Monthly Archives: July 2013

A moment of tinfoil

23 Tuesday Jul 2013

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Tomorrow Congress will begin doing nothing about the NSA’s online dragnet of the online activities of innocent Americans. But what if they actually did do something about it? Well, if Congress were to remove funding for the surveillance of innocent Americans, the NSA would have to designate more people as something other than innocent in order to keep their infrastructure and contracts alive. And that is the cusp on which this nascent culture of black ops and private security corporations falls apart. At some point that decision to designate innocent Americans as nearly guilty would be recognized as the beginning of two paths: the Sisyphusian trail of ever more unpopular justifications for the public-private security state, complete with mountain and boulder, always leaving the state back at the decision point; or the much easier trail around the boulder and a selloff of the Homeland Security white elephant.

Another point is that if Congress does absolutely nothing about this issue—which is exactly what I suspect will happen—this inaction will split both the Republican and Democratic caucuses into their corporate-incumbent and non-corporate-insurgent wings. This is a bit of reflected light and hope to aim at 2014.

Making Excise Taxes Progressive

22 Monday Jul 2013

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Income taxes were a paper-era hack. In order to tax economic activity more fairly at the beginning of the 20th century, an excise tax would have had to apply to the trades on Wall Street as well as wholesale activity throughout the economy. Apart from the never-ending wailing by the powerful about taxation, it would have failed because it simply wasn’t possible to track and do the accounting for large numbers of transactions in the pre-electronic era.

So instead the progressive income tax was introduced, taxing the people who have more economic activity using the crude sorting rule of income. It isn’t perfect (or maybe even good) but it was easier in the paperwork era to make one or two hundred million people responsible to file dossiers on themselves every year than it was to track tiny payments of excise tax on billions or trillions of transactions. But we aren’t in the paperwork era any more and the first step in taxing economic activity more directly and more fairly is to tax financial transactions.

But the first task, of course, is to overcome the mountain of FUD and defensive bullshit spewing from elites about how such taxation is unworkable. Fortunately, mainstream economists are on the task:

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&-columns/op-eds-&-columns/edward-snowden-and-financial-speculation-taxes

Calling for the Expulsion of Theodore Beale from SFWA

09 Tuesday Jul 2013

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Not being a member of the SFWA I hadn’t put much priority on finding out how much of a stain Beale is. “Spacebunny” … Um. For a libertarian he doesn’t have much conception of the idea of a voluntary organization if he is going to respond to cultural and electoral defeat in this kind of childish manner. And voluntary-ness goes both ways. The SFWA has already seceded from poop-smearing numbskulls like Beale; it makes me feel just fine that the other “libertarians” who defend him and throw around TANSTAAFL as a catch-all response find themselves socially on the outs. They are certainly free to add the SFWA to the tattered list of enemies hanging in the breeze out of the liner of their tinfoil hats.

Amal El-Mohtar

Recently, N. K. Jemisin delivered her Guest of Honour speech at Continuum in Australia. It is an excellent and important speech. In it, she mentions that roughly 10% of the ballots cast in the recent SFWA  Presidential election went to a man who is unabashedly racist, misogynistic, and just generally hateful in an astoundingly relentless sort of way. She does this in order to talk about how important it is to not be an enabler of that kind of hatred through one’s silence.

She doesn’t name him in her speech, and more power to her. He has, however, responded to her on his blog, so I will tell you here that his name is Theodore Beale, also known as Vox Day, whom I only encourage you to google if your day is suffering from a surfeit of happiness and sunshine. Here, however, are some relevant screenshots, posted with warnings for…

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Charles Stross’s Neptune’s Brood

09 Tuesday Jul 2013

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A little has been made in economic circles of how Charles Stross portrays interstellar finance in his new book, Neptune’s Brood. In the first of the series, Saturn’s Children, Stross established the physical mutability and psychological constraints of Freya, a transhuman sex-bot. In that story Stross took on more than just sex after it’s become obsolete. Stross took on slavery, inherited class and feudal control, and he illustrated how we are all at the mercy of our rulers’ damaged obsessions.

In this sequel Stross has a new protagonist, the banker Krina. With her Stross pivots away from the robot apocalypse of the near future. He skips forward thousands of years and brings the story back to the economic headlines of our world today. Krina’s story spans currency areas, economic expansion, economic depression, wage slavery, sovereign debt, banking regulation, and takes the story to the poor schlubs who audit the books after everything has gone wrong.

This story too often dominates our own news and Stross explores the world of finance with some subtlety. Stross also touched on these issues in Rule 34 but in this new novel he delves more deeply into the mechanisms and blends them into the sauce of space opera. The chief example of blending is the way Stross resolves transactions where a transaction must wait years for interstellar laser communications to transmit digital signatures. It’s fiddly science fiction at times but it’s grounded in real situations. Understanding it is worth the effort.

The book’s appeal is heightened by the constant peril faced by the protagonist, Krina. Compared to humans, Stross’s transhuman Krina is a cyber-superhero. Like the other transhumans of her universe, she is physically strong and able to shrug off the fatal effects of vacuum, radiation, and toxic atmospheres. Krina can back up her consciousness and transmit herself across the stars into new bodies. She can regrow practically any damage to her body by consuming partially-processed raw materials—or in extremis, another person (see Stross’s short story Bit Rot, the only plausible medical premise for zombies I’ve seen). Over time and with help Stross’s characters can be re-engineered into any imaginable form and can live essentially forever.

But Stross’s characters face a well-modeled web of new tensions. The protagonists of both books address the possibility of mind control, mind wiping, doppelgangers and compelled interrogation, but in Neptune’s Brood there’s less sado-masochistic sex slavery and even less discussion of the long-ago lost world of “meatsack” humans. Instead Stross falls back on how survival works in any world. His characters have to eat. They have to make a living. His protagonists have adventures, yes, but they are adventures that are mediated through their work. Their actions are often dictated by their bosses and institutions. When Freya and Krina express their own agency, their professional and economic survival are in the foreground. Stross has his finger on the thready pulse of our own times.

The cover of Neptune’s Brood is a change. The covers of some of Stross’s novels have been afflictions, Saturn’s Children Space Cleavage, for one, The Apocalypse Codex This Guy Looks Like a Jerk for another. But there’s hope: the new UK covers for the Laundry Files are an improvement; they err on the side of abstraction. The cover for Rule 34 was very cyberpunk-y and did justice to the character without exploitation. The cover for Neptune’s Brood continues the trend away from the cheap art that depicts latex or a chain-mail-bikini. The mermaid of the cover of Neptune’s Brood is naked, yes, but is fig-leafed by its frame, rendered well, and has a posture and expression of purpose.

I know the backlash against bad sci-fi/fantasy covers may seem prudish, but giggle-inducing crappy covers don’t allow for content that is well done and thought-provoking. The West is a couple decades past the point where we needed to Stick It To The Man by putting silly soft-core pornography on the cover of a book. The Man stuck back by giving up on prudery, then dumped books from the checkout aisle. So it’s a good thing that Neptune’s Brood can be put out where people can see it. Checkout customers have economic ideas that need updating.