The news material - 23 March 2011
Mar. 23rd, 2011 10:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptUp top today, take note of the following - how it makes more sense to self-publish in the long term rather than accept an advance and a significantly lower percentage of returns to publish with a big house. Standard caveats about name recognition and the like apply - it's a lot easier to go this route if you already have your devoted fanbase and have built up an audience through the publishing industry. Also, you need the infrastructure in place to handle what a publisher normally does for an author. That said, publishing contracts and recording contracts do really resemble indentured servitude, don't they...?
Elsewhere, it needs to be said, forever and always, that the requirement that persons working as models starve themsleves to unhealthy proportions is not sane, and that actual people prefer people that look like them modeling their clothes - not only do they think they models look more attractive, it also tells them whether or not they're going to be able to pull off the same look in their own bodies. Doing fashion with real models might actually mean more sales, not less, as people can be confident they will fit and look good in them.
Finally, twin stories of life and death. In life, meet Hideaki Akaiwa, who not only rescued his wife and mother from the tsunami that struck Japan, but continues to do rescue work in the affected area...by swimming out into the flooded area, sometimes using SCUBA gear, to find people trapped and barely surviving.
The death part is The Dead Pool Acting Company signs Elizabeth Taylor, noted actress, to a contract at 79 years of age.
Out in the world today, even though their flash is finished, and the revolution won, there is still the business of actual government and ownership of the means of production in Tunisia, and that should probably be getting a lot more media coverage than it is.
A soldier indicted for the murder of an Afghan man will plead guilty to three counts of murder and one of conspiracy to commit assault and battery in hopes of a reduced sentence. The soldier's misdeeds were flung wide to the world when the German magazine Der Spiegel published photographs of the soldier and others posing with the corpses of their alleged victims.
Staying in Afghanistan, think tanks are saying it's time to stop the United States' war in the country, even as the President urges the opposition to seek peace and not attack targets like schools.
In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency maintains that any radiation detected that might be from the Fukushima nuclear power plants is in sufficiently small quantities as to be harmless. In Japan itself, there's a bit more worry about radiation in food and beverages. When talking about exposure, though, it sometimes helps to have some pictures. For example, one suggestion of scale of things that you would normally get in a day versus the actual limits of exposure. Although, if you want it in little unit boxes with various amounts of scale, xkcd puts together such a graph - follow the flow, and it will make sense.
Speaking of nuclear objects, the Obama Administration is looking to see if there are placees where the budget can be cut on the nuclear arsenal past the point of the new START treaty. The Republican opposition claims that any cuts to the nuclear program are too much and that the security of the United States will be compromised by such a thing.
In technology, the increasing presence of BACON e-mail and how to fight off that tide - a little harder to do than spam because bacon e-mial is stuff that you've opted-in on, rather than opting-out.
A judge rejected a proposed settlemtn from Google that would have allowed its digitization program to continue, claiming the company would have been granted something akin to a monopoly and been allowed to profit from books without first obtaining permission from their copyright holders.
In opinions, the possibility that economists are no longer social scientists but members of the Cult of The Market (A.P.T.I.N.), based on how Mr. Krugman points out that most economists have not been paying attention to what researchers are doing, modeling, and concluding in the last few decades, preferring to see the science as settled rather than fluctuating. We suspect he would be more than willing to point at Mr. Forbes' column today claiming that The Great Saint Reagan was right on tax policy, and that lower taxes, combined with dramatically lowered spending, is exactly what the economy needs to take off and be succesful again. Instead of, say, the "massive expansion of government" that everyone claims only the Obama Administration and the Democrats are responsible for, turning a blind side to the manner in which Republican administrations have and continue to want to expand government in several sectors, while also implementing tax cuts for the people that least need them. Mr. Forbes also believes in the Laffer curve as doctrine for how governments should set their tax rates.
Ms. Glick lays into the Obama Administration for not following what she perceives are the core interests of the United States in the Middle East - cheap oil, propping up anyone who will sell cheap oil, and stopping anybody who would like to see the region united under a single banner, being it Arabia or Islam. If those have been the traditional goals of the United States in the region, no wonder we have an awful reputation and a rap for being imperialists of the worst order. The goals that are apparently now in vogue are "placating anti-US regimes", "trying to be friends with Europe" and "good PR from US media", a coalition led by Secretary Clinton against Barack Obama's desire to not intervene at all and the neoconservative insistence that all tyrants be squashed with military intervention. Since things are going this way, we can assume that Ms. Glick and others are assured that things are not going as they should have been, even as they pen columns saying "better late than never" when it comes to the intervention in Libya.
Contending not for a Worst, but a Strangest, is Mr. Gaffney, who sees the coalition attacks on Libya as the precursor to the United States letting Israel's neighbors attack them and standing by or actively helping them, as well as an apparent unresolved issue with having women in powerful positions.
Last for tonight, what networking does do for your career and what network really is useful for - getting stuff done. Networking probably doesnt help you get in to a field as much as you think, but it certainly helps you accomplish things once you're there. It also helps you learn who the real power-brokers are in any organization so that you can make friends with them. (Even though good ideas should be able to survive office politics.)
Elsewhere, it needs to be said, forever and always, that the requirement that persons working as models starve themsleves to unhealthy proportions is not sane, and that actual people prefer people that look like them modeling their clothes - not only do they think they models look more attractive, it also tells them whether or not they're going to be able to pull off the same look in their own bodies. Doing fashion with real models might actually mean more sales, not less, as people can be confident they will fit and look good in them.
Finally, twin stories of life and death. In life, meet Hideaki Akaiwa, who not only rescued his wife and mother from the tsunami that struck Japan, but continues to do rescue work in the affected area...by swimming out into the flooded area, sometimes using SCUBA gear, to find people trapped and barely surviving.
The death part is The Dead Pool Acting Company signs Elizabeth Taylor, noted actress, to a contract at 79 years of age.
Out in the world today, even though their flash is finished, and the revolution won, there is still the business of actual government and ownership of the means of production in Tunisia, and that should probably be getting a lot more media coverage than it is.
A soldier indicted for the murder of an Afghan man will plead guilty to three counts of murder and one of conspiracy to commit assault and battery in hopes of a reduced sentence. The soldier's misdeeds were flung wide to the world when the German magazine Der Spiegel published photographs of the soldier and others posing with the corpses of their alleged victims.
Staying in Afghanistan, think tanks are saying it's time to stop the United States' war in the country, even as the President urges the opposition to seek peace and not attack targets like schools.
In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency maintains that any radiation detected that might be from the Fukushima nuclear power plants is in sufficiently small quantities as to be harmless. In Japan itself, there's a bit more worry about radiation in food and beverages. When talking about exposure, though, it sometimes helps to have some pictures. For example, one suggestion of scale of things that you would normally get in a day versus the actual limits of exposure. Although, if you want it in little unit boxes with various amounts of scale, xkcd puts together such a graph - follow the flow, and it will make sense.
Speaking of nuclear objects, the Obama Administration is looking to see if there are placees where the budget can be cut on the nuclear arsenal past the point of the new START treaty. The Republican opposition claims that any cuts to the nuclear program are too much and that the security of the United States will be compromised by such a thing.
In technology, the increasing presence of BACON e-mail and how to fight off that tide - a little harder to do than spam because bacon e-mial is stuff that you've opted-in on, rather than opting-out.
A judge rejected a proposed settlemtn from Google that would have allowed its digitization program to continue, claiming the company would have been granted something akin to a monopoly and been allowed to profit from books without first obtaining permission from their copyright holders.
In opinions, the possibility that economists are no longer social scientists but members of the Cult of The Market (A.P.T.I.N.), based on how Mr. Krugman points out that most economists have not been paying attention to what researchers are doing, modeling, and concluding in the last few decades, preferring to see the science as settled rather than fluctuating. We suspect he would be more than willing to point at Mr. Forbes' column today claiming that The Great Saint Reagan was right on tax policy, and that lower taxes, combined with dramatically lowered spending, is exactly what the economy needs to take off and be succesful again. Instead of, say, the "massive expansion of government" that everyone claims only the Obama Administration and the Democrats are responsible for, turning a blind side to the manner in which Republican administrations have and continue to want to expand government in several sectors, while also implementing tax cuts for the people that least need them. Mr. Forbes also believes in the Laffer curve as doctrine for how governments should set their tax rates.
Ms. Glick lays into the Obama Administration for not following what she perceives are the core interests of the United States in the Middle East - cheap oil, propping up anyone who will sell cheap oil, and stopping anybody who would like to see the region united under a single banner, being it Arabia or Islam. If those have been the traditional goals of the United States in the region, no wonder we have an awful reputation and a rap for being imperialists of the worst order. The goals that are apparently now in vogue are "placating anti-US regimes", "trying to be friends with Europe" and "good PR from US media", a coalition led by Secretary Clinton against Barack Obama's desire to not intervene at all and the neoconservative insistence that all tyrants be squashed with military intervention. Since things are going this way, we can assume that Ms. Glick and others are assured that things are not going as they should have been, even as they pen columns saying "better late than never" when it comes to the intervention in Libya.
Contending not for a Worst, but a Strangest, is Mr. Gaffney, who sees the coalition attacks on Libya as the precursor to the United States letting Israel's neighbors attack them and standing by or actively helping them, as well as an apparent unresolved issue with having women in powerful positions.
Last for tonight, what networking does do for your career and what network really is useful for - getting stuff done. Networking probably doesnt help you get in to a field as much as you think, but it certainly helps you accomplish things once you're there. It also helps you learn who the real power-brokers are in any organization so that you can make friends with them. (Even though good ideas should be able to survive office politics.)
