Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Personal Enthusiasm: Loads of Fun

I really should know better than to underestimate John Scalzi. After all, I still think Old Man’s War was one of the best books I’ve read in the past 7 years. But, I did. I didn’t expect Fuzzy Nation to be all that good.

I had my reasons too. Fuzzy Nation is a remake of H. Beam Piper’s book Little Fuzzy. Movies are remade all of the time in Hollywood. And most of those remakes are poor imitations of the original. How often are books remade? Never? I should have taken a clue from Tyler Cowen and realized if something is done that’s never done, that’s likely to mean it’s of higher than average quality. And, boy, is that ever true here.

Scalzi took a good but dated 1950′s story and updated it into a very good, and fresh, story for the 2010′s. The broad, general, structure of the original is still here. Jack Holloway is a prospector working on Zarathustra XXXIII, looking for sunstone gems. He discovers an immense cache of them, enough to make his fortune several times over. Then he meets a small, fuzzy (of course), cute creature. Then he meets the creature’s family. Soon, he’s involved in determining whether these cute creatures are super smart animals or sentient people.

Scalzi modifies the story a good bit too. His book is every bit as much of a page turner as the original was, just in different ways. He manages to make a series of court cases far more interesting than the original did. But I find the most interesting changes to be the way that the story revolves around Jack Holloway.

Scalzi’s version of Little Fuzzy is really about Holloway. The fuzzys are there and central to that story, but Holloway is the focus. He’s a complex character and Scalzi progressively reveals him to us. Is he merely the galaxy’s biggest jerk? Or is there more to him than that? Scalzi continually gives us more insight into him as the story moves along, but still manages to keep his character ambiguous until the end. It’s not character development, exactly, but it’s character revelation, which I find just as interesting.

After reading this book, I’ve very definitely moved from “I’ll read it because it’s from Scalzi” to “I’d definitely recommend this book”. If you’re looking for an entertaining read, pick this up. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

The other day Mary Katharine Hamm tweeted a link to one of those utterly predictable stories about how corporations with more lobbyists pay lower taxes or some such. She also remarked “complexity is a subsidy” — and that really stuck with me. In many respects those four words distill vast swaths of scholarship from everyone from Friedrich Hayek to Charles Murray.

Again, it’s not a new idea, but I think it’s an extremely useful and pithy description of a very complex argument. The more that financial success depends on high IQ; the more demand there is for lawyers, lobbyists, and accountants; the more onerous regulations become for men-with-strong-backs to find work or for entrepreneurs to start businesses — then the more we move towards a society where the government rewards people based on their ability to navigate paperwork or fulfill quotas on a political to-do list. Complexity benefits statists because increasing complexity allows statists to claim we need more government to help people navigate through these complex times. In the process of helping, they make the government more complicated, creating new services for “fixers” of all stripes to solve problems the statists created in the first place.

The more you look around at spots where society and government intersect, the more you can see how pervasive and pernicious this dynamic is. The more rules you have, the more power you bequeath to the people well-suited to make or manipulate the rules.

Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra by Poul Anderson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book contains three complete Flandry novels. (Books were a lot shorter, in decades past.) Here, collected in one volume for the first time, is The Plague of Masters (aka Earthman, Go Home), Hunters of the Sky Cave and A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows.

The Plague of Masters had an enjoyable setup. Flandry lands on a planet where the air itself is deadly and prolonged exposure will lead to a torturous death. The only hope of a survival is to take a specific drug, every 30 days. It’s not even enough to flee the planet—without a final dose of the drug, you’ll die from the delayed effects of the air. Of course, the planet is under the thumb of a dictatorial group of scientists, who tightly control access to the drug. Anyone whoever stops playing along, stops getting doses. The setup and development of the story is wonderful. The ending is almost confusingly abrupt, lessening what would have otherwise been a very good story.

Hunters of the Sky Cave has Flandry confronting some invaders that he finds personally likable. Unfortunately, in order to complete his mission he has to smash not only their invasion but also their societal structure, just to keep the Terran Empire alive for a few more years. This was a well told story that showed Flandry doing what he does best but also recognizing that his efforts would have limited impact on the larger picture.

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows is the best story of the bunch. Flandry finds the son he didn’t know he had as well as a woman he can actually love. In the end, he completes his mission but at a staggering personal cost. As the story ends, you know the Empire will live on but you wonder if Flandry, personally, sees any point to it anymore.

These stories are uniformly good because they feature an older, wiser Flandry. He still cracks wise, he still dresses well and loves fine women. He’s still a staunch defender of the Terran Empire. However, he’s increasingly more aware of how decadent, corrupt, and unworthy that Empire is. It’s the best thing going, but it’s failing fast and not even he can keep it together much longer. He does everything he can to push back the arrival of The Long Night, even knowing that everything he does will ultimately prove futile.

That underlying emotional tension drives the stories and forced me to sympathize with Flandry to a much greater degree than I have previously.

Last week’s blog entry on Amazon’s ebook strategy went around the net like a dose of rotavirus. And, as we can now see from Tor’s ground-breaking announcement I was only just ahead of the curve: people at executive level inside Macmillan were already asking whether dropping DRM would be a good move. Last week they asked me to explain, in detail, just why I thought abandoning DRM on ebooks was a sensible strategy for a publisher. Turns out my blog entry on Amazon’s business strategy didn’t actually explain my full reasoning on DRM, so here it is.

Note that I am not responsible for Macmillan’s change of policy. An internal debate was already in progress; this move was already on the cards. I caught their attention and was given a chance to offer some input: that’s all. The final decision to drop DRM on ebooks from Tor/Forge was taken by John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, who ultimately has to account for his actions to the shareholders.

Along the way, he explains why I may be shopping somewhere other than Amazon, for my SF reading material.

[C]urrently Amazon have swamped the midlist among ebooks in a sea of self-published rubbish. It’s impossible to find anything worth reading in the Kindle store that isn’t a very obvious bestseller. This offers an opportunity for specialist bookstores to offer a curatorial role. I believe the voracious genre consumers are picky enough about what they read that they dislike Amazon’s slushpile approach, and will preferentially shop in better organized outlets.

I just hope he’s wrong about e-ink readers disappearing within 5 years. I vastly prefer my non-backlit e-ink display to any backlit LCD display.

Visit This Link →

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the name for a software lock that publishers apply to movies and e-books that you’ve purchased. When something is “protected” by DRM, the publisher is protected from the risk that you’ll copy it or use it in any way that they don’t like.

DRM prohibits you from doing bad things, like distributing something to 1 million of your closest friends. It also prohibits you from doing good things, like copying your new DVD to your iPad or loading your Kindle e-book into your Barnes & Noble Nook.

It’s worse than that though. It gives the publisher veto control over your devices—if you can’t transfer your existing library to a new device, you’ll be much less likely to buy it. With DRM, your e-books last only as long as the publisher does. If the publisher goes out of business (or leaves the market, as Wal-Mart did with digital music), you’ll lose the ability to load your DRM files onto new devices. For the customer, there’s absolutely nothing to like about a DRM lock.

With Tor’s announcement, the e-book industry finally begins a move that I’ve been predicting for a couple of years now.

It’s a move I’ve been predicting because of what I observed with digital music. In 2003, when the music publishers first made songs legally available through iTunes, they insisted that Apple wrap each track in a DRM lock. Their goal was to prevent widespread music piracy. Given the overwhelming popularity of the iPod, they succeeded in making Apple’s store practically the only legal source of music for most customers.

For six years Apple gobbled up an increasing share of the music market. The music labels finally realized that their insistence on DRM was making them dangerously dependent on Apple. In January of 2009, the publishers agreed to let Apple—and other online retailers—sell music tracks without any DRM wrapper whatsoever.

For the first time, customers were able to legally buy digital music from Apple and play it on a non-Apple device. And, for the first time, Apple customers were able to legally buy digital music from Amazon and play it on their iPods. It took six years but the music labels finally realized that digital music without a DRM lock was better both for them and for their customers.

A similar situation has been playing out in the e-book market. Amazon was the first company to produce a mass-market e-book reader, introducing the Kindle in 2007. Publishers were slow to embrace the new platform but gradually began putting more of their catalog into Kindle format. As they released Kindle versions of each book, they insisted that Amazon wrap the e-books with a DRM lock.

The firs true competitor, the Nook from Barnes & Noble, wasn’t introduced until 2009. At this point, digital music had already been DRM free for most of a year. E-books, however, were still DRM locked. As a result, Amazon was able to leverage their early start, large customer base, and solid hardware into a commanding market lead.

As Amazon grew, the publishers grew increasingly dependent on sales from Amazon. Each Kindle customer had a library that was locked to their Kindle device, through DRM. As long as those customers were locked to the Kindle hardware, they were also locked to the Kindle bookstore, making it hard to grow sales elsewhere. Amazon continued to grow Kindle and Kindle e-book sales, through aggressive pricing and discounting of e-books.

The publishers were aware of the trap that the music labels had fallen into with Apple. They were determined to avoid it but they were equally determined to ship e-books with DRM locks. The publishers decided to neuter some of Amazon’s advantages by removing Amazon’s ability to compete on price. In April, 2010 the publishers forced Amazon to purchase e-books through an “agency model“. Amazon would no longer be free to price e-books as it saw fit. Instead, the publisher would set the price and Amazon would get to keep a flat 30% fee.

From now on, e-books would be priced at $7.99, $9.99, $12.99, $14.99, $16.99, or even $19.99, as the publisher dictated. These prices would apply identically across all stores (Apple iBooks, B&N Nook, Amazon Kindle). The publishers hoped that by removing Amazon’s price advantages, they could entice customers into other stores and prevent Amazon from gaining an effective monopoly over the e-book market.

It was an interesting tactic but one that I didn’t expect to succeed, long term. Eventually one publisher would undercut another and the lock step pricing would fall apart. I continued to predict that publishers would eventually be forced to remove their DRM locks, if they wanted to have an open market with lots of sellers.

The agency model gambit hung together for 2 years and largely worked, until the publishers got sued. On April 12, the Department of Justice sued five publishers, under anti-trust law, alleging a conspiracy to fix prices. The DoJ sued HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Macmillan, and Penguin. All but Macmillan and Penguin immediately settled and agreed to stop using the agency model.

Macmillan, one of the two holdouts, is the parent to Tor Books. Tor publishes science fiction books. These books are written and purchased by tech-savvy people. Both groups have been begging for DRM free e-books for years. Tor has wanted to oblige them, but Macmillan has always set the rules and Macmillan has always said no.

Yesterday, watching the agency model go down in flames, Macmillan apparently relented, and Tor announced that, by early July, their entire catalog would be available DRM free. They’ll continue to sell e-books through Amazon and B&N but those e-books will now be DRM free. In addition, Tor will look to expand their reach by selling through additional retailers. (Until now, those other retailers have been off-limits because they only sell DRM free e-books.)

This policy shift will open up new opportunities for Tor. Because I believe it signals the beginning of an industry wide shift, it will also open up new opportunities for customers as well. No longer will you be locked into one e-book reader or one e-book store. You’ll have the freedom to buy e-books from any store and read them on any reader. You’ll have the freedom to switch readers, without needing the publishers to approve of your new device. You’ll have the freedom to loan the e-book to a friend, without that friend needing to use the same device as you.

I’m excited about the shift and I’m excited about what it means for the future growth of the e-book industry.

Now, when is the movie industry going to finally going to catch up and quit putting DRM locks all over their DVD and Blu-Ray discs? Are we going to have to wait another 3 years for that shift to occur? Or another 10?

The most idiotic reason that single mothers give for not marrying is: “I’m too poor to get married!” Evidently these women believe they’re not too poor to educate, house, feed, clothe, and provide a stable home and an enriching moral and cultural environment for a child on their own. The “I’m too poor” defense, documented by researchers such as Kathryn Edin, refers not simply to the cost of a wedding (which of course is avoidable through a City Hall ceremony), but to the day-to-day institution of marriage itself.

…Well, yes, “well-educated Americans” can offer “more” financial support to their spouses than less affluent Americans. But a married spouse at whatever income level is almost always going to improve the economy of a household over a lifetime, whether that spouse is adding the proceeds of a minimum-wage job or the inestimable value of being a stay-at-home parent while the other one works. But the notion that being a married parent requires more financial resources than being a single one is wrong not just as a matter of economic arithmetic but, more importantly, in terms of what married biological parents bring to their child — not money, but a 24/7 partnership in the extraordinarily difficult task of child-rearing. Household wealth is the least important reason to form a two-parent family; the idea that raising children as a single mother is on average in any sense easier than doing so as a couple, even in the stormiest of marital relationships, is absurd, and ignores the enormous strains of being both the sole bread-winner (or even welfare-collector) and the sole source of authority for your child. A second parent in the home provides back-up support in discipline when the other is at the breaking point, and a doubling of the emotional, intellectual, and moral resources that a child can draw on. You don’t need to be wealthy to offer that complementarity; poor married parents have raised stable, successful children for millennia.

Visit This Link →

The Post, dismayed about super PACs, reports “a rarefied group of millionaires and billionaires acting as kingmakers in the GOP contest, often helping to decide, with a simple transfer of money, which candidate might survive another day.” Kingmakers? Where’s the king?

If kingmaking refers to, say, Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino owner, keeping Newt Gingrich’s candidacy afloat with large infusions to the super PAC supporting Gingrich, then kingmaking isn’t what it used to be.

He also defends the constitutionality of campaign funding.

… The court’s unremarkable logic was that individuals do not forfeit their First Amendment speech rights when they come together in corporate entities or unions to speak collectively. What is the constitutional basis for saying otherwise?

… Actually, Citizens United has nothing to do with Adelson and others who are spending their own money, not any corporation’s. People have done this throughout the nation’s life, and doing so was affirmed as a constitutional right in the court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision.

And he defends the right of relative outsiders to influence the political process.

Critics of super PACs — critics who were remarkably reticent in 2004 when George Soros was lavishing his own money on liberal advocacy — often refer to them as “outside groups,” much as Southern sheriffs used to denounce civil rights workers as “outside agitators.”

Pray tell: Super PACs are outside of what? Is the political process a private club with the parties and candidates controlling membership?

It might be more wholesome for the speech-financing money that is flowing to super PACs to go instead to the parties and candidates’ campaigns. But the very liberals who are horrified by super PACs (other than Barack Obama’s) have celebrated the laws that place unreasonable restrictions on such giving.

The whole thing is worth reading and pondering.

Visit This Link →

This is a super cool piece of technology.

The instrument uses a near-infrared light that penetrates just below the skin and reflects off blood vessels. VeinViewer senses hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying component in blood, which an onboard computer uses to distinguish veins from arteries. It then projects an image of veins on the skin surface in a green light.

It’s especially useful on dark-skinned patients, whose blue veins aren’t readily visible, and overweight patients, whose veins tend to be deeper. It also highlights the tiny veins of infants.

“It’s a great tool to reduce a baby’s stress,” Ginny Johnson, director of women’s services at North Hills, said as she demonstrated the instrument on 1-day-old Zoey White. Helped by a little rubbing of her wrist, VeinViewer traced Zoey’s threadlike veins as she awoke from a nap.

It costs $17,000 but the patient satisfaction with these things has to be off the charts. If I was spending my own money on healthcare, this would definitely be something that I’d be looking for in the hospital or doctor’s office.

Visit This Link →

This story, which I hadn’t heard before, is pure Judy. Fantastic.

Leonard Mattioli, an Epic board member, recalls chiding Faulkner for driving an old Volvo. “I told her next time you buy a car, take a man with you,” says Mattioli, the founder of American, a midwestern retailer of appliances and electronics. A few years later, Mattioli introduced his fiancée to Faulkner. [Judy] proceeded to pepper her with questions Epic typically asks prospective employees: “How many square yards of astroturf are there in the U.S.? Which person, dead or alive, would you most like to have lunch with?” Turning to a bewildered Mattioli, she said “next time you take a wife, take a woman with you [for advice].”

Visit This Link →

The Democratic Senate has not adopted a budget in three years. This is not only flagrantly irresponsible, it is a violation of federal law. Outgoing Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, who is retiring at the end of the year, apparently felt pangs of conscience, because he decided it was finally time for his committee to mark up a budget. He announced that the committee would do so, starting tomorrow.

A standard markup process begins with the committee chairman laying out a proposal, with the chairman and the ranking minority member giving opening statements. This is followed by an amendment process, in which amendments to the proposed legislation (here, the budget resolution) are offered and voted on. The markup process concludes with a committee vote on the bill or resolution as amended. In this case, Conrad assured ranking Republican Jeff Sessions that amendments would be allowed, and as recently as a few hours ago, Conrad’s and Sessions’s staffs were working out details of the amendment process.

Then, earlier this afternoon, Conrad gave a press conference in which he made the stunning announcement that there will be no budget markup after all. Instead, he will present a budget to the Budget Committee tomorrow. There will be no amendments and there will be no votes; not, at least, until after the election. Apparently Conrad had been proceeding on his own initiative, and at the 11th hour Harry Reid–supported by members of his caucus who do not want to have to go on record in favor of any budget–shut down the process.

Even though Republicans are more than happy to vote “on the record about” budgets, never fear. It’s Republican obstructionism and a “do nothing” Republican Congress that’s keeping Washington paralyzed.

Visit This Link →