Rocket Bomber

Serious question!

What Is The Best Paleolithic Analogue To Your Current Laptop/Phone/Tablet/Primary-Internet-Interface:

• a walking stick of convenient length? [carried always, out of habit, but of limited-actual-defined-functionality]
• a handy discarded antler? [a fine tool, and one that lets you properly knapp flint cores but not a solution in-and-of-itself]
• a bone needle? [small, portable, does the One Thing well but not a multi-tasker]
• a knapped-flint hand axe? [the prototypical—and still, thousands of years later, the ultimate—multitool]
• fire? [necessary for all daily tasks, processing food, light, heat, religion, and life]

Is your “daily carry” a tool in-and-of-itself, or is it merely a toy? Does it enable you? or restrict you?

Chairwoman/Founder
Yeah, she owns this shit.

CEO Chief Executive Officer
This is your boss.

COO Chief Operational Officer
This is also your boss, and the one who knows how the logistics chain works.

CCO Chief Creative Officer
The CCO is your boss, but only if you use a Mac, know photoshop, and don’t have to wear a tie to work.

CTO Chief Technology Officer
The CTO is not your boss, but you wish she was. They get to play with all the cool stuff down there – well, until it breaks, and then it’s hell-on-18-wheels for 60 straight hours until you finally get it fixed.

CFO Chief Financial Officer
From the day you are first hired your goal is to get some kind of dirt on the CFO so you can claim Hawaiian vacations and Vegas junkets as fully-refundable “vitally important conferences on the future viability of our industry”. Also: the CFO is probably the only one who knows which side to bet on in the eventual IPO or sale of the company. *Do Not Cross*

General Counsel or CLO Chief Legal Officer
weasel.

Senior Vice Presidents
Used to be your boss, but they got a new title and a pay raise and now they seemingly don’t do squat anymore except drop into your department twice a year, are present at endless meetings at corporate, and [if you’re lucky and blackmailing your CFO] you’ll run into them at those Hawaii and Vegas conferences.

VP of [insert geographic region, business segment, core operational function, or Special Strategic Project]
Your Boss. It’s not that work gets done at this level, but this is where the reports are generated that describe the work that is being done. *note: the reports are actually researched and written by plebes much further down, but the VP’s office is where they are ‘generated’

Junior Vice President
ignorable. That said: if they offer you this job, step over the rapidly-cooling corpses of your peers to take it, as it’s a nice paycheck, cushy office, little responsibility, and easily delegatable duties and assignments. Just remember: when the stock takes a nosedive and corporate is looking at layoffs, yours is the only name on the list.

Spokesman, Media Liason, Corporate Communications Director, SVP for Communications and Public Affairs, et al.
The job title varies depending on how long one stays in the role and how good you’ve been at it, but it’s all the same: Mouthpiece. Damage Control. Shaping and Spinning the Message. Often this is just some JVP who has to write boring (intentionally boring, bonus if it can also be misleading and obfuscatory) press releases, but this one junior flack often has more influence on the daily stock price than anyone except the Chairman/Founder/CEO.

Regional Directors, District Offices, “Field” Management, Corporate Trainers & “Regional Training Managers”
oh god. For those of you working in corporations that have this many levels of management hanging over your head: oh god, I’m so sorry you poor, dumb bastard.

Branch Management & Store Managers
Well, this is where the work gets done and the money is actually made: Responsible for everything – but unable to change anything.

Department Manager [store level]
enjoy that extra $1 an hour.

employee

SO: all this corporate baggage and “strategery” and “long term” and reports and graphs and power point presentations mean exactly jack.

No matter how much you think SVPs and VPs and JVPs and RMs and DMs and corporate initiatives and “sales focus” and contests and merchandising updates and stock re-lays and new products and ALL THAT CRAP matters

…it comes down to your lowest-level smallest-cog front-line employee.

Is this person a full-time employee with appropriate product knowledge, a generally engaging demeanor, and both the experience and training to handle your day-to-day business — or, just-kind-of-imagining-a-worst-case-scenario here — has the company’s endless quest to “control costs” meant that your primary customer interface is now a student working part time (with no hope of promotion, or of ever going full-time with benefits) who just wants to get through the damn 6pm-11pm shift and go home so they can [study/get drunk/get laid/sleep/get back to coding that app that’s going to be a 7-figure IPO/blog/do laundry/pick-any-three]?

*special shout-out and congrats to those of you who parsed that last sentence: you’re my peeps.

Please remember, corporate America: To the vast majority of the public you are nothing – the corporation is often invisible unless it happens to share a name with the brand. Your Whole Company is in the hands of a part-timer earning minimum wage – and this poor sod is as invested in your success as you are invested in them.

That is to say: the outlook isn’t good. Much of corporate America is so very, very fucking lucky Unions are out-of-vogue and largely impotent, because there hasn’t been this strong of a catalyst for unions since 1880.

Moving forward, I have decided to turn off the commenting function on RocketBomber. There are several reasons, the foremost of which is I don’t really care anymore.

Commenting does have a place on blogs – and for websites that operate as pseudo-forums (or actual forums and web-boards) or who, as part of their stated mission, attempt to “foster a community” of like-minded miscreants, well – you do kinda need that functionality. There are even tools and services out there (Disqus and Gravatar spring to mind) to make commenting either spam-resistant, more capable, or more useful to both commentariat and website alike.

None of that applies here. With just a couple of exceptions (shout out to BruceMcF, and JRBrown) the comments are just a place for very lost spammatons to drop inappropriate links.

As for reader engagement, I guess I have a twitter for that.

With only half-hearted apologies to readers who will miss the opportunity to comment, commenting here is now closed.

So the Simpsons are showing up late to a trend, attempting to seem still-culturally-relevant in an age of viral video, near-simultaneous reblogging and linkbait, and a perpetually hip weberatti that’s much too hip to keep up with a show that’s only on broadcast television and only updates once a week:

Seen in that light, this could be called lame (has been called out as such in many corners online)

Ah.

But note Bart.

In his Bart-Man costume.
Doing the Bart-Man.

Viral video. Dance crazes. Taking over the broadcast platform.

Oh my yes, the “Homer Shake” is a blatant ripoff in a play for continued cultural relevancy — but who, exactly, is ripping off whom?

So this graph shows up on Reddit:

…from some smarty-pants who took Econ 101 and thinks the minimum wage is a bad idea. Nothing wrong with the math, or the graph, or the economics (necessarily) – but it posits that any proposed minimum wage increase (or any minimum wage at all) is necessarily going to be above the actual market price for labor.

Here, let me fix that for you:

IF wages were, I don’t know, being artificially suppressed by evil corporations attempting to maximize profits (a practice they engage in while Also keeping current wages stagnant and simultaneously demanding even more productivity ‘gains’ from already overworked employees) then, surprise, we would still be seeing artificially-induced unemployment.

The redditor used this for his post headline, “Dear Mr. President: price floors create surpluses. Raising the minimum wage = raising the cost of employment = you’re killing jobs. I know you don’t think laws apply to you, but—like gravity—the laws of economics are true whether you believe in them or not.”

Dear redditor & folks who agree with him: Employers unwilling to pay market rates for labor = people who need work but won’t work a crap job for a crap wage = jobs that go begging.

Take the agricultural industry: The only way they can fill the job for the wage they’re willing to pay is to take advantage of the most desperate, i.e. illegal immigrants, who will live in poverty and even put up with abuse for a few dollars they can send home to their families. If picking crops paid $15 an hour, college students who needed the money would spend their time off of school in the fields. Heck, some might skip class for a week to pick, given that harvest seasons are (necessarily) short.

Food would be more expensive, you say? I thought we believed in letting market forces determine prices, not in using policy decisions (a workforce of illegal immigrants is a government policy choice, one that is being debated now) to artificially manipulate markets?

The ‘Price Ceiling’ in this case is not an absolute requirement imposed upon the entire economy by the government, it has become a tenet taught in business schools and uniformly adopted by every employer. Because they can. Because they’re bastards, and money matters more than people.

[chart source]

I think a minimum wage increase is overdue. Yeah, so prices for some goods and services would go up. Fine. Let them go up. I’ll pay an extra buck for that unhealthy fast food hamburger, and I’d also be fine if there wasn’t a dramatic price difference between food grown on massive industrial farms and fruits and vegetables that are grown locally and sustainably. And why would aggregate food prices have to go up when there is plenty of money and corporate profits could come down?

Agriculture is only one industry, but the one most reliant on the cheapest unskilled labor. Say what you want about burger-flippers, fry cooks, cashiers, shelf stockers, and warehouse workers – the skills involved are not valued, but they are still skills. Look down on your janitor all you want, but he knows how to do his job. The guy working the line at the neighborhood bar and grill likely has a more technical (and more impressive) skill set than the bozos who sit in offices and bet on stocks all day.

I think a minimum wage increase is overdue, because I also think wages have been artificially kept low for at least two decades for no other reason than corporate greed, the pursuit of profits, and the need for some at the top to make the rest of us miserable. I don’t know, maybe it is only possible to enjoy millions of dollars of personal wealth if you can live in the high castle and look down on the pain and suffering of those less fortunate?

On the full scale that encompasses “hikkikomori”, “hermit”, “introvert”, “normal” and social butterfly, let me introduce one more complication:

Internet Anchorite.

Can one seal oneself off from the world, and only interact through a small window?

Damn right.

That window these days is a browser. The whole world, in a sense.
Does that make the desperate need to withdraw any less?

Why would someone seal themselves off from normal human contact and only treat with the world at arms-length (or the much greater length of an internet connection)?

Do the walls, actual or figurative, make the anchorite feel more secure? Does the separation make the contacts that are permitted or ‘allowed’ somehow more precious, even as they are necessarily limited by what the anchorite allows?

PLEASE do me a favor: DON'T pick out any gifts for your loved ones. Don't buy the book you know they'll love, DON'T get that one gadget you know they've been droping hints about for the last six months, DON'T even bother with gift cards.

You’re going to pick wrong.

I absolutely guarantee you’re going to pick wrong — just like you did last year, just like you’ve done for many, many years. Everyone has just been too polite to say anything.

And then I have to spend days of my life, after the holidays, doing nothing but processing returns. At least once an hour I’ll be asked, “Can’t I just get cash back?”

And sadly, the answer is no.

So let’s all agree: The Perfect Gift Is an Envelope Full of Cash.

I’d love to get cash. Anyone aged 14-28 would definitely prefer cash. Do a gut check: what do you want? Sure, that surprise gift, the exact right thing is great when it comes from the one person in your life (spouse, partner, boyfriend, girlfriend) but for everyone else?

I say: If you’re not sleeping with them, they just get cash.

[If you are sleeping with them, this seems appropriate]

Imagine the time you’ll save. Imagine the lack of stress. If you think cash is too impersonal, put the cash envelope inside of a tin of home-made cookies. That would be fantastic because, c’mon, *cookies* AND *cash*! That would be a holiday gift I’d be talking about for decades. The folks in the retirement home will be sick of hearing about it.

[cash is even traditional in some cultures]

So do yourself a favor. Do your loved ones a favor. Most Importantly, take the pressure and the hassle away from the poor retail clerks who have to process all those damn returns for clothes and other crap gifts: Just give cash this holiday.

Thank you for you time and polite consideration. And I’ll be back in 2013 to repeat this message in RocketBomber’s next Holiday Gift Guide!

##

image credits:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/beglen/157929769/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ashevillein/2421648773/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10899777@N02/1250836095/

So long as the data can be found (sadly, the AAP no longer does their own press releases; thankfully, other sources with access to BookStats do post the monthly ebook numbers) I’ll continue to update the graph.

I’d also like to remind the folks at AAP/BISG/bookstats.org that posts to RocketBomber.com are available freely under a Non-commercial CC license: they are welcome to include my analysis (or adaptations of my analysis) in their own reports. I’ll even waive the non-commercial requirement (which would be a sticking point, since they charge big bucks for the data now) so long as they still include an attribution. You share with us, I share with you, new things get created, new analysis and viewpoints proliferate: internet!

Those of you new to this blog should check out:

The Original Projection: June 2011
http://www.rocketbomber.com/2011/06/24/ebooks-predictions-math-that-lies

And Update 1: September 2012
http://www.rocketbomber.com/2012/08/30/ebook-sales-projection-2012-edition

[tl;dr-math]

The formula for the sales projection curve is

ebook(t) = k * (1 + tanh(-π+((π/80)t)))

Where t is the time variable, counted by months, and k is a constant one selects out of one’s ass (a surprising number of scientific constants work that way) equal in this case to $130 Million. The constant k is also the assumed value of ebook sales at the inflection point in the graph.

Using fractions of pi — (π/80) above — is how we “stretch” the s-curve to match the observed growth over time. My first projection used (π/60), an assumed dynamic growth phase of about 120 months. To get the projected graph to match reported sales, however, I had to slow things down a bit — (π/80) translates to a “dynamic” phase of 160 months, about 13 years. For the graph below, our starting point (t=0) is the month of August, 2005.

This also means we hit the inflection point back in May, 6 months ago.

[/tl;dr-math]

My [*] on the Projected Sales is the same disclaimer as last time:

• The only data available to me are ebook sales as reported by the Association of American Publishers: so these correspond only to US ebook sales from established publishing houses and does not include self-published ebooks.
• Merely looking at a dollar sales figure (again, the only data available) glosses over the fact that ebooks are sold at lower price points: unit sales of books will be higher than the dollar figure might suggest
• My projection is not the only interpretation – but I’ve tried some other models and ebooks sure look like they’re following a fairly common sigmoid growth curve
• …however, if ebooks do not merely cannibalize sales of other formats but instead push books into new genres, new business models, new retail channels, and effectively blow up books as we know them: why sure, I guess there’s no upper limit & my projection is wrong. You can make any assumptions you like along those lines. My graph represents a fairly short future time frame (3-5 years out) and a relatively stable publishing industry. (Well, stable other than the disruption currently happening due to ebooks.)

As data becomes available, I’m happy to post future updates. I think the next e-book sales projection will be after the Jan-Feb ebooks sales numbers go public — covering this fall plus the post-holiday-ereaders-given-as-gifts bump we’ve seen in years past. I’m guessing that will be in May, about 5-6 months from now.

Before my closing remarks, I get to share one two Three final submissions:

• Lori Henderson at Manga Xanadu with thanks for comic shops, publishers, and fellow bloggers
• Amy, Lori, and Alex at Manga Village all share what manga they are thankful for this year.
• Ash Brown at Experiments in Manga also submits A Note of Thanks for Wandering Son

Thank you, everyone, for your thoughts, and for sharing, and for making this a small but successful event! I look forward to December’s MMF, Hikaru no Go/Game Manga, to be hosted by Animemiz’s Scribblings.

Let me also thank, once again, all the original creators and publishers who bring manga into the world, and all the hard working folks who bring manga to our shores. My life is certainly richer for it, and I now know that feeling is shared by many fans.

I might have just one more submission myself for the MMF, but in researching the early American licensees and some of the very first books, I discovered a topic much larger than I anticipated. Since the essay veered off track, I chose not to post it. (I’ll be saving the research and the links, though, so I might have an MMF-unrelated manga history post at some future date.) If I can clean it up and simplify it a bit, I’ll certainly add another short link to the November 2012 MMF permanent archive.

If you were running late and also wanted your article added to the MMF hub page, just let me know: I’ll be glad to do so and will also be happy to blurb it on my homepage.

Thanks again to everyone, especially our readers, and we’ll see you next month for another MMF!