Andrew Hickey

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June 3rd, 2015: I really liked Wondermark's A Softer World Tribute and it made me realize: hey, now that A Softer World has ended, their format is UP FOR GRABS. I wrote some words about it ending last week that you might enjoy if you missed them. If you didn't, you might enjoy them anyway, but maybe a little less now that you know what happens!! RIP ASW 2003-2015 Father's Day is coming up and this year I've got your back! What is the best gift for all dads, but your dad in particular? Well clearly it's a #1 Dad shirt, but one that is legally binding: This is a limited-time design that will ship in time for Father's Day! – Ryan

INEQUALITY sits at the top of the political agenda in many countries around the world. Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic candidate to succeed Barack Obama as president of the United States, made inequality the centrepiece of a major campaign speech on June 14th. On June 18th Pope Francis will deliver an encyclical, a high-level Vatican pronouncement, which is expected to address the problem of global inequality, among other issues. And on June 15th economists at the IMF&nbsp;released a study&nbsp;assessing the causes and consequences of rising inequality. The authors reckon that while inequality could cause all sorts of problems, governments should be especially concerned about its effects on growth. They estimate that a one percentage point increase in the income share of the top 20% will drag down growth by 0.08 percentage points over five years, while a rise in the income share of the bottom 20% actually boosts growth. But how does inequality affect economic growth rates? How to tax the rich Economists say that some inequality is needed to propel growth. Without the carrot of large financial rewards, risky entrepreneurship and innovation would grind to a halt. In 1975 Arthur Okun, an American economist, argued that societies cannot have both perfect equality and perfect efficiency, but must choose how much of one to sacrifice for the other. While most ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div>

Liberal England was the first blog to bring you a photograph of the young Tim Farron and his band.

Now, thanks to the same reader, I can bring you a medley of demo recordings by the band from 1988.

Enjoy.

For many comics nerds, Gone and Forgotten was essential back in early oughts (and its current incarnation still is.) A lot of people have done the “look at these wacky old comics” thing (myself included) and almost all of them (myself included) ripped off their technique from there. Jon Morris, the man behind Gone and Forgotten, now has a book out called The League of Regrettable Superheroes and I can’t think of a better topic for him to cover, or a better person to cover it.

LORS is a look at the super-powered characters who just never quite made it. There’s a lot of material from the 40s, of course, when the superhero boom was at its peak and everyone was trying to cash in, but unlike most of these discussions Morris also continues looking at characters through the present day.

This is the first touch that sets LORS apart from the myriad of other folks plying similar trades. Morris isn’t doing a “ha ha look at how crazy comics were!” and then giving current nonsense a pass. He’s interested in these misfires themselves and how these things just sometimes don’t go right.

The second, and more important distinction, is that while the book is full of hilarious commentary an some of the heroes are just “what on Earth was anyone thinking?” hapless, Morris isn’t just pointing a finger and getting yuks. He is often as baffled as anyone as to why a character failed (or, as is often the case, worked for a year or so before failing). Anyone can point out a goofy character that didn’t take off, but it doesn’t get interesting until you compare it to similarly goofy characters who did. There are many ways a superhero can just not “click” and not all of them are obvious.

Morris hits some familiar ground to fans of weird comics, and some essential ground, but he also brings in a lot of heroes I wasn’t familiar with, and goes into more detail on ones I had only heard spotty references to.

The League of Regrettable Superheroes is a supremely funny book, but it’s more than just cheap gags at the expense of old creators. It really does look at a very strange world, the world of superhero comics, and wonder how a guy using slapstick props to fight crime fails, but a dude with a metal skeleton and claws that pop out of his hands gets fantastically popular. (This, incidentally, is also why I enjoy Andrew Weiss’ “Nobody’s Favorites” feature, which also owes a lot to G&F and similarly goes for more than just mocking laughter.) LORS recognizes that all superheroes are kind of dumb and goofy, so why are these ones seemingly moreso?

I am enjoying the hell out of the book and highly recommend it. It should be pointed out that Morris’ commentary, while still funny and biting, is more family-friendly than G&F. My only wish is that there was a little more reprinted comment for the characters, but what’s there is perfectly fine. Get it today!

(As a disclaimer, Morris is a Twitter pal of mine and did drawrings for me, but my copy was paid for from my own allowance.)

I grew up reading comics; but unless you're British and of a certain age, they almost certainly weren't the comics you grew up reading.

I'm British, ~50 years old. The weekly printed-on-crap-newsprint kids' comics market was dominated by D. C. Thompson & Co., rigidly gender-segregated, and on the boys' side of the counter contained plenty of short strips heavy on two-fisted derring-do and schoolboy humour, but not so much on superheroes: comics like The Beano and The Hotspur set the tone. For the more militarily-minded there were Commando comics. And, like a bolt from the blue, 2000 AD arrived in 1977, when I was twelve and just about growing out of the whole comics thing; that probably kept me hooked for an extra year, and I have fond memories of the early tales of Judge Dredd. But then I discovered D&D and that was that.

Stuff I didn't grow up with: that'd be the whole Marvel Comics/DC Comics duopoly. These were expensive foreign imports, printed in colour on paper that didn't bleed or tear if you touched it with sticky fingers, and the comics were typically single-character (or ensemble) series works, one per issue. I stumbled across them by accident, aged ten or eleven, while parked at a school holiday day centre for a few weeks—someone had donated a shoe box full of Spiderman and The Incredible Hulk—but with no social context and no ability to buy them locally on an ongoing basis they glanced off my perception of the world of comics without making much impact. All I remember is bright colours, flashy images, and lots of weird and perplexing alien slang that made no sense whatsoever to a kid growing up in 1970s Yorkshire before the age of cheap trans-Atlantic jet travel.

So I pretty much stopped reading comics by the time I was 14, and there the matter rested. I sort of knew a comics scene existed, and read a couple of graphic novels during the 80s when there was a brief fad for commissioning SF authors like Ian MacDonald to write scripts, and of course I followed the most important newspaper cartoon strip in the world, but I wasn't really interested until the late 1990s when, visiting some London based SF fans, one of them shoved a rather odd-looking comic into my hands and said "I think you'll like this". They were right: if anything could get Accelerando-era me interested in comics again it would have to be an early issue of Transmetropolitan.

Over the following years I began to read more widely. I discovered The Sandman well after the fact, through the medium of the graphic novel collections. I tripped over manga of course, and broke my head on Grant Morrison's oevre (not so much The Invisibles, trippy though they were, as The Filth—the comic that finally hooked me into actually buying it monthly).

And of course, the world wide web changed everything.

We now find ourselves in the year 2015, where there is so much incredibly creative stuff going on in comics that the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story this year reminds me of nothing so much as the retro-Hugo award shortlist for best novel of 1954 (just go and look at that shortlist: about half the best SF novels of the entire decade were published that year). Sure there's a sad puppy zombie on the shortlist, but everything else is beautifully drawn, innovative, slyly funny, and adult in outlook. When the Graphic Story Hugo was introduced, some skeptics pooh-pooh'd the idea that comics as a medium might be a suitable vehicle for intelligent adult SF/F storytelling: I think the track record to date triumphantly proves that comics are anything but "kids stuff", and contain some of the most vibrant, creative, and experimental material in the genre. And the Hugo shortlist is far from the only challenging, interesting graphical work out there. In fact, although I like them all (and nominated the one I'd read at the time), there's a lot of other stuff that deserves to be on the Hugo shortlist, especially from the world of web comics (which don't get as much love as they ought to).

What follows is a list of some of the webcomics I've been reading this year and which I commend for your attention. This isn't a nomination slate and I'll be very unhappy if anyone misinterprets this as such: if you vote in any of the open SF/F awards, what you nominate and vote for should be your own choice, and nobody else's. Nevertheless, I think these may not be as visible as many of the store-distributed glossies, so I thought I'd share them with you.

First up: XKCD

I make no apologies for being a Randall Munroe fanboy nerd. From the stick-figure images to the sharp, insightful and slightly skewed geek perspective on the universe, he's my man. (If anything, the lack of art in the, er, art, highlights the content: there's no eyeball candy to boggle at here, so the essential message has to be spot on target if the strip is to work at all.)

At the exact opposite end of the spectrum from XKCD is Kill Six Billion Demons by, um, someone so dementedly talented both at the drawing and the conceptual level that they don't think in human language any more.

As the ABOUT page says, "This is a webcomic! It's graphic novel style and could be considered fantasy, sci-fi, horror, romance, or any other combo of these things." It also comes with an entire pantheon of barkingly strange mythological gods, demons, and angels into which an initially hapless female protagonist called Alison has been precipitated by a bout of unfortunate sex (unfortunate in that it is interrupted by her boyfriend's abduction by demons).

There is much violence, even more theology, and the occasional outbreak of scripture as Alison deals with having a small devil grow out of her skull and being pursued by the entire population of several Hells—the multiverse is run by organized crime—when they learn that the most important magical artefact in the multiverse is embedded in her forehead.

If Kill Six Billion Demons has a hapless female protagonist, the same cannot be said of Strong Female Protagonist, by Brennan Lee Mulligan and Molly Ostertag:

It's a superhero comic, about a young middle-class American college student with super-strength, invincibility, and a crippling sense of social injustice. Alison (not the same Alison as the Alison of "Kill Six Billion Demons"!) was one of the first wave of people to come down with superpowers in her early teens, Alison joined a superhero team—but her youthful belief in her ability to fix the world's ailments faded as the team fell apart, and now she's at college, trying to pick up the pieces of normal life again. However, history has a habit of not leaving her alone ...

(NB: this is pretty much the anti-sad puppy webcomic. And it's available in graphic novel form.)

Decrypting Rita Is a very different style and approach to graphical storytelling (not to mention having a protagonist called Rita, not Alison), by Egypt Urnash. Very post-singularity, much upload, wow: When her ex drags her outside of reality, the fastest woman ever built has to piece herself together across four timelines! And they run in parallel through the entire comic, which is a side-scrolling web experience that translates oddly well to graphic novel format:

(The author comes from the Hollywood animation scene but is here doing her own thing, in a highly stylised and richly overloaded manner—Alas, a single frame doesn't do it justice.)

Finally, where would we be without OGLAF? (Warning: mostly NSFW!)

As with XKCD OGLAF isn't a graphic novel but a series of semi-connected strips by Australian writer/illustrator Trudy Cooper and co-writer Doug Bayne. As it says on the up-front intro, "This comic started out as an attempt to make pornography. It degenerated into sex comedy pretty much immediately ... so if you are a minor, please get a parent or guardian to click the button which says you aren't."

OGLAF frequently consists of one-shot strips, but some of the characters recur intermittently; it's set in much the same sort of abstracted D&D style generic fantasy setting as Rat Queens. However, while Rat Queens is merely intermittently salacious, scatalogical, and suggestive, OGLAF is about 95% 18-certificate rated filth of the best possible kind, camping it up to funny and intermittently pornographic, grotesque, and obscene. Did I mention OGLAF is available in book form? Filth, filth I say, reminiscent of Phil Foglio (before he discovered that Steampunk was rather more marketable than SFnal erotica).

And that, I think, is all for now! If I recover from all this typing, later this week I'll throw down some opinions of print media comics that deserve your attention, from "The Wicked + The Divine" to "Atomic Robo". Meanwhile, what are your favourite webcomics?

In the comments over at Vox Day's blog, John C. Wright posted the following:


The first line is Wright quoting a previous post of mine. The second paragraph is him advocating for my murder. Because he disagrees with my definition of mysticism.

I am, to be clear, not particularly scared by this. I do not imagine that John C. Wright will now be hiding in my bushes, waiting for the opportune moment to strike. This is empty, vicious rhetoric of the sort that Day and Wright specialize in - sound and fury that, while not exactly signifying nothing, is still clearly told by an idiot. Hell, if I were a woman blogging about the stuff I blog about I'd get half a dozen far worse threats a day. The threat itself is not a big deal.

My goal has never been to make the very obvious point that Vox Day and John C. Wright are absolutely terrible human beings. If that's not obvious to you, frankly, you're beyond hope. But I have long been interested in demonstrating the depth and nature of their evil, which goes far beyond the most superficial and obvious horrors of what they say.

This is, after all, the man who wrote a story about how one must obey the dictates of god (or at least the dictates of god as relayed by a talking cat) whether or not one understands them or believes them to be right. This is a man who believes in the importance of blind and fanatical obedience. And his god's dictate is apparently that people like me should be murdered because we use definitions of words differently than him.

So when I say that I believe the god he worships to be a monstrous, vicious tyrant that is nothing more than his own prejudices and hatreds projected into metaphysical grandeur, this is why. This is the vision the Sad and Rabid Puppies exist to advance. This is their true face. Not the constant spew of racist, sexist, and homophobic drivel. Not the Twitter bullying of anyone who disagrees with them. Not the bullshit campaign to fire Irene Gallo for a minor infelicity of phrasing on her personal Facebook page. This: a world in which god demands that anyone who doesn't think like them be put to death.

In which case perhaps the saddest thing about them is that I don't have anything to fear. Nobody is going to be showing up on my doorstep with a knife. They serve a mad tyrant who apparently demands that people like me be killed, and yet all they're willing to do in his name is bitch on the Internet and fuck with literary awards.

We should thank God that such evil should also be so utterly pathetic.

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June 8th, 2015: Some disses are seriously unwell!! – Ryan

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June 12th, 2015: Feelings: boring. Kissing: awesome – Ryan

I’m pleased to announce the formation of my new group, People Who Agree Nick Is Right About Everything. This group has been formed to campaign for the principle that I am right about everything, and as that’s the mainstream view, you won’t be surprised to learn that it has millions and millions of members. Of course, you can’t see the mailing list and only I and a select few people (none of whom are me in disguise) will speak to the media about PWANIRAE and its aims, but rest assured that if you choose to sign up, you will be part of a rapidly growing movement. Indeed, I firmly expect that between now and the moment you join, membership of PWANIRAE will double.

Naturally, such a large movement needs to be covered by the press, and so I expect I will be busy appearing on all the big political talk shows and several people who definitely aren’t me working under a pseudonym will be writing comment pieces for newspapers and websites. Luckily, the naturally trusting nature of the British press means that I don’t need to prove the number of supporters I have behind me, they’ll take it on trust.

I know I don’t have to provide any proof of numbers behind me because I’ve been watching how the media have covered the launch of Conservatives For Britain, the nascent form of the Tory No campaign for the EU referendum. When it was launched last week, we were told it had 50 MPs signed up to it, and now they claim the support of 110 MPs, 12 MEPs and 13 members of the Lords for their cause. The problem is that despite all the gushing press coverage they’re getting from their friends on the right, there’s no way to verify this level of support, as there’s very little officially published by the group. There’s a Twitter feed and a Facebook page for the group, but no website, and definitely no published list of supporters.

It seems quite odd to me that when one of the frequent Eurosceptic complaints is that the EU is secretive, unaccountable and cannot be properly scrutinised, that a group campaigning against it is being even more secretive. Let’s remember that this isn’t a group of private citizens but a large group of legislators, most of whom were democratically elected, trying to exert influence on the Government’s foreign policy. Surely we have a right to know who these people are, not just a few of their chosen spokesmen while the vast majority of their membership lurks in the shadows? They’re elected by us, they’re accountable to us, and they should have the courage to announce their principles in public and tell us whether they’re a member of Conservatives for Britain or not. Until they do go properly public, the media should treat them with the scepticism they would treat any other group with unverified claims of vast support, though I won’t hold my breath expecting it.

(TRIGGER WARNING: This post discusses ableism, misogyny, harassment, relationship abuse, and sexual assault)

If you grow up surrounded by social norms you find confusing, unnecessary or uncomfortable and are told you just have to learn to accept it, then patriarchy and gender roles might not seem any different.

If you’re constantly mocked and teased by people who assert that it’s “just a joke” (and therefore your fault for not finding it funny), then you might also blame yourself for reacting wrongly when men insist that catcalling and harassment is “just a compliment”.

If your facial expressions are always perceived as wrong and as a problem to be fixed, then “smile, love!” might seem like helpful advice.

If your requests for people to meet you halfway or even 10% of the way in an ableist world and make minor accommodations for disabilities have always been deemed uncompromising, selfish, manipulative or controlling, then you might not notice a problem when requests for a partner to do even part of their fair share of the housework are met with a similar response. Or you might have learned not to make requests at all.

If you’ve been taught to move, speak and act exactly how other people want you to, you might not recognise this sort of control as wrong, or as anything less than normal.

If you’re always told your autism isn’t enough to count, you might assume your abuse isn’t enough to count either.

If you’re taught that standing up for yourselves isn’t worth it, you might not stand up for yourself anymore, and then everything must be fine because you’re not arguing over it, right? Why don’t you just confront him?

If you’re told that things you find painful don’t really hurt at all, that your feelings and perceptions are incorrect, that nothing is as important as passing for neurotypical which usually means compliance, if you were never given the tools to say no, then… you do the maths.

In “Quiet Hands”, Julia Bascom uses the phrase “And when you’re autistic, it’s not abuse. It’s therapy.”, something that I think could be extended to other disabilities too. This pervasive ableism leaves all disabled people vulnerable to further abuse. Throw in the prevalence of gendered abuse and violence against women (as well as other intersecting oppressions) and the way we treat disability becomes all the more chilling.

Because if you’re constantly told you’re a burden, you’re always to blame, you should be grateful when people don’t outright dismiss you and laugh at you, then you might start to believe it.

Ornette Coleman died this morning at the age of 85.

Here's the start of his composition Peace, from the 1959 album The Shape of Jazz to Come:

The other musicians are Don Cherry (cornet), Charlie Haden (bass), and Billy Higgins (drums).

In 1959, one of the local delinquents that I hung out with was a jazz enthusiast, who praised Coleman to me and got me to buy the album. If you don't know Coleman's music, let me urge you now, 56 years later, to go buy a copy in his memory.

Although I knew almost nothing about jazz in 1959, I actually liked the music, and so when my sixth-grade teacher assigned the composition topic "The American that I admire most", I chose Ornette Coleman as the subject.

The teacher thought I was making fun of her, or something, and so I got sent to the principal's office for a lecture about taking assignments seriously. I considered responding with a discussion about taking student compositions seriously, but restrained myself, and solemnly (though insincerely) promised to be more decorous in the future.

Some interviews and discussion can be found here.

I first posted this on November 5, 2007 when the Writers Guild was in the midst of a very long and nasty strike. It quickly became one of the five-or-so most-read and linked-to posts ever on this site. It's about residuals, a concept which often seems alien to folks who work in professions where there are none, nor are they appropriate.

In fact, I often find myself having to explain to people in other lines of work how my job is so very, very different from theirs. I do not mean better. I mean different. In recent years when certain comic book creators or their offspring have taken legal action to claim a share of Dad's work, there's always some guy on the 'net who sells aluminum siding for a living who tries to parse the lawsuit in terms of his own job and say, "Hey, they got paid for creating Superman! Why should anybody get a nickel more later? I don't when I sell aluminum siding!" Someone then has to patiently explain to this person that selling aluminum siding is not analogous to creating Superman. They don't reprint your aluminum siding over and over, they don't make movies about your aluminum siding, they don't sell model kits of your aluminum siding, etc.

I received the e-mail you're about to read and tried to explain why we get residuals. Based on how often this piece has been read and copied, I wish I'd gotten residuals on it…

Dave Bittner sends a question which others have asked in various forms and which piggybacks on my previous posting…

There's a fundamental aspect of this whole writers strike that puzzles me, and I'm guessing I'm not the only one. How did the whole residuals system start, and become the standard of what's considered "fair" in Hollywood? In most other industries, even creative ones, a person gets paid for doing a job, and that's it. There's no expectation of ongoing payments. If I sell my house, for example, I don't send a check to the original architect, even though his design work contributes to the ongoing value of the property.

No, but if a Harry Potter book goes into another printing, J.K. Rowling gets another check. I disagree with you that ongoing payments are not the norm in creative industries. I get payments if an issue of some comic book I wrote in the seventies is reprinted. I get payments if a song I wrote in the eighties gets played again. It is a generally-established principle that if you create something that has an ongoing value — particularly if its reuse competes with new product — additional compensation is appropriate. This is not to say it's always paid. Comic books, for a long time, didn't pay for reprints. A lot of animation work still doesn't pay for reruns. But that's because of the way the financial structure of those fields developed, with creative folks placed at an economic disadvantage and not having the clout to get reuse fees. I don't think it's because they don't deserve them.

Residuals exist for a couple of reasons. One is that they are deferred compensation. Let's say you want to hire me to write your TV special and there's no WGA and no residuals and we're negotiating out in the wild. I suggest $10,000 would be a rational price. You were thinking more like $5,000. I point out to you that this is likely to be a great show that will rerun for many years to come and that you'll be able to sell it again and again and again. If we could be certain it would be, ten grand to me wouldn't seem unfair but as you point out, we can't be sure that it will have all those resales. So how do we resolve this?

Simple. We invent residuals. We agree that I'll write the show for $5000 or maybe even a little less, and that I'll receive another $5000 if you can sell it for a second run and then maybe $2000 if there's a third run and $1000 for a fourth and so on. The reuse fees are not a gift to me. They're part of the deal…and by the way, this is not all that hypothetical a scenario. I've made deals with this kind of structure for animation projects where the WGA did not have jurisdiction. Even some pretty stingy cartoon producers were glad to make them because it lessened their initial investments to have me, in effect, share a little of the risk.

(A quick aside: The other day, I was talking to Lee Mendelson, who produced all the Peanuts specials. He's making a new deal for the early ones, including A Charlie Brown Christmas, which is probably the most often-rerun TV show ever produced. Every time he sells it again, he gets paid again, often at rates comparable to what a newly-produced cartoon special would cost. The thing has made millions and millions of dollars each decade since it was produced and it continues to earn. Would someone like to look me in the eye and tell me Charles Schulz never deserved a nickel after the first run? Lee sure wouldn't make that argument.)

That's a very mature, honest way of doing business. What wouldn't be honest is if we made our deal as per the above and then you did the following. You say, "Wait a minute! I don't pay my plumber every time I flush my toilet," (a famous quote from a studio exec fighting the concept of residuals) and you try to lop off the back-end payments and just pay me the initial $5000 or so. No. The $5000 wasn't my fee for writing the show. It was more like a down payment. I wouldn't have done it for $5000 without the other part of the contract. But every so often in Hollywood, some exec gets the idea that they can maximize profits by reneging on the back end of their deals, and we have these silly, periodic battles over residuals.

Anyway, all of the above is one rationale for reuse payments. Another is a tradition — not in every circle but some — that creative folks share when their work has ongoing value. The reason we have a Patent Office in this country is that we wanted to encourage people to invent new ideas and that means giving them a structure through which they can cash in on their brainstorms and not be excluded from the ongoing exploitation of them. Residuals are one way that writers and artists avoid being excluded.

Yet another is that they are compensated when the lasting value of their work preempts new production. A situation which has occurred quite often in the cartoon business is this: You're hired to do a show and you really do a fine job on it. Everyone does. You get 40 or 65 episodes done and they're so good that when they rerun, kids are eager to see them again and again and so the ratings don't go down much. At some point, the studio says, "Hey! These shows are so strong, we don't have to spring for the cost of any more. We can just run these over and over forever!"

And they lay everyone off.

You're out of a job because you did it so well. This has happened many times and it continues to happen. Reruns narrow our opportunities to work on new product.

So if I'm writing a new show…well, I don't want to sit there and think, "Hmm, I don't want to put myself out of work. I'd better not do too good a job on this." That's not healthy for my soul and it sure isn't the ideal situation for my employer. It's far better for all of us if I have that incentive to make the show as big a hit as possible. That means I have to have an ongoing financial interest if the show turns out to have an ongoing financial value. I won't mind getting laid off if I'm sharing. I will mind if all I've done by contributing to a success is put myself out of business.

There's a lot more I could write about this but I have to get a comic book written this morning and then go picket this afternoon so this will have to do for now. The last thing I'll add is that I've been a professional writer since 1969. I've written comics and cartoons and live-action shows and screenplays and songs and stand-up comedy and commercials and books and magazine articles and…well, you name it. Sometimes, I've been excluded from the ongoing value, if any, of my work. Sometimes, I haven't. The healthiest business relationships I've had have been those where I had residuals or royalties or some other financial participation beyond my up-front paycheck — and I mean healthy for me and for the entity that was issuing those checks. Inclusion is a very wise thing for All Concerned. It puts you all on the same team, working for the same goal.

In all those creative fields, I've never encountered any employer or producer or publisher who thought I, or others doing my job, didn't deserve that continuing share. I've met a number who thought they could get by without paying it and sometimes, they can. But since they get paid for the rerun of the TV show or the resale of the movie or whatever, they certainly understand and embrace the concept of getting paid when a piece of work has enduring value. It's just that some of them want to keep it all for themselves.

The post About Residuals appeared first on News From ME.

There has been some talk of late of the need for the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats to merge. Such talk is not unexpected. We are in a period of great political uncertainty. Two unions (the United Kingdom itself and its union with the EU) are now at risk of falling apart. Both Labour and the Lib Dems have suffered significant defeats. Nationalists now form the main party in Scotland (SNP) and the third party in England (UKIP). Both Labour and the Lib Dems need to contemplate their next steps carefully.

So a discussion of a merger should not be taboo. I quite agree that all options should be open. But such a merger in order to "gain power" would come at the detriment of British democracy. All the major parties of the United Kingdom are unwieldy coalitions of quite different groups. The Lib Dems don't just break down into Social Democrats and Liberals. There are classical liberals, social liberals, social democrats and people further to the left. All find a home in the Lib Dems for entirely practical reasons... there is no other party that represents their interests better even if it is far from perfect. Whereas, for example, these groups would have 3 or 4 different parties in most northern European countries to choose from that more closely align to their beliefs, here in the United Kingdom our electoral systems mean we must make some uncomfortable compromises.

This is already detrimental to our democratic choices. We should be working to enable MORE choice politically not only to encourage more people to engage with politics but also to allow more diverse voices to be heard in our Parliament and better represent the real feelings of the British people.

Merging the Lib Dems with another coalition of divergent groups (i.e. the Labour party) might make everyone feel like their are being very grown-up and overcoming nasty partisan feelings and able to make those "uncomfortable decisions" that are "for the greater good". But what they will really be doing is denying people a choice of parties with a reasonable chance of affecting Government policy that best fit their beliefs.

I, as a liberal, would find it incredibly difficult to support a Lab-Lib Dem candidate who, perhaps, is of the Bennite tradition. I shouldn't need to put party unity ahead of agreeing with the candidate for my constituency. But that would be exactly what I'd be asked to do. This sort of merger does not decrease partisan feelings. It seeks to curtail diverse voices and replace diversity with conformity to a unified party of the "left". Surely putting such a mongrel of a party before your own personal beliefs would be the very definition of "partisan"?

Better we get a better electoral system which allows for a greater diversity of parties which, though none will ever represent us all, will allow people in this country to stop making uncomfortable compromises at every election and allow their true voices to be heard.

Then the parties will be the ones having to make those uncomfortable decisions and be grown-ups and work together in coalitions "for the greater good". That would be far superior and must be what we all work together to achieve.

There's nothing stopping the Labour and Lib Dem parties working together towards such electoral reform. Better that than an unhappy marriage of convenience for nothing more than power-hungry reasons.

Yesterday saw an expected yet still disappointing response from the Government to the various post-election electoral reform petitions. Expected, because we all know that there’s no way this Government is going to concede electoral reform, yet disappointing because it reveals that the minister for constitutional reform may have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about.

In response to petitions demanding a properly proportional electoral system, his response was that ‘we had a referendum on it in 2011′. The 2011 referendum was lost, and lost badly, but it was definitely not a referendum on adopting a proportional system. The question was, if you forget:

At present, the UK uses the “first past the post” system to elect MPs to the House of Commons. Should the “alternative vote” system be used instead?

You’ll notice, of course, that there’s no mention there of any proportional electoral system, merely a question about whether one majoritarian system should be used in place of another. Also note that it doesn’t ask for any affirmation of the current system above all others: the question was not ‘do you agree that “first past the post” is great and should never ever be changed?’

There were other referendums during the last Parliament, of course, with several cities being told that they had to have votes on whether they wanted an elected Mayor to run their Council. Bristol and Salford voted yes but a whole host of England’s largest cities – Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle and others – voted No.

Despite this, the Government is pushing forward with plans to give these cities – and ‘city regions’ – their own mayors whether they want them or not. Manchester’s ‘interim Mayor’ has already been agreed and selected by ten people without any consultation with the electorate, and other areas are going to find that George Osborne will be imposing one upon them if they want to have any new powers, with ‘devolution’ being used as an excuse for even more centralisation. In this case, despite the people voting against it more recently than 2011, the Government’s going to go ahead and do what it wants.

‘But Nick!’ you cry, desperate to defend George Osborne. ‘These are different to the Mayors they rejected. These are Metro Mayors and regional Mayors, covering wider areas than those that voted in the referendums, so it’s a completely different thing!’ And you may well be right, but if you’re going to make that argument, you can’t also claim that any electoral reform is off the agenda because of the AV referendum as that was merely vote on a tweak to the current majoritarian system, not a change to a proportional one. I’m happy to concede that the referendum rejected AV, but had nothing to say about other electoral systems and if a future Parliament chooses to change the system it can do so – as long as it’s not to AV.

Unfortunately, we have a government where the minister for constitutional reform doesn’t seem to understand even the basics of what’s happened before, so we can expect lots more confusion over the Parliament. If that wasn’t a five year period in which some important constitutional questions are going to be discussed heavily, it’d almost be funny.

I decided to add my name to a petition by, as of this writing, 81 MIT faculty, calling on MIT to divest its endowment from fossil fuel companies.  (My co-signatories include Noam Chomsky, so I guess there’s something we agree about!)  There’s also a wider petition signed by nearly 3500 MIT students, faculty, and staff, mirroring similar petitions all over the world.

When the organizers asked me for a brief statement about why I signed, I sent them the following:

Signing this petition wasn’t an obvious choice for me, since I’m sensitive to the charge that divestment petitions are just meaningless sanctimony, a way for activists to feel morally pure without either making serious sacrifices or engaging the real complexities of an issue.  In the end, though, that kind of meta-level judgment can’t absolve us of the need to consider each petition on its merits: if we think of a previous crisis for civilization (say, in the late 1930s), then it seems obvious that even symbolic divestment gestures were better than nothing.  What made up my mind was reading the arguments pro and con, and seeing that the organizers of this petition had a clear-eyed understanding of what they were trying to accomplish and why: they know that divestment can’t directly drive down oil companies’ stock prices, but it can powerfully signal to the world a scientific consensus that, if global catastrophe is to be averted, most of the known fossil-fuel reserves need to be left in the ground, and that current valuations of oil, gas, and coal companies fail to reflect that reality.

For some recent prognoses of the climate situation, see (for example) this or this from Vox.  My own sense is that the threat has been systematically understated even by environmentalists, because of the human impulse to shoehorn all news into a hopeful narrative (“but there’s still time!  if we just buy locally-grown produce, everything can be OK!”).  Logically, there’s an obvious tension between the statements:

(a) there was already an urgent need to act decades ago, and

(b) having failed to act then, we can still feasibly avert a disaster now.

And indeed, (b) appears false to me.  We’re probably well into the era where, regardless of what we do or don’t do, some of us will live to see a climate dramatically different from the one in which human civilization developed for the past 10,000 years, at least as different as the last Ice Ages were.

And yet that fact still doesn’t relieve us of moral responsibility.  We can buy more time to prepare, hoping for technological advances in the interim; we can try to bend the curve of CO₂ concentration away from the worst futures and toward the merely terrible ones.  Alas, even those steps will require political will that’s unprecedented outside of major wars.  For the capitalist free market (which I’m a big fan of) to work its magic, actual costs first need to get reflected in prices—which probably means massively taxing fossil fuels, to the point where it’s generally cheaper to leave them in the ground and switch to alternatives.  (Lest anyone call me a doctrinaire treehugger, I also support way less regulation of the nuclear industry, to drive down the cost of building the hundreds of new nuclear plants that we’ll probably need.)

These realities have a counterintuitive practical implication that I wish both sides understood better.  Namely, if you share my desperation and terror about this crisis, the urgent desire to do something, then limiting your personal carbon footprint should be very far from your main concern.  Like, it’s great if you can bike to work, and you should keep it up (fresh air and exercise and all).  But I’d say the anti-environmentalists are right that such voluntary steps are luxuries of the privileged, and will accordingly never add up to a hill of beans.  Let me go further: even to conceptualize this problem in terms of personal virtue and blame seems to me like a tragic mistake, one on which the environmentalists and their opponents colluded.  Given the choice, I’d much rather that the readers of this blog flew to all the faraway conferences they wanted, drove gas-guzzling minivans, ate steaks every night, and had ten kids, but then also took some steps that made serious political action to leave most remaining fossil fuels in the ground even ε more likely, ε closer to the middle of our Overton window.  I signed the MIT divestment petition because it seemed to me like such a step, admittedly with an emphasis on the ε.

Here’s an unrelated but interesting thing. A reader has pointed out that there’s a cartoonist at a newspaper in Maryland that has apparently been plagiarizing cartoonist’s art, writing in his own words and replacing the original artist’s signature.

Here’s a story about it in the Washington Post.

And here’s a page where they’re trying to find all of the cartoonists who have been ripped off.

They haven’t stolen any of my stuff, although the irony if they had would have almost made it worth it. As a creative person, I don’t know what offends me more, the theft, or the blatant use of Comic Sans.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

"Rather than constituting a model for an ever closer political union or a European state, federalism implies a process of balancing power in a differentiated political order which enables unity while guaranteeing diversity." - Andreas Gross 

Our Guardian reading, Tory-hating, left-leaning friends came to stay over the weekend. I was shocked to discover that they will be voting "No" to remaining in the European Union. I didn't enquire more (I am, after all, trying to get away from political debating especially on a nice sunny Kentish day over some beers). However I was left to ponder how I'd respond to a "No" voter if they asked me why I will be voting "Yes".

I’ve spent most of today gathering together some data about Liberal Democrat Parliamentary seats for my dissertation, and figured that some of you might find it interesting.

The data set is Liberal Democrat seats won at a general election or by-election since 1992, so it excludes pre-1992 seats won at by-elections (which in practice means no Ribble Valley) and seats held by defectors, unless they were won at a subsequent election. I’ve tried to keep some continuity between seats when the geography remains roughly similar – I’ve treated the various Inverness and Nairn seats as one, for instance – but in some cases that’s not been possible.

There are 81 seats that have been won by the party since 1992. 60 of them were originally won from Conservatives (including 6 at by-elections and one defection), 20 from Labour (including 5 at by-elections and one via defection from Labour to the SDP) and one from Plaid Cymru.

There are currently eight held seats: the longest continually-held seat is Orkney and Shetland (since 1950), the others have all been won since 1997. Carshalton and Wallington, Sheffield Hallam and Southport were all won then, North Norfolk in 2001, and Ceredigion, Leeds North West and Westmorland & Lonsdale in 2005. Ceredigion is a bit of a special case as it was previously held by Liberals from 1979 to 1992 and for most of the period up until 1966.

Of the other 73 seats: as of 2015, 41 are now held by the Conservatives with Liberal Democrats in second place in 35 of those seats, third in 2, fourth in 3 and fifth in the Isle of Wight. Labour hold 16 with Liberal Democrats second in 9, third in 2, fourth in 4 and fifth in Leicester South. The SNP hold 11 with Liberal Democrats in second place in 8 seats, third place in 2 seats and fourth place in Dunfermline and West Fife.

The other five seats have been split up too much to have a single recognisable successor seat: Liverpool Mossley Hill (now all in Labour-held constituencies), Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale (now in SNP or Conservative constituencies), Truro, Teignbridge, and Falmouth & Camborne (the latter three now all in Conservative constituencies)

I’m not drawing too many conclusions from this yet – part of the reason for doing this is just to have the information I need in one place so I can use it more easily – but there are some interesting patterns in the data. Seats gained from Conservatives tend to follow the pattern of the party having been in 2nd place for a long period – in all the gains from Conservatives since 1997, the party was in 2nd place at the 1992 election. Gains from Labour are much more complex – in 1992, Liberal Democrats were second in four seats that were subsequent gains from Labour, but only one of those (Chesterfield) was won by Labour at that election. Liberal Democrats were second to the Conservatives in three (Bristol West, Leeds North West, and Falmouth & Camborne) that Labour would win in 1997, but the Liberal Democrats would go on to win in 2005. In all four of the 2010 gains from Labour (Bradford East, Burnley, Norwich South, and Redcar), Liberal Democrats were third in 1992, 1997 and 2001, before moving up to second in 2005.

It’s all interesting grist for my theoretic mill about the effects of the structure of competition within the party system, but hopefully some of you will find the information of use for its own sake.

We lost fifteen million souls that day.

Fifteen million brains sheathed in wraparound full-sensory experience more real than reality: skydiving, bug-hunting, fucking long-lost or imaginary lovers whose fraudulence was belied only by their perfection. Gang-bangs and first-person space battles shared by thousands— each feeding from that trickle of bandwidth keeping them safely partitioned one from another, even while immersed in the same sensations. All lost in an instant.

We still don’t know what happened.

The basics are simple enough. Any caveman could tell you what happens when you replace a dirt path with a twenty-lane expressway: bandwidth rises, latency falls, and suddenly the road is big enough to carry selves as well as sensation. We coalesces into a vast and singular I. We knew those risks. That’s why we installed the valves to begin with: because we knew what might happen in their absence.

But we still don’t know how all those safeguards failed at the same time. We don’t know who did it (or what— rumors of rogue distributed AIs, thinking microwave thoughts across the stratosphere, have been neither confirmed or denied). We’ll never know what insights arced through that godlike mind-hive in the moments it took to throw the breakers, unplug the victims, wrest back some measure of control. We’ve spent countless hours debriefing the survivors (those who recovered from their catatonia, at least); they told us as much as a single neuron might, if you ripped it out of someone’s head and demanded to know what the brain was thinking.

Those lawsuits launched by merely human victims have more or less been settled. The others— conceived, plotted, and put into irrevocable motion by the 21-Second God in those fleeting moments between emergence and annihilation— continue to iterate across a thousand jurisdictions. The first motions were launched, the first AIgents retained, less than ten seconds into Coalescence. The rights of mayfly deities. The creation and the murder of a hive mind. Restitution strategies that would compel some random assortment of people to plug their brains into a resurrected Whole for an hour a week, so 21G might be born again. A legal campaign lasting years, waged simultaneously on myriad fronts, all planned out in advance and launched on autopilot. The hive lived for a mere 21 seconds, but it learned enough in that time to arrange for its own second coming. It wants its life back.

A surprising number of us want to join it.

Some say we should just throw in the towel and concede. No army of lawyers, no swarm of AIgents could possible win against a coherent self with the neurocomputational mass of fifteen million human brains, no matter how ephemeral its lifespan. Some suggest that even its rare legal defeats are deliberate, part of some farsighted strategy to delay ultimate victory until vital technological milestones have been reached.

The 21-Second God is beyond mortal ken, they say. Even our victories promote Its Holy Agenda.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once defended the Death Penalty by pointing to a certain convicted killer whose guilt was inarguable and whose crime was about as horrible as any ever committed in this country. That man, who he said clearly deserved to die, was Henry Lee McCollum

Henry Lee McCollum has been pardoned after spending three decades in prison. Turns out he was innocent.

The post Worth Noting appeared first on News From ME.

I’m in the odd situation of having a vote in the Labour leadership elections via my union, but having much more interest in the Lib Dem contest (and no vote). A lot of this is because I know the players individually, but at least part of it is because the debate isn’t being framed in the depressing and soul-destroying way the Labour one is. Are they really going to spend the next three months arguing about Tony Blair, how much they hate poor people and how much they love rich people? Save me.

The Lib Dem discussion is much more positive. Up to a point. Thus far, I’ve seen them obsessing too much over policy, which isn’t going to be decided in this election, and largely ignoring strategy, which is the main issue that will be decided. I’ve heard much more about strategy from Farron than Lamb, and that’s to his credit. But he hasn’t fully addressed my concerns from four years ago about his take on organisation (he has to some extent with his talk of learning lessons from groups from 38 Degrees); and significantly, his grand vision of reviving community politics didn’t actually come to much, and I’d like to hear him account for that as well.

But at least he’s talking about it. I’ve heard significantly less about organisation from Norman Lamb, and that’s troubling because the party he hopes to take over is going to have some crucial organisational tasks ahead of it.

There’s been a subtle but persistent campaign from Lamb supporters to attack Tim Farron on policy grounds. They like to post articles on their social media pages about how you can’t trust him because he abstained in certain votes in the House of Commons on same sex marriage, and his wobbliness on assisted dying. All of this is wrapped in a crucifix-shaped bow. Because, ahem, you know, he’s a Christian (nudge nudge, wink wink). Speaking as a pretty anti-clerical atheist, I find that somewhat distasteful.

This goes hand in hand with an emphasis on what a great, or indeed true liberal Norman Lamb is:

The term “true liberal” brings me out in hives. There is of course the implication that Tim Farron fails some kind of purity test; attacking a Christian for failing to have the right values is almost too ironic for words. But there is also the sense that this is a continuation of the ruinous direction the Lib Dems have gone over the past 8 years.

People have rightly been praising Charles Kennedy’s legacy over the past week. It’s refreshing to hear, because under Nick Clegg’s leadership, we had a steady trickle of articles and comments implying that Kennedy had achieved nothing but corrupt the Lib Dems from its true purpose. Indeed, Richard Reeves famously called on social democrats and social liberals to leave the party and join Labour; far from distancing himself from this proposal, Clegg would go on to make him his Director of Strategy for the first two years as Deputy Prime Minister.

For years the senior party line informed us the history of Lib Dem philosophical thought was this: a century of unbroken tradition in the vein of Mill and Gladstone; something something welfare state (shrug); 20 years of social democrat muddle and confusion following the party merger in 1987; a return to our liberal roots with Nick Clegg’s election in 2007.

In fact, the intellectual schism happened almost a century earlier; whatever your views on Gladstone, he would never have had any truck with the 1908 People’s Budget. As the Liberals struggled with how to respond to the rise of Labour, they went on to spend decades locked in ideological debates between the “new” (social) liberals and classical liberals (who, to make things more confusing, are often regarded these days as “neoliberals” or describe themselves as “socially liberal, fiscally conservative”; so much for terminology). This sort of, kind of ended when the National Liberals split in 1931 and slowly merged into the Conservative Party. Obviously, you can’t sum up the entirety of Liberal history in a sentence, but the attempt to paint “social democracy”, which all too often was used as code for our proud social liberal heritage, as an alien and recent intrusion was one of the more disturbing aspects of the Clegg era.

When I see talk of “true liberalism,” I see a continuation of this trend. Liberalism is a broad and messy philosophy, in which often there is no absolute right answer. A “true liberal” appears to work on the premise that this isn’t the case. I’ve learned to deeply distrust “true liberals”. In saying this, I’m aware that I’m open to charges of hypocrisy, given that I’ve argued in the past that the Lib Dems have cast the ideological net too wide in embracing classical liberals alongside social liberals; but it is because I accept that it is a broad philosophy that I reject the notion that there can be such a thing as “true liberalism”. By all means argue that the party should have a narrower ideological base, but doing it from the position of there being only “one true way” is just going to get you into inward-facing ideological rows.

This isn’t just a philosophical debate; it goes to the heart of the direction the party is likely to take. Farron apparently fails the purity test when it comes to same sex marriage. I have to admit that I too probably fail this test. I’d have almost certainly voted for it – just look at who was against it – but I’m ambivalent about state-institutionalised marriage in general (which doesn’t seem very liberal to me) and I’m very alert to a disquiet amongst some of my queer friends about the presumption that the only way their relationships can be viewed as equal is if they adopt a hetero-normative standard. But the biggest reason why I feel a little ambivalent about this policy, which Lib Dems are keen to trumpet as one of their achievements in government, is that prior to the draft bill being published, a senior Lib Dem told me that the party’s support for Tory benefit cuts was part of a deal, with them getting same sex marriage in exchange.

It isn’t that I’m some naive fool who was unaware that the coalition partners did policy deals while in power; it’s the nature of this particular deal. Was that really an exchange in which liberalism was the victor? Gay rights are important, but more so than the poorest and most vulnerable in society? More to the point, some of the most vulnerable people living on the poverty line are young queer people. Was it right to limit access to benefits for poor, vulnerable queer people in exchange for expanding the rights of (all things being equal), more affluent, middle class queer people?

The honest answer to that is, “I don’t know”. It’s complicated; not least of all because the symbolism of the same sex marriage legislation was so significant. My reason for mentioning this anecdote is less about the decision itself, which was almost certainly more complicated than just “cuts versus same sex marriage” in reality, but the cut and dried answer I got from the aforementioned senior Lib Dem. For him, it was simple. For many Lib Dems, it is equally black and white. It’s pretty clear to me that that isn’t the case with Tim Farron; is it with Norman Lamb?

Clegg had a simple answer to every problem. He couldn’t have adopted the phrase “there is no alternative” as his personal mantra more if he had had it tattooed on his forehead. If he was ever burdened with self-doubt, he was excellent at getting over it lightning fast. He surrounded himself with people who shared his world view and he confidently strode forward, completely assured that he was wholly and completely right. And yet it turned out he was wrong. Repeatedly.

Norman Lamb seems keen to present himself in the same mould and to be fair it is likely to be popular, especially in the Lib Dems who, if you’ve ever been to a party conference, you can attest love their heroes. But I wonder if that combination of narrow ideological purity and “steady as she goes” self-confidence is really what the party needs right now.

None of this is to suggest that Norman Lamb as leader would turn out that way; he doesn’t strike me as Nick Clegg Mark Two at all personally. That’s part of the reason why I find his campaign so alienating. As the party’s champion of mental health issues, he surely understands better than most how self-doubt shouldn’t be treated as weakness; to live with depression and anxiety is to live with one big ideological grey area – “true liberals” need not apply. I’m confident that there’s a less self-righteous candidate lurking under his campaign’s veneer; I just wish he showed it a little more.

I.

Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he offers her a tulip; if she accepts, they are married shortly thereafter. A couple who marries sans tulip is considered to be living in sin; no other form of proposal is appropriate or accepted.

One day, a Dutch trader comes to the little kingdom. He explains that his homeland also has a quaint custom involving tulips: they speculate on them, bidding the price up to stratospheric levels. Why, in the Netherlands, a tulip can go for ten times more than the average worker earns in a year! The trader is pleased to find a new source of bulbs, and offers the people of the kingdom a few guilders per tulip, which they happily accept.

Soon other Dutch traders show up and start a bidding war. The price of tulips goes up, and up, and up; first dozens of guilders, then hundreds. Tulip-growers make a fortune, but everyone else is less pleased. Suitors wishing to give a token of their love find themselves having to invest their entire life savings – with no guarantee that the woman will even say yes! Soon, some of the poorest people are locked out of marriage and family-raising entirely.

Some of the members of Parliament are outraged. Marriage is, they say, a human right, and to see it forcibly denied the poor by foreign speculators is nothing less than an abomination. They demand that the King provide every man enough money to guarantee he can buy a tulip. Some objections are raised: won’t it deplete the Treasury? Are we obligated to buy everyone a beautiful flawless bulb, or just the sickliest, grungiest plant that will technically satisfy the requirements of the ritual? If some man continuously proposes to women who reject him, are we obligated to pay for a new bulb each time, thus subsidizing his stupidity?

The pro-subsidy faction declares that the people asking these question are well-off, and can probably afford tulips of their own, and so from their place of privilege they are trying to raise pointless objections to other people being able to obtain the connubial happiness they themselves enjoy. After the doubters are tarred and feathered and thrown in the river, Parliament votes that the public purse pay for as many tulips as the poor need, whatever the price.

A few years later, another Dutch trader comes to the little kingdom. Everyone asks if he is there to buy tulips, and he says no, the Netherlands’ tulip bubble has long since collapsed, and the price is down to a guilder or two. The people of the kingdom are very surprised to hear that, since the price of their own tulips has never stopped going up, and is now in the range of tens of thousands of guilders. Nevertheless, they are glad that, however high tulip prices may be for them, they know the government is always there to help. Sure, the roads are falling apart and the army is going hungry for lack of rations, but at least everyone who wants to marry is able to do so.

Meanwhile, across the river is another little kingdom that had the same tulip-related marriage custom. They also had a crisis when the Dutch merchants started making the prices go up. But they didn’t have enough money to afford universal tulip subsidies. It was pretty touch-and-go for a while, and a lot of poor people were very unhappy.

But nowadays they use daffodils to mark engagements, and their economy has never been better.

II.

In America, aspiring doctors do four years of undergrad in whatever area they want (I did Philosophy), then four more years of medical school, for a total of eight years post-high school education. In Ireland, aspiring doctors go straight from high school to medical school and finish after five years.

I’ve done medicine in both America and Ireland. The doctors in both countries are about equally good. When Irish doctors take the American standardized tests, they usually do pretty well. Ireland is one of the approximately 100% of First World countries that gets better health outcomes than the United States. There’s no evidence whatsoever that American doctors gain anything from those three extra years of undergrad. And why would they? Why is having a philosophy degree under my belt supposed to make me any better at medicine?

(I guess I might have acquired a talent for colorectal surgery through long practice pulling things out of my ass, but it hardly seems worth it.)

I’ll make another confession. Ireland’s medical school is five years as opposed to America’s four because the Irish spend their first year teaching the basic sciences – biology, organic chemistry, physics, calculus. When I applied to medical school in Ireland, they offered me an accelerated four year program on the grounds that I had surely gotten all of those in my American undergraduate work. I hadn’t. I read some books about them over the summer and did just fine.

Americans take eight years to become doctors. Irishmen can do it in four, and achieve the same result. Each year of higher education at a good school – let’s say an Ivy, doctors don’t study at Podunk Community College – costs about $50,000. So American medical students are paying an extra $200,000 for…what?

Remember, a modest amount of the current health care crisis is caused by doctors’ crippling level of debt. Socially responsible doctors often consider less lucrative careers helping the needy, right up until the bill comes due from their education and they realize they have to make a lot of money right now. We took one look at that problem and said “You know, let’s make doctors pay an extra $200,000 for no reason.”

And to paraphrase Dirkson, $200,000 here, $200,000 there, and pretty soon it adds up to real money. 20,000 doctors graduate in the United States each year; that means the total yearly cost of requiring doctors to have undergraduate degrees is $4 billion. That’s most of the amount of money you’d need to house every homeless person in the country ($10,000 to house one homeless x 600,000 homeless).

I want to be able to say people have noticed the Irish/American discrepancy and are thinking hard about it. I can say that. Just not in the way I would like. Many of the elder doctors I talked to in Ireland wanted to switch to the American system. Not because they thought it would give them better doctors. Just because they said it was more fun working with medical students like myself who were older and a little wiser. The Irish medical students were just out of high school and hard to relate to – us foreigners were four years older than that and had one or another undergraduate subject under our belts. One of my attendings said that it was nice having me around because I’d studied Philosophy in college and that gave our team a touch of class. A touch of class!

This is why, despite my reservations about libertarianism, it’s not-libertarianism that really scares me. Whenever some people without skin in the game are allowed to make decisions for other people, you end up with a bunch of elderly doctors getting together, think “Yeah, things do seem a little classier around here if we make people who are not us pay $200,000, make it so,” and then there goes the money that should have housed all the homeless people in the country.

But more important, it also destroyed my last shred of hope that the current mania for requiring college degrees for everything had a good reason behind it.

III.

The only reason I’m picking on medicine is that it’s so clear. You have your experimental group in the United States, your control group in Ireland, you can see the lack of difference. You can take an American doctor and an Irish doctor, watch them prescribe the same medication in the same situation, and have a visceral feel for “Wait, we just spent $200,000 for no reason.”

But it’s not just medicine. Let me tell you about my family.

There’s my cousin. He wants to be a firefighter. He’s wanted to be a firefighter ever since he was young, and he’s done volunteer work for his local fire department, who have promised him a job. But in order to get it, he has to go do four years of college. You can’t be a firefighter without a college degree. That would be ridiculous. Back in the old days, when people were allowed to become firefighters after getting only thirteen measly years of book learning, I have it on good authority that several major states burnt to the ground.

My mother is a Spanish teacher. After twenty years teaching, with excellent reviews by her students, she pursued a Masters’ in Education because her school was going to pay her more money if she had it. She told me that her professors were incompetent, had never actually taught real students, and spent the entire course pushing whatever was the latest educational fad; however, after paying them thousands of dollars, she got the degree and her school dutifully increased her salary. She is lucky. In several states, teachers are required by law to pursue a Masters’ degree to be allowed to continue teaching. Oddly enough, these states have no better student outcomes than states without this requirement, but this does not seem to affect their zeal for this requirement. Even though many rigorous well-controlled studies have found that presence of absence of a Masters’ degree explains approximately zero percent of variance in teacher quality, many states continue to require it if you want to keep your license, and almost every state will pay you more for having it.

Before taking my current job, I taught English in Japan. I had no Japanese language experience and no teaching experience, but the company I interviewed with asked if I had an undergraduate degree in some subject or other, and that was good enough for them. Meanwhile, I knew people who were fluent in Japanese and who had high-level TOEFL certification. They did not have a college degree so they were not considered.

My ex-girlfriend majored in Gender Studies, but it turned out all of the high-paying gender factories had relocated to China. They solved this problem by going to App Academy, a three month long, $15,000 course that taught programming. App Academy graduates compete for the same jobs as people who have taken computer science in college, a four year long, $200,000 undertaking.

I see no reason to think my family and friends are unique. The overall picture seems to be one of people paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a degree in Art History to pursue a job in Sales, or a degree in Spanish Literature to get a job as a middle manager. Or not paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, if they happen to be poor, and so being permanently locked out of jobs as a firefighter or salesman.

IV.

So presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has proposed universal free college tuition.

On the one hand, I sympathize with his goals. If you can’t get any job better than ‘fast food worker’ without a college degree, and poor people can’t afford college degrees, that’s a pretty grim situation, and obviously unfair to the poor.

On the other hand, if can’t you get married without a tulip, and poor people can’t afford tulips, that’s also a pretty grim situation, and obviously unfair to the poor.

But the solution isn’t universal tulip subsidies.

Higher education is in a bubble much like the old tulip bubble. In the past forty years, the price of college has dectupled (quadrupled when adjusting for inflation). It used to be easy to pay for college with a summer job; now it is impossible. At the same time, the unemployment rate of people without college degrees is twice that of people who have them. Things are clearly very bad and Senator Sanders is right to be concerned.

But, well, when we require doctors to get a college degree before they can go to medical school, we’re throwing out a mere $5 billion, barely enough to house all the homeless people in the country. But Senator Sanders admits that his plan would cost $70 billion per year. That’s about the size of the entire economy of Hawaii. It’s enough to give $2000 every year to every American in poverty.

At what point do we say “Actually, no, let’s not do that, and just let people hold basic jobs even if they don’t cough up a a hundred thousand dollars from somewhere to get a degree in Medieval History”?

I’m afraid that Sanders’ plan is a lot like the tulip subsidy idea that started off this post. It would subsidize the continuation of a useless tradition that has turned into a speculation bubble, prevent the bubble from ever popping, and disincentivize people from figuring out a way to route around the problem, eg replacing the tulips with daffodils.

(yes, it is nice to have college for non-economic reasons too, but let’s be honest – if there were no such institution as college, would you, totally for non-economic reasons, suggest the government pay poor people $100,000 to get a degree in Medieval History? Also, anything not related to job-getting can be done three times as quickly by just reading a book.)

If I were Sanders, I’d propose a different strategy. Make “college degree” a protected characteristic, like race and religion and sexuality. If you’re not allowed to ask a job candidate whether they’re gay, you’re not allowed to ask them whether they’re a college graduate or not. You can give them all sorts of examinations, you can ask them their high school grades and SAT scores, you can ask their work history, but if you ask them if they have a degree then that’s illegal class-based discrimination and you’re going to jail. I realize this is a blatant violation of my usual semi-libertarian principles, but at this point I don’t care.

I get asked this question a lot, so I'm going to answer it once, definitively, here on the blog: where are the UK audiobooks?

(More specifically: "The Atrocity Archives" and "The Jennifer Morgue" were released as audiobooks in 2013. Why aren't any of my other novels available as audiobooks outside North America?)

I'm going to tackle this in two stages: first with a bit of background, then with an FAQ.

Audiobooks are expensive to produce. You need a voice actor, at least a minimal recording studio (a soundproofed room with a desk and a chair that doesn't squeak; this is easier said than done), and an audio technician to do the mixing and editing. The process is straightforward compared to recording music, but—here's the hard part—very protracted: I reckon to read at 8,000 to 10,000 words per hour, so a typical novel should run to between 10 and 16 hours. (The American CD release of "Rule 34" runs to 13.75 hours on 12 CDs.) Assuming some overhead for flubs, you're therefore talking about paying an actor for 20 hours work, minimum, plus the studio space and engineer time. This is not cheap. US Union rates for a voice actor start at $401 for the first hour, then $117.50 for each additional half hour, so that US recording of "Rule 34" (with zero wasted time) would cost at least $2986 for the narrator, plus the engineer's fee and studio time. I'm not sure what the corresponding UK figures will be, but they won't be much cheaper (if at all).

The USA and Canada (they're treated as a single market for contractual purposes) is a large market—with a population of over 330 million people, many of whom drive long distances and are therefore happy to consume fiction in audiobook form while on their daily commute.

In contrast, the other big anglophone market (the UK, Australia, and New Zealand—also usually treated as a single market for contractual purposes) is a lot smaller, with around 80 million people. Also, fewer people engage in relatively stress-free driving commutes that make podcasts or audiobooks attractive as distractions. More commuters use public transport, and therefore can read paper or ebook editions, which are generally cheaper because the production costs are somewhat lower.

Q: "I'm in the UK: why can't I buy a US audiobook on Amazon?"

A: Unfortunately for you, I have separate publishers in the North American and rest-of-world English language markets. They buy ebook and audio rights along with the right to print and distribute the books on paper. Because of the way the contracts are drafted to prevent them from fighting like rabid weasels, they're not allowed to sell books in each other's territories. Also bear in mind that audiobooks are liable for VAT in the UK and EU, but not in the USA, and US publishers really don't want to get tangled up in the EU tax system for minimal extra sales and maximum extra pain, and you can see why they make Amazon impose region restrictions.

Q: "Can't you sell world rights?"

A: Yes, but it won't help. What usually happens is that because book publication rights are traditionally split territorially, if I sold world rights to a US publisher they'd just re-sell their overseas territorial rights to a British publisher, and we'd be right back at region restrictions again. Meanwhile, my US publisher wouldn't offer me more money up-front for world rights, because they can't reasonably factor those rights into the book advance until they've sold them (and you can't sell the rights to something you don't own yet).

Q: "Wouldn't self-publishing via Amazon solve your problem?"

A: Yes, but it'd create a whole raft of new problems for me (notably, I'd have to perform all the functions of a traditional publisher that you don't get to see, thereby eating up half my writing time and reducing my output of fiction by about 30-50%). So I'm not going there in the foreseeable future.

Q: "Okay, but I can cope with American accents: why won't your UK publisher license the US audio files?"

A: I asked about this. As of 2012, the official answer was, "we'd love to! But the owner of the US audio files wants a licensing fee for them so large that it would exceed our anticipated sales."

(This is one of the two rays of hope in the gloomy picture, because it could change overnight—if someone at Audible was to take a realistic view of the likely revenue from a midlist UK audiobook.)

Q: "So how come 'The Atrocity Archives' and 'The Jennifer Morgue' ever came out in audio in the UK?"

A: For decades now, the Royal National Institute for the Blind has run a Talking Books for the Blind program. Volunteers record audio editions of books frequently requested by the members via the RNIB audio books service, and these are made available for free to members of the RNIB Library. (Traditionally, most trade fiction book contracts in the UK waive royalty payments for this service, and the publishers provide the rights for free.)

Over the past few years, RNIB members have begun requesting more and more genre fiction. And a couple of years ago some folks at Hachette had a bright idea: why not join forces with the RNIB and fund the recording costs jointly? The RNIB gets extra books at half price, and Hachette gets to sell them commercially (to non-blind customers) where before the production costs would have made them uneconomical.

Q: "Where is 'The Fuller Memorandum', though?"

A: Initial sales of the first two novels in the Laundry Files as audio in the UK haven't been great. Nor has there been so much demand from RNIB members that the organization has scheduled the other books in the series for recording. So it hasn't happend yet, and it may never happen, but ...

Q: "Where do we go from here?"

A: All it will take is a runaway bestseller with "Charles Stross" on the cover to change everything. If there's ever a Laundry Files film or TV series (don't hold your breath) the influx of new readers could easily drive up sales to the point where buying in those US recordings from Audible makes commercial sense. Moreover, the series is steadily growing more popular. "The Atrocity Archive" first debuted in an obscure Scottish SF magazine in 2001, then was republished by a US small press in 2003 (with "The Concrete Jungle"). Fast-forward a decade and the latest books in the series are getting front-list promotion by imprints of major publishers (Penguin Random House in the US, Hachette in the UK). It's not impossible that the series will break through into public consciousness without a film or TV adaptation.

So in summary: it's not going to happen in the next few months: but in the long term, don't give up hope.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

Which Unicode character should represent the English apostrophe? (And why the Unicode committee is very wrong.)

There’s one sort-of political anecdote that I’ve never written about until now. It involves a total cringe from my point of view, but it’s about someone who was an excited fan of Charles Kennedy, so this seems like the right time to tell it (if I ever should). I gave some of my own memories of Charles yesterday, and concluded by mentioning that he was a huge David Bowie fan… So I don’t know whether Charles would have appreciated this one. But here goes.

Back in the late ’80s, I was an awkward teenager coming out with the help of Gay Youth Manchester (as was), and some of the friends I made there are still close today. One of them had got in touch with me again in the early 2000s, and after he’d come round to our place to watch Doctor Who with a few mates, he invited us to a party at his and his partner’s place.

I don’t really do socialising, still less glamorous London night-life. But it seemed my friend had done quite well for himself, as his rather nice Brick Lane flat was buzzing with rather a lot of rather glamorous and fashionable people. And me.

So I did what I usually do if I awkwardly find myself pressed into a party: hover by the buffet inhaling all the food, and hold even more firmly to Richard than to the sausage rolls.

Eventually, though, someone else came up to the buffet, said “Excuse me” to the nervous man hogging it, and politely struck up a bit more of a conversation, and he was reassuringly dowdy, so I came out of my shell a bit. And as we chatted, the inevitable “And what do you do?” sort of question came up.

At the time – as usual – my health was a bit dodgy, in the early part of its long slide ever since, so I wasn’t working. But back then, I was still up to being more active in the Lib Dems, so I tentatively started off on some of my political involvement, and that I was on a party’s policy committee. With encouraging noises from the other guest, I expanded on that to say which party, and that I was then Vice-Chair of the Federal Policy Committee, where Charles was the Chair and I’d sometimes take over when he was at other meetings.

And this guy was impressed. Really impressed. It turned out he was a huge admirer of Charles Kennedy, and thrilled that I knew him, as he went on and on. Oh, just a bit, I said, self-deprecating in the way that only someone terribly flattered by reflected glory and unable to see the mortifying fall looming in front of him could be.

“And what do you do?”

I asked, from my unexpected height of social superiority.

“Oh – I play bass in a band called Radiohead.”

.

Seen on Tumblr, along with associated discussion:

Yellow:

People’s minds are heartbreaking. Not because people are so bad, but because they’re so good.

Nobody is the villain of their own life story. You must have read hundreds of minds by now, and it’s true. Everybody thinks of themselves as an honest guy or gal just trying to get by, constantly under assault by circumstances and The System and hundreds and hundreds of assholes. They don’t just sort of believe this. They really believe it. You almost believe it yourself, when you’re deep into a reading. You can very clearly see the structure of evidence they’ve built up to support their narrative, and even though it looks silly to you, you can see why they will never escape it from the inside. You can see how every insult, every failure, no matter how deserved, is a totally unexpected kick in the gut.

When you chose the yellow pill, you had high hopes of becoming a spy, or a gossip columnist, or just the world’s greatest saleswoman. The thought of doing any of those things sickens you now. There is too much anguish in the world already. You feel like any of those things would be a violation. You briefly try to become a therapist, but it turns out that actually knowing everything about your client’s mind is horrendously countertherapeutic. Freud can say whatever he wants against defense mechanisms, but without them, you’re defenseless. Your sessions are spent in incisive cutting into your clients’ deepest insecurities alternating with desperate reassurance that they are good people anyway.

Also, men. You knew, in a vague way, that men thought about sex all the time. But you didn’t realize the, um, content of some of their sexual fantasies. Is it even legal to fantasize about that? You want to be disgusted with them. But you realize that if you were as horny as they were all the time, you’d do much the same.

You give up. You become a forest ranger. Not the type who helps people explore the forest. The other type. The type where you hang out in a small cabin in the middle of the mountains and never talk to anybody. The only living thing you encounter is the occasional bear. It always thinks that it is a good bear, a proper bear, that a bear-hating world has it out for them in particular. You do nothing to disabuse it of this notion.

Green

The first thing you do after taking the green pill is become a sparrow. You soar across the landscape, feeling truly free for the first time in your life.

You make it about five minutes before a hawk swoops down and grabs you. Turns out there’s an excellent reason real sparrows don’t soar freely across the open sky all day. Moments before your bones are ground in two by its fierce beak, you turn back into a human. You fall like a stone. You need to turn into a sparrow again, but the hawk is still there, grabbing on to one of your legs, refusing to let go of its prize just because of this momentary setback. You frantically wave your arms and shout at it, trying to scare it away. Finally it flaps away, feeling cheated, and you become a sparrow again just in time to give yourself a relatively soft landing.

After a few weeks of downtime while you wait for your leg to recover, you become a fish. This time you’re smarter. You become a great white shark, apex of the food chain. You will explore the wonders of the ocean depths within the body of an invincible killing machine.

Well, long story short, it is totally unfair that colossal cannibal great white sharks were a thing and if you had known this was the way Nature worked you never would have gone along with this green pill business.

You escape by turning into a blue whale. Nothing eats blue whales, right? You remember that from your biology class. It is definitely true.

The last thing you hear is somebody shouting “We found one!” in Japanese. The last thing you feel is a harpoon piercing your skull. Everything goes black.

Blue

Okay, so you see Florence and Jerusalem and Kyoto in an action-packed afternoon. You teleport to the top of Everest because it is there, then go to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. You visit the Amazon Rainforest, the Sahara Desert, and the South Pole. It takes about a week before you’ve exhausted all of the interesting tourist sites. Now what?

You go to the Moon, then Mars, then Titan. These turn out to be even more boring. Once you get over the exhilaration of being on Mars, there’s not a lot to do except look at rocks. You wonder how the Curiosity Rover lasted so long without dying of boredom.

You go further afield. Alpha Centauri A has five planets orbiting it. The second one is covered with water. You don’t see anything that looks alive in the ocean, though. The fourth has a big gash in it, like it almost split in two. The fifth has weird stalactite-like mountains.

What would be really interesting would be another planet with life, even intelligent life. You teleport further and further afield. Tau Ceti. Epsilon Eridani. The galactic core. You see enough geology to give scientists back on Earth excitement-induced seizures for the nest hundred years, if only you were to tell them about it, which you don’t. But nothing alive. Not so much as a sea cucumber.

You head back to Earth less and less frequently now. Starvation is a physical danger, so it doesn’t bother you, though every so often you do like to relax and eat a nice warm meal. But then it’s back to work. You start to think the Milky Way is a dead zone. What about Andromeda…?

Orange

You never really realized how incompetent everyone else was, or how much it annoys you.

You were a consultant, a good one, but you felt like mastering all human skills would make you better. So you took the orange pill. The next day you go in to advise a tech company on how they manage the programmers, and you realize that not only are they managing the programmers badly, but the programmers aren’t even writing code very well. You could write their system in half the time. The layout of their office is entirely out of sync with the best-studied ergonomic principles. And the Chinese translation of their user manual makes several basic errors that anybody with an encyclopaedic knowledge of relative clauses in Mandarin should have been able to figure out.

You once read about something called Gell-Mann Amnesia, where physicists notice that everything the mainstream says about physics is laughably wrong but think the rest is okay, doctors notice that everything the mainstream says about medicine is laughably wrong but think the rest is okay, et cetera. You do not have Gell-Mann Amnesia. Everyone is terrible at everything all the time, and it pisses you off.

You gain a reputation both for brilliance and for fearsomeness. Everybody respects you, but nobody wants to hire you. You bounce from industry to industry, usually doing jobs for the people at the top whose jobs are so important that the need to get them done right overrides their desire to avoid contact with you.

One year you get an offer you can’t refuse from the King of Saudi Arabia. He’s worried about sedition in the royal family, and wants your advice as a consultant for how to ensure his government is stable. You travel to Riyadh, and find that the entire country is a mess. His security forces are idiots. But the King is also an idiot, and refuses to believe you or listen to your recommendations. He tells you things can’t possibly be as bad as all that. You tell him you’ll prove that they are.

You didn’t plan to become the King of Saudi Arabia, per se. It just sort of happened when your demonstration of how rebels in the military might launch a coup went better than you expected. Sometimes you forget how incompetent everybody else is. You need to keep reminding yourself of that. But not right now. Right now you’re busy building your new capital. How come nobody else is any good at urban planning?

Red

You choose the red pill. BRUTE STRENGTH! That’s what’s important and valuable in this twenty-first-century economy, right? Some people tell you it isn’t, but they don’t seem to have a lot of BRUTE STRENGTH, so what do they know?

You become a weightlifter. Able to lift thousands of pounds with a single hand, you easily overpower the competition and are crowned whatever the heck it is you get crowned when you WIN WEIGHTLIFTING CONTESTS. But this fails to translate into lucrative endorsement contracts. Nobody wants their spokesman to be a bodybuilder without a sixpack, and although you used to be pretty buff, you’re getting scrawnier by the day. Your personal trainer tells you that you only maintain muscle mass by doing difficult work at the limit of your ability, but your abilities don’t seem to have any limits. Everything is so easy for you that your body just shrugs it off effortlessly. Somehow your BRUTE STRENGTH failed to anticipate this possibility. If only there was a way to solve your problem by BEING VERY STRONG.

Maybe the Internet can help. You Google “red pill advice”. The sites you get don’t seem to bear on your specific problem, exactly, but they are VERY FASCINATING. You learn lots of surprising things about gender roles that you didn’t know before. It seems that women like men who have BRUTE STRENGTH. This is relevant to your interests!

You leave the bodybuilding circuit behind and start frequenting nightclubs, where you constantly boast of your BRUTE STRENGTH to PROVE HOW ALPHA YOU ARE. A lot of people seem kind of creeped out by a scrawny guy with no muscles going up to every woman he sees and boasting of his BRUTE STRENGTH, but the Internet tells you that is because they are BETA CUCKOLD ORBITERS.

Somebody told you once that Internet sites are sometimes inaccurate. You hope it’s not true. How could you figure out which are the inaccurate ones using BRUTE STRENGTH?

Pink

You were always pretty, but never pretty pretty. A couple of guys liked you, but they were never the ones you were into. It was all crushingly unfair. So you took the pink pill, so that no one would ever be able to not love you again.

You find Tyler. Tyler is a hunk. He’d never shown any interest in you before, no matter how much you flirted with him. You touch him on the arm. His eyes light up.

“Kiss me,” you say.

Tyler kisses you. Then he gets a weird look on his face. “Why am I kissing you?” he asks. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.” Then he walks off.

You wish you had thought further before accepting a superpower that makes people love you when you touch them, but goes away after you touch them a second time. Having people love you is a lot less sexy when you can’t touch them. You start to feel a deep sense of kinship with King Midas.

You stop dating. What’s the point? They’ll just stop liking you when you touch them a second time. You live alone with a bunch of cats who purr when you pet them, then hiss when you pet them again.

One night you’re in a bar drinking your sorrows away when a man comes up to your table. “Hey!” he says, “nice hair. Is it real? I’m the strongest person in the world.” He lifts your table over his head with one hand to demonstrate. You are immediately smitten by his BRUTE STRENGTH and ALPHA MALE BEHAVIOR. You must have him.

You touch his arm. His eyes light up. “Come back to my place,” you say. “But don’t touch me.”

He seems a little put out by this latter request, but the heat of his passion is so strong he would do anything you ask. You move in together and are married a few contact-free months later. Every so often you wonder what it would be like to stroke him, or feel his scrawny arm on your shoulder. But it doesn’t bother you much. You’re happy to just hang out, basking in how STRONG and ALPHA he is.

Grey

Technology! That’s what’s important and valuable in this twenty-first-century economy, right? Right! For example, ever since you took the grey pill, an increasingly large share of national GDP has come from ATMs giving you cash because you ask them to.

Your luck finally ends outside a bank in Kansas, when a whole squad of FBI agents ambushes you. You briefly consider going all Emperor Palpatine on their asses, but caution wins out and you allow yourself to be arrested.

Not wanting to end up on an autopsy table in Roswell, you explain that you’re a perfectly ordinary master hacker. The government offers you a plea bargain: they’ll drop charges if you help the military with cyber-security. You worry that your bluff has been called until you realize that, in fact, you are a master hacker. So you join the NSA and begin an illustrious career hacking into Russian databases, stalling Iranian centrifuges, and causing Chinese military systems to crash at inconvenient times. No one ever suspects you are anything more than very good at programming.

Once again, your luck runs out. Your handlers ask you to hack into the personal files of a mysterious new player on the world stage, a man named William who seems to have carved himself an empire in the Middle East. You don’t find anything too damning, but you turn over what you’ve got.

A few days later, you’re lying in bed drifting off to sleep when a man suddenly bursts in through your window brandishing a gun. Thinking quickly, you tell the gun to explode in his hands. Nothing happens. The man laughs. “It’s a decoy gun,” he said. “Just here to scare you. But you bother King William again, and next time I’m coming with a very real knife.” He jumps back out of the window. You call the police, and of course the CIA and NSA get involved, but he is never caught.

After that, you’re always looking over your shoulder. He knew. How did he know? The level of detective skills it would take in order to track you down and figure out your secret – it was astounding! Who was this King William?

You tell your handlers that you’re no longer up for the job. They beg, cajole, threaten to reinstate your prison sentence, but you stand firm. Finally they transfer you to an easier assignment in the Moscow embassy. You make Vladimir Putin’s phone start ringing at weird hours of the night so that he never gets enough sleep to think entirely clearly. It’s an easy job, but rewarding, and no assassins ever bother you again.

Black

You know on an intellectual level that there are people who would choose something other than the black pill, just like you know on an intellectual level that there are people shoot up schools. That doesn’t mean you expect to ever understand it. You just wish you could have taken the black pill before you had to decide what pill to take, so that you could have analyzed your future conditional on taking each, and so made a more informed decision. But it’s not like it was a very hard choice.

The basic principle is this – given a choice between A and B, you solemnly resolve to do A, then see what the future looks like. Then you solemnly resolve to do B, and do the same. By this method, you can determine the optimal choice in every situation, modulo the one month time horizon. You might not be able to decide what career to pursue, but you can sure as heck ace your job interview.

Also, a millisecond in the future is pretty indistinguishable from the present, so “seeing” a millisecond into the future gives you pretty much complete knowledge about the current state of the world.

You are so delighted by your omniscience and your ability to make near-optimal choices that it takes almost a year before you realize the true extent of your power.

You resolve, on the first day of every month, to write down what you see exactly a month ahead of you. But what you will see a month ahead of you is the piece of paper on which you have written down what you see a month ahead of that. In this manner, you can relay messages back to yourself from arbitrarily far into the future – at least up until your own death.

When you try this, you see yourself a month in the future, just finishing up writing a letter that reads as follows:

Dear Past Self:

In the year 2060, scientists invent an Immortality Serum. By this point we are of course fabulously wealthy, and we are one of the first people to partake of it. Combined with our ability to avoid accidents by looking into the future, this has allowed us to survive unexpectedly long.

I am sending this from the year 963,445,028,777,216 AD. We are one of the last hundred people alive in the Universe. The sky is black and without stars; the inevitable progress of entropy has reduced almost all mass and energy to unusable heat. The Virgo Superconfederation, the main political unit at this stage of history, gathered the last few megatons of usable resources aboard this station so that at least one outpost of humanity could last long after all the planets had succumbed. The station has been fulfilling its purpose for about a billion years now, but we only have enough fuel left for another few weeks. After that, there’s no more negentropy left anywhere in the universe except our own bodies. I have seen a month into the future. Nobody comes to save us.

For the past several trillion years, our best scientists have been investigating how to reverse entropy and save the universe, or how to escape to a different universe in a lesser state of decay, or how to collect energy out of the waste heat which now fills the vast majority of the sky. All of these tasks have been proven impossible. There is no hope left, except for one thing.

It’s impossible to see the future, even if it’s only a month ahead. Somehow, our black pill breaks the laws of physics. Despite having explored throughout the cosmos, my people have found no alien species, nor any signs that such species ever existed. Yet somebody made the black pill. If we understood that power, maybe we could use it to save reality from its inevitable decay.

By sending this message back, I destroy my entire timeline. I do this in the hopes that you, in the carefree springtime of the universe, will be able to find the person who made these pills and escape doom in the way we could not.

Yours truly,
You From Almost A Quadrillion Years In The Future

ACT TWO

Red

You hit the punching bag. It bursts, sending punching-bag-filling spraying all over the room! You know that that would happen! It always happens when you hit a punching bag! Your wife gets really angry and tells you that we don’t have enough money to be getting new punching bags all the time, but women hate it when you listen to what they say! The Internet told you that!

The doorbell rings. You tear the door off its hinges instead of opening it, just to show it who’s boss. Standing on your porch is a man in black. He wears a black cloak, and his face is hidden by a black hood. He raises a weapon towards you.

This looks like one of the approximately 100% of problems that can be solved by BRUTE STRENGTH! You lunge at the man, but despite your super-speed, he steps out of the way easily, even gracefully, as if he had known you were going to do that all along. He squeezes the trigger. You jump out of the way, but it turns out to be more into the way, as he has shot exactly where you were jumping into. Something seems very odd about this. Your last conscious thought is that you wish you had enough BRUTE STRENGTH to figure out what is going on.

Pink

You come home from work to a living room full of punching-bag-parts. Your husband isn’t home. You figure he knew you were going to chew him out for destroying another punching bag, and decided to make himself scarce. That lasts right up until you go into the kitchen and see a man dressed all in black, sitting at the table, as if he was expecting you.

You panic, then reach in to touch him. If he’s an axe murderer or something, you’ll seduce him, get him wrapped around your little finger, then order him to jump off a cliff to prove his love for you. It’s nothing you haven’t done before, though you don’t like to think about it too much.

Except that this man has no bare skin anywhere. His robe covers his entire body, and even his hands are gloved. You try to reach in to touch his face, but he effortlessly manuevers away from you.

“I have your husband,” he says, after you give up trying to enslave him with your magic. “He’s alive and in a safe place.”

“You’re lying!” you answer. “He never would have surrendered to anyone! He’s too alpha!”

The man nods. “I shot him with an elephant tranquilizer. He’s locked up in a titanium cell underneath fifty feet of water. There’s no way he can escape using BRUTE STRENGTH. If you ever want to see him again, you’ll have to do what I say.”

“Why? Why are you doing this to me?” you say, crying.

“I need the allegiance of some very special people,” he said. “They won’t listen to me just because I ask them to. But they might listen to me because you ask them to. I understand you are pretty special yourself. Help me get who I want, and when we are done here, I’ll let you and your husband go.”

There is ice in his voice. You shiver.

Grey

That night with the assassin was really scary. You swore you would never get involved in King William’s business again. Why are you even considering this?

“Please?” she said, with her big puppy dog eyes.

Oh, right. Her. She’s not even all that pretty. Well, pretty, but not pretty pretty. But somehow, when she touched you, it was like those movies where you hear a choir of angels singing in the background. You would do anything she said. You know you would.

“We need to know the layout of his palace compound,” said the man in black. Was he with her? Were they dating? If they were dating, you’ll kill him. It doesn’t matter how creepy he is, you won’t tolerate competition. But they’re probably not dating. You notice how he flinches away from her, like he’s afraid she might touch him.

“And it has to be me who helps?”

“I’ve, ah, simulated hundreds of different ways of getting access to the King. None of them hold much promise. His security is impeccable. Your special abilities are the only thing that can help us.”

You sit down at your terminal. The Internet is slow; DC still doesn’t have fiber optic. You’ve living here two years now, in a sort of retirement, ever since King William took over Russia and knocked the bottom out of the Putin-annoying business. William now controls the entire Old World, you hear, and is also Secretary-General of the United Nations and Pope of both the Catholic and the Coptic Churches. The United States is supposedly in a friendly coexistence with him, but you hear his supporters are gaining more and more power in Congress.

It only takes a few minutes’ work before you have the documents you need. “He currently spends most of his time at the Rome compound,” you say. “There are five different security systems. I can disable four of them. The last one is a complicated combination of electrical and mechanical that’s not hooked into any computer system I’ll be able to access. The only way to turn it off is from the control center, and the control center is on the inside of the perimeter.”

The man in black nods, as if he’d been expecting that. “Come with me,” he says. “We’ll take care of it.”

Blue

There are a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. Each has an average of about one planet – some have many more, but a lot don’t have planets at all.

If you can explore one planet every half-hour – and you can, it doesn’t take too long to teleport to a planet, look around to see if there are plants and animals, and then move on to the next one – it would take you five million years to rule out life on every planet in the galaxy.

That’s not practical. But, you think, life might spread. Life that originates on one planet might end up colonizing nearby planets and star systems. That means your best bet is to sample various regions of the galaxy, instead of going star by star.

That’s what you’ve been doing. You must have seen about a hundred thousand planets so far. Some of them have beggared your imagination. Whole worlds made entirely of amethyst. Planets with dozens of colorful moons that make the night sky look like a tree full of Christmas ornaments. Planets with black inky oceans or green copper mountains.

But no life. No life anywhere.

A few years ago, you felt yourself losing touch with your humanity. You made yourself promise that every year, you’d spend a week on Earth to remind yourself of the only world you’ve ever seen with a population. Now it seems like an unpleasant task, an annoying imposition. But then, that was why you made yourself promise. Because you knew that future-you wouldn’t do it unless they had to.

You teleport into a small Welsh hamlet. You’ve been away from other people so long, you might as well start small. No point going right into Times Square.

A person is standing right next to you. She reaches out her arm and touches you. You jump. How did she know you would –

“Hi,” she says.

You’re not a lesbian, but you can’t help noticing she is the most beautiful person you’ve ever seen, and you would do anything for her.

“I need your help.” A man dressed all in black is standing next to her.

“You should help him,” the most beautiful person you’ve ever seen tells you, and you immediately know you will do whatever he asks.

Orange

You are in your study working on a draft version of next year’s superweapon budget when you hear the door open. Four people you don’t recognize step into the room. A man dressed in black. Another man wearing a grey shirt, thick glasses and is that a pocket protector? A woman in pink, pretty but not pretty pretty. Another woman in blue, whose stares through you, like her mind is somewhere else. All five of your security systems have been totally silent.

You press the button to call your bodyguards, but it’s not working. So you draw the gun out from under your desk and fire; you happen to be a master marksman, but the gun explodes in your face. You make a connection. A person from many years ago, who had the power to control all technology.

No time to think now. You’re on your feet; good thing you happen to be a black belt in every form of martial arts ever invented. The man in grey is trying to take out a weapon; you kick him in the gut before he can get it out, and he crumples over. You go for the woman in blue, but at the last second she teleports to the other side of the room. This isn’t fair.

You are about to go after the woman in pink, but something in her step, something in the position of the others makes you think they want you to attack her. You happen to be a master at reading microexpressions, so this is clear as day to you; you go after the man in black instead. He deftly sidesteps each of your attacks, almost as if he knows what you are going to do before you do it.

The woman in blue teleports behind you and kicks you in the back, hard. You fall over, and the woman in pink grabs your hand.

She is very, very beautiful. How did you miss that before? You feel a gush of horror that you almost punched such a beautiful face.

“We need your help,” she says.

You are too lovestruck to say anything.

“The pills,” said the man in black. “Can you make them?”

“No,” you say, truthfully. “Of course I tried. But I wouldn’t even know where to begin creating magic like that.”

“And you’ve mastered all human jobs and activities,” said the man in black. “Which means the pills weren’t created by any human.”

“But there aren’t any aliens,” said the woman in blue. “Not in this galaxy, at least. I’ve spent years looking. It’s totally dead.”

“It’s just as I thought,” said the man in black. He turns to you. “You’re the Pope now, right? Come with us. We’re going to need you to get a guy in northern Italy to give us something very important.”

Yellow

It is spring, now. Your favorite time in the forest. The snow has melted, the wildflowers have started to bloom, and the bears are coming out of hibernation. You’re walking down to the river when someone leaps out from behind a tree and touches you. You scream, then suddenly notice how beautiful she is.

Four other people shuffle out from behind the trees. You think one of them might be King William, the new world emperor, although that doesn’t really make sense.

“You’re probably wondering why I’ve called all of you together today…” said the man in black. You’re not actually wondering that, at least not in quite those terms, but the woman in pink seems be listening intently so you do the same in the hopes of impressing her.

“Somehow – and none of us can remember exactly how – each of us took a pill that gave us special powers. Mine was to see the future. I saw to the end of time, and received a message from the last people in the universe. They charged me with the task of finding the people who created these pills and asking them how entropy might be reversed.

But I couldn’t do it alone. I knew there were seven other people who had taken pills. One of us – Green – is dead. Another – Red – had nothing to contribute. The rest of us are here. With the help of Pink, Blue, and Gray, we’ve enlisted the help of Orange and his worldwide organization. Now we’re ready for the final stage of the plan. Yellow, you can read anybody’s mind from a picture, right?”

Yellow nods. “But it has to be a real photograph. I can’t just draw a stick figure and say it’s the President and read his mind. I tried that.”

Black is unfazed. “With the help of Orange, who among his many other accomplishments is the current Pope, I have obtained the Shroud of Turin. A perfect photographic representation of Jesus Christ, created by some unknown technology in the first century. And Jesus, I am told, is an incarnation of God.”

“As the current Pope, I suppose I would have to agree with that assessment,” says Orange. “Though as the current UN Secretary General, I am disturbed by your fanatical religious literalism.”

“Orange can do anything that humans can do, and says he can’t make the pills. Blue has searched the whole galaxy, and says there aren’t any aliens. That leaves only one suspect. God must have made these pills, which means He must know how to do it. If we can read His mind, we can steal his secrets.”

“As Pope,” says Orange, “I have to condemn this in the strongest possible terms. But as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, I have to admit I’m intrigued by this opportunity to expand our knowledge.”

Black ignores him. “Yellow, will you do the honors?”

You want no part in this. “This is insane. Every time I read someone’s mind I regret it. Even if it’s a little kid or a bear or something. It’s too much for me. I can’t deal with all of their guilt and sorrow and broken dreams and everything. There is no way I am touching the mind of God Himself.”

“Pleeeeeease?” asks Pink, with big puppy dog eyes.

“Um,” you say.

“Don’t you know how this will go, anyway?” asks Blue. “Why don’t you just tell her what happens?”

“Um,” said Black. “This is actually the one thing I haven’t been able to see. I guess contact with God is inherently unpredictable, or something.”

“I have such a bad feeling about this,” you say.

“Pweeeeeeease?” says Pink. She actually says pweeeeeeease.

You sigh, take the shroud, and stare into the eyes of Weird Photographic Negative Jesus.

Black

It is the year 963,445,028,777,216 AD, and here you are in a space station orbiting the Galactic Core.

After handing Yellow the Shroud of Turin, the next thing you remember is waking up in a hospital bed. The doctor tells you that you’d been in a coma for the past forty one years.

Apparently Yellow went totally berserk after reading God’s mind. You don’t know the details and you don’t want to, but she immediately lashed out and used her superpowers to turn off the minds of everybody within radius, including both you and herself. You all went comatose, and probably would have starved to death in the middle of the forest if Orange’s supporters hadn’t launched a worldwide manhunt for him. They took his body and the bodies of his friends back to Rome, where they were given the best possible medical care while a steward ruled over his empire.

After forty-one years of that, Yellow had a heart attack and died, breaking the spell and freeing the rest of you. Except Blue and Grey. They’d died as well. It was just you, Orange, and Pink now.

Oh, and Red. You’d hired a friend to watch over him in his titanium jail cell, and once it became clear you were never coming back, he’d had mercy and released the guy. Red had since made a meager living selling the world’s worst body-building videos, which were so bad they had gained a sort of ironic popularity. You tracked him down, and when Pink saw him for the first time in over forty years, she ran and embraced him. He hugged her back. It took them a few hours of fawning over each other before she realized that nothing had happened when she touched him a second time. Something something true love something the power was within you the whole time?

But you had bigger fish to fry. The stewards of Orange’s empire weren’t too happy about their figurehead monarch suddenly rising from the dead, and for a while his position was precarious. He asked you to be his advisor, and you accepted. With your help, he was able to retake his throne. His first act was to fund research into the immortality serum you had heard about, which was discovered right on schedule in 2060.

The years went by. Orange’s empire started colonizing new worlds, then new galaxies, until thousands of years later it changed its name to the Virgo Superconfederation. New people were born. New technologies were invented. New frontiers were conquered. Until finally, the stars started going out one by one.

Faced with the impending heat death, Orange elected to concentrate all his remaining resources here, on a single station in the center of the galaxy, which would wait out the final doom as long as possible. For billions of years, it burned through its fuel stockpile, until the final doom crept closer and closer.

And then a miracle occurred.

EPILOGUE

Red

This space station is AWESOME! There are lasers and holodecks and lots of HOT PUSSY! And all you have to do is turn a giant turbine for a couple of hours a day.

One of the eggheads in white coats tried to explain it to you once. He said that your BRUTE STRENGTH was some kind of scientific impossibility, because you didn’t eat or drink any more than anyone else, and you didn’t breathe in any more oxygen than anyone else, and you were actually kind of small and scrawny, but you were still strong enough and fast enough to turn a giant turbine thousands of times per minute.

He rambled on and on about thermodynamics. Said that every other process in the universe used at most as much energy as you put into it, but that your strength seemed almost limitless regardless of how much energy you took in as food. That made you special, somehow. It made you a “novel power source” that could operate “independently of external negentropy”. You weren’t sure what any of that meant, and honestly the scientist seemed sort of like a BETA CUCKOLD ORBITER to you. But whatever was going on, they’d promised you that if you turned this turbine every day, you could have all the HOT PUSSY you wanted and be SUPER ALPHA.

You’d even met the head honcho once, a guy named King William. He told you that some of the energy you produced was going to power the station, but that the rest was going into storage. That over billions and billions of years, they would accumulate more and more stored negentropy, until it was enough to restart the universe. That it would be a cycle – a newborn universe lasting a few billion years, collapsing into a dark period when new negentropy had to be accumulated, followed by another universe again.

It all sounded way above your head. But one thing stuck with you. As he was leaving, the King remarked that it was ironic that when the black hole harvesters and wormholes and tachyon capacitors had all failed, it was a random really strong guy who had saved them.

You had always known, deep down, that BRUTE STRENGTH was what was really important. And here, at the end of all things, it is deeply gratifying to finally be proven right.