I think it's awesome that American culture generates a billion dollars of commerce every four years, solely to use mass media to inform and educate the public about the merits of political candidates. Wonderful that we care so much about full disclosure and analysis of our prospective leaders that we go to the lengths we do. Seriously, try to get away from the political storm, even for a day, and even this early in the election year, and see if you make it. By the time November rolls around, we're going to know absolutely every gritty detail about the history and politics of the Republican candidate. Isn't our system great?
Ironically - and I think this is a point worth seriously considering - we might at that time know even less about Barack Obama than we think we know now. That seems like it might suggest something important, doesn't it?
Whatever. Political commercial season sucks, since no political candidate yet - despite cumulative millions spent on devising campaign strategies - has figured out how to make a decent political campaign commercial. (Which also seems like it might suggest something, eh?) Nothing like months of 30-second spots, ten times a day, of being told ugly details of someone you're never going to meet, and who your vote doesn't get elected anyway. (Google 'electoral college.') But its IMPORTANT that you listen to them as they talk about 'the issues.' Yay, us!
For what it's worth, and (hopefully) resolving my civic analytical duties regarding who gets elected, and why: Hythloday Today officially extends endorsement to... Mitt Romney.
Honestly, my political views - particularly regarding social services - are aligned substantially further to the right than his. But under the current political climate, there is no way that any of the further-right candidates would defeat Obama in November. I'm not a Gingrich fan to start with, but you only need to poke around a little before you realize the field day that the news media will have with him as an opponent to Obama. All in all, he's a worse candidate than McCain was, because at least you could be confident who McCain was really representing, and predict which way he would jump. Newt, not so much. Romney, in contrast, is going to get grilled on a lot of issues (read: the Mormon thing), but I think he'll hold up better, based on charisma, personal success record, and the ability to project strength and authority. Newt always comes across to me as slightly apologetic, which is not going to work.
And the bottom line is that Romney is the furthest to the left of the candidates from the right, which makes him able to court the largest segment of the vote. Those ads you hear about how Obama is praying that Newt wins the Republican nomination? They got a point. If Newt wins the nomination, Barack will be turning cartwheels in the hallways, because the absolute truth is that Barack will garner a hell of a lot more of that middle-ground split than Newt can possibly hope for.
Newt cannot beat Obama. It really is that simple.
Besides which, the new wave of social conservative theory really is the best reasonable hope for the United States right now. Any political science sophomore can tell you about the progression of the right towards the left over time. At this point, I honestly don't think Barack gives a shit what changes get made to Obamacare. He managed to move our system SUBSTANTIALLY to the left. As a political scientist, he also knows that it's almost impossible for the right to get that ground back. Things will be massaged, policies and programs might be axed, but some of it is going to persist forever. The United States has passed national healthcare. He gets to claim that legacy. That's been the steady-left shift that's been going on since 1776.
We don't have a lot of history to use as an analytic sample for the shift from republicanism to democracy (and I'm talking now about the literal political systems, not about the American parties, although I suppose it applies to them as well). But we got thousands of years about the broader shift towards liberalism, including the concurrent grown of socialist policies. Despotisms, to organized monarchies, to republics, and the first rumblings of true democracy; got libraries filled with that shit. And just looking at generalities, looks like a big part of the survival of nations comes from how those in control (typically the right; being in control is why they're conservative) manage that trend toward to left. Historically speaking, either the system changes to allow liberization to happen slowly and progressively (as has happened in the United States for over 200 years), or else you get sudden increasinly violent fits, fires, and riots when the pressure builds, and it happens suddenly. Personally, I think the best thing for us to do is to keep the progression going as smoothly as possible.
Along those lines, and for mostly economic reasons, the best thing for the United States right now is a centrist President. Somebody who can at least get everyone at the table to address the issues, and agree that EVERYBODY is going to need to give ALOT before acceptable solutions are reached. Get everyone on the same page, so even if the system does absolutely suck, and even if everybody knows you're completely full of shit, at least people know what the system is and what it's going to be. Get rid of the political uncertainty and start agreeing on what we both know the end result is going to be, so commerce can start happening with confidence again.
We're already totally fucked on the budget thing. Really: raise your hand if you ever honestly and realistically believed that the United States will EVER pass a balanced budget. Have you looked around lately? Are we really that far removed from 'Idiocracy' these days? We're not going to tighten our belts now, preemptively. We're going to put it if off until sometime later when we might finally be left with no other choice, no one else to blame, and no one else to rob. The best we can really hope for right now is to stop using up all the other choices, scapegoats, and victims so quickly. Let's keep ourselves a little time to find new choices, scapegoats, and other victims, like we always have in the past.
The United States government will continue to run in the red. But that's life. Lets acknowledge that our politics are going to run at a loss, and do what we can to get our ECONOMY strong enough for the excesses of our government be manageable. If we get politics stable, and get commerce running smoothly, it will be able to keep the flow going. Some bubbles will burst here and there (same as always), but hopefully not so seriously nor so frequently as to crash the system, and we will all keep whistling along until the (already worthless) dollar can be phased out for something else. All we need is to find that something else; something that we can bring ourselves to believe is more valuable. Which is actually a pretty tall order.
In the meantime, lets keep the system under control, limit the wars and the riots to something that can be contained, and we'll all just keep on keeping on, at least (hopefully) for the duration of my lifetime. By then, I'll have prepared my children to prosper in the course of their lifetimes, just like my parents taught me what I needed to proper in this one.
Mitt seems like the right guy to keep things under control for the next four years, while we all do the best we can and wait to see what happens next.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Friday, December 9, 2011
Survival of the Fattest
CB and I were talking about the insurance industry the other day, and she raised the point that nobody who's in any sort of sales or customer-service industry today has the slightest clue what's is like to actually have to work hard to get results. Really. There have been hiccups here and there, but the American economy has been booming for decades. People - even those who are conveniently labeled 'low income,' either for political or for other purposes - generally have no problems making ends meet, and squeezing substantial luxury into those ends.
This is not to say that there are no people in this country who cannot make ends meet, and who literally go hungry because there is no money left at the end of the month for food. Those people do exist, and in increasing numbers. But I honestly believe that's a fairly recent development. Up until very recently, you had to go WAY down to a very small percentage of the populace before you got to a demographic too broke to indulge in some level of luxury consumerism. Until recently 'poor' meant that someone's 40" TV was a projection model rather than a flat-screen, that they only had basic cable, and had to suffer through the inconvenience of a single car shared by the whole family. Tough times indeed.
Living on the recently-ended unending prosperity of unlimited credit limits, nobody really had to work to sell much of anything, including luxury goods. Nobody had to go out and court the public in any involved way to get goods to move. All anyone really had to do was make the goods or services available, and find a way to inform the public that they were available. Work hard to SELL something? Why bother? If Douchebag Consumer A, here before you at this moment, is unwilling to swipe his card to take a (whatever) home, no problem. Douchebag Consumer B, who will walk in the doors momentarily, won't hesitate for a second before adding a token additional amount to his already crushing credit burden, so he can take a (whatever) home. Regardless of whether he actually needs it, and sometimes regardless of whether he actually wants it, there's a good chance that he'd buy it, just because it's there, and with no need for any more of a sales pitch than putting on the shelf in front of him. That's how fat our economy was. To a large degree, it still is.
Take the pornography industry, for example. Talk about a discretionary expense; it's pure hedonism. If ever there was a economic niche that people would cut from their budgets, THIS IS IT. Yet even today it's a multi-billion dollar a year industry. According to some statistics, over $3,000 is spent on porn EVERY SECOND. This, coupled with other obvious points, and you really have to wonder. Like the fact that over 50% of Americans are technically obese, and the fact that people of hypothetically 'limited means' will pay $40 a month for a gym membership they use once a week. Mebbe this country might actually benefit from some LEGITIMATE lean times - not to be confused with the present - where we might be compelled to lose a few pounds, cut a few luxuries, and actually earn the money we spend as a society, rather than just piling up debt. While a slight necking down of NINJA and similar credit lines has supported more and more of that last point occurring, neither of the subsequent two points seem to be gaining any traction. There is no impetus for anyone to be lean and efficient to be successful, a situation which continues to persist.
With the general availability of credit, and with the government's ever increasing support of Robin Hood economics, I don't see how anything is going to change, and certainly not until there is at least one more substantial credit-market crash. We are so used to rampant consumerism, and so enabled to overspend by creditors (even today), that we as a culture are going to spend until we literally can spend no more. Seriously, the dollars in your bank account are of value only because every other currency on earth sucks even worse than dollars do. Every single asset underlying the value of dollars is horrendously over-extended. Strangely, the best thing to do in times like this is to actually have dollars on hand (cash). Let me know if you want to hear the reasoning.
I'm not sure I have any real point to offer from all this; the real reason I got launched onto this train of thought was from dealing with idiotic sales people and poor customer service habits that about here in Vegas. I'm sure its worse elsewhere, so I'm sure you have it locally too. Wouldn't it be nice if people actually treated you like they NEEDED your money and your business, instead of treating you like they're doing you a favor by deigning to accept your money and your business?
This is not to say that there are no people in this country who cannot make ends meet, and who literally go hungry because there is no money left at the end of the month for food. Those people do exist, and in increasing numbers. But I honestly believe that's a fairly recent development. Up until very recently, you had to go WAY down to a very small percentage of the populace before you got to a demographic too broke to indulge in some level of luxury consumerism. Until recently 'poor' meant that someone's 40" TV was a projection model rather than a flat-screen, that they only had basic cable, and had to suffer through the inconvenience of a single car shared by the whole family. Tough times indeed.
Living on the recently-ended unending prosperity of unlimited credit limits, nobody really had to work to sell much of anything, including luxury goods. Nobody had to go out and court the public in any involved way to get goods to move. All anyone really had to do was make the goods or services available, and find a way to inform the public that they were available. Work hard to SELL something? Why bother? If Douchebag Consumer A, here before you at this moment, is unwilling to swipe his card to take a (whatever) home, no problem. Douchebag Consumer B, who will walk in the doors momentarily, won't hesitate for a second before adding a token additional amount to his already crushing credit burden, so he can take a (whatever) home. Regardless of whether he actually needs it, and sometimes regardless of whether he actually wants it, there's a good chance that he'd buy it, just because it's there, and with no need for any more of a sales pitch than putting on the shelf in front of him. That's how fat our economy was. To a large degree, it still is.
Take the pornography industry, for example. Talk about a discretionary expense; it's pure hedonism. If ever there was a economic niche that people would cut from their budgets, THIS IS IT. Yet even today it's a multi-billion dollar a year industry. According to some statistics, over $3,000 is spent on porn EVERY SECOND. This, coupled with other obvious points, and you really have to wonder. Like the fact that over 50% of Americans are technically obese, and the fact that people of hypothetically 'limited means' will pay $40 a month for a gym membership they use once a week. Mebbe this country might actually benefit from some LEGITIMATE lean times - not to be confused with the present - where we might be compelled to lose a few pounds, cut a few luxuries, and actually earn the money we spend as a society, rather than just piling up debt. While a slight necking down of NINJA and similar credit lines has supported more and more of that last point occurring, neither of the subsequent two points seem to be gaining any traction. There is no impetus for anyone to be lean and efficient to be successful, a situation which continues to persist.
With the general availability of credit, and with the government's ever increasing support of Robin Hood economics, I don't see how anything is going to change, and certainly not until there is at least one more substantial credit-market crash. We are so used to rampant consumerism, and so enabled to overspend by creditors (even today), that we as a culture are going to spend until we literally can spend no more. Seriously, the dollars in your bank account are of value only because every other currency on earth sucks even worse than dollars do. Every single asset underlying the value of dollars is horrendously over-extended. Strangely, the best thing to do in times like this is to actually have dollars on hand (cash). Let me know if you want to hear the reasoning.
I'm not sure I have any real point to offer from all this; the real reason I got launched onto this train of thought was from dealing with idiotic sales people and poor customer service habits that about here in Vegas. I'm sure its worse elsewhere, so I'm sure you have it locally too. Wouldn't it be nice if people actually treated you like they NEEDED your money and your business, instead of treating you like they're doing you a favor by deigning to accept your money and your business?
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
My Man-Crush on Christopher Nolan
I just watched Inception for about the 20th time. I suspect that it's going to become one of those movies that, when I see it's on, I can't help leaving the TV on that station to let it play out. Short list of movies that are like that. Thomas Crown Affair. Fight Club. How to Train Your Dragon. Jaws. Avatar. A few others. All of them masterpieces, and each in their own way. The only thing all of them have in common is, interestingly, great and distinctive musical scores.
What I love about Inception is the depth. The clear thought that was put into every angle, every character. I blogged what is now years ago about American culture, portrayed through movies, using Fight Club as the halcyon example of how action drama can be elevated to art, not just through violence, explosions, and camera tricks, but through depth and nuance that are sometimes hard to see. Fight Club has enough depth that a college-level literature course could spend a month on it. Inception has more. Even having had a few glasses of wine, I don't think I can adequately convey just how highly I think of these movies.
In any rate, Inception director Chris Nolan will be releasing another Batman movie in the not-terribly-distant future (July, 2012). Fairly little has been released about the plot and storyline. Christian Bale will be back as Bruce/Wayne Batman, and it will feature both major and obscure villains from Batman mythology: Selena Kyle (catwoman, played by Anne Hathaway) and Bane (played by Tom Hardy). Quite a lot of Nolan veterans in the cast, besides Bale and Hardy, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Marion Cotillard. (Could be the booze, but I find myself contemplating Ellen Page in a Batgirl costume. Mebbe seen Whip It too many times. I have a thing for petite willful women, and Page would kick the hell out of Alicia Silverstone's air-headed version.) All in all, the only sour note so far has been that Nolan plans the movie as a vehicle to conclude his take on Batman.
While I have no doubt whatsoever that Nolan will continue to make excellent films - with a few inevitable side-steps along the way - I'm interested to see how he plans to tie a bow around his Batman universe. I expect it to be outstanding, hopefully enough to satisfy Batfans for the next 10 years or so. Nolan abandoning the franchise unfortunately means that Warner Brothers/DC will hire some over-hyped douchebag to take another run at directing the character for however long the public will buy tickets; whoever happens to be the current incarnation of Joel Schumacher, circa 1995. Len Wiseman is probably near the top of the list. Or somebody from his stable, like Markus Nispel. Fair to say that one or (if we're very lucky) two worthy follow-ups are likely, inevitably followed by a steaming pile of dog-shit that will bury further attempts at comic-book movies for a decade. One-liners and chase-scenes will be offered as substitutes for dialog and drama, with the usual results. Gotta love Hollywood, eh?
But we will get one more Nolan rendition of Batman. So. My prediction: the Nolan Batman storyline will conclude with some great pulling-the-wool-over-the-eyes. Some great deception or obfuscation, which comes at great cost to a central character, but which frees them at the same time. All of Nolan's films highlight the concept that ignorance is bliss, which must sometimes be inflicted on others. The stories convey that reality is subjective. They involve situations where creating (or adopting) the reality that is required involves sacrificing a reality that most people would call "real." Leonard Shelby found his happiness by choosing to ignore and leave behind the reality he has been seeking for years. Likewise, Dominic Cobb found happiness when (by implication) he stopped caring whether or not his reality was real in the grander sense (the significance of the still-spinning top is not that it's still spinning, but rather that Cobb is no longer watching to see if it topples). In The Dark Knight, the reality of Harvey Dent's end was intentionally concealed, at great cost to Our Hero. Both Insomnia and The Prestige likewise have pervasive themes of obfuscation and subjective interpretation of "truth" and "reality." Nolan LOVES the emotional impact of a character transcending reality, by disregarding it. The Dark Knight Rises will be the same.
In interviews, Nolan has asserted that - unlike in comics, where storylines necessarily proceed into perpetuity - movie franchises must have some reasonable closure. I like to think if anyone can wrap up Batman with a clever, impossible to follow twist (which leaves Batman alive, as there must ALWAYS be a Batman), Nolan is the man for the job. Ideally, Nolan will create a storyline that will be difficult enough to follow-up on that the inevitable next director will decide to approach the character from a totally different angle. But alas, the sort of dipshits who will line up for the Batman director job in Nolan's wake are not the type to try to do something original.
But hey, it's about time for us to move past superheroes anyway, since we've pretty much used that up. Seriously, if we're resorting to Thor and Captain America, what's next? Aquaman? Seems we've also been through wizards and dragons, pirates, vampires, zombies, slasher horror remakes, and space drama all within the last decade. Could be mistaken, but its been over a decade since The Matrix, so I believe we're due for some man-against-the-world martial arts action flicks.
What I love about Inception is the depth. The clear thought that was put into every angle, every character. I blogged what is now years ago about American culture, portrayed through movies, using Fight Club as the halcyon example of how action drama can be elevated to art, not just through violence, explosions, and camera tricks, but through depth and nuance that are sometimes hard to see. Fight Club has enough depth that a college-level literature course could spend a month on it. Inception has more. Even having had a few glasses of wine, I don't think I can adequately convey just how highly I think of these movies.
In any rate, Inception director Chris Nolan will be releasing another Batman movie in the not-terribly-distant future (July, 2012). Fairly little has been released about the plot and storyline. Christian Bale will be back as Bruce/Wayne Batman, and it will feature both major and obscure villains from Batman mythology: Selena Kyle (catwoman, played by Anne Hathaway) and Bane (played by Tom Hardy). Quite a lot of Nolan veterans in the cast, besides Bale and Hardy, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Marion Cotillard. (Could be the booze, but I find myself contemplating Ellen Page in a Batgirl costume. Mebbe seen Whip It too many times. I have a thing for petite willful women, and Page would kick the hell out of Alicia Silverstone's air-headed version.) All in all, the only sour note so far has been that Nolan plans the movie as a vehicle to conclude his take on Batman.
While I have no doubt whatsoever that Nolan will continue to make excellent films - with a few inevitable side-steps along the way - I'm interested to see how he plans to tie a bow around his Batman universe. I expect it to be outstanding, hopefully enough to satisfy Batfans for the next 10 years or so. Nolan abandoning the franchise unfortunately means that Warner Brothers/DC will hire some over-hyped douchebag to take another run at directing the character for however long the public will buy tickets; whoever happens to be the current incarnation of Joel Schumacher, circa 1995. Len Wiseman is probably near the top of the list. Or somebody from his stable, like Markus Nispel. Fair to say that one or (if we're very lucky) two worthy follow-ups are likely, inevitably followed by a steaming pile of dog-shit that will bury further attempts at comic-book movies for a decade. One-liners and chase-scenes will be offered as substitutes for dialog and drama, with the usual results. Gotta love Hollywood, eh?
But we will get one more Nolan rendition of Batman. So. My prediction: the Nolan Batman storyline will conclude with some great pulling-the-wool-over-the-eyes. Some great deception or obfuscation, which comes at great cost to a central character, but which frees them at the same time. All of Nolan's films highlight the concept that ignorance is bliss, which must sometimes be inflicted on others. The stories convey that reality is subjective. They involve situations where creating (or adopting) the reality that is required involves sacrificing a reality that most people would call "real." Leonard Shelby found his happiness by choosing to ignore and leave behind the reality he has been seeking for years. Likewise, Dominic Cobb found happiness when (by implication) he stopped caring whether or not his reality was real in the grander sense (the significance of the still-spinning top is not that it's still spinning, but rather that Cobb is no longer watching to see if it topples). In The Dark Knight, the reality of Harvey Dent's end was intentionally concealed, at great cost to Our Hero. Both Insomnia and The Prestige likewise have pervasive themes of obfuscation and subjective interpretation of "truth" and "reality." Nolan LOVES the emotional impact of a character transcending reality, by disregarding it. The Dark Knight Rises will be the same.
In interviews, Nolan has asserted that - unlike in comics, where storylines necessarily proceed into perpetuity - movie franchises must have some reasonable closure. I like to think if anyone can wrap up Batman with a clever, impossible to follow twist (which leaves Batman alive, as there must ALWAYS be a Batman), Nolan is the man for the job. Ideally, Nolan will create a storyline that will be difficult enough to follow-up on that the inevitable next director will decide to approach the character from a totally different angle. But alas, the sort of dipshits who will line up for the Batman director job in Nolan's wake are not the type to try to do something original.
But hey, it's about time for us to move past superheroes anyway, since we've pretty much used that up. Seriously, if we're resorting to Thor and Captain America, what's next? Aquaman? Seems we've also been through wizards and dragons, pirates, vampires, zombies, slasher horror remakes, and space drama all within the last decade. Could be mistaken, but its been over a decade since The Matrix, so I believe we're due for some man-against-the-world martial arts action flicks.
Monday, October 24, 2011
The TwiHards
I do occasionally consider a change of career. Lately, I've been spending some time thinking about becoming a telephone psychic, since I can read a tarot deck, and since I learned that some of them charge $600 per hour. No, that's not a miss-print. There are people in the world who make $10 PER MINUTE to shuffle cards and talk on the telephone. I'm thinking maybe that could be me. Could even work out pretty well: I tend to come across pretty well on the phone, when people can't see me rolling my eyes, nor see the mocking expression on my face. This seems important, since those would be common occurrences when addressing people who accept and rely on advice from a deck of cards in the making of decisions. I think that career could be a real possibility.
Of course, I've always been candid about my intended fall-back career: writing B-movie scripts and trashy romance novels. This is the excuse that I offer for having recently picked up and read CB's copies of 'Twilight,' and the following works. Of course, I use 'works' in the loosest possible sense of the term.
My overwhelming response is to wonder at the success of that series of books. I have considered that the average high schooler can barely read, and that their emotional state renders most of them clinical sociopaths from the ages of 14 to 22 (assuming they outgrow it at all), but still. Endless drivel about how Bella simply looks at Edward, and has to take a second or two before she remembers how to breath? How she can't imagine life without him? Endless prattling about how gorgeous he is and how she really can't believe that he's into her? How of course she forgives him for everything he does, immediately, mostly because she doesn't think she deserves him at all? Really? REALLY? This is the sort of writing that earns the author millions?
I'm not sure why this should surprise me, but it kinda does. Maybe I'm a bit of a snob about my literary tastes( or maybe not), but these books are... awful, actually. I sincerely hope that Steph Meyer is one of those authors who thinks its hilarious that her readers are as devoted as they are.
I suspect that part of the issue is my admitted problems dealing with the teens-to-early-20s demographic as a whole. Hell, even as I was reading the books, it seemed a bit creepy to me that Edward, over 100 years old, was in love with a 17 year old girl. Okay, it was more than just a bit creepy, even (or perhaps, especially) when you consider that the author is Mormon and presumably open-minded about unions spanning generation gaps. I was a bachelor well into my 30s, and - living in Las Vegas - had pretty broad dating opportunities. It really didn't take long at all for me to adopt the firm guideline of a maximum allowable age gap of 6 years or so. Really, what were we going to talk about if I had finished law school before she finished high school?
Along those lines, what exactly is it that Edward and Bella connect over? Really, I'm curious. Reading both the language and between the lines, it seems he puts up with all of the drivel and bullshit that makes up her life as a 17-year old high school girl because she smells good. She puts up with all of his condescension, control-freak tendencies, and general douche-baggery (of which there is plenty), mostly because he's gorgeous. While I'm pretty sure that these sorts of arrangements underlie most if not all high-school relationships, I'm not sure that it's healthy for girls to be willing to commit themselves to such deals for all eternity.
So while all this strikes me as exactly the sort of thing that teenage readers would eat up with a spoon, it still depresses me that this is the sort of thing topping best-seller lists. And all in all, it really shouldn't surprise me that the Team Edward vs. Team Jacob debate really gained as much traction as it did. That's gotta be right up there with Survivor, American Idol, and Seinfeld in terms of contrived drama, with the added benefit of being expressed in small words, nearly all of which are known and/or can be sounded out by the target audience.
While real literary analysis is probably not warranted, I'm not going to be able to help myself from wading into the themes. Naturally, there is the almost-universal zero-to-hero angle you find everywhere from the Chronicles of Narnia to Harry Potter, but - interestingly - I think that's one of the more believable angles of the Twilight books. As someone who moved from a big city to a small town, I have no problem believing that a 5.5 to 6 in a big metropolitan pond suddenly rates an 8.5 to 9 in a small pond.
The close corollary 'I-can't-believe-something-this-good-is-happening-to-me' theme is there, in spades, and seems to be the driving force between the Bella/Edward thing as a whole. Seriously, if you took out the drama and dialogue (again, using terms loosely here) about how they REALLY DO love each other, and remove all exchanges where one is assuring they other they they really do want to be together, what all is left?
Answer: pretty much all that's left is another blatantly stereotypical meme: the internal and external conflicts over the wonderful-backup-boyfriend-she-doesn't-love. Oh, Jacob is so wonderful and always there and always saying the right thing and clearly, horrendously in love with Bella. As he is clearly the 'nice' one among her dateable prospects, he gets exploited mercilessly while she languishes over the gorgeous guy she loves. She doesn't WANT Jacob, she just NEEDS him for the actual emotional parts of a relationship, and to fill her pay-attention-to-me quota while Edward is off being dark and moody. This, of course, is all part of the love held for these books by young readers: pretty much every girl (or indeed, every PERSON) on earth will at some point have a hypothetically dateable prospect who loves them, who they don't love, but from whom they love attention. (Admit it, you've put some quality people in the 'friend zone' while you chased someone just like them, but not them. Doing so does not make you a bad person, it just makes you human.) So of course readers eat it up and keep buying books while Jake loves Bella and Bella loves the attention. And since he says he only wants her company, he's getting a positive quotient out of it, notwithstanding overt emotional leeching.
This, obviously, comports nicely with the teenage female world-view. While I haven't actually been able to finish the series quite yet (I can only take fairly small doses at a time before I start getting dry-heaves) I have no doubt whatsoever about how the Edward vs. Jacob thing is going to end. Spoiler alert: Edward is going to get the girl. But I also have no doubt that - part and parcel to final resolution - Jacob will either find his own true love, or die a monumentally heroic death; those are the only resolutions that a teenage female reader would accept. After all, Jacob has been a dutiful and attentive lap-wolf, and the only unforgivable transgression he ever made - other than being a genuinely nice guy - was that he's not as dreamy as Edward. Sadly, I think a heroic death is more likely, since Jacob finding his own true love would mean him finding someone he likes more than he likes Bella. That concept would be a tricky sell to the audience in a first-person narrative based primarily on the mood swings of the narrator. How to make Bella happy about not just losing the relationship that's actually based on personal interaction, but losing that relationship TO ANOTHER GIRL? Thus, I fear that while Jacob will go out well, he is not long for the world.
Reading these books has provided me with some interesting insights in the cravings of the book-buying public, which I confess I lose sight of occasionally. Clearly, any effort I might make to become any form of main-stream writer is going to require overcoming internal psychological barriers about what is and is not publishable quality, and about what I will and will not be willing to have my name attached to. If nothing else, these factors pretty much guarantee that I will be publishing under a pseudonym.
Responses?
Of course, I've always been candid about my intended fall-back career: writing B-movie scripts and trashy romance novels. This is the excuse that I offer for having recently picked up and read CB's copies of 'Twilight,' and the following works. Of course, I use 'works' in the loosest possible sense of the term.
My overwhelming response is to wonder at the success of that series of books. I have considered that the average high schooler can barely read, and that their emotional state renders most of them clinical sociopaths from the ages of 14 to 22 (assuming they outgrow it at all), but still. Endless drivel about how Bella simply looks at Edward, and has to take a second or two before she remembers how to breath? How she can't imagine life without him? Endless prattling about how gorgeous he is and how she really can't believe that he's into her? How of course she forgives him for everything he does, immediately, mostly because she doesn't think she deserves him at all? Really? REALLY? This is the sort of writing that earns the author millions?
I'm not sure why this should surprise me, but it kinda does. Maybe I'm a bit of a snob about my literary tastes( or maybe not), but these books are... awful, actually. I sincerely hope that Steph Meyer is one of those authors who thinks its hilarious that her readers are as devoted as they are.
I suspect that part of the issue is my admitted problems dealing with the teens-to-early-20s demographic as a whole. Hell, even as I was reading the books, it seemed a bit creepy to me that Edward, over 100 years old, was in love with a 17 year old girl. Okay, it was more than just a bit creepy, even (or perhaps, especially) when you consider that the author is Mormon and presumably open-minded about unions spanning generation gaps. I was a bachelor well into my 30s, and - living in Las Vegas - had pretty broad dating opportunities. It really didn't take long at all for me to adopt the firm guideline of a maximum allowable age gap of 6 years or so. Really, what were we going to talk about if I had finished law school before she finished high school?
Along those lines, what exactly is it that Edward and Bella connect over? Really, I'm curious. Reading both the language and between the lines, it seems he puts up with all of the drivel and bullshit that makes up her life as a 17-year old high school girl because she smells good. She puts up with all of his condescension, control-freak tendencies, and general douche-baggery (of which there is plenty), mostly because he's gorgeous. While I'm pretty sure that these sorts of arrangements underlie most if not all high-school relationships, I'm not sure that it's healthy for girls to be willing to commit themselves to such deals for all eternity.
So while all this strikes me as exactly the sort of thing that teenage readers would eat up with a spoon, it still depresses me that this is the sort of thing topping best-seller lists. And all in all, it really shouldn't surprise me that the Team Edward vs. Team Jacob debate really gained as much traction as it did. That's gotta be right up there with Survivor, American Idol, and Seinfeld in terms of contrived drama, with the added benefit of being expressed in small words, nearly all of which are known and/or can be sounded out by the target audience.
While real literary analysis is probably not warranted, I'm not going to be able to help myself from wading into the themes. Naturally, there is the almost-universal zero-to-hero angle you find everywhere from the Chronicles of Narnia to Harry Potter, but - interestingly - I think that's one of the more believable angles of the Twilight books. As someone who moved from a big city to a small town, I have no problem believing that a 5.5 to 6 in a big metropolitan pond suddenly rates an 8.5 to 9 in a small pond.
The close corollary 'I-can't-believe-something-this-good-is-happening-to-me' theme is there, in spades, and seems to be the driving force between the Bella/Edward thing as a whole. Seriously, if you took out the drama and dialogue (again, using terms loosely here) about how they REALLY DO love each other, and remove all exchanges where one is assuring they other they they really do want to be together, what all is left?
Answer: pretty much all that's left is another blatantly stereotypical meme: the internal and external conflicts over the wonderful-backup-boyfriend-she-doesn't-love. Oh, Jacob is so wonderful and always there and always saying the right thing and clearly, horrendously in love with Bella. As he is clearly the 'nice' one among her dateable prospects, he gets exploited mercilessly while she languishes over the gorgeous guy she loves. She doesn't WANT Jacob, she just NEEDS him for the actual emotional parts of a relationship, and to fill her pay-attention-to-me quota while Edward is off being dark and moody. This, of course, is all part of the love held for these books by young readers: pretty much every girl (or indeed, every PERSON) on earth will at some point have a hypothetically dateable prospect who loves them, who they don't love, but from whom they love attention. (Admit it, you've put some quality people in the 'friend zone' while you chased someone just like them, but not them. Doing so does not make you a bad person, it just makes you human.) So of course readers eat it up and keep buying books while Jake loves Bella and Bella loves the attention. And since he says he only wants her company, he's getting a positive quotient out of it, notwithstanding overt emotional leeching.
This, obviously, comports nicely with the teenage female world-view. While I haven't actually been able to finish the series quite yet (I can only take fairly small doses at a time before I start getting dry-heaves) I have no doubt whatsoever about how the Edward vs. Jacob thing is going to end. Spoiler alert: Edward is going to get the girl. But I also have no doubt that - part and parcel to final resolution - Jacob will either find his own true love, or die a monumentally heroic death; those are the only resolutions that a teenage female reader would accept. After all, Jacob has been a dutiful and attentive lap-wolf, and the only unforgivable transgression he ever made - other than being a genuinely nice guy - was that he's not as dreamy as Edward. Sadly, I think a heroic death is more likely, since Jacob finding his own true love would mean him finding someone he likes more than he likes Bella. That concept would be a tricky sell to the audience in a first-person narrative based primarily on the mood swings of the narrator. How to make Bella happy about not just losing the relationship that's actually based on personal interaction, but losing that relationship TO ANOTHER GIRL? Thus, I fear that while Jacob will go out well, he is not long for the world.
Reading these books has provided me with some interesting insights in the cravings of the book-buying public, which I confess I lose sight of occasionally. Clearly, any effort I might make to become any form of main-stream writer is going to require overcoming internal psychological barriers about what is and is not publishable quality, and about what I will and will not be willing to have my name attached to. If nothing else, these factors pretty much guarantee that I will be publishing under a pseudonym.
Responses?
Friday, October 21, 2011
Jobs Loss, and the iHipster
Alas, technology mogul Steve Jobs has shuffled off the mortal coil. Besides (Steve) Jobs, the last decade has also seen the deaths of (Bob) Hope and (Johnny) Cash. With the loss of Hope, Cash, and Jobs, we seem to be descending ever faster into at least the first level of hell with the loss of things everyone loves. Given the rate of loss of the good things, I'm seriously worried that next up will be (Kevin) Bacon.
In any rate, the loss of (Steve) Jobs has of course signaled a plunge in Apple stock, notwithstanding that Jobs left the company's CEO seat in August. But he was still - technically - chairman of the board of the directors. Besides, Apple's stock, and its reputation as a whole, has historically been based on excellent marketing and hipster mystique, so was destined to drop when it's guru did. What I really wonder, like lots of other people, is where the company is going to go from here.
The initial technology developed by Apple (mostly by the Other Steve) was good, but not spectacular. Mostly, it was good because it could do about everything a PC could do, but could be produced out of the Other Steve's garage. Funny that developments in the meantime resulted in the tables being turned: over the years - and notwithstanding that the technology has been proprietary to Apple, while the PC has dozens of manufacturers - the Mac has become substantially more powerful a platform than can be provided by any popular software for the PC, but with the production cost far outstripping the PC, and the added problem that nobody outside Apple is able to provide decent tech support. Other than the computer graphics industry (which genuinely benefits from the increased processing power of Macs over PCs), pretty much everyone who uses a Mac is paying a huge markup for computing power far beyond their requirements. Really, other than playing computer games (which are processing-power intensive, because of the graphic interfaces) the average computer user needs a mp3 player, a word processor, email and internet applications, and possibly basic accounting software. Except for music and online functions, decent versions of all of those programs date back to the Commodore 64. None of those applications, including the music and online functions, really require gigacycles per second of processing power. Amazingly, the public managed to figure this out, and for lots of years (especially after the Windows OS made PCs about as easy to use as Macs), most people bought cheap PCs that could do everything they needed done, rather than expensive Apple/Mac computers that had capabilities they didn't really need.
But Apple and Mac computers re-entered popularity - not through financial or technological advance, but rather through hype and pop culture - when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997. After helping found the company in the 70s, Jobs left Apple in 1985 to become the controlling shareholding of Lucasfilm's computer-animation spin-off. (Pixar. You may have heard of it. I think I might have mentioned the historic connection between Apple/Mac and the computer animation industry as well.) Getting him back as CEO resulted in substantial changes in Apple's operations, which we still see today. First and foremost, Jobs kicked off some truly spectacular ad campaigns, with a very specific target demographic. Way back when Apple was first successful, one of Jobs' programs was to get kids using computers: Apple donated thousands of Apple IIe desktops to public schools. I grew up in Sunnyvale, California (Google it). My elementary school, my junior high school, and my high school (which is the same high school that the Other Steve graduated from) had an Apple computer in every classroom which was almost never used, as well as a dedicated computer lab, where there were 20-30 more machines. This dates back to 1981, when ANY computer was really expensive, so this was not just a token outlay by Apple. But it turns out that one megacycle and 64 kilobytes of RAM was more than enough to get kids turned on by (or at least interested in) computers. Getting kids involved was explicitly part of Jobs' grand plan, based loosely on the Wayne Gretzky-ism of "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." Jobs is on-record as a huge fan of this quote.
So guess who Steve targeted his marketing towards when he re-took the helm at Apple? While Steve was busy at Pixar from 86 to 97, lots of kids who tinkered with Apple computers in grade school/junior high/high school grew up, got degrees, and started earning disposable income. People who who can't remember a world without Apple computers, finally at an age where they're climbing ladders, and making headway in wresting control of The Establishment away from the older generation(s). Chords were struck by commercials with young, hip, Justin Long - sporting zip-up hoodies and facial scruff with roots in Pearl Jam's 'TEN' tour - poking fun at a stodgy Bill Gates look-alike with pure dialog before a plain white background. Other ads were released on the exact opposite tack: purely technical (and spiffy) blue-screen transition work, set to catchy tunes from indie rockers, without even a voice-over. All of it was - in typical Steve Jobs fashion - innovative, fresh, and beautiful in subtly nuanced simplicity.
People ate it up, and we saw the culmination of Steve Jobs' decades-old efforts. Under the light of the Jobs 2.0 marketing campaign, and out of soil seeded with lavish outlay of the Apple IIe 20 years ago, we saw the birth of Steve Jobs' greatest and least appreciated creation: the iHipster. Apple under Steve Jobs pulled off the Oceans Eleven heist of the business world: it created a product, and then created the market for its own product. Sure, Apple made neat stuff, but lots of companies do that. That's not the remarkable part. The remarkable part was convincing the public that the iHipster was something they wanted to be, and that paying the premium for Apple stuff was TOTALLY worthwhile.
You know the iHipster. Odds are that you might be one. The young, savvy, technology user. The 20-40 year-old upper crust (and/or any pretenders thereto) of the Fight Club generation. Traveling light, fast, and green, thinking outside the box, and trying to break free of stagnation and stereotype. Nothing except Apple products will do for the iHipster. The iHipster thinks nothing of paying the markup for Steve's computers, phones, and other electronic toys. It's Apple. This is THE company of the generation. Started in a garage by a couple guys. Built from nothing except innovation. Non-establishment at its core. Dude, haven't you seen the commercials?
Brilliant.
Alas, alack, the King is dead. While he has already been cannonized in the computer world, Apple is now back were it was in 1985: with a good product and excellent goodwill, but without Jobs. I'm curious to see where things go from here, since the reality is that the iHipster image really has nothing to do with Apple's actual operations, or with any other reality. Indeed, Apple is every bit the corporate monster that the iHipster purports to rail against. Example: have you ever actually read the iTunes user agreement? All 68 pages of it? Suffice to say that if you have ANY worries about Big Brother, Dystopia, or the New World Order, you should be a hell of a lot more concerned about Apple than about the United Nations.
While Apple hesitates not at all to recruit talent with the innovation of its founders, and loves to point out that the company made millionaires out of lots of people, that's fluff. The truth is that Apple treats its employees like absolute dog shit. People are hired, assigned absolutely outrageous quotas, worked until they burn out, then fired based on their failures to meet the original outrageous quota. Oh, and any ideas that employees come up with while working at Apple (even those developed in the employee's own time, say, for example, while tinkering in the garage with their high school buddies) are contractually the property of Apple. Didn't you read that fine print? Their standard employee agreement is shorter than the iTunes contract. A bit.
Apple is currently green(ish), but only after it (and Jobs) was repeatedly and thoroughly lambasted by people who are legitimately green. While I don't doubt that Jobs owned a Prius, that's primarily for press-release purposes. (His usual ride was purportedly a $130,000 Mercedes.) Yes, he was paid ONE DOLLAR per year by Apple. But he also owned 5.4 million shares of Apple (currently trading at $405.80 per share) and another 138 million shares of Disney (currently: $35.39) from their takeover of Pixar, so bragging about earning just a dollar was really just a flaunting of how little he really needed payment at all. Without going into details, suffice to say that Jobs spent at least his share of time acting like a petty asshole (google 'Lisa Brennan-Jobs'), and really only got around to being charitable when he had so much money that he literally couldn't spend it all.
So, given that Apple's business current sales model is based largely on perception and/or illusion, and given that, while there are plenty of businessmen capable of running Apple, none of them look nearly as natural in a black turtleneck, 501s, and running shoes, I wonder what the future holds for Apple. Because while they are currently amazingly successful by any measure, the guy who made it all run is gone. Absent their guru - and setting aside the questionable points of the iReligion - is there someone ready and able to step up and convince the iHipsters that they need to keep paying the Apple markup?
In any rate, the loss of (Steve) Jobs has of course signaled a plunge in Apple stock, notwithstanding that Jobs left the company's CEO seat in August. But he was still - technically - chairman of the board of the directors. Besides, Apple's stock, and its reputation as a whole, has historically been based on excellent marketing and hipster mystique, so was destined to drop when it's guru did. What I really wonder, like lots of other people, is where the company is going to go from here.
The initial technology developed by Apple (mostly by the Other Steve) was good, but not spectacular. Mostly, it was good because it could do about everything a PC could do, but could be produced out of the Other Steve's garage. Funny that developments in the meantime resulted in the tables being turned: over the years - and notwithstanding that the technology has been proprietary to Apple, while the PC has dozens of manufacturers - the Mac has become substantially more powerful a platform than can be provided by any popular software for the PC, but with the production cost far outstripping the PC, and the added problem that nobody outside Apple is able to provide decent tech support. Other than the computer graphics industry (which genuinely benefits from the increased processing power of Macs over PCs), pretty much everyone who uses a Mac is paying a huge markup for computing power far beyond their requirements. Really, other than playing computer games (which are processing-power intensive, because of the graphic interfaces) the average computer user needs a mp3 player, a word processor, email and internet applications, and possibly basic accounting software. Except for music and online functions, decent versions of all of those programs date back to the Commodore 64. None of those applications, including the music and online functions, really require gigacycles per second of processing power. Amazingly, the public managed to figure this out, and for lots of years (especially after the Windows OS made PCs about as easy to use as Macs), most people bought cheap PCs that could do everything they needed done, rather than expensive Apple/Mac computers that had capabilities they didn't really need.
But Apple and Mac computers re-entered popularity - not through financial or technological advance, but rather through hype and pop culture - when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997. After helping found the company in the 70s, Jobs left Apple in 1985 to become the controlling shareholding of Lucasfilm's computer-animation spin-off. (Pixar. You may have heard of it. I think I might have mentioned the historic connection between Apple/Mac and the computer animation industry as well.) Getting him back as CEO resulted in substantial changes in Apple's operations, which we still see today. First and foremost, Jobs kicked off some truly spectacular ad campaigns, with a very specific target demographic. Way back when Apple was first successful, one of Jobs' programs was to get kids using computers: Apple donated thousands of Apple IIe desktops to public schools. I grew up in Sunnyvale, California (Google it). My elementary school, my junior high school, and my high school (which is the same high school that the Other Steve graduated from) had an Apple computer in every classroom which was almost never used, as well as a dedicated computer lab, where there were 20-30 more machines. This dates back to 1981, when ANY computer was really expensive, so this was not just a token outlay by Apple. But it turns out that one megacycle and 64 kilobytes of RAM was more than enough to get kids turned on by (or at least interested in) computers. Getting kids involved was explicitly part of Jobs' grand plan, based loosely on the Wayne Gretzky-ism of "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." Jobs is on-record as a huge fan of this quote.
So guess who Steve targeted his marketing towards when he re-took the helm at Apple? While Steve was busy at Pixar from 86 to 97, lots of kids who tinkered with Apple computers in grade school/junior high/high school grew up, got degrees, and started earning disposable income. People who who can't remember a world without Apple computers, finally at an age where they're climbing ladders, and making headway in wresting control of The Establishment away from the older generation(s). Chords were struck by commercials with young, hip, Justin Long - sporting zip-up hoodies and facial scruff with roots in Pearl Jam's 'TEN' tour - poking fun at a stodgy Bill Gates look-alike with pure dialog before a plain white background. Other ads were released on the exact opposite tack: purely technical (and spiffy) blue-screen transition work, set to catchy tunes from indie rockers, without even a voice-over. All of it was - in typical Steve Jobs fashion - innovative, fresh, and beautiful in subtly nuanced simplicity.
People ate it up, and we saw the culmination of Steve Jobs' decades-old efforts. Under the light of the Jobs 2.0 marketing campaign, and out of soil seeded with lavish outlay of the Apple IIe 20 years ago, we saw the birth of Steve Jobs' greatest and least appreciated creation: the iHipster. Apple under Steve Jobs pulled off the Oceans Eleven heist of the business world: it created a product, and then created the market for its own product. Sure, Apple made neat stuff, but lots of companies do that. That's not the remarkable part. The remarkable part was convincing the public that the iHipster was something they wanted to be, and that paying the premium for Apple stuff was TOTALLY worthwhile.
You know the iHipster. Odds are that you might be one. The young, savvy, technology user. The 20-40 year-old upper crust (and/or any pretenders thereto) of the Fight Club generation. Traveling light, fast, and green, thinking outside the box, and trying to break free of stagnation and stereotype. Nothing except Apple products will do for the iHipster. The iHipster thinks nothing of paying the markup for Steve's computers, phones, and other electronic toys. It's Apple. This is THE company of the generation. Started in a garage by a couple guys. Built from nothing except innovation. Non-establishment at its core. Dude, haven't you seen the commercials?
Brilliant.
Alas, alack, the King is dead. While he has already been cannonized in the computer world, Apple is now back were it was in 1985: with a good product and excellent goodwill, but without Jobs. I'm curious to see where things go from here, since the reality is that the iHipster image really has nothing to do with Apple's actual operations, or with any other reality. Indeed, Apple is every bit the corporate monster that the iHipster purports to rail against. Example: have you ever actually read the iTunes user agreement? All 68 pages of it? Suffice to say that if you have ANY worries about Big Brother, Dystopia, or the New World Order, you should be a hell of a lot more concerned about Apple than about the United Nations.
While Apple hesitates not at all to recruit talent with the innovation of its founders, and loves to point out that the company made millionaires out of lots of people, that's fluff. The truth is that Apple treats its employees like absolute dog shit. People are hired, assigned absolutely outrageous quotas, worked until they burn out, then fired based on their failures to meet the original outrageous quota. Oh, and any ideas that employees come up with while working at Apple (even those developed in the employee's own time, say, for example, while tinkering in the garage with their high school buddies) are contractually the property of Apple. Didn't you read that fine print? Their standard employee agreement is shorter than the iTunes contract. A bit.
Apple is currently green(ish), but only after it (and Jobs) was repeatedly and thoroughly lambasted by people who are legitimately green. While I don't doubt that Jobs owned a Prius, that's primarily for press-release purposes. (His usual ride was purportedly a $130,000 Mercedes.) Yes, he was paid ONE DOLLAR per year by Apple. But he also owned 5.4 million shares of Apple (currently trading at $405.80 per share) and another 138 million shares of Disney (currently: $35.39) from their takeover of Pixar, so bragging about earning just a dollar was really just a flaunting of how little he really needed payment at all. Without going into details, suffice to say that Jobs spent at least his share of time acting like a petty asshole (google 'Lisa Brennan-Jobs'), and really only got around to being charitable when he had so much money that he literally couldn't spend it all.
So, given that Apple's business current sales model is based largely on perception and/or illusion, and given that, while there are plenty of businessmen capable of running Apple, none of them look nearly as natural in a black turtleneck, 501s, and running shoes, I wonder what the future holds for Apple. Because while they are currently amazingly successful by any measure, the guy who made it all run is gone. Absent their guru - and setting aside the questionable points of the iReligion - is there someone ready and able to step up and convince the iHipsters that they need to keep paying the Apple markup?
Thursday, September 15, 2011
The Road Here
“It was not their irritating assumption of equality that annoyed Nicholai so much as their cultural confusions. The Americans seemed to confuse standard of living with quality of life, equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity, bravery with courage, machismo with manhood, liberty with freedom, wordiness with articulation, fun with pleasure - in short, all of the misconceptions common to those who assume that justice implies equality for all, rather than equality for equals.”
― Trevanian, Shibumi
After my recent ramblings about economics, and in the course of several vacations (to say nothing of having 'news' inflicted upon me pretty much every day), I'm thinking more and more about the United States in decline. And we've done it to ourselves.
My summer included such things as trips to Hoover dam. And riding the gondola from the shores of Lake Tahoe up to Heavenly. On various occasions, CB noted how remarkable it was that humanity was capable of building things like that, notwithstanding that most people on the streets cannot be trusted to tie their own shoes. To a large degree, America's creation of great works comes from allowing the best and brightest to succeed, by giving them means and resources to rise above the staid masses of mediocrity.
But somewhere along the way, we've turned into Ayn Rand's America from Atlas Shrugged. At some point, the balance of power changed. Rather than all of us benefiting from the capability and industry of the unleashed best and brightest, we've shackled the best and brightest, barring them from rising above the mediocrity. The Hoover dam represents one of the greatest investments ever made by the United States. Yes, $50 million was a lot of money in the 1930s. But that bad boy has been providing vast amounts of cheap electricity, uninterrupted, for SEVENTY YEARS. It would NEVER be approved for construction in America today. No way. Would never even make it out of committee. Hell, even the gondola at Heavenly; can you imagine the paperwork, environmental impact studies, and Sierra Club lawsuits that would be involved in building a chain of chairlift towers and machinery over several miles, from the heart of a California municipality up to a Nevada ski area on the other side of a mountain ridge? Civil building permits. State approval from both California (where the downtown lodge is in South Lake Tahoe) and Nevada (where the slopes are). Federal approval, since you've got a business enterprise spanning state lines. No way you're going to get all that; the construction costs would be dwarfed by the "campaign contributions" you'd need to make just to get permits and approvals from local, state, and federal politicians.
Doesn't matter that the end result (either Hoover dam or the Heavenly gondola) is a veritable cash cow, with returns vastly exceeding start-up costs. Regulations have been enacted. "Interested" parties need opportunity to voice their concerns and to be appeased. The ambitious and capable who might get the job done will not be allowed to do so, because power has shifted into the hands of the lesser minds, who's primary concern is and has always been the maintenance of the status quo.
Once upon a time, kids in American schools were convincingly told that they could grow up to be anything. And they could. Then. Do well in school. Start a business. Make millions.
These days, our educational system is more interested in pretending that kids of different intellect and capabilities are all the same, and as a result focus their efforts on the lowest common denominator. They're not allowed to leave a child behind. No matter that some such children are disinterested, delinquents, or just simply fucking morons, they MUST be nursed through the system. Sorry; we're going to have to cancel the AP programs. We need that money to triple the size of the remedial programs, which are not going to be able to squeeze blood from stones regardless. The government has So Ordered.
Starting a business used to be the American dream. Be your own boss, and do what you love. For the most part you can forget about that. You need permits. You need to adhere to the regulations. Face the inspections. Hire the requisite demographics, regardless of their qualifications. And even if you do all that, you can forget about making the millions. Our government has taken the overt position that small businesses are a good thing (never mind those issues listed above), but big businesses should bear the costs of public healthcare, welfare, and payment of the national debt, whether they like it or not. The government has So Ordered.
Existing "big businesses" will never face this in any meaningful way. They can simply move their operations overseas and/or exploit tax loopholes crafted especially for them. Your business, as a NKOTB graduating from "small" to "big," is unlikely to have those options. Should your "small" business be successful, and then become a "big" business (in the discretion of a government strapped for cash and free to change its arbitrary classifications pretty much at will), you will be ripe for plundering. At that point, taxes will come crashing down, and make you wonder if maybe you should ELECT to cut back your productivity, to stay a "small" business. Thus, and amazingly, American politics and economics dictates that if you own a business, it's in your interest to KEEP IT SMALL.
All in all, it's probably easier to work for somebody else, and let them deal with that bullshit. Or better yet, you should try to get a government job, which doesn't pay all that well, but from which it is pretty much impossible to be fired, regardless of your productivity/incompetence ratio. (See, e.g., United States Department of Energy.)
In the end, even the best and brightest these days are steered into middle-management jobs in "industries" that produce nothing but paperwork (I'm not passing judgment, since I'm in such an industry), where they expect grand salaries (again, not passing judgment, since I have such expectations). Those less than the best and brightest will have the same expectations (they're just as good as anyone else! Their parents, teachers, and politicians all said so!). Even they can rest assured that - just like in school - the government will make sure that they get the same benefits and treatment as everyone else. The government has So Ordered.
Given this situation, the sad result will be ongoing plundering of the capable by the mediocre. We see incompetent employees kept on, riding the coat-tails of their more capable co-workers, because The System won't let them be canned for their bullshit and incompetence. We see bosses who's primary job is finding employees smarter and more capable than they are, and taking credit for those employees' efforts, while convincing the employees that they're lucky to have a job at all. We see a national tax system where less than half of the populace actually pays taxes, and were politicians talk not about getting more of the populace to contibute, but about getting the contributing populace to CONTRIBUTE MORE.
Makes you proud to be an American, doesn't it?
― Trevanian, Shibumi
After my recent ramblings about economics, and in the course of several vacations (to say nothing of having 'news' inflicted upon me pretty much every day), I'm thinking more and more about the United States in decline. And we've done it to ourselves.
My summer included such things as trips to Hoover dam. And riding the gondola from the shores of Lake Tahoe up to Heavenly. On various occasions, CB noted how remarkable it was that humanity was capable of building things like that, notwithstanding that most people on the streets cannot be trusted to tie their own shoes. To a large degree, America's creation of great works comes from allowing the best and brightest to succeed, by giving them means and resources to rise above the staid masses of mediocrity.
But somewhere along the way, we've turned into Ayn Rand's America from Atlas Shrugged. At some point, the balance of power changed. Rather than all of us benefiting from the capability and industry of the unleashed best and brightest, we've shackled the best and brightest, barring them from rising above the mediocrity. The Hoover dam represents one of the greatest investments ever made by the United States. Yes, $50 million was a lot of money in the 1930s. But that bad boy has been providing vast amounts of cheap electricity, uninterrupted, for SEVENTY YEARS. It would NEVER be approved for construction in America today. No way. Would never even make it out of committee. Hell, even the gondola at Heavenly; can you imagine the paperwork, environmental impact studies, and Sierra Club lawsuits that would be involved in building a chain of chairlift towers and machinery over several miles, from the heart of a California municipality up to a Nevada ski area on the other side of a mountain ridge? Civil building permits. State approval from both California (where the downtown lodge is in South Lake Tahoe) and Nevada (where the slopes are). Federal approval, since you've got a business enterprise spanning state lines. No way you're going to get all that; the construction costs would be dwarfed by the "campaign contributions" you'd need to make just to get permits and approvals from local, state, and federal politicians.
Doesn't matter that the end result (either Hoover dam or the Heavenly gondola) is a veritable cash cow, with returns vastly exceeding start-up costs. Regulations have been enacted. "Interested" parties need opportunity to voice their concerns and to be appeased. The ambitious and capable who might get the job done will not be allowed to do so, because power has shifted into the hands of the lesser minds, who's primary concern is and has always been the maintenance of the status quo.
Once upon a time, kids in American schools were convincingly told that they could grow up to be anything. And they could. Then. Do well in school. Start a business. Make millions.
These days, our educational system is more interested in pretending that kids of different intellect and capabilities are all the same, and as a result focus their efforts on the lowest common denominator. They're not allowed to leave a child behind. No matter that some such children are disinterested, delinquents, or just simply fucking morons, they MUST be nursed through the system. Sorry; we're going to have to cancel the AP programs. We need that money to triple the size of the remedial programs, which are not going to be able to squeeze blood from stones regardless. The government has So Ordered.
Starting a business used to be the American dream. Be your own boss, and do what you love. For the most part you can forget about that. You need permits. You need to adhere to the regulations. Face the inspections. Hire the requisite demographics, regardless of their qualifications. And even if you do all that, you can forget about making the millions. Our government has taken the overt position that small businesses are a good thing (never mind those issues listed above), but big businesses should bear the costs of public healthcare, welfare, and payment of the national debt, whether they like it or not. The government has So Ordered.
Existing "big businesses" will never face this in any meaningful way. They can simply move their operations overseas and/or exploit tax loopholes crafted especially for them. Your business, as a NKOTB graduating from "small" to "big," is unlikely to have those options. Should your "small" business be successful, and then become a "big" business (in the discretion of a government strapped for cash and free to change its arbitrary classifications pretty much at will), you will be ripe for plundering. At that point, taxes will come crashing down, and make you wonder if maybe you should ELECT to cut back your productivity, to stay a "small" business. Thus, and amazingly, American politics and economics dictates that if you own a business, it's in your interest to KEEP IT SMALL.
All in all, it's probably easier to work for somebody else, and let them deal with that bullshit. Or better yet, you should try to get a government job, which doesn't pay all that well, but from which it is pretty much impossible to be fired, regardless of your productivity/incompetence ratio. (See, e.g., United States Department of Energy.)
In the end, even the best and brightest these days are steered into middle-management jobs in "industries" that produce nothing but paperwork (I'm not passing judgment, since I'm in such an industry), where they expect grand salaries (again, not passing judgment, since I have such expectations). Those less than the best and brightest will have the same expectations (they're just as good as anyone else! Their parents, teachers, and politicians all said so!). Even they can rest assured that - just like in school - the government will make sure that they get the same benefits and treatment as everyone else. The government has So Ordered.
Given this situation, the sad result will be ongoing plundering of the capable by the mediocre. We see incompetent employees kept on, riding the coat-tails of their more capable co-workers, because The System won't let them be canned for their bullshit and incompetence. We see bosses who's primary job is finding employees smarter and more capable than they are, and taking credit for those employees' efforts, while convincing the employees that they're lucky to have a job at all. We see a national tax system where less than half of the populace actually pays taxes, and were politicians talk not about getting more of the populace to contibute, but about getting the contributing populace to CONTRIBUTE MORE.
Makes you proud to be an American, doesn't it?
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Decline
The sad truth of the matter is that the United States is a nation in decline. Not that it's effecting me a whole lot, of course. While I'm not without my own financial woes or looming problems, I got launched on this train of thought while enjoying CB's company over another exceptionally bourgeois weekend at the Red Rock Hotel and Casino. In fact, this recent trip put the last trip to shame from a culinary perspective, yet somehow managed to cost slightly less than our last similar outing. Go figure. In any rate, the only real issue I've had lately with finances is wondering whether or not the dollar is going to be worth anything after any given day of stock market activity, and whether or not I just just simply spend every dime I have, and convert hypothetical solid liquidity (which is becoming more and more a contradiction in terms) into tangible chattels.
But while watching our national debt issues being spun by the media and politicians, and with The United States of American being declared a bad credit risk, I got to considering the long-term future of the United States. At least for the time being, we are a nation in decline, with the greatest evidence being the general disparity between parents and their adult children. Rather than parents moving in with their children as they grow physically infirm, adult children are moving back in their parents, because the parents are financially firm. These days, children aspire to the levels of success achieved by mom and dad, rather than dazzling mom and dad with successes and the reaching of new heights.
To a certain degree, this trend of parents having to play host and financier to their insolvent adult children is a little dose of justice. In many cases, the success and stability currently enjoyed by elderly Americans exists because they've spent their lives gathering wealth in an economy based largely on borrowing from the future. Only fair that they help out the younger generations, since those younger generations are charged with paying off the debt incurred by the older generations. The American populace and government has spent $14 trillion that they didn't actually have in order to get where they are.
From my own financial perspective, this is not an overwhelming problem. Both CB and I are highly educated, capable, and motivated when we need to be. So long as the legal and associated system remains operating in any meaningful form, we will be able to get desk jobs. And if there are no desk jobs, we'll find work doing other things, since we also have too much pride to spend substantial time on any sort of wellfare. To one degree, this means that we will feel the effects of a national economic decline worse than others, since we will remain in the minority who work, pay taxes, and so forth. But it also means that we will never be dependent on parents or Big Brother for our meals and comforts.
But beyond the issue of how to make ends meet (which I'm not worried about except insofar as I might have to eat more grains and veggies and less filet mignon), I've been thinking about the future because CB and I have been seriously discussing the issue of children, which has me thinking about the world such child(ren) might be brought in to.
Given the Way of Things, the United States economny may be unlikely to recover. On paper, the United States is over $14 trillion in debt, and that doesn't count toxic assets held by banks and other financial centers. The reason that Bank of America owns thousands of foreclosed upon homes: it LITERALLY cannot afford to put them on the market. So long as no new valuation is assigned to a property (as is the case in a sale), the theoretical value is the most recent purchase price. The reason that we are where we are is that nuances of the '90s and 00s financial booms supported vast overvaluation of real estate. Your took out a loan. The bankers used the value of your mortgage note as capitol, which was loaned to others. The higher property values rose, the more capitol the banks were able to generate for loans in vestments.
Then the crunch came and passed. Houses are no longer worth the price of the loans given to buy the property. What does that say about the value of the loan (which is secured by the property), which the bank lists as a debit to balance some credit? Much of the "money" in circulation is supported by only by a bank's listing of a loan value. If the house underlying that loan is foreclosed upon and sold, the bank needs to admit that it's accounts are undercapitolized, as the actual value of the debits not longer meets the actual value of the credits. Multiply this by the millions of homes and properties that the banks gave loans on, which are no longer worth the value lent. So the banks allow those properties to sit empty, to preserve the lie that they are an asset, rather than a liability. The sad truth of the matter is that many of the property loans made in the last decade or so are upside down, and represent financial liabilities, which banks are listing as actual assets. The privately owned totality of the United States is, to one degree or another, a toxic asset.
So. Besides the $14 trillion that we acknowledge as national debt, there is the hole that represents the cumulative liability of every upside-down property in the free world. More and more Republicans are likely to be elected to office with hard-line positions on debt management, but the truth of the matter is that we really have overspent to the point of no return. Nobody really wants to stop spending, much less start paying off debt. The only real question seems to be how long we can preserve the lie that our books balance, and thereby prevent the sudden and catestropic loss of value of every account evidenced only by a dollar value in a computer somewhere.
I think this will actually last quite a while, since - with the wonders of our global economy - everything in the world is valued in dollars, and NOBODY really wants to own up to the lie we've all been living. So we will keep spending, allow interest to continually accrue, continue to borrow more money to pay existing liaiblities, and so forth. It will get really fun if interest rates rise. Anecdotal note: the United States nation debt is largely funded with T-bills and other notes based on variable rates (prime), currently dirt-cheap at 3% or less. If the interest rate rises to as must as 5.7% (which is the average for the last 20 years or so), the United States debt will grow by $5 trillion in the next decade, BASED ON INTEREST ALONE. So realistically, the United States Treasury CANNOT raise the interest rate, which takes away a check-and-balance on the financial system, with all sorts of interesting consequences on inflation and other financial factors.
Given the numbers, the still-hidden toxic assets, and the inability of elected officials to make hard decisions (the ones that cause austerity for the electorate), one would think it must necessarily come to an end, and perhaps sooner rather than later. Eventually, people are going to realize that a dollar is no longer worth a dollar, and slowly, steadily, move their assets into other values, while shifting their liabilities into dollars. That's the hope for an orderly transition; that the change happen slowly, rather than catastrophically. The worst case is a sudden upheaval, which might result from such things as Texas Secession, or China calling its loans due.
But alas, like Rome, the Holy Roman Church, and the British Empire, the United States will ultimately decline and be subsumed. A younger, healthier world leader will arise, and human existence will continue on as it always has. Until the zombies come, that is.
In the end, I guess what I'm really wondering is, in the course of maximizing the ability of my hypothetical child(ren) to succeed, should I or should I not be considering a move to another country? Or at least to Texas?
But while watching our national debt issues being spun by the media and politicians, and with The United States of American being declared a bad credit risk, I got to considering the long-term future of the United States. At least for the time being, we are a nation in decline, with the greatest evidence being the general disparity between parents and their adult children. Rather than parents moving in with their children as they grow physically infirm, adult children are moving back in their parents, because the parents are financially firm. These days, children aspire to the levels of success achieved by mom and dad, rather than dazzling mom and dad with successes and the reaching of new heights.
To a certain degree, this trend of parents having to play host and financier to their insolvent adult children is a little dose of justice. In many cases, the success and stability currently enjoyed by elderly Americans exists because they've spent their lives gathering wealth in an economy based largely on borrowing from the future. Only fair that they help out the younger generations, since those younger generations are charged with paying off the debt incurred by the older generations. The American populace and government has spent $14 trillion that they didn't actually have in order to get where they are.
From my own financial perspective, this is not an overwhelming problem. Both CB and I are highly educated, capable, and motivated when we need to be. So long as the legal and associated system remains operating in any meaningful form, we will be able to get desk jobs. And if there are no desk jobs, we'll find work doing other things, since we also have too much pride to spend substantial time on any sort of wellfare. To one degree, this means that we will feel the effects of a national economic decline worse than others, since we will remain in the minority who work, pay taxes, and so forth. But it also means that we will never be dependent on parents or Big Brother for our meals and comforts.
But beyond the issue of how to make ends meet (which I'm not worried about except insofar as I might have to eat more grains and veggies and less filet mignon), I've been thinking about the future because CB and I have been seriously discussing the issue of children, which has me thinking about the world such child(ren) might be brought in to.
Given the Way of Things, the United States economny may be unlikely to recover. On paper, the United States is over $14 trillion in debt, and that doesn't count toxic assets held by banks and other financial centers. The reason that Bank of America owns thousands of foreclosed upon homes: it LITERALLY cannot afford to put them on the market. So long as no new valuation is assigned to a property (as is the case in a sale), the theoretical value is the most recent purchase price. The reason that we are where we are is that nuances of the '90s and 00s financial booms supported vast overvaluation of real estate. Your took out a loan. The bankers used the value of your mortgage note as capitol, which was loaned to others. The higher property values rose, the more capitol the banks were able to generate for loans in vestments.
Then the crunch came and passed. Houses are no longer worth the price of the loans given to buy the property. What does that say about the value of the loan (which is secured by the property), which the bank lists as a debit to balance some credit? Much of the "money" in circulation is supported by only by a bank's listing of a loan value. If the house underlying that loan is foreclosed upon and sold, the bank needs to admit that it's accounts are undercapitolized, as the actual value of the debits not longer meets the actual value of the credits. Multiply this by the millions of homes and properties that the banks gave loans on, which are no longer worth the value lent. So the banks allow those properties to sit empty, to preserve the lie that they are an asset, rather than a liability. The sad truth of the matter is that many of the property loans made in the last decade or so are upside down, and represent financial liabilities, which banks are listing as actual assets. The privately owned totality of the United States is, to one degree or another, a toxic asset.
So. Besides the $14 trillion that we acknowledge as national debt, there is the hole that represents the cumulative liability of every upside-down property in the free world. More and more Republicans are likely to be elected to office with hard-line positions on debt management, but the truth of the matter is that we really have overspent to the point of no return. Nobody really wants to stop spending, much less start paying off debt. The only real question seems to be how long we can preserve the lie that our books balance, and thereby prevent the sudden and catestropic loss of value of every account evidenced only by a dollar value in a computer somewhere.
I think this will actually last quite a while, since - with the wonders of our global economy - everything in the world is valued in dollars, and NOBODY really wants to own up to the lie we've all been living. So we will keep spending, allow interest to continually accrue, continue to borrow more money to pay existing liaiblities, and so forth. It will get really fun if interest rates rise. Anecdotal note: the United States nation debt is largely funded with T-bills and other notes based on variable rates (prime), currently dirt-cheap at 3% or less. If the interest rate rises to as must as 5.7% (which is the average for the last 20 years or so), the United States debt will grow by $5 trillion in the next decade, BASED ON INTEREST ALONE. So realistically, the United States Treasury CANNOT raise the interest rate, which takes away a check-and-balance on the financial system, with all sorts of interesting consequences on inflation and other financial factors.
Given the numbers, the still-hidden toxic assets, and the inability of elected officials to make hard decisions (the ones that cause austerity for the electorate), one would think it must necessarily come to an end, and perhaps sooner rather than later. Eventually, people are going to realize that a dollar is no longer worth a dollar, and slowly, steadily, move their assets into other values, while shifting their liabilities into dollars. That's the hope for an orderly transition; that the change happen slowly, rather than catastrophically. The worst case is a sudden upheaval, which might result from such things as Texas Secession, or China calling its loans due.
But alas, like Rome, the Holy Roman Church, and the British Empire, the United States will ultimately decline and be subsumed. A younger, healthier world leader will arise, and human existence will continue on as it always has. Until the zombies come, that is.
In the end, I guess what I'm really wondering is, in the course of maximizing the ability of my hypothetical child(ren) to succeed, should I or should I not be considering a move to another country? Or at least to Texas?
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