Interesting concept. For books, renewal value gets trumped by cost at about 10 years into the scheme for a reasonably good-selling work, or at about 13-15 years for a best-seller.
Given that if you really need to make a living at it, series are the way to go, and it can take a series 10+ years to get momentum -- I think 21 years is a good starting point. Gives the smaller-selling authors a chance to get some secondary sales on reprints and ebooks of older series entries, without having to be well-heeled or a corporation to afford the copyright renewal.
Who was it that recently charted significant deadtree-sales spikes directly related to ebook piracy?
As to the nominal topic, being a rabid Jack Vance fan I immediately had to sally forth and find the cited work, which lies here (and which I had never before seen in print):
"This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note."
I'm more inclined to trust PG's lawyers than Greg Bear's outrage.
I don't use adblock because I use some basic settings (no flash, block unrequested popups, block images from certain servers) that filter the real crap well enough most of the time. But that's not the point:
I don't mind well-targeted ads *that don't slow things down*, but we hardly ever see those anymore. I was astonished the other day when I was at some tech site and was served simple, fast-loading ads directly relevant to the site topic itself -- and I'm like, hey, get a load of these ads that I *don't* want to block, cool!
But the constant barrage of sheer garbage taking 90% of the page-load time (and what does it say about your business model if you rely on that for revenue??!) -- either I do something to stop it or I don't visit that site at all. And that's why we've got the war we do today.
As to facebook, I'm so damned tired of its "like" widget taking its sweet time loading, stalling pages sometimes for several minutes, that I finally blocked facebook in HOSTS.
I'd put the onus the other way: if you're such an idiot that you put that much weight on a shelf designed to hold a cellphone charger, your busted sheetrock is not my problem.
Seriously, there comes a point where the consumer has to exercise common sense. You can't expect the manufacturer to exercise sense for you for every little thing. If it weren't for personal injury lawyers (and the extremity of that issue is documented by the absurd "do not whatever idiotic thing no sensible person would even think of doing" disclaimers found on so much merchandise today), maybe it would still be a two-way relationship and not always the mfgr's fault, no matter how stupid the user is.
I'm reminded of a story someone from Denmark posted a few years ago:
Seems Denmark had required gun registration way-back-when. During WW2, first thing the Nazis did when they marched into town was visit the police station, to get the Handy List of gun registrants, who were then deprived of their weapons and occasionally their lives.
The moral being, don't assume that what's a good law under today's conditions will be equally good under tomorrow's conditions. Unintended consequences can be fairly extreme.
"You should not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered."
-- Lyndon Johnson, 36th President of the U.S.
That's why UPS has my address on "Signature Required" delivery status now -- stuff randomly left wherever the driver got tired of looking for my house. (Which can't be TOO hard, since there's all of two houses anywhere in sight.)
When it was the same driver for a long time, I only had to get after him ONCE. Now it's a different guy every time so there's no point in trying to train 'em.
Consistent with my experience across 40 years of parcels shipped with whatever the sender used, tho. USPS is most reliable, UPS the worst.
Local TV station has run tests several times at Xmas, and reached the same conclusion.
Lately I had UPS put my address on "Signature only" because their moron drivers were leaving stuff at random places down the driveway or next door, and couldn't even be arsed to put stuff on the porch out of the weather (ie. the direct sun which here does a nice job of cooking electronics).
I used to have to go down to UPS's regional sorting facility in Pacoima (Los Angeles) to pick up packages. The sorting conveyors were clearly visible from the pickup window. Two interesting points:
-- Boxes fell as far as ~30 feet in the course of being shifted from one conveyor belt to another.
-- There was a HUGE pile (probably 30-40 feet across and 15 feet high) of obviously smashed boxes (in all shapes and sizes) shoved into the back corner beyond the conveyors, clearly having been put there via forklift. =====
My personal experience across the past 40 years has been that if you want something to arrive intact, use USPS.
Okay, tho that's not what I got from your previous post (nor your others in this chain, which I've read most of -- the impression I got was that you were FOR increased tax on business).
My own solution would be to eliminate all the income and sales taxes (sales/use taxes unfairly penalise those least able to pay, as such tax is a much larger proportion of their income) and go to purely an import/export duty at both the federal and state levels... which certainly did us well enough before the income tax was instituted!!
Government, both state and federal, would be limited in size, directly proportional to what the people can produce in hard goods (I contend that services are a cost, not a product). It would therefore be in the govt's best interest to not meddle in ways that unreasonably reduce our production capacity.
There would be a better balance between some level of local protectionism and the needs of import and export markets, as it would no longer be more profitable to import cheap junk, if anything even reasonably equivalent could be made domestically.
The real trouble is, as someone pointed out recently (and I find this a reasonable explanation for the unholy symbiosis that's developed between gov't and certain megacorp influences), that gov't has become the biggest corporation on the block, and like everyone else is engaging in shortsighted pursuit of the almighty bottom line. Only diff is, gov't can run at a loss forever, and we're forced to make up the difference.
One of the big problems with ALL the present gov't revenue-shifting schemes is that they still assume the same level of expenditure by the gov't. Only gov't is allowed to have ever-increasing spending. This has to stop, and we need to go back to levels of gov't and spending that can be rationally supported by our true production value, as above. "Making up the difference" by raising taxes somewhere else should NOT be part of the equation, as it comtinues to enable this "spend it all" gov't mentality.
"but if you take that course, then corporations can have Zero lobbyest, and zero contributions to ANY political organization. They should be treated like the hostile para-governmental agencies they really are. Corporate taxes would not be needed if they weren't allowed to retain earnings."
While I totally agree with the first part of that statement (why should any entity that doesn't pay taxes have lobbying/political influence?) -- if corporations aren't allowed to retain earnings, what's their motivation for staying in business?
For the people who like to diss business and "the rich" -- how many poor people do you see paying wages to others?
Oh, that's right, poor people don't pay wages, cuz they can't afford to hire anyone. So, if you get rid of those nasty "rich folks" and evil businesses, who pays your wages?
Actually, I'm a small-business owner with 4 decades of experience.
Guess you've never heard of state sales tax. Or worked out what it costs you to have a single employee in California (hint: almost 3 times as much is paid to the state as to the employee). Or figured out what level of revenue you need to stay in business at all, never mind make a profit sufficient to live on. When my costs (including taxes) go up, I can only eat the increase up to the point where I start losing money, even if I can afford to break even. So if taxes go up, something has to give. For a small business that's usually the owner's paycheck (owner gets paid LAST), then you have to start squeezing materials and employees. OR you can raise prices, if your market allows it. OR you can go out of business or flee that business climate. Sure, you charge what you can. But you seem to think that's always a great profit margin, and the truth is more the opposite, usually the most you can get barely keeps your business afloat. And when cheap foreign junk drives prices below your rising costs, then what?
But hey, go right on raising taxes to business, and bang the drum of unrestricted globalization, then bitch about the tough job market....
If my business was portable, I'd consider it. As it is, I'm trying to get moved to a less business-hostile state, but that's being a very slow process.
As to the Great Depression, current thought by economics researchers (at least what I've read lately) is that FDR's "New Deal" Democrats and their policy of "spend your way to prosperity" actually *prolonged* the depression, and created the major roots of the issues we're suffering from today.
I wonder if we should add private debt to that figure, since so much of America is presently underwater, due to rising costs/prices and falling purchasing power. I know it's reached the stage for me where the harder I run, the behinder I get.
My own business costs have gone up by roughly a factor of FOUR in the past 10 years, yet I've had to drop prices back down to what I was getting in 1985. How the hell am I supposed to stay in business and stay out of debt? I'd be happy with 1985 prices if I had 1985 costs as well!!
True:) But there is a division of the FBI that deals with counterfeit goods, is there not? I know they've busted dealers of fake-label clothing; eyeglasses should be in the same bucket, perhaps moreso considering how much the damned things cost.
Between the Civil War and WW1, the U.S. gov't was funded by tariffs. Which is great if you've got something to export, and it keeps the size of gov't limited to what the hard-goods economy can actually support. (I'd note that since like all corporations, gov't wants to grow, under such a system it's in the govt's best interests to encourage the expansion of hard-goods production and export. BTW I distinguish this from service industries because I believe those actually represent an economic *cost*, not a salable product.)
The trouble now, as you point out in another post, is that we exported all our manufacturing capacity and now import most of our daily-use consumer goods -- even food is going that way. Sooner or later the whole termite-riddled mess is going to implode.
I'd love to see deflation, but it won't happen so long as population keeps expanding -- the definitive commodity that ultimately drives all inflation is real estate (no one ever sells at so much as a break-even price), and when that's getting scarcer per capita, costs necessarily go up, since ultimately everything sits on a piece of land.
"We should tax them when they pay workers, in the location those workers are. We should tax them when they sell goods, in the location those goods are sold. (Or, easier, when those goods are imported.) We should tax their capital and real estate, in the location that capital and real estate is. We should tax their corporate dividends, in the location that stockholders live."
Wer already do that:
1) Payroll taxes 2) Sales and use taxes 3) Import/export duties/tariffs 4) Income tax
All of which hurt everyone up and down the line, with the possible exception of import/export tariffs. Wages are suppressed by the amount of payroll taxes; consumer purchasing power is depressed by the amount of sales/use/income taxes. Any tax dinged against a business MUST be passed along to the consumer, which means higher prices (and proportionally more sales tax) because no business can absorb rising expenses forever and stay in business... paying wages and incidentally payroll taxes. Income tax on dividends hurts mainly small investors relying on it for their retirement, who hold (per the last figures I saw) over 90% of stocks.
In California, gov't charges to business (payroll tax, workmans comp, etc.) account for approx. 70% of the cost of each worker. How much better off would we be if that 70% went into your paycheck (and into business expansion, which leads to more jobs) rather than being paid to the gov't?
Finally, the notion that you can tax business into being a prosperous, fully-employed, debt-free nation seems to forget that poor people pay no wages. Wages are *paid* by people who are making money (ie. businesses). Make it impossible to make money, and who is going to pay your wages??
The REAL problem is that the government has become the biggest corporation in every developed nation, and like all corporations, it looks to grow its own bottom line first and foremost. But the difference between gov't and business is that when gov't revenues aren't up to covering costs, it can simply make up the shortfall from its citizens.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting concept. For books, renewal value gets trumped by cost at about 10 years into the scheme for a reasonably good-selling work, or at about 13-15 years for a best-seller.
Given that if you really need to make a living at it, series are the way to go, and it can take a series 10+ years to get momentum -- I think 21 years is a good starting point. Gives the smaller-selling authors a chance to get some secondary sales on reprints and ebooks of older series entries, without having to be well-heeled or a corporation to afford the copyright renewal.
Who was it that recently charted significant deadtree-sales spikes directly related to ebook piracy?
As to the nominal topic, being a rabid Jack Vance fan I immediately had to sally forth and find the cited work, which lies here (and which I had never before seen in print):
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30002
It is appended with this notice:
"This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note."
I'm more inclined to trust PG's lawyers than Greg Bear's outrage.
http://bigpicture.posterous.com/miss-tsa-2011-pinup-calendar
I don't use adblock because I use some basic settings (no flash, block unrequested popups, block images from certain servers) that filter the real crap well enough most of the time. But that's not the point:
I don't mind well-targeted ads *that don't slow things down*, but we hardly ever see those anymore. I was astonished the other day when I was at some tech site and was served simple, fast-loading ads directly relevant to the site topic itself -- and I'm like, hey, get a load of these ads that I *don't* want to block, cool!
But the constant barrage of sheer garbage taking 90% of the page-load time (and what does it say about your business model if you rely on that for revenue??!) -- either I do something to stop it or I don't visit that site at all. And that's why we've got the war we do today.
As to facebook, I'm so damned tired of its "like" widget taking its sweet time loading, stalling pages sometimes for several minutes, that I finally blocked facebook in HOSTS.
I think the OP is missing the inverse point --
If I've done nothing wrong, why is what I did any of your business in the first place??
I'd put the onus the other way: if you're such an idiot that you put that much weight on a shelf designed to hold a cellphone charger, your busted sheetrock is not my problem.
Seriously, there comes a point where the consumer has to exercise common sense. You can't expect the manufacturer to exercise sense for you for every little thing. If it weren't for personal injury lawyers (and the extremity of that issue is documented by the absurd "do not whatever idiotic thing no sensible person would even think of doing" disclaimers found on so much merchandise today), maybe it would still be a two-way relationship and not always the mfgr's fault, no matter how stupid the user is.
I'm reminded of a story someone from Denmark posted a few years ago:
Seems Denmark had required gun registration way-back-when. During WW2, first thing the Nazis did when they marched into town was visit the police station, to get the Handy List of gun registrants, who were then deprived of their weapons and occasionally their lives.
The moral being, don't assume that what's a good law under today's conditions will be equally good under tomorrow's conditions. Unintended consequences can be fairly extreme.
"You should not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered."
-- Lyndon Johnson, 36th President of the U.S.
That's why UPS has my address on "Signature Required" delivery status now -- stuff randomly left wherever the driver got tired of looking for my house. (Which can't be TOO hard, since there's all of two houses anywhere in sight.)
When it was the same driver for a long time, I only had to get after him ONCE. Now it's a different guy every time so there's no point in trying to train 'em.
Personally, I prefer to not think of the white hippopotamus while changing the boiling water into gold.
===
[Side effect: by the time I got done typing this, I'd forgotten what it was you told us not to think about, and had to reread your post. *sigh*]
Consistent with my experience across 40 years of parcels shipped with whatever the sender used, tho. USPS is most reliable, UPS the worst.
Local TV station has run tests several times at Xmas, and reached the same conclusion.
Lately I had UPS put my address on "Signature only" because their moron drivers were leaving stuff at random places down the driveway or next door, and couldn't even be arsed to put stuff on the porch out of the weather (ie. the direct sun which here does a nice job of cooking electronics).
So... the obvious solution to destructo-shipper?
Include a few live bees in every package.
Nice concept. Roughly what do they cost you per shipment? (Don't see any pricing offhand on their site.)
I'm wondering if you should include another warning:
"Caution: Inflatable Lion. Any puncture will cause it to inflate."
I used to have to go down to UPS's regional sorting facility in Pacoima (Los Angeles) to pick up packages. The sorting conveyors were clearly visible from the pickup window. Two interesting points:
-- Boxes fell as far as ~30 feet in the course of being shifted from one conveyor belt to another.
-- There was a HUGE pile (probably 30-40 feet across and 15 feet high) of obviously smashed boxes (in all shapes and sizes) shoved into the back corner beyond the conveyors, clearly having been put there via forklift.
=====
My personal experience across the past 40 years has been that if you want something to arrive intact, use USPS.
And for ghu's sake, DON'T use Canada Post!
I'd be hard put to resist writing in reply, "My hobby is reading the bottom of shipping boxes."
Yeah, I'm easily amused too. :)
Okay, tho that's not what I got from your previous post (nor your others in this chain, which I've read most of -- the impression I got was that you were FOR increased tax on business).
My own solution would be to eliminate all the income and sales taxes (sales/use taxes unfairly penalise those least able to pay, as such tax is a much larger proportion of their income) and go to purely an import/export duty at both the federal and state levels... which certainly did us well enough before the income tax was instituted!!
Government, both state and federal, would be limited in size, directly proportional to what the people can produce in hard goods (I contend that services are a cost, not a product). It would therefore be in the govt's best interest to not meddle in ways that unreasonably reduce our production capacity.
There would be a better balance between some level of local protectionism and the needs of import and export markets, as it would no longer be more profitable to import cheap junk, if anything even reasonably equivalent could be made domestically.
The real trouble is, as someone pointed out recently (and I find this a reasonable explanation for the unholy symbiosis that's developed between gov't and certain megacorp influences), that gov't has become the biggest corporation on the block, and like everyone else is engaging in shortsighted pursuit of the almighty bottom line. Only diff is, gov't can run at a loss forever, and we're forced to make up the difference.
One of the big problems with ALL the present gov't revenue-shifting schemes is that they still assume the same level of expenditure by the gov't. Only gov't is allowed to have ever-increasing spending. This has to stop, and we need to go back to levels of gov't and spending that can be rationally supported by our true production value, as above. "Making up the difference" by raising taxes somewhere else should NOT be part of the equation, as it comtinues to enable this "spend it all" gov't mentality.
"but if you take that course, then corporations can have Zero lobbyest, and zero contributions to ANY political organization. They should be treated like the hostile para-governmental agencies they really are. Corporate taxes would not be needed if they weren't allowed to retain earnings."
While I totally agree with the first part of that statement (why should any entity that doesn't pay taxes have lobbying/political influence?) -- if corporations aren't allowed to retain earnings, what's their motivation for staying in business?
For the people who like to diss business and "the rich" -- how many poor people do you see paying wages to others?
Oh, that's right, poor people don't pay wages, cuz they can't afford to hire anyone. So, if you get rid of those nasty "rich folks" and evil businesses, who pays your wages?
Actually, I'm a small-business owner with 4 decades of experience.
Guess you've never heard of state sales tax. Or worked out what it costs you to have a single employee in California (hint: almost 3 times as much is paid to the state as to the employee). Or figured out what level of revenue you need to stay in business at all, never mind make a profit sufficient to live on. When my costs (including taxes) go up, I can only eat the increase up to the point where I start losing money, even if I can afford to break even. So if taxes go up, something has to give. For a small business that's usually the owner's paycheck (owner gets paid LAST), then you have to start squeezing materials and employees. OR you can raise prices, if your market allows it. OR you can go out of business or flee that business climate. Sure, you charge what you can. But you seem to think that's always a great profit margin, and the truth is more the opposite, usually the most you can get barely keeps your business afloat. And when cheap foreign junk drives prices below your rising costs, then what?
But hey, go right on raising taxes to business, and bang the drum of unrestricted globalization, then bitch about the tough job market....
If my business was portable, I'd consider it. As it is, I'm trying to get moved to a less business-hostile state, but that's being a very slow process.
An interesting book which talks about the internal supply issues the Soviet Union had:
Why They Behave Like Russians
http://www.openlibrary.org/details/whytheybehavelik00fiscmiss
As to the Great Depression, current thought by economics researchers (at least what I've read lately) is that FDR's "New Deal" Democrats and their policy of "spend your way to prosperity" actually *prolonged* the depression, and created the major roots of the issues we're suffering from today.
I wonder if we should add private debt to that figure, since so much of America is presently underwater, due to rising costs/prices and falling purchasing power. I know it's reached the stage for me where the harder I run, the behinder I get.
My own business costs have gone up by roughly a factor of FOUR in the past 10 years, yet I've had to drop prices back down to what I was getting in 1985. How the hell am I supposed to stay in business and stay out of debt? I'd be happy with 1985 prices if I had 1985 costs as well!!
True :) But there is a division of the FBI that deals with counterfeit goods, is there not? I know they've busted dealers of fake-label clothing; eyeglasses should be in the same bucket, perhaps moreso considering how much the damned things cost.
Between the Civil War and WW1, the U.S. gov't was funded by tariffs. Which is great if you've got something to export, and it keeps the size of gov't limited to what the hard-goods economy can actually support. (I'd note that since like all corporations, gov't wants to grow, under such a system it's in the govt's best interests to encourage the expansion of hard-goods production and export. BTW I distinguish this from service industries because I believe those actually represent an economic *cost*, not a salable product.)
The trouble now, as you point out in another post, is that we exported all our manufacturing capacity and now import most of our daily-use consumer goods -- even food is going that way. Sooner or later the whole termite-riddled mess is going to implode.
I'd love to see deflation, but it won't happen so long as population keeps expanding -- the definitive commodity that ultimately drives all inflation is real estate (no one ever sells at so much as a break-even price), and when that's getting scarcer per capita, costs necessarily go up, since ultimately everything sits on a piece of land.
"We should tax them when they pay workers, in the location those workers are. We should tax them when they sell goods, in the location those goods are sold. (Or, easier, when those goods are imported.) We should tax their capital and real estate, in the location that capital and real estate is. We should tax their corporate dividends, in the location that stockholders live."
Wer already do that:
1) Payroll taxes
2) Sales and use taxes
3) Import/export duties/tariffs
4) Income tax
All of which hurt everyone up and down the line, with the possible exception of import/export tariffs. Wages are suppressed by the amount of payroll taxes; consumer purchasing power is depressed by the amount of sales/use/income taxes. Any tax dinged against a business MUST be passed along to the consumer, which means higher prices (and proportionally more sales tax) because no business can absorb rising expenses forever and stay in business... paying wages and incidentally payroll taxes. Income tax on dividends hurts mainly small investors relying on it for their retirement, who hold (per the last figures I saw) over 90% of stocks.
In California, gov't charges to business (payroll tax, workmans comp, etc.) account for approx. 70% of the cost of each worker. How much better off would we be if that 70% went into your paycheck (and into business expansion, which leads to more jobs) rather than being paid to the gov't?
Finally, the notion that you can tax business into being a prosperous, fully-employed, debt-free nation seems to forget that poor people pay no wages. Wages are *paid* by people who are making money (ie. businesses). Make it impossible to make money, and who is going to pay your wages??
The REAL problem is that the government has become the biggest corporation in every developed nation, and like all corporations, it looks to grow its own bottom line first and foremost. But the difference between gov't and business is that when gov't revenues aren't up to covering costs, it can simply make up the shortfall from its citizens.