Author Archives: Andrew Hilmer

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.

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.

Time, Wealth, Workflow, and Influence

26 Wednesday Jun 2013

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A comment on Paul Krugman’s column last week: “Profits Without Production”.

People at the top have a problem to go with their wealth. In determining their available economic strategies, the time available to a wealth owner is as important a factor as their available capital. A 100M$-aire like Mitt Romney has a great quantity of capital, but very limited time per unit of wealth. That will determine his capital allocation and his time allocation. While the risk and returns of the abstract capital and financial markets aren’t all that good in the long run, those markets are excellent in their time-cost to the investor.

With money managers to offload the work to, a wealth owner can maximize time for leisure, family, and building relationships. They can cultivate influence and secure rent-seeking rights and other political favors. The wealth owner can simply leave behind any active concern for their wealth while reaping its practical advantages.

The chief advantage a wealth owner has is the status and time for other high-profile pastimes—like racing cars or seeking high public office— which the wealth owner may or may not be suited for. In the case of Steve Forbes, Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, or Mitt Romney, they were not suited to winning elections but that didn’t prevent them all from wasting enormous amounts of wealth and connections to pursue their political hobby.

Three of my examples are known for having real (as opposed to honorary) jobs as venture capitalists, CEOs and corporate board members. But as a job these don’t primarily have to do with operations. Fiorina and Whitman spent their time at the top of the corporate world operating their charges as if they were whales, as if their corporations were wealth owners whose wealth they were “managing”. HP’s leadership has all been down this road, as have most major corporations. And as those corporations get big, their wealth managers produce ever more abstract and narrow returns.

Wealth management by playing capital markets doesn’t have that good a return, long term. Much of the time, however, the risk and returns of the markets seem good enough for wealth owners to indulge their lazier options. For a competent individual to do a good job at growing wealth as a capitalist, the capitalist must demote himself to working very long hours doing real work and organizing real work. This is not to most capitalists’ liking, even to those who might have the competence to manage their capital applied to production. So wealth owners drift away from active economic activity toward reading monthly statements, learning to fly helicopters and visiting Iowa.

Perhaps the wealth owner trusts the wealth managers, perhaps they don’t. Either way, wealth manglers as a whole will suffer more scrutiny and skepticism in the future. If the day-to-day returns of abstract profits in the market casino were substantially cut by tax policy or some other mechanism, capitalists would have to do something more direct with their capital. To maintain and improve their position, wealth owners would need to change their workflows so that they would have them.

There will always be room for new ideas in genre…

19 Wednesday Jun 2013

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…a review of Mur Lafferty’s The Shambling Guide to New York City

Like some (many) other aspiring writers I follow Mur Lafferty’s I Should Be Writing entries on her blog. I’ve also followed the podcasting she’s done for Escape Artists. She’s had a few stories published so she’s past the aspiring part, and with last month’s release of SG-NYC being the first in a new series she begins the long slog through the next few milestones of her writing career.

I picked up SG-NYC at Powells last week and finished it yesterday. For a new series of urban fantasy it’s marvelously planned out. SG-NYC is the first of a series that will mirror an apocryphal series of travel books written for the underground of the world’s monsters “coterie”. Like the True Blood franchise, it’s a new premise for urban fantasy, but it goes much further than just the regular variations of beasties and emotional turmoil. Unlike the True Blood franchise the heroine is allowed to stretch her intellectual legs and be more than just a meal. Also, there are giant robots golems. And where there’s giant robots, there’s always room in future installments for giant-robot-on-giant-robot romance. Here’s hoping.

Consideration of Things Present; or In Guiding the Slippery Now

10 Friday May 2013

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Feeling Now

What is it about now that is different from then and what comes? I had this thought Monday, walking home in a slightly happy daze after getting out of a movie. What is it about this moment, I thought, that makes it this moment? Isn’t the entire universe and all of time encompassed by a single electron zipping forward and back, giving the universe its shape and making all moments part of a timeless whole? Or is that just glib sci-fi nonsense cribbed from Michio Kaku?

Back to the moment: walking home in the cooling, breezy evening under shade trees and a cloudless blue sky…

Now is different from then and the future, so what can I say about now? Scientifically, I can’t say much beyond the idea that science is built upon data recorded as it whizzes by the moment or is dug up later in a different moment. Looking at that data hints at predictions we might make for other moments in the future or other traces hidden elsewhere. We collect data from those predicted moments or traces to compare them against our hypothesized predictions. As future predictions or revived traces slide through our personal now we refine our hypotheses or even craft a theory.

But is there anything to be said, scientifically, about my personal experience? I don’t have the budget to record molecular or quantum activity inside my head as the future passes through my now, so no, this is going to slide out of science and into philosophy and psychology.

So what is it about now that I am feeling? I feel a feeling, to begin with. Now is always a new beginning starting with how I feel right now. I have felt in the past but I don’t feel a past feeling now. Now is how I feel. Now is a feeling that is more than a description of my state, it is my state. Crisis or chemistry can dominate a feeling and give it a strong label: sad, happy, hungry, enraged, fearful, horny, sated, but even during these skewed moments the rest of the feeling is there, overshadowed by the major chemical characteristic but as a whole every feeling is much more than the label.

For past feelings, our memories can be impossible to recall without using the shorthand labels. Adding scents and sounds and images can be enough to bring back a spookily similar overall feeling. A ghost of the past feeling, the past moment, rises out of the physical structure of our brain whether it’s welcome or not. That ghost has better resolution than any label or prose description. So with PTSD sufferers the problem is a kind of involuntary time travel of a past state into the present. A pervasive record of a feeling becomes a too-slowly-fading structure in our brain.

But even when those structures are influencing our now, we only have the single now we are feeling.

Illusion of Now

I don’t want to turn this into a review of Iron Man 3. Other people have done a good enough job of hitting the high points and getting to the thumbs-up consensus. What interests me is the weird phenomenon of complex, effects-heavy superhero-genre films being put together with enough effort and ability that even an anti-genre elitist like Kenneth Turan can give his reluctant approval. All I can say is that I’m glad the local one-screen theater isn’t showing Oblivion. That vehicle seems to have been choreographed as well as Iron Man 3 while showing so little empathy for a wider audience that it’s difficult to take seriously as an idea, much less as art.

Film is built of moments. Prose does this too but leaves more of the work of creating the feeling up to the reader. Movie directors don’t have this luxury. They must manage the moments for a specified period of time for an ever-expanding toolbox of performance apparatus. A state-of-the-art movie consumes dozens or hundreds of worker-years to produce one and a half to three hours of content. Every moment is managed and the result is a machine of sound and images—and in a theater in Nagoya, 4DX wind and stink—to generate those specific, repeatable feelings.

So when a movie manages to craft a pervasively credible stream of experience that feels like it might be the experiences of interesting human beings, that movie gets good reviews regardless of the genre.

A re-playable sequence of feelings is the goal of film-making and music and poetry and prose. But as I walked home yesterday afternoon after watching the matinee I was getting more stimulation from my environment and the flowing liquid now of the real-world than I got during the film. Perhaps the film created a mental stage for a pleasant feeling in my brain or perhaps a real individual experience will always expose a fundamental pointlessness in art.

Showmanship of Now

The question I had while returning from the movie was how to save the now I was feeling for re-creation later in front of the keyboard. I was walking in a compositional ooze of writing flow without being able to record the words. So I memorized the initial sentence and was later able to recreate a semblance of the moment.

Is that enough? Is the recording and regurgitation of moments a substitute for a personal now? Should I just do my best to spend as much time in the moment as I can and forgo writing about it? A wordless now is a fine enough experience in itself.

But it isn’t only about my personal experience. Nor is it about running and re-running a tape of created feelings as a kind of drug. It is also about communicating one person’s moment to another person. Transmitting or receiving a now between separate people is what makes us people. With that, art loses its pointlessness and the question turns back toward message, craft, audience, and reach.

When I consider that a now can be built, however, I drop out of the now and into the expectations and history that a now-seeker fears. Now is unstable, or at least our consideration of it. But perhaps a large part of the joy of now is the ability to drop into a now-considering state after a sojurn outside. Our consideration can’t only consider now lest we starve.

Cloud Atlas and the filmic gauze (3 of 3)

29 Saturday Dec 2012

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I didn’t publish this back in November because I’ve decided that commenting on pop culture and other people’s work doesn’t really sit well with me. But I want to get it out of my queue, and nothing kills a piece of writing better than publishing it.

I’ve already said some caustic things about the novel (see a few posts down, or up or sideways, however you’re navigating):

“Hopefully in the Wachowski Siblings’ movie it will be the structure, images, and characters that shine through and not the gloomy stereotype of a future.”

And that’s what we got. They even explicitly cleaned up the unreasonable gloominess of all but the most prosthetic of the six stories. Andy, Lana, and Tom Tykwer dissolved the structure as well, switching to an intercutting of the different stories based on context rather than David Mitchell’s nested dolls. While David Edelstein (“You’re Better Off Reading the Book”) disliked the changes made to Mitchell’s darlings, I found that the Wachowski’s changes worked quite well (given the density of the material remaining after the inevitable cutting) and managed to make palatable the most obviously false notes of the novel.

Mainly, though, I noticed that old people love them some sci-fi when it’s conceived by one of their own and shamelessly packaged for and aimed directly at them. The horde of retirees in the audience may have been motivated by a similar desire as my own—be cheap and see the matinée on the Sunday after the film’s release—but the characters who were most easily identified as from our world were also all from the boom generation: the vital heroes of a 1970s thriller and the rattling retirees of a 2010s farce. It’s not a coincidence that elements of the stories also seem drawn largely from a bin of boomer context. In strict chronological order they are:

  • the mendacious and racist Enlightenment— as exposed by boomers in the Civil Rights era
  • pan-sexuality— acknowledged by boomers (with ambivalent caveats) during their grumpy middle age
  • two explicitly boomer stories— empowering fantasies of “fighting the man” by boomers past and present
  • a reactionary vision of middle-future dystopia— as endlessly wanked about by boomers
  • an idyllic beachcomber’s paradise Somewhere Else at the very end— what it all means for boomers

As a film, the density of the remaining material follows the traditional mismatch between the narrative size of novels and movies.

Without having read the novel some of the dialogue would have been incomprehensible, especially Mitchell’s simple patois of the far future. The action was pretty understandable despite this. While I can understand why some readers of the novel would be disappointed with the change from Mitchell’s structure to reg’lar old, filmic intercutting, the joy of watching a film for just a few hours is often in the way a set of disparate moments can be edited together. A novel has a much more difficult time mining this dynamic across several sessions of reading.

At the climax, the Wachowskis maximize this effect when every central character in every story says, indignantly, “I will not be subjected to criminal abuse!” including twice over from the character of Timothy Cavendish, once played by Broadbent as the character experiencing his life now and once played by Tom Hanks playing an aged Tom Hanks in the movie adaptation of Cavendish’s autobiographical novelization, in the 3d-HD-ultra-something-or-other movie of 2020-something being viewed as banned entertainment far in the future. This got a laugh from the bluest of hairs in the audience. They got it and I enjoyed the moment as well.

Given the source material and the limited narrative space of a movie adaptation, the Wachowskis made the right choice in cleaning up some of the down notes and ambiguities, limiting the cast to recurring actors (even though the bit where “white people have freckles and future Koreans must look like androids, while future Korean androids are played by actual Asians” was never anything but jarring). The major false note was the homage to their own work in the action fight sequences of future-Seoul followed by a firefight that looked like it was lifted from an old episode of Stargate SG-1.

Abandoning Mitchell’s measured and recursive structure was a solid choice for the movie. Mitchell’s structure would have made a movie version seem interminable. Those who think otherwise might be dreaming of an eleven-episode television series instead. It’s a solid success for the siblings and Tykwer when it could have been so easy to let Mitchell’s unformed vision guide them to disaster.

Homeland

15 Thursday Nov 2012

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I was never into 24 when it was on. I’d already drawn my conclusion about the torture-porn ticking-time-bomb fantasy so I felt no ambiguity about the show’s main emotional draw.

My starting point is that if our hero has a terrorist in custody and believes that the prisoner has information that is needed to save lives, then the hero should know the state of the art of interrogation and act accordingly. As in: don’t give into the terrorist’s fantasy about being martyred through abuse. And if you go off-book and abuse a prisoner, don’t whine about how the politically-correct justice system won’t allow you to be a properly unaccountable psychopath. In a real-world ticking-time-bomb scenario (has this ever happened, in the entire history of counter-terrorism?), I’m sure the judge will be understanding. Own up to your mistake for the sake of civilization. It’s not like you’re going to be tortured or abused during your probation.

Homeland isn’t about torture, though. It isn’t about terrorism or the power of the aristocrats who treat the State like the family business. Homeland’s thriller context is a simple cloak of fantasy around the relationship between an organically nutty single person and a horribly abused and damaged married person. The show owes its success as much to that dynamic as it does to the cloak and dagger. The fact that the show’s context is stuck in 2005 adds to the draperie of delusion.

It’s important to note that the show is not a delusion playing out in Carrie’s manic brain. Not quite, anyway. That would be too obviously indulgent. In that scenario, Saul Berenson is Carrie’s shrink, (really, Carrie’s shrink is her sister? That fails the delusional smell test on so many levels), the CIA is Carrie’s occasional sanitarium and is also Berenson’s main place of employment. Brody is the poor bastard with severe PTSD and post-concussion syndrome who Carrie is obsessed with and who breezed through Berenson’s care recently (and who Carrie met in group). Looked at cynically, this framework of Carrie’s self-delusion works as a realistic context but doesn’t really have the kind of punch needed to bring in ratings. So that’s not what the show is about.

In the actual show, everyone is deluded, except maybe Brody’s daughter. Not only is Carrie a real (ex-)CIA agent who keeps working cloak-and-dagger jobs, but all kinds of other unlikely things happen as well, including a young and vigorous Dick Cheney who never fell out of the public’s willful suspension of disbelief. The unreality that cloaks all these characters is a major part of the genius of the show. People fall all over themselves to cite the delusional facts of the show in their commentaries, but the real indulgence is watching all the character’s delusions simultaneously instantiated as reality. Also hot, crazy people get it on and don’t quite get away with it.

So maybe I should give 24 another chance. If it’s about something else—the story of a guy who slowly finds himself becoming an violently abusive dad who alienates himself from society and loses himself in work, but not really, so the guy’s guilt doesn’t have to be real—that might actually be interesting.

“A Scause for Applause”

01 Thursday Nov 2012

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I don’t know if I’m just in an especially receptive mood this morning, but Trey and Matt are at their best when they are being most topical with a short lead-time on an issue. Long simmering cultural issues like Mormonism and Scientology lead to funny but schmaltzy equivocation from the team—it’s almost as if they need to be stopped from thinking too much. Last night’s South Park was a masterpiece. In classic form, they didn’t even mention Lance Armstrong by name, but elevated him to Messiah status. That is all. Watch it.

In an alternate history…

22 Monday Oct 2012

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November 7th, 2012: America Called Romney’s Bluff

Our new President is a Master of the Universe, a child whose father was a virtuous (and losing) candidate for the Presidency in 1968, a bully of a boy who was raised into the quickest growing religion most focused on prosperity, a vigorous (if less virtuous) young man who skipped Vietnam to attend the best schools and enter the most profitable profession two yards from the end-zone, a corporate operator who became a politician of the most reactionary party at the height of its popularity, a flexible deal-maker who won the governorship farthest inside enemy territory by promising not to be the guy everyone worried he might be, a helmet-haired opportunist who benefited from the dullest field of dullards to win the latest Republican primary, and a mendacious and non-human shoveler of such a huge blizzard of bullshit who barely won against the most-hated moderate to ever be elected, a tottering tower of entitlement who owes his position to Republican filibustering and the vociferous stupidity of Tea Party “revolutionaries” who would rather be dumb and poor than blue.

I hope he realizes he’s playing poker and not rummy.

Fortunately, Obama’s floor of support is 47% and Romney’s roof is also 47%. I also like to think Romney’s oiliness will ooze through in the next couple weeks. I guess we’ll see.