Yesterday, I made my year’s wages in profit for them. And it wasn’t that busy of a day.
Lies, Damned lies, and Statistics …. way off down that line is Gov’t Statistics.
All one needs to do is go back and see the revised figures, that turn out like the First Quarter ones they gave…”Unexpectedly” they told us, because of cold weather etc. etc. it was a minor contraction of -.01% …then when no one was looking revised it to -2.9%. That’s not a rounding error.
Jobs is the same way. no longer getting unemployment? congrats, you are no longer unemployed … even if you still have no job. The rate has been played up so much it and manipulated so heavily, it is essentially a worthless number they can almost get away with making up from whole cloth. We, more often than not, it seems, have not been adding enough jobs to cover those growing old enough to now start working, let alone reemploy those who lost their jobs when it took a dump due to poor attempts at manipulation.
Even the few “Revised UP” revisions, when looked at closely have not been great news. Usually they are, at best, not quite as bad news, but neverless, are still bad news.
As a wise man said, “It’s not what you don’t know, it’s what you know that ain’t so.”
I never liked Heinlein’s “soon enough you will know, so why worry?” approach, though; largely because “the best you can do” does change depending on what is or is not true. We may not be able to know what X is with certainty, but if X might make a difference — controlling for acceptable risk levels of “might” and acceptable scopes of consequence of “difference” — a smart person takes X into account. (Even today, while I am pretty wholeheartedly an AGW skeptic, I am not against the idea of reducing industrial emissions within practical limits; it may not be necessary, but it can’t hurt and does have other benefits as long as it’s not overdone.)
Some FYI:
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts
&
http://www.shadowstats.com/article/no-414-hyperinflation-special-report-2012
I know two things regardless of whether or not they’re true:
1. All markets clear.
2. The invisible hand will smack you if you try to restrain it.
The government can spin all it wants but the economy does care anymore than gravity does.
All the social experiments that the government runs always run into these two facts and then things grumble. If the government let business fail and allowed creative destruction to take place and the business cycle to do its thing, the bad times today would eventually become good times tomorrow. Instead, you get extreme highs that turn into extreme lows and corporations who take extreme risks because they know the government will bail them out. Eventually the government is going to run out of money. (Or more accurately the money the government prints will run out of value.) At some point we need to stop stealing from future generations.
Check out http://www.shadowstats.com/
with regard to ” the information on what is going on with the economy is vital for a hundred different decisions: which job to take; what property to buy; whether to invest in this or that”
From his biographical notes:
“One of my early clients was a large manufacturer of commercial airplanes, who had developed an econometric model for predicting revenue passenger miles. The level of revenue passenger miles was their primary sales forecasting tool, and the model was heavily dependent on the GNP (now GDP) as reported by the Department of Commerce. Suddenly, their model stopped working, and they asked me if I could fix it. I realized the GNP numbers were faulty, corrected them for my client (official reporting was similarly revised a couple of years later) and the model worked again, at least for a while, until GNP methodological changes eventually made the underlying data worthless. “
When I worked at a large defense contractor, we had our production numbers posted on a large chart in the middle of the department. The goal was a 45 degree line from the bottom left to the top right. After several months of production well below goal, the chart stopped getting updated. Then it disappeared for a couple of months. Finally, towards the end of the year it reappeared with all the actual production numbers well above the line. “How is that possible?”, I remember thinking. Upon taking a closer look I realized that the goal had been dramatically reduced; allowing us to finish the year above goal and giving management the opportunity to strut around congratulating themselves on a job well done.
That is our current situation in a nutshell. When real life doesn’t conform to the expected fantasy, the goals shift so the administration always comes out a winner. Everyone knows it’s crap, but there’s just not much you can do about it other than look at everything with a jaundiced eye
I’m seeing “help wanted” signs, but they are for part time. Construction is starting to taper off, and people are starting to look sideways at major expenses. I’ve noticed several niche shops, real world and ‘Net, are offering more sales and fewer new products, and many of the new products are simpler than before – more modest dresses and fewer ball gowns, for ex. That’s the real economy, and I’m in an area that’s doing pretty well.
one thing I’ve noticed is shops offering fewer choices.
Whereas in other countries not currently sabotaging their own economy, construction is booming. Within a five-mile radius of where I live in Thailand, there have been two new shopping malls opened in the past couple years. And less than a mile from my home, there’s a new hospital that’s been under construction for the past couple years which is now about a month or two (I’m guessing) from opening for business. (The exterior looks finished, and the grounds are now landscaped instead of being dirt-with-construction-vehicle-tracks.) And it’s hard to find a square mile in this city that doesn’t have a crane parked in it. (With the exception of the downtown areas that are fully built up, where putting a new building in would mean tearing down an existing one.) I almost don’t even notice construction sites any more, I’ve seen so many of them all over the place. Makes a stark comparison to what I hear from my friends in the US.
I’ll grant that my sample is biased: I happen to live on the edge of the built-up parts of the city, so naturally a large part of the construction is happening near me. (E.g., those two new shopping malls are the only new shopping malls that have been build in this city in the past couple years, and they both happen to have gotten built within that five-mile radius of my house.) But still — what American city has had two new shopping malls go in in the past couple years?
Well I know of two new shopping malls that I staked in the city 6-8 years ago, they are standing empty, or in one case only half constructed.
Well not completely empty, one of them has a bank in it, but that is the sole business that has been opened in an entire strip mall since construction was finished around the time Obama was elected.
When you say staked, do you mean putting down physical stakes, as in for survey measurements? Or do you mean investing? Or some other meaning I’m unaware of?
Survey stakes, sorry.
Part of the reason for companies wanting to hire part-time help has nothing to do with the state of the economy. Rather, it’s due to the ACA rules. If you hire full-time employees (or anyone working 32+ hours a week), and you have 50 or more employees, then you need to pay for healthcare. If you hire someone who only works for, say, 20 hours, then they’re responsible for their own healthcare.
Yep. I noted that below, somewhere… BUT it allows them to claim the unemployment rate is low.
Reminds me of a political cartoon during the Clinton years with two guys in a restaurant gloating over the high number of new jobs… and their waiter grumbling to himself that he’s got three of those new jobs.
What you’re talking about is the difference between a devotion to a moral ethos composed of actions as defining right and wrong and a moral ethos composed of using identity, or a set of identities – a brand, a side – to define right and wrong.
Americans are fond of imagining they use a true moral ethos because we like to talk about fair play, are proud of our legal system (mostly) and are generally convinced that, like baseball umpires, we call ’em like we see ’em. In baseball we openly submit to the rule of identity by rooting for teams for no reason other than they’re in our city but while having a system of baseball rules that allow for no cheating – an actual ethos. Baseball rules amount to having tools of self-criticism by which we can measure our real worth, no matter how much we despise the outcome, as opposed to our imagined worth. Bathroom scales don’t lie and don’t allow us to lie to ourselves.
The problem in larger society is that we do a similar thing and also imagine we have rules to keep our “side” under an umpire-like scrutiny to keep us from cheating but in fact we don’t. In real modern American society, modern liberalism is driven by intersectionalism, and so balls and strikes depend on the batter and pitcher’s “age, attractiveness, body type, caste, citizenship, education, ethnicity, height and weight assessments, immigration status, income, marital status, mental health status, nationality, occupation, physical ability, religion, sex, sexual orientation.” That intersectionalist bathroom scale is now a tool of oppression with a large series of teacher’s notes explaining how “it ain’t so, Joe.” There is no more fat, stupid, insane, etc.
The above being so, the ball and strike zone expands and contracts according to your “privilege.” In societal terms, a pragmatic rationalist – an umpire – is today considered no better than a racist and a bigot. It should then go without saying that being an actual racist and bigot (or not) depends on one’s race and sex, not whether you are actually a racist and a bigot. Suffice it to say that means one side can call 1,000 strikes in a row and be considered fighting for “social justice,” even if those strikes means a given target – Jews, Arabs or whites – all of them – are wrong 1,000 times in a row.
Ask yourself who benefits from this unreality and the answer is simple: failure. Failure then becomes an actual type of success by simple will power and semantic gibberish. Should anyone then be surprised we give literary awards to neo-Nazis, or that folks hanging out doing nothing to anyone are painted as a privileged KKK? These are Orwell’s umpires, not our Constitution’s, because liberal intersectionalism openly admits they have no use for law or a Constitution written by slave-owners.
Here in San Antonio I am sheltered a bit from the cold winds metaphorically hitting the rest of the country, so I really don’t have a sense of how bad the economy is. It’s not good – but not totally disastrous. Prices for groceries are up, and the price of gasoline is erratic-but-trending upwards, construction is … meh, but there seems to be another development going in around the corner from me, where there was once just acres of scrub. Curiously, some long-vacant commercial strip buildings are actually being torn down. There was one at a major intersection near by – a long, l-shaped one, where they took out everything but the Gold’s Gym. A Super Walmart went in, and the whole block is perking up a bit.
My immediate neighbors are employed – one of them in the shale-oil fields out south of San Antonio.
Still don’t believe what the mainstream media has to say about it all, though. The press corps, better known as the Public Affairs office for the Democrat party, lost their credibility with me about 2008, if not before.
From the anecdotal perspective, living here in Texas and realizing we’re relatively sheltered at the moment, I get a little worried when I recognize the disconnect between the “numbers” and the reality.
Because we are relatively sheltered, and yet the anecdotal evidence is still a bit grim.
*sigh*
I see some of it where I live in LA County. Most of my city appears to be in fairly good shape. But on some blocks, you’ll see over half the storefronts empty.
And the grocery stores closing left and right…
I love Saar’s– a local chain, has a great Asian section and wonderful meat prices, will gut you on “convenience foods”– and they recently lost a store, too. Happened by (….I got lost, OK?) and ducked in. They had signs on every door that were sun-faded that no bags were allowed in past the registers, and they still were losing so much to theft that they had to close.
How the heck do you steal a 10 pound pack of chicken!?!
There’s a video floating around security professional and police spaces showing a fairly small statured HS kid unloading all the weapons he managed to stash about his person.
10lbs of chicken would be too easy, sadly.
Point.
There’s also the possibility of it walking out the back door with one or two mildly corrupt insiders. (Don’t have to risk much if you just “happen” to kick a rock into the back door so it doesn’t close all the way.)
Yeah, as I understand it, a fair amount of retail loss can be tracked back to this sort of scenario. Have had some convo’s with loss-prevention guys, the retailer is caught in the spot of needing/having to trust their employees and not being able to trust their employees…
My sister says that her Target hires at least two folks a month who show up for exactly one day, and then don’t show up to get their paycheck– and their ID is false when checked.
They figure that’s a pretty big chunk of losses.
Sheesh. Tough to fight, too.
Standard statistic in the security industry is that for every shoplifter we catch, there are an average of four employee thefts that we miss.
That could really feed my misanthropy.
Does it help any to know that it only takes one guy who acts like he’s supposed to be doing what he’s doing? It took me years to realize that the cook at my first job was stealing a case of meat every time I worked, because she acted like she was supposed to be taking a big white box out the back door when she took her smoke break. Exact same behavior as when she was taking out a bucket of fryer oil.
Maybe. A little. As long as I don’t think about the compounding effects of the one bad apple.
I know, right?
I’d say we have a sputtering recovery not a roaring one. At least that’s how I see it from San Diego
FWIW the British civil servant who oversaw the post 2nd world war growth of Hong Kong – Sir John Cowperthwaite – deliberately refused to try and collect GDP and similar statistics. Hios view was that if you had these kinds of numbers then policicians and bureaucrats would try to “improve” them in ways that wouldn’t work so it was much better not to give them any ammunition.
I asked him to name the one reform that he was most proud of. “I abolished the collection of statistics,” he replied. Sir John believed that statistics are dangerous, because they enable social engineers of all stripes to justify state intervention in the economy.
At some point during our first conversation I managed to irk him by suggesting that he was chiefly known “for doing nothing.” In fact, he pointed out, keeping the British political busy-bodies from interfering in Hong Kong’s economic affairs took up a large portion of his time. Throughout Sir John’s tenure in office, the British political elite tried to impose its own ailing socialist economic model on Britain’s colonies, including Hong Kong. Sir John managed to quash all such attempts and Hong Kong benefited as a result.
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/sir-john-cowperthwaite-personal-tribute
It occurs to me that one reason that people such as the holy RAH had such faith in governm,ent in the 1950s was because there were many civil servants in those days who were like Sir John. That breed seems to have mostly died out now though.
Yes, this is why those Washington Republicans who are so worried about being labeled “the party of No” drive me nuts. If they actually did spend their time saying No and stopping all these new regulations from being passed, their constituents would be happy with them. Instead they are worried about being labeled as such, so they first say No (ticking off all those who want the legislation passed, namely those who would never vote for them) and then after a short time they cave and pass the legislation, perhaps with a couple of minor concessions, kind of like instead of giving away your car, you give away your car, but keep the carburetor and battery, which don’t do you any good, but cause the person receiving the car to not be able to use it until they go buy themselves a new carb and battery. This ticks off the people who didn’t want the legislation passed (and probably did vote for them).
Then they are unable to comprehend why Congress has a 7% satisfaction rating. Couldn’t be because the people who actually bought the car are ticked they gave it away, and the people who got the car are ticked because when they came to pick it up it doesn’t run, when they expected a running vehicle.
John Cowperthwaite, the hero of the 20th Century that almost nobody has ever heard of. Because his policies worked and were the complete answer to all the BS we get from our “authorities.”
What about Norman Borlaug? The agricultural hero.
“His view was that if you had these kinds of numbers then politicians and bureaucrats would try to “improve” them in ways that wouldn’t work so it was much better not to give them any ammunition.”
That’s the core of an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while, I just haven’t quite worked out how to express it. If a person’s compensation is tied to some metric, they will figure out a way to game that metric to their benefit. In doing so, they will destroy the value of the metric. You can see it with politicians and things like GDP and unemployment, teachers and test scores, or factory workers and production reports.
Hm. Yes. Nature of incentive structures and the human animal, isn’t it?
“If a person’s compensation is tied to some metric, they will figure out a way to game that metric to their benefit.”
From Dilbert: PHB: “From now on, you’ll be paid a bonus based on the number of bugs fixed.” Wally: “I’m going to go write myself a minivan!”
Ah, Wally. Gotta love that guy.
Which leads to a problem. You want to reward performance. In order to reward performance you need to measure performance. But once you start rewarding performance based on a metric, you start losing the ability to measure performance with that metric.
They managed to believe this despite the fact that visitors to the Soviet Union inevitably caught a feeling for just how deprived these people were. But of course, they could tell themselves that they were just rich in non-material things.
————————
I find this particularly ironic. Perhaps the greatest amount of “non-material things” comes from the spiritual department. But Communism is, and always has been, a great spiritual wasteland. I’m also reminded of the scene in Forrest Gump when Forrest is on a TV talk show with fellow guest John Lennon (I don’t remember who the host is), and Forrest talks about how poor the people are in China. Lennon’s response is a dopey-sounding comment about that not being everything.
On a loosely related note, I read an article a while back written by a guy who’d visited North Korea as part of a tour group. While in Pyongyang, they were shown a display of the city’s two train lines, with lights that lit up when the trains were at the corresponding stations. Obviously, it was a simple map that showed people at the station where the trains were at any given moment. The state tour guide asked the visitors if Seoul had a map like that, and was please when the tourists told him no.
But what the state tour guide was incapable of understanding is that the reason Seoul had nothing like that was because Seoul’s train terminals were so much more technologically advanced and sophisticated. The tour guide’s question was like a man from a thousand years ago figuring out how well-off a modern office is by asking how many slates and styluses they have.
I think there is a scientific method facet to this. Facts are things that are verifiable and reproducible. Truth is the theoretical structure we erect around the facts to explain them.
If your facts are shaky then your Truth will be shaky also.
I would say truth is the overall reality of which the facts are pieces. Truth doesn’t change our knowledge and understanding of it do. The shakier the grasp on the truth, the shakier the position.
They’re trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous. – Scytale
Speaking of which, the Mollie Hemmingway article that’s been circulating today regarding ignorant journalists…
http://thefederalist.com/2014/07/09/media-ignorance-becoming-serious-problem/
Back in the early 90s, shortly after the USSR fell, some of my classmates did a study abroad program in Russia. One of the interesting comments they reported was along the lines of, “Americans smile all the time. They have a lot to smile about.”
Have you ever read Heinlein’s non-fiction essay about the trip that he and his wife took to the USSR? Afterwards, he talked to a friend of his who was involved in civil planning, who pointed out—just from an official map of Moscow—that the population could only be a fraction of what was reported, because the city simply didn’t have the infrastructure to support the reported population, and which implied that the population numbers for the whole region were probably cooked. Fascinating stuff.
Yeah. Read it. It’s the basis for my suspecting the world population is WAY jacked up. Russia is not the only one to make up numbers.
When I came here in the early eighties I found that Portuguese pop. growth was estimated at something like 4 children per woman. Look, I knew more people from families of one than I knew from families of two. And after that things became SERIOUSLY iffy. I knew exactly two people from families larger than 3. Those numbers stank to high heaven. In my parents’ day, sure. In the eighties? No way. Now over there families of TWO are almost unheard of. But at least the numbers here sort of kind of reflect that.
How accurate do you think the USA population numbers are? I know my perspective on family size is skewed by living in Mormonville, but even so, families seem to be about half the size they were when I was a kid. Six kids is a big family now, while twelve was then.
I think our economic crisis is PARTLY a population crisis. And I think that’s part of the reason the people “in the know” are desperate for immigration. I only object to the way they’re doing it.
Regarding smiles and the lack thereof… in the case of Russians, I don’t think it was just the Communism. Have you ever read any of their literature? The country is full of fatalistic basket cases. One of Tolstoy’s novels (name left blank to avoid spoilers) has a wounded character who’s recovering and doing well… right up until the moment he decides that he’s TOO HAPPY. At which point he pretty much immediately dies. And this is in a relatively upbeat (for Russians) novel!
Sarah: “And meanwhile we drown in a welter of made up figures and pretend facts.
Sarah: this isn’t made up. I worked in accounting until I retired & doing spreadsheets is as second-nature as you writing novels.
This is projected USA DEBT; the source is the president himself: historical Table 7.1 from Whitehouse.gov
IN TRILLIONS!
2007 $8,950,744
2008 $9,986,082
2009 $11,875,851
2010 $13,528,807
2011 $14,764,222
2012 $16,050,921
2013 $16,719,434
2014 estimate $17,892,637
2015 estimate $18,713,486
2016 estimate $19,511,611
2017 estimate $20,261,711
2018 estimate $20,961,055
2019 estimate $21,670,744
This predicts a near tripling of debt from 2007 to 2019!
Jefferson warned against this and specifically condemned it as enslavement of the young.
That part I know. It’s why I wake up screaming.
A few years ago, I would read Zerohedge for giggles. I thought they were loons. Now ….
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-23/germany-gives-trying-repatriate-its-gold-will-leave-it-feds-safe-hands
Good Lord. You too? I thought only I had made that transition. Now, sometimes, I think they’re TOO conservative.
Either Zerohedge got more sane or the world got crazier … don’t mention the third possibility…
I vote for option #2, with perhaps the slightest small dash of #1.
The logic and identification of fact is good there but they have trouble seeing beyond preconceived notions. (analogy, if you are convinced that pheasants can swim, the fact that bird you see on the pond has a green head and blue accents on the wings just is proof that it is indeed a pheasant)
I left out the word “sometimes” there. Sorry.
Info on the TB vaccine:
http://www.cdc.gov/tb/topic/vaccines/default.htm
(I was all prepared to dig and dig deep… and the CDC popped up on my first Elegantly Crafted search.)
Quote:
BCG Recommendations
In the United States, BCG should be considered for only very select people who meet specific criteria and in consultation with a TB expert. Health care providers who are considering BCG vaccination for their patients are encouraged to discuss this intervention with the TB control program in their area.
Children
BCG vaccination should only be considered for children who have a negative TB skin test and who are continually exposed, and cannot be separated from adults who
Are untreated or ineffectively treated for TB disease, and the child cannot be given long-term primary preventive treatment for TB infection; or
Have TB disease caused by strains resistant to isoniazid and rifampin.
Health Care Workers
BCG vaccination of health care workers should be considered on an individual basis in settings in which
A high percentage of TB patients are infected with TB strains resistant to both isoniazid and rifampin;
There is ongoing transmission of drug-resistant TB strains to health care workers and subsequent infection is likely; or
Comprehensive TB infection-control precautions have been implemented, but have not been successful.
Health care workers considered for BCG vaccination should be counseled regarding the risks and benefits associated with both BCG vaccination and treatment of latent TB infection.