Rocket Bomber

[blockquote]

“The myth is that anyone can come from anywhere and achieve great success in Silicon Valley if they are skilled. It holds that those who “make it” do so due to their excellent ideas and ability, because the tech scene is a meritocracy where what you do, not who you are, matters.

“There is some truth to this statement. To a certain extent, there is a lower barrier to entry in tech than in some other industries. Having a famous father or coming from an old money family would not necessarily be an asset as it might in banking (it wouldn’t necessarily hurt, either). And certainly the highest status in the tech scene comes from one’s job rather than family name, although wealth factors considerably into status.

…

“The trope of the successful high-tech entrepreneur is surprisingly similar across twenty-five years of technology development: young, brash, rich, famous, intrinsically risk-taking, innovative, and intelligent. In Silicon Valley specifically, the image of the entrepreneur that has persisted through thirty years of boom-and-bust cycles is almost always young, white, and male.

“This image has deep implications for the way the technology industry functions, particularly when it comes to gender. Entrepreneurialism is a loaded concept that incorporates male-normative notions of behavior and success — and because entrepreneurs are so high status, this means that women have been systematically excluded from the highest levels of the technology scene.

…

“People in tech repeatedly portray Silicon Valley as places where the smartest, most motivated people from around the globe are changing the world for the better, and this rhetoric has been taken up and repeated often by traditional media outlets. Unlike, say, community activists, public schoolteachers, social workers, or health care providers, technologists are ultimately focused on a small slice of the population, and they are primarily looking for ideas that will prove profitable. These entrepreneurs may have a passion for better audio streaming or e-mail, but to say that such pursuits are world-changing is a bit disingenuous.” [/blockquote]

Silicon Valley Isn’t a Meritocracy. And It’s Dangerous to Hero-Worship Entrepreneurs : Alice Marwick, 25 November 2013, Wired

[blockquote]
“These competitors, typically governments or private capital sources with a social agenda, look at the mix and say, ‘we have world class universities surrounded by large companies with lots of talent’ and conclude that the missing ingredient is capital, and possibly desirable real estate or incubation zones conducive to the needs of a startup.

“Unfortunately it’s not so easy. Sure, there have been pockets of success — we constantly hear and read about ‘the new Silicon Valley’ or the ‘next tech hub’ — but thus far nobody has really found a way to approach the scale of the Valley. So what is missing?

“Silicon Valley is as much about mindset as it is about the location. This mindset is something rarely studied as it is woven through the fabric of the Valley and difficult to see. Like any shared culture, this mindset is reinforced by an extended network of people and businesses that also touch the Valley in numerous ways.” [/blockquote]

Why There is Only One Silicon Valley — And Why It Needs to Step Up Its Game : Tim Wilson, 26 November 2013, Innovation Insights blog at Wired.com

[blockquote]
“The business of selling books is run by a communal ‘brain,’ managed by three personality types; those who lead the market, those who organize operations and those who task themselves (like me) with imagining its future. The balance of these types in this brain, this bookselling brain if you will, and the relationship between the parts, determines the behaviour and direction of the industry as a whole.

“Using the evolutionary triune brain theory developed by the American physician Paul MacLean, I’m going to apply neuroscience to this bookselling brain. I will argue, very briefly, and with the diplomatic immunity of an enthusiastic amateur in a land of neurological experts, that the bookselling brain is of a very similar design to every other brain, including your own.

“Understanding how this brain functions, I believe, will make us more mindful of its mechanics, better equipping us to adapt, survive and even flourish in this period of unprecedented opportunity and change.” [/blockquote]

The bookselling brain : Richard Kilgarriff, 26 November 2013, Futurebook.net

##

I leave, as an exercise for the student, the determination as to whether the “Bookselling Brain” has Alzheimer’s, is suffering from oxygen deprivation, or is the victim of blunt trauma.

I don’t often do a link-roundup post (I personally am of the opinion that no one really clicks any of the links, and many folks will skim a list, only pick up on 2-3 headlines, and the rest just scrolls past unread and unremarked) however I seem to have accumulated way too many interesting articles related to books and publishing to tweet in an effective manner, so…

A link roundup.

##

[blockquote]
“Last week, BusinessWeek published a themed issue entitled, ‘The Year Ahead: 2014.’ It’s a fascinating compilation of interviews, data, projections, and ideas. I will be reviewing my copy of this superbly useful print publication for weeks to come.

“One article in particular caught my attention: ‘The Year of the Paywall.’ In a single page, it neatly summarizes the problems facing newspaper, entertainment, and magazine publishers, while touching on problems facing scientific and scholarly publishers by extension.

“The major premise? Publishers were demonized for having paywalls for individual subscribers, but now are finding that every alternative is either too unreliable or simply insufficient, and are returning to individual paywalls with a vengeance.” [/blockquote]

Will 2014 Be the Year of the Individual Paywall for Publishers? : Kent Anderson, 25 November 2013, The Scholarly Kitchen

for reference: The Year of the Paywall : Edmund Lee, 14 November 2013, Bloomberg Businessweek

##

Is Government the Only Force Able to End Amazon Dominance? : Roger Tagholm, 25 November 2013, Publishing Perspectives

What If Amazon Was Run By the US Government? : Roger Tagholm, 25 November 2013, Publishing Perspectives

Are Book Machines the Right Fit for Indies? : Judith Rosen, 22 November 2013, Publishers Weekly

For those not familiar with On Demand Books or the Esspresso Book Machine I’d start with a simple Google search for Espresso Book Machine and start clicking links.

This guy even used the sentence “It’s a telling sign of how blind postmodern thinking can make us” and still manages to miss the whole point : The Bechdel test: Application, historical context, and introducing a male equivalent : Bonus points for “If the people who complain about movies using the Bechdel test would instead proactively contribute to making the postmodern movies they want, maybe things would look differently” like we all have a couple million lying around to make movies, or are even given the opportunity to ‘vote’ for better options with our dollars, in a world without options.

From campfire to holodeck : Joanne Jacobs, 24 November 2013, joannejacobs.com (“Linking and Thinking on Education”)

The Absence Of Serendipity, Or, Why I Hate Shopping At Amazon : Tim Worstall, 19 November 2013, Forbes.com : via The Passive Voice where you’ll find additional commentary

10 Reasons Amazon is Great for Book Lovers : Joel Goldman, 21 November 2013, joelgoldman.com

Comment: How I learned to stop worrying and love Amazon : Anne Treasure, 21 November 2013, SBS.com.au

What’s the Key to Solving the Book Discoverability Problem? : Laura Fredericks, 18 November 2013, Publishing Perspectives

The main factor contributing to the problem of book discovery is the sheer volume of books out there : Stephanie Anderson, 19 November 2013, Bookavore

##

[blockquote]
“The digital revolution brought forth a frenzied hoard of futurists who declared the publishing industry is dying. They say publishers simply can’t compete with authors who can self-publish or the growing dominance of Amazon. I disagree. I don’t think the end is near. I think we’re looking in the wrong direction. Rather than look at the end, we need to look down the middle.

“To illustrate, draw a horizontal line and write ‘Free’ on the left side and the number ‘$9.99’ on the right side: Free represents content that readers can get at no charge, such as book samples, blog posts, free resources, etc. The number $9.99 represents the typical price used to sell digital e-books. To date, most publishers and authors concentrate their efforts on either end of the line. They give away free content to promote their titles and entice readers. Then, they charge consumers around $9.99 or more to purchase a digital e-book.

“Notice the wide gap between free and $9.99. I call it the ‘Digital Middle’” [/blockquote]

Making Millions in the Digital Middle : Rob Eagar, 25 November 2013, Digital Book World

##

As noted in the post title, this is a relatively rare exercise on my part, but I needed to clear the link cache. My next essay on books will be on the discovery problem, or discovery “problem” depending on your approach to the topic, so I might be referencing a couple of these sites again there.

Tomorrow is a travel day, and then it’s family, Thanksgiving, a wedding (on Friday), and more family. If I can find wifi and the beer holds out I might be posting — else I’ll be back with more Monday next.

[image source: Wikimedia Commons]

Breadcrumb trail – found at The U.K.‘s Misguided Attempt to Bring Back the ‘Garden City’ : Feargus O’Sullivan, 21 November 2013, The Atlantic Cities Blog

[blockquote]
“Ours is an overwhelmingly auto-oriented landscape, except in a few big city downtowns and older neighborhoods, many populated mostly by residents without kids. Most people have to drive to get to work or school, to go out to eat, to take their laundry and dry cleaning for service, to shop for groceries. If they have children, chances are they are also spending a lot of time shuttling the kids around from one event to another. It’s normal, I think, by today’s standards. But it’s not much fun.

“I’m old enough to remember when driving was fun. If you can tell a lot about a society’s culture from its popular music lyrics, the 1960s were surely the golden age of the American automobile.

…

“Instead of the open convertibles that symbolized the most desirable cars of the 1960s, sport utility vehicles – essentially complete family rooms (if not fortresses) on wheels that isolate their passengers as much as possible from the external world – became the preferred vehicles of the 1990s and early 2000s.

“What happened between the golden age of the automobile and today?” [/blockquote]

The Evolution of Driving in America : Ken Benfield, 18 November 2013, The Atlantic Cities Blog

I won’t spoil the article: Go read it. But here are the money quotes:

“Our public education system is a vestige of the 18th century, when 85% of Americans were farmers and schools lacked air conditioners.”

“These suggestions could leverage the vast American community college system, more than 1,200 institutions, spread across the country.”

“The US residential college system is unique; with the exception of a few universities worldwide, most colleges are largely urban. The 500-acre suburban campus with beautiful quads, high-end dorms and frat houses, and professional football stadiums — while appealing — is something of a luxury.”

“If we could start with a blank slate and look around the world, we would probably institute state and federal funding in public education like virtually every other country, and not fund education largely through property taxes.”

“These educational recommendations have the potential for multiple dividends in America: building better human capabilities, better economic possibilities, better health, less inequality, and a more competitive workforce amid intense global competition.”

The four ways to really fix education (that no one wants to hear) : Peter Marber, 18 November 2013, Quartz

“All of which makes $15 an hour sound too high. Hardly. Over the last half-century, American workers have achieved productivity gains that can easily support a $15-an-hour minimum wage. In fact, if the minimum wage had kept pace over time with the average growth in productivity, it would be about $17 an hour. The problem is that the benefits of that growth have flowed increasingly to profits, shareholders and executives, not workers. The result has been bigger returns to capital, higher executive pay — and widening income inequality.

“Efforts by the states and the federal government to raise the minimum wage are an important way to counter that dynamic. But they must be seen as modest and partial steps in the direction of fair wages. Other steps include more progressive income taxes, enhanced rights to form unions without retaliation, and government job-creation programs, because a tighter labor market would force employers to compete for workers.”

Redefining the Minimum Wage : The Editorial Board, 11 November 2013, The New York Times

##

This is a straight forward, common sense way to frame the issue: so of course it’ll be seen by some as “radical” and “socialist”. The New York Times might as well be 1960s-vintage Пра́вде.

Let’s Ask Forbes.com (note: not the website of a notorious liberal rag) for some opinion:

“Even if only half of minimum wage workers rely on those paychecks for their livelihood, that should be reason enough to ensure that they have a decent standard of living. It seems to me that employers who reap the rewards of that labor should be the ones who pay for it. The deadlocked Congress is unlikely to pass a minimum wage law. It’s a good thing that states and municipalities are moving to fill in the breach.” [11 November 2013]

The staff writers at Forbes are, of course, also making so-called eloquent arguments against a minimum wage, but I find even in their protests there are glimmers of real-world facts shining through the self-serving bullshit:

“It is true that average wages should rise in line with average productivity. For, what we all, on average, produce is what is available for us all, on average, to consume. What is produced must be what is consumed so therefore the two averages, production and consumption, must at least roughly match.” [source]

* The question is not just a matter of production matching consumption though, now is it? It’s whether the profits made on the sales of that production are distributed equitably: It’s wages vs corporate profit taking, not just production versus consumption.

“Related to that is a destructive idea about the role of law. The concept of a minimum wage is that it is a proper use of the force of law for the government to put the following choice before an employer: Either you give this worker a raise, or we will punish you. But that is no more a proper use of law than if a similar choice were put to a worker: Either you accept the employer’s terms, or we will punish you.” [source]

* except the worker has to work, and there are plenty of economic incentives to do so, and some people have to take whatever crap job they can get. The worker is going to work without a law requiring them to do so. The employer has no incentive to pay more: if anything the incentive would be to pay less — indeed, there is an incentive to spend money lobbying congress so they don’t have to pay what they do now, as is easily proven whenever Michelle Bachman opens her mouth to express ‘her’ opinion on the issue. There are also incentives to pollute the air and water, to sell spoiled meat, to make quack medicines out of poisons, and treat workers like serfs, chattel, or worse. It’s not that there is a law telling workers to “accept the employer’s terms”, rather that in the absence of law there is no choice. And when employers collude to keep all wages low, there’s not really a ‘free market’ for labor either. A recourse to the law, and the courts, seems like the only way to redress the balance.

Sadly, influencing the law-making process or seeking legal redress for legitimate grievances both cost a lot of money. More than folks can make flipping burgers. Seems like the system is set up this way by design.

“The real centrepoint of this story is that there simply is indeed a trade off between the price of labour and the amount of labour that people will want to employ. Raise that minimum wage too high (and what is ‘too high’ should be discussed) and there will indeed be more people without a job at all. This is just one of those things about economics, there are very rarely solutions, there are only trade offs. And those arguing for a uch [sic] higher minimum wage need to make the case for some people earning more money and others earning none.” [source]

Tell you what. We’ve tried crap wages for 30 years, and people are struggling. Let’s try it the other way for 30 years and see where our country is at in 2050.

##

Update 8:35am 19 Nov 13: Please see this article for even more background on the issue

The 40 Year Slump : Harold Meyerson, 12 November 2013, American Prospect

“Yet, the truth is that innovation is a messy business. It’s full of blind alleys and half-baked ideas, random collisions and abrupt changes in direction. Ideas mix and recombine, fail, reemerge and, in the end, a precious few become wildly successful.

“Innovation, most of all, is driven by collaboration. So it takes more than just smart people, but diversity as well. Different people, working on different things, colliding together in unexpected ways is what brings about important new ideas. That’s why, more than anything else, vibrant cities are crucial to our continued ability to innovate and compete.”

Why Cities Are Our Most Important Innovation Platform : Greg Satell, 9 November 2013, Forbes

Money quote:

“As Steve Jobs noted, creativity is about connecting things. The more random collisions you have with people who have different ideas, the more creative you’ll be. That’s why he designed Apple’s new headquarters to facilitate interactions, with lots of open spaces and common areas. It’s also why cities need more than office buildings and research parks. They need cafes, music festivals, art shows and other places where creative people meet and exchange ideas.“

emphasis mine.