Bookmarks – Trickle down golden geese
And mislabeled fiction.
Yeah, you just read that right. In 2013, by giving huge bonuses to those on Wall Street instead of low-wage workers, we actively prevented the creation of about $22 billion in additional national wealth. In 2014, we did the same thing, but to an even larger degree, preventing about $23 billion in additional national wealth that would have otherwise been created, had those billions in bonuses been distributed to low-income earners instead.
Trickle-Down Economics Must Die, Long Live Grow-Up Economics by Scott Santens (3826 words).
Then, my father was once again a father to me. With a shoebox under her arm, a nurse came by to comfort me. The box was full of sealed envelopes, with sentences where the address should be. I couldn’t understand exactly what was going on. The nurse then handed me a letter. The only letter that was out of the box.
“Your dad asked me to give you this letter. He spent the whole week writing these, and he wants you read it. Be strong.” the nurse said, holding me.
The envelope read WHEN I’M GONE. I opened it.
When I’m Gone by Rafael Zoehler (2143 words).
And just when you’ve stopped sobbing you find out that it was mislabeled fiction.
But here’s the thing: “When I’m Gone” is fiction.
At least that’s what Zoehler writes on his Twitter feed. In fact, the author — i.e., the dying old man in the story — is apparently 28 years old.
By itself, this is not a problem. Indeed, 28-year-old people pen engaging stories all the time. But when a first-person narrative such as “When I’m Gone” is not labeled clearly as fiction — as it would be in a bookstore, in an anthology of short stories, or in an online writing journal — do we now have a problem?
Hold Up — Medium’s Top Story Is Fiction? by Kelli Marshall (458 words).
Whatever is the reason, the anecdotal reports I’m getting suggest that the price increases aren’t being so easily swallowed in the current round of Agency pricing. Amazon may not care about ending discounting from those prices because they don’t need to or want to, but it would appear that the new deals won’t let them. They certainly don’t have the flexibility to do so that they did before Agency came to the marketplace. So the sometimes startlingly high publisher-set prices are prevailing. And, aside from the Hachette numbers that were reported, we’re hearing widespread but totally unofficial reports that big publisher ebook sales are dropping noticeably when their new higher agency prices are activated.
The publishing world is changing, but there is one big dog that has not yet barked by Mike Shatzkin (1918 words).
It’s almost as if traditional publishers don’t want ebooks to work out and are deliberately scuttling the market.
Should a blog home page just be the 10 most recent posts, or should it be a landing page?
— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) July 31, 2015
I’ve been thinking about this. There is no reason why the first page of this site should be a list of the latest posts. It makes more sense to put my best foot forward, so to speak, for those of you who click on through to the front page. Highlight the latest post, maybe. List the best stuff. Tell you why you should subscribe. It’s something to think about.
FWIW, I think until ad industry realises and starts caring that it's damaging User Experience and killing the golden goose it won't change
— Ian Betteridge (@ianbetteridge) July 31, 2015
Just because I'm a woman doesn't mean I have to like all female comedians. I don't see anyone insisting men have to like all male comedians.
— Justine Larbalestier (@JustineLavaworm) July 31, 2015
To all those who bash Amazon, spend your energy making your stuff better. Can assure you, it'll be much more productive.
— Sam Missingham (@samatlounge) July 31, 2015
New rules force innocent people to plead guilty in English courts due to high fees for pleading not-guilty: http://t.co/Z3aPuE4kPY
— Charlie Stross (@cstross) July 31, 2015
Importantly, from the very first chuckle, the survey responses show that babies are laughing with other people, and at what they do. The mere physical sensation of something being ticklish isn’t enough. Nor is it enough to see something disappear or appear suddenly. It’s only funny when an adult makes these things happen for the baby. This shows that way before babies walk, or talk, they – and their laughter – are social. If you tickle a baby they apparently laugh because you are tickling them, not just because they are being tickled.
What’s more, babies don’t tend to laugh at people falling over. They are far more likely to laugh when they fall over, rather than someone else, or when other people are happy, rather than when they are sad or unpleasantly surprised.
Laughter as a window on the infant mind by Tom Stafford (718 words).
Steve has talked about doing “one for love and one for money” in the past—taking on those gigs that are just for pay, so that you can pay the bills and fund time to develop your craft. But what if all you did was your craft? What if your craft generated enough for you to live off of it?
In surfboard artist Drew Brophy’s case, “painting 10-15 surfboards a day helped him to get really good and to develop a very strong style of his own,” said his wife Maria. “If Drew had been working in another field and only painting in his spare time, he would have been wasting his talent.”
His craft advanced because he put in the time. He had the time because he focused on the business and sold his work.
Horse Sense: “Lay a Little Heavy on the Business Side” Revisited by Callie Oettinger (1211 words).
I can’t even entertain the thought that being paid makes your work less good. That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard.
I asked him, “If they don’t get paid, who feeds their families and pays for their supplies?”
“They should work another job,” he said, rather smugly.
Why Artists Should (Not) Be Paid for Their Artwork by Maria Brophy (1027 words).
It is time to just take the whole idea of sexuality as immutable, the born this way notion, and just come to a consensus as scientists and as legal scholars that we need to put it to rest. It’s unscientific, it’s unnecessary and it’s unjust. It doesn’t matter how we got to be this way. As a scientist, I think it’s one of the most fascinating questions out there and one that I will continue to investigate. As a lesbian and a progressive, I think it’s totally irrelevant and just politics.
Sexuality is fluid – it’s time to get past ‘born this way’ by Lisa Grossman (1270 words).
If you can’t defend it at a choice—if you have to couch your promotion of LGBT rights in terms of ‘well they were born that way’—then you haven’t defended those rights at all. If we can’t accommodate people merely deciding that from now on they are gay, straight, bi, or whatever irrespective of biology then they aren’t rights.
- The First Amendment is not a part of the Constitution. It's part of the Bill of Rights, which is like fan fiction that became canon.
— Justina Ireland (@tehawesomersace) July 31, 2015
At the new company, Ms. Zhou did it all. She repaired and designed factory machinery. She taught herself complex screen-printing processes and difficult techniques that allowed her to improve prints for curved glass.
“In the Hunan language, we call women like her ‘ba de man,’ which means a person who dares to do what others are afraid to do,” said her cousin Zhou Xinyi, who helped her open the workshop and now serves on the Lens board. Along the way, Zhou Qunfei married her former factory boss, had a child and divorced. She later married a longtime factory colleague, who serves on the Lens board, and had a second child.
How a Chinese Billionaire Built Her Fortune by David Barboza (1862 words).
Me: New Android vulnerability impacts 95% of devices
Wife: I'm surprised you can get anything to run on 95% of Android devices
#burn— Mike Hall (@mikehall314) July 28, 2015
I can't imagine wanting to be an accountant, but CPAs are legal. Your inability to see yourself as a sex worker isn't a reason to outlaw it.
— Lux Alptraum (@LuxAlptraum) July 31, 2015
Nonconsensual sex work should always be fought. Consensual sex work should be decriminalized.
— Lux Alptraum (@LuxAlptraum) July 31, 2015
See the birth of the world's first global information network; watch it be taken over by an amoral economic paperclip maximizer.
— Gary Bernhardt (@garybernhardt) July 31, 2015
Most teams have the skills and a decent product idea, but internal politics and bad behavior stop innovation.
— Joshua Porter (@bokardo) July 31, 2015
The pm, designer, developer triangle is broken. So easy to see from the outside. A lot of our work has become fixing that specifically.
— Joshua Porter (@bokardo) July 31, 2015
The single biggest advantage analog has over digital for the tasks both can do is that the UX of apps is generally awful. (Not talking here about tasks you can only do in digital or only do in analog.) Apps may be vastly more powerful than pen and paper, but it’s all hidden behind random assortment of toggles, confusing structure, and designs that are generally clueless about how humans work.
(The other major advantage analog has is a more intuitive and fluid use of three dimensional space. In case you’re curious.)
You're a guy, founder and executive of a multi billion dollar organization, the other guy that lives with you isn't your roommate.
— Brett Sandusky (@bsandusky) July 31, 2015
'How can we make this more heartbreaking for the fans?'
'We could blame them?'
'Oh, like last week? Great idea!'— Andrew Wheeler (@Wheeler) July 31, 2015
Templates are bad! We put them in our JavaScript and now they’re awesome! CSS is bad! We put them in our JavaScript and now they’re awesome!
— Snook (@snookca) August 1, 2015
Same shit, different pile.
— Snook (@snookca) August 1, 2015
A surprising # of expired SSL cert issues are caused by people advancing their system date to trick Candy Crush (ht @apf @shanselman )
— Jeff Moser (@jeffmoser) August 1, 2015
QA Engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a sfdeljknesv.
— Bill Sempf (@sempf) September 23, 2014